How Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun Solved Pathfinding | War Stories | Ars Technica

welcome back matter incoming transmission hi Louis castle and the co-founder of Westwood Studios I'm here to talk about Tiberian Sun which was built by a team of people that had built many RTS in a row and it really shows in the way they innovated him to push the edges [Music] Nanuk locker was really the the second game that we have done in the real-time strategy genre at Westwood of the first game of real time strategies that looked like a real time strategy game would be dune 2 and then the guys at Blizzard did a game called Warcraft light and then we dig thematic lockers so if man card was effectively the third RTS game in the world and the first one in the command & Conquer series command & Conquer was conceived of as a trilogy we were going to start with tiger & dawn then go to Tiger and his son and then ultimately Tiberian Twilight we start off command & Conquer one with this idea that as a kid in your bedroom with a computer and a modem you were hacking into or becoming a remote commander of a battlefield and so we wanted to deliver that as authentically as possible so the idea that the screen would be fullscreen audio/video was kind of a necessity because it was supposed to be tying into a real feed with a real person somewhere are you picking this up with Tiberian Sun we wanted to fast forward the world so we wanted to advance that timeline several decades so we could do things like standing next that would walk around and stuff and do more science fiction and then of course the world also had gone through a big transformation where Tiberian had infected most of the world you had the GDI areas or some sort of safe zones and you had the infected wastes and butan sand all sorts of other things that we could bring into the game so it really added a lot of texture to the story and have a lot of complexity to the kinds of things we could do with the characters command & Conquer was this idea of your your being constantly pressed between having to make decisions to build up your economy while you're waging war oftentimes you're doing it while somebody else is doing the same thing on the other side so it's this tension of preparing for battle executing battles and having to manage both the macro and the micro at the same time the Blizzard games the Starcraft games or Warcraft games Age of Empires all of those games lend themselves all the way back to the original doom to welcome and conquer there's all these games that people play today like League of Legends and that would simply wouldn't have existed it wasn't for the talented team that thought what a crazy idea let's make something really hard to do and make you put under pressure to time to do it and that's where artistic gods roots we always were looking at what was happening around the industry and saying okay that's an interesting innovation we like that one we don't like that one one thing was there's a big problem was unit caps we didn't want to have any you like the idea that people could build tons of units and go marching across the world and just mow everything down that was lots of fun [Music] so we were thinking about the game series as hey we look around the world we're looking to see whatever the people are doing it every time we saw some great innovation we said does that make sense for our series or not and we were constantly editing what's in what's out the way Westwood generally made products was we start off with the high ideals of what we were trying to accomplish this game is going to about these things and so for Terry and Sun it was destructible terrain it was real-time lighting it was the sort of fantastic futuristic units there was about five or six of these things that were just really kind of core tenants of what the game was going to be about the Singapore experiences were ways of understanding games so by the time we finished the single-player experience each one of the units that we unlock is explored in a way that gives you an idea of how it functions how you should use it and how you shouldn't use it but it also gives us an opportunity from a story point of view to put some meaning behind it and I think that's something that we were particularly good at at Westwood people cared about their Wolverines because they had the mission that made you care about the Wolverine as a unit as I think so later when you're playing multiplayer you're throwing 50 of those at somebody in the back of your head that still means something to you the unit was more than just a bundle of stats I kind of missed the fact that people don't tend to spend as much time anymore around the actual universe and the characters and the stories they go oh well you know it's just a shooter game doesn't really matter there's a play area I think it's really important to know your relationship with the game it's not just about moving a mouse and a keyboard around it's really about getting into the units and what they're there for and what their goals are see and see and in general always had a lot of technical problems that maybe not obvious to people I'll start with the first one which is a big bucket called the CD so what really distinguished command & Conquer from a lot of other games at the time was the use of the cd-rom CD ROMs had just come out recently they were single-speed and they were thought of as a big storage device where you could load a lot of stuff but the speed of a CD is really really slow so there were only a few games that could figure out how to use this in a way that was effective and we used it so much that I ended up shipping the game with two CDs that changed everything about how we thought about command & Conquer we went from one megabyte floppy to 700 megabytes CD so to 700 megabytes CDs to store stuff on we actually consumed all of it virtually because we decided with command conquer we were gonna do fullscreen video & audio and this was quite a challenge at the time when you see Kane Kane was not just the star villain of the series he was actually our director and our producer for all of our video shoots so we had this great talent and Joe why not believe he did well to Barry & Son we really wanted to step up our game we wanted a list double-a triple-a so Michael Bain and James Earl Jones I mean these are top-notch actors if the heyday of their careers let's kick some ass so our compression technology for all the video that we did for the games for cutscenes and such had to be such that it would be able to be playable from a single speed cd-rom there were no third-party codecs even by a time to every and son that could do that so we had to create all of the video compression technology ourselves [Music] we enlisted the aid of some people from university I think was University of Washington that worked on a thing called a vector quantization we would take the video and sliced up into little blocks and the individual blocks would be quantized into a single scalar value and they would be put into a multi-dimensional cloud and reduced down to the one set of blocks that could represent the most number of other blocks reasonably well and so for to grandson we were able to get a much higher quality visual with our technology than was available for the same kind of data rates as other things there were certainly better code acts as far as like the total quality but nothing that could run at the same speeds that are still so cd-rom ended up being both a huge benefit because we could do these great sequences and also an incredible torturous pain as a thing to use because there were these is a massive