How The Game Is Played

One door most close for another to open.

Its been a great nine+ years at Sun, but I am afraid I must announce that I am moving on. This is both a sad and a joyous time for me. Sad because I leave behind a great many wonderful colleagues. joyous because I am taking a big and exciting step for my career.

If Sun has one really remarkable asset, in my opinion it is the quality of the talent we have attracted. Not only are some of the best and smartest engineers I have ever worked with here at Sun, but we also have some terrific marketing and management folks. because Sun marketing often takes a lot of flack, I'd like to specifically mention a few specific people. There are equally great people in engineering, such as Seth Proctor, Jim Waldo and the entire Darkstar team. And great managers such as my first manager at Sun Steve Wilson, Vicki Abe and Karl Haberl. But marketing seldom gets mentioned positively around Sun so...

My recent work on Darkstar marketing with Jennifer Kotzen has been wonderful. True collaboration I have learned a great deal from her and, I hope, her from me. A brilliant lady, I hope she continues on handling the public face of Darkstar for a long time to come. Sun ia about to debut a wonderful new Project Darkstar community site. Know that she really drove that effort. I think the community will love the results.

Chris Melissinos. Compadre. Partner. Amazing speaker and communicator with a gift for quickly grasping technology, and the most amazing nose for where popular culture is going that I have ever seen. Also one of the few ,men I've ever met who really fits the italian term "sympatico." Sympatico has no english translation that is quite right but I can try to define it by way of describing Chris. Chris has the most open heart I know of. He genuinely wants to like everyone and find the good in everyone. You CAN get on his shit-list, but only by earning it.

Really, I cannot say enough good about this man. When I would call Chris and get his wife, she'd tell him "your other spouse is on the phone" and mine much the same. The journey inside of Sun that led first to javagaming.org and the technologies it spawned, and now to Project Darkstar has been a long and sometimes arduous one. Without Chris there to bolster me when it all got to much, and I to do the same for him, I don't think either of us would be where we are today. I just bought the sports car Ive always wanted/dreamed of. There are two people I will let drive it other then me. My blood-brother Joe, and Chris who is just as much a blood brother, just in a different way.

So, with that said, let me get on to what I am sure you are really interested in. First and foremost this is by no way shape or form the end of Project Darkstar. Two and a half years ago, my leaving the project probably would have been. But project Darkstar has grown far laregr then just my notion. It has a superb and dedicated technical team behind it in Jim Waldo's group. I have no doubt that they will continue to evolve the technology to levels of sophistication far beyond what I ever could have done alone.

I am also not leaving the team without a visionary. if I thought that was true, i wouldn't be able to leave. But Seth Proctor has really stepped up and into that role. He fully groks the original vision and has made it bigger and better in making it his own. ('Grok' is an old sci fi term, meaning to completely understand on both an intellectual and gut level.) I am confident that there are no finer hands I could leave that in.

Karl Haberl, Sun Labs director, is a fine adoptive parent for my baby. He has fully committed to and believes in Project Darkstar, putting an not insignificant amount of his own corporate capital into its success. he has also led the project places I probably would not have chosen to go, was dubious about, and was ultimately proved totally wrong about.

I was, and am still, skeptical about the latest buzz in "Virtual Worlds". I still remember the LAST time this went around. ("desktop VR" anyone?) But what I cannot deny is how it has grabbed the imagination of corporate America. Project Wonderland, Sun's VR toolkit on top of Project Darkstar and a project Karl made happen, has been nothing but terrific for the external impressions of Project Darkstar. It also has proved extremely valuable in driving internal development. In short, I am very confident that Karl will continue to make the right decisions to move Project Darkstar forward as a major and important technology both inside and outside of Sun.

For myself, an opportunity I have been wanting for a long time opened up and I couldn't afford not to take it. I am moving on to be the Chief Technology Officer (Chief Technical Monkey ) at Rebel Monkey software. The point of creating Project Darkstar for me was always that i wanted to use it to create games. At Rebel Monkey I will have that chance. Rebel Monkey is still in run silent-run deep mode so I can't share everything we are doing, but I can say that we are developing something in the casual/social space and that Project Darkstar is an important technology to us. In that regard, I promise I will stay a very active member of the Project Darkstar community, just as a user rather then a developer.

