The JM Perspective

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.

This topic is really one of contention especially in the recent pc games space for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 which is following more a of a closed centralized approach. The game itself has done away with allowing 3rd parties to easily add content to the game and not release dedicated servers with it. Instead they appear to be following the path of subscription based content to be released through their framework called IWnet, which conducts multiplayer action. Similar ventures in the past such as K2 networks Warrock have lead to rampant cheating, in-effective administration of rooms and peer to peer hosting (not a bad thing but for large games its a drag).

The major complaints against this type of activity are from communities of players that form around being able to setup a server and play the game how they would like. Now i’m all for allowing people to use a product as they would like and as history has dictated if there’s something missing in the game the community will add it in somehow, however if the company goes ahead and starts locking down the game against the communities efforts how many actual players will be effected. Most of the sales for these cross-platform games come from consoles these days anyway where the accepted norm is a locked down platform that is subscription based, and as newer games are released they will leverage what the platforms have to offer. Like any other business their goal is to deliver a good product that pulls in the customers to make money and anything that either adds value or allows for future revenue is fair game in this respect. 

In the end it will probably end up being mostly pc only based games that retain the capability to play 3rd party developments so long as the companies see value their. The dedicated servers are of course a sticking point as it will not only effect the player based communities but also server re-sellers and server rental companies that have a section for games. Having a unified platform to host and distribute games will make it easier to locate any server however they may want to take a page out of Valves playbook and have dedicated servers that patch into their framework like Left4Dead.

For most of the massively multiplayer games that are out there, the majority of them are either intitial purchase and recurring payment or free to play with advertising. World of Warcraft is an easy target given it’s size and user base, then their are others that differ form this. A game like Eve online simply has a recurring payment per month, no initial purchase, no buying expansion packs and continually adding to a game world on a regular basis, that is if you like space games. Others like Rose online or Fiesta fall under the free category with alternative revenue models behind them to keep the games going.

In more recent times, games such as Exteel, Dungeon Runners and Hellgate: London features free play with premium content on a recurring or non-recurring basis. The lastest game to join this trend is Dungeons and Dragons online with their unlimited client. Maybe in the future more large scale games will feature different levels of subscriptions so long as it is clear on what your getting. A game like Knight Online has different levels of subscriptions but has the unfortunate effect of going to the extreme of pay more spend less time. So far though i happen to like the trend of reaching out to a wider base of people to join in on the fun.

Lately i have been playing aorund with Aion, NCsofts new mmorpg game among the other lists of thigns to do. Overall it is a solid rpg game that attempts to raise the bar in certain areas that fantasy based mmo games have yet to differ from. The fact that it is in open beta means that soon it will be released and like all games before it that had open beta’s, sometimes that’s not enough to fix everything for launch date. Most software titles have alpha’s which signify the first running version and however many features are specified that is tested behind closed doors at the developers studio. This is followed by a closed beta most of the time where it is invitation only to test containing a partially finished product that recieves updates and feedback from the testers on a regular or one time basis.

Then there’s the monster ones, the open beta tests where hordes of people compete to get a key offered up in several different places and replicate the equivelant of launch day. At this point though i would have to say it’s the deal breaker for a developer as most people decide at this point whether the title deserves attention or not. For something like World of Warcraft there wasn’t too much of a story presented to the player until the second expansion wrath of the lich king came out and as such was not a big risk to beta out. Here’s the universe called warcraft where people can levelup and destroy each other or the instance dungeons, which really is being up fornt and people happened to like it. Other games that have had a similar hype and trying to be more then they were ended up getting torn to shreds in open beta testing, like Asherons Call 2, that i had been apart of.

The other issue is if the game is nearing completion overall people may not want to buy it after playing it endlessly up to the launch date. For a game like Aion that has a presented story and multiple ways to level yourself i believe it will stand against the beta hordes into a good recievership form gamers in general.

