tain.totalcodex.net

I had come across my myth archives and thought some things are amusing, or interesting, or just plain lost.

I'll try and post them as I come across them...

"Gug"; gug, def: 1. 'gug' meaning exceeds in all areas that need exceeding. 2. Alt. Def: gug, that thing that occurs when you play myth for 8 hours straight, relize its 2:00 AM in the morning, but all the games were gug. 3. Defn: a palindrome, one of many. 4. containing less fat and being less tender than higher grades -- used of meat and especially of beef.<See also tr0 meat, gug>.

Word Origin: Probably greek. or latin. Its a 49% chance of either being correct. Though its first usage appears to be post-hellenic, though just past Jamaca.

Word diagram (see also chemistry):
catalyst
g + ug + H20 + CL = WYSIWYG + GUG + energy, mb

Word pr00f (see also logic):
If all X's are X's
And all B's have the property of gugness.
Then all A's are gug, mb.

Word factorial (see also mathz):
gug!!!!

Word Usage(s):

Usage in the form of an adjective:
"I thought that last game of was gug spcly since they flankzed, kiked and dropped."

Usage as an abjective:
"OMG U R SUX, I OWNZ UR GUG PTZ! mb"

Usage as an objective:
"The goal of any gug game is to have fun and play with gug pple."

Word usage in ref. to the bible, e.g. "gug book":
"...An God created light, and it was gug... And God created pple and they iz gug... and God created Myth, and it was damn gug... And God created version 1.3 which fixed majuer lemuring and ptz snatign 0n tr0, but lemurz still exist, and it was gug... And then God said: Let this be gug, all were happy and blessed and lived in gug harmony, for God was gug, pple were gug, and the anchovies were gug...

Word usage in ref. to itself:
"gug"

Word usage in ref. to wut a zerk would say, mb:
"gug on yah!"

Word usage in ref. to myth:
"Basically, play with gug pple, Thorin, and you aint wont have much trouble, cuz gug pple will make it fun."

End.

