jeffpk's blog en Post-labor day blues <!-- | 0 --><p>This week's title sort of sounds like cowboy-bepop episode, doesn't it? </p> <p>It's tuesday following labor-day and the world seems to be spinning up to work pace again slowly for me. It doesn't help that I'm off to NYC Friday for a week making this a very short week.</p> <p>But here's the week's updates</p> <p><b>DEVELOPER'S JOURNAL</b></p> <p>We're still gearing back up into the game server development. Around that we are upgrading the lab leading to further odds and ends to deal with. The equiptment for the prototype game server has been finally re-installed and brought back up since taking it down for CGDC. I have also installed a full development environment on my Alienware laptop and hope to be able to do portable development on the project on that.</p> <p>The schedule to alpha has been completed and basically shows we have too much to do and too little man-power to do it with. Welcome to life in corporate america. We'll keep pushing through and eventually, when its a true crisis, management will give on either schedule or man-power.</p> <p>.</p> <p>. <p> JNWN is to the point where I have my resource browser working and Im working now on parsing the tile map information out of .are files. I have also proposed a project to house it on the project pages and have uploaded my code to date. Ofcourse, it being CVS, the repository ALSO has a whole bunch of other crap it shouldn't and is a mess. The fact that you cannot delete directories in CVS really is its achillies' heal. I've requested that they repository be wiped as now I finally have figured out what really needs to go up and how. Til then, feel free to play with whats up there but be aware that only the com directory has anything real or relevent in it.</p> <p><b>RANT'S, RAVES and OTHER NONSENSE </b></p> <p>My controller, Ms. Terry, is up to level 19 in City of Heroes. One more level and she finally gets a second uniform,which to me means street clothes. (I really think they should give you 2 to start with.) She picked up Phantom Army (PA) at 18th and I've pumped its slots at 19 for 1 Dual Origina (DO) accuracy buff and 2 DO recharge time buffs. She's finally starting to kick ass and I was able to actualy complete a reasonable mission in reasonable time the other night by myself for the first time.</p> <p>Rumor however is that they are NERFing PA in the next update. **sigh** For those who don't know "NERF" is an online gaming term. NERFing in abiltiy is making it less effective for damaging enemies, like a NERF weapon.</p> <p> Picking up PA inspired me to write another story patch explaining where it came from. As usual all my story patches are available for reading in the Charatcer Stories section of <a href="" title=""></a>. Rumor is, by the way, that the next release for CoH is <b>also</b> going to add a lot of level 10-20 content. Sounds like they've been listening to the player feedback, which is an excellent sign for this product's long term life. </p> <p>My mom the professional writer has turned me on to an online course/tool set for fiction writers called FictionMaster. She says its the only really good one she's ever seen. I'm supposed to be receiving a copy soon and I'll start writing here about my experiences with it.</p> <p>Last saturday we had a get together for Avlis folks in the area at Dave and Busters. (<a href="" title=""></a>). Was fun to mee tthese folks. Interestingly it was by and large an older crowd then I see at RPG conventions. For a change, I wasn't the oldest gamer at the table. (I was second oldest.)</p> <p>$10.00 DVDs by the way are my weakness. $10.00 is my impulse point on my movie collection. This week I picked up The 30th Anniversary Blazing Saddles, Master and Commander, The Leauge of Extrodinary Gentlemen and Equilibrium (a low budget sci fi/action film a friend highly recommended), all at Circuit City in their $10.00 bin. A few weeks back I got the original Manchurian Candidate for $10.00 at Fry's</p> <p>. <p>Finally, I spent some serious bucks on a few collections. $60 or so on the complete Vicar of Dibley for my wife. $60 or so on Red Dwarf season one and two for me, And about $90 on the complete A&amp;E release of The Prisoner. The first two I bought from the BBC America website. The last I got at almost half price (list is something like $170) from CostCo. </p> <p>All three of those are BBC releases. I don't buy american TV shows on DVD because its too damn expensive-- a few episodes per disc. But BBC puts an entire season on each DVD plus extras which is a lot more reasponable. (The exception above being the prisoner, because its an A&amp;E release, but i got that at discount anyway). The Red Dwarf discs are a bit more expensive then usual for BBC at about $30 per season but each is a two disc set. the second disc contains the season's out takes and a ton of other materials. They also each come with a very nice full color booklet giving backgroudn info on the fimilming of each episode. Definitely made for collectors with a lot of love and care.</p> <p> Thats life this week in Jeff-ville</p> Games Tue, 07 Sep 2004 21:14:24 +0000 jeffpk 231805 at He's Baaaak <!-- | 0 --><p>Hey Guys and Gals!</p> <p>I'm back after an extended absence and I am going to try to hit once a week blogging again. They may not be as well thought out and structured as the essays I've done in the past but I hope to at least keep them interesting.</p> <p>As part of this I am beginning a disorganized developer's journal this week. So having said that, lets dive right in......</p> <p>DEVELOPER'S JOURNAL</p> <p>I have two projects to talk about right now. My official Sun project and my unofficial late night project.