All Posts by gabbz

Here are my takes:

1. Non-SOE Star Wars MMO (to stop the so-called SWG veterans from crying ffs)
2. Blade Runner MMO (hell yea, that'd rock)
3. Diablo MMO (with both fractions playable - humans as well as demons)
4. Snow Crash MMO (based on the Stephenson cyberpunk novel)
5. 10,000 BC MMO (we have SciFi and Fantasy, but nothing prehistoric, I think it might rock if it has the crytek engine, vast landscapes and large monsters/dinosaurs - "Shadow of the Colossus" style)

Hm, I could think of a dozen more cool IP's to make MMORPGs, MMORTS or MMOFPS's out from.

I don't think its necessarily two camps. You don't have to think the screenshots are fake to think they are milking this cash cow.

What they are basically doing is this:

• create a name/brand/identity (first video which appeared somewhat around 2002?)
• use viral marketing methods (aka mouth to mouth propaganda, providing a video to youtube is a good start)
• produce information to make the game seem legit (website, devblog, screenshots, etc.)
• setup either a beta-registration or at least a newsletter (number of signups are used for projectories of userbase aka subscribers aka customers)

All that and the information they get this way is being used to charm investors to pump as much money as possible into this project.

I am not making this up, this is how most enterprises start when they don't have the financial backing or a sound finance plan / business plan at first. A friend of mine has sold screenshots of a website to an investor, used to money he got to hire web programmers who actually built the site then. I even sold a powerpoint presentation once, thats how entrepreneurs work, especially with venture capital.

The only problem with Darkfall is, that they not only tricked investors with it, but also fanboys, who are out there trying to defend Darkfall for whatever reason. My prognosis is that Darkfall will either remain what it is now: Vaporware - or they will find a large enough investor to hire a project manager and devs to built it, at which point it will be clear, that the game won't be released before 2010, which would conclude a total of development time of 10 years.

Fact, Fiction or Rumour? Fact, but an outdated one, so by now its history, with a few exceptions maybe.

How do you prevent someone from swimming out to the open sea without invisible walls? Imagine someone thinks its funny to swim out for an hour, then realizes there are no invisible walls, but no secret islands either. Then he will be pretty pissed off and annoy GM's to warp him back to civilization.

AoC will be more restrictive as WoW in some fashion, but the PvP system, the graphics, the story and so much more make up for it.

Originally posted by Aragon100

Originally posted by Sam123jo0123

There have been alot of 'rumours' that you can't stray from a certain path of terrain in AOC, similar to guild wars.

Other "rumours" about Pizza Hut on their shields. Hope it not ruin the inner feeling of Conan world.

Yea, I heard that too. I also heard that you need to rest in a McDonalds if you want to re-gain your health points and that you can do long-distance travel in a Mercedes that looks like a dragon ... dude, what are you smoking?

The invisible walls have been bugs that have been fixed, as for your "rumour", I guess it will take a shrink to fix that one.

Originally posted by downtoearth

 

 

I can garrentee beta this year if it doesnt happen im not going to follow it either just play something else

On the Darkfall website a new Press Release just appeared! They are hiring 20 more developers and are in talks with a Publisher. As for the reason for this unexpected move they stated: downtoearth wouldn't play Darkfall if we don't have a Beta this year.

Originally posted by Vagelisp

Just imagine what will happen if Darkfall goes beta. A small dev team versus multi million mmos that all of their features tied together are not even half the features that Darkfall has, but they are not even half the features of Ultima Online (which unfortunately for them is not a vaporware).

I want Darkfall to succeed and i would love to see the faces of the cloners that take 4-5 years in development (Betas and Gammas not included) and then come here to show off their unfinished games that feature visual chat rooms, instances and loading screens in the year 2008 of quad core CPUs and several gigabytes of RAM.

And then, pot plant designers, boob algorithm specialists and many other professions made up to consume and justify the standard 20 million dollar mmo budget, will give their place to real developers worthy of their salaries-time and that's just the problem they have against any kind of Darkfall. 

I LOVE YOUR REPLY!!!

It showcases exactly what some of us have been mentioning. This - for the lack of a better word - Fanboy-environment that some created here on the forums and the Darkfall community forums. Its the adorable "we're a small, but elite group of devs and their fanboys against the mean and mighty corporate sell-outs, we'll show 'em!!" attitude. I really wonder what the Darkfall devs have given you so far to make sure they have your undying love and loyality. Can anyone answer me this please?

Hm, my last post was more an additional point of view to complement what the previous poster said.

So, to address your other questions:

