Game Genus

Minecraft: Sorting and smelting system using RedPower 2

2012-01-03T21:29:00.002-05:00

Since building the Compact cobble generator I've been expanding my base. This article describes the sorting and automatic smelting system I built using RedPower 2.

The system uses seven sorting machines in series all sharing a common delivery tube. The use of a single delivery tube saves tubing and space in exchange for limiting your sort to fifteen categories (sixteen if you included unmatched items). While I used seven sorting machines, this system could be expanded to any number of sorters which would allow the sorting of hundreds of different items.

Photo 1: Seven sorting machines fed from the alchemical chest on the left (click to enlarge)

Of course you could use any number of sorters all using separate delivery tubes, but I wanted to see what could be done with an array of sorters using just a single delivery tube.

Overview diagram (click to enlarge)

A chest serves as the main input to the row of sorting machines.
The sorters assign color tags to the items which travel to the storage chests.
Items which traverse all 7 sorters without getting matched end up in an exceptions chest.
Ores which require smelting are sorted to the furnace feed chest.
8 blulectric furnaces arranged in parallel make short work of smelting tasks.
Ingots from the furnaces are returned to the sorters, bypassing the input chest.
Also bypassing the input chest are the harvests from the sugar cane farm, a cactus farm, and a low-output passive tree farm.

An alchemical chest from the Equivalent Exchange mod serves as the input chest (see photo 1).

A filter pulls the items from the chest. Because the filter's inventory is empty, it will pull all the stacks from the input chest. (If you want single items pulled, use a transposer.)

Output from the filter enters the first sorting machine. It's powered with a blue alloy wire, and passes the power along to the adjacent sorters.

Since the sorting machines are all in-line and receive items already traveling through the tubes, they don't require a redstone signal to activate.

Configuration for the second sorter in the chain (click to enlarge)

The sorting machines are set to mode 5 and so sort everything they receive, and assign a color to items that don't match. This system uses pink for unmatched items.

Sorted items emerge from the sorters with a color tag. They go up and take the common delivery tube to their destinations. Unsorted items enter the next sorter in the chain.

To understand how this arrangement of sorters works it's useful to review two basics about tubes in RedPower 2:

Routing in RedPower tubes selects the closest valid destination.
Color tags keep wrong-colored items out.

After the first sorter, the inputs to the subsequent sorters in the chain are colored pink. All items emerging from these sorting machines want take the shortest path and enter the next sorter in the chain, but the pink input tubes keep everything out except the unsorted items. Thus the sorted items are forced up into the common delivery tube on top of the sorters.

Photo 2: The transposer near the last sorter (click to enlarge)

The last sorting machine in the chain sends its unmatched output to a chest (see photo 2). Note that the chest is further away than the route back to the last sorter's input, so unmatched items will loop through the last sorter unless special measures are taken. An in-line transposer causes the route to the chest to be seen as the shortest path for pink-tagged items. (If you have extra colors, you can eliminate the transposer by replacing the pink tag with an unused color.)

Photo 3: A filter pulls a few unsorted items (click to enlarge)

A filter grabs a few specific unsorted items for storage in a separate chest (see photo 3).

Currently the sorting machines still have many unused columns available for sorting additional items. Besides the default color of pink, this system currently has 13 colors assigned, for a total of 14. That leaves two colors for expansion.

Note that sorting machines in mode 5 without any items in their configuration columns don't think they have anything to do, and won't assign the default color. In other words, an empty sorting machine won't do anything. When you are testing the handling of unsorted items, make sure you put at least 1 item into each sorting machine, even if you don't assign it a color. [Update: This has been fixed in RedPower 2 Prerelease 4c.]

Photo 4: The common delivery tube connects to the storage chests (click to enlarge)

The common delivery tube leads from the sorting machines to the storage chests (see photo 4).

The two alchemical chests are not connected to the sorting tubes. The first stores the RedPower 2 supplies for color tagging the tubes.

The second is for tools storage, and uses an Equivalent Exchange mod item called the Talisman of Repair to keep things in good condition.

Here's the current assignment of storage chests:

Yellow: metal ingots
Light blue: redstone, glowstone, and covalence dust
Brown: wood products

White: RedPower rocks (marble and basalt)
Gray: stone, stone brick, and clay

Green: plant harvests
Lime: creature drops

Light gray: glass and RedPower microblocks
Blue: RedPower wiring and logic items
Orange: pistons and RedPower machines and tubes.

Cyan: diamonds and other valuables
Black: coal and flint

Photo 5: The red tube ends at the furnace feed (click to enlarge)

The red tube leads to the furnace feed chest (see photo 5).

A filter pulls items from the chest in stacks of 4 to send to the furnaces.

Stacks of 4 take 20 seconds to smelt, so the timer for the filter is set to 2.5 seconds, which is 20 seconds divided by 8 furnaces. I haven't done timing tests to optimize the timer setting. An optimum configuration would locate the filter adajcent to the first split in the tubes to minimize travel latency.

Photo 6: The 8-way Blulectric Furnace system (click to enlarge)

The feed tubes lead to the center of each furnace cluster; equal path lengths yield even distribution (see photo 6).

Return tubes go under the floor and lead to a retriever. An empty inventory causes it to pull any item from the furnace outputs. Equal length tubes ensure that the retriever pulls evenly, and it's on a fast timer.

Prior to prerelease 4 a transposer would have been needed for each furnace to gather the output, but a single retriever can pull the smelting results from all the furnaces.

Blulectric furnaces take input on the left side and make output available on the right, so each cluster has the furnaces rotated so that left faces in towards the feed and right faces out for the return.

The two furnace clusters could have been located closer together but I wanted to be able to walk between them.

A bank of 18 battery boxes powers the furnaces. Three blue alloy wires in the floor provide power to different sections of the two furnace clusters. Since the wires are rated for 100 amps, and each furnace pulls about 10 amps, there is no danger of overloading the power feeds.

Photo 7: Not quite enough solar panels for the job (click to enlarge)

The battery boxes are charged by an array of 22 solar panels, which is only half of the 40 panels that I should have to run the furnaces (see photo 7).

[Edit: I thanked them on the forum, but I'd like to express my gratitude to Minecraft Forum users Kyyshrrk, TheEnlightened, and Eloraam for clearing up my confusion about the way that color tags influence tube routing.]

Minecraft: Compact cobble generator using RedPower 2

2011-12-18T11:25:00.002-05:00

Now that Eloraam has released RedPower 2.0pr4 I've generated a new world in Minecraft 1.0.0 and have been starting to build things.

One of the basic devices that I build early on is a cobblestone generator, to ensure that there's plenty of cobblestone at hand.

Back in 1.8.1 with RedPower 2.0pr3 I'd come up with a vertically-oriented design for a cobble generator on a small footprint and minimal use of parts. The Redstone Tubes added in RedPower 2.0pr4 make the design cleaner and use even fewer parts, since Redstone Tubes carry the redstone signal to the block breakers.

Side view (click to enlarge)

Top view (click to enlarge)

YouTube video of the cobble generator

Each vertical layer uses two lava and four block breakers, producing four cobble. As is typical for me, I went overboard and opted for four layers, so the cobble generator produces 16 cobble per two second tick.

Here's the layout of each vertical layer of the cobble generator:

Redstone Tube	Block Breaker	Cobble	Lava
Block Breaker	Stone	Water	Cobble
Cobble	Water	Stone	Block Breaker
Lava	Cobble	Block Breaker	Redstone Tube

The Bill of Materials for each layer:

2 Lava
2 Redstone Tube
4 Block Breaker
8 Glass Covers (for the sides of the lava and cobble)

Additional materials required to complete the cobble generator:

Timer (set to default two second interval)
Lever
Various bits of wiring and tubing
Chest(s) to store output

Just a single water source block is used for the entire generator. Note the water has a 1 block horizontal run before the vertical drops; this is critical to prevent the water from flowing horizontally inside the generator and turning the lava into obsidian. The water columns extend 1 block into the floor below the bottom level of the generator.

Each layer requires lava source blocks in order for it to flow horizontally and create the cobble. A more compact version could be built with lava source blocks above the cobble columns, but the vertical flow of lava is so slow that the generator couldn't operate on the two second cycle, so output speed would be reduced. This might be something to try in the Nether, since lava flows faster there, I think.

Each layer generates 4 cobble every 2 seconds, which works out to 120 cobble per minute per layer. This 4 layer generator produces 480 cobble per minute, which is 7.5 stacks.

An alternate layout is possible using half as much lava in a central column:

-	T	B	C	W	-	-
T	B	C	L	C	B	T
-	-	W	C	B	T	-

This can be used if lava is at a premium at the expense of a wider footprint and the use of more redstone tubes.

Mojang speaks with authority about a mod API, but many questions still unanswered

2011-12-11T10:46:00.000-05:00

Last week Gamasutra published Persson Hands Minecraft Lead To Jens Bergensten, 'Confident' About Move which contains the following:

Bergensten's next step is to work on the mod API for Minecraft, a feature that players have been yearning for.

"Until January I will be the only developer on Minecraft, so things will have to be slow initially. But my absolute main priority now is to create a mod API, because there is no way in hell I will be able to add as much content as the whole internet can do," he laughed.

"The game needs an API, so end users can obtain the mods without hassle.... I'm not going to do it all by myself though. We have a new programmer beginning in January, and we are talking to existing mod API teams, such as Bukkit, Minecraft Forge, and Minecraft Coder Pack."

As for an estimated release date for the API, the new Minecraft frontman suggested that we will see a release "no sooner than March." [my emphasis]

Jens gets it. He gets that it's absolutely critical at this point for Mojang to shift focus from Minecraft the game to Minecraft the platform.

Because outside of a cultlike reverence for Notch by some Minecraft players, there's nothing tying people to the game, and a significant percentage of the user base will jump ship the moment a viable alternative arrives. Particularly if the successor offers advantages by being technically superior, or is easy to mod, or free, or some combination of the three.

And alternatives are coming, but that's for another post.

Reinforcing the technical base of the Minecraft platform will ensure its continuing vitality with users and modders and buttress it against forthcoming competition.

Additional details became available as a result of a subsequent interview with Jens:

MFM: You said in another interview you were going to work on the Mod API. I know it’s early to ask for specific details, but a lot of people are wondering do you plan on doing this through a web interface, or directly from Minecraft or the launcher?

Jeb: My plan is that you are going to find and install mods from ingame in the main menu.

MFM: How do you plan to handle it for the modders? Does the old plan of making the latest source code always available still apply?

Jeb: No, we will only release an api that you build your mods upon.

MFM: Are you going to work on the Mod API exclusively, or alongside developing new features for the coming updates?

Jeb: I’ll still add some new features, too. Currently I’m looking for a mod api team that can help me out with the modding stuff.

Will Jens announce the membership of this mod API team helping him? He specifically listed Bukkit, Minecraft Forge, and Minecraft Coder Pack, but did he also talk to the Modloader/ModloaderMP and Spout teams? And there may be additional players interested in the direction of the mod API who'd like to talk to him or be included on the team.

Changing a mod to use the new mod API may involve a fair amount of work. One can speculate that a certain amount of lobbying must be going on behind the scenes from proponents of the various APIs. If two APIs offer similar hooks implemented in different ways, modders using the technique which is selected for inclusion into the official API won't be required to make changes that are as extensive as those who use the API which implemented the techniques that were passed over.

Some of the lobbying is overt. I recall seeing on Minecraft Forum a number of messages from a member of the Spout community; the messages addressed Eloraam and touted the advantages of Spout along with exhortations to switch RedPower 2 to Spout instead of using Forge. (I can no longer find these messages; either they've been deleted, Minecraft Forum's search function is flaky, or Google's indexing of Forum messages is incomplete.)

With the prospect of a new modding system, there are many questions which arise. A sampling:

Will the arrival of an official mod API, will Mojang withdraw permission for mods to directly modify Minecraft using decompiling/deobfuscation techniques?
What will become of MCP? Will the community still perceive that there is value in the work needed to support it?
If a modder needs a hook that hasn't been implemented in the API, will there be a way to request that it be added?
Since the new mod system will likely result in more mods being used simultaneously, the demand for the limited number of block IDs will increase. Will a Block ID-conserving practice such as specifying block types as Block ID/Tile Entity pairs become standard? Will Minecraft itself be modified to use such techniques to reduce the enormous number of Block IDs that it currently consumes?
Will there be an option to disable particular installed mods? Currently sophisticated users are able to change their mod configurations to allow different mod combinations on a per-map basis.
Will mod combinations/block ID assignments be stored for each map? This would support the easy exchange of maps requiring particular combinations of mods.
If mods will be downloaded and installed from the main menu of Minecraft, where will they be hosted? Is Mojang going to offer to host the download files for mods?
Many modders rely on ad.fly and other sites to receive a small amount of revenue when the link is clicked to download a mod. What will happen to this revenue stream?
To date, while amassing millions from Minecraft, Mojang has done nothing to share its windfall with the mod community that helped propel the game to success. Will Mojang implement a "mod store" to allow modders to recoup their sometimes considerable time investments?

I'm sure that many modders will be paying close attention to the answers of these questions as they emerge.

Luke Plunkett's great Minecraft review on Kotaku

2011-12-04T14:16:00.001-05:00

I highly recommend Luke Plunkett's Minecraft: The Kotaku Review. He does a great job of capturing the essence of the game and how it rises above its shortcomings.

I take issue with just a couple of points.

The first is that I think he's overly negative about solo play. I play solo almost exclusively and don't seem to have the issues he does. Of course, I'm now using mods to eliminate some of the tedium. And I basically ignore the Nether and End dimensions.

Then he says:

Tell me that any other game needs such extra-curricular dedication and I'll tell you it's a game not worth playing, but there's just something disarming about the way Minecraft does it that makes it all OK.

I certainly agree that games should be more self-sufficient when it comes to information, but has he forgotten MMOs such as World of Warcraft? You'll waste much time and play poorly if you don't refer to external sources of information while playing WoW. But maybe he doesn't like WoW, for this reason. It's unclear.

Plunkett really nails it in his penultimate paragraph:

It does something that's very important to a lot of people, so important that they're willing to put up with its flaws and quirks. And that something is allow freedom. Expression. Creativity. Minecraft gives you the means to truly play a game, to bend it to your whims, and not just press buttons to advance someone else's story. [my emphasis]

You make the story. No cutscenes. No voice from Headquarters in your ear explaining your mission. Just complete freedom.

Overall a terrific review of Minecraft by Luke Plunkett, check it out.