amount of data for the time and this little tiny straw that you had to sip everything through so I guess the second big bucket I had mentioned CD was one of them the other one was just the idea that we had these realistic units you have this imaginary space that's represented by mathematics and you need to move an object from one place to another the simplest way like if you've ever wanted to always solve a maze you can just go to the right until you can't go to the right and eventually you'll find a way out of the maze and if I said take this unit to go from here to here and it went around the edges of the map all the time to get there that would look ridiculous you also can't just do a beeline because if you try to do a beeline something might be in the way and you have to go around it so you have to figure out how to do that because we had lots of choke points in the game and because you could deform the terrain you couldn't pre calculate a lot of the path fighting so all the stuff was done in real time so something like that doesn't seem like a big problem but just the sheer computational need to calculate hundreds of Units pathfinding there's actually one of the things that brought all the CPUs down to their knees [Music] the computational need to calculate all these possible branches all these possible locations becomes just too many computations too big of tables and it just brings the processors down even to this day pathfinding is still a problem in every single game in RTS it's just happens to be a really hard problem because you have hundreds of units especially a CNC and they all move in different kinds of ways and the terrain they're moving through can be very dynamic and so it's changing all time most paths finding solutions that are fast to rely on the fact that the things around them are not moving and so you can do pretty good path fighting node based stuff when a lot of stuff is moving in virtually everything is moving it becomes really difficult I think one of the other things that people underestimate is how hard you have to work to make a game not do something stupid right so the best part about artificial intelligence if you want to call it that is you just want to avoid our artificial idiocy path fighting algorithms have this weird edge cases where something will thrash back and forth what it'll go up to an edge and it's clear that it should go one way but it goes all the way around another way those kinds of edge cases that do things that are really illogical ruin the game experience for a player because you get mad at the unit you're going what is this guy just completely stupid he's going the wrong way you know the player doesn't know how much work you've had to do to make it work they just know when it comes out so I always tell people it's like well if you spend more time just making sure it doesn't do something stupid it'll actually look pretty smart I think you know a Tiberian Sun we really complicated some of the simple stuff in our TSS talked a little bit about path finding and that idea of finding your unit from one place to another we make it really hard when the unit can suddenly burrow underground and one can't or there's gonna be a wall that pops up in increments so when I go to test my path that the wall is there and then it's gone and then it's there and then it's gone so you have to know over time whether or not you're driving toward something you could go through all these problems become really complicated so there's all these algorithms out there people can do it you can implement it you can have one unit go across the map and it looks great we start putting hundreds of units across people fighting each other and trying to exploit the system it becomes really problematic and it takes a ton of CPU time we start with a path finding saying any friendly unit that's moving with my guys that isn't stationary assume those are not on the map and then do your pathway and that actually works kind of surprisingly well because if they're moving they're probably moving because you grabbed a bunch of Units a tonne we all go one place so they're kind of probably all doing that anyways and then the second tier that was he said okay once we do that if you run into something you can't move because there's a stationary unit of friendliness wiggle that unit a little bit make them move in one direction or another a little bit to see if it unlocks and then there was a sort of series of decisions after that so you sort of wiped out the edge cases one at a time like if there's a bunch of units and try to jam them over a bridge they would keep shuffling and doing this kind of weird little dance and they would eventually get all the units over the bridge each one of the layers that they added starting with not considering friendly units that are moving and when you're doing your algorithm for path binding so it's quicker and then ultimately moving units around to try to get them through openings and then finally if you just have to punch find another way around the map those types of layer after layer after layer of innovations finally got the game to where even with hundreds of units that were playing against another player with lots of different things happening the Train changing most of the time the units did what you thought was fairly reasonable and logical and so it became an acceptable thing so the funny part about it is it's not trying to write a perfect path finding out trying to write one that isn't stupid [Applause] at the end of September grandson and shipping that one it was a lot of working hard and there were a lot of folks at Westwood wanted to try some other things and now that we were part of Electronic Arts we had a lot of freedom to do other kinds of games we were focused on a first-person shooter renegade which is the cabana car universe a really fun game by the way and we were doing a PlayStation two stuff and a lot of other things so most of the team that had built command & Conquer were off doing other kinds of games and stretching out into other genres I guess what was really endearing about Tiberian Sun for me personally was the team had taken a lot of risks and done a lot of new technology it was really neat to see so many new innovations and so much new thinking get into a game and get out there even by that time there were so many RTS meters out there that so many games just copied everybody else's stuff it was neat to see the team innovate in lots of ways that ultimately made it into other products as well for me it's always been very charming because it was probably the most definitely the last scenes he made in Westwood Las Vegas and it was done in a way that was really a labor of love to do the best job we could with a franchise that we had built tips son really reached beyond what anybody would have thought was rational at the time and tried to do some pretty innovative things from all the RTS is that we built the I've often said my favorite one riddle or two of Yuri's Revenge many of the things that that game did were facilitated by the innovations were built by difference' all the ideas about the veteran sea of the unit's the very tech itself and just some of the thought process of design and how we would make these very different kinds of units interact with each other these things were played out in full when a game could start from that baseline and build up instead of having to innovate everything so for me that's it's always gonna have a very special place in my heart it sold very well and that's always important and the the quality that people were put in the game they just made a very special objective complete

