How The Game Is Played

Odds and Ends

This blog is just a short report of odds and ends.

I'm still in documentation hell. The game server doc is up to almost 50 pages and I still don't think I'm more then half way to what it really aught to be. I am reminded of something one of my first good managers, a man by the name of Bob Patton, said to me: "Writing code is easy. Writing english is hard!"

To relieve documentation stress I've picked up one of my pet projects again, a game client I'm writing in Java using Java3D that can be fed data right out of the NWN Aurora Toolset. You can see more info on it at http://jnwn.dev.java.net. All the work to date has been in the Aurora data loading and management. The ultimate goal is a MMOLRPG open source client that leverages the really great NWN tools.

The only down side of this approach is that you will need to own a copy of NWN to legally play as you need a license to the data, but its getting to be an old game so that shouldnt be that big a stumbling block.

Ive just about fnished the loader and am almost ready to start working on the fun part-- the game engine itself. One thing I hope to support, that NWN couldn't, is jumping and flying. NWN used a very conservative collision-map approach to collision detection that meant you could not allow the players' and monsters' feet to leave the "floor". Since I also want to experiment with game physics, I'm going to need to implement a real 3-space collider anyway so this constraint should be lifted.

Another subject: Hats off to the VM team!

I don't think I've gotten around to mentiong this yet, but I am seeing no noticeable GC pauses in any of my game-code these days, even in code that I had to write fast for GDC and that did a LOT of temporary allocation. Hats off guys, you finally have it working for short-lived objects the way you always told us you could-- invisibly. I'm very very impressed. Our Hostpot VM guys really are some of the best VM programmers in the world.

Online Game Report -- Matrix Offline. Okay I promised I wouldn't waste too much ink on this subject but I think I'm over my MxO phase. The biggest issue for me is that the game design really requires you to devote a LOT of time if you want to really be involved in things. Between the comittment necessary to create crews and factions, which is how you get enough attention to be included in the interactive parts of the game, and the level-horing that has players who just work the system in order to gain results fast already at levels 4 and 5 times my own, its just losing its appeal for me.

I understand why they went the way they went the way they did with the interactive game elements-- its really hard to scale those and include everyone. But the result is yet another game where, in order to be a first class citizen, you have to both devote most of your life to it and be willing to "play the system." Two things I am not willing to do.

So I'm back to CoH. At least its a game I can drop into for an hour or two, have some fun, and then leave and go back to productive stuff again. I'm finding solo-play in CoH frankly boring these days, but when I have friends to play with its still fun.

Posted at 03:09AM Apr 18, 2005 by gameguy in General  |  Comments[1]