A statement on Minecraft mods copying features from each other

2011-12-04T10:24:00.004-05:00

In No One Cares About Your Cool Game Idea, Mike Birkhead, Senior Game Designer at Vigil Games, said:

Ideas are worthless. The only currency that holds any weight is the ability and drive to execute. That awesome game idea you have, the one that’s going to “change everything”, the one that you’re going to sell for a million dollars, the one that no one has come up with yet… frankly, no one gives a shit. Harsh, but then, the truth is not pleasant; it is just that, the truth. [my emphasis]

Copying ideas and features is okay. (Copying code or textures is not, unless it is open source and the copying is compliant with the license.)

Notch himself copied the idea of the final boss fight. Years ago, before many Minecraft players were born, someone named Scorpia used to write a column for the magazine Computer Gaming World. So many games ended with a final boss fight that she coined the name Foozle as a generic one for a final boss. Since we hadn't expected it, many of us were surprised when Notch chose to make Minecraft a Kill-the-Foozle game.

The game industry has been copying itself for years! The software industry, too. Have you ever used a spreadsheet? I bet it wasn't Dan Bricklin's VisiCalc.

Many of the cases so far of mods implementing each other's features are the result of parallel development, not copying.

We've been in the early, "wild west" phase of mod development, where it was frequently possible to write the first mod to implement a particular feature. As the Minecraft mod scene matures and it becomes harder to achieve a "first", we will increasingly see mods incorporating each other's features.

In cases where parallel development isn't involved, when implementing a feature from another mod the polite modder will acknowledge the mod that served as inspiration.

But above all, no modder should criticize another modder for copying, or imply a lack of creativity. Copying is merely a sign that the "wild west" phase of Minecraft modding is coming to a close.

[This post first appeared on the Minecraft Forum.]

Inducing motion sickness in your customers is not a good business model

2011-12-02T08:21:00.006-05:00

I saw mention of a juicy-looking rant, but when I got there the page had been taken down, so I stayed for a bit to check out the rest of the site.

What I found was this:

A New Zero by Cryptic Sea

I've played thousands of hours of first and third person 3-D games without experiencing motion sickness, but I always turn head bob off.

Watching even this short clip was distinctly unpleasant. The camera is bouncing around way too much for comfort. There was nothing subtle about the head movement.

There's a reason why most FPS games act like stable gun platforms—they don't want to make a large percentage of their customers too ill to play.

This Siggraph piece on simulator sickness has some very interesting information:

20% to 40% of fighter pilots suffer from these symptoms when using simulators and the symptoms may last for several hours. It should be noted that fighter pilots are specially selected for resistance to motion sickness and are used to simulators. [my emphasis]

Fighter pilots, wow!

And there's this:

...in motion systems, motion at 0.2 hz is particularly nauscogenic.

I didn't time it, but it appeared that some of the modelled head oscillation wasn't far off from 0.2 hz.

Finally, under recommendations for preventing sickness in virtual environments:

don't move your head too much.

Unless there's an option for a completely stable head, this developer's innovation will amount to suicide as the game will acquire a reputation for inducing motion sickness.

I left a comment at the blog. Let's hope the developer switches to spending time implementing innovations that everyone can enjoy.

FlowerChild withdraws from Minecraft Forge

2011-11-30T11:01:00.008-05:00

Last week in a post to the Minecraft Forge topic on the Minecraft Forum, Better Than Wolves mod author FlowerChild said:

I just wanted to officially announce that I am withdrawing support for the Forge and will begin the process of removing its use from Better Than Wolves.

While I still believe in the vision behind the Forge, creative differences with a key team member that run counter to the collaborative spirit of this project, and the increasingly invasive nature of the changes made by the API to the Minecraft code-base, have resulted in a situation that I am not at all comfortable with.

During the transition, I will likely be distributing a heavily modified and trimmed-down version of the Forge with Better Than Wolves for MC 1.0, along with the source for those changes as per the Forge licensing agreement. With successive releases, I'll be removing remaining dependencies until the mod is completely detached from the API.

My apologies in advance for the incompatibilities that this will inevitably cause with your mods. It is a very unfortunate situation from which I believe it is simply best to extricate myself for my own peace of mind.

In order to discover the details, one must read the topic "Considering dropping Forge" on the Better Than Wolves Forum. It's not pretty.

FlowerChild quickly gets to the heart of the matter:

-I can't stand working with Eloraam.

I have nothing but respect for SpaceToad, but Eloraam's ever increasing trend of ripping-off functionality from other major Forge mods, and dominating the development of what was supposed to be a communal API to suit her own development agenda, turning it into this bloated mass that only she's able to maintain, is just not something I have any desire to collaborate with.

She's an extremely talented programmer, and I used to get along with her quite well, but a month or two ago (around the time she released Flax and Pipes in RP), I realized I couldn't stand it anymore and largely dropped out of development of the Forge. Considering she's now the primary developer on the API, and I don't even want to talk to her anymore, leaving BTW dependent on her is not something I'm at all comfortable with.

How does one drop out of development when you were never involved to begin with? No FlowerChild commits here. Or here. Or here. (Links via Minecraft Forum user power crystals.)

FlowerChild continues in a subsequent post:

Gilberreke wrote:
It is a technical thing too, a lot of recent Forge edits have become largely pervasive to the game and compatibility with other mods, just for the sake of having complex RedPower features.
^^^^ This ^^^^

She really has no sense of moderation when it comes to these things and routinely rewrites large portions of vMC to get the features she desires, which also leads to her being the only person that knows how the whole thing works, and whom is capable of maintaining it.

We got into big arguments about that when the Forge first came together, but I eventually conceded, which in retrospect, was a huge mistake.

He continues:

Man, there's implementing a certain kind of functionality, then there's just whole-sale copying of an idea right down to the way something looks.

...I fail to see any need whatsoever to parrot the implementation details of other mods, ESPECIALLY those whose authors you are supposedly collaborating with for the good of the overall community.

There's a line there man, and while it may be blurry, as I said, I saw a point at which I had no doubt that it had been repeatedly and intentionally crossed.

Highly revealing is this post by FlowerChild:

JRoush wrote:
Eloraam is an exceptionally good programmer. I know this thread is nominally about the Forge, but really it's about her, and I want to put this on record. Even in a group of good programmers, she's uncommonly talented. Her implementations are elegant, effective, and reliable, which is more than I can say for many of the features she ripped off (anyone built a multi-pulley elevator recently?). And yes, she did rip them off. No arguments there.
I've said myself, including in this thread, that she's a very talented programmer man. I've never brought that into question.

However, as to whether she's more talented than I am (which seems to be what you're implying), man, there's a lot of variables to that equation and I wouldn't even want to hazard a guess. She makes technical trade-offs that I am not willing to and everybody goes nuts because she's using tile entities for everything and hardly consuming block ids as a result. That's cool and all, and it was a very smart move given the trade-offs she's willing to make, but is that better?

She's also willing to spend a huge amount of time on things that I am simply not willing to. Placement code for sub-blocks for example. Again, what's better in that? I don't think that the sub-block placement I have going is optimal, but I think there are far more important things to work on in the mod, so I move onto those.

She's also willing to make far more extensive and invasive changes to the MC code-base than I'm willing to in order to get the functionality she wants. The number of base-class mods that RP now requires makes BTW pale by comparison, with the difference being that all of them are hidden in the Forge in her case. Again, which approach is better in that is highly questionable.

I wouldn't even want to hazard a guess as to who the better programmer is man, and honestly, I stopped caring about programmer cock-fights a good 15 to 20 years ago.

What I will say is this though:

If you log into an SMP server and spend a few hours building a castle, only to log back on the next day to find someone has built one twice as big next to yours overnight, you're going to say "wtf"? So, you decide to wander off into the wilderness and work on a nice circular tower, spending a few more hours on it. The next day, you log on, and find someone has built a tower identical in shape but twice as big, again, right next to yours. So, you start getting pissed.

This keeps happening and it becomes apparent that someone is intentionally copying your creations but always doing them "bigger! better! more powerful!".

Is this fun? How long before you say "fuck this" and quit the server? [My emphasis]

I'll interject here that he admits to caring about programmer "cock-fights" in the past, and despite his statement to the contrary, he still cares now. Especially when he loses the "cock-fight" to a woman.

FlowerChild continues:

I personally don't think it's coincidental that she signed onto the Forge and the next thing you know she's putting in functionality that attempts to outdo the features of the primary mods she's supposedly collaborating with, and intentionally attempting to draw comparisons between them by putting in obvious similarities. So far, that's actually *all* I've seen her do without one original idea appearing in her mod.

It's cheap, it's aggravating, it runs counter to a collaborative spirit, it's overly competitive, derivative, uncreative, and just plain sad. To me, it seems she's making every attempt to piss off the people she's working with through this kind of passive-aggressive nonsense (whereas I'm just straight out aggressive) and has succeeded admirably in that regard.

More FlowerChild:

If the update to 1.8 was any indication, I get the impression that it also won't be updated until she's ready with a 1.0 release of her own mod putting me in the position of twiddling my thumbs until that happens, and of course guaranteeing that hers will always be the first mod to update out of the other Forge mods when a new release of MC comes out (again, competition).

Version 1.2.0 of Forge for Minecraft 1.0.0 was released today [Nov. 30]. RedPower 2 won't be ready for awhile. [Edit: RP2pr4 was released on Dec. 5.]

And finally FlowerChild says this:

Seriously man, my perception of it is that she's selectively going after key features in the other "big" Forge mods with the intent of making them obsolete so her big uber-mod will be the only one around and because the features she's making now are intended for her eventual commercial product: Minia. Coming out "on top" of the Minecraft mod scene will obviously contribute greatly to the popularity of that game.

I would also say, if she has so many original features planned that people are so excited about, why is she pushing out release after release of copy-cat features if not to try and establish the kind of dominance I'm talking about above? Why is that her priority? Why not at least space it out with *some* original content if she's got so many ideas planned?

I very much doubt anything anyone would say to me at this point would convince me otherwise and considering that mine is one of those mods that she's trying to "push out", I take that as an act of outright hostility which I refuse to cooperate with. [My emphasis]

So after the lengthy series of personal attacks on Eloraam over a number of posts, we finally learn the real reason behind his withdrawal from Forge: it's about 'coming out "on top" of the Minecraft mod scene.'

Normally I would not have quoted so extensively, but I felt the need to counter my fairly effusive treatment of FlowerChild in my piece Will the Minecraft Forge API help resolve the current modding mess? I think the attacks on Eloraam reflect very poorly on FlowerChild, and as a result I now have a much lower opinion of him.

I still value his work on Better Than Wolves, and also his opinions on Minecraft modding. Another reason I quoted FlowerChild so extensively is that his posts confirm a number of my thoughts, in some cases quite strongly:

There is competition between at least some Minecraft modders.
Writing a "dominant" (to use FlowerChild's term) mod could prove lucrative itself, or be a stepping stone to later success.
Eloraam's RedPower 2 is likely to achieve the kind of "dominance" FlowerChild describes.
Minia is likely to be a significant successor to Minecraft.

FlowerChild has asserted that Better Than Wolves is a hobby project and there is no profit motive involved.¹ But his injection of the concept of mod "dominance" into the discussion indicate that he's given the matter much thought.

His claim to be uninterested in profits might be more credible if his mod was open source. But it's not. Back in October, FlowerChild posted:

But sorry man, I don't give out the source. As the others have said though, I'm working on an API to work with the mod that might make this kind of thing easier in the future.
I'll definitely have functionality in the API to add anvil recipes, so you should have no problem adding something like that.

So while he's unwilling to have Better Than Wolves be reliant on Minecraft Forge, he intends to implement his own API so that other mods can be dependent on his.

The path to mod dominance must have looked easy to FlowerChild, who after all, named his mod "Better Than Wolves" in a direct criticism of Notch's game design skills. And for awhile, while his mod was gaining users and garnering rave reviews, all must have seemed to be going according to plan.

But he hadn't counted on the appearance of a new, more talented competitor.

In conclusion, it appears that FlowerChild's withdrawal from Minecraft Forge is simply a reaction to being outclassed by a competitor.

FlowerChild's personal attacks on Eloraam appear to be motivated by resentment stemming from his realization that RedPower 2, and not Better Than Wolves, will likely become the "dominant" Minecraft mod.

[Update: I have written A statement on Minecraft mods copying features from each other.]

1. The following appears in post #16524 in the Better Than Wolves topic on the official Mindcraft Forum. Since direct links to posts haven't been working correctly on www.minecraftforum.net, here's the relevant text:

Do keep in mind that BTW is a hobby and in no way a product. It's something I do for my own personal recreation, and if an aspect of that process becomes unenjoyable, it will inevitably get the axe. Participating in the Forge has become distinctly unpleasurable and thus runs counter to the continued development of this mod.

Tech: Startup script for Minecraft under Linux

2011-11-30T08:10:00.001-05:00

I use a heavily modified script to start Minecraft under Linux (Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid).

The script incorporates many of the suggestions from [HOWTO] Optimize Minecraft for Linux thread on the official forums.

It also resizes the Minecraft window on startup to 720p, convenient for recording videos.

You can get it here: minecraft startup script.

Notch exits, hands Minecraft development to Jens Bergensten (@jeb_)

2011-11-18T18:27:00.003-05:00

From Minecraft: Beyond "Final Release" by Anthony Gallegos on IGN:

Mojang doesn't have a plan for content after Minecraft's "final release." According to Jens Bergensten, who's leading up Minecraft development post-'launch', he hasn't "planned out anything yet." But many "simple things" are swimming around in his head. Only one "big" feature is in the works right now, but he did let us in on a couple of smaller details he's personally out to change in the coming months.

The big feature Mojang's tackling after the final release is NPC A.I. In the final game NPCs exist, but don't really do much more than meander. With a new A.I. programmer on board in December, Bergensten says the goal is to "give the NPCs in village some kind of purpose" or "predictable behavior that's more interesting than just wandering around."

So Notch has reached the abandonment stage of Minecraft. I'm sure that after two years he'd like to move on to something new. It's not in the nature of highly creative types to add the finishing touches to their game systems, or to do the hard design work required to make a good mod API.

I'm very much in favor of this turn of events. Notch's Minecraft fatigue has become somewhat evident, so it's great he's handing the lead over to Jens, who actually wants to work on it. Jens was originally hired for the Scrolls team, but talked his way onto his preferred project, Minecraft.

No mention of APIs or new mod-enabled launchers in IGN's article, and no mention of Jens' ascension after Notch's abdication during Notch's "keynote"/Minecraft launch session. Perhaps these will get mentioned during the Q&A later today.

Update 11/28: A number of diehard Minecraft fans on the official forums didn't think the articles by IGN and gamespy were credible enough to be believed (yeah, I know). They could only accept the news directly from Notch himself, or from Jens.

That news has finally arrived:

Jens Bergensten tweeted "@MinerFlat64 I will still be fulltime Minecraft, but Notch will be working on new projects"

I find it interesting that Mojang chose to downplay this bit of news until well after Minecon.