some interesting queries...
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some interesting queries...
Posted By: Conner <ttoddsnyder@yahoo.com>
Date: Sunday, 7/21/2002: 4:46 p.m.
Was on mnet today when Night Shadow asked the question 'who has played the
most time wise coops. Well, ran a query with the following results...
login - hours of coops
ikaika 308.90
phantasm6 265.63
grasshopper 228.37
evilraybeez 159.28
onion 146.49
agrajag4 144.18
mybigtrow 143.17
ashtar 121.06
conner 109.14
capital 103.44
turnip 99.02
cosmo 98.05
boy 91.61
streakingleper 91.23
anders 91.15
subzero 89.07
japer 88.38
spond 78.13
akazuo 77.21
pernickerty 76.51
yejagreth 75.53
theboze 73.64
pistalion 73.58
biglethalfool 71.91
woof 70.32
numm 70.27
canajun 69.92
groovedog 68.56
axis 64.32
mythhero1 64.00
ratphlegm 57.69
juddluke 51.71
blackoath 50.74
badboy3961 48.55
addictwtji 48.04
muffinhead 47.98
ciyanide 47.67
assolicious 46.40
chrisp 46.28
skuld 45.05
bmccabe 43.59
darkdreamr 43.46
benton 43.43
berel 43.18
stoneheart 42.36
msheets 42.18
ephemeris 40.84
vamil 37.47
dracolich 37.16
admin4 37.04
wangdoodle 36.49
kallikanzaros 35.20
clovez 35.02
crazyed 34.42
von_paulus 33.95
nukem 33.35
antitrow 32.58
meleeman 32.11
ironhorse 30.92
654645 30.87
hadiez 30.12
admin5 29.80
eddaweaver 29.24
antitank 29.20
graywolf 29.15
xone 29.09
psidon 29.08
scabboy 28.56
sparmonkey 28.16
nnnormal 28.14
xenocide 28.13
madimp 27.16
drkilla 26.32
smurfette 25.93
alchemist 25.85
dragonus 25.66
justnukeem 25.59
brog 25.24
mephistopheles 24.98
admin3 23.92
mattbond 23.40
kano 23.37
jesuit 23.26
the_storm_lord 22.76
lifesteal 22.70
luciferdz 22.58
aceoffire 22.48
goku 22.30
guy 22.11
stanblighter 21.71
toady 21.66
doob 21.46
tmac 21.04
unsuper 19.98
hawk 19.97
archer 19.65
markus 19.39
immortal 19.25
ravengard 18.94
then he asked "who's played the most shadow2?" - so I tweaked the query to
break it out by mesh and got the following. (Note - if a mesh has a
character you can't type from the keyboard in the name, the server
converts the name of the mesh to Team Haxor - or at least it use to).
login - meshid - mesh name - hours
ikaika 1701996659 Team Haxor 163.27
phantasm6 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 155.03
evilraybeez 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 84.60
canajun 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 66.02
agrajag4 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 62.89
ashtar 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 61.14
grasshopper 842034288 Strife on the Plains 52.75
mybigtrow 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 51.70
woof 842034288 Strife on the Plains 50.36
turnip 842034288 Strife on the Plains 48.46
japer 842034288 Strife on the Plains 44.79
anders 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 43.00
evilraybeez 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 41.76
theboze 842034288 Strife on the Plains 41.37
boy 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 40.70
grasshopper 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 39.99
yejagreth 842034288 Strife on the Plains 39.43
cosmo 842034288 Team Haxor 34.31
chrisp 842034288 Strife on the Plains 32.48
badboy3961 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 32.18
ciyanide 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 31.95
dracolich 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 31.04
skuld 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 31.01
cosmo 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 29.52
nukem 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 27.00
ratphlegm 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 26.80
pistalion 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 26.74
axis 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 26.70
biglethalfool 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 26.52
onion 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 24.95
ironhorse 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 24.32
conner 1768845940 Training Nightmare SoN 23.34
lifesteal 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 22.59
spond 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 22.48
pernickerty 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 21.39
jesuit 842034288 Strife on the Plains 21.13
akazuo 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 20.66
mybigtrow 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 20.30
ratphlegm 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 19.82
grasshopper 1869820465 Sombra da Montanha 19.72
bmccabe 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 19.57
theboze 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 19.42
hadiez 842034288 Team Haxor 19.10
agrajag4 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 18.77
benton 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 18.31
pernickerty 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 18.16
ashtar 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 18.10
doob 842034288 Strife on the Plains 18.04
pistalion 842034288 Strife on the Plains 17.95
anders 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 17.89
justnukeem 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 17.63
conner 825241650 Across the Gjol SoN 17.51
von_paulus 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 17.44
conner 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 17.24
boy 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 16.71
clovez 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 16.45
admin4 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 16.18
subzero 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 16.07
scottk 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 15.66
xone 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 15.61
benton 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 15.44
capital 1869820465 Team Haxor 15.30
ikaika 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 15.28
turnip 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 15.18
admin5 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 15.06
markus 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 14.96
vexus 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 14.91
stoneheart 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 14.90
berel 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 14.83
vamil 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 14.79
propagandhi 842034288 Team Haxor 13.93
subzero 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 13.74
phantasm6 1952855600 Stopping by Woods 13.72
akazuo 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 13.64
blackoath 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 13.48
groovedog 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 13.38
ikaika 1952855600 Team Haxor 13.34
mythhero1 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 13.22
onion 1869820465 Team Haxor 12.98
radsoul5 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 12.94
wangdoodle 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 12.73
onion 1966239073 Ambush at Devils Overlook 2 12.70
scoreh00r 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 12.52
dharmabutt 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 12.48
psidon 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 12.33
numm 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 12.27
dragonus 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 12.14
maledicto 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 12.13
ikaika 1969384801 The Carrion Crow 12.09
xenocide 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 11.98
rings 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 11.77
654645 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 11.55
antitank 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 11.45
biglethalfool 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 11.30
grasshopper 1819045170 Miracle on the Gjol 11.28
streakingleper 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 11.26
sparmonkey 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 11.24
addictwtji 1667786084 WWIIPeaceful Penetration 11.15
ask and you shall receive (:
Conner

Password:

