Company News Troika hiring for Action CRPG title

[Saint_Proverbius]

Tags: Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines

<a href="http://www.troikagames.com/">Troika Games</a> is hiring for those interested and have the skills. Per their <a href="http://www.troikagames.com/jobs.htm">job page</a>:
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<blockquote><b>Senior Gameplay Programmer</b>
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Troika Games, maker of fine role-playing games, is seeking a senior-level programmer to aid in the development of an upcoming action/RPG hybrid title for the PC. This position's primary responsibility will be to work closely with designers and the rest of the team to help develop and implement unique behaviors for individual NPCs and distinct gameplay events for major story points, using existing low-level AI and scripting systems.
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The ideal candidate will have:
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a.. strong C++ and vector math skills
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b.. a good awareness of the performance implications of his code
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c.. experience contributing in a meaningful way to the gameplay of at least one shipped title
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d.. a love for games and strong ideas about what does and doesn't make them fun
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e.. experience working with quake-style BSP engines</blockquote>
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Umm.. Ew.
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Thanks to <b>Dan</b> for the word.
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[Vault Dweller]

distinct gameplay events for major story points

Well, at least it has a story that's long enough to have major points :D

 

[Jarinor]

d.. a love for games and strong ideas about what does and doesn't make them fun

DS designers need not apply I guess :D.

I guess this is Troika's 'other' project, the one with Chad, Leonard and all the other guys not working on ToEE. Kinda wondered what they were working, now we know.

Please make it good guys.

 

[Rosh]

I have a feeling that it will be good, and fun. Given their design ethics on other projects, I'd be very surprised if it weren't. Action/CRPG does leave a LOT of things open too, and not just in terms of a Diablo clone.

 

[Flarnet]

All in 3D too it would seem. I guess an action game makes economical sense, and it makes a nice counterpoint to the turnbased Greyhawk, but I can't say that I need another one personally.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Well, I can see why they'd make an Action CRPG, because that would mean they're covering all their bases. I'm just kind of curious why they'd want a Quake style BSP person, though.

 

[Rosh]

System Shock 3?
:D

 

[Psilon]

They probably want a BSP person if they're coding their own engine. Binary Space Partition trees, while rather expensive to generate, are a really efficient way of computing drawing order on the fly.

As far as I know, the only major alternative to BSP trees in today's games is the portal system they use in Unreal.

 

[Flarnet]

Unreal still uses BSP though. The portals are another part of the visibility system.

I'm pretty sure that any upcoming System Shock 3 variant will use a "big" licensed 3d engine. In fact, I bet the publisher would demand it.

 

[DrattedTin]

I don't know about the rest of you, but I enjoy any *good* game. If it's action, I can still enjoy it.

Still, anyone ever heard of a little game called Blood Omen?

 

[Flarnet]

It could be that they are over-cautious and are calling it "action rpg" even if it's exactly like Baldur's Gate. Which makes it an action rpg for some people.

 

[Section8]

All "Quake style BSP knowledge" means is that they need someone to implement some decent poly culling algorithms for their renderer. BSP trees do tend to make the world far less interactive, but it's still possible to do some nice dynamic things with non-BSP meshes within a BSP based engine.

In case anyone who doesn't know about BSPs is interested, what it means at a basic level is that the world geometry contains a tree that stores data of what polygons are in front of others. It uses that data to efficiently cull anything that is behind the camera.

 

[Rosh]

Yes, in other words it's potentially one of the better ways of making a rendering engine a lot less resource-consuming and cull out any bleed-through.

It's also good ffor tying in what a character could conceivably "see" if you have it tied to a certain fixed point.

 

[triCritical]

a, b, d = pass.
c, e = fail