Kevin Jenkins' Blog

The last half-week I’ve been working with artists to try to get their levels working right.

Right now this is turning into a big risk for the project. I paid $1200 for an add-on called oFusion so the artists could theoretically see how things look in the game within the modeling program. But support is too slow and the bugs are killing me.

I had a real dilemma yesterday with how to export materials.

I could:

1. Create materials by hand in text files, which is good because they are source controlled and I can easily change common properties. But then, due to bugs, the artists could not see what they are doing in the game. And also as sort of a hack I would have to name materials in the modeler exactly the same as in the text file. This means I have to do everything myself because that takes too much rigor for the artists to handle.

2. Specify in oFusion which material file I am using. This was a feature I requested, but was buggy to the point of being unusable, and caused problems in step 3.

3. Create everything using oFusion’s preferred system, which is basically to program the material in a GUI through MAX. This means every material takes about 5 minutes for me or 30 minutes for an artist to setup because you really are programming the material. Materials cannot be source controlled and changing any common property means every material in the game needs to be recreated. Worse, because step 2 could not be turned off once activated, I had to delete and recreate the object entirely.

I ultimately went with step 3, because this was the only thing that worked at all.

I’ve been waiting for support to get back to me on various bugs for half a week now and so far no response. This is such a critical time I can’t just drop oFusion or I would and ask for a refund and hire someone to program a decent exporter. Maybe the author is ignoring me. I’m trying really hard to keep a neutral tone in my bug reports but maybe some of my frustration is showing through.

End loss: $1200, plus about 200 hours of my own time, 100 hours of artists time.

I tend to consider days where I don’t implement major new features wasted days. By that standard I’m working very hard and getting nothing done.

My time right now is split:

15% answer emails (mostly artists)
10% updating the artist Wiki
15% general artist support
30% training & bug-fixing for a new programmer
5% fixing old bugs caused by myself
5% refactoring
5% communication in general (bug reporting, etc).
5% miscellaneous crap (blog, worrying. stress)
10% adding minor features

It’s probably been like this for the last week.

I have a few good things going for me:

1. All the major architectural features are in. It’s just a matter of polishing them and getting them working.
2. My programmer from Portugal is really good. I can assign him stuff and just know that it will get done right.
3. While I don’t like it, I’ve been paying a lot for the best tools. These tools are starting to pay off.
4. I have as many people as I need now working on stuff. So I don’t have to spend time interviewing.

Fortunately, I only have a few major features left. Unfortunately, one of these is splitting the client and server and getting everything actually working over the net. Ouch.

As the game nears completion I’ve been working with a lot more people lately. If you asked me to sort these people in terms of how useful they are the sort would go first by correctness, then by speed, then by cost. Correctness is something I haven’t considered much until now because I took for granted that people generally got the job done right. While this is true on a very high level, on a low level certain people tend to cause a lot of problems for simple tasks while others can do reasonably complex tasks right the first time.

Some examples over the last week:

Bad: Today I spent the entire day doing level design. This was because the artist who was doing it did it wrong twice in a row, and it was so wrong it was less trouble to do everything myself than to try to explain why.

Average: Three times in as many days I had to have some outsourcing programmers make changes to the GUI for the autopatcher. This cost me a total of about an hour explaining the same thing over and over again (Document, match my coding conventions, no Hungarian notation). It would have cost me a lot of money too, but this was a fixed price contract to another company so it cost them instead.

Good: The sound artists noticed I was using FMOD so asked to use FMOD designer so they could do a better job of starting and stopping sounds on events, rather than just hard stopping as I was originally planning to do. Their solution was more correct than mine, so I ended up with a better game.

When you account for this and for speed, the cheaper guys aren’t any cheaper. You really do get what you pay for.