Explaining The Nuts and Bolts Behind MMOCGs: Interview with Turbine's Craig AlexanderCraig Alexander, Vice President of Product Development at Turbine, explains the potential in building massively multiplayer online console games (MMOCGs), after years of uncertainty and false starts. What challenges must be hurdled to develop a console MMO game? What does it take for a consumer to embrace an MMO game developed on, or for, the console? What tools and best practices are available to developers to more easily craft a console MMO game? Read on to preview answers to these questions that will be covered head-on at Craig's talk, "Building Online Games for the Console Generation: Challenges and Opportunities " at the 2009 LOGIN Conference!
In broad strokes, how is developing a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) for a console different than developing one for a PC? Fortunately, there are many similarities between console and PC development but also some major differences. These include simplified UI especially on standard definition TV sets, more frenetic combat, and shorter play sessions. Most importantly, the limited input of a console controller pushes the design into simpler directions, working well with a simplified UI, but certainly challenging MMO preconceptions. This, when combined with the more voice based social features on a console, certainly push the boundaries of most MMO’s.
We haven’t announced what title we are developing but let’s just say we’ve never considered “making a port”. Developing from scratch is difficult but we firmly feel porting a PC MMO to Console is not viable for many reasons, since the game play pace, demographic and input devices are so different. That said, having an existing game platform (servers, tools, etc.) and infrastructure is invaluable, and the differences in these areas are relatively small. What technical and marketing hindrances have so far kept MMOGs from finding their way on to powerful connected consoles like the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3? Very few developers are capable of building an MMO let alone a console MMO. There are numerous technical hurdles including memory constraints, storage, and patching; design hurdles including user interface and lack of keyboard; operational challenges including the requirement for public beta testing of all new content; and on the marketing side, of course there’s an enormous challenge in the fact no-one has really ever done this yet, so we have to design to appeal to a target audience that doesn’t exist today – very exciting. Are the Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network services useful for potential MMOG developers, considering their content delivery systems and social networking features? Or do they give users a thorough enough community experience they may not want or need to play a console MMOGs? Yes, the console community and social networking features and services are very useful for console developers and allow them to leverage existing functionality, especially billing, DLC, and account management.
The key feature of consoles, that make them so accessible and popular as gaming platforms, is the tremendous job they do of minimizing the friction to enter and enjoy the game. We believe anything that goes against this paradigm will be counter-productive. With this current generation of console hardware now approaching its fourth year, looking ahead to the next generation of consoles ahead is worth a thought or two. What kind of hardware, user interface and front-end experience would developers most want or need to make an MMOG easier to create? More main and video memory along with a robust/fast virtual memory system plus a built-in chat pad extension to the controller. A built-in network interface card (such as Bigfoot’s Killer NIC) would also be huge for MMOs, both to reduce lag and reduce operational costs. In your LOGIN lecture, “Building Online Games for the Console Generation: Challenges and Opportunities”, do you plan to communicate to attendees caution or gung-go optimism about creating an MMOG for a console, and why? Cautious optimism. There are many challenges but the platform holders are very supportive and the rewards are enormous. The console market is 4-5 times the size of the PC and console online” revenues are the fastest growing revenue segment in the history of video games. The Hidden Art of Procedural Content Creation Techniques : Interview With Allegorithmic’s Sebastien Deguy Dr Sébastien Deguy, Founder and CEO of Allegorithmic, speaks in-depth with LOGIN Beat about the art (and science) of procedural content creation techniques. This particular technique offers tantalizing potential in shrinking MMOG bloatware, improving the potential for user generated content and enhancing the end-user experience overall. Read on for much more in this preview of Sebastien’s lecture, Procedural Techniques for Optimized Distribution of Online Games and Large-Scale User Generated Content, only at LOGIN 2009. PAUL PHILLEO: Sebastien, we appreciate your willingness to contribute your time and expertise to this issue of LOGIN Beat. What influences brought you into the game industry, and what did they do to motivate you to found Allegorithmic? SEBASTIEN DEGUY: First, thanks for the opportunity here, it’s greatly appreciated. I’ve always been a gamer, and overall CGI has always had a strong appeal to me. When I was a student, I hesitated between doing movies and math. At some point, I’ve not been accepted into “La Femis”, a famous French directing school, but I’ve been awarded a grant from the French government for my PhD, so I pursued that way. Then, the mathematical models that I would work on during my research started interesting great companies involved in computer graphics, which got me thinking maybe I could accommodate both my passions, art and science, in setting up a company devoted to producing tools for 3D, games in particular. That’s Allegorithmic, a mix between Allegoric and Algorithmic. Describe procedural content creation techniques in general for anyone not versed in this aspect of the game development process. Procedural content is described rather than painted. It is generated on the fly, according to parameters. For instance, when you describe a texture like “draw randomly a thousand lines in color C”, you have a parameter C allowing to create different realizations of the same resulting image. Give C the value (128,0,0) and you’ll have a red-ish set of lines displayed, give C the value (0,255,0) and the lines will be pure green. I didn’t draw the lines, I described the procedure allowing me to produce the image with the lines. This is what a procedural content is: a description of a procedure and a set of parameters controlling that procedure. What that then means is that you can modify the parameters on the fly, while you play the game: for instance, you might want your textures to be shinier when it’s raining. The wetter, the more wet the texture should look like, and so the game engine will give to the procedure the value for “wet” and the texture will be generated according to that parameter. Every technique