BA5 Contextual Studies #6

Final Research Links & My Essay

As I did most of my research and back up work at the beginning of the contextual studio project all I needed to find were a few more academic sources to further back up my project essay. I will post links to these reference here and then post up my essay. 

http://scratch.mit.edu/forums/viewtopic.php?id=56247

 

http://www.valvesoftware.com/ 

http://journals.fcla.edu/demcom/article/view/78739

http://www.vgu.tv/2012/04/05/the-story-based-dlc-dilemma-2/

 

http://rachelkaplan.hubpages.com/hub/DLC-for-Video-Games-A-Bad-Deal-for-Gamers

http://kotaku.com/5887626/mass-effect-3-dlc-triggers-fan-outrage-bioware-response 

http://resolution-magazine.co.uk/content/brave-new-world-the-dlc-debate

www.joystiq.com/2012/08/07/uncharted-3s-v1-13-update-adds-tournaments-micro-transactions/

A Study of the Evolution of Digital Downloadable Content (DLC) and how it's Effecting the Games Industry via Platform and Distribution

In 1997 Atari introduced the Atari 2600 which offered players a service called "GameLine". Use of this service allowed the player to download full Atari games via their telephone line. Sega also offered a similar service titled "Sega Channel" which also allowed for the downloading of games via a telephone line. Despite only being able to offer full pre-existing games, Atari and Sega's services were the first in their kind to offer digital distribution of content via downloads thus beginning the phenomenon that would soon be downloadable content for video games. 

As the personal computer (PC) became a common attribute to people's homes it offered a new method for players to experience games. Notorious PC title "The Sims" (Maxis, EA, 2000) offered 7 on disc expansion packs; Livin' Large, House Party, Hot Date, Vacation, Unleashed, Superstar and Makin' Magic, all for a reasonable price. These expansion packs contained new fresh content for the players to purchase in addition to the original game. Despite not being downloadable content, they're extra content none the less providing an early origin within the evolution of DLC.  

With rising internet speeds players saw their gaming platforms becoming increasingly more associated with online connection, opening up a new area to explore regarding the distribution of digital content. The first console to offer what gamers today would consider "proper DLC" was the Dreamcast. Released in 1988 by Sega, the Dreamcast was the first console built and shipped with online support as standard. The gamers who could connect their console to the internet were ready for the distribution of digital content via the internet straight to their system.

Examples of Dreamcast DLC are the "events" released for "Sonic Adventure" (Sonic Team, Sega, 1998). These were small digital content packs that players could download and see in game. "Scratch" forum poster agscratcher states that they " create a special event to happen in your game" and  also lists the various event packs available for Sonic Adventure. Examples include Twinkle Park Halloween Party, Station Square Christmas and Sonics' Game of Hide and Seek which "spreads five pictures of real life hedgehogs hidden throughout Station Square in various locations" (agscratcher, 2011). 

However, due to narrow bandwidth connection and limited sized memory cards, DLC on the Dreamcast wasn't as readily available as many hoped. Although the ability to connect to the internet made an easy pathway for digital distribution and was still considered a breakthrough in video games. 

The next breakthrough in the evolution of DLC was in 2001 when Microsoft released their first Xbox console. Rival company Sony missed the DLC bandwagon by releasing their PlayStation 2 console with no built in network adapter meaning players couldn't use their system to purchase digitally distributed content online. 

Microsoft offered full titles and new content ready for players to download via their online store called "Xbox Live Market Place". This was a virtual shop and media hub for players to access and browse downloadable content ready for digital distribution straight to their Xbox's' hard drive. 

The evolution of DLC thrives among the current generation of gaming, which began back in 2005, where internet enabled consoles and PC's became popular hardware within the gaming industry. Sony's Playstation 3, Microsoft's Xbox360 and high end PC's relish from being constantly connected to the internet so that players can have access to the latest DLC.

Obtaining digitally distributed content is made incredibly easy with the implementation of digital stores. Players no longer have to visit brick and mortar shops in order to purchase game related content. Instead they simply access the digital shop associated with their gaming platform to buy additional content for their games. 

Business, Technological, and Social Dimensions of Computer Games refers to the digital distribution of downloadable content as a form of "episodic gaming" and states that the breakthrough was "Triggered by the mass adoption of the internet, a new way to develop and play games[...]" which "relies on the internet as a distribution channel and less as a gaming platform and affects the business side of video games as well" (Cruz-Cunha, Carvalho & Tavares, 2011). 

