Ten years since Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory shipped

http://www.clicknothing.typepad.com/click_nothing/2015/03/ten-years-down.html

by angrow • 11 years ago

159 72 11 years ago

clicknothing.typepad.com

After working in software development for over 10 years I've been part of many late nights, weeks and even months before. Every time I have to work well over the normal 40 hours many things start deteriorating. I am tired all the time, the quality of my work goes significantly down and I certainly have issues concentrating and remembering things. I've had weeks where I've worked 100 hours and I'd be surprised if I was 50% effective as I was working around 40 hours.

Stress sucks and it ruins so much.

FrankenPC• 11 years ago

When I get into that state, by mind starts to lie to me about the quality of work. I start believing I'm still being effective. Must be some sort of survival mechanism.

orasis2• 11 years ago

I experienced the same thing with my startup. My vocabulary started to deteriorate, my memory was shit, and it was taking me longer to calculate tips.

This is very alarming for a previously "smart" person.

I ended up retreating to a small town in the mountains and it took about 3 years for my brain to heal.

_Adam3• 11 years ago

Were you getting less sleep than normal? I have a theory (which is supported by a few papers I've read) that an extended period of reduced sleeping time can cause what we might call "brain damage".

thisjepisje• 11 years ago

Haven't looked into it a lot, but it reminds me of the concept of sleep debt:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_debt

orasis2• 11 years ago

I was typically sleeping 7+ hours per night, but the stress from the day was giving me scrambled restless dreams. Nowadays I sleep 10+ hours per night.

seivan• 11 years ago

I'm a huge Splinter Cell fan, and I remember loving Chaos Theory. I am sorry for the shit he had to go through. I feel like this as well actually. It takes longer to calculate simple math and I'm having issues remembering stuff.

This image did not help at all: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CAqwcQdUkAAsz_G.jpg

bdg• 11 years ago

I just wanted to chime in here that I am a developer and also feel I am prone to memory loss (I forget about features I've spent weeks working on), and vocabulary issues which I feel may be a result of my brain being in "programming mode". Extremely frequently will I reverse my words, eg, "Can you food on this salt?". English is my first language.

FLUX-YOU• 11 years ago

I ended up retreating to a small town in the mountains and it took about 3 years for my brain to heal.

I wouldn't mind doing that, but that sounds like you'd need a decent amount of cash to do.

_Adam3• 11 years ago

While I can understand Clint's concerns, I am very wary about his conclusion that his memory loss is a direct result of his stressful job. He doesn't mention if he ever saw a neurologist.. it's possible he had a "silent stroke".

http://www.webmd.com/stroke/news/20061009/can-you-have-strok...

elvispt• 11 years ago

Right or not this is definitely cause to go to a neurologist.

uptown• 11 years ago

Could also have had a seizure and not recognized the signs. They definitely screw with your memory, and sleep deprivation can sometimes be a trigger.

iLoch• 11 years ago

I was 11 when this game came out. My brother bought it for us to play and I have to say, even as an 11 year old I could tell this game was unique - I have never seen such a well designed game since the release of Chaos Theory. Everything about this game was fantastic. I'd definitely buy a "anniversary edition" if they made one.

engi_nerd• 11 years ago

There was a "Splinter Cell Classic Trilogy" HD re-release for PS3, but it was technically hit-or-miss. Chaos Theory got the best treatment and graphically it's still great. However, neither Pandora Tomorrow nor Chaos Theory remakes have the multiplayer component.

lkrubner• 11 years ago

I have been through something similar, when facing very tight deadlines. The most recent was in 2012. It was the first project where I had ever worked with Clojure, had ever worked with the JVM, had ever worked with "functional" concepts. I had to learn a great deal in a hurry, and the hours were crazy. I got very sleep.

I developed weird memory issues, in particular about people's names. I could remember details about people -- where I knew them from, what they did, but their names went completely. This included some people who were close to me, so there was a scary feeling of the memory loss being strange and almost like dementia.

I have rarely had to learn so much in such a short amount of time, and for awhile it was literally as if each new thing I learned was pushing something else out of memory, as if my brain was full and I could only learn new things by erasing something else.

Thankfully, the project ended, I got some sleep, and a few months later I felt normal again.

IndianAstronaut• 11 years ago

I am experiencing something similar. I was in biology, but the field isn't in good shape so I had to put in long hours into programming. Now I barely even remember DNA base pairs and basic info.

Gifford2• 11 years ago

After you slept, did you remember what you had previously forgotten, or was it a loss?

nekitamo3• 11 years ago

Just a random aside: What's also interesting about Splinter Cell Chaos Theory from a security point of view is that it was one of the hardest games to crack, ever. It was protected with a beefed up version of Starforce 3, and iirc it took around a year for a proper crack to come out, which is a huge achievement considering most games are cracked the day they are released.

AlyssaRowan2• 11 years ago

Longer than a year. RLD released a proper after 424 days.

Inquisitive minds wanting more information should be directed to StarForce.RE.Tools.ReadNFO-RELOADED - http://www.glop.org/files/rld-sfrt.rar (sorry for the hotlink!) - for a detailed technical analysis published concerning the StarForce 3 protection. A fine piece of work, if I may say, though I shall not identify the authors.

