by Cody Bye on Sep 18, 2007
by Cody "Micajah" Bye
Whenever I go to a convention or a conference, I always try to keep an
open mind. In the world of MMOGs, things change so rapidly that you
never know what you might see, especially from a technical standpoint.
Graphics, server performance, the dynamics of a world, all of those
things can change practically over night as super-intelligent
programmers and designers construct ways to enhance the way a game
looks, sounds, and plays. Before the Austin Game Developers Conference,
I was contacted by a company by the name of Allegorithmic. Usually I'm
fairly hesitant in talking with companies that focus primarily on the
technical side of things. Not only is it typically beyond me - all the
formulaic mumbo jumbo goes right over my narrative mind - but it rarely
resonates with Ten Ton Hammer readers on the level that discussing
games does.
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An example of a pixel shader used in MapZone.
However, the individuals representing Allegorithmic assured me that our
readers would want to hear about the company and what they could do to
improve the gaming experiences of MMOG players everywhere. As I sat
down with Dr Sébastien Deguy, President and Founder of
Allegoritmic, at the game developers conference, he expressly told me
that Allegorithmic worked extremely well in the online game space.
Being the vigilant reporter, I asked him to explain what the company
does and why MMOG players should be so excited about his products.
According to his Dr. Deguy's presentation, Allegorithmic is the first
company to propose a professional middleware for the authoring and
on-the-fly rendering of procedural textures. Based on the patented
concept of FX-maps released by the company in 2003, ProFX allows
content developers to produce texture assets twice as fast as usual,
while ProFX description files are typically 500-1000 times smaller than
regular textures. The company has continued to grow since 2003, but
they are holding steady at 16 staff members currently.
In laymen's terms, Dr. Deguy has created middleware that allows
developers to create content at an incredibly rapid pace while
delivering it to the user in much smaller portions. Currently, a large
part of any game's data content is devoted, in large part, to the art
assets that are being created for the game. "The most expensive part of
the game is the textures," Dr. Deguy said. "MapZone is used to create
the textures, and ProFX is the delivery and storage component." When
using MapZone, Deguy continued, the developers can produce content 1-2
times faster than using a regular Photoshop bitmap. Deguy had several
texture pictures as examples, comparing textures created with MapZone
to textures found in games currently on the market. The results were
strikingly similar, and Dr. Deguy even had a side by side comparison of
a World of Warcraft texture and a similarly fashioned texture made in
MapZone. If the MapZone textures truly took less time to make than the
standard bitmaps, it would be worth a look by developers.
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A render using the MapZone and ProFx middleware.
"We save time by making it a non-linear approach," Dr. Deguy said.
"Imagine you take five steps to create a texture. In Photoshop, if you
make a mistake at the third step, you have to redo step four and five.
But MapZone allows you to simply go in adjust step three then four and
five adjust to the new content in three." While Deguy said that
Photoshop would still be used for particular textures that required
more of a personal touch, a vast amount of the game's textures could be
replaced. In fact, he claims that at least 70% of the
textures in games can be replaced by MapZone textures, which would
reduce the size of many games dramatically. "We were talking to a
client, and they told us that there client was 2.5 gigabytes," Dr.
Deguy said. "But textures took up 2 gigabytes of that entire client.
Replace those with textures created by our program and the client ends
up being just above 500 megabytes, due to the compression we can get in
our textures. There's obviously an impact there."
How does MapZone get away with such huge compression? From what Dr.
Deguy explained, this is where the ProFX program comes in. Instead of
having to dump all the textures into the client in their big, raw
versions, ProFX renders the textures as they're needed in the game,
allowing the textures to be much smaller than what we normally see in
games. Since the graphics are being rendered in real-time, does this
affect the frame-rate of the game? Not according to Dr. Deguy, who
explained that the state of current systems allows for the real-time
rendering of textures.
So what does this mean for MMOG players?
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Another screenshot from the Allegorithmic programs.
When you're downloading an update or patch for your favorite game, have
you ever wished that the download would get into your hands faster? Or
what about that direct digital download that you've been waiting hours
for? When you're looking at a digital distribution model for your game,
speed is constantly important. Even from a developer standpoint, every
moment that your servers are being pushed for bandwidth on patch day,
every second costs you money. Imagine the World of Warcraft servers on
patch day and how much load they're put under. Millions of players are
accessing their accounts at the same time, wouldn't it make more sense
to try to compress that file into something that could be downloaded a
bit faster?
That's the sort of reality that could occur with the implementation of
MapZone and ProFX. Now I'm no professional developer, programmer or
designer, but this seems like a dream come true for some studios. How
big was the Vanguard client? How much could the client size have been
compressed with the MapZone and ProFX programs? As a gamer, I would've
loved to see a smaller version of Vanguard hitting store shelves rather
than the uncompressed goliath that we received.
Finally, I think MapZone certainly has a few things going for them.
They've got an illustrious selection of partners including AMD, nVidia,
Epic Games, Microsoft, and Sony, and it's a company that already has a
few games on the market, including the well-known Xbox Live game,
Roboblitz. MMOG players, keep on the lookout for your next MMOG to be
made by MapZone. You may find yourselves with smaller downloads and a
better looking overall world.