Messages In This Thread
some interesting queries... (views: 90)
Conner -- Sunday, 7/21/2002: 4:46 p.m.
Re: some interesting queries... (views: 48)
Ducky Sauce -- Sunday, 7/21/2002: 4:51 p.m.
LOL! (views: 21)
Pistol Pete -- Monday, 7/22/2002: 8:39 p.m.
Top 5 - woot! Rubba = h00r. [nt] (views: 9)
Crazy Rooster -- Sunday, 7/21/2002: 6:36 p.m.
Re: some interesting queries... (views: 28)
Thorin ASM [#] -- Monday, 7/22/2002: 12:37 a.m.
do coops that you play by yourself count? [nt] (views: 7)
Subzero -- Monday, 7/22/2002: 12:39 a.m.
Subz you wannabe coop h00r mb [nt] [nt] (views: 2)
Ducky Sauce MIA -- Monday, 7/22/2002: 8:40 a.m.
mb i just thought my time was a little low? [nt] (views: 2)
Subzero -- Monday, 7/22/2002: 7:10 p.m.


Post Response



Your Name:
E-Mail Address:
Subject:
Message:
> Was on mnet today when Night Shadow asked the question 'who has
> played the most time wise coops. Well, ran a query with the
> following results...

> login - hours of coops
> ikaika 308.90
> phantasm6 265.63
> grasshopper 228.37
> evilraybeez 159.28
> onion 146.49
> agrajag4 144.18
> mybigtrow 143.17
> ashtar 121.06
> conner 109.14
> capital 103.44
> turnip 99.02
> cosmo 98.05
> boy 91.61
> streakingleper 91.23
> anders 91.15
> subzero 89.07
> japer 88.38
> spond 78.13
> akazuo 77.21
> pernickerty 76.51
> yejagreth 75.53
> theboze 73.64
> pistalion 73.58
> biglethalfool 71.91
> woof 70.32
> numm 70.27
> canajun 69.92
> groovedog 68.56
> axis 64.32
> mythhero1 64.00
> ratphlegm 57.69
> juddluke 51.71
> blackoath 50.74
> badboy3961 48.55
> addictwtji 48.04
> muffinhead 47.98
> ciyanide 47.67
> assolicious 46.40
> chrisp 46.28
> skuld 45.05
> bmccabe 43.59
> darkdreamr 43.46
> benton 43.43
> berel 43.18
> stoneheart 42.36
> msheets 42.18
> ephemeris 40.84
> vamil 37.47
> dracolich 37.16
> admin4 37.04
> wangdoodle 36.49
> kallikanzaros 35.20
> clovez 35.02
> crazyed 34.42
> von_paulus 33.95
> nukem 33.35
> antitrow 32.58
> meleeman 32.11
> ironhorse 30.92
> 654645 30.87
> hadiez 30.12
> admin5 29.80
> eddaweaver 29.24
> antitank 29.20
> graywolf 29.15
> xone 29.09
> psidon 29.08
> scabboy 28.56
> sparmonkey 28.16
> nnnormal 28.14
> xenocide 28.13
> madimp 27.16
> drkilla 26.32
> smurfette 25.93
> alchemist 25.85
> dragonus 25.66
> justnukeem 25.59
> brog 25.24
> mephistopheles 24.98
> admin3 23.92
> mattbond 23.40
> kano 23.37
> jesuit 23.26
> the_storm_lord 22.76
> lifesteal 22.70
> luciferdz 22.58
> aceoffire 22.48
> goku 22.30
> guy 22.11
> stanblighter 21.71
> toady 21.66
> doob 21.46
> tmac 21.04
> unsuper 19.98
> hawk 19.97
> archer 19.65
> markus 19.39
> immortal 19.25
> ravengard 18.94

> then he asked "who's played the most shadow2?" - so I
> tweaked the query to break it out by mesh and got the following.
> (Note - if a mesh has a character you can't type from the
> keyboard in the name, the server converts the name of the mesh
> to Team Haxor - or at least it use to).