</p> <p>My Sun project is the Sun Game Server Technology (SGST). This is a baby of mine that actually predates to before I came to Sun. It was started as a late night project of mine back when I worked for the Total Entertainment Network, one of the earliest providers of Internet game play for packaged games. It grew out of my work on Dark Sun Online and my conclusions about what was required to really make writing and running MMOLGs manageable. </p> <p>The SGST white paper which talks about what it does is here:</p> <p><a href="" title=""></a></p> <p>I have just finished a white paper on the basics of <b>how</b> it works that is slated for the ACM journal on entertainment technologies. When thats released I'll try to get a link to it posted in the blog as well.</p> <p>This week we are completing the schedule to get us from the engineering prototype we have now to an SDK usable by you wonderful folks out there. After that, we go back into heave development mode.</p> <p>My midnight project is JNWN. This is an Open Source OLRPG game client that can be fed data from the NWN aurora tool set. I've been doing some NWN hacking for Avlis<br /> (<a href="" title=""></a>) and its reminded me of how much I love the NWN tools, hate the NWN server, and <b>despise</b> NWNC.</p> <p>In the scale of stupid ideas NWNC, the scripting language of NWN, ranks somewhere right after the decision of Hitler's parents to have children. Its a bad, quirky, sub-dialect of C that runs on a slow interpreter and pretends to be object oriented just enough to frustrate you when the underlying system doesn't act like objects should. The API is spotty and incomplete and in general it just a pain to try to program.</p> <p>Considering the JavaVM was available to them for <b>free</b> and has <b]\>none</b> of these problems this was definitely a case of reinventing the wheel and making it triangular.</p> <p>Now NWNC is the scripting language for the server, which is where the game logic runs, but as the comm protocol is sealed you cannot replace the server without re-writing the client. Add to that some true annoyance in NWN client limitations (like there is no reasonable way to let the user edit text) and the conclusion I came to was that Id need to re-write the client. </p> <p>About the only really good thing about NWN really is the Aurora tool set. Luckily the file formats at least are open. Ergo, the JNWN project.</p> <p>I have completed a first pass at a resource manager that mimics their resource management scheme and gives access to the data in the files. I also have a test program which is a resource browser. Its incomplete currently (only handles three data types) but I intend to add to it as I need it.</p> <p>Ill be posting the undocumented code shortly to a new jnwn project here on I hope to do some commenting in the next few weeks.</p> <p>RANTS RAVES AND OTHER NONSENSE</p> <p>Finally, Im going to close these with odd game industry observations.</p> <p>DOOM3 is out to much noise. Looks really pretty, not my kind of game. I'm sure Doug Twilleager or Chirs Melissinos will tell us all about it.</p> <p>I'm still playing and enjoying City of Heroes. Ms. Terry my controller is up to level 17. One more and she gets the Illusion Controller's dream power-- phantom army.</p> <p>I DO think the developers are having a bit of trouble with ignoring the lower levels in up dates. Not everyone shoots their characters straight up to 20+ and its a bit discouraging to see all the cool new stuff being added only for higher levels. I'd encourage them to invest some time and money soon in giving some updates to the lower levels.</p> <p>Thats it for this week''s ramble.</p<</p> Games Mon, 30 Aug 2004 21:09:12 +0000 jeffpk 232224 at CoH Update <!-- | 0 --><p>City of Heroes Update</p> <p>Well CoH has launched and I've been playing for a few weeks. Here's my rundown of the game so far.</p> <p>I have to say I'm very impressed with CoH. Although it has some pretty severe limits they've done an awful lot of things right.</p> <p>One of the first things you notice on entering CoH is the vast array of choices for your character's look. I really have yet to see 2 players that look exactly the same. Between costume choices, body choices, and a very complete coloring system everyone can real;ly look quite different. Certain choices are limited to certain character origins, for instance only Mutants can have tails. Similarly in game certain visual effects are limited to certain character types (called Archetypes.) Only those with the Rifle power get a gun. Only the pugilist type of flame powered hero (Scrapper) get a whole body burning penumbra. This is a little restricting on conception but has a pay-off in game in that you can kind of recognize what sort of super-hero and what sort of powers you are dealing with. All in all it makes Origins and Archetypes really mean something in game and so<br /> was a good decision.</p> <p>The second thing you notice very quickly once you start to play is the existence of a true third dimension. Characters run and jump on top of and over things and the cityscapes are built almost like an open-ended 3D platform game with tons of ways to run up and down embankments, run across roof-tops and generally use the whole city as a giant jungle-gym. Higher level characters can actually get hovering or true flight and use that third dimension strategically in combat. Compare this to all of the fantasy games to date which, while 3D environments, restrict players to always having their feet on the ground.