Sony offers its users the Playstation Network Store (PSN) which is incredibly similar to Microsoft's marketplace. Both get updated regularly with the latest digital content to download. Finally there's Steam. Founded in 1996 Steam is a PC/MAC social entertainment platform,  it's a "direct pipeline to customers...the world's largest online gaming platform...[it] guarantees instant access to more than 1,800 game titles" (Valve, 2013) Most of which have additional DLC to offer. 

Provided players have internet access they can browse PSN, Steam and Xbox Live Marketplace to view the wide selection of DLC's available. Examples of the varying types of DLC available to players include paid, free, subscription, day1, expansions, levels, campaigns, quests, new game modes, songs, equipment, weaponry, costumes, characters, vehicles, map packs and more. There's a fair amount of division between those who appreciate DLC and consider it to be a good and positive addition to gaming and those who state that it's having a negative impact on the games industry. 

Story based DLC has positive connotations when compared to older previous generation games such as Spyro The Dragon (Insomniac Games, 1998), Metal Gear Solid 1 (Konami Computer Entertainment Japan, 1998) and Crash Bandicoot (Naughty Dog, 1996) simply because story based DLC didn't exist on the PlayStation 1 therefore, unfortunately, these games couldn't have their campaigns prolonged. Games today can have story DLC added so that the gamer can continue to enjoy their favourite game even after its release/been completed. James Pungello, a writer for VGU.TV, strengthens this opinion stating that "Sometimes the DLC that is released adds a whole new story arc that takes multiple DLC pieces to complete or some are self-contained missions. Some are even outside of the story of the main game or act as a “deleted scene” type feature." all of which enhance the story element of the game for the player. In addition, he suggests that "The idea of DLC is to continue to support the game and the fan base after the launch. This extends the time that the game is relevant to gamers..." (Pungello, 2012). 

As with everything there are also negative repercussions surrounding story based DLC and its impact on the games industry. Previously, in 1999, a full game would be released and post release developers would be working on disc based DLC which would be an expansion pack. These expansion packs would be costly but the price was fair as the player would be investing in an almost entirely new game in addition too, and expanding on, their original title. Come 2005 and publishers realised that players would pay large sums of money for new content. However, it seemed that a percentage of expansion packs released would, instead, contain more or less the same content already released and for more money. Nowadays it seems developers and publishers will release tiny DLC packs for more money than they are worth for content the players already have. Of course this is a generalisation but most who consider story based DLC to be a bad thing would agree this is true.

Rachel Kaplan, a blogger on Hub Pages, reinforces this notion and states "Years ago, a gamer who completed difficult tasks was rewarded in-game for them. The switch from allowing players new content as unlock able in the original game to posting new content as downloadable with a fee isn’t a good sign for anyone. Having full access to games a player buys is something that should not be overlooked or ignored because of any reason. Gamers have unintentionally given the industry a pass to force jumping through hoops to get content which used to come in one complete package." (Kaplan, 2012). 

Clearly there is an apparent divide between positive and negative views on DLC. Whilst adding new fresh story driven content into a game adds replay ability and may be a good thing for some, other's can see the pitfalls and bad deals in disguise.

Fallout 3 (Bethesda, 2008) is an example of fantastic story based DLC. Bethesda released five additional campaign add on's to Fallout 3 and one even gave an alternate ending to those who chose to play it. Operation: Anchorage, The Pitt, Broken Steel, Point Lookout and Mothership Zeta all roughly cost £10 and each offered a slew of extra hours worth of gameplay. "The idea of DLC is to continue to support the game and the fan base after the launch. This extends the time that the game is relevant to gamers..." (pungello, 2012) which is exactly what Bethesda did right with their Fallout 3 DLC. 

There have been reports recently detailing companies who are supposedly acting greedy by locking off content that is actually on the disc when players purchase the game. Supposedly Bioware did this with Mass Effect 3 where by an integral character to the plot was intended to be made playable with campaign DLC. However, disc hackers found the code to this character already on the disc when the game was released. Jason Schreier reports for Kotaku saying that "some Mass Effect Devotees have expressed disgust" (Schreier, 2012). This is known as on disc DLC (sometimes day one DLC) and, understandably, retains bad press from gamers.  

Laying somewhere on common ground is DLC that is sold in the form of micro-transactions. Micro-transactions are small pieces of DLC, usually "Purely cosmetic and utterly uninspiring" (Anderson, 2010), which cost a small amount of money but when substantially large numbers of gamers purchase them there's a possibility of  making extra money from the already released game. Items such as hats, costumes and weaponry are popular examples of micro-transactions. These have become increasingly popular due to  the "video game industry [becoming] a multi-billion dollar-a-year business, due in large part to the explosion of downloadable content" (Lizardi, 2012). Developers and publishers understand the amount of money that can be made from micro-transactions and want to ensure they reap the benefits. 

