Update . . .

The past month has been a busy one: hiring new employees; programming; delegating work to others. We currently have thirteen members right now and I plan on continuing to add more.

I will begin testing the world server today; I will see how many times I can crash the server, which is always a blast! I don’t know of when I will be releasing more screen shots because many different departments are all working on pieces of the project. So, all of the different pieces need to be finished before I will release anything.

Until then!

-Scott, August 9, 2010

Brain Food

First, read the following article http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm/loadFeature/4381/The-Rising-Influence-of-Casual-and-Social.html. The page name basically sums up what is contained in the article. There are some excellent posts and comments at the end of the article too!

Reading articles like that really generate an emotional response from me. As most gamers know, MMO’s are going the way of the casual gamer. Which means, most content can be done solo; finding groups is easy with the automatic group finder and placer (look at Wow’s dungeon finder) –in fact, you don’t even have to talk to anyone or know anyone in the group!; powerful items are easily accessible to most players; instancing is used so that you can be alone in your group or raid –you wouldn’t want any outsiders in your dungeon, would you?; and most raid encounters are brute force and static experiences. These are a few attributes that make a game causal. Now, on the surface, most gamers would say, “I want all of those, make the game easy for me so it is fun!” Well, I am not going to convince you to play games that are not casual; instead, I just want to talk a bit about the article and some of the comments made in response to it.

Most MMO’s are targeted at casual gamers, because that is the largest market, but in doing so, another market emerges for those who want a game that has some depth to it. (Casual games by their nature cannot have depth). First, Richard starts by saying that MMO’s changed so now a player can log in for 15 minutes and accomplish something. He then continues to speak about how back-in-the-day-MMO’s used to encourage –and enforce– grouping; and that now, that thought is extreme. Richard then says that MMO’s like WOW have moved to what he calls a Massively single-player game (I concur with that assessment!), and he wishes that developers would come up with an idea that brings back the social aspect. This is a very short summary of his article.

Now comes the good part: the comments. After reading over the comments, I can definitely see the market for Destination. Players are practically screaming for a game that is social, where communities exist, and players interact with each other in a seamless world. (I just said the same thing three times in that last sentence.) Posts 1, 2, 5 and 7 are great posts. I didn’t bother continuing beyond those four posts, but I really want to address why I think each of those comments are great.

In the first post, by UsualSuspect, he nails it with this sentence, “This is the problem with solo able content, it doesn’t breed a community.” He is spot on, with that comment; there is nothing I can say to that. Making content easier for people means there will be less of a community, he is absolutely correct because players will not interact with each other to overcome obstacles.

In post number 2, by Caskio, he says this, “Why should a game force some one to make friends?  Shouldn’t that be the choice of the players? . . . I have a hard time staying logged into a game that long anyways either do to the boredom or personal life matters.” Now, everyone is of course, entitled to their opinion; but I will reserve commenting on this one and instead move to post number 5 because he responds to Caskio. UsualSuspect responds with some pretty good logic here,

No game has ever forced people to make friends, that’s up to the people involved, though they do implement tasks that require other people to complete. Or at least they used to, that’s becoming less and less common as the solo aspect of MMO’s takes over. And has been seen from the recent stock, the more soloable the MMO, the more the community suffers.

Your reply is a common theme among people who prefer to play solo, that they become frustrated with random people or don’t want to waste their time with them, and that they have very little time to play these games. To me, when I hear that from people, I wonder why they’re playing MMO’s. Even the author of the article admits that social elements have always been built into the games, so you’re obviously going to have to deal with random people, and these games always take more than a few minutes to play.

Surely if you only have 15 minutes or so to play, you would be better off playing Soiltaire or something. Why log into an MMO where you deal with people you don’t want to, to do something that you haven’t got time to do? Makes no sense.

