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人物专访:约翰·卡马克谈对手机游戏开发的看法

发布时间:2010-12-06 17:40:59 Tags:,,,,,,

如果电脑游戏界也有一座拉什莫尔山(游戏邦注:该山位于美国南达科他州,刻有华盛顿、杰斐逊、罗斯福、林肯4个伟人巨石雕像),约翰·卡马克(John Carmack)的雕像不但将现身其中,而且无疑是当中最高峰。近日,arstechnica网站记者在采访中与这位3D游戏之父讨论了有关手机游戏的话题,包括iPad、Android与iOS,当然还有id Software工作室最新推出的手机游戏《Rage》等内容。

John Carmack

John Carmack

在iPad刚刚发布时,我们内部争论的话题就是“这种系统真的支持运行正宗的AAA级游戏吗?”所以我想听听您的看法。

我们花费许多功夫去考虑和讨论的问题之一就是,我们应该怎样把握好游戏的运行空间。初步来看,AAA级游戏确实可以在iPad上运行,但游戏最大下载容量仅2GB,不过是一张DVD的一点零头而已。这样一来,虽然理论上用户还可以下载更多内容,但整个游戏规格大小都要受到限制;所以说现在流行的AAA级游戏的开发在很大程序上取决于媒介的技术标准。

但从硬件发展水平来看,这种问题又完全有可能解决。另外苹果拥有大量的用户,他们非常希望这个平台可以成为PSP或DS的接班人,成为一款专业游戏机。虽然触摸屏界面可能还是不够大,但它的点触控制功能确实更出色。

现在的问题就是,我们真的想针对这个平台开发大型游戏吗?我在几年前就说过,我们可以投入500万美元去开发一款iPhone游戏,但现在我们已经有了成倍的功率和可用内存,我可以为一款iOS游戏开发支出1000万美元。手机平台最值得推崇的地方在于,它的投资并不大,这样游戏开发过程也就不会束手束脚。

一款流行、顶级的AAA级游戏动辄耗资数千万美元,而且还需要60至100人的大型开发团队连复一年地赶工,人力和物力成本实在很高。而且涉及到这样一笔钱的事情,你就难免会顾虑重重,犹豫不决。你确实很想推出一部让众人叫好的作品,也想通过不断优化,让它更加完美,但这样一来你就没有机会全身而退,因为这种项目的风险真是非常非常之大,大家都不愿意孤注一掷,把公司的生死押在这种项目上。

再看典型的手机游戏开发过程,你只需要6名开发人员,投入6个月时间,大多数健康运作的公司都可以消化这种模式的失败后果,它和那种可能赔上公司前途的模式截然不同,所以我认为手机游戏非常可取。这可能是上天给开发商的意外惊喜,不知道游戏市场怎么偏偏眷顾这种规模更小、成本更低的项目。

但如果是AAA级的游戏,你就得做好忍痛面对现实的心理准备了。即使你有很出色的亮点,但只要它是一款常规类型的游戏,而且如果用户还能列举出5项其他游戏具备而你的游戏缺乏的元素,你的业务运营就不免要受到影响;但在iOS这个相对宽容的市场上,你的游戏可以有一些创新和独特之处,不需要完全照搬其他游戏风格。

目前我们针对手机平台所推出的游戏都只是在价格和策略上的一种尝试,我们现在最为盈利的游戏是《Doom: Resurrection》,售价是9.95美元,但还没有足够的数据证明它的运营非常成功。《Wolfenstein Classic》、《Doom Classic》 这两款游戏曾让我们大获成功,但它们的成就离不开原版游戏的品牌价值。至于《Rage》,我们有意让这款游戏以低价出售,主要是为了打开市场,推广今后开发的重量级游戏。

我当然希望这些游戏可以自立根生,光靠自身吸引力就能盈利,但我们也不排斥折扣促销手段,《Rage》是我们目前最畅销的一款游戏。在iPad上排名第一,登陆iPhone平台仅12小时就跻身前三甲,这些游戏交易数据非常给力。

就我个人而言,我还是比较偏好那些大型游戏,以及涉及这类游戏的硬核软件工程、项目管理等事宜。但如果这个小巧玲珑的游戏市场,在数年之后也进化成了AAA级游戏领域这种庞然大物,我也会感到沮丧,因为我们在其他三种平台上已经推出了不少AAA级内容,我还是希望手机游戏市场能保持自己的特点。

关于游戏界面的问题,Kinect正是一项新颖的游戏控制技术,它可以提供一些新功能,但也有很多玩家无法实现的功能。请问您怎么看?