If I have one thing to conclude on, its this: I don't want anyone to think my leaving has anything to do with my belief either in Sun or the future of Project Darkstar. I have quite a lot of Sun stock I accumulated in my 9+ years and I am holding on to all of it because I firmly believe that "the Sun also rises." Sun continues to be a great collection of fantastic talent and Jonnathan is positioning Sun to be a major player in a future that runs largely on open source software. I am proud to be a Sun alumn and don't rule out my returning some day.

Similarly I think project Darkstar is poised on the edge of massive success. The last 2 years have been Jim and his crew laying the groundwork and figuring out the lay of the land. What will come out of the group in the next year I think is going to turn the online game development world on its ear. I am betting my and Rebel Monkey's future in part on Jim's team's work because I am that confident in their drive and capabilities.

if there is one thing I have learned in my Project Darkstar experience, is that it truly does take a village to raise a child. Sun labs is that village and I have no doubt that I am leaving my baby in hands better then if I had continued on with it all by myself.

Leaving Sun means I also will lose the ability to add to this blog, though Sun will be nice enough to keep the existing posts up. For my future blog entries I have created a new blog on blogspot. I encourage you all to join me there:

http://cto-rebelmonkey.blogspot.com

Posted at 11:00AM Jul 21, 2008 by gameguy in General  |  Comments[1]

Short update on AoC

They say the last words on any flight recorder recovered from a plane crash are always "oh shit."

Maybe Funcom is reaching the "oh shit" point on their particular crash and burn. I just received an invite to participate in a survey. The most interesting part was in the last few questions:

With Conan at it’s present state, how long do you think you will stay subscribed?
1 to 3 months
4 to 6 months
over 6 months


If you have planned to stop playing Age of Conan, please tell us why?
Technical reasons (ie. You have problems playing the game)
Gameplay reasons
Financial reasons
Social/Time reasons

Keep in mind this game is only about 3 months old. This is a time when most MMos should be focused on growth of the player base. There were lost of satisfaction questions but not ONE "would you recommend AoC to your friends" type questions.

Reading between the liens, I see subscriber bleed as the primary concern right now. If they actually started *listening* to their users, maybe they could pull the nose up in time. or maybe its too late already. I give it 50/50 odds and time will tell.

Posted at 12:40PM Jul 19, 2008 by gameguy in General  | 

Cimmeria: A community in crisis (Age of Conan)

Or "How the Game is Lost"

I am afraid Funcom is in the process of proving an old adage-- that any MMo lives and dies on its customer service. And Funcom's Age of Conan has absolutely the worst customer service it has ever been my displeasure to experience.

The game design itself is great, in someways even ground breaking. The art is absolutely stunning.

The game itself, is broken. very broken. Their regression testing is so bad that they actually introduced major new bugs in their last patch. (A starting enemy for beginning characters suddenly started doing thousands of hit points of damage, ensuring that no one could successfully start a new character.)

Amazingly, this alone would not necessarily doom a promising game. Hardcore MMO players are an amazingly forgiving lot, really, and will put up with amazing levels of brokeness if they feel the developers are listening to them and working with them to find a solution.

The secret, is that MMOs are all about community. In that regard they can ALMOST operate like open source projects. But this only works if the players really feel that the developers are actively acting in good faith with the community. This is where customer service enters the picture. The way a developer establishes that good faith is with clear lines of communication. This doesn't mean they have to cater to every player's whim or idea of what would make the game better, but it DOES mean giving the players the feeling that they are being listened to. Responsive customer service is a key bridge piece that engages the members of the community when they are most emotional and most likely to feel ignored. Good customer service can heal all kinds of wounds. But BAD customer service can create just as many.

Funcom right now is becoming the test book case of how to do customer service wrong.

Funcom has customer forums. However they do not deign to actually engage with the customers on those forums, despite many many pleas by a great many customers. For the past few months there has been a growing petition on the forums for a minor administrative change. It has over 600 signees to date. the requested change, to the US servers, is something that already exists and is in operation in Europe. Not only has Funcom not said yes, they haven't even given a reason why not. in fact, they have outright IGNORED all the posts for months and not even deigned to say "no" despite further pleas for at least that much recognition by their customers.

