Call of Duty engine blamed for lack of female fighters (until now)
Female soldiers are a new inclusion to the Call of Duty series and Activision senior producer Yale Miller talks about why they decided to debut them for Ghosts.
Call of Duty: Ghosts is the first game in the franchise that lets you play as a female soldier. According to Infinity Ward executive producer Mark Rubin, tech was to blame for the all-male roster so far.
"Our previous engine would not handle that," he told Kotaku. "The way memory worked in the previous engine, it never would have been able to do that. When we got a chance to re-tool the engine completely, that gave us the opportunity to make the change that we could have character customization. That then gave us the opportunity to do female characters."
Of course, Ghosts uses a "next-gen engine," according to Activision.
With tech no longer being a limiting factor, it simply made sense for Ghosts to offer female playable characters, Activision senior producer Yale Miller told Shacknews. "I think it makes sense. There are females in the military, there are females in combat, so when they went down the path of having character customization, it just made sense to have female characters. Obviously, I've been asked the question on previous games, like Black Ops 2, 'Are you going to put a girl in the game?' from both female gamers and female military. It makes sense. They're in combat, so if you're making soldiers, you should be able to make a female soldier."
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Shacknews
replyOzzie Mejia posted a new article, Call of Duty engine blamed for lack of female fighters (until now).
Female soldiers are a new inclusion to the Call of Duty series and Activision senior producer Yale Miller talks about why they decided to debut them for Ghosts.-
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You don't know how technology works. They obviously required double the number of bits for a new chromosome configuration. Yesterday's computers could not do that. That's why it could do dozens of different player models but none of them could be a woman. Now that computers are advanced enough they changed their engine so it can.
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Obviously it was that, but all it means is that they thought 2 additional terrorist skins were more important than a female model, new skeleton or not. My point is that if they actually wanted it they could have made it happen, especially after so many iterations of the engine, and saying it's only possible now because of the tech or memory or whatever is just a cop-out.
http://www.shacknews.com/chatty?id=30650566#item_30650566-
not even sure how that's relevant. Quake 2 had pre-baked vertex animations IIRC. There was no animation blending / skeletons used for those player models. At that logic, you could point to literally every game and say every feature should be possible and included because X game did it 5 years ago in some form.
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It took this long to get a licensing deal in place for the boobs physics engine from the DoA-team.
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we rolled our own boob physics (and gut physics) for hitman absolution, we had some horrendous bugs with inverted boobs, meter long boobs and static boobs (they would remain at the character origo while the character would leave her boobs behind stretching the geometry across the level)
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omg. What happened with the vagina physics?
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Is that from in-game?
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not enough bump mapping
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If I were to get this game, I would rock a female player character, and would set her up with brunette hair, imagine her with a British accent, and a penchant for sadistic shotgun sprees. Basically like a female Gaz.
That's a big "if"; I still hold the MW2 PC grudge, and they've said nothing on PC because it's not in the PR plan for August. Dedicated servers hosted by the community have been declared "quaint" and "not worth the dev time in our tight schedule" by everyone except Valve for the past 3 years. I want to see single-player and multiplayer drop-down tilde console for client settings, config saving, and demo recording. Other developers have stepped up their PC FPS feature set, but will IW justsay nothing yet again?
I dunno; just don't pull a Rage. -
How retarded. Quake2 had female marines. Technology!
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With sound samples that were some dude grunting, and then they turned up the pitch. Unreal 1 had true female voice samples (and IIRC Tim Sweeney's wife was the computer announcer).
Soldier of Fortune had at least one female character in almost every "locale" model set (NYC gang, Siberia, Yakuza, etc) and had Soundelux use female voice actors for the barks.-
What about the sound the strogg rocket maidens made? sounded like they liked shooting you a little TOO much ;)
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Well, I imagine their design was solidified earlier in development than the point that female player models made it in.
I just thought of something: this Activision / IW announcement is basically saying, "Yeah, we remember the controversy of True Crime Hong Kong getting its female protagonist getting cut; let's spin this female CoD player model as something to counteract that." Which I imagine won't appease Sarkeesian, Pratchett, or Alexander, because it's a shallow effort, but at least it's an effort.-
Ok seriously, I need to understand this. I really thought this was a joke. I just don't get it, how can tech prevent you from a few extra polygons or recording a few extra lines? I'm completely confused can someone explain this garbage to me?
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ok nevermind I just read spongeh's post. Still, I can hardly believe it. With all the other assets in that game they couldn't have had another model, not a single one? lol. LOL. Consoles.
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No a single character model is only 1-2 megs but the animation set easily runs up to 10-15 megs, and then on top of that you have the additional textures and additional models that you need enough variation to not end up with clone armies. On the ps3 you had 256 megs, the runtime executable probably took some 50-80 megs or so of that for code leaving some 150 megs or so for actual game assets meaning: sound, animation, geometry, materials etc.
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Sounds like less-than ideal design to me.
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Its not really design its just the plain fact that if you do want _playable_ female characters within the same memory budget then the animation fidelity has to be halved and the geometry fidelity has to be halved. Doable ofcourse but not really worth the quality cut.
Now on the new consoles we have so much memory that animation and geometry memory usage becomes fairly ignorable in the big picture, but on the last gen they were extremely constrictive.-
Disclaimer: I am no programmer. More meaningless opinions follow -
Fairly ignorable from today's memory standards on consoles. If it were in the cards to begin with couldn't they have designed their code to allow for that? So in other words couldn't they have built their tech around their design from the get-go? I just feel like it was an afterthought and then they realized upps we can't add that!
Going forward, taking into consideration that at some point the new consoles will reach their limits, they should make sure their design includes what they want and then build their game around that. It should all mesh at that point. I just don't like the 'not enough memory' excuse because it just sounds like a scapegoat.
At the end of the day who cares, I am just talking out of my arse.
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Wasn't the Helo pilot you have to rescue in CoD4 a female?
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Artificial intelligence is finally robust enough to model their erratic behavior...
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Simply put, there is a lot less stuff in Q3. Even with that, memory was still a problem in Q3. The original purpose of forcemodel was to reduce memory usage due to all the player models. If you went through and clicked each one in the UI you'd pretty quickly get an "out of memory" error where the preview is on most machines at the time.
GPU scaled up higher than memory did in this generation, memory is typically now at a premium not GPU horsepower. Q3 was like half a dozen frames each for jumping, crouching, and some pain animations. I wish I could find numbers to compare, but I would not be surprised the player's gun costs way more in memory than a whole player model in Q3.-
There's a reason Generations Arena had a higher memory requirement than Quake 3...all the extra models and shit made it necessary to bump up the requirement to like 128MB of RAM (Q3 required 64).
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What about the playable dogs? Important!
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heyooo?
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Bitches, leave.
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I don't play CoD
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I'm just hoping they keep the Q3 mouse code in there. The CoD games have always had decent Q3 like mouse code and I'd imagine that's one of the left overs in the current games.
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