News: Community Night November 2011 Recording!

[SKYeXile]

Originally Posted by Higby

Actually yes, he did. That was the first project we worked on together, he was the UI artist and I was the UI/UX lead.

Perfect.

[Aractain]

I don't really get Free Realms. If I had children Id just make them play proper games. Worked for me... Gender shouldn't even matter; "Hello little girl thing, here is Ultima Underworld! And a pony!"

Thus I have no idea what your talking about regards UI design in that thing.

[MgFalcon]

Originally Posted by basti

http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/11...ang/#continued


Now that this is on massively, it wont take long to spread out even more.

Hamma, prepare the webserver!

I'm very excited to see this on massively, as PR goes this was a good one!

Hopefully Higby didn't get his ear chewed off that bad for all the footage he showed us haha! IMHO this was the perfect amount of information released, it was enough to wet our palates while at the same time making us scour for more.

[Shogun]

yeah, i hope matt is not in trouble now! the amount of info was really great! and that we even got an exclusive Q&A there! hamma has to send invitations for every next agn show to all dev members ;-) there should be at least one on every show! these guys are all so great and when do gamers get insight into gamedevelopement like this? seeing the devs while they are at work, and seing how enthusiastic they are is just priceless!
matt showed us that the devs are really working hard on this game and that they all have fun and are really proud of what they are doing! that´s the headshot for every "vaporware" shouter ;-)

[Crator]

^^^ Would be great to have someone from SOE at each AGN broadcast. But I'm thinking it has to be Higby. The other staff members don't seem as enthused to talk to the community as Higby does.

[Shogun]

if highby is with us on every agn, i´m all fine with that, too ;-)

looked like he enjoyed drawing unsuspecting colleges in ;-) and he really is an expert in keeping us begging for more while throwing us some bones and even some steaks ;-)

but we cannot keep him away from his work all the time, i suppose.
i am sure this agn was the best pr activity for ps2 so far!
when i look at the youtube comments on the first trailer i tend to throw up when i see people complaining that this game doesn´t look as good as bf3 or halo. everybody has to comment, but almost nobody knows what they are talking about. i would never expect the bf3 level of details in a persistent mmo shooter with thousands of players. most people still donß´t believe the scale of planetside 2 or just cannot comprehend what it really means.
those people look at the game, compare it to a random actual singleplayer shooter and judge on this basis. but now in that ingame footage even those gamers will have to realize that ps2 will not fear any comparison to any actual game! those clouds and lighting mechanics are unique and i guess forgelight is the first engine who can do this level of quality!
and this in a game where everything that moves is controlled by players!

i think almost everybody in this community is here mainly because the massive scale of ps1 more or less spoiled all the other 4-32 player shooters for them. ps1 spoiled them for me ;-)

people just don´t seem to realize what the scale really means. there are a lot of games where big armys are seen in action, but none of them features big armies whithout npcs or bots. THAT will be the main selling argument for ps2 and i hope that the next trailers will point that out to even the dumbest ;-)
please show massive event grade battle and have the narrator point out that every single soldier on the field is an actual player! punch it into our faces! shout it out loud and put it on the screen in big letters!

if a trailer like that goes live its all TAKE THAT, HALO AND BF3!

[sylphaen]

Originally Posted by Bags

Well, it's unoptimized alpha build and I'm sure he has the game maxed, while in windowed mode with a ton of stuff running in the background.

And as mentionned in the video, the night/day cycle was sped up at extra super speed to make its evolution visible. I'm not an engineer but I assume that must be a lot lot lot of dynamic lighting/shadows calculations per frame and that's why the 40 or 50 FPS figure was mentionned.

The way I understood it is that quite the contrary of being weak, that was a proof of the strength of an engine with an unoptimized build which performs nicely even under large stress.

So in my opinion, do not stop at that 40-50 FPS figure since I do not think it represents the engine's performance under regular conditions.

[Ailos]

I'm willing to shed out the cash to crossfire/SLI two of the latest cards if I have to, to run that game with max details, but in all honesty, the processing power of modern cards is growing quite rapidly, and the way they perform under extreme stress is differing also.

9 years ago, when PS1 was under development, much of the hardware had a lot of bottlenecks in it, a lot of bandwidth and latency issues that have since been resolved through a number of ways. The issue was rarely the computer not having enough processing power to crunch the numbers, but its ability to get those numbers to other parts that required them for their next calculation. Modern quad-cores, their motherboards for them, and the PCI 2.0 x16 interfaces dwarf the old Pentiums, Athlons, and GeForce 6600s and Radeon 1k's in terms of the sheer amount of data they can put through their bus lines.

Also, the netcode for PS1 had to deal with poorly developed internet networks that delivered mediocre bandwidth, and make it playable for players with latencies all the way upwards of 200 ms. That meant your CPU has to manually chug through data bits few and far apart to give you directional, positional, and projectile data for everyone on the battlefield to give you a decent picture (I know projectiles weren't physical objects, but it still has to calculate the trajectory for the animation), in addition to decompressing the highly-packed data packets.

Fast forward to 2011 when, not only the average home gaming computer has increased its processing power by several orders of magnitude, but so have the servers, and so has the condition of the internet. For example, when BF2 came out in 2005, it was pretty common for me to have a server latency of ~100 ms. Today, in BF 2142, BF3, and TF2 I consider my ping high if it's above 25 ms. Today, more information can be processed serverside and be reliably and quickly sent to the home computer, who has a lot more brute force to render it quickly at its disposal.

So between that and the fact that it's an unoptimized alpha build I'm confident this game will be very playable even in the biggest clusterfuck battles.

[QuantumMechanic]

The love and attention the PS2 devs are giving the fans about a game that is still in ALPHA is amazing. This wizened gamer hasn't seen anything like it before. I've been playing SOE games for a long time now, but I am impressed by these guys now more than ever.

In the broadcast, when Higby takes off in his mossie, and before he crashes it into the base, you can catch a glimpse of what appears to be one or two parked Loadstars on the ground. This would be first evidence of Loadstars ingame as far as I know.

*edit: you can see it shortly after 1:26:00 in the video. It's either a Loadstar, or a Loadstar-shaped bunker.

[Peacemaker]

So I've been working a ton of hours this past week and havn't had the time to watch this whole thing, but I'm at 1:06:57 right now, and need to go to sleep, but I'm going to go to work tomorrow and all I'm gonna think about is how awesome this is going to be. Damn its gonna be a long day. -_-

[basti]

Originally Posted by Crator

^^^ Would be great to have someone from SOE at each AGN broadcast. But I'm thinking it has to be Higby. The other staff members don't seem as enthused to talk to the community as Higby does.

I beg to differ. Im pretty sure they would LOVE to hop on here and just talk with us about everything all day.

[Crator]

Alright, so you are saying it's a matter of if they have enough time to do so. Makes sense.

[basti]

Originally Posted by Crator

Alright, so you are saying it's a matter of if they have enough time to do so. Makes sense.

More a matter of "they are not allowed to".
Thing is, they are under some sort of NDA.

[Crator]

Interesting. I would think that if this were the case then Higby would be gone already... <shrug>

[Tigersmith]

Hamma and the rest of the crew. well done guys! ..its amazing how much the video has worked out the way you wanted