Multiverse Developer Newsletter Number #4

Multiverse Developer Newsletter

Volume I, Issue 4

In this edition:

Corey's Column: Sound and Fury-- Notes from E3

The Electronic Entertainment Expo--E3--has once again come and gone, leaving in its wake ringing eardrums, the lingering odor of stale sweat, and a vague sense of having been mugged.

But I love it. E3 is a hoot. Everyone should see it at least once. If you've never been, it's a multi-gazillion-dollar assault on the senses where every game company tries to convince journalists and retailers that their impending game is the Next Big Thing.

It was a great show for Multiverse. CEO Bill Turpin spoke compellingly on a panel about the future of MMOGs--check out the writeup at http://www.gamasutra.com/e32006/news.php?story=9248

Besides Bill's panel, we spent most of our time in back-to-back-to-back meetings. It's incredibly gratifying to see the way the game industry has responded to Multiverse. Not only are the independent developers excited by what we're building, but so are some surprisingly large companies.

Happily, we did have a bit of time to play some of the actual games being previewed. We saw some good ones, but I have to say, in the MMOG space, I wasn't impressed with many of them. Mostly, it was a sea of Guild Wars clones--massively multiplayer lobbies that lead to sparsely populated instanced areas where you play the "real" game. I like Guild Wars, but I'm dying to see the nascent virtual world industry do new things--to at least try to live up to its potential.

I don't really blame those studios, though. The huge cost of creating an MMOG--pre-Multiverse, naturally ;) --forces publishers to make very conservative bets. So instead of radically new gameplay and genres, you get a rehash of what we've already seen, with maybe just a few small features tweaked.

Obviously, it's our mission to change all that. By changing the economics of making virtual worlds, we're making it feasible for developers like you to take risks, to dare and make the worlds that that we've never seen before.

Next year, I'm really looking forward to shaking things up with some of our first customers. I hope you'll join us there.

—Corey

Corey Bridges
Executive Producer, Multiverse

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Multiverse and you at the Austin Games Conference

Multiverse is a proud supporter of this year's Austin Game Conference, August 6-8, which promises to be even more outstanding than previous years: current Keynote speakers are Rob Pardo, Blizzard Entertainment's VP of Game Design, and Science Fiction author Vernor Vinge. As always, the top online-game industry professionals will attend to discuss their craft. If you want to make virtual worlds, this is THE show to attend. This year's theme is "Brave New Worlds", a nod not just to the virtual worlds that people like you are making, but also to the new crop of independent designers and creators breaking into the brave new world of the game industry. Multiverse will have a special lecture session where we show how our technology works. Plus, our own Corey Bridges and Ron Meiners will also be speaking on industry discussion panels. To learn more and to register, go to: http://www.gameconference.com See you there!

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Guest Column: The Future of MMOGs

by Patrick Hamilton and Jeff Newcomb, Wardog Studios

This month we'll be starting a new feature, a column by a member of our Developer community. Our first column is by a consistently strong forum presence, Patrick Hamilton along with Jeff Newcomb of Wardog Studios.

Persistent world online gaming is in its infancy. The current player base is a fraction of the expected player base in 2012 as today's console gamers grow up and China enters the market full force. Developing a game system means creating a service to support the player base of the future. Independent developers today may be the giants of tomorrow, but they must plan for that success.

To become the giants of tomorrow, developers need to peer into the future, anticipate the merging of technologies and to logically integrate those anticipated realities into their games. As today's console players age and enter the PC gaming marketplace, they will be more apt to play a game that incorporates the other luxuries of their lives, such as MP3 players, cell phones, instant messaging, email and more accepting of in-game advertisement. According to Nielsen Entertainment, young people are spending less time watching TV and more time playing online computer games. In 2002, males age 18 to 34 spent an equal amount of time of watching TV programs and playing computer games. In 2004, TV viewing in the same group declined by 12%.

Successful developers will be those that blend TV entertainment with their game systems. That's not to say existing TV shows need to be made into games, but developers should have their games marketable for a TV audience. So much of popular gaming depends on storyline, especially overseas. Television, movies and books will be crucial to providing that background for new titles. Online Role-Playing Games (RPG) and other media need to form a symbiotic relationship to support one another. Online RPGs provide the interaction, while conventional media programs provide information and passive entertainment. With this support, advertisers will have confidence in sponsoring both a game and a TV show.

The Force of Arms project is expecting to implement monthly online live-action video episodes with the scripts being derived from the actions and game play of players. These video segments are geared to help maintain player retention and a proof-of-concept of TV-Game relationship. Video production can be expensive, though. One method for keeping the cost down is by working with the video production department of local colleges. With plans to merge additional content from e-books, cellular text messaging and interactive embedded advertising, Force of Arms will enter the "new future" with Multiverse, with eyes wide open and ears to the ground.

For independent developers, Multiverse represents limitless opportunities. With flexibility and scalability, it is the clay that any team of talented, dedicated people can mold into a niche market dominating game. Built in a modular fashion with an eye to the future, developers will be able to mold their games to meet the challenges of gaming in 2007 and beyond, be they cost, technology or massive subscription levels. Online RPGs are evolving game systems and are following the history of tabletop RPGs. Build the core system and they will come. Keep up the pace, apply other forms of media and they will stay.

—Jeff Newcomb & Patrick Hamilton
Wardog Studios

Wardog Studios is entering the online 3D gaming market with the Sci-Fi mechanized game, Force of Arms (FOA). FOA has been in development for two years and will incorporate additional forms of media entertainment and business practices. Wardog Studios is a corporation located in sunny San Diego, California, USA. The team members are professionals of the computer field and recognize the potential niche markets and revenue that online entertainment systems will provide.