Notch's Keynote and Minecraft Launch

2011-11-18T17:58:00.003-05:00

Here's a compliation of my tweets during the live stream, which summarize what took place:

IGN's livestream covering ONLY the five Mandalay Bay Ballroom events. ALL of the panels will get missed.
Livestream up, cheesey opening video ends and @MinecraftChick takes the stage!
She introduces CaptainSparklez, who introduces his video "Revenge" - A Minecraft Parody of Usher's DJ Got Us Fallin' in Love - Crafted Using Noteblocks. The video appears to use Minecraft textures in another engine.
Now she's talking about the panels, none of which will be livestreamed. Apparently the terse agenda was all anyone got describing the panels.
Microsoft Games producer Stuart Platt now onstage. Showing trailer. Minecraft for Xbox 360 demos will be playable in the MS booth.
Mojang's Daniel Kaplan introducing Minecraft Pocket Edition on iOS.
@MinecraftChick now introduces Mojang staff members who walk across the stage while she pauses her patter to allow for applause.
@notch finally takes the stage after @MinecraftChick gets the crowd rhythmically chanting "Notch, notch, notch."
Mega64 folks now showing their video about Minecraft, featuring a Notch impersonator.
Mojang team gathers on stage while notch throws big mock-up Minecraft lever to release 1.0.
After dancing and high-fiving each other while loud music plays, the Mojang team leaves the stage.
Session over, live stream returns to still image. On audio we hear someone exhorting people to "please walk" leaving the ballroom.

For another summary of the event, see Danny Sullivan's liveblog, Move Over Angry Birds, It’s The Minecraft Coming Out Party.

It was remarkably content-free. Notch's "keynote?" Blink and you missed it. He spoke for a couple of minutes and said nothing of import. Mostly it was an opportunity for him to bask in the audience's adulation. None of the announcements that Notch alluded to in his blog were made.

Besides the celebration, time was spent marketing two other versions of the game, Minecraft for Xbox 360 and Minecraft Pocket Edition on iOS. Of course it was mentioned that even with a secret advance release, the iOS edition made top grossing app (different from top selling). This was despite lackluster reviews and was mostly due to its inflated price ($6.99) compared to other apps.

Minecon: The event schedule

2011-11-18T01:34:00.002-05:00

Minecon is upon us, and for those of us that can't attend, IGN is streaming ~~all~~ a few of the panels live.

The bulk of this post consists of the Minecon event schedule reproduced from Mojang's website, along with my speculation about some of the sessions. I'll be using this as a guide to help decide which stream to view.

One thing I'm particularly interested to see is @jeb_'s (Jens Bergensten's) talk about generating map structures, which I'm guessing will be during the Mojang Developers' Panel on Saturday.

Mojang in October issued an open call for speakers, so its likely that most of the panels will consist of people from the community, as opposed to Mojang employees. Since the schedule (which Mojang called an 'agenda') doesn't list panel members or describe the nature of each session, it's difficult to determine the value of some of the panels. I hope conferees at least get a handout with that information to aid in choosing which panels to attend.

For example, on Friday there's a panel API for Game Developers while Saturday has one called Creating Mods. It would be nice to know more about these panels in advance.

Also missing is any mention of the 'lightning talks' discussed in the open call for speakers.

A distressing number of the panels are about YouTube, either making videos or featuring particular channels. With 1.1 million Minecraft videos, do we really need more?

Friday, November 18th

10 a.m. Game Room and Exhibit Hall Open
1 - 2:30 p.m. Keynote Address and Minecraft Launch with Notch (Mandalay Bay Ballroom A-G) [Notch releases Minecraft! He hinted at surprise announcements—if they happen at Minecon this is the likely venue. Let's hope his fanbois don't overdo it; some of us have weak stomachs.]
2:45 - 3:45 p.m. Panels

YouTube 101 (Jasmine ABEF)
Composing Game Music (Banyan ABCD)
API for Game Developers (Palm A) [Which API? Is this for modding? ]
Minecraft as a Tool for Education (Palm B) [Probably presenting material available on The Minecraft Teacher blog.]
Creating Custom Maps (Palm C) [Sounds mildly interesting.]
Running a Server (Palm D) [Also could be interesting.]

4 - 5 p.m. Mojang Panel with Q&A – Live Demos of Scrolls and Cobalt (Mandalay Bay Ballroom A-G) [Q&A might bring worthwhile questions, but time will be taken up by the off-topic demos. Bah, marketing.]
5:15 - 6:15 p.m. Panels

The Art of Games (Jasmine ABEF)
Machinima Channel Panel (Banyan ABCD)
Bukkit for Multiplayer Servers (Palm A) [The clear choice in this time slot.]
Video Editing (Palm B)
YouTube 101 (Palm C) [Again? Two presentations of this off-topic panel?]
The Family that Plays Together (Palm D)

7 - 10 p.m. Kickoff Party – Open to all Ages (South Seas Ballroom)

Saturday, November 19th

10 a.m. Game Room and Exhibit Hall Open
10:00 - 11:00 p.m. Panels

Making a Difference – Minecraft (Jasmine ABEF)
YouTube Partners (Banyan ABCD)
Amazing Builds (Palm A)
Minecraft Community Ideas with Curse (Palm B) [Might yield insight into Curse's intentions regarding Minecraft, or it could turn out to be as lame as it sounds.]
Creativity with Redstone (Palm C) [Pointless considering that Eloraam's Redpower 2 mod far surpasses Minecraft's built-in redstone logic.]
Modder Concepts & Ideas (Palm D) [Really need to see a description of this. It almost sounds like it's describing the ridiculously ambitious pipe dream mods announced weekly by middle schoolers on the forums.]

11:15 - 12:15 p.m. Mojang Developers' Panel (Mandalay Bay Ballroom A-G) [A must-see. Perhaps the most important event of the conference. Likely venue for @jeb_'s generating map structures presentation.]
1:30 - 2:30 p.m. Yogscast Panel (Mandalay Bay Ballroom A-G)
2:45 - 3:45 p.m. Panels

Creating Compelling Videos (Jasmine ABEF)
Creating Stories and Comics Using Minecraft (Banyan ABCD)
Minecraft Architecture (Palm A) [Is this in-game building architecture? If so, that's nice, but hardly critical.]
The Shaft Podcast Live Recording (Palm B)
Family Game Night: Bonding through Minecraft (Palm C)
Creating Mods (Palm D) [Which mod API will be recommended?]

4:00 - 5:00 p.m. Closing Session (Mandalay Bay Ballroom A-G)
10 p.m. Into the Nether party – 21 and over (XS Nightclub, Wynn Hotel)

Notch acknowledges Minecraft's modding mess

2011-11-17T17:01:00.001-05:00

Last week I wrote about the horrendous situation with Minecraft mods that resulted from Mojang's lack of leadership: Minecraft itself has some inconvenient limitations, incompatibilities between mods are common, there are multiple incompatible and competing mod APIs, and the difficulty involved with creating and installing mods has led to much frustration among mod developers and users.

I've been hoping that Mojang would take the opportunity offered by Minecon to address the mod situation and announce a solution, or at least a roadmap, and apparently that is a possibility. In his blog entry Soon., on Tuesday Notch said:

we have many exciting plans for the next year.. some of these will be announced fairly soon.

One thing that kind of fell between chairs is the mod support.. Sorry about that, I take full responsibility for letting that get forgotten about. But when it comes to the new launcher, it got folded into a new exciting project I won’t talk about yet.

It's unclear if the new exciting project involving the launcher is something we'll learn about at Minecon, or if "yet" is further in the future. Since he discusses them in practically the same breath, apparently the new launcher will include support for installing mods. One can only hope.

Unfortunately for Mojang, this delay by Notch in addressing the mod situation could end up proving to be costly. When you have an energetic user community numbering in the millions, many of whom are technically capable, they don't stand around waiting.

Last spring the Bukkit project was established as an admin and plugin API for Minecraft servers, and its use has become widespread. On its About Us page, Bukkit has made a clear statement of its independence:

...our design choice to keep in the mind the possibility of 3rd party Minecraft servers needing a modding and plugin interface. That being said, when any 3rd party developed Minecraft server becomes stable, Bukkit will be there to allow our collection of plugins to work with them too through a new interface, without any work required for the plugin author to make it compatible. [Emphasis not in original text.]

I've previously linked to Tim Edwards's PC Gamer article The game’s industry’s massive fail: where are all the Minecraft clones?, but one of the points he made bears repeating:

I honestly think the market for games like Minecraft is far, far larger than even Mojang have been able to exploit.

2012 will be the year that Minecraft begins to move beyond Mojang, and a viable third-party server could prove to be a significant factor in Minecraft becoming independent. This week at Minecon we may get an indication from Mojang's announcements regarding mod installation and APIs just how firmly Mojang will remain in the driver's seat.

Did Notch invent a new category of game that he doesn't intend to pursue?

2011-11-15T17:56:00.000-05:00

There are a number of Minecraft players unhappy with the RPG elements recently added to the game, in the form of potion brewing, enchanting, and a dragon boss to fight.

The RPG stuff didn't make Notch rich and famous, since it wasn't in the game yet when it went viral.

Had he started with brewing, enchanting, and the dragon fight, he'd still be toiling in obscurity.

Exploring the procedurally-generated world to find a good site for a base, then building it up and staying safe from the bad guys is what made the game compelling for many of us. For a long time Minecraft was about this, as it was what had been implemented before the RPG stuff was tacked on. It doesn't matter to us that Notch ultimately intended to make an RPG when for months what he'd delivered was a survival builder.

With Railroad Tycoon, Sid Meier inspired the creation of many other business simulation games (often with the name "Tycoon" in them), but besides a single sequel many years later (Sid Meier's Railroads), he only did the one. I think Notch is a game designer in the mold of Sid Meier, the pioneering trailblazer who never stays too long in any one place. You can kind of see this from his recent blog Inspiration, motivation, stress, and abandonment.

So on the way to completing his RPG, Notch invented a new category of game that he doesn't intend to pursue. Survival builder set in a procedurally-generated fully editable voxel-based world is a mouthful, so maybe the category will become known as voxel-based survival builders. In the same way that Railroad Tycoon is seen as the original Tycoon game with the railroad theme being incidental, years from now Minecraft may be known as the first survival builder, with oh yeah, some RPG elements.

Since gross revenues from Mindcraft are approaching 100 million dollars, Mojang will have competition, even if it's not from the big companies (see The game’s industry’s massive fail: where are all the Minecraft clones?). It's a perfect opportunity for other independent developers.

While it stinks that we can't have them now, in a year or two I think that several voxel-based survival builders will be available.

[Most of the text of this article originally appeared in a comment on the Minecraft Forums.]

Minecraft has grossed $77 million to date

2011-11-08T15:09:00.000-05:00

Minecraft's numbers:

Version	Units sold	Price	Total
Alpha	800,000	9.95 €	$11,014,252
Beta	3,200,000	14.95 €	$66,196,208
Total	4,000,000		$77,210,460

Sources: Minecraft Draws Over $33 Million In Revenue From 1.8M Paying Customers and Minecraft Reaches 4M Sales.

Will the Minecraft Forge API help resolve the current modding mess?

2011-11-08T00:31:00.001-05:00

I thought of a small useful mod I want to implement, so I've been investigating current best practices when modding Minecraft.

Boy, what a mess.

The modding situation in Minecraft is quite chaotic at the moment.

In a January, 2011 interview with Gamasutra, Notch said:

High up on priority is a proper modding API that lets people who make mods plug into the game in a way that doesn't break when we update the game.

That never happened. Instead, in a series of three blog posts (post 1, post 2, post3) in April, Notch renounced the idea of an API, instead opting to someday require people to pay to become licensed Minecraft mod developers and download the full source code. In the meantime, Mojang would do nothing.

Due to a storm of protests, Notch quickly backed down on charging fees for mod development. But as promised, Mojang has announced nothing since then about modding. Thus the chaos.

The Wiki page on data values shows just one of the problems: block IDs are restricted to being 255 or below. That's right, it's 2011, RAM hasn't been an issue for years and yet something as important as the Block ID is restricted to a single byte!

Mods that implement new block types have to find an unused ID in this tiny space and hope that another mod or the next update of Minecraft doesn't claim it too. Indeed, the wiki's own pages provide an example of the problem; Minecraft block IDs end at 121 (End Stone), but IDs used by mods start at 98, probably because the wiki page is out of date and doesn't reflect the changed mod block IDs.

There are other IDs for items and sprites that can clash as well. But IDs are just the tip of the iceberg: in order to function, mods need to modify Minecraft's code, and these changes to the java classes can clash with other mods or Minecraft itself due to an update.

Providing an API to allow mods to hook into Minecraft game functions to prevent these clashes is the task that Notch and Mojang walked away from, and the proposed solution of allowing full source access to developers doesn't resolve it. Even with full source access it will still be possible for mods to step on each other's changes.

Full source access may even make the problem worse!

Currently, modders must process Minecraft's .jar file using something called Minecraft Coder Pack. MCP decompiles the java and replaces obfuscated class and variable names with sensible ones chosen by MCP staff members who reverse engineered the meaning of the code. But despite the heroic efforts of the MCP crew, source code that's been reconstituted through decompilation and deobfuscation is never as clear as the original.

Once Mojang allows access to the full source code, mod development will become easier since the actual source code is clearer and easier to work with, plus the tricky steps to invoke MCP's wizardry won't be needed. With this barrier to entry removed, the number of Minecraft mod developers should increase, and as it does the issue of them stepping on each other's toes will get worse.

Members of the Minecraft mod community have attempted to solve this problem themselves by writing their own APIs, but the efforts have been uncoordinated and several competing APIs exist.

In the midst of trying to figure out which community-sourced API had the most support and complete implementation, I came across an audio interview with FlowerChild of the impressive Better Than Wolves mod. I don't usually go for audio presentations such as lectures or podcasts due to the low rate of information transfer, but FlowerChild is a compelling speaker.

The interview is available both as a single long audio file and split up into several YouTube videos. While they all should be listened to by anyone interested in Minecraft modding, his explanation of the need for and merits of the open source Minecraft Forge API project directly answered my questions about the community-based APIs:

FlowerChild's opinion on the Minecraft Forge (LP #6)

I must say that this is the best minecraft related interview I've seen for a long time. As a person who tracks minecraft moding community for a while, that was damn interesting. -miki537, commenting on the YouTube video.

I'm extremely grateful to FlowerChild for taking the time away from other things to be interviewed. He provides valuable insight into Minecraft modding—not just how to do it, but why things work that way. The metadata, as it were.

I had a chuckle when just after listening to FlowerChild's explanation of the monetary motives of some of the competing API developers to profit from downloads or donation buttons, I came across an API whose developer explained its existence by saying that it provided hooks unavailable when using Minecraft Forge. Rather than contribute to the Minecraft Forge project, this developer chose to remain solo. Sure enough, a donation button appears prominently on his download page, and he invokes his API in his plea for monetary support.