I was recently asked by someone about what it takes to program, which really doesn’t take that much effort. It’s more about the knowledge behind it to apply commands in the correct order for what you are doing. To that end the first thing is purpose and so long as you don’t keep adding ideas to it and work away at it you will have yourself a finished program. The knowledge for writing out commands and beginning to program are normally straight forward do x and y to get result z. Programming itself revolves around input by the user (like a keyboard), output (displaying something on the screen) and reading and writing information to somewhere where it won’t disappear (like a harddrive disk or flash drive). Keep in mind the examples given for each or the most common, and for each example it doesn’t mean you are limited to only one type.

The easiest programs i have wrote are console (command line) based ones with text based input and output, some of which store and retrieve information as well. Graphical programs like windows based ones can be trickier to start off with if you don’t have any tools to assist you (however to embark on graphical programs without tools will teach you a lot if you get it working). The choice in what language to learn first is always a debate point on any site and how to approach it. From my own perspective you learn a language that gives you the tools you need to do the job, which leads me to suggest the following: for lower level access to the computer components you use C, for graphics based you use something like Java, C# ro VB.NET, for portability between different operating systems you use Java. There are many more situational based problems and other languages like C++, Perl, Python, Lua, Delphi, VB and many more that you are free to lookup.

Now getting back to the problem at hand that you want to model and program. I find it’s easiest to break down the program into many pieces of simplified logic. The simplier it is the easier it is to program out, be warned though that if you begin programming and you find you don’t know what to do with a piece you should break it down further to the absolute simpliest commands. For example: The probelm may be we want to drive a car so we model a car as follows, steering wheel, gas pedal, break pedal. Very simple i know, now add what each of those does: gas pedal propels the vehicle forward based on the amount of pressure applied, break pedal slows the vehicle based ont he pressure applied and steering wheel adjusts the tires which in turn alters the car’s orrientation. You then further break it down to the last details of what you need to do, in this case i will use the gas pedal piece.

The gas pedal has a default speed of 0 when no pressure is applied, a maximum speed of 200 when fully pressed to the floor and a 10 point deduction in propelled velocity if suddenly depressed from a running speed. That right there is a good point to begin programming in as we have all the information about it.

Finally in this long winded post where to find the knowledge of commands and learning a language: Wikipedia is a good place to get more general information (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming#Methodologies), for C and C++ programming a good place to start is http://www.cprogramming.com/, for C# look no further than http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-ca/vcsharp/aa336768.aspx and http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/bb188199.aspx for any other microsoft programming languages and tools.

Continuing on the trend set yesterday i guess (gets hard to write without coffee day in and out) i shall delve into more of a favourite little debate around what makes a game good. Specificly i would like to present those interactive art pictures called video games. What comes to mind when i go game hunting these days is vastly different from when i first got into games, which was definitly in a different world of games so to speak. When i had originally started buying games for the good ol 150 mhz processor there was an explosion of games, not just of similar types but of experiments to be sure. It was more of a “lets see what this is all about overall” type mentality when shopping and during that time even if the games themselves weren’t brimming with shine like these days it is a testiment that there were definitely more kinds of games. Yes you will always have the bad eggs trying to capitilize on cloning something successful but somewhere along that line of thought there seemed to be a reduction in them. Even if everyone tried to build and explore areas of different mixes or genres many of them left good memories.

Some good examples lay in the realtime strategy segment which you can’t mention without referencing games like Starcraft, that did leave a lasting impreshion there are others. One is called Warzone 2100 which i regard as something unique at the time. Researching parts to assemble and deploy legions of custom built units with a streamlined resource system. Sure it had its sets of problems especially being a 3d game at that time but it still reminds me of something more than running the gauntlet of build x to train y to kill player z, finito!!!! Another example is in the the earlier rpg games like Ultima and the original Bauldurs Gate. It allowed you to craft something more personnal then telling soldier A to attack desert troll B that helped shape an experience.

These days i look for story and ability to play the game the way i would like to based on how it is initially presented to me. To be able to craft something more then a static game that says play it this way or don’t play it at all is something i think would be passe these days. With most stores switching over to console game inventory rather than PC game’s it is pretty clear that even with a few good titles for each platform theres still legions of all 3d effects designers and not much attention to something more appealing individually. Even if branded and marketed differently we still have a very limited selection for choice of game styles of how to interact and connect on a greater level to that of a spoon presented as something else.