Recently Naughty Dog's critically acclaimed Uncharted 3 integrated micro-transactions into its multiplayer modes in the form of hats, taunts, costumes and weaponry which are "either unlock-able in-game by levelling up and completing certain actions, or purchased directly through the game with micro-transactions" (Hinkle, 2012). 

Uncharted 3's micro-transaction model works but is fairly young in terms of DLC, the industry and how it affects games. Players can actually unlock the items in game by finding treasures meaning they may not need to spend money at all. Another game which supports the micro-transaction model is Team Fortress 2 (Valve, 2007). The game went free to play in 2011 and has since released weaponry and hats available to purchase by players who can't find what they want in game, similarly to Uncharted 3. This means that Valve are able to continue to make money from a game they released free.

Again, there are negative views on this form of DLC too. Anderson states that "as a culture of micro-transactions [begins] permeating the world of videogames, dissatisfaction [begins] to brew as the quality of DLC [becomes] varied wildly." (Anderson, 2010). This is a common opinion held by gamers who see the extra content as something they should own outright. Items such as costumes and weapons shouldn't need to be paid for in order to unlock and use in game. This argument is fair but consideration needs to be taken when realising the revenue made from micro-transaction based DLC and how it can, in some cases, encourage further development of popular game titles.

Ultimately there is a great divide in opinions among gamers as to whether the evolution of DLC in video games has been a good concept and whether the repercussions of DLC are harming the industry itself. Many "internet users have come to expect that much or even most content [distributed via/on]  the web should be free, or of minimal cost..." (Rabowsky, 2010) which suggests that perhaps many gamers feel digitally distributed content to their gaming platforms should be free or perhaps with fairer prices and content. Whilst this is an extreme opinion it is  hard to ignore the positives that DLC can offer. Extra campaign content prolonging the narrative experience gamers love, new characters and quests to enrich the story and much more becomes easily accessible for players. Thanks to the internet, platform and electronic stores, developers can now continue working on games and, so long as the content is fresh, new and exciting, make more money from their digitally distributed downloadable content.

BA5 Studio Project | Production #28

Overcoming my Irrational Fear of Texturing!

(please note that the textures I use are free to use from various FREE TEXTURE sites. I will produce a blog post giving credit once I have finished using them)

Today at uni I began to texture the bookcase asset for my scene. I was so irrationally scared to start it and I have no idea why, when I got going it was really fun, time consuming but genuine fun! With the ambient occlusion and UV snapshot in Photoshop I had to add a mid tone grey base colour underneath both the layers to ensure my textures weren't completely exaggerated. I then began with the first base texture.

 

However, this texture looked awful. It’s grungy and dark just how I need it to ensure its associated with my game design document but there just isn't enough detail, it looked too flat. So I asked Lothar and he said that I needed to tone down the saturation because it looked overly grungy and too bright. With this in mind, I took to Photoshop with various textures and started combining them to try and enhance the wood texture. 

I used a variety of layer settings, opacity changes, erasers, hue/saturation's, vibrancy's and other tools in Photoshop to acquire the right look for the wood.  Here’s the process I went through to create the main wood texture. 

  

At this point I decided to apply the texture onto the bookshelves to see where it needed more work. Here is the render.  

 

After I showed Lothar my progress he said that it still needed a lot of work, I needed to enhance the broken wood quality, adding cracks and splints to express how this bookcase wasn’t just “normal”. So I went back to Photoshop with new textures and kept editing the image. I started to find textures with cracks and more detail that I needed to apply.  

  

With this new detail added into the wood, I did a fresh render in  Maya to see how it they looked.

 

Even though this was an improvement on the previous version I still  knew I had to add more detail to ensure my asset was believable but also retained its likeness to Distorted Delirium. I decided to take Lothars advice further and add old newspaper scraps into the texture as if someone had done a bad fixing job…I dunno, Lothar seemed to think it was a good idea so I just went with it >:D

 Despite my best efforts I thought I had recorded images for all my renders, alas I am missing the one where I added the newspaper textures on their own so I am going to have to skip onto the next part which was assigning the wood texture I had created to the correct areas of the UV snapshot and ensuring that the ambient occlusion didn’t make them entirely black. 

When it came to assigning textures to the other parts of my diffuse map I realised that parts of my ambient occlusion made the texture appear black. To fix this I had to manually paint over the dark areas, on Photoshop, using a lighter grey colour so that the textures would actually show up correctly.  With the ambient occlusion slightly altered I was able to apply the rest of my textures and finish the model (for now).