</p> <p> Even here though care has been placed in making sure that you don't <b>have</b> to be a jumping whiz. I'm not great at that sort of timing but before I got my hover power I had already discovered that, not far from any hard jump, was an easier way around. I contrast this to Tomb Raider where I gave up as soon as I hit a frustratingly difficult (for me) and required jump sequence. This game is designed to keep me playing, and they've done that very well.</p> <p> Frustration in general can kill the enjoyment in an online game and lose the game subscribers. The CoH team has gone out of their way to make it hard to get too frustrated with this game. By the time you finish the tutorial, you've already reached level 2 so you start the game already with some differentiating choices in power and abilities. The next 3 or so levels can be done solo and relatively quickly, though it may take multiple tries and passes through the hospital to complete some of the later missions. This is good as it hooks you in. By the end of your first play session your at at least level 3 or 4.</p> <p> Speaking of the hospital, again I have to give the developers top marks on this. Going to the hospital is your defeated event. In many games, when you die you lose experience points. This can be incredibly frustrating as you can end a session feeling further behind then when you started. The CoH solution borders on brilliance. First, at low levels, dying is free. About the time you hit 5th or 6th it starts costing you BUT the experience cost is not subtracted from what you have. Rather, a debt is added that some of your future experience goes to paying off. When you accrue new experience points those points are split between your debt and continuing to go up. Now numerically in the long run this is no different from losing experience points but it feels <b>very</b> different because (a) you never de-level (lose levels you already gained and thus lose abilities) and (b) you continue to move your level forward, albeit at a temporarily slower rate. This is ground-breaking game design and I expect to see it copied a lot in future OLRPGs</p> <p> Solo-play though is not what on line is really about. The developers have covered this as well. Around level 5 the missions it starts to give you are too tough to do alone. It recommends you find a team and there are a variety of ways to do it. There is a built in mechanism for advertising and recruiting members. Many people simply broadcast over the chat what kind of character they are and what sort of team they are looking for. This team-orientation of the game is another thing that makes it really work. Players may start by teaming at random but those with similar play styles and goals will start to look for each other and form regular groups. This is assisted by a buddy list system (called "friends" in the game)</p> <p>Once you form a team a whole new side of the game opens up. Teams can chat directly with each other enhancing the group experience. (Such "party" channels aren't new but CoH does a nice job with integrating them into the chat GUI.) Characters of level 10 or higher can "sidekick" lower level characters. This gives them a temporary boost in level in combat (though no new powers or hit points) and thus allows them to play effectively together. This really helps eliminate the "newbie" feelings of inferiority when playing with much older and more experienced characters. </p> <p>Additionally, when you reach 10th level you can declare an official "Superhero Group". The declarer of the group can define group colors and insignia and invite others into the group. When you join a group you can create a second "group costume'" based on your primary costume but using the group's colors and carrying the group's insignia Again this enhances the group play experience and really makes you want to play more with your friends in your Superhero Group.</p> <p> All of this individually sounds kind of neat but what really counts is what it adds up to. CoH hits a magic spot where your primary play is group oriented and involves people you've chosen to be with while still allowing you to participate in a world full of Superheroes and periodically meet and make new friends. When we first heard about the CoH project a lot of us asked 'How in the heck is a world full of Superheroes going to work. How is it going to make you feel like a hero?' The answer is, surprisingly well. Better, in my opinion, then any of the Fantasy games to date.</p> <p> My hat's off to the CoH team. While they may or may not be one of those quantum leaps in games that I talked about in my last blog and that are always easier to see in hindsight, they have definitely gone new places with this game and done a great job. By eliminating all of the things that frustrate casual players and lead to feelings of inferiority when weighed against the hard core players, they may have finally opened up this genre of game for the general public.</p> <p> Bottom line, the game is <b>fun</b> regardless of whether you are a casual game or a 15 hour a day addict.</p> Java Patterns Tue, 11 May 2004 05:38:28 +0000 jeffpk 231880 at Cross Gender Role-play <!-- | 0 --><p><b>Cross Gender Roleplay.</b></p> <p>I've been playing pen and paper role play games fairly consistently for almost 30 years and online RPGs on and off since Ultima Online. As someone who plays both male and female characters today I often find myself called on to answer the question. "why would a guy want to play a girl?"</p> <p>Well there are probably as many reasons as there are cross gender players. Although I have immense sympathy and respect for those with gender identity issues I don't feel qualified to talk about that particular subject so I am going to leave that reason alone. Instead I'm going to focus on those of us that sometimes play characters that differ from our own gender identities.