差点儿忘了转贴这篇，内容更全面些，但时间上更早。补一下。
Chris Taylor: Hello, Hello!
Aaron@EndgameRadio: Hello, Chis Taylor?
CT: yes!
EGR: This is Aaron from EndgameRadio! How are you doing?
CT: Hey, I’m doing great, thanks!
EGR: Good to hear! So going right into the interview, you’ve got about 15 minutes, Paul said?
CT: Yes.
EGR: Ok, cool, I’ll try and make it short then.
CT: If we need a little more time, we can take a little more time. It’s just a really insane time right now right now. My schedule is packed, like uh, I don’t even wanna say what it’s packed like. [laughter] It’s insane.
EGR: I’m sure, ok, cool. Well first off, I just want to ask, Supreme Commander is coming out pretty much beginning of, well this month? Is it February already?
CT: It is coming out this month, yes it is, and we got a couple more weeks. It’s actually different days for different parts of the world, so let’s just say the third week of February, roughly.
[01:15] EGR: How is this game going to revolutionize real time strategy games? What kind of innovations and features do you have in this game?
CT: Well the number one thing that everyone will recognize and experience right off the bat when they play Supreme Commander is what we call Full Strategic Zoom, so it’s the ability to take the camera, when you’re in a very traditional way, to pull out by rolling the mouse wheel so you can see the entire theater of war. And often times when I demo the game at trade shows and everything, I say “You ever get a brand new game and install it, intuitively everybody gets on that wheel, and they’re rolling that wheel, and the camera does move, and it moves back like an inch.” [laughter]Bam.
[02:07] CT: That’s the thing that drove me nuts, and so, now when you pull that camera back, you go to what used to be the mini map, but now you have the full screen, and at any level you can control units. You can drag-select units, and give orders, and hold down the shift key and adjust existing orders, and really just play the game in a way that really changes everything about the wayRTS games used to play, and it makes it play in a way that we all go “Wow, that’s great!” you know, “That’s the right hit, that’s the right place for theRTS genre to go!”
[02:45] EGR: What’s your favorite RTS design feature. Was it this or were there other things that you really enjoyed working on?
CT: Well it’s a package, it’s a real package when you start looking at the strategic zoom. And you look at large maps, and you look at the large numbers of units, and also the the experimental units, which are the really large over the top units that are very expensive that just do massive amounts of destruction. All of those things just fit together seamlessly, and that’s the package. So, there’s actually those four big features that really set the game apart.
[03:25] EGR: What was the most challenging feature to implement, or element of this package?
CT: It was definitely: A. It was the strategic zoom, because when you look at it at first, it seems very very simple and intuitive. You’d think “Oh, if you were designing an engine, it should just work really easy.” There are many, many levels of very complex things going on: progressive mesh systems on the terrain. Progressivetexturing systems. There’s all sorts of advanced sound management. There is a level of detail on units. There’s all kinds of things that are flagged to happen at different depths, this is a very sophisticated piece of software that allows us to do all of that stuff.
[04:13] EGR: How moddable is it?
CT: Very moddable. The game was architect-ed from day one, believe it or not, I am just a firm believer that the mod community is instrumental to creating a successful game, so we basically said you got to be able to mod everything in this game. You’ve got to be able to mod the AI, you gotta be able to add more units, you gotta be able to add new factions, you gotta be able to create new maps, campaigns, you name it. Even aUI, a new UI, so people can create more advanced UIs that take up less screen space, say, but would be too difficult for the average beginning player to understand. So people can create more advanced versions of things, for harder-core players if they want, so it’s yeah I’m just “nutty” about modding, really. You can put “nutty” in quotes.
EGR: Alright well it’s on quotes in the audio then!
CT: [laughter]
[05:17] EGR: How are mods going to interact with online play? This is a big question of mine, especially with the hosting service, with GPGnet. How are you going to have people who have mods play with either other people, or people who have other mods. Is there anything designed for that?
CT: Yeah we’re obviously doing something very new here, that’s a little frightening, because there’s going to be mods that are created that we can’t quite wrap our heads around, so we’re going to go through some learning some lessons, we’re going to learn some things here, and we’re going to react and move to make sure all those things ultimately move really smoothly.