As FlowerChild said during the interview, each additional API to download increases the burden on users of Minecraft mods, as well as complicating the support issues for mod developers. Since naive users of mods have trouble installing mod files, the less they need to do it the better. By keeping his functionality out of Minecraft Forge, this API developer seeks to profit by increasing the burden on everyone else.

Back to the main topic: anyone modding Minecraft should use and contribute to Minecraft Forge. It represents the way forward to a future of Minecraft modding that best serves both users and mod developers. Nondevelopers can help too—mod users can preferentially choose mods that use Minecraft Forge, and request Forge support by mods that don't.

My hope is that Minecraft Forge can achieve the same level of success that the developer community for the WowAce library has done with addons for WoW.

Minecraft: Did Mojang Unethically Starve its Cash Cow?

2011-10-26T08:50:00.000-04:00

@Sheirmans Hehe no I don't think so... We're still only two developers on the PC version of Minecraft [link]

Notch recently blogged that "we’re 12 people in the office", so the two people working on the PC version of Minecraft represent just 16 percent of Mojang's staff that is advancing Minecraft.

As I wrote in Minecraft: Is Notch crazy? Mojang should hire more developers for Minecraft, and particularly, QA staff.

At what point does the lack of resources that Mojang has devoted to Minecraft become an indication of mismanagement? If purchasers of alpha and beta versions were willing to help fund the development of Minecraft, how much cash must roll in before it becomes unethical and immoral to have hired only a single addition developer to work on the game?

Minecraft: Is Notch crazy?

2011-10-24T08:09:00.000-04:00

Obviously he's not completely crazy, but lately Notch has made a number of strategic decisions that call his judgment into question.

1. Lawyers. Really?

In his blog Update on the “Scrolls” lawsuit, Notch says that:

Lawyers have been sending papers back and forth, threatening each other with deadlines and court dates.

WTF?

He's pissing money away and wasting his time fighting with Bethesda over the name of a game that's a long way from release? Spending money on this is a horrendous waste, just change the name of the game and be done with it.

Below I'll argue that Mojang shouldn't even be making the game, never mind getting embroiled in a legal dispute over its name.

2. Selling out with an Xbox 360 exclusive.

As I said in Mojang is no longer an indie developer, in selling out by entering into an agreement with Microsoft for Minecraft to appear exclusively on Xbox 360, Notch gave up his freedom and accepted PR guidelines that control what he is "allowed to say."

What I didn't discuss is the effect of Notch's decision on gamers. Microsoft paid a lot of money to Mojang so that PS3 and Wii owners won't be able to play Minecraft on their consoles.

Prior to this deal, Mojang had been very responsive to gamers. But when faced with choosing between Microsoft's money and gamers owning PS3s or Wiis, Notch chose to take the money and thus disempower owners of the other consoles.

(I play Minecraft on PC under Linux. I'm not a console owner and don't care for them, but I don't like exclusive deals since they enrich the partners by disempowering certain groups of potential customers.)

3. MineCon: The Stake in the ground.

MineCon was set up to celebrate the official release of Minecraft on November 18, 2011. The date of release was a completely arbitrary choice on Notch's part. Given that Mojang already has great cash flow without having "officially" released the game, I don't see the advantage to declaring an official release date and putting artificially created deadline pressure on Minecraft's development.

4. Dance with the one that brung you.

Why do another game (Scrolls) at all when Minecraft still isn't finished, and is a now infamous cash cow? Scrolls dilutes Mojang's resources and takes attention away from Minecraft, which could use developer resources beyond what Mojang has assigned.

The Minecraft project would benefit from a few more developers, and particularly, dedicated QA staff.

Minecraft got Notch and Mojang to this point, and it's not yet in the kind of shape that it's appropriate to shift focus away to another project.

Dwarf Fortress in the NY Times

2011-07-24T20:00:00.009-04:00

There's an interesting profile of the creators of Dwarf Fortress in the NY Times magazine. It's a long piece but well worth reading. In it there are a few particularly interesting bits. First this:

“The processing power that Dwarf Fortress uses is on the same scale as modern engineering software for designing aerospace hardware,” says Ames, the engineer. “You have more complicated simulations in Dwarf Fortress than when you model the aerodynamics of a wing.”

Towards the end is an interesting statement echoing my earlier post about games on rails:

At bottom, Dwarf Fortress mounts an argument about play. Many video games mimic the look and structure of films: there’s a story line, more or less fixed, that progresses only when you complete required tasks. This can make for gripping fun, but also the constrictive sense that you are a mouse in a tricked-out maze, chasing chunks of cheese. Tarn envisions Dwarf Fortress, by contrast, as an open-ended “story generator.” He and Zach grew up playing computer games with notebooks in hand, drawing their own renditions of the randomly generated creatures they encountered and logging their journeys in detail. Dwarf Fortress, which never unfolds the same way twice, takes that spirit of supple, fully engaged play to the extreme.

As I said, it's long but highly recommended.

Branching storylines: Still on rails, but with switches in the track

2011-07-24T14:00:00.000-04:00

Some people love the Bioware games, but I find it hard to be immersed in a branching storyline.

That's because I know that under the hood the game is still on rails. The difference is that every now and then there will be a switch in the track where one must choose, and the choice is irreversible. I'll be travelling along nicely towards Chicago, and then a switch comes along where if I make the wrong choice I'll end up in Cleveland—or even worse, Akron. Then I'll have to restore from an old save point, because once you've chosen the wrong branch (as they say in Maine), "You can't get there from here."

Then there's the issue of replay value—games that are on rails have limited replay value. Branching simply hides that a bit, but it doesn't fundamentally increase the replay value.

There's also a cost issue which effects the amount of content in the game: each branch adds to the cost to produce the game, so naturally companies seek to minimize the amount of branching in the plot.

Branching storylines are familiar to the Hollywood types who have infiltrated game companies, and many of these people think of games as movies that you can play, with all the inflexibility that's implied.

As an alternative, I'd like to see more effort spent on dynamic, mutable storylines that change in response to the player. To fully realize this vision would require an AI breakthrough that's a long way off, but I think a lot could be done with today's technology. A move towards algorithmically-controlled plots would buck the trend of static stories that's preoccupied the industry for many years now.

In some ways Bioware's upcoming MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republic, represents the culmination of the on-rails branching storyline genre because every NPC is fully voiced. Not only will it be on rails, but the track will be cast in concrete since changing any dialog will require a return to the recording studio instead of just a text edit. This portends the most rigid and unchanging theme park MMO to date.

This is a big reason why I have no interest in Star Wars: The Old Republic—it's just another theme park.

The End is in Sight

2011-06-20T13:25:00.000-04:00

Perfectly timed for my last post on rat pellets is an extensive interview with legendary developer John Carmack in Eurogamer where he says:

...the better games get the harder you have to go to give a delta people care about. That's going to be a challenge for the next-generation of consoles, to show that the pack-in title is going to look more awesome than what you get on the current ones that people will want to go spend $300 on a new console.

They'll be able to do it on the next generation, but it's going to be much harder. And whether it's even possible another generation after that is an open question.

And in an interview with CNET, Carmack says:

I can recognize the knee in the curve where I can do things that make the graphics better than what they are right now, but not as much better as if we put all that engineering effort into things that make it more fun.

This is huge.

Of course he's likely known this forever but it's nice to hear someone like John Carmack say that better graphics don't make games more fun, echoing what Chris Crawford said twenty years ago.

But more importantly, Carmack sees the end of the line for the improved graphics train that the industry has been riding all these years. He's saying the next generation of consoles will probably be the last to show obviously better graphics. For years improved graphics have been a major driver of sales for consoles and PC graphics cards, so this has huge implications for hardware vendors such as nVidia, AMD, Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft.

It's been awhile now that I've been unable to see much (if any) difference in the side-by-side comparison images that purport to show the graphic improvements offered by the new offerings from nVidia and AMD. Since frame rates are decent, my main focus has been on power consumption as high-end graphics cards tend to be undesirably hot and noisy.

One of my pet peeves is draw distance. I always want to see further away, and for performance reasons most FPS and small scale tactical games have very short draw distances. So while improved hardware could offer longer draw distances, seeing tiny objects better in the far distance isn't going to offer a compelling reason for people to upgrade.

It's not just hardware -- as Carmack notes, the end of the improved graphics cycle will have a big effect on marketing games, too. Since so many games now are just old games redone with better graphics, publishers will have to find other reasons for people to buy new games.

The era of good enough graphics is almost upon us.

Don't get all excited by the rat pellets

2011-06-16T19:46:00.002-04:00

Many years ago, while it was still known as the CGDC, Chris Crawford gave a talk (no, not the The Dragon Speech) in which he brought up the concept of rat pellets.

Crawford has long maintained that a game's interactivity as expressed by its algorithms, systems, and play mechanics are what's important. I'm paraphrasing from an ancient memory here, but I recall Crawford saying that he'd work on a game to the point where it was fun to play, and at that point he considered it to be done. But then he'd have to add the rat pellets: the graphics and cutscenes and eye candy that the publisher required for a shippable game.

Subsequently the industry ignored Crawford and went on a twenty-year binge of emphasizing graphics over everything else. Well, most of the industry, anyway. Blizzard emphasizes gameplay, and Chris Hecker is taking that approach as well:

Make the deep and hardcore game first, and make it accessible later in development. I’m ripping this off directly from a 2006 speech by Rob Pardo, the Vice President of Game Design at Blizzard, about how they design games for the long term. Here’s a great quote from the Gamasutra writeup: “First we try to come up with what are really cool things, things that will get people to play for two to three years. Then we actually start talking about accessibility, how to make the content approachable and easy to learn. But it starts with depth first.”

One of the greatest achievements of Minecraft has been to allow gamers to see that graphics don't make a great game. It's always entertaining to read another admission by someone saying that after initially being turned off by Minecraft's simple graphics, they found the gameplay to be compelling.

I'd been thinking about bringing up this recollection of rat pellets and was moved to action by a recent posting over at Bio Break, where Syp posted 8 thoughts on the new Old Republic cinematic. Take it easy there Syp, I know there's not much else to go on at this point, but it's just a cinematic that nobody will care about once the game launches and folks can actually play it. Don't get all excited by the rat pellets!

Core gamers: You guys are so over

2011-06-13T16:08:00.000-04:00

Core gamers had it great for years. During their reign at the top of the game consuming pyramid core gamers were the prime target of game companies. AAA games were mostly shooters or about topics appealing to 14-34 year old males, and many companies developed expensive hardware aimed at gamers. Life was good; it's good to be the king.

But with the Wii, Facebook, the iPhone, and iPad things have changed. From a piece by zebulum:

Angry Birds, by Rovio, has sales figures that would make an Assassin's Creed fan weep.

I had been working on a hardcore game targeted to the core gamer demographic of males, eternally trapped in a long adolescence. When our gameplay lead pulled out the Kinect, and began to dance with his avatar on the screen, I thought that our hardcore console project was going to get shrunk, maybe canceled, to reallocate company resources to this new device. After that, I believed the flood of out-of-work game design talent was going to flow away from hardcore games, towards the iPad and Google Android.

My prophecy was correct. The project is gone, swallowed up in pre-production hell, and the team shrank with two waves of lay-offs. I went with it. Most of my fellow designers have moved on to designing games for the Google Android, Apple iPhone, and the iPad.

The other day I published a piece about booth babes at E3 and Zygna's absence from the trade show. In a response that perfectly embodies zebulum's characterization of core gamers as "males eternally trapped in a long adolescence", an anonymous commenter said:

This is funny and a bit misleading.

42% of all game players are women.

But does playing social flash games on your handheld smart phone on a casual Wednesday make you a gamer?

The bottom link is the funniest of all. Zynga calling FarmVille players Hardcore Gamers.

HAHahahaha, what a joke. And then feminists complain that women aren't being catered to properly in the mainstream video game (not flash game) market. Too funny.

Note the denial of the changing world. He's a gamer, and those casual FarmVille players aren't. He thinks he's still the king.

But when Zynga’s annual revenues exceed $250 million or more, even Activision notices:

You have said you are hoping to reach a broader audience than your typical hardcore Call of Duty player. Why is it so important to encompass a wider audience with Elite?

Sonny: I think the idea that most Call of Duty players are 16 to 35-year-old males might have been true a few years ago, but when you think that we have 30m players worldwide, the reality of the diversity within the Call of Duty community is astounding. We have, on average, people playing 170 hours a year, but there is still a tremendous number of people who play a smaller amount and they’re not just the 16 to 35-year-old male. They’re students, they’re male and female.

Berger: ...everyone should have an opportunity to compete and join clans – not just the core gamers. We already have a mass audience, so all we need to do is build something that’s right for the full spectrum.

Just because they've been catered to for years doesn't mean core gamers will remain supreme. It's a new world out there, and core gamers should be ready for it.

It's 2011. Why is E3 still full of booth babes?

2011-06-09T15:25:00.000-04:00

I'm not at E3, but apparently there are plenty of booth babes, as usual.

It's 2011. Why are game companies still doing this?

Forty-two percent of all game players are women. In fact, women over the age of 18 represent a significantly greater portion of the game-playing population (37 percent) than boys age 17 or younger (13 percent).

I've been disappointed to see companies that have gotten my money turn around and spend it on booth babes. Don't get me wrong, I love women. But to me it's a misallocation of resources since booth babes don't make games better. Designing for the male gaze doesn't make games better either.

It's disappointing to see the perpetuation of sexism through the presence of booth babes at E3 and the exploitation of booth babe photos by so many gaming sites.

Meanwhile, in a smart money-saving move, Zynga stayed away from E3. Check Zynga's demographics:

Figures from Anekal suggest that 55 percent of all social gamers in the US are female while, 53 percent of Zynga players are females between 25 and 44.

While I've yet to play any of its games, I appreciate Zynga's decision to avoid E3 and the whole booth babe issue which might turn off some of its female customers. While the rest of the industry continues to stock up with booth babes at E3 in order to chase the same old pool of 14-34 year old males, Zynga's laughing all the way to the bank.

World of Tanks price list in dollars

2011-06-07T21:54:00.002-04:00

World of Tanks is free to play with the option of spending money to buy gold coins. Since the store prices are listed in gold coins, it's not immediately obvious how much things really cost.

Below is a list of items purchasable in World of Tanks with prices converted to dollars.

