Questions
by Cody “Micajah” Bye, Managing Editor
style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">
Answers
by BigWorld’s Gavin Longhurst (VP of Business Development)
and Simon Hayes (Chief Technical Officer)
The technical side of massively multiplayer online games is
ridiculously complex. For the average gamer, hearing about middleware
solutions and the licensing of graphics engines really
doesn’t get the adrenaline pumping. Yet it’s a
crucial part of the MMOG industry and should not be ignored, especially
by the gamers. With that in mind, Ten Ton Hammer’s Cody
“Micajah” Bye asked a series of gamer-related
questions to BigWorld’s Gavin Longhurst and Simon Hayes at
the ION Games Conference. Their answers were articulate and really help
simplify the reasons why gamers should be interested in the technical
processes of these MMOGs.
border="1">
href="http://tth.tentonhammer.com/modules.php?set_albumName=album279&id=fantasy18&op=modload&name=gallery&file=index&include=view_photo.php">
style="border: 0px solid ;"
alt="BigWorld Technology Suite demo image"
title="Click to Enlarge"
src="http://media.tentonhammer.com/tth/gallery/albums/album279/fantasy18.thumb.jpg">
style="font-style: italic;">38 Studios will use
the BigWorld Technology Suite as the foundation of their upcoming
MMORPG.
Ten Ton Hammer: Why
should gamers be interested that an upcoming game uses BigWorld tech
rather than any other technologies that are out there?
gamers should care because the developers have probably more time
working on the gameplay and special effects; things that are going to
affect their day-to-day experiences. They’re doing that
instead of spending all their time working on how to send packets.
Gavin Longhurst:
If you look at the recent events in MMO gaming, one of the main reasons
a lot of these other games decide to launch is because they either run
out of money or they run out of time. That’s issues with the
production process, building technology, lack of polish, and a lot of
those projects go two to three, or even four to five years.
You also have an issue from a production standpoint when
you’re building a game, as it’s often takes much
longer than even the high caliber Hollywood films. You get people
passing in and out of the company, and then you run into brain trust
issues where you wonder which people have what knowledge. You may have
one or two producers that maintain that continuity throughout the
length of the project, but there are multiple changes on how the market
is viewed and its position in the marketplace.
If you view game development on a very crude level, it’s
boiled down to amount of money units, amount of time units, and amount
of people units. We’re able to impact all three of those
areas. The developers can get started a lot quicker. A lot of the
really boring work is already taken care of.
Simon: At
the end of their training, the developers have at least an avatar that
can engage in combat and chat. They don’t have to spend their
time working on the boring stuff.
Gavin:
Rather than spending all of their time and energy working on getting
the basic simple functions created – like just getting their
client to turn on – instead developers can work on things
like game polish, narrative, storyline, innovative game mechanics,
combat; things any gamer is going to appreciate. You’re not
burning 10-20 people for a year and a half trying to simply put a dot
on a screen.
Ten Ton Hammer: What
areas does BigWorld touch on? Do you touch on every piece of core MMO
technology? Or are there still areas of a game that developers need to
build on their own?
BigWorld was created to go after the MMO and the online space. In the
beginning it was construct to simply serve as the server component,
which is where we’ve had the most success so far. There was
no server component middleware out there, and we were seeing a lot of
second generation server components. When we established ourselves
there, a lot of our discussions with licensees were “Well,
you’ve got this great server side technology, but
I’ve still gotta write this DirectX client.”
We started working on that and trying to create a system that could
build seamlessly large worlds where you could go in and out of
doorways, long vistas, lots of geometry, building the idea of streaming
information to the player, and other things.
Simon: But
it’s always been about the MMO experience. You’ll
have ten times as many animations, so you can’t just load the
animations; you have to have them streamed in as you go.
Gavin: In
your average first person shooter, you may pick up twenty weapons and
kill 80 different enemies. But that’s your entire database
for the game. In MMOs, you’re dealing with tens of thousands
of millions of transactions between people, items, monsters, and other
things.
Simon:
We’re not criticizing first person shooter engines,
it’s just that we built our engine as an MMO engine.
border="1">
href="http://tth.tentonhammer.com/modules.php?set_albumName=album279&id=fantasy16&op=modload&name=gallery&file=index&include=view_photo.php">
style="border: 0px solid ;"
alt="BigWorld Technology Suite demo image"
title="Click to enlarge"
src="http://media.tentonhammer.com/tth/gallery/albums/album279/fantasy16.thumb.jpg">
style="font-style: italic;">BigWorld gives
companies a plethora of options concerning the development of MMOGs.