[05:55] CT: But here’s the way it should work in principle: I’ve installed a bunch of mods on my machine, in my game. And you’ve installed a bunch. And we’re going to play with some subset of those mods. So you go to host a game, and you check, inside the mod manager, (which is built right into Supreme Commander,) you check the things you want to have active. So what happens is, in order for me to play with you, I have to have those same mods, and then the game will automatically check those same mods on my end. So the host really can decide what mods are in and what mods are out.
[06:27]CT: Now take a look at a traditional system. And there’s no rules. So what happens is, in a synchronous game, a game where what’s going on, on both ends, simulation wise has to be identical, otherwise the synchronousmultiplayer model doesn’t work, and the game goes out of synch , and the game goes out of sync, and then the fun ends shortly thereafter. [laughter] If you’ve ever played a game that’s ever gone out of sync.
[06:55]CT: What’s really key here is that if you go to get a mod in a typical game, and you install it on your PC, you really don’t have a clean and easy to get rid of that mod. Now if someone had wrote a nice installer for the mod, that would be true. But if the mod goes in and changes some of the existing data, the only way to really get back to the beginning is touninstall everything, maybe even go in and find some rogue directories that are left laying around, and then reinstall the core game, maybe there’s an expansion pack, reinstall the patch for the expansion pack, so four hours later, you’re back to where you were, before you installed this mod you don’t want. You follow that? It’s a little much to get your brain around real fast, but the bottom line is, with our mod manager, you can install a mod and say, “y’know, I don’t really like that mod,” and just un-check the box. And the mod is no longer active.
EGR: Right, that’s definitely very cool, having a lot of experience playing games with mods, doing that exact pattern that you described.
[08:00] CT: Yeah it’s just another thing to make PC gaming scarier and harder for people to get into. Now, if you had something like a mod manager, and your friend comes over to your house and says, “Oh check out all this stuff, blah blah blah blah,” he’s going a million miles an hour, he downloads all this stuff onto your game, and then when he leaves you justun -check the stuff, or you leave it there, and guess what, you go to play with a friend online, and only the mods he’s got installed and he’s chosen will activate on your system, and you’ll go ahead and you don’t have to worry about itde-syncing. So it’s just a nice nice, really cleanly architect-ed system.
[08:35] EGR: What about mod interoperability. Is there any way of like determining conflicts and all that kind of stuff:
CT: Well ultimately we don’t have to worry about conflicts in the sense that only the same mods run on both ends, the mods will just do whatever they are going to do. Now interoperability of any mod will be dependent on the mod-maker to warranty his mod. Now for whatever reason you’ve downloaded two different mods, one from one friend, another from some random guy in someplace else, and you go to run those mods and they don’t work, well you’ll just turn one off other the other, right? You won’t have to really figure out which one you want to keep forever and which one you want to get rid of forever, there’s just no reason why you shouldn’t just be able to turn off, you know one or the other on. In fact the mod manager, once again, (hey are these questions prearranged?) [laughter] The point is with the mod manager, a sophisticated problem like interoperability of mods actually, it doesn’t go away completely, it’s just heavily mitigated. You know?
[09:42] EGR: Now the beta’s been out for a little while, and you guys have been looking at people playing and you know balance testing and all that kind of stuff. What kind of play style have you seen emerge?
CT: Well, you know, when you do a Beta, you see it all. You see crazy stuff, and it’s great. Beta testers do exactly what we want them to do. We want them to abuse the game in every conceivable way. If they can find an exploit, everyone will eventually will start using it, and then you’re forced to do an update to your Beta to plug that exploit, (to fix the game, essentially.) They have found a hole in the bottom of your ship, and all the water will come rushing in and you will, to use an analogy then move to the next one, and to the next one, and to the next one. So the beta testing group, community if you will, is just awesome, and you really don’t want them to behave, because then when a game goes out to a million people, (or however hundreds of thousands of them online at any one time,) you don’t want to find out then where all the exploits are. So when you talk about play styles, it’s almost difficult to sit here and characterize a range of play styles, it’s basically they are searching for a way to break the game. And occasionally I’m sure you get someone out there having fun, which is good too, but you really do want them hammering on the game in every conceivable way. And they do, they find it all, and they play every way, every conceivable play style kind of emerges out of it, until they find that exploit.
