Reno 911 Paintball

1
Reno 911 Paintball

• MTV Networks Online Game Group

2
Description

• Extremely simple 3D FPS
• Based upon the Reno 911 show characters
• Easy to play Hardcore gamers are not the
  audience.
• 10-15 minutes of gameplay(yes thats right)

3
Requirements

• Had to play in a browser
• Could only use the plugins already on
  ComedyCentral.com.(Shockwave or Flash)
• Kinda limits your options to Shockwave 3D or
  embedding some engine in shockwave as a plugin (
  xtra)
• Keyboard only controls
• Had to be at most 2MB total size

4
Rejected Solutions

• Shockwave 3D
• Uncertain future support
• Suboptimal rendering performance and tools
• Torque Too big a filesize
• Irrlicht Too big a filesize
• Ogre Too big a filesize
• Groove/Otoy not open source and at the time
  Otoy was not a shockwave plugin(as far as we
  knew).

5
Accepted Solution

• Custom shockwave plugin(xtra)
• Designed to be as independent as possible from
  shockwave XDK (can be used as standalone app)
• Written from scratch using C/DirectX 8
• OpenGL not available everywhere, worried about
  drivers
• Newton Dynamics Physics SDK
• X-Files and Half-Life 2 SMDs for asset formats
• Might use COLLADA if I had to do it again
• Custom Maya MEL Script exporter turned Maya into
  a simple level designer.

6
Rationale

• With our own plugin we could control everything
  and access the best APIs.
• We could gradually build upon the tech with each
  game.
• Could integrate our multiplayer technology in the
  future.

7
Challenges

• Had to learn DirectX(only knew OpenGL)
• Had to learn Maya and MEL Script
• Had to learn Shockwave/Director XDK
• That really sucked, no really it did badly
• Trust me it sucks.
• Had to implement (almost)everything myself!
• If a feature was desired it usually had to be
  written from scratch.

8
What went right

• Plugin code once it was written it could be
  used for other projects Intellivision Emulator
  in a browser for VH1.
• Saved us money didnt have to hire an external
  developer to do it for us.
• Download size. The whole engine was around
  400KB.
• Newton Dynamics (Physics SDK). Was really small
  (added about 100K) and did a lot of things we
  needed.

9
What Went Right (2)

• Prior expertise in browser plugin development
  helped out when we got stuck
• Debugging with two programmers and one keyboard
  really great method of debugging
• Friday nights for some reason we always solved
  our bugs on Friday nights.
• Research Collecting data on the users of
  comedycentral.com helped us discover what our
  target hardware was.
• Data driven design.

10
What Went Right (3)

• Having a good low poly 3D artist. Who was patient
  (He needed to be!)
• Working on a project that I really liked
• I added a lot of features in my spare time (or
  snuck them in at work) because I wanted to see
  them in the game
• Half-Life 2 SMD based importer and animation
  system
• Particle system
• Decal system
• Projectiles
• Radar
• Damage threat direction indicator

11
What Went Wrong

• Made invalid assumptions about utility of 3rd
  party code
• Project took way too long
• Microsoft example skeletal code was awful
• Load times and spaghetti code were an issue and
  led to dropping MS skeletal code
• Director, Shockwave XDK Shockwave player
• Dealing with the idiosyncrasies of the tech ate
  up 1/3 of the total development time.
• Having a reliable installation and the ability to
  automatically upgrade the xtra took the most time.

12
Wrap Up

• Works! (Phew!) And has decent performance on low
  end hardware
• 25 FPS on PIII 866 w/Intel 82810 chipset
• 200 FPS on P4 3.0 w/Intel GMA 950 chipset
• Game is not a CPU hog, most of the performance
  will come from GPU
• Visually appealing as compared to other browser
  games
• Gave us an extensible platform for future 3D
  browser games
• Took 6 (immature)man months (1 programmer Me! -
  plus some debug help from Dan Goldstein)
• 160 source code files.
• Polygon budget 20,000 per level (including npcs)
• Texture Budget 32MB
• Tools used
• Visual Studio 2005
• Maya 7
• Half Life 2 SDK MEL exporter
• X-File exporter
• Newton Dynamics SDK
• Nullsoft Installer Compiler