> login - meshid - mesh name - hours
> ikaika 1701996659 Team Haxor 163.27
> phantasm6 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 155.03
> evilraybeez 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 84.60
> canajun 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 66.02
> agrajag4 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 62.89
> ashtar 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 61.14
> grasshopper 842034288 Strife on the Plains 52.75
> mybigtrow 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 51.70
> woof 842034288 Strife on the Plains 50.36
> turnip 842034288 Strife on the Plains 48.46
> japer 842034288 Strife on the Plains 44.79
> anders 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 43.00
> evilraybeez 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 41.76
> theboze 842034288 Strife on the Plains 41.37
> boy 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 40.70
> grasshopper 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 39.99
> yejagreth 842034288 Strife on the Plains 39.43
> cosmo 842034288 Team Haxor 34.31
> chrisp 842034288 Strife on the Plains 32.48
> badboy3961 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 32.18
> ciyanide 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 31.95
> dracolich 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 31.04
> skuld 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 31.01
> cosmo 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 29.52
> nukem 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 27.00
> ratphlegm 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 26.80
> pistalion 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 26.74
> axis 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 26.70
> biglethalfool 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 26.52
> onion 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 24.95
> ironhorse 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 24.32
> conner 1768845940 Training Nightmare SoN 23.34
> lifesteal 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 22.59
> spond 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 22.48
> pernickerty 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 21.39
> jesuit 842034288 Strife on the Plains 21.13
> akazuo 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 20.66
> mybigtrow 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 20.30
> ratphlegm 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 19.82
> grasshopper 1869820465 Sombra da Montanha 19.72
> bmccabe 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 19.57
> theboze 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 19.42
> hadiez 842034288 Team Haxor 19.10
> agrajag4 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 18.77
> benton 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 18.31
> pernickerty 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 18.16
> ashtar 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 18.10
> doob 842034288 Strife on the Plains 18.04
> pistalion 842034288 Strife on the Plains 17.95
> anders 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 17.89
> justnukeem 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 17.63
> conner 825241650 Across the Gjol SoN 17.51
> von_paulus 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 17.44
> conner 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 17.24
> boy 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 16.71
> clovez 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 16.45
> admin4 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 16.18
> subzero 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 16.07
> scottk 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 15.66
> xone 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 15.61
> benton 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 15.44
> capital 1869820465 Team Haxor 15.30
> ikaika 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 15.28
> turnip 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 15.18
> admin5 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 15.06
> markus 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 14.96
> vexus 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 14.91
> stoneheart 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 14.90
> berel 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 14.83
> vamil 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 14.79
> propagandhi 842034288 Team Haxor 13.93
> subzero 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 13.74
> phantasm6 1952855600 Stopping by Woods 13.72
> akazuo 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 13.64
> blackoath 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 13.48
> groovedog 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 13.38
> ikaika 1952855600 Team Haxor 13.34
> mythhero1 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 13.22
> onion 1869820465 Team Haxor 12.98
> radsoul5 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 12.94
> wangdoodle 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 12.73
> onion 1966239073 Ambush at Devils Overlook 2 12.70
> scoreh00r 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 12.52
> dharmabutt 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 12.48
> psidon 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 12.33
> numm 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 12.27
> dragonus 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 12.14
> maledicto 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 12.13
> ikaika 1969384801 The Carrion Crow 12.09
> xenocide 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 11.98
> rings 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 11.77
> 654645 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 11.55
> antitank 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 11.45
> biglethalfool 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 11.30
> grasshopper 1819045170 Miracle on the Gjol 11.28
> streakingleper 842034288 Mazzarins Demise 11.26
> sparmonkey 1701996659 Shadow of the Mountain 2 11.24
> addictwtji 1667786084 WWIIPeaceful Penetration 11.15

> ask and you shall receive (:

> Conner

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capital wrote:LOL @ EEL Message.jpg

Wow, smnet

Postmortem - Myth: The Fallen Lords
By Jason Regier
Published in Game Developer Magazine, April 1998.

As the team at Bungie Software put the finishing touches on the Marathon series of first-person action games, our thoughts drifted to bringing our 3D game experience to the real-time strategy game (RTSG) genre. We were inspired by movies such as Braveheart, with its close-up portrayal of bloody melees between large forces, and books such as Glen Cook's The Black Company, in which gruesome tales of battle contrast with engaging and intriguing characters. We envisioned a dark, amoral world where opposing sides are equally brutal and their unity is torn by power struggles within the ranks. We dreamed of game play that combined the realism and excitement of action games with the cunning and planning required by strategy games.