First, the price of gold coins:

Gold	Dollars
1250	6.95
3000	14.95
6500	29.95
12000	49.95
25000	99.95

Premium subscription prices (five prices given, corresponding to the price of gold above):

Days	Gold	Dollars
1	250	1.00	1.04	1.15	1.25	1.39
3	650	2.60	2.71	2.99	3.24	3.61
7	1250	5.00	5.20	5.76	6.23	6.95
30	2500	9.99	10.41	11.52	12.46	13.90

Premium tanks (again, five prices given, corresponding to the price of gold in the first table):

Tier	Country	L/M/H	Tank	Gold	Dollars
2	US	L	T2 Light Tank	375	1.50	1.56	1.73	1.87	2.08
2	Ger.	L	PzKpfw 38H735 (f)	750	3.00	3.12	3.46	3.74	4.17
5	US	H	T14	750	3.00	3.12	3.46	3.74	4.17
5	US	M	Ram-II	875	3.50	3.64	4.03	4.36	4.87
4	Rus.	L	Valentine	1000	4.00	4.16	4.61	4.98	5.56
3	Ger.	M	PzKpfw S35 739 (f)	1000	4.00	4.16	4.61	4.98	5.56
4	Ger.	H	PzKpfw B2 740 (f)	1250	5.00	5.20	5.76	6.23	6.95
5	Rus.	M	Matilda	1500	6.00	6.24	6.91	7.47	8.34
5	Rus.	H	Churchill	1500	6.00	6.24	6.91	7.47	8.34
8	Rus.	H	KV-5	7500	29.98	31.22	34.56	37.37	41.70
8	Ger.	H	Lowe	7500	29.98	31.22	34.56	37.37	41.70

Other items sold in the store (again, five prices given, corresponding to the price of gold in the first table):

	Gold	Dollars
Demount a locked item	10	0.04	0.04	0.05	0.05	0.06
Consumable (Chocolate, etc.)	50	0.20	0.21	0.23	0.25	0.28
100% training for 1 crew	200	0.80	0.83	0.92	1.00	1.11
Exchange Gold for 100,000 credits	250	1.00	1.04	1.15	1.25	1.39
Slot	300	1.20	1.25	1.38	1.49	1.67
Convert 10,000 XP	400	1.60	1.67	1.84	1.99	2.22

Finally, let's say someone wanted get from tier 9 to 10 as quickly as possible. Assuming they had experience available, how much would it cost to convert the XP needed to reach tier 10 and buy the credits needed to purchase a tier 10 tank?

	Gold	Dollars
Convert 250,000 XP	10,000	39.98	41.63	46.08	49.83	55.60
Exchange Gold for 6,100,000 credits	15,250	60.97	63.48	70.27	76.00	84.79

Note that the 250,000 XP used above is an approximation; the actual amount of XP needed to reach tier 10 from tier 9 varies: 236,100 for US, 279,870 for German, and 311,415 for the Russian tech tree.

Mojang is no longer an indie developer

2011-06-06T16:35:00.001-04:00

By entering into an agreement with Microsoft to put Minecraft on XBox 360 exclusively among consoles, Mojang has given up its independence and has chosen to be bound by contracts and PR guidelines that control what Notch is "allowed to say".

PR guidelines are what happens when you sell out.

There's nothing wrong with selling out, it's a stage that many people and organizations pass through. But once you've sold out, the "indie" label no longer applies.

RIFT Executive Producer Scott Hartsman addresses login validation bug

2011-03-19T19:34:00.000-04:00

In the wake of Friday's update to fix the player-discovered bug with login validation between the Rift client and server, Executive Producer Scott Hartsman posted the following statement:

Weekend Security Update

Hi, everyone -- I wanted to get an update out for the weekend after the last day of excitement around here.

On last night's fix -- I'm very happy to confirm that we did fix a login vulnerability, with significant assistance from an extremely clever user.

The root cause was a very subtle bug in error checking of our login validations deep in the server code. No personal information or any such was leaked out, and no outside attacker penetrated our servers, networks, or databases.

We'd definitely like to thank Mr. ManWitDaPlan for the well-timed assist. Sir, we salute you and offer our most heartfelt thanks.

The rest of what I'd like to add isn't to detract from the above well-deserved compliment, but it's important to include in the comprehensive picture.

The sobering fact is that account security remains a multifaceted issue, as attacks from other sources continue.

It's important to remember is that while a hole was identified and fixed as rapidly as we possibly could, there are still hackers and botnets trying account/password combinations from compromised web sites and past MMOs.

They are doing this right now. Those attacks have been coming constantly since we launched the game. The only thing that changes are how many hundreds of computers are trying to get into your account at any given moment, where they're coming from, and how many are succeeding.

We do block them as they are detected, but the fact that they are using distributed botnets (compromised computers from across the globe) means that this will remain something that we will continue keeping an eye on, forever.

For users getting hacked this way, Coin Lock is currently doing its job protecting people's belongings, provided that your RIFT password and EMail password are both complex and entirely different.

Both the login fix and the Coin Lock addition have been doing their part in signficantly reducing overall incidents over the last 18 hours.

Neither one is a silver bullet, but so far it is looking to be a solid one-two punch for the weekend.

Then, with two-factor authentication coming very soon, we expect security to be improved even further.

All totalled up, under 1% of accounts with characters have had characters impacted. However, 1% of a surprisingly large number is still very noticeable.

Our staff has been, and will continue to be, working around the clock to get those impacted back in shape. We'll continue hiring on even more people to help people with issues of all kinds, as quickly as we can. (Another round of hires begin on Monday, and there will be even more to follow.)

As always, thanks very much for your time, your attention, your assistance, and your patience!

- Scott Hartsman
Exec Producer, RIFT

Hartsman's statement makes clear the magnitude of the support issue created by the bug. He indicated that there is a backlog of people waiting on Customer Support to repair the damage to their characters inflicted by the hijackers. The total number of people affected could number in the low thousands, but the exact figure is unknown as Trion has not released numbers for its player base.

ZAM followed up with an extensive interview of the player who discovered and reported the security bug: Ex-Hacker Finds RIFT Account Flaw, Talks to ZAM

Trion Worlds patches security hole in Rift

2011-03-19T03:55:00.001-04:00

On Friday a member of the Rift player community with the handle ManWitDaPlan discovered an exploit in the login protocol for Rift which allowed the Rift client to access accounts without authentication. He promptly communicated directly with Trion's technical staff to convey the details about the exploit. An update to the game was released Friday evening which closed the hole.

Shortly after Trion learned of the exploit, James "Elrar" Nichols, Assistant Community Manager, posted this statement:

We have some things in the works right now and have been passing on your feedback, concerns, and thoughts throughout the day (no matter how radical or unlikely).

Sharing sensitive information about our actions (no matter how broad) naturally also informs those carrying out these attacks. This puts us in a tight spot with how much information we can provide, and the questions we can answer.

Apologies we can't be more forthcoming at this time, but we appreciate your understanding - its always our goal to ensure you can play and enjoy the game securely, and unfettered.

Later in the evening ManWitDaPlan posted:

Got word back from Steve Chamberlin, the development lead for Rift. This hole is sealed...the issue I found is no more.

In recent days the official forums had seen a marked increase in the number of complaints of hijacked accounts—players wrote of logging in to find their characters broke, or naked, or missing. Some players wrote of struggling with the hijackers over control of their accounts.

The closing of this security hole and the recent implementation of the Coin Lock feature should sharply reduce the number of hijacked accounts.

The login exploit and resulting hijacked accounts is the first blemish on what had until now been a very smooth and successful launch by Trion.

The response by Trion to the report of the exploit was very quick; just a few hours elapsed on Friday between when Trion first learned the details of the exploit and the restart for the update which closed the hole.

Update: On Saturday, RIFT Executive Producer Scott Hartsman posted a statement addressing the situation.

Rift opens with full servers, queues

2011-02-24T18:39:00.004-05:00

This was the situation just minutes after launch:

Almost all servers were full


Long queues to join

Shortly after the above screenshots were captured, the last servers filled leaving none available for waiting players to join. More servers were brought online fairly quickly which absorbed many of the waiting players, but queues on the original group of servers remained lengthy due to the number of guilds which had prearranged to play on them.

Performance on the servers I was able to join seemed decent and they remained stable for several hours, with 15 minutes of downtime for a performance adjustment.

Rift's in-game Twitter integration and automatic tweets

2011-02-24T12:53:00.002-05:00

Rift has built Twitter capability into its client so one can tweet messages (via /tweet) and screenshots (via /tweetpic) while in-game.

Of course Trion Worlds has done this to leverage the social web in an effort to drive adoption of the game.

In addition to user-initiated tweets, there is also the option to allow the client to tweet automatically. When this feature was first added during the open beta it immediately flooded the #rift hashtag with automatically-generated achievement spam. Trion quickly patched it to default to using a different hashtag, #riftfeed.

I'm interested to see what gets tweeted automatically and how spammy it is, but in order to avoid disturbing my tiny handful of followers with game activity, I've set up another account just for in-game tweets from the Rift client.

To see those tweets, check out the Twitter stream for Strat_in_game.

The capability for players to easily tweet while in-game, particularly to include screenshots, is quite cool. But the automatic tweets seem like useless spam if they can't be filtered by the player. I don't see how automatically-generated tweets are useful at all to players. Once Trion implements an Armory-like interface to character data over the web, it's likely to include achievements and anything else likely to be auto-tweeted.

Update: Shortly after launch, #riftfeed was flooded with auto-tweets, many for server-first acquisition of green and white items!

Rift starts with about 1/3 the zones of original WoW

2011-02-22T20:40:00.005-05:00

[Update: The purpose of this post is to point out the difference in zone count at launch and get reaction. Once I compiled the two lists I was struck by the magnitude of the difference, and thought it would be a good discussion starter. See the ensuing reactions on Bio Break and this GameFAQs thread.]

Rift has generated much enthusiasm as a result of its recent open beta. People have been wondering how the Rift game world compares to World of Warcraft. A comparison of the number of zones in Rift versus WoW at release is illuminating:

Zones at Launch
Rift	WoW
Mathosia (1-6) Terminus (1-6) Freemarch (6-20) Silverwood (6-20) Gloamwood (20-27) Stonefield (20-27) Scarlet Gorge (26-30) Scarwood Reach (30-35) Droughtlands (?) Iron Pine Peak (?) Lake of Solace (?) Moonshade Highlands (?) Shimmersand (?) Stillmoor (?)	Dun Morogh (1-10) Durotar (1-10) Elwynn Forest (1-10) Mulgore (1-10) Teldrassil (1-10) Tirisfal Glades (1-10) Darkshore (10-20) Loch Modan (10-20) Silverpine Forest (10-20) Westfall (10-20) Barrens (10-25) Redridge Mountains (15-25) Stonetalon Mountains (15-27) Ashenvale (18-30) Duskwood (18-30) Hillsbrad Foothills (20-30) Wetlands (20-30) Thousand Needles (25-35) Alterac Mountains (30-40) Arathi Highlands (30-40) Desolace (30-40) Stranglethorn Vale (30-45) Dustwallow Marsh (35-45) Badlands (35-45) Swamp of Sorrows (35-45) Feralas (40-50) Hinterlands (40-50) Tanaris (40-50) Searing Gorge (45-50) Azshara (45-55) Blasted Lands (45-55) Un'goro Crater (48-55) Felwood (48-55) Burning Steppes (50-58) Western Plaguelands (51-58) Deadwind Pass (55-60) Eastern Plaguelands (53-60) Winterspring (53-60) Moonglade (55-60) Silithus (55-60)
(Source Telarapedia)	(Source WoWWiki)

The score for zone count at release is 40-14 WoW over Rift.

A couple of caveats about the zone counts. Mathosia and Terminus, Rift's two initial zones, can only be revisited by starting a new character. WoW had three zones without much content at launch—Moonglade, Deadwind Pass, and Silithus.

WoW currently has 75 zones; 12 were added with The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King added another 12, and Cataclysm added 11 zones, nine new ones and two created by splitting existing ones.

It will be interesting to see if Trion Worlds is able to sustain the interest of players in Rift with such a low number of zones available to max level players.

WoW: Battle.net account merge incoming

2009-10-12T23:10:00.003-04:00

Blizzard announced today a deadline for the conversion of World of Warcraft accounts to Battle.net accounts: November 11, 2009. That gives WoW account holders 30 days to make the switch.

As an incentive, Blizzard is offering an in-game penguin pet.

In light of the high number of stolen WoW accounts it will be interesting to see how Battle.net compares in security. While we can hope that Battle.net accounts will be more secure, a few things come to mind.

Battle.net uses the primary email address as the account name. It may be somewhat easier to guess, or in Tolbold's case, very publicly known, which is why he's all over the security ramifications in Blizzard sabotages WoW account security.

Instead of taking Tobold's suggestion of setting up another email account for use with Battle.net, gmail subscribers can use the alias feature to make the Battle.net account name hard to guess. In gmail, you can add +anything to an email address and still receive the email, so if your email address is foo@gmail.com, you will also get any email sent to the alias foo+anything@gmail.com. Replace anything with something obscure and your Battle.net account name becomes as unguessable as your old WoW account name was. This is a convenient alternative to Tobold's suggestion of setting up another email account just for Battle.net.

I just used a gmail alias to set up a new Battle.net account, and it worked. (With one small glitch, the link in the first verification email failed, so I had Battle.net send a second verification email.)

Of course the problem remains that using an email address for the account name is a very bad choice. Email addresses are not usually considered to be private information and are much less well protected than passwords. For example, email addresses are often sold to third parties, thus increasing the risk of the address becoming public. Indeed, Blizzard is well aware of the problems with email addresses becoming known, as shown by this forum post about Fake E-mails from "Blizzard Entertainment":

Why am I receiving these e-mails? What can I do to ensure malicious parties do not have my e-mail address?
In most cases, e-mail addresses are gleaned from unofficial World of Warcraft web pages(guild websites, fan sites, etc) and social networking sites (Facebook, Myspace, etc). As such, you may wish to set-up a new, separate email address and register it to your account. When selecting the username and password for this new email address, ensure that these variables do not overlap with that of your WoW account or any other login type (guild websites, Facebook, MySpace, etc). Once this address is registered, do not use it for anything else: no additional registrations, no guild websites, no newsletter sign-ups, et al. Keep this address isolated.

First Blizzard tells people to protect their email addresses so they won't receive emails phishing for account info and then turns around with the new Battle.net and uses the email address as the login!

One indication of how bad the situation is with stolen WoW accounts is that the Blizzard Authenticator is being sold for $6.50 with free shipping. At that price Blizzard is making little if any money on them. It's cheaper for Blizzard to hand out the Authenticators essentially for free than to incur the support costs in dealing with customers whose accounts have been stolen.

To anyone who objects to the cost of the Authenticator: Blizzard charges $25.00 to move bits around if you purchase a Paid Character Transfer. Yet it will ship an actual physical object to you for $6.50, which is basically the cost of shipping. There's a reason for this: the Authenticators work. And by keeping accounts secure they save everyone grief and time. Well worth the money.

