Dev Vlog #1

The PGI team has posted their first Vlog.. this is supposed to be a replacement for the forum based ‘ask the devs’ weekly Q&A.

This initial episode, was supposed to be released in Mid-December (it was filmed December 13th).  With it just now being released a good portion of the information in the video, is outdated.  Really, everything except the initial portion covering the ‘lessons learned’ from the HPG map was outdated at release.

Here’s the video:

Here’s the one relevant question (IMO) out of the video:

“In regards to the newest map, HPG manifold, which will technically be the tenth map added to MechWarrior Online. What have you learned about making maps for MWO since first introducing us to Forest Colony back in early closed Beta?

Answer (Dennis de Koening): “Lot’s of stuff. It’s kind of a hard question to answer because a lot of the evolution of maps has been gradual and sporadic. Many different things have been more evolved than learned. We’ve learned new techniques for texture application. A good example is making a 900-story Tourmaline rock to not make it look like a repeating texture and still have a glistening sparkle on it. We’ve learned a lot of techniques on how to make a little go a long way; The easy one there is modulation: Being able to make three chunks of geometry turn into ten different things. Tourmalines are another good example: You can take one of those tourmalines and rotate it sideways, upside-down and every direction. For every tourmaline there’s just as much under the terrain that is showing its different version just next to it, flipped. That helps a lot.

Considering the strengths and weaknesses of the engine during the concept stage means a lot. I could put some fantastic stuff in a concept art that the engine just cannot achieve so obviously I’m not going to be doing those couple of concepts that we just cannot do at this moment, because we haven’t yet figured out how to do it. So, obviously, keeping that in my mind mitigates a lot of problems down the road.

I think we’ve gotten a little better at achieving the scaling queues. Once again, that is still the hardest thing to do, no matter what you do. A really good example there is some of the plants in Forest Colony, like the Bracken, for example. A bracken plant is generally no more than a meter tall but in Forest Colony they are upwards of three meters tall. When we make them actual size they basically turn into noise: It looks like a pixelated carpet. We have to enlarge them in order to get a little of three-dimensional texture on the ground. Obviously this isn’t real but we have to balance it. It’s tough to find those balances but we’re learning better ways of achieving this as we move forward.

Another point is we study the gameplay a lot. Many people have different ways of playing the game. You release a map and the gameplay is almost predictable. A month later it’s completely changed. People just start to learn the map, new techniques, they have strategies built up. We learn from being for it: “How do we make the map instantly adaptable to users?”, making it fun based on they are playing techniques are. We want these maps to be addictive. Getting back to scaling stuff, this is one of the harder things. Generally speaking in most games the camera is only about 2 meters off the ground: The player can only see about 250 meters into the distance, they run at about 120km/h (people run fast!), our ‘mechs are anywhere between 2 and 6 stories tall, they can fly into the air at ridiculous heights. So distances are upwards of 4 kilometers. Players run and turn and twist and everything has got to stream in at the same time so we cannot have too much detail. In a regular game you can have litter and newspapers on the streets. If we do that online it looks like a pixel. You just cant do it. The detail has to start up at around 2 stories and go up to about 6 or 8 stories and then from there fade off. So finding those magic areas where it really counts is an art.

The rest of the questions relate to Clan Tech, or other information that was released last month.

My suggestions to PGI:

  • Fix the audio.. in addition to the levels being incredibly different between the NGNG segment, and the actual Dev segments, there are lots of  audio issues with the Dev sections (primarily echo).
  • Release these more frequently, you’re trying to replace a weekly/bi-weekly Q&A session.. releasing a 20 minute video, almost 30 days after the information you refer to in the video as ‘coming soon’..isn’t a good substitute for the forum Q&A.
  • There needs to be a transcript posted at the same time as the video.  Not all players are English speaking, and some have hearing issues (both reasons the forum based Q&A is better).
  • Where’d you get the questions from??  There was no (that I remember seeing) thread asking for questions for this Vlog, make a clearly labelled thread requesting questions for the next one (assuming there is a next one).

 

Looking forward to seeing if the PGI team can turn this Vlog series into a better Q&A than what we had in the forums, so it will be interesting to see what gets covered in the next couple Vlogs (and, how frequently they release them).