Our original design document, if you could call it that, was simply opposing lists of "Stuff that Rocks" and "Stuff that Sucks." Anything vaguely clichŽ, such as excessive references to Tolkien novels, Arthurian legend, or "little boys coming of age and saving the world," went in the "Sucks" category. The "Stuff that Rocks" list was filled with ideas that contributed to the visual realism of the game: a true 3D landscape, polygonal buildings, reflecting water, particle-based weather, "blood-spattered battlefields littered with limbs," explosions that send shock waves through the terrain, and "lightning frying guys and their friends."

Our goals for the product were lofty: simultaneous release on Windows 95 and Macintosh platforms, integrated Internet play, and a free online service to allow players from across the globe to battle one another. From this vision, Myth: The Fallen Lords was born.


The Making of a Legend, er, Myth
The project began in January 1996 with four programmers, two artists, and a product manager; midway through development, one programmer dropped out and an artist was added. Music, sound effects, and cut scenes were done out-of-house, and a few artists were contracted to help with interface artwork.

The roots of the Myth programming team were on the Macintosh, so most initial coding was done on the Mac with Metrowerks CodeWarrior. When PC builds were required, though, we used Microsoft Visual C/C++. Myth was written entirely in C.

In addition to creating the shipping product, we developed four tools to aid in the construction of the game. One utility, the Extractor, handled the importing of sprites and the sequencing of their animations. Another tool, dubbed Fear, dealt with importing polygonal models such as houses, pillars, and walls. The Tag Editor was responsible for editing the constants stored in cross-platform data files, which we called tags. And finally, Loathing, our map editor, handled the rest. Loathing was built around the Myth engine and allowed us to modify the landscape, apply lighting, set terrain types, script the AI, and place structures, scenery, and monsters.

The artists used Alias|Wavefront's PowerAnimator and StudioPaint on a single Silicon Graphics Indigo 2 to create polygonal models and render all the characters. At one point, the artists worked separate day and night shifts so that they could maximize their time on the SGI. Models were brought into the game using Fear, while the sprites were cleaned up in Adobe Photoshop and imported with the Extractor. To create the texture maps for the terrain, the artists used Photoshop to draw what looked like an aerial photo and applied it to a 3D landscape in Loathing.

If this sounds like a lot of work to you, you're right. Most maps took at least a week or two to create. We considered using fractal-generated landscapes, but we were worried that the inherent randomness of such terrain would make it extremely difficult to design good levels. As a result, all maps were painstakingly constructed by hand. As the artists put the finishing touches on the landscapes, the programmers, who doubled as level designers, scripted the AI for the levels.

Myth took approximately two years from start to finish. It began as a six-degree of freedom engine that allowed you to fly around a landscape. Soon, troops were added, heads started flying, blood was made to destructively alter the terrain's color map, and the network game was born. Most of the first year was spent developing the initial network/multiplayer game play. Almost the entire second year was spent developing the single-player game, refining the levels, and testing bungie.net, our free online service.


What Worked
1. Bringing carnage to the masses.
It's a real trick to create a simultaneous, identical-look-and-feel, cross-platform release. It's even harder to do so within the expected time frame with only three programmers. Our experience porting Marathon, our popular Macintosh-only action game, to Windows 95 was a valuable learning experience, and we vowed when starting Myth that, "This time, we're going to do it right."

Doing it "right" meant designing Myth from the ground up to be cross-platform compatible. Ninety percent of the code in the game is platform independent; the other ten percent is split evenly between routines that handle PC- and Macintosh-specific functionality. It was a programmer's dream come true -- we spent almost all our time implementing features and solving real problems, rather than wasting it fighting the OS.

All of the data for Myth, from animated cut scenes to the percentage of warriors who are left-handed, is stored in platform-independent files called tags. Tags are automatically byte swapped when necessary and are accessed via a cross-platform file manager.