WoW: You vill play how ve vant you to

2009-10-04T15:18:00.001-04:00

Now that I've been playing WoW again for a bit, I've discovered that due to recent changes the game is a lot less alt-friendly for a player without a level 80 character. While there has always been a natural advantage in having a max-level character to pass items and gold to the alternates, the game has now added explicit benefits: there are new heirloom items that can be passed to any character on the account which boost experience gains. One heirloom, the Tome of Cold Weather Flight, allows flying in Northrend at level 68.

As a result, while I'd rather play the warlock, it made less sense to level it up from 41 than to first get the 70 shadow priest to 80 and start grinding for heirlooms. And the situation is even worse with the lower-level alts (yes, I'm an altoholic).

Of course the business reason for favoring the alts of dedicated players is to keep them engaged in WoW rather than wandering off to other games. While it's a bit frustrating for an atypical player like me to see certain play styles favored over others, in the end I decided to conform and play in the manner that Blizzard rewards with incentives.

But I'm not particularly happy about it.

Will Microsoft buy EA and cut the MMOs?

2009-10-02T18:58:00.003-04:00

"...if you really look at the data there's basically one [MMO] that's successful and everything else wouldn't meet our level or definition of commercial success."

–Shane Kim, head of Microsoft Games Studios in a February, 2008 interview with MTV Multiplayer.

Bruce On Games recently discussed the rumors about a possible acquisition in Microsoft to buy Electronic Arts? His main point is that the analysts are wrong to say that EA/Microsoft would be a bad fit.

He also examines how EA's current plight came to pass. Among the reasons:

"EA launched products onto the market that would not work because product quality made them uncompetitive. Warhammer Online is a prime example."

(I'd put Spore in this category as well.)

Another reason is mismanagement, as Bruce rather tactfully put it:

"Management of an organisation can be done efficiently at minimum cost. The British ran Imperial India with few civil servants, for instance. However it is also possible for management, because they have the power, to become self serving and overly expensive for what they do, with empire building, secretaries, bloated expenses and a pile of other ills. I think that perhaps EA are not quite the mean, lean management machine that they could be."

I'd had similar thoughts about EA's middle management after reading comments from developers in a couple of pieces at Gamasutra.

Bruce states that Microsoft (or any new owner) would fix the problems that have rendered EA unprofitible.

While Bruce doesn't discuss EA's RPG/MMO Group, returning to the Shane Kim quote above, Microsoft sees that beyond World of Warcraft in the MMO market, "everything else wouldn't meet our...definition of commercial success." This is borne out by Microsoft's history with MMOs:

December, 2003:	Asheron's Call repurchased by developer Turbine Entertainment Software.
February, 2004:	Mythica canceled.
June, 2004:	True Fantasy Live Online canceled.
December, 2005:	Asheron’s Call 2 closed.
May, 2006:	Vanguard repurchased by developer Sigil Games Online.
mid-late 2007:	Halo MMO canceled (under development by Ensemble Studios).
February, 2008:	Marvel Universe Online canceled. Cryptic Studios continued development as Champions Online.

If Microsoft acquires EA, it's likely that the MMOs will be closed, canceled, or spun off. Notwithstanding this hint that it was hiring for a 300,000-player game in May, Microsoft just isn't that into MMOs.

But what about BioWare, you say? They're awesome! Star Wars: The Old Republic is gonna be great!

It doesn't matter to the bean counters. Since it's still under development, Star Wars: The Old Republic is all cost and no revenue. The EA RPG/MMO Group's other titles, Warhammer Online, Dark Age of Camelot, and Ultima Online, all fall into Microsoft's category of not being commercially significant.

What will be the EA RPG/MMO Group's fate? Given its history with MMOs, and Microsoft's willingness to close such notable organizations as ACES Game Studio (Microsoft Flight Simulator, Microsoft Train Simulator) and Ensemble Studios, anything is possible. Even if the buyer isn't Microsoft the MMOs could still be at risk.

John Boyd's OODA loop and games

2009-10-01T14:44:00.000-04:00

The late John Boyd was a colorful and brilliant Colonel in the USAF whose work on military strategy included developing the concept of the OODA loop. OODA stands for observe, orient, decide, and act. The OODA loop originally described the behavioral process of military entities but has since been more widely applied. Its sequence of steps must be repeated to account for changing conditions, thus the loop.

There are a couple of ways the OODA loop applies to games.

The first, obviously, is artificial intelligence (AI) as used in games, since it can be argued that the OODA loop describes the way any intelligent entity functions, whether real or artificial. Of course AI in games is still terrible; in OODA terms the current AIs don't orient or decide well.

But the second, and most important, application of the OODA loop to games is to describe what's going on inside the head of the player.

Note the difference between playing a game and passively consuming content. When someone reads a book, or watches sports or a movie, the loop involves just observing and orienting, that is, watching the events unfold and fitting them into the ongoing narrative. Passive consumption of content involves just an OO loop.

In contrast, playing a game invokes the full OODA loop. The deciding and acting steps nicely describe the activities involved in play—think about how children play with toys.

The word flow has been used to describe the state when one is absorbed in a game in a satisfying way. That flow is the smooth functioning of the player's OODA loop, particularly the deciding and acting steps.

What happens when a player's OODA loop can't keep up with events? In some cases they end up becoming overwhelmed to the point of watching helplessly. Examples are found in action games like Tetris when the speed increases past the point where the player can keep up, or RTS games when facing a much stronger opponent. Many players are familiar with the feeling of their OODA loop becoming overwhelmed.

When a player's OODA loop becomes overwhelmed in the face of a superior opponent it's no fault of the game design. Nor is there a design fault in games which speed up and eventually overwhelm a player's OODA loop. But there are several ways that poor game design can break a player's OODA loop and thus cut off the feeling of flow.

I'll have more on how games can break a player's OODA loop, with specific examples, in another post.

The tenacity of spammers in WoW

2009-09-27T21:03:00.004-04:00

Last Monday I took the screenshot below of the spam in Stormwind made from dead bodies but waited so long to write about it that The Ancient Gaming Noob beat me to the punch with his story Corpse Spam in Stormwind.

I'd seen such spam in Stormwind before, but since I've not been around when when it was being created I'd wondered how the bodies were placed so accurately. TAGN answers that question:

I’ve sat and watch these URLs get spelled out. It looks like these bodies are just dropping out of the sky.

Obviously the spammers are using software to position the characters. I vaguely recall reading something about the WoW servers trusting the position information reported by the client; if true, the software can simply position a low level character in the air over the spot where the corpse is to be left and rely on falling damage to kill it.

At the time I took this screenshot I noticed that all the corpses have different names. The accounts being used may be filled with low level toons who are killed sequentially to produce the writing. If the number of characters per account is maxed out, not many accounts will be needed.

With all the recent discussion of impact in games, this corpse spam is an excellent example of the downside. The more ability a game gives a player to alter the game world, the greater the possibility for misuse. It's striking that WoW, which is the leading example of an unalterable theme park game world, still allows for this tiny bit of impact (a character's death leaves a corpse) which can be exploited by spammers. WoW is so popular that it's worthwhile for the spammers to spend the time and trouble to develop specialized software needed to create corpse spam.

On a related note, for the past few days I've been getting whispers from spammers pretending to be offering new free mounts. The spam attempts to send people to a website apparently purporting to be a Blizzard site in the hopes that players will log in using their game accounts. Of course their passwords are immediately stolen, their game character's stuff is sold off and the gold sent to another character operated by the spammer.

So anyone thinking about buying gold in World of Warcraft should consider this: Since Blizzard doesn't permit gold sales, the companies you buy it from get it through fraud, theft, and other illegal means. In buying gold you are endorsing and encouraging crooks.

Free Realms demographics

2009-09-22T13:54:00.003-04:00

We learned a few things about Free Realms from John Smedley's keynote at GDC Austin last week. While he didn't give numbers for the number of concurrent players or how many people make up the fifty percent of in-game store users who make a purchase, he did reveal some user demographics.

From Xemu's blog, AGDC 2009: Smedley on Free Realms:

Free Realms player age

Age	%
Under 13	51
13-17	29
18-24	12
25-34	5
35-44	2
Total	99

More after the jump.

Free Realms player gender

Gender	%
Male	67
Female	33

Free Realms store sales by gender

Gender	%
Male	32
Female	68

WoW: Patch 3.2.0 tries to segregate twinks

2009-09-20T10:26:00.006-04:00

With all the talk about twinked alts in WoW at We Fly Spitfires (Twinking Is Just Another Form Of Cheating) followed by Welcome to Spinksville (Twinks, Heirlooms, and Morality) and Tobold's MMORPG Blog (Twinking and the economy) I was a little bummed out. My main is only level 70 and so doesn't yet have access to heirlooms for the alts. But then as part of preparing to play after more than a year away, I saw this in the notes for WoW's patch 3.2.0:

Players with experience gains turned off who compete in Battlegrounds will face off only against other players with experience gains turned off.

Blizzard is trying to segregate the twinks! And why will twinks have XP turned off?

Players will now be awarded experience for completing objectives and actions that yield honor in Battlegrounds (honorable kills not included).

By boosting the XP awarded in Battlegrounds, Blizzard has created the incentive for players with twinked characters who want to remain in a certain tier to pay the 10 gold to shut off the XP gain (which stops gains from any source, not just battlegrounds). Once the XP is shut off, Blizzard knows which ones to isolate into separate BGs. And they'll want to be separate, with competent teammates rather than clueless PUGs. Pre-mades without having to be pre-made!

I'm pretty pumped, since after my time in Warhammer Online I wanted to use BGs more for leveling the alts. Not only has the XP awarded in Battlegrounds been increased, but if the other changes work then the worst of the twinks will be gone. And even if they don't move to their own twink leagues, the changes are a clear sign that Blizzard recognizes that twinks are an issue in battlegrounds.

Return to WoW: It's a lot of work!

2009-09-19T21:51:00.001-04:00

Barriers to re-entry

It's in some ways much easier to start a new game than to return to an MMO after a long absence. I've been away from WoW since May, 2008, so of course a lot has changed due to an expansion and major patches in the interim. And one forgets things, too.

With a new game you just install and start playing. All fun and no work. Of course, since you're just learning the game, you don't always do things in the most efficient manner. And if the game is still in beta or has just launched, there won't be as much information around to help as there is for a more mature game.

But an old game, wow, it's work! Blizzard doesn't delete your characters in order to make it easier to pick up where you left off, but still it's taken a few hours just to get ready to play! Why? Here's a list:

Check the main and alts. What are the classes, levels, and professions. What's in the bags and banks? Talents have been wiped, oh joy. Need to re-talent. At least most of my action bar settings were saved!
What changed with the expansion? What's this about glyphs? Do I have an alt that can become a scribe? Should I start a Death Knight?
I can't bear the default UI; install addons. I didn't keep a list, what addons did I used to run? Some are abandoned, which ones do I use instead? What new ones does everyone use? What functionality is now in the native UI? What was the name of that addon with the boat schedules? (Nauticus.) Configure the addons.
Cool, I wanted to see Stormwind harbor. What's this portal in Ironforge leading to Blasted Lands? What else has changed in the transportation network? Hmm, maybe I should read the patch notes. Wow, a lot has changed. I'd heard about the earlier mounts, but being able to swim while mounted rocks! Dual-spec, hmm, may need to save up for that.

You get the picture.

And this is a game that's known as an easy, mainstream MMO.

Missing Kotick's Point: The resurgence of PC gaming

2009-09-18T06:30:00.004-04:00

GameSpot has an article Activision games to bypass consoles covering CEO Robert Kotick's presentation in San Francisco. The article quotes him as saying that his goal "was to take all the fun out of making video games."

I've seen several references which conflate that quote with another in the article:

"We are very good at keeping people focused on the deep depression."

But taken in context the meaning is different:

The executive said that he has tried to instill into the company culture "skepticism, pessimism, and fear" of the global economic downturn, adding, "We are very good at keeping people focused on the deep depression."

The depression he refers to isn't the lack of fun, it's the economy, stupid!

If this wasn't bad enough, by focusing on the "fun" remark, an even bigger point is missed:

"expect many of our products to be playable independent of a console," specifically saying he'd been impressed with media hub functionalities shown by 1080p TVs that let users stream content from their PCs.

That's right, PCs. This...is...huge! The CEO of major publisher is stating that contrary to the common wisdom that PC gaming is dead, he intends to start moving products off consoles to PCs.

There's a long history of friction between game developers and console companies. Not only has access been limited (Nintendo approves just a few third party developers) and development costly, but the console makers collect hefty royalties on each unit of the game sold.

Add in the cost to sell downloadable content through the console's online stores (and in Sony's case, the PlayStation Network Bandwidth Fee) and Kotick's motive is clear. By moving to the open platform of PCs, Activision Blizzard can control the distribution of its DLC and reduce cost by selling in its own online store, Battle.net.

Battle.net 2.0 was announced in August at Blizzcon and covered very thoroughly by Gamasutra in The Man Behind Battle.net: Greg Canessa Speaks. Canessa worked previously at Microsoft where he was "one of the executives over Xbox Live" and speaks with firsthand knowledge of the limitations of the one-size-fits-all online platforms offered on consoles.

Canessa discusses the opportunities inherent in deeply integrating online services into each game in a custom-fitted way, starting with StarCraft II. Matchmaking, ladders, and leagues will be implemented and the mod community will be supported. He goes on to say:

"What we're doing with the marketplace -- and that's again a post-ship future -- is to provide a common aggregation point like the iPhone's App Store..."

As shown by SOE's experience with Free Realms, microtransactions work best when buying is tightly integrated into the game, which can be done better on PC than consoles. Compared with the online and DLC possibilites available on the PC, consoles start looking restricting and outmoded.

Returning to the original Kotick article, the big news was the resurgence of the PC platform at the expense of consoles. Even though bypass consoles was in the title, that point was missed by many.

John Smedley on Free Realms at GDC Austin

2009-09-17T14:32:00.005-04:00

Cherry-picking the coverage of Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley's keynote at GDC Austin. Most of the bulleted items are text from the articles; the direct Smedley quotes are in italics.

From GameSpot, Free Realms PS3 due mid-2010, EyeToy support 'likely':

The biggest surprise to the developers is that while two-thirds of the audience is made up of boys, two-thirds of the [microtransaction] purchasers are girls.
75 percent of the game's traffic is driven by TV.
The company is so pleased with the product that it's preparing another product along the same audience-expanding lines
Quote: "There are some upsides to kids. They don't call customer service, almost ever. And they don't talk on the forums."

From Gamasutra, GDC Austin: Free Realms And The Attention Span Challenge:

Free Realms players now play for about 20 minutes per session.
"We found very quickly that kids had their own way of playing a game, but we also need a way to monetize them" said Smedley. "...Commerce to kids is hard -- a lot harder than we thought it would be."