</p> <p>The reasons even there can vary substantially. A friend of mine who used to play females did so, according to him, "because you spend most of your time at the terminal staring at your own character and its more fun for me to look at a girl then a guy." Certainly a valid, if maybe a touch shallow, reason.</p> <p>I've known other male players to admit that they play females for purely mercenary reasons. That the male characters fawn all over them and offer them all kinds of help, generally making the game easier to play. I'm not so sure this is a great reason, but to some degree the other players facilitate it by being so desperate to interact with the virtual females in their world. This doesn't say a lot for the emotional or social development of those other players but then again the net itself has long been a refuge for those that have trouble making social connections in the physical world.</p> <p> Cross gender role-play isn't restricted to men. Woman sometimes play male characters on-line. I'm not as familiar with all the reasons there but a few young women have told me they do it to eliminate the creep-factor and so they aren't being hit on all the time by the guys. Playing females I've certainly seen some of what they are talking about but that is getting ahead of the story.</p> <p>Then there are my reasons. In order to understand them I have to go back to my opening comments. I've been pen and paper role-playing fairly continuously for about 30 years. After college I went to Italy for a year. One of my characters in a very long standing Dungeons and Dragons game was important enough to the game that the Dungeon Master asked permission to use him as a character he controlled. (What we call an NPC or non-player character.) I said sure and went off to work in Europe.</p> <p>Returning home a year later I went back to the weekly game, and was introduced to a number of new players. When the DM got to one particularly large and impressive looking fellow he said, "And this is Roger, he's playing Della, your girlfriend." (Roger is not his real name but since he doesn't know I'm writing this, thats what we'll call him.) </p> <p>I think I made a response something like "Oh", but being a long standing role-player and having a very clear understanding that role-play is acting-- that it is about pretending to be other people, not being who we are, I sort of shrugged and went with it.</p> <p>Roger and his wife eventually became good friends of mine and, in fact, I met my wife through them. To be honest Roger is <b>such</b> sweet and nice guy that I often think playing the caring and nurturing side of Della came easier to him then playing the Warrior she also was, but thats just my impression. Nonetheless, it opened my eyes a bit to the fact that a guy <b>could</b> ,with work, play a convincing girl. The frustrated actor in me was intrigued by the challenge.</p> <p>Jump ahead about 5 years. I was searching for a new D&amp;D character to play. Thumbing through the second edition AD&amp;D bard's handbook I happened upon a sub-class (they're called "kits" in 2E AD&amp;D) of bard called the "Gallant." While written in gender neutral terms the writer had obviously envisioned a male character with statements like "The Gallant cannot leave battle until after all members of the opposite sex have done so." Chuckling to myself I started imagining what would happen if the gallant were a woman and all the social issues that her trying to protect the guys would create and thought "what the hell." </p> <p>In method acting, when you don't initially have the experiences to draw on, an accepted way to develop the character is to look for external role models and through a combination of mimicry and empathy try to draw into your own experience base the ways they deal with the world. Being married at that point, I had a great model in my wife, and thus was born Lady Cassandra (Sandra) Tesper of Waterdeep -- a Gallant-kit bard. She is still one of my favorite characters .</p> <p>In playing Sandra I learned a lot of things, both internal and external. My wife, like many women, is naturally a more intuitive thinker then I am. Playing Sandra I like to think helped develop that intuitive side more. I also learned a *lot* about what a strong woman faces in our society, both good and bad. I have to say that, in my experiences playing females I really *have* seen the fact that in or society a guy almost cannot be too assertive while a woman really has to temper it lest she end up with the "bitch" label. Its not fair, its not right, it is however <b>very</b> real.</p> <p>And that gets me to my conclusion. For myself, I play female characters as much or a bit more then males these days for a few reasons. First off, after so many years and so many male characters I think I've about covered every male personality type I am at all interested in exploring. (I've never played a complete jerk. In general I don't like insensitive self-centered bastards and I have no urge to experience their world. Maybe thats a failing. Similarly I haven't played deranged psycho-killers or other seriously mentally ill characters. Everything else I think I've played.) Women's personalities are interesting and new to me, providing new social experiences to explore. </p> <p>More importantly though, I've learned a lot about the world women have to live in and, guys, its different then ours with different rules and different expectations. My wife says my female characters have made me a more sensitive and thoughtful man and husband. And thats something all us guys can use a dose of.