MULTIPLAYER
After the departure of our network programmer in the last week of November 2005,
we had a difficult choice to make - whether to take his code and complete it,
fixing any bugs we found and hoping we could patch around any problems we
uncovered, or throw it all away and start again. This was a difficult call, as
time was running short for an area of the game which is always known to be a
challenging one to implement.
We took the option we all felt was right, which was the braver/more foolish one
of replacing it all. Steve Sharp, the coder we tasked with it has done a great
job in a short time in a coding area he was previously unfamiliar with, and we
now have all of the Live support in place and working well. The recent addition
of speech to the online game over the past few weeks has also added greatly to
the player experience.
CONTROL SYSTEM
Over to Mark Sample, normally our game designer/ producer here, for a little on
the controller code.
Our task for Xbox 360 was to make sure the game played right with the console
controller. This is harder than most think as many gamers take the highly
responsive keyboard and mouse feel of the home PC for granted and we knew from
the outset that we wanted to be as faithful as possible to the way the game
plays on PC rather than changing the experience for the gamer.
Assigning the action buttons to the pad was easy, however the fun started with
getting the feel of the player movement and looking around right with the
sticks. Using a vast array of tweakable values we set about tuning the turn-rate
and acceleration. From the get-go we knew it was vitally important that the
player felt completely in control at all times. They need to have enough
low-down sensitivity to make small delicate moves, as well as fast response for
sweeping, super-quick 180’s – as you never know who might pop up behind you =).
After much testing and tuning, the stick controls now feel robust and
razor-sharp; we’re really pleased with the results and think the gamer will be
ready in no time to take out a hunter or two with what we have delivered.
Our QA team in LA recently suggested that the game could also benefit from a
facility for user-assignable weapon switching on the D-pad, and we added this
into the game. We designed a method which allows the player to assign and
re-assign weapons to those buttons quickly at any time as they play, as simply
as programming stations in on a car radio. It works great, and we confidently
expect to see other games following suit soon.
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