Posts with tag: game dev

• Code archaeology: Reading City of Heroes' .bin files • 07 Mar 2020
  For the past month, I’ve been digging into the data files for a nearly twenty year old MMO. It’s a fascinating journey through not just the juicy details I’m looking for, but also how the original City of Heroes devs thought about structuring the very data for their game and the systems design behind the character data and abilities. "But why?" you might ask. Why? Because it was fun! But it was also frustrating at times. The data structures are directly tied to how City of Heroes represents data in memory, to the point that it has pointer offsets encoded... Read more ...
• Why don't you just quit? • 04 Aug 2019
  It can be tempting to simplify the woes of the games industry into “obvious” solutions. “Why don’t you just quit?” is one I hear a lot, many times over the years, and it came up yet again earlier this week. In one of the industry forums that I participate in, we were discussing how studios frequently exploit their QA staff. One person put forth an argument that boiled down to: if they just quit their jobs and go somewhere else, the studios would have to improve because they would be unable to hire people to exploit. Unfortunately, it’s just not... Read more ...
• Bored by E3 • 11 Jun 2019
  Is it just me, or were the E3 press conferences this year particularly boring? Like not bad, per se, just… uninspired. Part of it might be due to the upcoming console refreshes… perhaps the flashy stuff is waiting in the wings for reveal next year. But there were still a lot of games shown by all the different publishers, and I just found myself underwhelmed. Opinion warning! I’m rambling about my own personal feelings here. If you don’t agree, that’s great! Go post about it on your own blog. Read more ...