</p> <p>In general, entertainment can reach the level of art when it teaches us about the world and/or ourselves, I believe that role play games played with serious role-play can teach us to be more sensitive to others issues and needs by allowing us to experience perspectives and issues different from our own.</p> <p>I'll end this with an apropos quote from the great Scottish poet. Robert Burns. In "To a louse", he concludes:</p> <blockquote><pre class="prettyprint"><code>O wad some Power the giftie gie us<br />To see oursels as inthers see us!</code></pre></blockquote> JXTA Tue, 04 May 2004 00:48:47 +0000 jeffpk 231682 at History is made of this... <!-- | 0 --><p><b>History is made of this...</b></p> <p>Another week, another games ramble.</p> <p>The history of computer games can be viewed a myriad of different ways. For me, the big &#147;historical events&#148; have been the growth of new genres. </p> <p>Once a genre is established it will get worked in every possible manner but to me those have always been the boring details. I find DOOM far more interesting a phenomenon then Quake4 or DOOM2 because all these games add is technical refinements to a fundamental formula that was established by DOOM. At the end, the experience may be refined and enhanced but its still an experience I've had before (running around with a gun in my hand trembling at whats around the next corner) and that bores me.</p> <p>To me games that were really historical landmarks are relatively few and far between. Just to illustrate, I have below a short list of games I feel fit into this category and why. It is of course a subjective and personal list and it is biased to some degree by the kinds of games I like to play and thus knew best. These are all computer games or arcade games that I believe directly influenced computer games. I've also left out education which again is a separate category for another time.</p> <p> <li> (1)Pong, Atari. The first game to recognize that moving dots on a TV screen inert actively could be fun.</li> <li>(2)Tanks, Atari. The first (very privative) combat vehicle sim. </li> <li>(3)Adventure, (student at MIT whose name escapes me). The genre setter for interactive novels and the root of all adventure games.</li> <li>(4)Code Wars. The first programming combat game and the granddaddy of all the programmable robo-sim games of today.</li> <li>(5)Riddle of the Sphinx, Activision. The first graphic adventure game.</li> <li>(6)Wizardry. The first CRPG and the fundamental genre setter for all CRPGs to follow.</li> <li>(7)Pool of Radiance, SSI. The first CRPG with a third person combat mode.</li> <li>(8)Hack (later Rouge). The first all third person RPG.</li> <li>(9)Donkey Kong, Nintendo. The first platform game.</li> <li>(10)Bill Budge's Pinball Construction Set, Electronic Arts. The first &#147;game&#148; that was a toy to build your own games with. (Ignoring BASIC and other languages.)</li> <li>(11)The Sub-Logic Flight Simulator, Sub-logic (later acquired by Microsoft). The first flight sim for a mass market micro-computer.</li> <li>(12)???, Electronic Arts. I can't remember the name of this but it was the first submarine-simulator game.</li> <li>(13)Need For Speed, Electronic Arts. Set the standard for driving simulations.</li> <li>(14)Crush Crumble and Chomp, Automated Simulations. The first &#147;you play the monster and destroy things&#148; game. </li> <li>(15)Whatever the first SSI hex war-game was. (I can't remember they had so many and they were all so much alike.)</li> <li>(16)The first sailing simulator, whose name again escapes me.</li> <li>(17)Warlords. Arguably the first strategic level battle simulator and the granddaddy of the RTS category today.</li> <li>(18)Balance of Power, EA (Chris Crawford). Set the standard in grand-strategic political games.</li> <li>(19)Trust and Betrayal: The legacy of Siboot, EA (Chris Crawford). The first experiment in real machine opponent personality and AI. Arguably the granddaddy of games like &#147;Good and Evil.&#148; (Also one of the only games ever to be released first on Macintosh ;) )</li> <li>(20)Maze Wars, (freeware, many versions). The first multi-terminal real time game and one could argue the granddaddy of all FPSs.</li> <li>(21)Xtrek, (freeware). The first multi-terminal third person shooter.</li> <li>(22)DOOM, ID software. The first environmental horror survival game. Yes I know most people consider it the granddaddy of FPSs but I'd actually disagree slightly. Maze Wars had already established the &#147;run around the maze and shoot things&#148; genre. What was really new about the DOOM experience, I'd argue, was that it made you AFRAID to turn the next corner. Genre wise I'd argue that DOOM has more in common with House of the Dead then with Max Payne.</li> <li>(23)Summer Games, Electronic Arts. The first sports game.</li> <li>(24)Impossible Mission, Electronic Arts. The first sneaking game.</li> <li>(25)Hitman: Code Name 57. The first &#147;sneak up and kill someone&#148; game ;) Okay its really a mix of pre-existing genres but I couldn't resist it. This game DID gie me a fundamentally different experience playing it then any game I had played before.</li> <li>(26)Neverwinter Nights (the original), SSI. The first &#147;massively&#148; multiplayer on-line RPG. (After multiple enhancements, massive topped out at about 500 simultaneous players as I recall</li> <li>(27)MechWarrior. The first giant robot sim.