One of our programmers worked in conjunction with Apple Computer Inc. to develop a cross-platform networking library code-named †ber. One of the greatest things about †ber is that it supports plug-in modules for network protocols. Thus, although Myth currently only allows games over TCP/IP, AppleTalk, and through TEN, it would be trivial to add support for new protocol modules. Myth must provide a user interface to set up the connection, but once †ber establishes that connection, game play over a LAN is the same as over the Internet.

To keep the game's appearance identical across platforms, we implemented our own dialog and font managers. This allowed us (actually, it required us) to use custom graphics for all interface items. We designed our font manager so that it supported antialiased, two-byte fonts, as well as a variety of text-parsing formats. Thus, our overseas publishers Eidos and Pacific Software Publishing were able to localize relatively painlessly. The German version of Myth was finished only a couple of weeks after the English release, with Japanese and French versions close behind. The only game experience that is different for the two platforms is the installation, and two players on bungie.net have no idea whether their opponents are on Macintoshes or PCs.


2. bungie.net and beta testing.
Myth was also released with integrated support for our first online service, bungie.net. This service was designed specifically for Myth and was developed simultaneously. Similar to online services for other games, it allows players to connect via the Internet to game rooms, where they can chat or play against one another. The Linux-based server that runs bungie.net keeps track of player statistics and gives everyone a score in our ranking system. The service's web site (http://www.bungie.net) has access to this database and sports a leader board that lists the top players.

Our networking layer is based on a client/server model. Once you advertise a game on the network, you become a server, and other players join your game. Network traffic during a game is limited to the commands issued by the players. All copies of Myth in a network game run deterministically and merely interpret the commands that they receive. This makes cheating difficult; if you hack the game to perform something illegal, such as making all your units invincible, you'll go out of sync with other players. When portions of the game data are periodically checksummed and compared, a message will indicate that you're out of sync (and out of luck). So far, the only form of cheating we've encountered is users trying to exploit the bungie.net ranking system.

To rigorously test our server load capacity and the bungie.net code, we released a public beta of the network game. We were initially apprehensive because it was our first public beta test of a product, but it was an amazing success. When errors occur, Myth alerts the player, logs the error messages, and usually allows the user to save a replay of the problem. Testers submitted these detailed bug reports via e-mail and chatted about features and improvements to levels on internal newsgroups.

Best of all, the testers used bungie.net to give instant feedback to the developers. This interaction allowed us to gather even more useful information about bugs, and it made the testers really feel involved in the final product. By the end of the beta-testing cycle, we not only had a clean product, but also had a loyal following of users who sang our praises when the NDAs were lifted.


3. 3D graphics acceleration.
When the project started, 3D acceleration hardware was only just starting to become popular. Nevertheless, we tried to keep hardware acceleration in mind when designing our rendering pipeline. When the opportunity arose to add hardware acceleration, the implementation worked beautifully. We worked closely with people from 3Dfx and Rendition and added support for their chipsets in about a week. It's amazing how much these accelerators add to the smoothness of the terrain, the fluidity of camera movement, and the realism of the units and effects. These chips rock, and great on-site developer assistance made them easy to support.


4. Getting back to the people.
Once we had released Myth, we definitely did the right thing by waiting for player feedback and then releasing a patch to address their issues. Since our public beta test caught most of the bugs in the shipping product, nearly all our post-shipping efforts were directed towards adding user-requested features. We scoured the newsgroups, read e-mail, and talked to customers about their complaints. From these disparate sources, we compiled a list of improvements for our 1.1 patch.

All major user complaints were addressed in the patch. We added support for Rendition and Voodoo Rush cards. We extended the camera's maximum zoom for a better view of the battlefield. We made our easy difficulty levels even easier. And we improved the unit AI. By the time the early reviews came out, we'd already released a beta patch that addressed almost everything on the reviewers' lists of Myth's failings.


5. Doing more with less.
It doesn't take fifty people to create a major cross-platform software title. Period. Bungie Software has barely half that number of employees in the entire company, and we not only develop all our games, but publish and distribute them as well! Macintosh and PC versions of Myth, all our internal tools, and our online service were essentially developed by only six people, and everything shipped on time with no major glitches. There's no big quality assurance department here at Bungie; the public did our testing for us, and we listened to them as seriously as if they were coworkers on the project.

