Quote:
Originally Posted by ashatumar
Question for Brad, a direct one:

Are you satisfied with the models and the animations that accompany them?

Second part:

Do you feel that the models and their animations add to or diminish the game world (environments) you've so obviously worked hard to create?

Either way, it can't be a wrong answer, but perhaps give us (the critics) some way of determining what page you're on.

As I've always said about Vanguard: You're not there yet, but I can see where you're headed -- and it's going to blow us all away.


1. I am about 85% happy with the models, especially the playable races. They need some tweaks, and a LOT more outfits, items, etc. are going in. But I'm happy with the progress and am confident we'll be in good shape by launch. I'm completely happy and at peace with the 'unibody' decision -- having more outfits by an order of magnitude vs. races looking a bit more varied because they don't share a skeleton? It's a no brainer. A huge portion of these games are about collecting items and then wearing them to look different, show off the loot you've earned, etc. Being able to do this to a degree heretofore unseen was the right call. Same with being able to share them with humanoid NPCs -- having NPCs being able to wear PC gear and vice versa. This is huge. It may not be totally apparent yet, but it will be.

2. The animations. I'm pretty happy with the animation data we've captured thus far. Sure, I could nitpick. And yes, I wish I had more. And we will do more motion captures in the future, plus more hand animation.

3. The smoothness of the animations. No, not happy with that. But what you're seeing there is a product of several different things:

3a. The animation technology. It continues to improve. It's not where it needs to be yet. Things will blend together better and appear smoother as we continue to implement this tech and to tweak it. I am confident it will be in good shape by launch.

3b. The framerate in general. I'm not happy with the FPS. I'd be even more unhappy were we about to ship. I am pretty happy with the speed at which we are getting more and more optimizations done. The optimizations that were done between beta 2.5 and 3 in terms of Medium settings were very significant. The optimizations that we are doing right now for Low settings will be huge, not just in terms of FPS, but also in terms of making Low settings look a heck of a lot better. The last focus on general rendering optimizations will be focused on High and Very High settings, taking advantage of higher end machines, Crossfire and SLI, making 64bit clients, etc. Getting anti-aliasing in, etc. All of this will make the game look absolutely beautiful. And the vast majority of it, because of the way the engine was architected and because of the tech level we chose, can be done with minimal if any art changes, which is huge. In the past (say EQ), to make huge changes to how the game looked required a lot of work not only for programmers, but for artists too, and you also ended up with areas of the game that were clearly newer than other regions. This will be a LOT less true with Vanguard.

3c. What lower framerates are doing to animations. The lower the framerate, the less frames of an animation is played, and the less smooth it is. Frames are actually skipped, making the animations look bad. This was especially apparent with some of the FRAPs videos, because FRAPs makes you lose 7-10fps. And if you are, say, normally at 20fps, which is pretty good for an MMOG, and then you turn FRAPs on and are at 10-13fps, the difference is huge. Now if you were at 40fps, going down to 30-33fps isn't nearly as big of a deal. With a decent machine, you usually get 20fps or so outside, and 30-40+ fps inside on average (obviously it all depends on the area, what is being drawn, how many people are in your view (which with an MMOG, unlike, say, an shooter, is uncontrollable).

3d. We also have some other related animations focused on characters where we will use dynamic LODs for characters when a bunch of them appear on screen. Normally, LODs are used at a distance (and you can already see that we use this system extensively in Vanguard -- you *have* to with a seamless world where you can see for miles and miles). What you don't usually do, however, is switch to lower LODs up close. We will be if a bunch of people appear on screen all at once (say, a raid or a wedding, or whatever). There, we will switch and use LODs that would normally be used for drawing characters farther away up closer to keep the framerate high (of course, this will be such that you can set the degree you want the engine to do this in-game yourself). I think this technology will make a big difference, although we will be sacrifices visuals for framerate and smoothness.