</li> <p>I'm sure there are others but I'm going to stop here and ask all of you to add your own. Keep in mind that to be part of this list the game should have defined a truly new genre with a genre being defined as a fundamentally new experience and not just a twist on an old one. Just better graphcis (or graphcis v. text) shouldn't be enough to qualify it. Thats an incremental imrpovement. Adventure for instance made me think I was physically somwhere else doing something else and thus no other game can lay claim to originallity just on that score. This is all of course subjective but I think its interesting to think about.</p> <p>Now what I really wanted to get to is... what next? We haven't had a real genre burster for a long time. I think one might argue that City of Heroes for instance is at least partly a genre buster being the first massively multiplayer supers game. Doing a world of Supers is a whole different problem then doing a game where there is only one super hero-- the player. How they've approached it is interesting. While large parts of it are derivative of previous RPGs, they've come up with what might be considered a new synthesis that gives a fundamentally new play experience.</p> <p></>I contend that there is huge untapped potential in the online space and the next big leaps are likely to occur there. Online games are fundamentally different from single player games .In single player games, you primary job as game designer is to craft an interesting and engaging experience. In online games though arguably more important then the challenges are designing an environment that creates a functioning and engaging community.</p> <p>A friend of mine in high-tech policy (he was a senior high-tech ad visor to the Clinton administration) once said to me: &#147;The killer app of the Internet is each other.&#148; In retrospect think he was right and it will be interesting to see what new genres of games emerge as game designers Grok this.</p> Games Tue, 27 Apr 2004 23:44:39 +0000 jeffpk 232202 at Things that go BOOM! <!-- | 0 --><p>This week's Blog is gonna be a ramble. I hope at least its a fun one.</p> <p><b>Things that go BOOM!</b></p> <p>Well I've been playing for about a week in the City of Heroes beta. I'm not wrong often, but when I am I do my best to own it. I've described this in the past as &#147;The Greatest Game That Will Never Ship.&#148; I was wrong. Its simple, but done, and will be going live on the 28th.</p> <p>Whether it survives going live only time will tell. They have been doing their best to have us testers simulate launch load but I doubt we're even close to whats gonna hit these machines opening day. Lets face it Sword and Magic and Lords and Ladies has a pretty limited target demographic. But wearing bright colored Spandex and making things go BOOM has a pretty wide appeal. Based purely on what I see I'm going to make some guesses to their server architecture and what they've encountered so far. </p> <p>It looks to me like the basic design of the game is very much EQ like in server design. They have central &#147;congregation&#148; servers where people tend to clump and then mission areas you get sent off to. Unlike EQ the mission areas are spawned dynamically on entrance. Thus if my team and your team go on the same mission we end up in different areas. </p> <p>As well as spreading the load out some, this has the nice effect that you don't get to your mission just to discover someone else has already accomplished it. It also builds strong team spirit as those are the folks you really &#147;are playing with.&#148;</p> <p>The whole setup is of course sharded into multiple &#147;servers&#148; each of which is really the cluster of servers running that instance of the game.</p> <p>Having said this, it looks like they discovered during test that their congregation hubs just couldn't handle even the sharded the load. As such the effectively &#147;sub-sharded&#148; those areas into multiple instances. Atlas Park for instance is actually 6 or 8 different instances of Atlas Park and you chose which one you want to go to when you enter that region. The good news is that it keeps those areas from becoming over-crowded. The bad news of course is that it introduces an obvious &#147;break with reality&#148; into the game.</p> <p> <li>&#147;Hey I'm in Atlas Park under the Atlas statue where are you?&#148;</li> <li>&#147;I'm there too.&#148;</li> <li>&#147;Oh.... ", pause, "Atlas park 2?&#148;</li> <li>&#147;No, Atlas Park 5.&#148;</li> <p>The hacky nature of this makes me strongly suspect it was a kludge to handle over-loading on the server, client, or both. </p> <p><b>Are Roleplay Games about Roleplay? <p>Role play, N. In role-playing, participants adopt characters, or parts, that have personalities, motivations, and backgrounds different from their own. </b></p> <p>Source: <a href="" title=""></a></p> <p>An interesting, and to me frustrating, observation from playing CoH is that the majority of the community not only don't role play, but don't even understand what role play is and why you would want to do it. As an old Pen and Paper role-play gamer this is the primary draw to me and role-play only works in an environment where people understand it and participate in it.</p> <p>Now come launch those like me are talking about staking off one server as the &#147;role-play server&#148; and moving there en masse but this begs a bigger question.</p> <p>Namely, is Role-play the primary goal of an OLRPG? If so then all the games to date pretty much fail in their goal. I have only actually ever seen one game that taught/encouraged people to learn how to role play. A pen and paper game called TORG. By its however nature that aspect would not convert to an automated environment because it requires a human to judge the role-play and modify results accordingly.