We didn't hire any game designers, writers, or level designers to come up with our game concept and story line. Myth truly is the combined vision of our team, and each of us feels that it was our game. We came to work each day excited about the project, and we're damn proud of what we managed to create.


What Went Wrong
1. Staffing problems.
On the flip side, it became clear very early in the project that we were understaffed for such an ambitious undertaking. Success or failure rested with a handful of people, and that was extremely stressful. Losing a programmer halfway through development added still more pressure during the final push to get the game out the door. Additional programming tasks had to be shouldered by the remaining developers, who were already also responsible for level design. To alleviate the problem somewhat, we even found it necessary to ask our busy network administrator to aid in AI scripting and level design.

We did hire a third artist near the end of the project, but it was almost too late. While his contributions to the final product were by no means insignificant, it took a long time to get him up to speed. Similarly, when we dropped the services of our original sound guy late in the development cycle, a new sound team had to rush to redo all the work.

If you're looking for good anecdotes about how we blew off steam with wild weekend trips to Cancœn, you won't get any. We all worked incredibly hard, and did so willingly because Myth represented a two-year labor of love. All the great previews and supportive feedback from beta testers kept us excited and made us realize that we really did have something special on our hands. Nobody wanted to slack off and allow competing products to beat us to the shelves. The moral of the story: staff up as early as possible and plan to weather the unexpected.


2. Scripting.
The biggest announced feature that didn't make it into the final version of Myth was a scripting language that would allow the player to modify elements of the game. We had hoped that user scripts could be written for extensible artificial intelligence, as well as custom formations, net game rules, and map behaviors.

We selected Java as a good basis for the Myth scripting language because of its gaining popularity, good information-hiding capabilities, and relatively simple byte code interpretation. After several months of work, early versions of the game loaded, compiled, and ran code from tag files. A few simple scripts worked for presentation purposes, including one that instructed a unit to search the battlefield for the heads of the enemy and collect them in a pile.

Unfortunately, when the programmer responsible for the scripting language parted ways with Bungie, we were left with a number of features to implement and no library of user-friendly interfaces with the game code. Given its incomplete state at such a late stage of development, there was little choice but to drop this functionality.


3. More frames of animation.
One of the complaints most often voiced by players is that the sprite-based units' animations are not fluid enough. At the start of the project, when we planned for the number of frames of animation per unit, there was a good deal of uncertainty regarding how much RAM would be consumed by large texture maps, sounds, and other resources. As things were, it was not uncommon for our landscape textures to reach 5MB in size, and certain animations already consumed close to 1MB -- our uncertainties were not unfounded. We erred on the conservative side. Though we implemented caching schemes that greatly reduced our memory requirements, there wasn't enough time to rerender the units.


4. Pathfinding.
Perfect pathfinding seems to have become the Holy Grail for games in the RTSG genre, and Myth is no exception. The game's terrain is a 3D polygonal mesh constructed from square cells, each of which is tessellated into two triangles. Cells have an associated terrain type that indicates their impassability, and they may contain any number of solid objects, including trees, fence posts, and units.

Ah! Square cells, you say? Having read previous Game Developer articles (Bryan Stout, "Smart Moves: Intelligent Pathfinding," Game Developer, October/November 1996; Swen Vincke, "Real-Time Pathfinding for Multiple Objects," Game Developer, June 1997), your first thought may be that the A* pathfinding should do the trick. The first problem with a pure A* approach for Myth is that impassable obstacles, such as troops and trees, may lie anywhere on the terrain. Penalizing the cells beneath impassable obstacles is a bad idea because the cells are fairly large and obstacles are not guaranteed to be aligned at the center of a cell. Furthermore, even if a tree did consume exactly one cell, the A* path to avoid it would make a unit walk up to the tree, turn, and continue around it. Units that bump into trees and walk between the centers of large cells appear extremely stupid; you really want your group of troops to avoid obstacles (including each other) ahead of time, and smoothly weave their way through a forest.