EGR: How do the three faction play styles differ?
CT: Well as you may or may not know, the early tech levels for balance, for early game balance, for small map balance, we kept those factions relatively similar with a couple of difference in some of the factions. Like theAeon with the units that can move across water, (which really does have an impact on early games,) Early water, so if you’re playing on an island if it’s a two island game, if you’re on one island and your opponents on another island, and you’re playing theAeon , it’s a definite advantage. So there’s some very very different play styles there. But for the most part we try to keep the early game play styles on a level playing field. As you increase through the tech levels, we start to try to take them in new directions. We actually did a lot more to diverge each of the factions than we have now, but in the time we had with tuning and balancing in the beta, we had to kind of keep lopping off things that were throwing stuff off, and out of balance. It was a real heartbreak too, because it takes the game back in a direction you don’t want to go in, but with time we’ll be able to push those boundaries back out.
[12:38]CT: As it is right now, the experimental units is really the place where the asymmetry of the game shines, and that happens on the big maps. So, that’s where I love the game. I mean when you have a giantMonkeylord attacking your base, and you’re furiously trying to build a Fatboy, (which I was trying to do about an hour and a half ago,) [laughter], the miner just lit my Fatboy up, and I was going “GAH !” You know? That’s awesome. But you see, at that stage of the game, symmetry, and careful tuning and balancing just doesn’t matter as much as it did in that first 20 minutes. So we really struggled with that. I mean I know everyone who has followed us through the beta, probably wonders what’s going on in our head. Well that’s kind of it, it’s that terrible battle between game balance and game asymmetry, which has us pulling the hair out of our head.
[13:44] EGR: Scale factors are a major differing factor. There’s a lot of RTS games which are becoming more real time tactical, almost, where you have small groups of units of big hero units, and that’s pretty much all you’re controlling. How do you feel this game differs from the traditionalRTS?
CT: I’m pretty open about the idea that I think a lot of the past RTS games were heavily tactical, of course there strategy, even in tactics there’s strategy, if you will. But strategy, in the way that I conceived of it, is what I call, something that happens before the battle, and tactics happen during. And I do feel like a lot ofRTS games are about the battle, where Supreme Commander is about the war. It takes everything up to another level. Now, the cool thing about the game is that we’ve built it so that it scales, the tech levels and such. So if you play it on small maps, you get a tactical game. You get a traditional game. It feels very much like a traditionalRTS game. So as you increase the map size, the tech level, you’re further from your opponent, which means you get a chance to get more resources, and you can build bigger units, then things get a lot more strategic, because now you’re sitting there thinking to yourself, well heck, if I don’t attack my opponent in the next 10-15 minutes, they are going to have nukes, which means heck, I better have anti-nukes. So then you start going into this defensive mode, when a moment ago, you were thinking about offensive.
[15:17] CT: So you then get thrown back, I mean, you know you go back to like Eisenhower planning the invasion of Europe, you know, Operation Overload. He can’t have possibly said to himself, “Oh, the Germans will just sit and wait while I plan Operation Overload.” They could do something in those 10 months or however long it took, I think it was somewhere around 10 months, maybe it was nine, [laughter] I’m getting old. You know, He didn’t just sit there, and say “Oh they’re not going to do a thing, they are just going to wait for me when I’m ready.” So he had to be very strategic in the way he planned that thing, he had to be ready to go at a moments notice, he had to be ready to react, at the same time go through training exercises, and create the illusion that there might be an invasion at any time, and any place, so that they were never going to. Deep, deep strategy, strategy that would really keep you up at night. And there was not a shot fired. That’s the key, right? These are the things that take place in the minds of the player without a shot being fired. And that was really missing from a great manyRTS games. It was pretty much “engage withing the first 6 to 8 minutes,” and then after that it was just a wrestling match. And I really wanted to get strategy into the picture, in a way that no one had ever really felt in their gut before.