The ONLY communication from the Funcom game team comes in the forum of periodic "pronouncement from the mountains" speeches from the head game designer, full of self importance and lacking any of the information the players are screaming for on the forums.

In game customer service is useless, though arguably slightly improved from when the game originally launched. When the game launched, if you had a problem , you could put in a trouble ticket. If you were unlucky, the system would just drop it. If you were lucky, it would sit in the system for 8+ hours. Finally a CSR would get to it, see that you had logged out, and send you a message that they erased your ticket since you were no longer online. You'd get this infuriating message the next time you logged in.

Now, if you put in a ticket, they will get back to you within an hour or so, and generally tell you that the policy is not to do anything about your problem. They will tell you o email customer support to escalate. This is apparently a bit bucket. I've never even received an acknowledgment of on of these emails arriving let alone had someone respond to it. And no one else I've talked to about this has, either.

So, faced with mounting frustration, what do players do? What else, they go to their friends for support. In this case its back to those self same forums that funcome will not respond to.

Well, will not respond is too strong a term. they WILL respond to criticism... by locking and deleting threads. They respond by any questioning of such actions as follows. (A private email sent to me recently)

Dear Cyberqat,

You have received an infraction at Age of Conan Forums.

Reason: Questioning Moderation
-------
Greetings,

You were given an infraction for questioning moderation in the public forums. If something has been moderated then it's not something to open a new thread about the topic. It will only become closed or removed to a restricted forum.

You now have 3 infractions of 6. When you hit 6 infractions then you will be automatically suspended.

Thank you!
-------

This infraction is worth 3 point(s) and may result in restricted access until it expires. Serious infractions will never expire.

I guess the "age of conan" is 1984 and I've just heard from the Ministry of Truth.

Ofcourse, this blog is the true meaning of "information wishes to be free." They cannot silence their community and by trying they are only enraging it further. I encourage others who have been so silenced, in whatever venue, to seek alternate means of expression as well. Such expression is the heart and soul of the internet.

Funcom seems to have invented a new concept: Customer Disservice. A systematic way to take already upset customers and inflame their outrage to the breaking point. I'm not sure how useful it is though, except as an object lesson for future game developers on what not to do.

The train is on the tracks and headed for the cliff and Funcom seems intent on blindly shoving coal into the boiler. Sadly, a promising game with a great start will probably die soon from total mismanagement by a company who never understood that a game service is first, and foremost, a service.

Posted at 09:59PM Jul 11, 2008 by gameguy in General  | 

Its an XML... its a YAML.. no, its SADDL!

So, I've been meaning to check out YAML for awhile. XML can be handy but its SO verbose and so human-unfriendly. A friend suggested I check out YAML. Since I was writing a configurable UI system for my current project I figured now was a good time to try it

YAML is *better* in the area of human writability but it had a big flaw in my mind. By default, order has no significance. In order to make order significant you need to clutter up your file with this extra lines containing nothing but a dash. Two levels deep on my menus was already ugly. I was dreading going three.

What I *really* wanted was something that was like a Windows INI file or a Java properties file, but that had some of the characteristics of YAML such as hirearchical data blocks and the ability to represent objects.

Thus was born SADDL. That stands for either "Simple Application Data Description Language" or "Still Another Data Description Language." Ive been evolving the unspecification in an open soruce project as well as a currently about 80% complete reference implementation. I call the document an unspecification because it is not a formal specification. Honestly, I hate formal specs. IMO all they tend to do is obfuscate the facts to anyone but an academically trained reader. I am also not a formal spec trained writer. I am trying however to make the unspecification easy to read and logically complete. If you spot any holes, let me know!

The SADDL project can be found at:
http://code.google.com/p/saddl

Posted at 05:07AM Jun 14, 2008 by gameguy in General  | 

A travelog of alternate realities

So,
Lost of people around here have heard me snort whenever second life is mentioned as a good example of a "virtual world." You will get the same reaction from most gamers. I could try to explain why, but they say a picture is wroth a thousand words.

So here is a little journey in stills across two current, real virtual worlds in two games today-- City of Heroes and Age of Conan. Please realize that as impressive as these are, they don't really do the games justice because there are all kinds of in game animated effects you cant really see in stills. Ripples on the water, things like that.

