Hi Zach! I miss the luxoflux bunch (I had to help briefly on the first True Crime with the xbox audio, and we pretty much stole all the QA from you guys for Spiderman, which I think is what killed TC:LA (not enough testing))
I really don't know when comes to creative decisions (I'm very bad at that). At the end of the day I can only say we can stream this much and this much (say max 1 stereo stream for music, 6-7 mono voices occasionally, and rest for streaming geometry,t exture).
So part of all this was adjusting, testing to get it right. This is what the author misses - user provided content would never get the same amount of testing, as there is simply no money behind that. For that reason they should limit themselves as much as possible. But I'm begining to go into waters I've never been (never worked on MMO, so what the hell do I know :))
Cheers! I think we met, or at least said Hi couple of times, when walking by! (I'm still at Treyarch)
Oh yeah, Malkia! I'm sorry I didn't recognize you, big guy. Jeff Lander was so thankful you came in, he wanted to kidnap you to keep you at Luxo! You were great!
Yeah, we had some crazy QA requirements for True Crime. It blows me away that there were parts of the map maybe only driven through a few times (we didn't have the resources to do that many complete drivethroughs - 240 square miles is just so big). We have so many "glitch videos" on YouTube I think it autocompletes the word glitch after our game's name!
But that's very true - the iteration was a huge part of the process and of setting those limits.
I couldn't imagine us not being able to go back to an artist and tell them it was chugging. I know some other studios did this thing where anytime the frame rate dropped below 30fps they put a bright red border up! We did fine with just a graphical meter and some really talented environmental artists.
That's another thing - the folks who made our environments got increasingly better at delivering stuff under our budgets, because they were constantly getting feedback about it. Without that, you just can't get the best quality.
I really don't know when comes to creative decisions (I'm very bad at that). At the end of the day I can only say we can stream this much and this much (say max 1 stereo stream for music, 6-7 mono voices occasionally, and rest for streaming geometry,t exture).
So part of all this was adjusting, testing to get it right. This is what the author misses - user provided content would never get the same amount of testing, as there is simply no money behind that. For that reason they should limit themselves as much as possible. But I'm begining to go into waters I've never been (never worked on MMO, so what the hell do I know :))
Cheers! I think we met, or at least said Hi couple of times, when walking by! (I'm still at Treyarch)