| Istvan's Update:
OK, Spill It!
DSD: As we’re doing this interview, we’re
about a day away from NetDevil’s "open house" where you’ll be giving
guests a first glimpse at development work on a revamped Jumpgate. Can you tell us 1) some
specifics about what these guests will be seeing, 2) who generally will be in attendance,
and 3) what happened to my invitation?
IST:
The guests will be seeing a
demo conducted by Jumpgate’s Producer, Draker. It’ll be a fly-through of an
initial combat mission in Solrain Core sector, showing off the new graphics and user
interface. My understanding is that most invitees are from various game industry media and
portal sites, as well as companies with whom NetDevil has some sort of relationship.
We’re showing off all our projects and the new NetDevil facility.
Your invitation was obviously intercepted by pirates, probably
paid off by Hyperial scum. I suggest retaliatory strikes against Hyperial interests in the
border sectors.
DSD: What's your role now on the JG development team?
IST: I’ve got a peculiar sort of generalist-emeritus role where I
aid everyone else working on the project in dealing with the legacy datatypes and code
that preceded their involvement. I also advise on pre-existing functionality, and to some
degree pick up miscellaneous tasks for the rest of the programming team. Being
knowledgeable about the classic product, I’m involved somewhat with design and
storyline work. I provide tech support to the existing Live game servers, and also am the
team liaison with customer support and for most of our community contacts. I’m pretty
much doing my old job except that responsibility for programming and design has been
spread around much more. Now I do a lot of facilitation, so my teammates can focus on
making things happen for the new project instead of trying to figure out how things used
to work.
DSD: How many people have
significant time devoted to JG development right now? What are their jobs?
IST: We’ve got a team of eight dedicated people
on Jumpgate now: a concept artist, two modelers, four programmers, and our producer and
team lead, who actually spends nearly all his time working as a fifth programmer.
DSD: We know Keith
Baker has signed-on at NetDevil. Is he currently or going-to-be involved in backstory and
storyline work for the JG Update?
(For those who don't
know who Keith is, check out http://bossythecow.com)
IST: Keith has taken on a
role that involves him in the storyline and writing work for every project NetDevil has
underway, so yes, he’s participating in storyline work for JGE now.
DSD: You mentioned
"JGE." I assume this is the project name. What’s the "E"?
IST: The press release that went out Friday, June 22nd,
announced NetDevil’s work on the new Jumpgate title "Jumpgate: Evolution."
Internally, we use "JGE" for the new game and "JGC" to refer to the
‘classic’ product.
DSD:
I'm not going to focus on graphics, but
it's something people want to know about -- so lets get this out of the way. Gamers have
become accustomed to pretty high-end graphics in recent MMOs like Eve, LoTR and WoW. Do
you think the JGE will meet the expectations set by those games --- or take them to a new
level?
IST: We’re pretty much going to leave it to the customers
to decide whether the graphics meet their expectations. However, what we’ve done
isn’t just some kind of touch-up of the prior engine and assets. The render process
has been entirely rewritten and the new game takes full advantage of pixel shader 2.0
technology. We’re also continuing fixed-function support for customers still using
legacy hardware, and in fact I test on such a rig.
DSD: What impact do you expect upgraded graphics will have on Jumpgate PvP
which currently requires fast client response and low network lag in order to "work
properly?"
IST: We really aren’t noticing any impact at all yet during
internal playtests, and some of our test hardware is, quite intentionally, pretty dated.
DSD: OK,
lets turn the clock back a year. You were The Lone Ranger and had a
long list of interesting things you wanted to do. On August 27 (106.8.27 for you Jumpgate
sickos!) you released the first big patch in a long while -- the Military I Patch . . .
with a Military II patch to follow. Clearly, that effort was superseded by the current
major game update effort. The first hints you dropped were in a JOSSH post on 12/13. When
did NetDevil actually decide to redirect resources to Jumpgate for a major game update?
What catalyst made Scorch decide to do this?
IST: It was back in late July that Scorch walked
into my office, sat down, and essentially said, "Hey, I’d like to put a team
together to work with you on Jumpgate. I want to update and improve the game." Aside
from wrapping up that Military I patch, work began immediately, though at the time I was
still under the delusion that my work on the classic product could continue in parallel.
By September, though, my old solo development agenda had to be set aside in favor of
concentration on the upgrade, which itself has evolved into a much more ambitious project.
Scorch has since shared with me that some of his contacts elsewhere in the game industry
had repeatedly suggested to him that he sink more resources into Jumpgate, since it’s
a title NetDevil wholly owns. He’d always wanted to devote attention to Jumpgate, and
last year he decided both that the time was right for the company, and that the resources
were at last available.