Flawless response, there is nothing that I could have added. To reiterate, why would someone want to play an MMO that is so easy things can be accomplished in 15 minutes of game play? I cant even check my e-mail in 15 minutes!! That isn’t even enough to advance in most single player games. I was having a discussion with a friend of mine a few months ago and he asked me a question about Destination, he said,  “In Destination, players should be able to log in for 15 minutes, kill monsters and gain exp and log out. You are going to have that, right?” I responded, “No.” Destination is not going to be a game where players log in, kill for 15 minutes and log out. If a player cannot devote at least an hour to playing a game in order to advance, that player is really better off playing solitaire as UsualSuspect suggests. Would anyone play a game for 15 minutes and then stop? Is it even possible to play a console game for that short of time and then quit? I believe the list of games that could be played in that manner are very limited; and, the list will most likely contain games that are written for children because those types of games are simple and basic.

The last post that caught my eye was by GrayGhost79, he mentioned UO; he must be as old as me and loosing his hair too! In his first sentence, he got it right, “The part in red bothers me. MMO’s are social games.” Ok, maybe it was his second sentence. But he continues to talk about Ultima Online,  how it was a virtual world, and how it was a social game. But, he is right, MMO’s are social games. Sure, companies have found ways to make non social MMO’s but I am concerned with the normative view in this respect: MMO’s should be social games.

I feel like I am beating a dead horse here, the social aspect of MMO’s is what is missing. Creating a single world with no instances is vital to creating a community. My whole point here is respond to those who are wanting a game that is not available. Don’t worry, it is coming!

-Scott, June 13, 2010

Moving Forward!

Many people have sent in requests to join this project, and unfortunately, most requests were rejected. I reiterate: this is a serious project! After sorting through many applications, the team is now up to 4 programmers, 2 3d modelers, 2 concept artists and 1 writer. This post will be rather short and is just to remind everyone that we are still here and moving forward. I posted some new in-game screen shots after I rebuilt the mesh importer to be more robust than the last version. There is also a new concept art picture as well. That is about it for now, everything is running smooth, and just like a stubborn mule, we are trudging ahead!

I also uploaded a newer version of the Math Library for everyone –there were a couple of problems that are now fixed.

Ultima Online is a strong influence for this game and I realize that some people have never played it *gasp*, so I will have a permanent link placed inside the netcasts page. The link goes to a page where you can download everything you need to play for free!!! Check it out http://www.defianceuo.com/.

-Scott   June 30, 2010

Recruitment

Over the past 2 days, I have responded to at least fifteen e-mails from various people wishing to join this project. Some good at what they do, others were too young, or inexperienced, and some had bad attitudes!  I was completely baffled, by an e-mail I received saying I was basically, an idiot for running this project; but, the person also wanted to join, even though he didn’t think I had a chance. I have always wondered how some people are able to have these contradictions in their brain; and yet, somehow, they really believe these ideas to be logical. It is really bizarre.

So, out of those e-mails, interviews and the like, we should have a few new members, then I will pause for a while on recruitment unless someone really great comes by. I believe in the slow and steady approach. I think it beings stability. I don’t want to build my house as fast as possible, I want to build my house as smart as possible. So, I take my time, get to learn the new members, learn their strengths and weaknesses so I can place them accordingly. A successful project like this cannot simply open the flood gates, get 20 people at once and go for it. Professional relationships must develop through time, and cannot be speed up, or artificially created by bringing a bunch of people together under a common goal. That kind of thinking works for short term goals, this project is long term –I must think that way.

This post is to say thank you to all who applied, I am responding as fast as possible; and thank you to all the e-mails sent in support.

-Scott   June 12, 2010

Math Library

I am going to put my work-in-progress vector math library up for download to anyone to use as they wish. I searched the internet for a library that worked for me and I could not find one. What I did find were libraries written in regular c++, using no intrinsic functions (intrinsic functions are really synonymous with assembly language). Why would I use a normal library like that? If anyone is going to write their own library, they are doing for a couple of reasons: control, speed, ease of use, or simplicity. I did find some that would have been good except they were missing what was crucial for me: speed. I wish I would have kept the links to some of the libraries that I found because some were so out-of-this-world-complex that I was completely dumbfounded how anyone could write so much garbage in a library. There were so many type def’s, scopes, templates, cryptic names, strange function calls, and derived types that I would have to spend a week just trying to figure out what was actually happening, or how the library actually worked.

I am continuing to work on the library below, as you can see that not all my library is using sse instructions –it will! Any bugs or problems, let me know.

Math Library – Free to use as you wish, enjoy!

–Scott,  June 8, 2010