Lastly, computer hardware, be it CPUs, RAM, HDs, graphics cards, sound cards, motherboards with pci-express and faster FSBs, etc. continue to become cheaper and cheaper (Moore's law and all of that). Right now you can buy a 256M ATI card that out performs and has more functionality than one you could buy a year ago, or even less, for a fraction of the cost. Take an ATI x800 or x850. They used to be $400 or so. You can buy a card that smokes an x800 or x850, plus again has better tech too, today for $130.

So whereas when we started the machines you can buy today were not even in existence, and the hot machines from 2 years ago that were more than $3000 became around $2000 a year ago and are now just a bit over $1000. When we release, they'll even be less than that.

We did make a choice with Vanguard and that was to take advantage of new technology to make our game both more immersive and also to stand the tests of time. There are downsides to this. Obviously games like WoW have done incredibly well and chose not to focus on tech, but instead using a more stylized approach, made a very immersive world using lower tech requirements. This certainly hasn't harmed them to-date. In North America, where people generally have higher end machines, the fact that there aren't a lot of choices in terms of games like WoW didn't hurt Blizzard much. Sure, there was EQ 2, but there were and are a lot of other factors there in terms of why WoW did so much better and it's not my place to do an analysis there -- everyone has compared the two games, their focus, their adherence to a vision, etc. ad nauseum and I'm not going to add to it. In Europe, and then big time in Asia, the combination of lower tech, the style of gameplay, and Blizzard's fantastic name and reputation there combined with their already tremendously successful line of RTS games and therefore their pre-existing channels of distribution in, say, Asia (which is VERY different than in North America) all added up to a HUGE unprecedented success. And as I've mentioned several times, not only a success for them, but they've potentially done all MMOG developers a huge favor by growing the gamespace by leaps and bounds -- no longer do you here people assert the MMOG gamespace is saturated and that only a million or so people will ever be into MMOGs, heh

All that said, our strategy is different (not necessarily better or worse, but different because we had no intention of building a WoW clone and never will -- people want choices, and people also like different styles of art (as well as gameplay, etc.).

Vanguard is the big AAA MMOG coming out and is going to be a huge deal in 2007. But it is also built for the long haul, the bitter lessons of EQ 1 and not planning ahead for success, keeping up with tech, adding expansions, adding features, etc. have haunted us since day one at Sigil. To that end we have hundreds of pages detailing expansions out to probably 5 or 6 years into the future. We have lists upon lists of game mechanics and features we will be adding to the game, whether it be revising and extending existing features, or adding completely new ones. And we have also designed an engine that will relatively very easily allow us to continue to take advantage of the technology that will exist in 07, 08, and well beyond. Going to 64bit, going to Vista, going to shader 3.0, taking full advantage of crossfire/SLI, taking advantage of dual core and then later multicore CPUs, migrating to DX10 and integrating Unreal 3.x technology, using physics cards -- all of this has been planned for, and not just on paper, but in code. Parts of that code are already there. Stubs in the code are sitting there ready to take advantage of this stuff are there.

Working with Microsoft for so long allowed us a very clear view into the future of technology from both a hardware and software standpoint. Our programmers sat on boards and didn't just hear what about the future but took part in those discussions and contributed. Our Director of Technology is great friends with Tim Sweeney and they talk all of the time and share ideas, and Tim is very excited about what we have done with their engine, how we have already done things with it that it doesn't support, how we have already implemented Unreal 3.0 code into the game, etc. We also talk to ATI and NVIDIA all of the time, do panels with them, etc. and have a very clear view of the road path ahead of us.

All of this has saved us a lot of time and has put us in a situation where we could make technology decisions that to people outside of the box might seem bleeding edge or risky. It's why we didn't announce a lot of our features early on and it's why we still shy away from being too specific in terms of min and recommended specs. It's why we've implemented some advanced code already, sometimes earlier than others would expect, but at the same time held back on implemented other technology (say, environmental shadows).

Now, by no means do I predict doom and gloom for WoW. Their installed base is absolutely incredible. Their sales are as well. Their penetration into Asia is fantastic. Their decision to go lower tech, mix single and MMOG gameplay together, to use stylized graphics, to set the rate of character advancement that they did was mostly planned out in advance and it has most certainly paid off.