Channel: Ars Technica

Views: 1,007,007

Keywords: ars technica, real time strategy, rts, louis castle, command & conquer: tiberian sun, command & conquer, conquer, c&c, command and conquer, c and c, tiberian sun, command and conquer tiberian sun, tiberian, command and conquer tiberian sun making of, making of command and conquer, c&c tiberian sun, rts game, war stories command and conquer, war stories c & c, war stories tiberian sun, command and conquer cd rom, command and conquer pathfinding, ars, technology

Id: S-VAL7Epn3o

Length: 13min 2sec (782 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 26 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/amroamroamro]

For anyone feeling nostalgic, several C&C games were released for free in 2010:

https://web.archive.org/web/20100216115944/http://www.commandandconquer.com/classic

You can find fan-made installers online which include fixes/patches to play on a modern OS as well as adding multiplayer servers.

[u/Ollymid2]

Tiberian Sun was a treasured part of my adolescence. Loved that game

[u/SmokeeDog]

Red Alert 2 is still probably my favorite game all time

[u/spacejack2114]

Jesus, Michael Biehn and James Earl Jones are so young in this.

[u/StickiStickman]

Kinda cheap when the fix for path-finding is "just add checks for every single edge-case".

[u/VeganVagiVore]

Timestamp for video compression

He says they made their own block-based codec and it used vector quantization. They didn't farm it out to Bink, he says there were no third-party codecs at the time. (Actually Wikipedia tells me that C&C Tiberian Sun came out in 1999 and Smacker video was released in 1994 and used in Warcraft 2 from 1995. So maybe he was talking about the very first C&C game, or just forgot.)

But that's it. He doesn't mention audio at all.

I'm always looking for more info on video codecs, cause I think they're really cool and entertaining, but nobody want to talk about them.

Going off of just vector quantization and blocks, I'm guessing it was an intra-only format? So maybe it could pick out all the solid-color blocks and the vertical and horizontal edge blocks and de-dupe them, but it didn't do predicted frames. He didn't mention visual flow or motion compensation or whatever it was called that was the big deal for MPEG-1.

So probably an improvement over GIF, and faster than MJPEG, but not really great compression.

This is a hill I like to die on because it never gets a lot of screen time.

There was even a video a few months ago about a Sonic game and all the "deep hacks" they did for video compression:

• Use a lower resolution
• Use a color palette
• Use a lower framerate
• Interlace the videos

That's not compression. That's just making the video look worse. The point of compression is to get more visual quality per bit, not to sacrifice quality entirely by using the most obvious config options that don't even require new code.

[u/anomaly149]

if any game was waiting for a high-def remaster, TS is near the top of the list, this game was so cool

[u/dopefish2112]

Same here. I still fire up Red Alert and TS sometimes after work to relax in the nostalgia. Spent so much time with these as a kid. For the Brotherhood!

[u/hagamablabla]

Early game developers always impress me with the kind of stuff they came up with. Today's game devs are still great artists, but the earlier ones were wizards.