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Balancing realistic physics with fun in Black Prophecy
The latest info about the sci-fi MMO Black Prophecy, currently in development at Reakktor Media, comes in the form of a series of dev blogs from the game's Technical Director, Cyrus Preuss. As with his two previous blogs, Cyrus gets down into the nuts and bolts of how the game's physics work, which may be of interest to those who'd like to know more about the underlying systems that will govern Black Prophecy's space combat. His rather technical dev blog is all about interaction with the physics engine. It especially deals with balancing the realism that some players want with the need to throw aspects of that realism to the wind, in favor of game mechanics that are simply more fun. He also discusses how the physics engine will relate to space stations, capital ships, and weapon physics. Black Prophecy fans interested in this kind of a look at the game can read all about it in "Interaction with the Physics Engine" on the game's official site.
Black Prophecy technical director on game's physics
Black Prophecy from Reakktor Media is a sci-fi MMO that may ultimately be a bit more accessible to some gamers than reigning sci-fi champ EVE Online. It will be a very different sort of game than EVE, though. In fact, there is still much about Black Prophecy that has yet to be revealed, but the title's certainly got potential from what we've learned so far. While we're hoping to have more information for you about Black Prophecy in the coming months, the team at Reakktor Media is keeping fans up to date with dev diaries explaining some of the different facets of the game. The latest series of these blogs on the game's physics is being written by Black Prophecy's Technical Director Cyrus Preuss, which he continues today by focusing on the physics engine itself. His dev diary is a bit technical, but not all that difficult to follow either. Cyrus explains the concepts of the "physics loop" and the factors which ultimately define the game environment in space. (This includes collision detection, which triggers particle effects and sound effects, but there's quite a bit more to it than that.) If you're curious about this aspect of Black Prophecy's game design, have a look at Cyrus's dev diary or jump into the discussion by the fans on the game's official forums.
Black Prophecy dev diary gives peek at game's physics
Now that the sci-fi MMO Black Prophecy is free to keep moving forward, the game's developer Reakktor Media is revealing more about the title. Recent dev diaries focused on Black Prophecy's art direction but now Technical Director Cyrus Preuss is kicking off a short series on the game's physics. The physics in any game can be important, perhaps moreso in a space-based MMO where players can move about in any direction and potentially interact (and collide) with many other ships in a single area. Cyrus boils a complex subject down to some easily understood explanations of how game physics work in the first installment, and will explore more on the topic in the coming weeks. He writes, "But you don't need to be afraid that I will confront you with highly complex equations or formulas. With this diary I also want to provide a look behind the scenes to those who didn't take the advanced physics or mathematics courses in school." Fans of Black Prophecy or those curious about the underlying game physics in an MMO can follow along with Cyrus' dev diary on the official game site.
BioWare's Bill Dalton reveals the secrets to making big teams work
These days it's extremely rare for a video game to be made by one person. Groups of people from different disciplines work on a game, hired for their proficiency in their area of specialty. When we're talking about an MMO, the game development team often ends up being pretty big. When we're talking about an MMO as ambitious as Star Wars: The Old Republic, the team is freaking enormous, by necessity. In a recent article on Gamasutra one of the members of the SWTOR team, Bioware Austin technical director Bill Dalton, discussed the challenges that come up when working with such a large group of people.Unsurprisingly, Dalton said that communication is at the core of keeping a big team afloat: "There is nothing you can do to communicate too much. In a situation where things are in crisis and something is broken, and you've told individual people as they come up, it's not a bad idea to overcommunicate and tell the whole team what's going on." Dalton mentioned that another difficult aspect of team development is balancing the differing view-points that each sub-team looks at the game from. Again, communication is the key to solving these puzzles. Check out the full article at Gamasutra to read about an interesting case study involving Star Wars: The Old Republic and its Hero Engine, which allows developers from all disciplines to make live edits to the game simultaneously -- impressive.
CCP Games points to EVE client as source of performance woes
The Quantum Rise expansion for EVE Online brought with it numerous server side and database improvements, and brings us a bit closer to the ideal of having smooth fleet battles with thousands of ships. So after the expansion rolled out, with the promise of improving the game experience, why was performance subpar at first? The latest CCP Games dev blog points out the culprit -- it's the client. CCP Atlas (aka Jon Bjarnason), EVE's Technical Director, has written a dev blog on the performance issue. He states, "In hindsight, we should have caught this, but we didn't. Needless to say the week after Quantum Rise wasn't exactly our proudest moment. Although we had improved server and database performance in Quantum Rise, due to the client issues the perception was that overall performance had degraded. And perception is reality, doubly so in virtual worlds."
EQII dev discusses the art of plugging a memory leak
No one enjoys a memory leak in their favorite game. Perhaps you've reported one in the past, in the hopes of a speedy fix. EverQuest II's technical director Joshua Kriegshauser recently noticed quite a few reports coming in about a possible leak in the zone Veeshan's Peak, and has done a write-up of what it takes to repair these crippling and annoying problems.Having read through the article, we won't pretend that we understood everything that Kriegshauser has written, but we get the point -- fixing memory leaks is no stroll in the park. For those of you that can keep up with what he is saying, kudos to you. For the rest of us, it opens our eyes to what really goes on behind the little hotfixes we zoom past in the latest patch notes of any given game. In case you don't make it to the end of the article, we'll let you know that he did manage to fix the leak -- we're going to go now and sleep off the headache we got from reading that far.