Also please keep in mind that there are no backdrops. Everything you see in the distance is real geometry that
can be approached, walked on or otherwise interacted with. The jaggies you see are because these are full screen sized shots that I set for reduced size in the web page so you could look at them easily in a browser.

Posted at 04:35AM Jun 14, 2008 by gameguy in General  | 

Fun with Project Darkstar and JMX

Hey All,

This is just a sort of a random update, but I thought it was neat enough to share. I'm currently multi-tasking and one of the projects I'm working on is the server side of a complete casual game example for Project Darkstar. It is our intent to show it at the AUstin Game Developers Conference in september and release it as open source for other developers to take and modify.

As part of the demo w wanted to be able to peek under the hood at what the app was doing while it was running. After some poking around (and a pointer from a co-worker) I discovered that Java 6 has a *wonderful* tool built in called JConsole.

It is a complete, extensible, JMX viewer you can fire up and just attach to your VM. For anyone who doesn't know, JMX is the monitoring API for Java. You get all sorts of useful VM stats like memory consumption and number of current threads, but the best thing is that extensibility. By writing very little code you can expose your own information to the Console!

For my demo I have written a little Project Darkstar service thats starts an MXBean and registers it and then handles data requests from thw NMXBean. A service is necessary because the data comes from a Project Dakrstar managed object and you need to be able to run transactional code to read a Managed Object. I will be posting the actual code in tghe next day or so, its remarkably small and simple!

Posted at 11:30AM Jun 13, 2008 by gameguy in General  |  Comments[2]

AoC... the C is for Conan, not Customer Service

Alright,
Last week I gave the new Age of Conan game a rave review. This week I'm going to give it a rant.

The game is really really good. It has the usual launch technical issues but these in themselves are not all that surprising.

Funcom however should be ashamed of how bad their customer support is right now. I want to make it clear that I am not blaming the GMs (the CSRs). They are doing what they can with an obviously and terribly broken system. The system does not and cannot scale to meet the needs of a launching game.

Here's how the system is designed:
(1) The player tells a chat-bot that it wants help. This goes on an (in memory) queue in the chat-bot process.
(2) As GMs come available, they take the next ticket in strict FIFO order. This removes it from the queue.
(3) The GM attempts to contact the player in game. If the player is NOT in game, then they send the player a "Sorry you weren't here. Please resubmit your problem" message and the ticket is deleted.
(4) Next time the player logs on, they see that message and have to start at the back of the queue again.

You see the problem don't you? This is a queue thrash waiting to happen and in fact thats what IS happening right now. The queue gets so big so fast that it takes many many hours for any one persons ticket to get looked at. I'm estimating about 8 to 10 hours in the current avg queue length Im seeing of 200 messages, based on my own experiences in that queue.

This means the vast majority of tickets WILL get read AFTER the user has logged off. Which means the CSRs are spending msot of their time writing "Sorry" messages rather then getting any real work done. This slows the queue down even more so it grows even bigger.

The only release valve for the queue is players who give up on ever getting help from Funcom and stop re-submitting. This is NOT a desired customer service state.

Here is a journsal of my own 3 days spent on that queue:

Day 1:
I get stuck behind a peice of geometry. I try the /stuck command. This makes it worse by actually throwing me behind the building and off the map.

I try "Asura's Recall", it won't work because I am on the "Kill Strom" quest which disables it.

I try an instance change. It wont work because there is only one (personal) instance of any tortage night mission. I look around for some way to kill my character and find there is nothing. I put in a ticket and wait, and wait, and wait, at 1:30am I go to bed cause I have to work,

Day 2:
I log in and the first thing I am greeted with is a message from a GM saying "Hi. You werent here so we deleted your ticket. If yous till have problems please resubmit." I resubmit and discover that I am at the back of the queue all over again.

I resubmoit my ticket and start waiting. I periodically check my ticket, which starts at about 210. Apparently the ticket serve crashes because my ticket vanishes at about 180. I submit it *again* and Im back to 200. This happens once more during the night.

Pissed off, I go to the boards and spew. Someone points me at a buried response from funcom in the customer service part of the web site that says if you have waited over two hours and then gotten one of these messages you can email support@funcom.com for offline support., I do so and get an automated message back with a ticket number. I check but there is no way to tell the status of this ticket-- its write only email based system.