that is physics-based, behavior-based is procedural. This is what we call the dynamic content. Overall how does implementation and optimization of effective procedural techniques affect the end user in terms of the quality of game experience? There are many ways procedural content can improve the quality of the game experience. A first example is size: procedural content is usually very compact, making games leaner. When it’s an online game, you don’t have to wait for hours before the game is actually downloaded. We know this is a very important factor for the quality of the experience. Some other examples involve the dynamicity of the procedural content: never having twice the same action when speaking of procedural animation, never having twice the same environment when you launch the game because the whole city is new and all the textures are new, having a fully dynamic and interactive environment, not only in term of objects physics, but also in character behavior, weather impact and so on. I personally believe procedural techniques will pave the way to future gameplays. On the user generated content front, how can procedural techniques support the development of large-scale UGC? How might this benefit the game developer, the user content creator, and the content consumer? In order for the users to be able to create their own rich content, they need to a/be able to produce it without being a trained artist and b/be able to share it without overloading the network. By its descriptive nature, procedural content can be modified through higher level paradigms. What that means is that one can encapsulate the complexity of the creation process and propose very simple tweaks to the user to create and modify new, customized content. By its compact nature, procedural content, even produced in mass by thousands of creators, can be easily shared through the networks without overloading them: you’re not sharing your uncompressed TGA maps, you’re sharing a small description file of 2KB. Many free-to-play MMO games are huge in file size, measured in gigabytes, not megabytes, per download. Is there a risk of a trade-off in quality of experience with a significant reduction in file size due to procedural content creation techniques? Actually, and this is key to understanding the new generation of procedural content, utilizing procedural content helps in IMPROVING the quality of Free2Play games. F2P game developers are indeed facing the issue of size when they want to distribute their games (there is a direct relation between the size of the game and the money it will generate; this is true to every online game but especially true in the case of F2P games), and the way they are currently handling it is actually by reducing the quality of the game: decreasing the resolution of textures, not embedding normal maps for every object, not embedding any specular map at all, etc. By utilizing procedural content however, game developers don’t have to care about the size of the content to be distributed anymore, and the full quality content is generated on the client size. One can actually go one step beyond: depending on the machine you generate the content on, you can actually generate higher resolution textures for instance. All from the same initial package of a few kilobytes! So overall, procedural content will make F2P games look not only the same, but better! It is finally important to note here that although procedural content can’t be used for everything, it has now reached a point where it can be visually as good as any painted/hand-crafted content. Is it possible procedural generation could be overused in game development in pursuit of its previously noted values, such as a decrease in client heaviness? I see it as a possibility, but I will take it as a good thing. I remember when the first 3D games would appear: most of the games were really paving the way to future generations of games and gameplays, but sometimes 3D was just a marketing word to sell a game that had no real usage for it. The use of procedural content might lead to the same trends, but overall, again, I believe it’s paving the way to future games and gameplays. The FPS demo project, .kkrieger, was released several years ago, and proved what could be done with procedural generation with an executable under 100K. What are a few of the more recent techniques created over the last 4-5 years that are reflective of next-generation game design, and why should they matter to developers? A: .kkrieger was indeed impressive and I’m personally a fan of the demo scene. Since then, we have seen tremendous advances in procedural techniques, but also in the hardware able to run these new techniques. I can cite the quasi ubiquitous use of physics and middleware like NVidia’s PhysX or Intel’s Havok, procedural animation and behavior with middleware like Natural Motion’s Euphoria utilized in GTA4 and Force Unleashed or procedural texturing like Allegorithmic’s ProFX and now Substance which is used by companies like Microsoft, Acony Games or NCSoft. We also lately hear a lot about city building techniques like Procedural’s City Engine and Gamr7’s Pad. The reason they should matter to developers is: these techniques are now out of the lab, real production tools. They have been used with success in several productions and will lead to a lot of new creative opportunities. Jump in! :) What’s the overall status of the quality of middleware tools that support the creation of procedurally generated textures, terrains, scripts, etc. How could these tools be improved for online games being developed in the near future? As I was saying previously, you can now find really packaged middleware dedicated to specific tasks such as physics, animation, behavior, terrain, textures, cities, etc. the ones I have cited here are well put tools, with excellent companies and/or very devoted people behind them, so the quality you can expect is the highest. When speaking of online games especially, I guess taking into account immediate feedback and interactions through the network will make it unique. And again, the dynamicity and compactness of the procedural content will be of tremendous helps in providing true over-the-network interactions. Lastly, by attending and speaking at LOGIN, what impact do you hope to make on online game developers? I hope online game developers realize that procedural content is now a reality that can help them make better games, distributed more efficiently, RIGHT NOW. You should see me restlessly evangelizing people to this new truth :) |
PAUL PHILLEO: Hello Craig, and thank you for participating in this interview for LOGIN Beat. For those who many not be acquainted with you and your body of work, tell us a bit about yourself and your background with Turbine, especially in console MMOG development.
By extension, do you feel it’s easier to port an existing massively multiplayer online game title, rather than developing one from scratch, for a console?
Given the different demographics between console and PC users, what business model makes the most sense to support a console MMOG – and recoup the costs of investment and operation?