• Yes, it can be fun and exciting, it depends what you are programming thou. If you REALLY REALLY like programming drivers, then its alot of fun to write a code that will make pushing the left mouse button open the CD-drive. If you are not into this, then you won't have as a driver programmer. Same with visual stuff. If you like graphics and 3D, then being a game programmer can be amazing. If you find math too complicated that you won't like the math behind a world matrix.
• What does it take? Well, you need to be focused and solution-oriented. What I mean is, you basically solve problems all the time. A problem could be: how do you evenly distribute 20 points on the surface of a ball/globe? The problem is called/related to equidistant distribution. There are solutions that work for certain number of points (number of edges on so-called platonic solids: 4, 6, 8, 12, 20), but if you want to distribute 21 points you can't use that solution. So its up to you as a programmer to decide to go for that solution (which fits the immediate requirement of placing 20 points on the sphere) or to go search for another solution that will work for any number of points. I know this is complex, read it again and let it sink in. :P
• Computing/Programming jobs are and will be on a rise or at least steady. Ever since the first callcenter in india opened there have been doomsday projections of everyon outside of india losing his computer-related job and so on. But the matter of fact is that you mostly need good programmers right now and right there. You don't want a team of translators to give vague requirement documents (which are the result of the mentioned requirement engineering) to a totally unfamiliar team of programmers most of the time.
• The second part of your question deals with learning basically. No, you won't have to learn a new programming language every time you switch companies or projects. Most of the time you will code only with one language because you'll become a specialist for one eventually and be staffed for projects that need that language (which is a decision by the software architect). BUT: learning is a constant process in the information age, especially for a programmer. You will learn something new every year. Not necessarily a new language, but maybe a new method of coding, a new API for a database, a new meta-language to describe user-interaction and so on. So if you don't like learning new stuff, programming is not for you.
• I don't know what you mean by designing iPhones, but if you mean the interface, then yes. You grab the iPhone SDK (software development kit, provided by Apple) and learn the API calls you need to make the phone do this or that. Then you simply decide what you want your phone to do and start programming (and designing a GUI)
• Programming a database interface for an airport, eh? Not sure what you mean by that, but I guess you are asking if you could do the two things and if they are basically the same. They are not. Programmers are as diverse (if not more) as doctors. Your physicist won't be able to operate on a heart, just as a GUI programmer/designer won't be able to write a database interface for concurrent queries or alike. There is a HUGE field of jobs for programmers and I'd suggest checking out monster.com or something like that and search for programmer. Then you'll soon find out that the requirement of skills differ alot inbetween the jobs.

Ok, enough spam.

You can ask the question ten times and will get ten different answers.

Here is my take/opinion on the matter: As a (complete) programmer you will do multiple things that go beyond mere hacking some codes into a compiler/interpreter. You will start out with programming basics, learn data structures, learn a little bit of memory management, learn the concept of a von-Neumann-Architecture and how it affects programming. Then it depends on how hands-on or theoretical you wanna get.

Hands-On:

• Requirement Engineering (find out what the client/user actually wants)
• Software-Architecture (think global like what data do I need, what do I output and how)
• Programming (actually writing code)
• Testing (every bug you squash now will save you lots of trouble later)
• Roll-Out (how does everyone get the software, how do you maintain it with updates?)

Theoretical:

• Maths (with a solid mathematics background it will be easier to write complex algorithms)
• Logic (problems and problemclasses have different complexity -> different memory requirements/runtime)
• soft computing (neural nets, support vector machines, fuzzy logic/systems, binary networks)

This is no complete overview of programming and what's involved in writing code, but it might give you a few ideas on what you'd like to do and what not.

If you get good at it, then solving problems with code can be really fun (yea I know, this sounds geeky).

Excellent reply Gishgeron! *tips hat*

Originally posted by Nightdragon8

While I would hope AoC would become a WoW destroyer, I just dont see it happening, with the asain market buying it up.

If AoC becomes a WoW destroyer, then I will cancel my subscription and sell my Pre-Order CE package on eBay. The one thing I DONT want AoC to be is a WoW destroyer. This would mean that all the WoW kiddies would be crawling all over Tortage with hundreds of Gold Sellers as their Entourage.

I am hoping AoC will do fine, attract the mature audience and WAR will attract all the WoW fanboys since its graphically pretty similiar. My ideal scenario would be 20k of users subscribing to AoC, while a few hundred thousand subscribe to WAR. I will take a handful of mature players over hundred kids with AOLbonics any day.

Interview from 2001, by yours truly: MMORPG:

MMORPG - How long has Darkfall been in development?

Claus - It has been designed on paper for years, but the actual fulltime development started in May/July 2000.

Age of Conan has been in development since 2003, so 3 years less and they will have the open beta in a month and the release on 20th of may. From this perspective the AoC dev has every reason to be critical when people start comparing or asking for Darkfall features on their community forums/blogs.

Imagine you are a professional engineer and created a car. Then someone comes along and asks you: "but why can't it fly? My neighbor has drawn a car with Photoshop that has wings and can fly to the moon, it also comes with two pornstar actresses in the backseat." Wouldn't you doubt that its highly likely to ever be built and able to all the things the Photoshop guy promises?

Make no mistake - Darkfall is a mockup, a showcase. As an entrepreneur thats all you want really in the beginning, because thats what you take to your investors and try to get financing with. But comes the time for a reality check: who of you has actually played Darkfall? Right, who has insights on classes, skills, quests, etc? No one, because most of that information does not exist yet.

I know how appealing the two videos of Darkfall are, but try to be reasonable. I know after watching the Matrix some of you also thought you can plug a cable into your neck and be Neo and hack the world, but those of us who have not yet lost the grip on reality will stick with a game that is about to be released, instead of the vague promises of Darkfall.

Well, I have to side with the AoC developer here. I have coded myself plenty of 3D applications with DX and I know how easy/hard it can be to make a video like the latest Darkfall one.

Now please add the code to maintain a persistent world where you have at least a thousand players interact simultanously. I think thats where the AoC Dev was coming from. Its a whole 'nother story to have a running client instead of a eyecandy mockup.

I'm also not sure where the "epic fail" comment about AoC is coming from - last time I played the game it looked pretty awesome to me. Sure, some things needed to be fixed, but I guess that has been done by now and they are only polishing a few more things atm.