Again after 1 am I log off.

Day 3:
I log in and find Im STILL stuck and another one of these "You werent here so we deleted your ticket." messages. I check my email, still no reply from a real human being for offline support. I put *another* online ticket in and sit off the map chattign with friends staring at my unusuable character feeling pissed off.

One of them suggests I try spamming the /stuck command. Even though that was what got me into this mess, I figure it cant get any worse and I try it. Low and behold, after about 10 min of trying it in every nook and corner I can find in the back-side of th geometry it works!

I delete my ticket from the queue to guive some other poor user half a chance of actually GETTING help and send an email to cancel my offline ticket.

In short, AoC is a great game IF you dont need FUncom's help. If you do, your shit out of luck. I cannot in good conscience recommend this game any more until Funcom fixes some of these fundemental support issues. All it would take is modifying their system so, rather then giving the GM the next ticket in the queue, to skip any tickets where the user isnt online and leave them in place. That way, the next time the user logged on they would be at the ehad of the queue, rather then going abck to the tailall over again.

This sia fix, but its only an immediate fix. The REAL fix is to be able to do CS while the user is off line. I really dont udnerstand why they couldnt move me abck to the start position when I wasn't online. It seems like that woudl be one SQL quey. But I don't know what their back end looks like.

On the bright side, all this DOES point to the need for mature, manageable systems for running online services. Maybe next time, they should look at Project Darkstar as a base. Project Darkstar is in its infancy now but it would (a) give them more time to work on the issues they clearly didnt have time on this time around like customer service and (b) as a standard platform allow them to leverage others work in these areas.

Posted at 11:44AM May 30, 2008 by gameguy in General  | 

Go Speed Racer, Go

Okay now for part tow of my weekend.

I went to see "Speed Racer" in Imax with my wife, brother and his SO on Monday.

This is a movie that justifies IMAX. One part original speed racer, one part "power rangers" and one part video-game it is just dripping with visual appeal. That there is a video game aesthetic should come as no surprise to anyone: The film was written and directed by the Wachowski brothers who also brought us The Matrix. Whereas the Matrix though was a dark and brooding videogame, this is all bright lights, garish colors and fast action.

Setting the action in an entire world that looks like a cartoon allowed them to get away with what is probably the most important part of a speed racer cartoon-- the over the top cartoon physics and race car driving. The Mach 5 seems to spend more of its time spinning, flying through the air or sliding sideways then it actually does driving straight ahead. But it "works" in the context of this world its set in.

This really isn't so much an "update" as an opening out of the speed racer story. All the elements I remember from the cartoon are there. The original cartoon aired in the late 60s, and the time period for the film is the late 60s, although a late 60s in this alien cartoon world. The "high tech" in the film all looks like the 60s idea of the future pushed through the lense of a modern 3D animation esthetic.

All in all this move was far better then I expected it to be. Its not deep, but it IS fun, especially for those of us who fondly remember the TV show. It looks gorgeous, even better on a bigger screen. The plot doesnt have many surprises but thats okay. Where this move is going really isnt all lthat important. Just sit in the passenger seat and enjoy the ride!

Posted at 01:22PM May 27, 2008 by gameguy in General  | 

Speed and Gore

So its been an interesting weekend. I played the new Age of Conan MMO up to 18th level, and I saw Speed Racer in IMAX. Below are some imrpessions of both:

Age of Conan.

This is the first (mainstream ) MMOLPRG that is rated M for mature. (There have been a few pure cybersex MMOs already. If you don't know what cybersex is, you probably don't want to.)

Being M rated effects it in some interesting ways. First off, it is the goriest MMO I've ever played. It has "fatailities" which are basically like "finishing moves" in Mortal Combat. Do the right things at the end of a combat and you chop the other guys head off, splatter your screen with blood, or trigger other serious gorefest animations.

I'm not a big fan of gore for gores sake but in thsi case, it works. Anyone who knows the original Conan source material knows that this is an important part of the genre. As such, it never feels gratuitous and actually is fun in a mildly sick way.

The game also contains sexual references. I have yet to see an overt sex scene but there is no doubt that the charcters have a sexuality. The NPCs will often tlak in innuendo (the females at least. Which feels a bit odd if your playing a hetero-female character.)

