All Posts by Drafell

Although it may be relatively easy to come up with MMO concepts and idea's, it is incredibly difficult to get the backing to produce and publish them. Like any financial market, the publishers tend only to stick to what they know the consumer will like - the "tried and tested" formula - and are unwilling to take larges risks on entirely novel game-play concepts.

The idea's are out there, but the backing to develop those idea's is not.

Yup, EvE has the largest supercomputer server cluster of any MMO. I think it might even be rated as one of the worlds top 500 supercomputers..

I think that with the growing presence of desktop Linux, and the high level support that will be driven on this platform by more and more governments and bodies switching over to using it, we could soon see a sharp increase in the number of developers creating cross-platform game solutions.

With Open-GL and Open-AL, porting games to other platforms such as the Mac and Linux is reasonably easy. It takes more effort and time to code a game to take advantage of these possibilities, and the middle-ware to support large scale production is pretty much non-existent at this time, so most production companies currently considering this route have a high development overhead on this front.

However, this is a field of development which is growing fast, especially considering the number of Asian countries that are moving over to alternative software platforms and O/S's at a government level, and even some of the more traditional western countries too.

As originally posted in the news on the Darkspace site:

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It has taken us 6 years to get there, but on the 18th March 2007 we finally reached 140,000 user registrations!

Hopefully, with a little effort, the support of the community (and the upcoming patch), we can achieve the next 140,000 in a slightly shorter timespan.

Thank you to everyone who has made this possible and for all of the community members who have stuck with us through the years.

Here's to the future!

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Although this may not seem like much of an achievement to many players used to larger games, for a company as small as Palestar, and for a relatively unknown title, this is something of which to be proud. DarkSpace may not be considered successful by many standards, yet it is still around 6 years later, and although it may not be considered as the best of it's incarnations, it is still under active development and progress is being made.

For those interested in a little more of the history behind the DarkSpace game and where it is at today, I would like to point you to our entry in the Wikipedia. It contains quite extensive information on the game play and the development cycle to date.

I guess this shows what can be done, given enough determination and the support of an awesome community.

- Drafell

Do you mean skill based as in actual player skill, or a whole list of skills/abilities that you can level up?

I am waiting for an MMO that plays much more like an FPS than having an artificial skill system (except where magic is involved, of course).

Oooookkkkaaaaayyyyyy................

Can I have fries with that?

No! Not chips! I want good ole' american french fries!

What do you mean I can't have fries?

Well which daft idiot put my Mac in a computer?

What? It IS a computer? No wonder they taste funny.

It's a logical step. AO already has in game advertising, and I would not be surprised if other MMO's didn't start introducing advertisements (in the right game context). MMO's are big businesses now with large, predictable and captive audiences. If you have those people staring at a screen for X hours a day, the media industry is going to find some way to take advantage of it to sell more stuff.

I am most interested in seeing how a softs drinks company can introduce advertising in your typical fantasy MMO for their flagship product, without breaking immersion.

I think the right game could quite easily do it, given that MMO's are now mainstream titles. If something can crack the live console market and PC at the same time, I can easily see WoW being surpassed several times over.

Quite a few of the titles in development are getting dropped, and so rightly removed.

The game list was outdated enough as it was. Good to see something finally being done about it.

It's not all about testing, it is whether you can implement your given design goals within the time
frame which is set. Obviously, testing is a large part of this, and it is very important to get feedback from people with a wide and varied knowledge of games. This includes the hardcore professional testers as well as the more casual players who just want to see a game before it is released.

All feedback should be used. You often find that is the inexperienced testers which actually come up with the best suggestions for improving a game, or pointing out those oh-so-obvious bugs that your professional team has missed.

There is no such thing as a bad tester, providing you have the necessary tools to make use of the information they generate.

Don't scare us with such horrible thread titles!

There is also the possibility that through such a medium, the players can influence the future of the Star Trek universe as a whole, and even lead to inspiration for new books and series series based on it. The developer sets up the framework, and the gamers and Trek fans make it happen and unfold. It could well be what's needed to help the ST IP succeed in future, given the relatively lukewarm reception of the Enterprise series (which I actually liked).

It gives the game developers a lot more freedom in terms of game design, art design and the overall story-arc for the MMO. Given the vast amount of lore already available for the Star Trek universe, it would be extremely difficult to design a free-form MMO to fit into the currently known universe settings, without conflicting with a lot of the already existing documentation.

It will already be a monumental task given that they are using an existing IP with extensive documentation. Making it harder is kinda pointless.

DarkSpace.

Even as a developer, I will admit that this space-based twitch combat MMO (gawd, what a mouthful) is not currently in it's best form, yet the game play is still exciting and pretty much unique when compared to anything else out there. One of the reasons I am a developer there is because I know we have the ability to make it better and a lot more fun for existing players and new players alike.

It is also arguably free, although there are limitations in just how much you can do in the free "demo" mode. Yet you can still have a significant impact on the game universe.

I have been with the game 4 years myself, although I only became a developer within the last 6 months. Before this period I was helping out a lot with community moderation, game testing, and also doing a spot of PR and promotional work.

Why am I still here after 4 years? I couldn't really say. I guess the game has an indefinable "something" which many of the current community members would agree with. It is six years old and still going, so that in itself is an achievement.
Maybe I am still here because the community CAN get involved in the future of the game and where it is headed.

*shrug*

-Draf.

I work for a game where we regulate religious/political/racial discussions, and it does work, although we use active moderation rather than inbuilt filters. I t, however, is time intensive for the Staff involved. They are nearly all community volunteers who want to help maintain the standards that we have set, and with supervision it is a system that has worked well for us for the last 6 years. Admittedly we do use filters for profanity, but we still moderate attempts to circumvent them.

I am not in favour of outright banning the use of words such as the "Bible", "Koran" or other religious texts, as they are used too often in day to day conversation, but without the presence of active community moderations there is little else that can be done. Until software is developed that can accurately interpret text in context of the native language, blanket filtering will always be the least resource intensive method.

I don't particularly agree with their stance here, although I can see why it has been done. I feel that there are much better solutions though, even if they do require a lot more effort and support to implement and maintain.

One point that might be of interest to everyone here is that the American constitutional "right to free speech" doesn't apply in private venues, this includes web based games, servers and communication facilities...

Being totally biased, I have to say DarkSpace, even with it's current idiosyncrasies.

Off-line crafting is a good idea. It is already shown that it works in EvE.

I have created quite a few tracks to date, although most of them tend to be not so good. I am glad you like this one n particular.
I should sit down and render a version of the music without the game audio and effects overlayed, for those who want a decent quality version.

I will compile a list of the better tracks sometime soon and get them uploaded.