</p> <p>On the other hand. These non-role-players, as lame as they might seem to me, are having fun and are paying big bucks up to the game developers. In any game development effort that sounds like a success. </p> <p>So maybe, just maybe, whats wrong is the name and we should stop calling these &#147;Online Role Play Games&#148; and start calling them something else. I'd vote for OLBMCJ myself (Online Bash Monsters &amp; Collect Junk.)</p> <p><b>Conclusion</b></p> <p>Well, I have to say that even with server oddities, simplistic game play and lame kiddies who wouldn't know role-play if it bit them in the ass , City of Heroes is a lot of fun. How long it will hold my interest is tough to tell, I generally burn out on these things after I've explored most of the new-experiences and role-play potential. I also have some concerns about launch day. Cryptic is doing all the right things in testing, but its clear they already had scaling issues even with the just the beta population and there is no way then can predict or model the flood of pent up demand for this product. About all they could do is limit the number of boxes they ship, but that could have other bad impacts on their sales. <p>All I know is I intend to be there banging on the login server with the rest of them the day they open the gates!</p> Games Wed, 21 Apr 2004 02:42:06 +0000 jeffpk 231012 at Faster, Better, Cheaper. That's What! <!-- | 0 --><p>In AT's interesting Blog "You Can Make Real Games In Java!!! Yeah... But So What?" he raises a lot of interesting questions. What I don't entirely agree with though are his answers:</p> <p>"Problem is, as far as these guys are concerned, anything we can do in Java, they can do in C++. And they already know how to write games in C++, so proving equivelant (sic) capability is no real argument at all."</p> <p>By definition, anything that can be done in any language can be done in assembler. Yet higher level languages continue to evolve and developer. Why is this?</p> <p>The answer is that just getting the job done is not enough. If there is a tool that will get the job done faster, cheaper or quicker then that is often the right tool to use. Sometimes its tough to convince someone to try a new tool. It took me forever to convince my wife that using the heal of a shoe to drive a nail in was giving her inferior results for too much effort and that she should leanr to use a hammer. Needless to say today though she doesnt reach for a shoe when hanging a picture. </p> <p>"Cross-Platform? Well, cross-compilers for games have been around for a while, and when game companies are thinking cross-platform they're primarily thinking PC, PS2 &amp; Xbox not PC, Mac &amp; Linux, so Java's not really gonna help them there. "</p> <p>Tell this to Bioware, who set out to write Neverwinter Nights as a cross platform C project for Mac, Linux and Win32. In the end the Linux and Mac versions shipped highly incomplete and have not been maintained with upgrades the way Win32 has. Why was this? Because while you CAN write cross platform C, its damn hard. In the end trying to do so adds so much to your expense of development that you really can't afford to target those secondary markets. Bioware eventually gave up and used Win32 specific tools to build the ore of their product-- the Aurora toolset. As a result that is not part of the Mac or Linux releases and what could have been major breakthrough products on thsoe platforms instead became incidental curiosities.</p> <p>"Why care about the Mac market. Its only 10% of the desktops", you might ask. Yes, its only 10% but its a voracious market under-supplied for game content. That market supported and built Bungee, the company responsible for Halo, through all its start-up years. Thats real money folks IF you can get there cheap enough that the expense of opening the market doesn't eat the all the profits.</p> <p>Java can do that. C can't. Its that simple. And who is to say Java won't extend its reach to other important platforms like the game consoles? The game console manufacturers are driven by their developers. Thats a fact of the industry. All it would take is one developer writing a super-hot game in Java and then telling Sony, "Gee we'd like to port to your platform but we need Java" and I guarantee you Java would arrive on PS[whatever].</p> <p>Athomas next comments on the memory management situation in Java.<br /> "No offense to the truly brilliant minds who continue to catapult the JVM leagues ahead in power and capability with each release, but memory management in games, especially on constrained devices like consoles, largely consists of pre-allocating objects and disposing of them when you're done. Having a process you don't control eating CPU cycles in the middle of a tight game loop isn't really seen as a bonus."</p> <p>The mistake here is equating the state of current Java memory management with the possibilities of proper game-oriented GC. Let me tell you as someone who wrote games and game portability libraries that "little process" of self memory-management that game developers follow that AT describes is a royal pain in the rear. A proper game GC, where you could tell it "this is the maximum hit I want per game loop iteration right now" would be a godsend and reduce development and debug time significantly. It would also reduce the large number of memory errors that games today typically ship with. (Ever play your favorite game for a really extended period of time and have it lock or crash out? Surprise, thats probably bad memory management at work.)