[16:42] EGR: So what is your favorite RTS game, not including ones you’ve worked on. Do you even play any? [laughter]
CT: I do, [laughter] I certainly don’t ever ever talk about what I don’t like, I only do talk about what I do like. I was a crazy, rabid fan ofWarcraft 2. And then I moved into Command and Conquer. Well first, Command and Conquer, then Warcraft 2, and then on through different RTS games. I would say that my number one favorite in recent years was Age of Empires 2, it just seemed to get so much right, and of course everyone in my family likes it, so we could all play as a family which is really great. The recent round ofRTS games, (if you wanna drill down on stuff,) I really enjoyed Rise of Nations. I’ve spent progressively less and less time playing games as deeply as I used to, eight or nine years ago, just because of demands on my time, being a father and running and having a business, and being the lead designer to Supreme Commander. But the truth is the last round of games that went out, Empires at War, Company of Heroes, there was just so many of them, and the thing that I really recognize for the first time in 10 years was that all of these games are really quite good. It was really hard to pick a game out and say, “Well that one was definitely no good.” No, no, they were all great games, and of course they were all made by people that I love, I mean I’m friends with everyone in the business. [laughter] All of them did such great work, I just enjoyed the hell out of it, all theWarhammer stuff that Relic has done, Relic has just done an amazing job. But I’m not going to sit here and bullshit you, and say that I play each of these games for hours and hours and hours. It’s just an impossibility.
EGR Right, there’s almost too many games to do that with anyone at this point
CT: Yeah, it really is. And it’s competitive, and you’ve got to create something that really goes a lot deeper now so they have a reason to play your game, instead of just skipping over it to the next thing that comes along.
[19:12] EGR: How did you get into game design?
CT: Well it’s funny you ask that because when I first started in the business, I never specifically said I wanted to be a game designer. I wanted to be a programmer, I wanted to actually write the games. Because they were all the same person. In the early days, the programmer and the designer, it was all one guy. When I got in to the business in 1989, I was working at Hardball 2, and I was the only guy really on the project. So nobody really called me the designer, I don’t think I was called the lead designer, or a designer, I was just a programmer. But I was the only one who was really making any decisions. So I started to do the design work, for lack of a better, because there was no one else there. There were other people there, I don’t mean to pay any disrespect to them, I just mean they just weren’t in my face. You know what I mean? The management was giving me general direction and so forth and so on. And then when I went into 4D Boxing, for those who can remember that far back, back in 90, it was a bigger hole that just was formed, for stepping in there and doing the day to day design work. And then of course Triple Play, it was pretty clear that I needed to be the lead designer. And then of course Total Annihilation, I was categorically the lead designer in title and in everything, coming up with the core vision of the game, and I was still the engineer, and that’s the interesting thing through all of these projects, I was the lead engineer. The entire time, and the lead designer, and in Total Annihilation, I added a third hat, I became the project leader. So I was doing all those jobs. And then on Dungeon Siege, to run you through the entire thing here, I was the lead designer, and essentially the spiritual project leader kind of guy, but I dropped programming. It just became too much, to be a programmer on the project as well as these other things. And then of course, (now that I’ve just bored you to tears here with my life story,) I picked up all these other hats, being a PR guy, being a marketing guy, kind of getting out there in front of the world and doing all these trade shows and all these demos, and so you just start asking yourself, you know, “How does one do their job when you’re wearing all these hats?” But you know, we find a way. Weget’er done. That was supposed to be sarcasm. But anyway. [laughter]
[21:50] EGR: I’m glad you do go out to trade shows, otherwise I wouldn’t have run into you last comicon
CT: Oh that’s right, I did run into you at Comicon, eh? Yeah that was my first.
EGR: You gave us some shirts and showed us how to fold them properly, because we were noobs.
CT: You know, I never quite know what I’m going to do when I’m out in public, you know one time it’s shirt folding, another time it might be origami, you know, I don’t know. Was I drunk? [laughter]
EGR: I don’t think so, you couldn’t really tell, it was Comicon, who knows.
CT: I couldn’t have been drunk, because I don’t drink. Much.