But our philosophy is different. Coming from EQ 1, which is *still* going relatively strong, we think *very* long term and are very patient. We plan to receive the vast majority of our revenue from subscriptions not sales. Our focus is on retention and making sure the Vanguard of 2008 or 2009 both looks and plays great. The downside is that we most likely will not do as well in countries where the average gamer has a much lower end machine than, say, the average gamer in North America. We will also likely sell more slowly because we don't have the rep that Blizzard does in Asia, nor the sales channels and set up. We also didn't spend 5+ years and 80 or so million dollars focusing as much on polish as on content and long term playability.

Instead, we spent less money and have a different target audience -- the core gamer, as I've posted about so much that I'm not going to re-post about it right now. We only require a couple hundred thousand subscribers to start making money. Put us into the 500,000 realm, and we are making big time cash. Put us higher than that, and whew, things will be good. Likewise, take those subscriber numbers and combine them with a game that from a content, feature, and technology standpoint is designed to look and play great for 5-10 years and hold onto those people (e.g. high retention, like we saw in EQ 1 and like I'm pretty nobody has come close to to-date) for a long time, and you have our recipe for success. And not just a financial success, but a creative one, because we didn't come back and do a second High Fantasy game by coincidence. While most developers want to move onto other genres or themes, we wanted to make a better EQ and so much more. That's just who we are -- we really think long term, and we really want to achieve things in terms of creating a fantasy MMOG both at launch and far beyond launch that will go down in history as being unprecedented and revolutionary.

So, by all means it's important to make sure the average gamer can run Vanguard and have a great time at launch. And that we'll achieve that I am very confident, not just from gut instinct, but by the advances we have made in beta thus far. We will also run on less than average gamer machines, although unlike, say, a WoW, you will notice the visual consequences. But we'll also have a game that will look fantastic on higher end machines at launch, and those higher end machines will quickly become average machines in 6-12 months after launch, and then lower end machines 1-2 years after launch.

From a tech standpoint, we'll be likely the only game that will actually take advantage of a 64 bit client and more than 3 gigs of RAM, and by take advantage of, I mean you'll see the difference in the game and it will be noticeable. Same with Crossfire/SLI. Same with Vista and integration into Microsoft's future plans as they turn their focus from dominating the business and home side of PC operating systems to entertainment and as they change their focus from console to PC when it comes to Windows Gaming Live, etc. The same with shader 3.0, DX10, physics cards, etc.

And taking advantage of this tech, like I alluded to, won't be a nifty tech demo or will it manifest itself in some tiny subset of the game, but rather you'll see it immediately throughout the world of Telon. View distances are applicable in most places, except maybe a purposely fog enshrouded forest. A seamless world that currently only uses x and y coordinates when it comes to laying out the world will easily transition into using a z coordinate as well, allowing us to go well above and beyond the 2km by 2km regions we currently use -- you'll be able to fly a mount several km up into the air and explore entire floating cities or, conversely, travel kilometers into the earth and find an entire under world (think D&D's Underdark actually realized in an online virtual world). And like I said, you'll see the entire world, not just new expansion areas look better as we use DX 10, more Unreal 3 tech, shader 3.0, etc. allowing us to keep building and building the world as opposed to having to commit resources to re-do the world (or, worse yet, like EQ 1, let the old world become obsolete and unused).