StarForce 3 was really quite intrusive, including secretly-installed ring0-access device-drivers. Flaky and damaging to the security of your system and very widely complained about.

I would not say such a monstrosity is an achievement UbiSoft should be proud of: indeed, they actually apologised, although I would not say they were genuinely sorry in any sense.

I would like to thank the developers working on the actual game, of course. I feel sorry for them that the publisher had such strong opinions about that.

jsheard• 11 years ago

I'm still holding out hope for an analysis of the Denuvo DRM scheme, which has only been defeated with unwieldy and slow emulators after five months. As far as I know it doesn't use any invasive kernel modules like StarForce did.

Probably won't happen though...

voltagex_2• 11 years ago

That's very rare to see tools released by a group like RELOADED. I wonder what else is out there?

mikeknoop• 11 years ago

The 2v2 SC:PT and SC:CT online multiplayer was the absolute best. It was asyemntrical, well balanced, and required good communication with your partner.

I've never been able to replicate that experience in another game.

Someone tried to clone it but never took off: http://www.projectstealthgame.com/

Best wishes to OP for the game and (at least) giving me fond memories.

rl34• 11 years ago

SC:CT's adversarial MP really was fantastic, even more so when you consider that it managed despite an engine that was roughly a generation behind what the single player and co-op modes were using.

The only thing is that, like quite a few games today, it was best in beta. I distinctly remember that in the final version, they tweaked the lighting model across all levels to be far higher contrast, and that pretty much killed it for myself and everyone I knew who played it.

Yeah, you couldn't cheat anymore by turning up your gamma, but that came at the price of destroying those priceless moments where you thought you saw something in the shadows, but you weren't sure.

bentcorner• 11 years ago

I loved SC:CT, and have played every iteration of SC from the first.

One of my favorite bits of SC:CT is the "are you a ninja?" dialogue.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuQJn93ZTqo

aikinai• 11 years ago

I (and my friends) still consider it the best multiplayer game ever. I really wish someone could make another game like that, but the depth and learning curve limit the market so much that it might never happen again.

mercer• 11 years ago

I suspect the multiplayer took a lot of inspiration from Thievery:UT, a total conversion / mod for Unreal Tournament that offers a multiplayer game inspired by the game Thief.

One of the developers for Splinter Cell, in his spare time, helped out with the project and probably benefitted tremendously from all the multiplayer testing and balancing we did.

At some point he asked all the team members for our real names and put us in some of the communications documents/emails in the actual game. It's really odd to see my name pop up in GameFAQs walkthroughs and such, and perhaps a bit depressing to know that it's what 'my name' is most famous for. But mostly fun.

I never played the SC multiplayer, but Thievery:UT has been some of the most fun I've ever had multiplayer, more than all the UT, Quake, Age Of Empires, and whatnot.

rocky11383• 11 years ago

Looking back at when I was a kid, these games and products felt like something that simply always existed as though they were a force of nature, something created by a huge faceless team that knew what they were doing.

Being in the industry myself now, what amazes me most is almost every one of these great forces of nature was actually the result of one leader burning themselves right to the ground in order to get it done. In some cases, it's a small handful of people, but even then there's usually one that takes the whole thing on their shoulders even above the rest.

It helps further the old saying "if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself."

Gifford2• 11 years ago

Why do you believe it's not an army of real people all burning themselves to the ground?

rocky11383• 11 years ago

In my experience, in any team, there is usually one person who is at the forefront of the team. This is the person who is the first to go in to battle the blaze, so to speak. To light the way.

nkg• 11 years ago

Managing a team means that you have to get everyone to do their job the best they can, not that you have to burn yourself out to fill the gaps. As a developer, I have seen a lead dev burning out and that wasn't heroic, that was pathetic.

rocky11383• 11 years ago

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink. The desire to go above one's level to do the work to make real change has to come from within.

moron4hire4• 11 years ago

Every week we get a new article about a developer's battle with burnout and too many hours, and they always get filled with replies from other developers with their own stories that are largely the same, and I'm sure there are 10x as many people who have been through it themselves as well and never comment.

And yet it still continues to be a problem.

I'm starting to think we only have ourselves to blame. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. Why do we continue to let companies treat employees so poorly? Hell, why do we continue to start our own companies where we treat ourselves so poorly? If we can't have a little respect for ourselves, how are we going to expect some middle-manager at a gigantocorp to care?

No more long hours. Stop it! I don't care how exciting your startup is. The work will be there tomorrow. No, you aren't trying to beat someone to market. Hire more people. If you can't afford more people, then you can't afford the project. Because you're going to pay, one way or another.

I used to do it, too. I used to work 60, 80 hours a week, especially when I first started freelancing. I'd get burnt out and started goofing off during the normal busy hours. Then I'd feel like I had to make up for it, so I worked more.

I had to just stop doing it. I was lying to people. I was saying "on yeah, the work is done", and then staying up until 3am to finish it so they could have it the next day. I was lying to myself, "you can make up for this, and then everything will be back to normal."