Top is before, bottom is after. 

 

As you can see after I adjusted the ambient occlusion values my textures popped and also had more depth. I did another render and here is the outcome.

 

Thinking ahead to producing specular maps, I thought it would be cool to use the blood splatter paint brushes I downloaded for Photoshop for the last project. I figured I could add a couple of blood spatters onto the textures and produce a specular map so that they appear glossy as if the blood was really there. Just a thought :) For now, I am really happy with the outcome of my bookshelf!! YAY!

BA5 Studio Project | Production #27

Finalised (hopefully) UV’s and Baking (but sadly not the type of baking where you get tasty muffins and cakes at the end…)

Today I spent all day at university ensuring my UV’s were in an acceptable form to start putting my textures onto them. I am actually really happy with the way they have turned out, considering I have spent all weekend organising them. Every time I go back to them I keep noticing parts I could change and alter but I am finally at a stage where I am happy with them, enough so to start texturing them. 

I have kept the bookcase as its own UV map, combined the 2 frames together on another, the books also have their own map as I have simply repeated them and finally the vase has its own UV map which I will probably make bigger as I have enough space.

  

Once all the UV’s were organised I was able to move onto producing a baked ambient occlusion for the bookcase to really emphasise the shadow details given off by the vase, photo-frames and books (yes I am aware that in the screen caps above there is already an ambient occlusion baked on, I was working backwards with regards to getting screen caps haha). 

How to Bake Ambient Occlusion

First of all you want to open the hypershade window with your model highlighted. Go over to the Maya render options and select SURFACE SHADER. This will then appear in the work space of the  hypershade window. Then you’ll need to select the object(s) that you want to bake the ambient occlusion onto. You need to middle mouse click and drag the SURFACESHADER onto your model. Your model will now appear black, in my case it was the bookcase that I wanted to bake onto which is why it is black. 

  

The next step was to find TEXTURES under MENTAL RAY and click the mib_amb_occlusion. This will now appear as a white box under your SURFACE SHADER. Middle mouse click drag this onto the SURFACE SHADER and select default. 

Now that the hypershade window is set up to bake ambient occlusion we need to change the drop down  menu on the shelf at the top of Maya’s interface to RENDER and select  the LIGHTING/SHADING > BATCH BAKE (mental ray). This will bring up the batch render window where you need to change the settings accordingly, under camera settings check the box for “USE BAKE SET OVERIDE”, change the drop down menu to “OCCLUSION” and ensure the map is a big size ratio (1024 in my case). 

 

After a few tweaks of the UV’s and menu settings I finally got an ambient occlusion baked that I was happy with. 

  

After this process I was able to take a UV snapshot of the UV’s I organised for the bookcase by going into the UV/Texture editor > polygons > UV Snapshot. I then located this file in PhotoShop and loaded it up. I then loaded up the ambient occlusion map onto the same file as the UV snapshot. I made the UV snapshot layer a SCREEN layer and the ambient occlusion map a MULTIPLY layer which was placed underneath the UV Snapshot. I then created a third layer which was placed directly under the other 2 layers and coloured it grey. 

 

Now I just need to get over my irrational fear of texturing >:D

BA5 Studio Project | Production #26

Organising UV’s

Lothar taught me that I need to make sure I organise my UV’s well enough within the grid so make the most of the space.  This is something I never practiced before but thankfully its more time consuming that difficult. I spent today re-building my books for the top shelf of the bookcase  because I realised that as they were previously, I would have had to of mapped them all separately which would have been a frustrating given how simple they are to just duplicate with a UV map already unwrapped. 

Lothar told me that I should start with the biggest book first and use that as the main unwrapped model. That way I would only have to duplicate smaller versions of it which means the textures wouldn’t be an issues (as opposed to making bigger versions which would stretch the already mapped UV’s). 

 

The book in the middle is the biggest book that I unwrapped originally. I then duplicated it and downsized it. By right clicking on the newly duplicated book and selecting “UV” I was able to see where the new UV had been placed on the grid (which was right on top of the original book that I duplicated from). I simply selected UV on the grid, highlighted this new books UV’s and moved them so that they didn’t overlap. 

  

I repeated this process until I had the correct number of books to fill the shelf on the bookcase. As you can see the UV map is the same which I need to talk to Lothar about asap to see if they need tweaking. I also want to see if I can assign this as its own UV set and then make the picture frames and vase on another UV set and then finally the bookcase on another so that all 3 main areas has 1 UV set.