We weren't sure last year whether we would having flying mounts by launch -- we are now, and we will. But we always knew they would be possible given the way we designed the technology and architecture of the world. And when we made that decision, we didn't have to change the world or just having flying mounts only usable in a subset of the world. Having ships that can sail anywhere and getting rid of all transportation on rails allows us unlimited expansion opportunities. Not using Instancing, coupled with our seamless world, has allowed us to not only add to the world at any time via patching or a major expansion, but also by having vast dungeons that can be shared experiences as well as have the room where the majority of people can own a house and have that house actually exist in the world and not be some pocket dimension (and therefore have its location relevant, have varying housing prices, have people sell their lots and move on as they level up, etc.) is pretty exciting. Having a seamless world also means we have to be able to load up *any* art asset in any part of the world at any given time -- yeah, that was tough to code and it wasn't fun writing that memory manager and it's still being tweaked -- but amongst other things, it means you can literally pick up any object from anywhere in the world (assuming it has an item pointing to it in the database), put it in your inventory, and then set it down in your house -- a totem or statue from Kojan can be placed in a house in Thestra or out in one of the several entire islands that exist so people can build on them and eventually create player driven cities with their own economies and RTS style gameplay. Integrating crafting into actual gameplay out in the real world means that characters will be able to fix bridges or remove cave-ins. How much harder will it be to have those bridges break or those cave-ins happen while you're standing their using physics cards, say a year from now? Not hard at all, and again, instead of it just looking nifty, we already have gameplay associated with it.

I know, I've gone on and on, but really, I've barely touched the surface. What we've shown to major gaming pubs and online sites when they've come and visited Sigil has blown their minds. When they come by E3 or Leipzig with 15 or so minutes in their calendar and then don't end up leaving for 3 hours and we're still not done showing them things -- well, that really says something, IMHO.

Ultimately, my point is that we made our choices and our competition made theirs. There are advantages to both. The advantages to the decisions Blizzard made can already be seen and can't be argued with. Our decisions people can still debate or be skeptical about. Not much I can do about that. Obviously, given the type of game we wanted to make, and have since really the mid 90s, the choices in terms of tech and gameplay foundations were correct. Given how much we rely on retention and long term playability, I think we made the right call. Given the evolutionary foundation behind Vanguard but then the revolutionary ideas behind it, both at launch and then planned after launch, we need and will need to be able to use technology that is cutting edge today. And if we can spend most of our time making games and not re-writing tech or re-creating art assets, then we'll be able to jump ahead over the years in terms of how much content we have, how good it looks and plays, how relevant it is, etc.

Short term, though, we do have a challenge. Games like WoW look more polished and generally run at higher framerates, especially given that our game isn't out yet and not optimized like it will be both before and after launch. Animations run smoother and don't drop frames. Some people like more stylized art better. Instancing allows the number of people in a given area to be more easily controlled. And so we have a tough job ahead of us getting the word out about the game, what it can do that no other game can, both at launch and well into the future. How much more freedom you have, how many more options you have, how many more play styles the game will appeal to, how those who do appreciate technology and update their machines for other genres of games regularly will be also rewarded with an MMOG. Getting the game done, getting more people into beta, continuing to polish and optimize, eventually drop the NDA so that people can see with their own eyes how much more immersive a seamless world with unparalleled character customization, no instancing, player owned towns and cities, multiple paths of characters advancement, the ability to sail a ship anywhere you want, and then later a flying mount...

There is a cost for freedom, whether one speaks of games or just about anything else. Again, I'm confident we're not talking about serious cost, especially by launch. But it will take more of a machine than, say, WoW. Our job is to get that message out, be clear about the advantages, display them, talk about them, show them. It's the same with the stereotypes that we fight about Vanguard being only for the Hard Core, all about down time, nerfs, boring travel, and the like. Short term interacting with the community has helped considerably, whether it be our own or on other boards like this. Screenshots will help, and videos even more. Ads will help, both online and in gaming pubs. Interviews with strong and clear messaging will be key. A solid beta 5 sans NDA will be HUGE.

We'll get the message out, no matter what it takes, how much effort, time, or money. Given the fact that we're likely the only other AAA MMOG for the year 2007 means that we can do no less. As does the fact that Vanguard is our dream, short and long term, and that almost a hundred people have poured their hearts and souls into it for over 4 years, not to mention an experience pool in terms of MMOG development that is absolutely unrivaled.

'Nuff said
<div class="smallfont"> Last edited by Aradune Mithara : Yesterday at 11:54 PM.

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