From Virtual Worlds News, a preview written before the keynote, Free Realms Tallies 5 Million Users; No, Really:

"Because kids' mind [s]hare is so constantly inundated with new games, new things on TV, it's literally necessary to remind them [about the game] on a daily or weekly basis," Smedley says.
"We've instrumented literally every single aspect of Free Realms in ways that few if any game has ever done," Smedley says. "We report every click every person does when they register."
[The collected data is analyzed by a] team of five full-time data crunchers
51 percent of Free Realms gamers are under 13, with around 75 percent under 18.

From austin360.com, Sony Online president talks kids, women and MMOs:

the company erred early on in giving too much free content away when the game launched
the company is working on a PlayStation 3 console version of “FreeRealms” due out sometime in the middle of 2010 and is also planning a Facebook-based online game.

From Xemu's blog, AGDC 2009: Smedley on Free Realms:

Peak pop around 5:30 PM. Huge spikes when TV commercials run. Commercial = 5 mins later in game. These are not just new customers but returning ones, need to remind them to come back!

I'm still waiting on the coverage teased by Massively, and will edit to include anything significant.

Update 1: Added a few bullet points.
Update 2: And another.

Do casual gamers care about fairness?

2009-09-15T23:08:00.016-04:00

The Rudolfo's Speedy Kicks nerf

Do players of casual games care about fairness and equal treatment? Or are they so blasé that they remain unaware of any disparity in treatment that might give some players an advantage? Can publishers of casual games get away with deliberately withholding information in order to keep players ignorant and happy? With the case of the Rudolfo's Speedy Kicks item nerf in its game Free Realms, Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) may be on the way to finding out.

Summary

A somewhat hard to get item, Rudolfo's Speedy Kicks offers a speed boost to a player wearing it. SOE reduced the speed boost on the item, and then after the predictable complaints, restored the original speed boost, but only for players who already had the item. Thus players with the old item have an advantage in all the timed minigames where it may be used. Among other disadvantages, players with the inferior version of the item will never be able to reach the top spots on the leaderboards for those minigames.

Subsequent posts from the Community Relations Manager (CRM) for Free Realms revealed that it was a deliberate decision to create two classes of players: those with the faster original item, and all other players who will receive the new slower item. While complaints from disadvantaged players have caused the CRM to avoid conducting events that might involve use of the item, the relatively mild uproar hasn't caused SOE to resolve the issue and restore fairness and the equality of players.

SOE sells items within Free Realms via microtransactions that confer advantage to the buyer. Players seem to have accepted this since any disadvantaged player can opt to spend real money to buy the item. In the case of Rudolfo's Speedy Kicks, players with the inferior version have no recourse. As the issue is still being played out, it's too early to know how customer satisfaction will be affected.

One of the benefits of paid membership is getting ranked on the leaderboards. Making top spots on the timed minigame leaderboards unavailable to the majority of players won't help membership numbers. Zam's wiki has over 60 entries in its timed minigame category, but some are job-related and thus preclude wearing Rudolfo's Speedy Kicks. The large number of timed minigames indicate that they are an important component of the Free Realms experience, and at least several dozen are affected. Since timed minigames are just one of the activities affected by the speed disparity there is ample potential for unhappiness.

The changes to Rudolfo's Speedy Kicks were not listed in the update notes, and were only acknowledged by the CRM in response to player inquiries. SOE has a policy for Free Realms of limiting information about updates to a brief summary of highlights. This stands in stark contrast to the detailed information about updates made available by SOE for its other games (which follows standard practice in the online game market).

The broader issue is not that a specific class of players is being disadvantaged by this particular change, but that by witholding details about changes to the game, all Free Realms players are disadvantaged compared to players of games with full disclosure. It's as if casual gamers are to be kept fat, dumb and happy: that by offering many distractions in the form of activities and new content (fat) while hiding details about game changes with negative impacts (dumb), players can be kept happy. It remains to be seen if such a policy can succeed.

Details

Info tooltip for the male version
of Rudolfo's Speedy Kicks

To get Rudolfo's Speedy Kicks, a player must complete three collections. These collections, Postman Packages and Envelopes, Postman Postcards, and Postman Stamps, are completed by gathering items from resource nodes that spawn in a limited number of locations and remain invisible unless the player is doing the Postman job. (Free Realms currently offers 15 jobs for subscribers, 10 of which, including Postman, are available to free players).

Due to the difficulty of finding the item spawns (called Mail Supplies and Mail Supplies <Rare Collection>), it's common to reach level 20 of the Postman job (the level required to wear Rudolfo's Speedy Kicks) before completing the collections needed to acquire the shoes.

On 8/14 SOE released an upgrade to Free Realms which nerfed Rudolfo's Speedy Kicks. In keeping with SOE's policy of hiding the detailed information about Free Realms updates from players, no indication of this was given in the update notes.

On 8/18 the original speed was restored. Again, no mention was made in the maintenance announcement, but in response to a player-created topic heralding the restoration of the former speed, the CRM posted [reqires login]:

Those with Speedy Kicks have the speed boost back. We may make it so any future versions of the kicks will be at the reduced rate, but your's are good to go.

On 8/19 a topic was created that confirmed the reduced speed of new Rudolfo's Speedy Kicks and in that topic kadewolfspotter noted that [reqires login]:

...the referee confirmed that this is the policy moving forward. New kicks are level 11 speed boost vs. the originals which are level 13 speed boost.

Within just a few hours posts were added to this topic discussing the fairness of the change and its impact on disadvantaged players, as well as the lack of disclosure by SOE about changes to Free Realms.

Also on 8/19, kadewolfspotter posted [reqires login] a link to the video below which shows the speed difference between players using the two versions of Rudolfo's Speedy Kicks:

Video showing comparison tests of the old and new versions of Rudolfo's Speedy Kicks. As of this writing it had 1,333 views.

Discussion continued over the next several days in both of the previously-linked topics. On 8/25 the CRM posted [reqires login]:

We did allow those players who already have the shoes to keep them. There aren't that many of them out there when compared to the number of people who play on a regular basis.

The biggest issue was that the change was not announced or explained properly. FR is not a typical adult MMO and we don't post every change that gets added to the game like other titles.

On 8/26 the CRM posted [reqires login]:

...I was going to do a postman run as a community event, but given all the Speedy Kick uproar changed things.

There have been no developments since 8/26.

Conclusion

SOE has admitted to a policy of treating its casual gamers differently than other MMO players. This affects not only current players of Free Realms but also potential players of its forthcoming casual Star Wars MMO. Its actions make clear that it's unconcerned by the potential business ramifications of disadvantaging the great majority of Free Realms players in favor of a tiny minority, since if the disadvantaged are kept ignorant they won't know any better and so won't complain. An assumption has been made that equal treatment isn't important to casual players and those in younger demographics, but anyone with kids knows that children can be particularly sensitive to unfair treatment, so this policy seems counterproductive for a game heavily marketed to younger players.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to FreeRealmsInsider for the video on YouTube, and ZAM's Free Realms Wiki was a handy reference. While I've specifically quoted and linked kadewolfspotter's comments on SOE's Free Realms forums, several other posters provided information and insights; see the topics linked above.

I've refrained from mentioning by name SOE's Community Relations Manager for Free Realms since they are simply communicating policy decisions made by others.

Update on 9/17: This post was written before the GDC Austin keynote in which SOE president John Smedley said:

"There are some upsides to kids. They don't call customer service, almost ever. And they don't talk on the forums."

For a summary of his remarks, see John Smedley on Free Realms at GDC Austin.

It's all Tolkien's fault

2009-09-15T12:49:00.000-04:00

Yesterday in Game worlds and geographic realism I talked about the overuse of mountains as zone borders. A quick look at this Google image search shows that it's all Tolkien's fault.

Game worlds and geographic realism

2009-09-14T17:23:00.001-04:00

One of the things I've always disliked about Warhammer Online is its game world. There are two problems with it:

First, the way the game zones are laid out is quite artificial. Each faction's quest hubs are strung along roads that wind through the zones in a completely arbitrary way. The RvR "lakes" are plopped down in the middle, with terrain barriers to prevent entry except at a few select locations.

The second problem with WAR's game world is that each campaign, i.e. Dwarfs vs. Greenskins, stands alone: that is, they aren't part of a larger continent. As a result, there is no world map of WAR. What's worse, even within the campaigns the way the zones themselves are arranged is essentially a graph: nodes (circles) connected by edges (lines).

For example, a dwarf in the starting zone of Ekrund follows the Order road east through Mount Bloodhorn and further east through a zone portal to Marshes of Madness. There the road turns north and leads into Barak Varr, where the road forks. If the left fork is taken, and the Destruction road is followed northwest, a zone portal is reached leading west. Go through the portal and poof! you're back in south central Ekrund, heading east!

The end result is that while on a small scale the graphics strive for realism, the contrived layout of the medium and large scale geography in WAR ruins any realistic effect.

In contrast, World of Warcraft's game world is consistent with the exception of the Deeprun Tram, which runs northwest from Stormwind when it should run north-northeast. WoW does suffer from overuse of bottlenecks and view blocks at zone boundaries, but these result from technical issues like palette switching and scene complexity. The believability of the original WoW continents is enhanced by the several zone boundaries without mountains or other obvious bottlenecks or view blocks: Elwynn Forest/Westfall/Duskwood, Hillsbrad Foothills/Alterac Mountains, and Darkshore/Ashenvale. Even traveling from The Barrens through Thousand Needles through The Shimmering Flats to Tanaris, the transitions didn't seem too contrived.

Perhaps a bit surprisingly, the Free Realms game world has a fairly believable geographical layout. It's far better than WAR's, and at least the equal of WoW. While it overuses mountains as zone borders, it does have some rather large contiguous areas without mountains. But FR's geography may need to be re-evaluated after the expansions. There are instances on the borders of the current game world which extend pretty far and may overlap the expansion areas.

To sum up: nothing breaks suspension of disbelief and says game more than geographic inconsistency in the game world.

Free Realms adds Take Me There

2009-09-11T17:32:00.001-04:00

Free Realms keeps on removing the tedium. The latest innovation in yesterday's update is the Take Me There button in the quest tracker, which when clicked automatically runs you to the next location in the quest. It's for overland travel to major quest stages, not for during quests like the ones that have you track down a few items.

While the pathing is a bit inefficient and doesn't make use of warpstones, it's still useful as you can be chatting or making other use of the time during travel. Also added: any icon in the Atlas now is a teleport destination!

Take Me There brings back memories of WoW's AutoTravel addon, which worked until patch 1.6. It was a great addon which let you define paths and waypoints which it would automatically follow when you selected a destination.

Return to WoW: First disappointment

2009-09-10T13:00:00.003-04:00

WowAce Updater is gone. Bummer. My return to WoW starts on a down note and I haven't even logged in.

When I last played WoW I came to favor the WowAce mods. Unlike monolithic addon bundles such as Cosmos and CTMod, WowAce is a mix and match collection of addons. WowAce doesn't force an entire UI change on a player, instead you choose just the addons you want.

Another advantage of separate addons happens after patch days: a monolithic project often waits to release until all its components are updated, while individual addons allow you to install updates as they are released, so at least you have some functionality.

Back in the day, the WowAce Updater allowed one to pick the addons one wanted and it would install them while checking the dependencies to ensure you had the common libraries needed by the addons. It kept the addons up to date too, downloading new versions when needed. WowAce Updater simplified the whole issue of managing many individual addons down to just a few clicks. It was slick, and free.

And that was the problem. WowAce Updater (WAU) was so easy to use and good at its task that the bandwidth costs grew to exceed what the supporters of WowAce could afford. WowAce is a development community and repository, not a release site. So WAU was disabled and the Curse Client substituted instead.

Not only was WAU the better program, but the free version of Curse Client is both adware and crippleware. To even approach WAU's functionality with Curse Client one must be a Curse.com Premium member, at a base cost of $4.95/month. When I was actively playing Warhammer Online I used Curse Client for my addons. I went back recently to update them and first had to update Curse Client only to find that it no longer updates all addons with a single click. That feature has been moved behind the pay wall.

Finally I get to the point of this post: companies that leave in the hands of intermediaries aspects of a customer's experience that could easily be brought in-house. While outsourcing functionality often makes sense, the game industry has cases where the goals of game companies and their intermediaries aren't well aligned. Typically the intermediary's goal is to make a customer's experience worse before making it better.

Curse.com is making making the free Curse Client as bad as it can possibly get away with in order to maximize the contrast with the paid client. While this makes sense for Curse, it doesn't make sense for Blizzard. Blizzard would be well served to incorporate addon management functionality into its forthcoming improvements to Battle.net. This would provide support to all Blizzard's games and offer the best experience to customers at the lowest cost.

Game industry intermediaries whose revenue is derived from a two-tier scheme where bad service is free and good service requires a paid subscription have a problem: this isn't a viable long-term business model.

Fallen Earth beta quick impressions

2009-09-09T11:36:00.004-04:00

I made it into the Fallen Earth beta shortly before it closed and am finally posting my impressions of the short time I spent in the game.

The tutorial intro sets up the story well, but the high-end weapons and armor disappear once the game starts, which is a bit of a disappointment.
Mounts seem only to have a cash requirement, and it's low. Since there is no level minimum they can be purchased early. I got a mount easily at level 4 without really knowing what I was doing, and saw level 2 characters with mounts.
Combat is not smooth. It feels laggy, either due to server issues or unoptimized graphics in the client. This is a major issue due to the FPS nature of combat with the need to aim.
Jumping: are physics used at all? The way jumping works it seems like there are no physics in the game.
The game has two modes: normal and Aim mode. You can't really fight in normal mode, and you have no mouse cursor in Aim mode, so while in that mode you can only interact with objects by aiming at them and clicking. In normal mode the camera is usually third-person, and first-person is best for combat in Aim mode (although the camera can be adjusted to be one or the other at any time). Transitioning between normal and Aim mode requires a keypress; the camera can be set to autoswitch at the same time between third- and first-person. As someone who hates all things modal in user interfaces, I found the need to switch modes inconvenient and clumsy. The modal interface was my main dislike in the game.
With six weapon slots added to what appear to be numerous combat abilities, it looks like high level characters will have overflowing action bars and hotkey assignment issues.
As a whole quests offer nothing new. One quest supplied a bunch of NPC companions for a squad fight. There seemed to be too many timed quests at the starting quest hub which were a pain to do before getting a mount. Solo questlines can culiminate in group quests which block progress until you can find a group.
Crafting seems deep and interesting. My impression was that almost every useful item in the game can be crafted. The crafting interface and mechanic is good: multiple items can be queued up and crafting takes place simultaneously while you do other things. This is necessary because the times to craft items are much longer than in MMOs where you must remain stationary while crafting. Crafting is also useful, I was able to craft items for my character that were upgrades.
Resource gathering is easy to level once appropriate nodes are found. This was a bit of an issue in the starting area as the non-crafting quests lead to areas with resources nodes that are too high for new characters to harvest. There are numerous low-level nodes for new characters, but they were concentrated in just a couple of areas which were away from the locations used by the standard quest lines.
Abilities are skill-based, one assigns points to abilities. Experience seems to be gained from using any ability, including crafting and harvesting.
The world is large. Getting a mount as soon as possible is a must.
Away from roads the world is fairly empty. Once I had a mount I immediately headed out into the wilderness to explore a bit of the game world. It was mostly empty, with only the occasional mobs to avoid or nodes to harvest.
The graphics are in need of tuning, some towns would kill the framerate. They're also a bit drab. It's the desert, yet not sunny due to a dull gray overcast.
The implementation of the post-apocalyptic scenario in the sparsely-populated desert makes far less sense than Fallout 3's metro-D.C. setting. For example, there are the remains of a monorail system which meanders around the desert like an amusement park ride instead of running in relatively straight shots between (the ruins of) population centers. Remains of railroad lines terminated for no apparent reason. As a result I found Fallen Earth's game world far less believable than Fallout 3's.
With just one server the beta was very active. You'd run into lots of other players in the world, and there was so much chat traffic it was a problem; the random chitchat would obscure real discussion of the game.
The support for Fallen Earth seems decent. Patches seem frequent and GMs are available, although one of the GMs I chatted with couldn't tell me the meaning of one of the symbols on the minimap, or even how to find the key (it's in the filtering function of the main map.)

