Tagged News: blog

Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley is back for another installment in his regular blog. In this edition, he shares details about SOE's fight against fraud and the solutions being implemented in the near future:

Farming has unfortunately become a big business, largely driven by companies on foreign soil that are virtually untouchable due to their location in places where the legal system just doesn't give us the tools we need to fight this. The dirty little secret of the farming business is that many of these companies use stolen credit cards as well as charging back their purchases months after they conduct transactions.

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Former SWG WarCry staffer and current SOE programmer Matt "AdeptStrain" Boudreaux gives us an inside look at the animation system within SWG in this latest developer diary:

Once the artists have created the various bone animations, we need a way to assign those assets to objects in our world. This is where our designers come in. Our designers actually have a great toolset to decide which animation should be played, depending on the type of weapon the player is using, the skill they are using, and many other factors.

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Sean Dugan, the Lead Content Designer for Stargate Worlds, penned a new journal that looks at the period in which Stargate Worlds is set. There has been a movie, a couple TV shows and all sorts of debate on how the game would fit into the established canon. In this journal, we find out exactly where the MMO takes off from.

Each choice has its own appeal and limitations. Start early in the series and you are limited by show canon. Create an alternate reality and you undermine the feeling that people are in the 'real' Stargate universe.

Eventually, we realized we needed to find a space for players where they could interact with their beloved show characters but not to feel overshadowed by them. Where players can credibly move from planet to planet through the universe without being totally hampered by the awesome might of the enemies they are facing. Where they can access cool off-world high technology without losing the grounding in modern day military science.

Read more after the jump.

In their latest Developer Log, NetDevil's president Scott "Scorch" Brown talked about Jumpgate's journey from a personal obsession to an advanced and highly polished reincarnation, appropriately titled "Evolution":

When we started Netdevil 10 years ago to create Jumpgate Classic, we were just a handful of people. Most of us were still working fulltime jobs, but every free minute we had was spent developing the game. For us it was the game that we always wanted to play. At the time the most popular space games were Elite and Wing Commander and those games were our inspiration.

Jumpgate Classic was a true labor of love and because of it we have some great stories to tell. It really shaped us as developers and we gained a lot of experience from it. We often joke that the game was finished on passion alone. Well, passion and a lot of Pizza...

Knowing what we know today and being in possession of much better resources then we were 10 years ago, we felt very confident that we could make a much better game that was based in the Jumpgate universe. A game that would be really special. Thus, the decision was made and Jumpgate Evolution was born.

Read More for the full log plus the latest released screenshots!

Our Darkfall developer journal continues with its recent twist. Today, Associate Producer Tasos Flambouras answers 29 questions he gathered from the fan community.

Fan Question: What will the construction system be like? Also, will players be able to create a city in mountains or in underground locations?

Tasos Flambouras: I'm not going to directly answer this question because we intend to show you at some point how the construction system works. Describing it here is not descriptive enough. We've said before that "building anywhere" is relative. In Darkfall you can't build in any location you want, but this provides with unique clan cities built in awesome locations. So your clan city can be built on top of a glacier, have a waterfall hiding its entrance, be built on several levels on the side and in caverns inside a mountain, have secret underwater entrances, on a remote island...that kind of thing. These clan city features are not just about aesthetics, like where you ask about customizations, there is functionality in their layout. Darkfall's clan cities are extremely impressive and no two will be the same. Furthermore their location is strategic as far as geography and proximity to limited resources, making them points of conflict.

Read it after the jump.

After less than a month in the big chair recently vacated by Robert Garriott, Chris Chung, the new president of NCsoft North America, talks about taking the reins in Austin and lays out some of his plans for the future:

In any organization, when you get a new person at the helm, there are bound to be questions as to what he or she is going to do. Rumors can start in the break room and quickly spread throughout the organization and beyond. It doesn't matter what the change is. Change makes people nervous. Although it helps that I've been around as a part of NCsoft in one capacity or another for the last five years, there are still a lot people in the company that don't know me very well. It can also be a burden coming behind someone so well known and respected, both within and outside of the company, as Robert Garriott.

Read the rest after the click.

In the first of what could be a few new takes on the developer journal series, Associate Producer Tasos Flambouras goes to a straight Q&A; of questions he selected from his community. This is obviously a week early of the regular bi-weekly timeslot, not that any fans will complain, I am sure.

Community: With the more advanced AI of enemy monsters, how relentless will they be when it comes to pursuit? Will they follow us a set duration of time or distance, would they be smart enough to stop if we ran to a city? Also, along a similar line, if an enemy monster is outnumbered and out matched will it flee to find nearby allies?

Tasos Flambouras: They'll follow you around but they won't follow you forever, they'll return to their area. They will call for help, and they'll also flee when the odds are stacked up against them or if they're damaged. The AI constantly assess the situation and will react accordingly but not in a consistently predictable manner. This is something I have personally never enjoyed in other MMOs that I've played, but it's fun fighting AI in Darkfall.

Read the Q&A; after the click.

SOE Producer Lorin "DeadMeat" Jameson stopped by the official forums with another Producer Note. In this edition, DeadMeat talks about Chapter 8 and lays out plans for a new way of managing updates:

It has been pretty busy around here lately with the start of the new year and the release of Chapter 8 earlier this week but I have finally had a chance to catch my breath and drop the community a note.  We are all very excited about C8 and the great response we have had so far.  I think the new space content is a very cool addition to the game and we as a team definitely learned a lot in the process.

Read the rest after the click.

SWG System Designer Thomas "Hanse" Eidson checked in with another Dev Diary, this time giving us an inside look at some of the unique challenges the team encountered while building new spaceships for Chapter 8:

The space system introduced with Jump to Lightspeed has been tweaked and fixed in small ways in the last few years. New ships were added to the system later, but the designers who added those ships are no longer with the company and their methods for adding them were not documented. I volunteered to add the new ships as I have fixed space issues previously and had the most experience with the systems involved. Since then, much of the design team has worked on space and many of us are now very knowledgeable of those systems.

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In the latest Darkfall developer journal, we get a status update from Associate Producer Tasos Flambouras and he promises to chime in with a community driven Q&A; style developer journal next time.

Anyway, since the last journal some people had a few precious days off to go home and spend the holidays with their families. This year we had a very short break, less than we've ever taken, trying to get back to the loads of work waiting for us. We're regrouping now getting back to work on some really awesome new equipment. We've been doing a lot of work around the office setting everything up to run as it should. The new equipment has been helping to speed up the remaining tasks and making our lives a little easier with a lot of things. A sound studio is being set up on-site to help with the final sounds for the game. Also at the moment, we're building a new server cluster.

Read more after the click.