[22:32] EGR: What kind of games did you play, getting into games growing up, that really influenced your work now, video games or other kinds of games.
CT: What has influenced my work now? Well you know movies, I love movies, films, I sat there and watched Episode 1, (say what you like about the movie,) but I was fascinated with what they were able to do with CG, and it was a huge inspiration to see large and small all working together in those big battles, and so I took a lot of inspiration for that, for Supreme Commander. The books I read in high school were huge, you know the Foundation series, basically anything from Heinlein or Asimov, those two are two of my favorite authors, I read through almost all of their stuff. Get a little of L. Ron, dabbled with L. Ron, [laughter] I know it’s almost like you can’t say that.
EGR: Here in Hollywood it’s almost a taboo word, but at the same time you hear it so often you’re just kind of used to it.
CT: So yeah the Battlefield Earth, and there was The Missioners. I got to about Book 5, I think that’s a record, before I threw some power cord up in the garage. [laughter] That’s terrible. That’s a terrible thing to say. Am I supposed to be serious? Is this a serious interview? [laughter]
EGR: No, not at all.
CT: Ok, good. I couldn’t stand listening to an interview about some guy just prattling on and being really boring. So you know I had a lot of influence from those books back in high school, and then it became harder and harder to read fiction because I got so excited about history, about reading about WWII, and Vietnam and I just found that those real life stories of the crazy stuff that has happened on this planet in the last 100 years is really the stuff that has had an influence on me in the last 10 years of my life. But yeah, film, books, real life. It’s all a big influence. If you look at the back story of Supreme Commander, the whole political intrigue, all these agendas and everything else of all these factions. That comes straight out of real life. That’s me just taking a page right out of what’s happening on the news every night.
[25:00] EGR: What draws you to the RTS genre? Because you’ve had somewhat of an affair with that genre. What makes it special?
CT: Well, that’s true. When you’re a kid and you have no agenda, and you’re naturally drawn to something, it shows up in your adult life, in some way or another. Always drawn to the back of the comic book, where there’s the little green army men you can order. I never did get them. That’s the real crying shame, right there. But you know, I got older, I started playing Risk. I took a ping pong table, and I covered it with white cardboard, and I drew a whole island continent, and islands, and attack routes, and I basically took the Risk game, and I blew it up. But I didn’t blow up the size, I kept the scale the same, so that it was essentially like playing on fifteen Risk maps at once. And we used to play games for weeks on this ping-pong table. And everything got big and insane, so you weren’t just attacking with 20 or 30 units, you were attacking with 100 or 200 or 300. So it was a real precursor to what I did in Total Annihilation where I wanted lots more happening. You watch a movie a movie or whatever, you don’t have 10 guys fighting 10 guys, you have armies clashing. Those old BenHur movies. Ben Hur , that doesn’t really sound quite right. Where you’ve got the peasants and the Roman army all clashing and there’s guys everywhere, and it’s bedlam, it’s awesome, right? I like to capture that.
[26:45] CT: But there’s a twist with me. I don’t really necessarily go after human suffering and human bloodshed. I really like the drama and I like the over the top action, and I like all the clash, and the big craziness, but I don’t like all the blood and guts. So I use robots. And the robots actually make it really fun, because you can kind of be sort of ridiculous about it, you can just grab these guys and throw them in, and there walking guys or whatever. And there blowing up. But you feel like, oh, but there just robots. So it’s kinda cool, you know? I kind of try to not emphasize, in any way, the negative side of war, really, to put words on it.
EGR: That’s a really interesting take on that, I didn’t think of that.
[27:30] EGR: So where do we go from now, from here on to this point, in the RTS Genre? I read an interview where you said there’s that still a lot to be done. What do you think some of the next things on the horizon, without spoiling anything?
