Tomb Raider Legend

[Gambit37]

Well, I wrote my review. It's long! I've been a TR fan for yonks and wanted to do the new game justice, so apologies if it's over long or too verbose.

If anyone cares to read it, it's here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/matt_hill/ ... review.htm

[zoom]

It was a nice, interesting read(challenging, but therefore more rewarding for me) which had also funny parts
When we first heard that Legend would ‘take Lara back to her roots' we didn't think...(<--enter spoiler)

Next to being written well, in all it is ok;
there could be parts left out, or generally made shorter, as you said , but this is only could.
(nostalgic comes to mind, but that is really not that bad!)

Gives the reader all there is to know about this game !

I have not played TR, apart from 5mins the first part, ages ago.

There I remember Lara half falling half jumping down a wide , steep corridor, where she had (or not had) to grasp some liana,
better,if timed correctly, jump beforehand to a secret area above. Many ways next to falling down.

(That is , I think what you mean by nonlinear gameplay of TR 1 in contrary to linear gameplay of TR Legend )
---------------------------------
However, I found two typos:
1.Installing on my now aged PC, I waited {?}with{?} breathlessly for the game to..
2.but I am nostalgic for the original Lara {?}is {I?} grew to know.

Gambit, have you considered making a blog .. just an idea.
Go on!

[Gambit37]

Thanks for the notes -- I made those corrections and also added a couple of extra bits about the saving system and the fact that I resorted to save games to complete it.

[Gambit37]

I've read that many people are annoyed about how much was cut from the final version of Legend compared to early screenshots and movies. Often, the counter argument is that Crystal Dynamics, the developer, needed to 'save space'.

If you think Crystal Dynamics were worried about 'saving space', think again!

Using the Tomb Ripper tool on the PC version of the game, if you extract all the available data (RAW, SHP, TGA, DDS), it comes to:

3.28 GB (3,526,455,158 bytes) - 30889 files.

I then used a duplicate file remover program on the data and reduced it to:

1.21 GB (1,309,240,689 bytes) - 9937 files



I am not certain if the SHP data is level data or just in-level meshes. It takes 190MB, so I assume it's probably the full level data as well as all character data.

EDIT: Just checked my TRL folder and it's 7.13GB! Taking into account full uncompressed audio at around 1.1GB, I guess the remaining ~3GB is the level data and cutscenes.

So, assuming that everything extracted by the Ripper is the entire game content EXCEPT for text and music, why on earth does so much of it need to be duplicated? It's utterly crazy. I certainly resent losing 2GB of disk space that is completely unnecessary. When you look at the sophistication and complexity of other game engines such as Unreal or Source, these manage perfectly well without duplicating anything.

I'd be very interested to see if anyone can shed light on why the Legend engine appears to have no decent resource management. I'm not a programmer but I understand the tech behind games and there doesn't seem to be a good reason for this duplication.

I know the original TR games duplicated stuff because everything was stored in the level data file, but in this day and age and the size of assets in games, that can't possibly be a good way of doing things.

[George Gilbert]

I know the original TR games duplicated stuff because everything was stored in the level data file, but in this day and age and the size of assets in games, that can't possibly be a good way of doing things.

It might be precisely because of the size of assets in games that it's so bloated.

I've no idea if this *is* the case or not, but at least hypothetically it may be that there are different teams working on different levels - each of whom need their own set of graphics / sound resources etc. Due to the sheer size and complexity of the project it may be that they literally just stuck all the component bits together on a CD, added a lightweight menu system and called it done.

I agree that it's a bit of a inelegant way of doing it (the best way would clearly be to define some resources as common and then each group effectively #including them), but it could well be the most efficient...from a time spent putting the game together point of view.

It is a bit rubbish though

[Sophia]

Quake did it this way, too. All textures and such were stored with the map... this can be good, because it allowed user-created maps to use custom textures.

Of course, this was ten years ago and people complained then, too!

[Gambit37]

it may be that there are different teams working on different levels - each of whom need their own set of graphics / sound resources etc. Due to the sheer size and complexity of the project it may be that they literally just stuck all the component bits together on a CD, added a lightweight menu system and called it done.

I should have counted the numbers of duplicates of Lara's outfits before I deleted them, to see if it matched the level count. There were definitely many tens of copies of her face texture at the very least...!

I think your supposition is probably right, but it's pretty poor show. Even with today's big hard-drives, 2GB is a huge waste.

Just a thought -- id don't know the spec of Xbox or PS2 -- do these have big hard-drives that games are loaded on or do they play direct from disc? If the latter, I imagine having all the assets for a level in one big chunk is much faster to load than shared assets all over the disc... I could see in this instance why the decision might have been made.

[Trantor]

The PS2 does not have a harddrive at all (at least not in Europe), so the whole game is loaded from disc. Also, the PS2 operates with standard DVDs, so the PS2 version can't have more than 4.3 GB.

[Tom Hatfield]

The quality of assets on console games is generally diminished specifically because they don't have a whole lot of memory for them, and they have to be loaded from disc (takes a while). That's why PC versions of multi-platform games almost always look better, unless the game was ported to the PC, in which case it usually looks like ass.

Either way, improper resource management is a travesty to the industry. I'm extremely disappointed developers are taking this path, and publishers are even worse for letting it happen when they're the ones putting money into the project. But that's another argument.

[Tom Hatfield]

Okay, I started playing it again, with the latest patch, and I've found that at least one of the boss fights (the same one Gambit mentioned earlier) is extremely buggy. My camera tends to freeze, and I can't move the Tesla cannon to shoot anything, and sometimes it fires right through the boss, who then knocks me out of it. He also tends to camp the cannon itself, so as soon as Lara hops in, he knocks her straight back to the floor. I tried about five or six times before my patience was absolutely gone.

Otherwise, it's kind of neat. I don't like the motorcycle side games because the camera tends to get all kinds of messed up, and I tend to fly off the bike when I crash into invisible barriers. Lara's animation is better than ever, and I like all the cool moves she has. Most of the combat moves are rather difficult to pull off, however, especially without getting shot fifty times while clearing the distance to gun-toting enemies. I've found dodging to be the single most useful feature in her repertoire. I also like the grapple. This is a game that should have made better use of real-time physics.

The installation size is 7.18 GB, but the actual DVD is only 4.31 GB. Load times are still ridiculously fast. The levels are apparently memory images that are simply blitted into RAM, which is probably what they did for the console versions, too. I've heard this technique being used for other games, and I think every software engineer should use it. Of course, there's also something to be said for efficient storage.

I think the first one is still my favorite, too. It'd be really awesome if they used the current engine for an updated version of the original, like Valve did with Half-life Source (though it wasn't updated all that much; they basically just added ragdolls and better looking water).

Edit:

6:22:35, 86%

That's taking my sweet time, though I didn't explore for secrets and just grabbed whatever I saw. Had to look up how to beat a couple of the bosses because the solution is never obvious, and sometimes even trial-and-error doesn't help. This is definitely the most frustrating of the series, which is saying a lot, maybe because the controls are HORRIFIC. I had to reconfigure half the keys just to be able to play the game.

Time to rip all the resources.