While it's nice to see new MMO ideas from an independent company, in my case the cons outweighed the pros, so instead of jumping into Fallen Earth at release I'll sit back to see if the cons are addressed.

Pros: Crafting; ability system; XP and skill-based leveling; cheap mounts; not another fantasy scenario
Cons: modal UI; jerky, unresponsive combat; quests

The Sims 3: Pre-made Sims Explained

2009-09-08T20:40:00.002-04:00

I picked up The Sims 3 recently, and not long after I started playing I found myself asking a FAQ: how does one get a Sim from the Library back into Create a Sim?

It turns out not to be that hard, but the relationship among the game components and the various storage sites for Sims is hard to understand at first. To clarify, I made this graph to show how Sims can be moved around the various parts of The Sims 3 (click for full-size image):

To get a Sim from the Library into Create a Sim without using a mod:

Put a copy of the Sim into a house, play the game as that Sim.
Click on a dresser and select Plan Outfit. This enters Create a Sim in single Sim mode.
In Create a Sim, click Save Sim to Bin.

The Sim will now appear in the Pre-made Sims list (AKA the Bin).

The Bin stores single Pre-made Sims. Towns, the Library, and the Clipboard in Edit Town mode all store households of Sims. The Clipboard is temporary storage; apparently Sims stored only there can be lost if not saved elsewhere before quitting Edit Town mode.

The worst quest in WoW?

2009-08-30T17:42:00.005-04:00

Topless Robot has The 10 Most Legitimate Gripes Players Have About World of Warcraft.

I have to chuckle at the memory of one of the worst quests in WoW because it offers a deadly combination of two of the gripes: nonsensically low drop rates and Murlocs. Called The Star, the Hand and the Heart, it's available to both factions; Alliance picks it up in Badlands. It involves travel to three widely-separated locations on two continents. But here's the clincher -- on an island off the coast of Dustwallow Marsh, one must grind Murlocs for a low drop rate item called Enchanted Sea Kelp. This can take anywhere from twenty minutes to two hours! The comments on this item are a hoot; my favorite:

This part of the chain can take hours and hours of mindless grinding. The droprate is so low that you can even outlevel the quest before this actually drops.

On Murlocs!

Guild Wars product confusion

2009-08-30T07:24:00.000-04:00

In a comment at Syp's When Is It Too Late To Begin A MMO?, Brian 'Psychochild' Green mentions that the complex Guild Wars product line leads to confusion:

With so many expansions, I’m not sure what to buy, exactly.

I ran into this myself. No wonder:

...NCSoft published at least two dozen different editions of Guild Wars...

After examining GuildWiki and the NCsoft Store I decided to get them all, which means buying Guild Wars: The Complete Collection, but it's a Europe-only product and the best one can do in North America is Guild Wars Trilogy, purchasing Eye of the North separately.

In contrast, Firaxis has always done this well. It's now offering Sid Meier's Civilization IV: The Complete Edition which bundles everything: Civilization IV and the expansions Warlords amd Beyond the Sword, along with Civilization IV: Colonization.

Did WoW contribute to the demise of Ensemble Studios?

2009-08-15T14:49:00.003-04:00

Like many, I was shocked when Microsoft announced the closure of Ensemble Studios. But I began to understand when Dusty Monk blogged about the effect World of Warcraft had on the folks at Ensemble Studios (Lessons from Titan – 2 Years on a cancelled MMO):

In 2005, pretty much all of Ensemble Studios was enthralled with World of Warcraft. We all were playing it pretty much every night. We were talking about it all day. And we were, to a man, convinced we could build that game and more. And therein lay the key. We wanted to build that game.

Microsoft has devoted most of its gaming efforts of late to the console market, and on PC, it has canceled or sold off its MMO projects. Apparently it wasn't good for Ensemble to be enamored of a type of project with little appeal to its owner, Microsoft.

I ran across this back in April or so, but Syp's recent item about NCsoft's modest goal for Aion to be the number two MMO after WoW prompted me to post this. Like Microsoft in the 1990s, WoW is the 900 pound gorilla whose MMO market share has attracted numerous competitors who haven't succeeded in grabbing its share. Unlike Microsoft, though, Blizzard hasn't used underhanded tactics, and has thus far maintained its share legitimately.

The example of Ensemble Studios may prove that NCsoft has the correct goal for Aion.

Wallace & Gromit: A great series marred by horrid controls on the PC

2009-08-09T15:17:00.005-04:00

Telltale's Wallace & Gromit series is great but for one thing: the controls.

It's shocking that Telltale made a point and click adventure game where you can't point and click. That's right, on PC, you have to steer your character around using the keyboard!

Another issue is the flakiness of the brackets that show up when mousing over an interactable object; sometimes the brackets show, and sometimes they don't. They're a bit slow to pop up which means you can miss an important object entirely if you move the cursor too fast. Finally, the area that triggers the display of the brackets is sometimes just a portion of the area they enclose.

And finally, Wallace & Gromit suffers from the constrained camera that plagues all of Telltale's releases to date. All camera positions and angles are preset; you have no control over the camera or when cameras change. This interferes with exploring and understanding the game environment, and the sudden camera switches can be frustrating. Games aren't television, and Telltale should stop trying to make them like television. At the very least, allow a free camera option for more advanced players.

But don't let these issues stop you from enjoying this delightful series, particularly anyone who is a fan of adventure games or Wallace & Gromit.

[Image © Telltale Games. Used without permission.]

Empire: Total War quick take

2009-07-05T13:48:00.004-04:00

I picked Empire: Total War up recently and while slowly working through the Road to Independence campaign got to my first sea battle. Some quick reactions to sea combat:

1. What is up with the controls? They're terrible! When you order a ship to turn you can barely see the turn indicator unless you are zoomed in close. At one point I had two ships grouped and instructed them to turn right, but they both turned left.

2. I won the battle but elected to hunt down the routing French sloop to practice a bit more. The damaged sloop could make speed while sailing directly into the wind! It should not have had headway at all. My sloop had to tack, of course, and with sails at battle level could not keep up, needing full sail to stay with the routing French sloop.

3. I was appalled when I saw and heard the tutorial instructions that spoke of "zig-zagging" instead of tacking. However, now that I've seen that the sailing simulation is crap I understand why the term wasn't used.

This title is my first exposure to this series. I bought it because of the high metacritic score and good reviews. It's not a bad game, but so far I don't feel it's living up to the scores and reviews.

Except for the graphics (which are of course dated now) Rise of Nations is still unmatched in the category of historical RTS games. In particular, the UI and controls (both land and sea) in RoN are far superior to E:TW.

[This was also posted to GameFAQs.]

TMZ.com ads are spreading PDF exploits too!

2009-06-26T03:11:00.006-04:00

On Monday I posted about a PDF trojan downloaded from an ad server.

Tonight I saw another one, this time from TMZ.com.

Like last time, I took a look:


% ls -l 710.pdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 uid gid 14720 2009-06-26 02:44 710.pdf
% file 710.pdf
710.pdf: PDF document, version 1.1
% cksum 710.pdf
279936831 14720 710.pdf
% strings -a 710.pdf | less
var bd = "10%32%118%97%114%32%86%121%103%76%78%100%106%32%61%32%110%101%119...etc.

It looks very much like the last one (which I deleted), even being the same size. The var bd stuff is the payload, which is a (Javascript?) text string containing what appear to be the encoded binary exploit code.

Firefox history contained two URLs, with path components of /kn/in.php and /kn/pdf.php, both from the same server.

> host s.hhxzao.info
s.hhxzao.info has address 64.34.162.71
s.hhxzao.info has address 64.34.172.142
s.hhxzao.info has address 66.135.37.21

> host 64.34.162.71
71.162.34.64.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer sever3.adv-basesrv.net.
> host 64.34.172.142
142.172.34.64.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer server2.advert-base.net.
> host 66.135.37.21
21.37.135.66.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer server1.advert-base.net.

Look familiar? It should, it's the same outfit as last time!

Wikipedia's entry for TMZ.com say it "has major corporate backing" and names AOL/Time Warner. As I cited from Another virus infection, courtesy of Yahoo News in the prior post:

Major web sites like Yahoo.com and Boston.com are infecting thousands, if not hundred thousands of computers with trojans, back doors, and other viruses, through some of their ad service providers.

The scope and breadth of this is startling, and it's been going on for months!

What gives? Why aren't people up in arms? If the Internet trade press has covered this, please let me know; I haven't seen anything. Is scandalous news being covered up?

Update: I moved the 710.pdf file to a Windows machine and scanned it with both Trend Micro HouseCall and AVG Free and neither one found a thing.

Update 2: See Steps To Prevent Gumblar / Martuz / Nine-Ball for things you can do to stay safe.

Ad servers being used to spread exploits

2009-06-22T20:55:00.005-04:00

Tonight I went to look at Blue's News to see what's up in gaming today. Firefox popped up a dialog wanting to save a file called 941.pdf. It's not the first time this has happened, but this time I decided, sure, since I'm on Ubuntu, let's have a look at the thing.

> ls -l 941.pdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 uid gid 14720 2009-06-22 20:14 941.pdf
> file 941.pdf
941.pdf: PDF document, version 1.1
> evince 941.pdf
Error: PDF file is damaged - attempting to reconstruct xref table...
>

Sure looks fishy.

Running 'strings -a' showed some Javascript that included a long string containing the payload. Next I looked into the machine that served up the file.

> host w.eaaxra.info
w.eaaxra.info has address 64.34.162.71
w.eaaxra.info has address 64.34.172.142
w.eaaxra.info has address 66.135.37.21
> host 64.34.162.71
71.162.34.64.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer sever3.adv-basesrv.net.
> host 64.34.172.142
142.172.34.64.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer server2.advert-base.net.
> host 66.135.37.21
21.37.135.66.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer server1.advert-base.net.

Searching on adv-basesrv.net didn't turn up much, but a search on advert-base.net led to this blog from April 9th, Another virus infection, courtesy of Yahoo News which opens:

Major web sites like Yahoo.com and Boston.com are infecting thousands, if not hundred thousands of computers with trojans, back doors, and other viruses, through some of their ad service providers. When will the people in charge of these web sites wake up and start screening the ads that they are serving?

Apparently the blogger over there was infected, and after cleaning up he traced his infection back to good old advert-base.net.

So after two and a half months, this advertising outfit is still spreading exploits in addition to the ads. Why is such an irresponsible company still in business?

To think that censorship stunts art, it helps to not have seen Hitchcock's Psycho

2009-06-19T12:35:00.006-04:00

In The nascent art form, in which Dustin Sklavos asks "Are video games art?", he also writes:

I'm not one of those "old films are the best films" blah blah jackasses; for my own enjoyment and education, I generally don't watch anything made before 1970.

But one of my favorite examples is in a French film I watched in one of my classes, Francois Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player from 1960. There's a scene in the bedroom where the main character has just had relations with a prostitute, they're lying in bed together, and her breasts are exposed. They're having a conversation, and the prostitute says something to the effect of "look at me, I'm an American" before covering up her breasts with the sheet. Keep in mind that in 1960 with the Hays Code still active, this scene would never have made it to America. So if anything, what you learn from this bit—in context—is that censorship stunts art, and the French will mock us for it.

[My bold.]

Or they might mock someone for not having seen Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, with its infamous shower scene, which is also from 1960. The shower scene has its own lengthy section in Wikipedia's page for Psycho where it's described as "one of the most famous scenes in cinema history". (Indeed, searching for hitchcock psycho shower scene returns about 242,000 hits on Google.) The shower scene alone utterly demolishes any notion that censorship stunts art.

That limitations can spark creativity might not occur to someone arguing that, while there's plenty of violence, what games currently lack is more sexual content.

Shamefully, Slashdot used the Sklavos piece as the basis for its story Censored Video Game Content Stifles Artistry.

Thank God it's Fryday!

2009-04-20T18:18:00.013-04:00

Since I play Pryo a lot in Team Fortress 2, I made this spray using GIMP and Inkscape.

I couldn't find a good source for the circular pyro logo (hint, hint, Valve!) so I made one using Inkscape. Once imported to GIMP, a layer with a brick texture from CG Textures was added behind to make the logo less bland. The logo was reversed from its normal appearance on the Pyro's suit to improve the composition.

The orange lighting on the Pyro was achieved by making a simple custom map using the Hammer Editor in Valve's Source SDK. The custom map contained only a raised platform, a ramp up to it, and an orange light source somewhere below the Pyro's knee level, so as to illuminate the underside of the flamethrower (as you can see, I should have used several).

Posing the Pyro was a little tricky; I wanted the normal, non-taunting stance and wasn't sure how to get the third-person front view while in the game. It turns out that at the end of the taunt animation, the normal stance is shown for a fraction of a second before the view switches from third-person back to the normal first-person view. After many taunts and screen captures I managed to get some usable ones.

Lettering made use of Valve's TrueType font that ships with TF2 overlaid with flame textures from Mega-Tex Studios. I had tried various other GIMP filters and methods to make flaming text and didn't like the results.

The final step was to export a TIFF file and create the spray using VTFEdit. This spray has transparency; the tutorial Create Team Fortress 2 Sprays with Transparency was most helpful.

It's not perfect, but good enough, and has been satisfying and fun to spray in TF2. If you'd like to use this spray yourself, download the .vtf and .vmt files and place them in the folder Steam/SteamApps/[your_steam_ID]/team fortress 2/tf/materials/VGUI/logos/