我们暂时无意在游戏中添加Kinect等体感控制功能,因为我们的游戏都是根据掌机控制器量身定制的,所以很难在这个基础上添加额外的功能。

我倒是想在Xbox Live Arcade平台上尝试推出一些新项目,就是那种不需要拿公司命运赌明天的游戏,但我们现在还没有明确的计划—-公司现在没有空闲的人力物力资源,但如果有机会我想还是可以试试看。

让我们来谈谈手机硬件与掌机硬件之间,苹果第四代与360之间的区别。我们知道360硬件一直很强大,请问您认为苹果第四代与360之间的差距有多大?

iOS平台的性能比上一代掌机要强得多。我可以利用等量的开发资源,创造出一款在iOS平台的运行效果优于原来的Xbox或PS2等上一代掌机的游戏。当然,这一代的掌机游戏功能无疑要比iOS更加强悍,不过如何提高针对掌机的游戏玩法和设计仍然有待推敲。

iOS平台能否在下一代掌机上市之前赶上这一代掌机的性能是一个很有意思的话题。考虑到硬件方面的能量功耗问题,这两个平台的设计可能会非常不同。手机的能耗如果和掌机一样大,用户拿着就容易烫手,而且有可能半小时内就消耗掉了电池能量。话虽如此,我们仍然不宜过早定论这个平台到底属于什么性质,或者它应该走什么路线。即使这些平台的能耗相当,它们的运行性能也都会呈双倍增长。

相信多芯手机也会在不久的将来问世,我非常期待手机领域也能采用64位地址。我最看中的项目发展方向之一是,将静态文件的GPU地图资源植入手机平台,我们也有可能遇到32位地址限制。我们将尝试在手机平台上植入4GB以上的存储数据。

关于Android平台,你们曾在去年提到正在测试Android版本游戏……

不是去年,是在几个月之前。我已经拿到了Android开发工具,确实有准备将一些游戏编译到Android平台,但还不打算通过Android Marketplace出售游戏,因为我还是不放心这个平台的技术支持和游戏移植工作量。

比起其他平台,iOS的确是一个非常理想的选择……为iOS平台开发游戏的感觉很奇妙,这也是我们放弃过时的功能性手机的主要原因之一。但如果针对Android平台,恐怕我们只会开倒车走下坡路。不过Android平台的用户规模一直很庞大,所以我们还会密切关注Android。只是还不能确定到底要不要把《Rage》投放到Android Marketplace。(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,转载请注明来源:游戏邦)

Primal Rage: a conversation with Carmack, and a look at id’s latest

If there were a Mt. Rushmore of computer gaming, John Carmack’s head would not only be on it, it would have the highest polygon count. Ars recently caught up with this founding father of 3D to talk about mobile gaming, the iPad as a console, Android vs. iOS, and, of course, id’s newest and most advanced title: Rage. After the interview, you’ll find our review of Rage for the iPad, so don’t forget to click all the way through.

JS: One of the debates that we had internally when the iPad launched was, “is this the kind of system that could host a real, triple-A title?” So I wanted to put that question to you.

JC: That’s something we spend a lot of time thinking and talking about—how we want to scope the games. There is no doubt from a raw horsepower standpoint that you can do a triple-A game on there.

You’re somewhat limited by the maximum download size, which is 2GB—that’s a fraction of a DVD. So you’re limited by total initial size, although you could theoretically download as much[additional content] as you want to; there’s going to be some limit where people don’t want to download 10GB of data. Much of what makes a modern, triple-A title is the media that goes into it.

Half of the reason for us ditching the old feature phones was that it was so much more pleasant to develop for iOS. And I fear that we would be slipping back into some of that quagmire on the Android side of things.But still, on a raw hardware level, it’s definitely possible to do that. And there’s a vocal fraction of the consumer crowd on the iDevices that really wants the devices to be the successor to the PSP or DS—they want it to be a gaming machine. You’re somewhat hampered by the touch interface—there’s a lot of places where tactile controls really are better—but you can definitely do a lot.

Now, the other side of that is, do we really want this to become the same development process as the big titles? I said years ago that we could spend $5 million developing an iPhone game, and now that we’ve doubled and doubled again the horsepower and available memory, I could spend $10 million developing an iOS game. And you can see where all that would go, and it would be glorious and spectacular. But one of the really cool things about the mobile platform has been that, because it’s not as expensive, you don’t have to be quite as conservative with that.

A modern, top-notch, triple-A title costs many tens of millions of dollars to develop. If you have 60 or 100 people working for multiple years, it’s just really damn expensive. And, when there’s that kind of money on the line, there is an unavoidable degree of conservatism that comes in. You want to do things that you know people love and you want to make it better and polish it, but you really don’t have an opportunity to go off into left field—that’s really, really risky, and people don’t want to bet their company on things like that.