DSD: In
the Volume III, No. 2 Darkspace Dispatch, your column talked about the Military II patch:
Territorial Contests and
Privateering are key parts of the complete conflict system design, and will be my top
priority after patch 1.0109 is released. Territorial Contests will be a
"game-within-the-game" to focus fleet battles on border areas and add objectives
to the faction struggles. Privateering will be a system to allow pilots to fly for other
factions in "foreign service."
Is
this, or something similar, going to be incorporated in JGE?
IST: I don’t know for sure. Determination
of the features to be included when we release JGE is still in progress.
DSD: In that same column, you identified other agenda
items as: Economy Updates, Conflux AI, Squad System and Graphics. Are all of these things
currently on the slate for JGE v 1.0? (i.e. in the initial release as opposed to "in
the plan.") If some (but not all) will, which ones?
IST: All prior plans for conflux AI work have
been completely superseded by the new AI system, which is incredibly more sophisticated
than the adjustments to AI that I had been planning to make. Changes to the game economy
and the squad management system are definitely under serious discussion, but we’re
still in the process of determining what will end up within scope for release, and what
will have to occur post-release.
DSD: Can you give us some detail on one or two
of the upcoming game-play / game-feature updates (other than graphics) that you are most
excited about?
IST: I’m rather excited about a whole bunch of
things, some of which may or may not make it into the initial release. Among features that
will certainly be in the release, though, I suppose the one thing that I’m most
excited about is the AI system. It’s giving us capabilities far beyond our original
intentions, and we think it’s likely that we’ll see it generate some emergent
behavior, which is to say we will see sophisticated-appearing interactions among bots, or
between bots and players, that originate from combinations of otherwise simple behavior
rules. As development of other features has proceeded, we’ve begun leaning on the AI
system more and more for things that weren’t in the original AI design, but naturally
derive from what it already was built to do.
One of the things
we’ll see is that bots are now capable of communication and some limited forms of
teamwork. With the dynamic spawning and responsiveness to player activity for which the
system was designed, this together really ought to result in a rather more interesting
ongoing conflict with the Conflux.
DSD: I’m intrigued. When you talk about
the new AI, you talk about "bots" and not Conflux. Does this mean that we can
expect to be interacting with AI ships other than Conflux? Can you give us some details?
IST: We’ve set aside the JGC scheme where every
ship was a player, and are building a living universe with continual activity. JGE will
have AI in nearly all walks of life that a player could choose. There will be bots hauling
goods, as well as AI pirates and smugglers, and even active AI defense forces. Plans are
also underway to integrate AI raiders and defensive forces into the factional conflicts so
that the bots conduct combat operations in parallel with or directly as part of what the
players decide to do in factional PvP.
DSD: Wow!
Well it
seems pretty clear that what's going on here is not just a "dressing-up" of the
old game. Some basic gameplay changes are anticipated. What do you think will be the
biggest adjustment for hard-core JG players who have "grown up" in the game over
the last five-plus years?
IST: Without any real doubt, it’ll be the user interface
changes. We’ve all had years to grow accustomed to the classic game’s UI –
both its quirks and the things that work well. JGE has a completely redesigned interface,
which may arrive as a bit of a shock to veterans. My role with UI work has been to act as
an advocate for the community, to try to ensure that the key things we rely on as players
(since I was a Jumpgate player before joining NetDevil) are being kept, and also to try to
integrate many requests for improvements and additions that have come in from the
playerbase over the years. No matter what, though, any dramatic change like this will take
some getting used to. Refinement to the user interface is happening daily as we develop,
and we fully expect changes for the better to continue through the beta test phase, so the
community can expect to see it and have some input before release.
DSD: When I think UI, I think of both the visual
interface as well as the control interface. I’ve always looked at Jumpgate as a
joystick game. Do you expect the joystick to remain the preferred control device? Will you
make it more mouse-friendly? Are you considering gamepad support?
IST: One of the things we became aware of when
analyzing the pattern of player acquisition was that the vast, and I mean overwhelmingly
vast, majority of people checking out Jumpgate did not own a joystick, and the perceived
need for one was seen by them as a reason to not play the game. As a result, Jumpgate
attracted a following mostly composed of people who already liked flight simulators. JGE
will be much more friendly to keyboard and mouse players than JGC is, but we believe
joystick support is an absolute necessity. Several members of the team vastly prefer
joystick mode, so there should be no fear that joysticks will be neglected. We intend good
support for both input modes.
Gamepads are on our
"would be nice" list. My understanding is that they still aren’t the most
common PC input device, and JGE is of course a PC title. I can’t confirm at this
point whether we’ll have support for them integrated by release.
DSD: How about game physics? The D.A.N.C.E.R.
engine has been at the core of Jumpgate gameplay. Have there been any changes to the
physics or the flight engine?