Though i havent tried it, Im told if you take all the clothes of a PC there is actually a naked body under it. There is actually a potentially good reason for this. Most MMOs put "molded on " underwear on character models, like a barbie doll. The problem with this approach, ask any woman, is that one set of underwear dopes not go with all types of outer clothing. Different clothes call for different undergarments. By having a real anatomy, a 3D model cna be dressed in any sorts of clothing and "look right." I have yet to see enough "social clothing" in the game to really taje advantage of that but Im still in newbie land.

Thats the next thing about the game thats unusual. It takes a LONG time to get out of newbie land. Your there til level 20 which is almost half of the current Max level of 50. But it doesn't really feel that bad cause the newbie space is huge compared to many games and the work your given is varied with an interesting, deep plot line behind it.

This has to be one of AoC's stroingest points in fact. The plot is VERY strong and well written with multiple threads that all come together nicely in your story. The quests are, for the most part, directly related to that story and advance it in interesting ways. None of the quests feel like repeats of previous ones and there are very few that feel like "time wasters." All in all the newbie quests are an outstanding feature of AoC.

Another interesting difference is that AoC has two modes, day-play and night-play. In the newbie areas, day-play is multi-player while night-play is single player. Your main story is moved ahead through night play. i *think* the design reason for this is that, as people get higher level characters, it will prevent them using them to "twink" beginning players through the main starting quests.

A final thing I really appreciate about AoC, is that the M rating cuts way down on the kiddie factor. It doesn't eliminate it, especially late at night. (Parents, do you know what your kids are up to on their computers late at night? For some of you, the answer seems to be no.) But in general it makes for a much more enjoyable social environment for adults.

AoC is, in the end, a niche product. It is intended for and theoretically limited to a mature market who like gritty fantasy. Time will tell how big its niche really is, but its a worthwhile contender in the arena thatw as obviously crafted carefully and with love.

Posted at 01:00PM May 27, 2008 by gameguy in General  | 

Hot troll in the city

This is actually a test of blocking. Right now blocking occurs at the 0.0 point on the model so the gets half-way into walls but then is indeed stopped. Im going to move the test point forward by half his bounding box width to fix that.

This is also a bit more complex scene then the first tests. Its a bit dark because I haven't done anything with lights yet.

Posted at 11:01AM May 03, 2008 by gameguy in General  | 

Walk the Troll

Here is a video I made of the DarkMMO client with a troll under user control.

The jerkiness is an unfortunate side effect of the video capture software I used. Motion is silky-smooth when its not doing capture.

Posted at 03:30PM Apr 30, 2008 by gameguy in General  | 

Troll animation in NB6

Here's the latest from the DarkMMO project.
I've added animation playback in the Netbeans NWN mdl viewer.

I caught a little video. Its a bit jerky due to running the capture software along with NB6, but you can get the general idea.

Play Video

Posted at 04:58PM Apr 28, 2008 by gameguy in General  | 

Beware of the troll...

Here is the next step, a troll placed into the scene by the server.

He's in a neutral position because animation isn't working right yet. Thats the next thing for me to fix...

Posted at 01:17PM Apr 27, 2008 by gameguy in General  | 

Hot troll in the city

This is actually a test of blocking. Right now blocking occurs at the 0.0 point on the model so the gets half-way into walls but then is indeed stopped. Im going to move the test point forward by half his bounding box width to fix that.

This is also a bit more complex scene then the first tests. Its a bit dark because I haven't done anything with lights yet.

Posted at 07:47AM Apr 27, 2008 by gameguy in General  | 

Mission control, we have lift off!

Here is the screen shot of the very first Zone rendered by the DarkMMO client.




It doesn't look like much, I'll have some more interesting maps to show at JavaOne. But it does represent
a very important milestone. I can now build a Zone in the NeverwinterNights toolset, load it up into the server and then connect and have the server send the tile map for the Zone down to the client for display.

The server retains a WalkMesh for the zone so it can do collision checking for cheating clients. My next order
of business is to add in moving characters and do that collision detection. As thats based very heavily on the "BattleTrolls" code base from about 3 years ago, with a bit of luck I should be able to get that much in
before JavaOne!

Posted at 03:00AM Apr 26, 2008 by gameguy in General  |