But the way that mobile games have been going, with the typical development cycle, if you spend six months with six people on something, that’s the type of thing where most healthy companies could absorb a total failure on that. So it’s not the same bet-the-company type of approach to do something different, and I think that’s really valuable. It’s sort of a nice happenstance that the market seems to be rewarding these smaller, more focused projects.

On the triple-A titles, you must throw in everything and the kitchen sink. Even if you have some brilliant part in there, if it’s a conventional genre and people can tick off the five things you didn’t do that other games did, it’s going to have an impact on the level of success that you can get. But there seems to be much more forgiveness in the iOS market to be able to have something that’s new and clever and different, and flashy in some way without necessarily having all of the checkbox items that every other game has done.

Every release that we’ve done on here has been an experiment with price point, and with different strategies. So far, we’ve had the most commercial success with Doom: Resurrection, which launched at $9.95. But we don’t have enough datapoints to really draw conclusions from this. We had great success with Wolfenstein Classic and Doom Classic, but they’re sort of riding the nostalgia buzz. So they can’t necessarily be evaluated in isolation. With Rage, we intentionally went with a much lower initial price-point, because to some degree this is marketing and promotion for the big title.

I absolutely want them to be able to stand profitably on their own, but we can offer some discounting there, and so far this has been far and away our best launch ever. We just hit number one on the iPad list, and we’re at number 3 on the iPhone list after only 12 hours of being available. So it is interesting to see those kinds of tradeoffs.

But personally, I love the big titles and the hardcore software engineering and project management that goes into doing these glorious things, but I’d be sad if this kind of neat new little market space evolved away in a couple of years into being the same sort of triple-A-driven content development that we already have on three other platforms. We’ve already got that in other places, so I’d be happy if this stayed a little bit different in focus.

JS: To zero in on the issue of the interface, this is the kind of thing that we’re seeing with the Kinect, as well. It’s novel, there are some new things that you can do, but there are a lot of things that you can’t do that maybe you want to do as a gamer.

JC: The Kinect and the Move stuff, we have no intention of supporting that right now because our games are carefully crafted around what’s going to play well on a console controller. And it’s hard to add a frill on top of that.

What I would love to do is do something novel and experimental on an Xbox Live Arcade download, something that is not, again, betting the whole company on some design direction. We don’t have any actual plans to do that [type of small effort]—all resources are pretty much committed right now—but that would be the way I would love to experiment with that.

JS: Let’s talk about mobile hardware vs. console hardware, and about the A4 vs., say, the 360. The 360′s hardware is pretty long-in-the-tooth at this point, so how big a gap would you say there is now between the A4 and the 360.

JC: It’s probably fair to say that the iOS devices are better than the previous-generation consoles. You could pick poster-child optimization cases where any given platform is going to be better, but in terms of just saying, “what’s the best game you can make with this,” I could certainly make a better game given the same amount of development resources on an iOS device than on anything in the previous console generation—the original Xbox or the PS2. But, conversely, the current generation of consoles is quite significantly more powerful than what you can do on iOS. Of course, how much that actually turns into better gameplay and design is certainly open for some discussion.

Whether the iOS devices will reach that same level of performance before the next console generation ships is quite an interesting question. There are some very different designs for power consumption considerations that go into their hardware design, and cranking things up to give that level of power but gets burning hot in your hands and uses up the battery in 30 minutes is absolutely possible with the form factor right now, but it’s probably not the right decision from the standpoint of what the device really is and is supposed to be. But even at the same power draw, they’re going to be doubling and doubling again the performance level.

In the not-too-distant future, we’re going to be seeing multicore on mobiles, and I’m very interested in when the transition to 64-bit addresses is going to come in the mobile space. One of my pet project directions is enabling GPU mapping of resources from static files on there, and we will be bumping into the 32-bit address space limit on that. Before we know it, it’s right around the corner that we’re going to be trying to map more than 4GB of memory data on mobile devices.

JS: With Android, you guys had said last year that you were testing out Android, and doing some spot checking…

JC: It wasn’t actually last year. It was couple of months ago. I’ve actually got the Android dev kit installed on a few platforms down here. The official word here is that we are definitely going to get some games compiled on the Android platform, but we are not yet committed to selling something on the Marketplace. Because I’m honestly still a little scared of the support burden and the effort that it’s going to take for our products, which are very graphics-intensive.

The iOS platform has really been a pleasure to work on compared to all of the… half of the reason for us ditching the old feature phones was that it was so much more pleasant to develop for iOS.

And I fear that we would be slipping back into some of that quagmire on the Android side of things. But there’s no doubt that the installed user base is huge, and is getting larger all the time. So it’s something that we’ll have to keep an eye on. But it’s not yet clear whether we’re going to have this Rage project available in the Android Marketplace or not. (source:arstechnica)


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