Multiverse Wiki Page:
http://update.multiverse.net/wiki/index.php/Wardog_Studios

If you'd like to contribute a column for a future issue, please drop us a line to discuss it.

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Design Discussion Forum Opens

The Multiverse platform gives independent developers a chance to bring their games to life, and this has drawn some very capable and articulate folks to our site, and to our forums. We've consistently seen a very exciting level of discussion regarding the potential of the platform, but also regarding MMOGs and game design issues in general. At a suggestion from the Multiverse community, we've opened a new forum, dedicated to discussion of a topic very important to all of us: MMOG Design. We hope the new forum will help support what has become a very meaningful component of Multiverse thus far: the wide ranging and consistently impressive discussions covering many aspects of good MMOG design and creation. Got a design question? Someone might have come up with something. Let's talk about it.

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Podcast: Metaverse or Multiverse?

Mark Wallace and John Swords of the Metaverse Sessions sit down with Multiverse Executive
Producer Corey Bridges for a wide-ranging and irreverent discussion covering topics from the recent Roadmapping the Metaverse conference to Hollywood's interest in MMOGs. Along the way they touch on the philosophy of Multiverse, how we see the platform and community, and how important it is to put development tools into the hands of indie game developers. And, of course, Corey discusses the importance of pants! Listen to the podcast here.

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Tech Corner: The Collision Detection System

by David Stryker, Multiverse Engineering Team

In the coming weeks we'll be rolling out our collision detection system, so we asked David Stryker, who's been working on this core element of the platform, to discuss it.

The Multiverse MMOG platform is designed to provide the full range of infrastructure required for game development. An important element of that infrastructure is the mechanism to detect when a moving object, such as an avatar or vehicle, collides with objects in the environment, such as trees, boulders, walls, furniture, or other moving objects. The Multiverse Collision Detection system provides the power to model arbitrary moving objects and obstacles, and efficiently determine collisions even in very large environments.

Objects Supported
Many collision systems support only a single kind of object, such as a box, but this makes it difficult to model many objects of interest. In contrast, the Multiverse implementation supports moving objects and obstacles made up of arbitrary combinations of spheres, capsules, axis-aligned bounding boxes (AABBs) and oriented bounding boxes (OBBs). Avatars are often modeled as a single capsule, or a stack of capsules. A moving vehicle might be modeled using a collection of OBBs. A building is usually modeled as a collection of OBBs for the walls, floors, beams and ceilings. A ramp is best modeled as a thin OBB. SpeedTrees are modeled as a collection of capsules and spheres.

Where Do Obstacles Come From?
Game developers free to create arbitrary obstacles under program control, but often obstacles will be associated with materials in the environment. When building custom materials, any submesh whose name starts with mvcv_sphere_, mvcv_capsule_, mvcv_aabb_, or mvcv_obb_ is interpreted as a collision volume of that shape, and the set of all collision volumes will be written out in COLLADA physics XML format when the Multiverse Conversion Tool is run on the mesh containing them. Alternatively, the game developer might have some other tool that spits out a COLLADA physics-compatible file format. SpeedTree collision volumes are handled automatically, without any special effort by the game developer. Each obstacle has a 64-bit handle; several related obstacles can have the same handle.

Minimizing CPU and Memory Load
A key characteristic of MMOGs is scalability, and any collision system suitable for MMOGs must scale to worlds containing huge numbers of obstacles. The computational load of a collision system depends on two characteristics: the number of object pairs that must be tested, and the costs of the tests. The Multiverse collision system client minimizes the computational and memory load by only caching obstacles within the "collision horizon" of moving objects. To minimize the number of object/object overlap tests that must be performed, the Multiverse collision system maintains all obstacles in a "sphere tree" that grows and shrinks as obstacles come inside the horizon. Testing if two spheres overlap is very cheap indeed, so the sphere tree locates the minimum set of candidate obstacles for collision detection cheaply. Most real-world obstacles will be capsules or OBBs, and capsule/OBB and OBB/OBB overlaps tests are relatively expensive.

The Multiverse Collision API
The API is quite simple: it allows the user to:

  • Create moving objects, and add instances of the four shapes to them.
  • Create obstacles, or remove all obstacles with a given handle.
  • Test whether adding a vector displacement to a moving object would result in a collision. If it would result in a collision, the moving object is not moved, but the API returns the obstacle it would have collided with, and the "normal vectors" on both the moving object and the obstacle at the point of collision. These normal vectors let the game designer decide how he wants to handle the collision. Often, the user will want to "slide" the moving object perpendicular to the obstacle's normal vector

Avoiding Punch-Through
It is important that a moving object never "punch through" a thin obstacle, even if the displacement is very large. So the displacement is larger than the minimum dimension of the moving object, the collision API is careful to move the object in steps, smaller than that minimum dimension. This guarantees that only legal movements will be allowed.

Summary
The Multiverse Collision Detection system is powerful enough to create the richest MMOG collision environments, and small and fast enough to provide spectacular collision effects with minimum cost, and minimum effort by the game developer.

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Found in the Forums:

"Well, for me I'm looking at the bigger picture... I'm trying to create a gaming community instead of just a single game. For the players I'm trying to create a sense of community & give them a certain amount of identity so that no matter what kind of gameplay they are partaking in they will still feel a part of something much bigger. And for the developers I'm trying to create a place where they can utilize & share common resources & tools to create games for this gathered community of players.

For me whether or not a character only uses the same name or the same avatar, or any combination thereof, would still be more up to either the players or the developers depending on the style of games they create, but having that ability would be a plus to players where it makes sense, & sharing resources etc. & being able to aim your games at a larger player base to start with is definitely a plus for developers."

—ToppDog, Multiverse Developers Forums

Copyright 2006, The Multiverse Network, Inc.