</p> <p>More importantly though is what garbage collection really enables, which is proper object oriented coding. Today game programmers don't write OOP. They may use C++ but by and large they use it as a C compiler with stricter type checking. Given their tools today they cannot separate their code effectively into reusable objects and modules. Global memory management means monolithic code, its really that simple. Java GC frees you from that. You can allocate temporary on-the-fly objects as needed and be assured they will get collected without other parts of the code needing to know anything about them. And thats the real reason why GC is essential.</p> <p>Does today's GC meet game needs? Unfortunately not, but the developers of the Java spec in their wisdom preserved a lot of maneuvering room for new GC algorithms and I'm confident we will eventually see GCs that can handle game needs.</p> <p>"What about RMI? Object Serialization? " Sorry AT, this is a straw man. Noone having to manage and count individual bytes uses these. Instead, you should have asked "what about NIO and scattered reads and writes?" These are the Java facilities for low level packet twiddling and they are a lot more convenient then their C counterparts. conveniences means faster development and less bugs.</p> <p>However, I'd even argue with the assertion that serialization is not of value. Used judiciously it again can give you code modularity without a very high overhead. A great example is the UUID class that is used throughout the back-end of the Sun Sim Server (I'm told by the way we're going to change its name back to Sun Game Server so get ready to see that in the future.) UUIDs are generated in a few different factories and then passed around and used by other parts of the stack that never need to know their insides. Without serialization, the layer that transports such things must know their internals. I can see this convenience and code modularity (again read "faster development, fewer bugs, better maintainability") reaching out through the edge of the back-end and over the net as bandwidth issues become less and less. There are already game consoles that require broadband for game play. What's 10 or 12 extra bytes on a 128K connection?</p> <p>Then there are some other qualities of Java AT didn't get to. Like the fact that the entire language is designed to "fail-early". Many errors that plague C programs are caught at compile-time in Java (eg uninitialized variables, dead code, memory leakage through orphaned data blocks). Others are caught as soon as they occur and exceptions are thrown (eg null pointer access, array over-run and under-run.) These are all things that plague games in release today. So not only is writing Java more convenient, its inherently more bug-proof.</p> <p>Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Java is a language built to handle complexity. In C++ you pay penalties for making your code modular and reusable. In Java, thanks to the miracle of run-time compilation, the easiest and fastest ways to do things are often also the most modular and reusable. Reused code is tested code, leading again to faster development and fewer bugs escaping into the field.</p> <p>Okay so maybe Java IS good for game developers. It opens markets by reducing porting costs. It allows the developer to deliver more reliable code quicker. Most importantly It allows the developer to reduce the complexity of the game programming problem down to manageable units.</p> <p>But what's wrong with Java as a scripting language?</p> <p>The answer is nothing is inherently wrong with it. In fact, its so easy and obvious, its already a fait accompli. Management always likes targets that are already accomplished-- they can declare victory and go on. But setting your goals on already accomplished things gets you no where.</p> <p>Java has the potential to radically transform the game industry, making better and more reliable games easier to build and deploy. It would be a crying shame to set our goals at anything else. </p> <p>We've seen transitions like this before in the game industry. Perhapses I'm the only one in the GTG long enough in the tooth to remember this but I lived through the transition of game coding from assembly to C. And the partial transition to C++. These transitions *are* painful there is no denying it. Some developers will absolutely refuse to move, and will eventually find themselves marginalized like the assembly coders are today. Another set will only move when its a proven thing. When the waters seem safe. Those guys will be scrambling for jobs and catching up on their skills. Some will manage the transition and some will fall by thge wayside. But the leaders, the guys who are *always* at the front of the industry, are already playing with alternate technologies like Java. They do it at home on their time so when the shift comes they will be ready for it.</p> <p>The big question for the game developer is which group do you really want to be part of? The big question for us at Sun is, do we want to ride the front of the wave which means pushing Java into new uses or do we just want to sit safely on the beach content with the uses and users of today.</p> <p>Myself, as John Brunner puts it in "Shockwave Rider"-- I'm a chaos surfer! </p> <p>Always have been. Thats why I'm here at Sun pushing Java for game development instead of writing "web services" or whatever managements favorite easy-win is today. Why? To quote a song well known to old fogies like me, &#147;'Cause Mama, that's where the fun is!&#148;</p> Games Wed, 14 Apr 2004 01:34:30 +0000 jeffpk 232057 at