IST: Netdevil’s D.A.N.C.E.R engine remains the
core of flight behavior. Most of our changes are being made at the user interface level,
not at the flight physics level.
DSD: What's the biggest development hurdle the team has
had to overcome so far?
IST: When we ripped out the old render loop, we began a
somewhat incidental but rather thorough process of breaking pretty much every major
feature in the classic game, in one way or another. We started the project with the
intention of rewriting as little as possible, but eventually came to the realization that
a great many things were going to need to be reworked to make the improvements we wanted
to make. The intentional and unintentional have therefore combined to widen the scope of
the project considerably and exposed the team to a lot of material we had hoped to avoid
touching.
DSD: The JOSSH website has been pretty much the
same for a long time. You don't have to dig far to find content that is either inaccurate
or references un-implemented features (such as station maintenance requirements). Will a
website revamp be part of the re-release? If so, do you expect to enhance or eliminate any
of the current areas of the JOSSH site?
IST: The new product will have its own separate website
from the venerable JOSSH, and work on it is in progress. It’s not clear to me yet
what will be added or enhanced and what, if anything, will be removed. Our webmaster,
however, is extremely capable and has rapidly done some impressive things on other
NetDevil projects. I have great confidence that the JGE website will be state-of-the-art
and a big improvement upon JOSSH, which after all has seen almost no real change since
2001.
DSD: Third-party tools and applications have a long
history in Jumpgate. Do you plan to continue to make flat files available for third-party
market listers? If yes, you do you plan on expanding the data your make available (e.g.
online pilots and faction mission progress)?
IST: Nothing about this is certain, but I’m an advocate for releasing
in-game data in easily-accessible formats. Often the database dumps are a simple matter. I
hope to be coordinating appropriate arrangements with our webmaster when we are finalizing
the website work.
DSD: How about for the severely
Jumpcrack-addicted, are you considering things like RSS feeds to the addicts can see
who’s online, leaderboards, FM progress, etc. via their mobile phones and
Blackberrys?
IST: That’s going to be up to our webmaster, but
we’d love to get exactly that kind of involvement from our playerbase. The technology
is certainly here to accomplish that.
DSD: Using an analogy I know you can appreciate . . .
Jumpgate was Scorch’s baby, but you became a foster parent and have been doing all
the diaper changing for a long time. Prior to last July, you had a vision of where you
wanted to take Jumpgate. How close is the new Scorch/JG-Team vision, to Istvan’s
pre-7/06 vision?
IST: As was mentioned, my old agenda was largely
superseded by the new rework. The graphical update itself was never exactly part of my own
plans, because working alone I knew I had none of the needed expertise to make it happen.
That huge, glaring problem has been utterly and completely solved. Furthermore,
there’s general agreement that pretty much everything major that had been on my list
is a logical part of a modern online game, so even if my projects can’t all be
prioritized as necessary for release, we are operating under the assumption those things
and more will happen during continuing post-release development of the game.
DSD: I won't ask you when you expect to
release, but Scorch has talked publicly about "beta-testing" -- how many
beta-testers do you think you will be recruiting? Have you set a target for when you want
to start the beta?
IST: Thanks, it’d just be silly to talk about a
release schedule at this point. First of all, NetDevil has a somewhat different view of the purpose of beta test these days than
might be commonplace in the industry. I do think we’ll begin closed beta
testing later this year, but I have no way to tell when we’ll enter an open beta
phase because that strongly depends on our rate of implementation. Active JGC players will
be among the first-choice recruits for our testing pool.
DSD: OK, final question. Turn the clock forward one
year. How many people do you realistically expect to be playing during peak hours?
IST: We have no way to know, but our target for JGE is
considerably higher than JGC ever saw. A very large part of our focus in making changes
anywhere in the game is to reduce things perceived as barriers to entry. We’re
attacking problems both inside and outside the game with the intention of both attracting
a wider audience, and keeping them interested. Time will tell whether we succeed.
DSD: So when you’re building game code you
don’t have to worry about whether it needs to handle 1,000 players at-a-time or
10,000?
IST: ‘Too many players’ is the problem every
game would love to have. If that turned out to be the case, we’d certainly have the
resources to get the logistics resolved quickly. The JGC code that JGE is built upon was
never remotely stressed even at our original peak numbers, so this is really one of our
lesser concerns.
DSD: Well now that the first news has broken, I hope
you’ll keep us up-to-date as more details can be released. I personally want to thank
you not only for the time today, but also for all the work you’ve done on Jumpgate
through some low times.
IST: It’s been my pleasure. It’s great to
have weathered the last couple years and know that Jumpgate is still flying. I find an old
80’s tune pretty apt these days: "The future’s so bright, I’ve got to
wear shades".
|