I finally just stopped lying. I finally just told people, "no, that's not done". I took my lumps. And it wasn't that bad. I didn't lose any clients. They didn't even express disappointment. It was just, "oh, okay, let us know when it's ready."

By forcing myself to work NOT work OUTSIDE of a normal schedule, I also grew a much more healthy respect for the normal schedule. I don't goof off during the regular busy hours anymore. Work time is for work, because I don't want leisure time to be for work. I set the schedule, regardless of who thinks they set the schedule. If people say, "we need it sooner than that" I just tell them, "sorry, I can't." It's when you stay up the late hours and make miracles happen that they start expecting it.

egypturnash• 11 years ago

We are in America, where overwork is the cultural norm. It's that old Puritan "work ethic" combined with dramatic concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. The propaganda campaign waged against unions for several decades in the name of increased corporate profits hasn't helped either.

Jare5• 11 years ago

This happens everywhere (the article specifically refers to a game developed by Ubi Soft Montreal)

michaelmior2• 11 years ago

Splinter Cell is probably my favourite game franchise. This gives me more respect for the people who make it happen :)

moron4hire4• 11 years ago

Things aren't going to change until we stop treating such behavior with "respect". You treat it with "respect" and it become a "respectful" thing to do.

michaelmior2• 11 years ago

I don't think the two are equivalent. I'm not saying I necessarily think it was a good idea to make the sacrifices that he made. But that can't be changed now and I appreciate the amount of effort that was put in.

rl34• 11 years ago

2005 was a crazy year. It feels almost surreal it's been ten years.

Chaos Theory was one of the first games to use DirectX 9.0c/Shader Model 3.0. A couple months later, Battlefield 2 was released. A few months after that, F.E.A.R. and Age of Empires 3. By the end of that year, X3: Reunion. All of these games had incredible graphical fidelity for their time, and the remarkable thing was that for the most part, they weren't just glorified tech demos.

From 2004 to 2007, it really felt like a renaissance in graphics. Far Cry and the UE3 demo in 2004 served to kick it off. During 2007-2009, things sort of solidified in a sense, locking us in to this weird post-modern level of graphical fidelity that's stayed more or less evolutionary ever since.

Hopefully there will be another golden age. Perhaps VR will lead the charge this time, rather than the GPU.

---

Also, Amon Tobin's score for Chaos Theory was excellent. IMHO, it played a huge role in making the game what it was. Even today, you rarely see scores so eccentric, let alone in AAA titles.

zokier• 11 years ago

From 2004 to 2007, it really felt like a renaissance in graphics. Far Cry and the UE3 demo in 2004 served to kick it off

HL2 was also massive benchmark in graphics. But probably the most impactful thing that happened in that period was the release of new generation of consoles (X360/PS3). You might also note that almost all early UE3 games were released console-first.

rl34• 11 years ago

Good points. I'm not sure how HL2 slipped my mind.

In addition to graphics, HL2 was more or less the game that ushered in truly modern physics. Even today, some AAA games don't have physics systems as good. Likewise for facial animation.

There was also Doom 3 that year, though arguably it lacked the same level of fidelity. However, it was really ahead of its time in the years leading up to release.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj3dPyk7hPI (Doom 3 at MacWorld 2001)

twostorytower• 11 years ago

I'd also add that the Source engine is the only engine (that I can think of) that has scaled for three console generations. Half-Life 2 was on Xbox. The Orange Box (HL2: Episode 2, Portal, and TF2) as well as L4D (and dozens of other Source games) were on Xbox 360, and Titan Fall was on Xbox One (lauded as one of the premier next-gen games).

keypusher• 11 years ago

Could not agree more about Amon Tobin's score. Not every game needs a perfect score, but when done right it adds so much to the ambiance. Reaching out to an innovator of his talent was a bold move that paid off.

weaksauce• 11 years ago

the score for duet is done really well and without it I don't think it would be half as good of a game.

SCdF• 11 years ago

Amon Tobin's score opened an entirely new genre of music for me, and it really set the tone of the game beautifully. Chaos Theory the game intermingling with the soundtrack (and then getting the soundtrack and listening on its own, and then spreading out to his other albums and other similar artists) remain one of my favourite experiences in gaming.

hellbanner• 11 years ago

I can't help but notice the post date is almost 2AM (after talking about late nights).

slowmotiony• 11 years ago

What a fantastic game that was, with an even more fantastic soundtrack. I wish they thought about a Remaster edition for the newest gen consoles.

moron4hire4• 11 years ago

It really bothers me that so many people in this thread are talking about the game, their formative experiences with it, how much they enjoyed it, and not the man and his health issues caused by the unreasonable expectations set upon him by his employer. Right now, the only thing the top comment has in common with the original article is that they both mention "Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory".

It bothers me on one aspect because the article is only tangentially about the game, so this talk about the game is really all off-topic and distracting from the bigger issue of healthful work-life balance. But even worse than that is the aspect that it is because of this single-minded attitude on the consumer side that employers like Ubisoft put this sort of pressure on their employees.

Ten years since Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory shipped

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