CT: Well, you know, I was just playing like I mentioned like an hour and a half ago, and there’s like 10 things that were bugging me. [laughter] I was playing the final gold, and saying “Why is it doing that, and why is it doing that?” And so you know what, there’s so many things now, of course I don’t want to list them out on the phone, (because I don’t want all my competitors to hear my ideas for the next thing we’re doing.) You know we’re going to continue, we’re going to continue to makeRTS games. We’re going to continue to innovate. We’re going to make the UI even more, we’re going to be things, you’ll go “Oh, wow, yeah, that’s awesome.” There’s things, I have a design document over in 2003, before Supreme Commander, and I cut, (I make up a different number every time, I’ll be honest with you,) but it’s gotta be over half of the features in the document that never made it. Don’t tell the publisher that I didn’t implement half the stuff I promised. Keep that a secret between the two of is. Because there was so many things that I wanted to do. The engineers looked at me, quite honestly, like “Are you out of your mind? That’s going to take a Cray,” (We don’t have a Cray supercomputer anymore, I don’t know what it is,) “It’s going to take a thousand computers a million years to make those calculations.” and I’m going, “Yeah, well… If I don’t ask…” And so, guess what, a lot of the other features I asked for the engineers to blow some brain cells on, they actually implemented, so that’s what we have today. And those things should all make it in the future some time.
[29:17] CT: And there’s a lot of them, and it’s everything from UI, to control, to AI in a unit, not opponent AI but the Unit AI, that you see, that when you unit goes to do something. Say your unit goes into a base. And it’s walking into the base and it’s attack moving. And it’s attacking the first thing it sees, like a Mass Extractor, and you’re like “Cool.” But then it moves in a little further, and it’s being attacked by a point defense gun. You kinda want it to stop attacking the Mass Extractor and go after the Point Defense. And you know there’s 100 if not 500 of those kinds of things, that you want, that are so subtle, that you just, sometimes it’s a question of technology, sometimes it’s just doing it, sometimes there’s a CPU hit, sometimes it’s because you just forget.
[30:10] CT: There’s so many reasons why things don’t happen, and then there’s just being hit by the title wave, and you’re standing on the beach and the tidal wave just hits you. That’s what doing Supreme Commander was like. I mean the game was so huge, in every way, you can play through the entire game and forget to do something basic. Like I was an hour into a game and I forgot to build anomni , a radar sweep. I was like “What’s the matter with me?” I actually sat there and was going, “I’m the lead designer of this game! How do I forget to build anOmni Radar?” But I was so wrapped up in my strategy to take my siege assault bot in behind this guy’s base, that I was just blinded. And I mean somebody out there in, you know Peru, is going to remember to build that that, and they’re going to kick my ass.
[30:58] CT: So you see the game really gives opportunity. for people who are capable of thinking on so many more levels. And that’s what the game is about, it’s really about the creme rising and the really smart cookies, they are the guys who are going to win this game, and I love that. I don’t want to play a game where whether you are smart or you’re not smart, there’s no difference, there’s no change in the outcome of the game. Does that make sense?
EGR: One of the things that’s most exciting about Supreme Commander is that concept of strategic intelligence and things, and not it just being micro skills. And that there being something else about winning, as opposed to just being able to click really fast, and command the units efficiently, you know?
CT: Exactly. Clicking fast was not something I necessarily wanted to be the exclusive reason for someone winning. I didn’t want to punish that person, but it had to be that if you are a deeper thinker, and if you had to hatch bigger strategies and bigger plans, that you would be the winner, and that was the very fundamental goal of the game.
[32:10] EGR: I’m really looking forward to it. One final question to wrap up. Say a wizard has turned you into a robot. Is this awesome. Yes or no?
CT: A wizard has turned me into a robot?
EGR: Yeah.
CT: You know, the mood I’ve been in these days, I think it would be awesome. [laughter]
EGR: Ok. Good to hear. I think robots are always awesome.
CT: Well then I would crush and destroy everything, with my new robot body, and I think that’d be pretty fun.
EGR: Well I look forward to that.
CT: Ok. [laughter] Wow.
EGR: Well thank you very much for your time, it’s been an awesome interview.
CT: No, thank you, I appreciate it.
EGR: I will let you get back to your crushing.
CT: Ok, I’m going to go crush and destroy. Thanks man.
EGR: Thank you!
[ 本帖最后由 银河解放军 于 2007-2-27 16:53 编辑 ]