Ten Ton Hammer: What's
the next big venue for MMOG gaming? Is their any region that remains
untouched?
really been the sleeping giant in the MMOG universe for the last five
years. They haven’t really done anything. PC games just
aren’t as big; it’s Planet Sony in Japan. The
console history and implementation in that nation has been quite
prevalent. Although it seems like the Japanese gamers fall into the
socializer – acquirer model of gaming, they also
don’t seem to enjoy PvP as much as Korean or American gamers.
That said, there is a PvP-based MMO in development in Japan right now
that’s based off of the Fist of the North Star manga series.
Simon: Which
is cool, because it really takes a lot of cues from Mad Max, which is
an Australian movie.
Ten Ton Hammer: Fist of
the North Star was the first anime I ever watched….
What’s cool about that is the developers came across the
BigWorld engine and basically within a number of months made the switch
from their own technology to the BigWorld engine and had the game up
and running.
Ten Ton Hammer: Do you
have a lot of individuals interested in your tech these days?
wants to get an MMOG up and running. No one wants to make a movie
anymore, it’s all about MMOGs. Developers want to make
everything from an interactive Facebook clone to World of Warcraft with
big hats.
Nobody wants to make a film anymore, everyone wants to make a MMOG. I
read somewhere the other day that the gaming industry has won. The
average gamer is now in their 40s, and you’ve got to
concentrate on people that are wanting to get into this MMOG space.
The thing is, even if you’re building a client on our basic
toolset, you’re still having to deal with your thousands of
customers and dozens of employees. Our smallest team is probably 10-12
people and our largest team is well over a hundred. Once you add on all
the outsourcing shops and that sort of thing, the teams get even bigger
still. It’s possible to do a smaller, more focused MMOG, but
it’s still a massive undertaking.
From a technological standpoint, we’ve been working for eight
years on our tech, but we’re still not done and
we’ll never be finished. Like any of these technologies
– Unreal, EVE, and others – there are constantly
new ideas, techniques, and demands from the users. One of the biggest
things that occurred over the past two years was the influx of Web 2.0
functionalities. Socially networking in all of those features has been
an interesting adjustment to our MMOs.
Ten Ton Hammer: Are you
selective about who gets to use your tech?
didn’t used to be. We were incredibly
“hungry”. But we are now a bit more discerning. We
still talk with almost anyone regarding their story, mission and game,
but – from a brand perspective – we want to do
things right. We have at least five titles – maybe eight
– going live this year, and it’s important for us
to manage that brand going forward.
We are trying to tackle fundamentally weird problems. High traffic,
physics issues, streamlining the production process, those are the
problems we deal with. Four or five years ago, the idea of a game
coming on a DVD was bizarre. But now games like Age of Conan are coming
out at 13 gigabytes. You’re talking about an incredible cost
when you add up time to produce, overhead to produce, and the budgets
are going through the roof.
But that’s one segment, the segment that’s balls
out and wants to drive a Viking ship across a fjord. And
there’s a segment out there for everyone.
Ten Ton Hammer: Are you
Mac compatible at the moment?
very recently Mac only held something like 6% of the computing
population. For certain demographics that makes a lot of sense, but
there’s a couple of very interesting shops around the world
that can help migrate a Windows client to a Mac friendly client. We
can’t do it in-house because we’d have to hire a
bunch of engineers who would focus on that particular problem, and for
just 6% of the market, that doesn’t make sense.
Nobody’s come to us and asked us to do a Mac build yet, but
I’m interested to see when a company will pitch a Mac idea to
us.
Ten Ton Hammer: Finally,
many of the upcoming games that are using your technology have
announced that they’re supplementing other third party tools
like the Unreal Engine. Is that a fairly common practice? Do you help
integrate those technologies together?
it’s been fairly uncommon. We have a world wide business and
do a whole bunch of business in southeast Asia and Europe. But in the
U.S., there has been – uniquely – a number of teams
that are basically looking for the best way to position themselves and
nabbed the Unreal Engine as a rendering solution. Epic’s done
some terrific work with their engine, but there’s only two
groups out of about thirty BigWorld licensees that are using
Epic’s Unreal Engine.
Really, it goes back to what we discussed earlier: complex animation
systems, large vistas, streaming technology, seamless outdoor/indoor
spaces, and those aren’t necessarily factors that are
associated with other engine technologies. But in the process of
bringing our client up to that super-high fidelity level, other
companies like id and Epic are coming down to try to function in the
MMO market.
The thing to remember about the hardcore graphic effects is that it may
sell magazines and look fantastic – look at Crysis for
example – but there may be some problems with falling in love
with that visual fidelity in that it won’t run on as wide a
range of machines. That’s a killer with regards to online
worlds and MMOs. You want to get population through the game.
We’ve spent an inordinate amount of time polishing for the
low end along with including stuff for the higher end as well. We want
to get those users through the door to help our developers make more
money.