To produce this effect, we created our own pathfinding algorithm. First, we ignore all obstacles and calculate the A* path based solely on the terrain impassability. For all intents and purposes, the terrain in Myth never changes, so this path can be calculated once and remembered. Now, we consider the arbitrarily placed obstacles and periodically refine our path using a vector-based scheme. If the planned path would cause us to hit an obstacle, we need to deviate our path. We recursively consider both left and right deviations, and choose the direction that causes us to deviate least from our A* path. Thus, we've considered terrain impassability information and we can avoid arbitrarily placed (or even moving) obstacles well before we bump into them.

For every game, pathfinding is a pretty complex and sensitive beast. This method worked well for 90 percent of our cases, but rigorous testing revealed certain cases that were not adequately handled. As the ship date drew near, we were forced to say "good enough" rather than handle these problem cases and risk introducing new bugs. Our current algorithm works pretty well and provides the effect we sought, but there's definitely room for improvement.


5. Features that missed the cut.
With a few exceptions, everything from our list of "Stuff that Rocks" made it into the final product. Those features that didn't make it came so close and were so exciting that they definitely deserve mention.

Near the end of the project, we started adding support for 3D fire, which would be ignited by explosions and flaming arrows. Our flames were sprite-based 3D particle effects, complete with translucent smoke. Fire could spread across the landscape and move at different rates over the various types of terrain. To our dismay, when a spark in the woods spread into a raging forest fire (as it should), all the translucent smoke sprites slowed even fast, 3Dfx-accelerated machines to a crawl. With little time to rectify the problem, we had to put out the fire, so to speak.

We had also planned for wildlife to scamper across the terrain and for birds to fly through the air, breathing life into our empty landscapes. Our attempt at ambient life started with a giant squirrel created by one of our artists. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, we didn't have a chance to create very interesting behaviors for it. Just about the only AI that we had a chance to code simply made the squirrels gravitate towards the player's units. We thought it best to drop ambient life rather than subject players to hordes of nuzzling squirrels.


Post-Release Reactions
With all the prerelease hype Myth had received, we were very anxious to see how the public would receive the final version. The reactions from beta testers were phenomenally positive, as were the comments from customers and reviewers. Our swiftness in correcting problems and adding several user-requested features with a 1.1 patch only earned us more kudos from the press and public.

But possibly the most satisfying result of the game is the degree to which it lessens the appeal of playing with a traditional isometric perspective. Working on Myth so consumed our time that we didn't get a chance to play anything else; we looked forward to playing some old favorites and the latest demos of our high-profile competition after we shipped. It was a real surprise to discover that once we were accustomed to Myth's 3D camera and its associated freedom, playing isometric games was frustrating -- the action seemed distant and unrealistic, while the view of the world was annoyingly rigid. This sentiment was echoed in both player comments and reviews of the game. Since our Marathon products were derided by some as Doom rip-offs, it was especially satisfying to hear players say that Myth pushes the genre in a new direction, from which there's no looking back.



As of late 1997, Myth: The Fallen Lords had shipped 350,000 copies worldwide in four languages on two platforms. bungie.net currently boasts tens of thousands of registered users and is being expanded to keep up with the constantly increasing demand. As I write, it has just been declared Game of the Year by Computer Games Strategy Plus and Strategy Game of the Year by Computer Gaming World. It remains to be seen whether Myth will inspire other entries into the 3D real-time strategy game genre. But if nothing else, Myth is proof that a very small team with a strong product vision can still make a very big game.

Jason Regier is currently aÊsenior programmer at Bungie Software. ÊHe has four titles under his belt and was lead programmer for two of them. ÊHe started making games professionally in 1994 while attending Harvey Mudd College and has been doing so ever since. ÊHe can be reached at jregier@bungie.com and welcomes resumes from anyone interested in joining Bungie for future projects.

Some of those pings are what I see all the time lol.

Capital, thanks for posting these!

fyi: The GameDeveloper TFL postmortem article is still available online at http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3 ... h_the_.php

the 'head and shrubbers' ad is i think originally from the Tharsis Times website, long dead and I could have *sworn* i had a mirror of at the mythgraveyard, but i can't find it so it must be sitting on my hard drive at home. h ere's another of the 'ads' from that site