The Second Trimester: The Heartbeat of the Auto Content Generator System

This is something truly unique to the MMORPGs so far (though you can see this to some degree in Diablo and Daggerfall ): the ability of the player to request content on-demand. Central to this for AO is the mission system. Here a player can use a terminal anyplace in the world and request a mission just for him/her. I think this was a very important selling point for many players wanting to migrate from other similar games . People were tired of waiting ”camping as it is called ”and downtime. I think my idea here was basically to enable people to have a single-player or limited-number-of-players experience in a multiplayer world. Today in AO , it is used all the time. People spend as much time in the auto content generator (ACG) areas as outside in the "static" world.

For example, let's say you ask for a mission, such as finding an item. The mission system then assembles a bunch of rooms, more or less like auto-assembling a puzzle. Next, these rooms are populated with monsters, chests, traps, and so on using the category system and interpolation system. The creation of these areas is done in a "hands-off" way, with designers simply pulling strings, setting down rules, and making building blocks. It is like setting the rules of DNA and letting evolution take its course.

I have no regrets about this system, save one. We invested too little resources in it. The major part of the system was made by only three people: a programmer, a world designer, and myself . Only toward the very end, when it was appearing to everyone how big it might become, did we add more people. The problem here was really convincing people that something made so hands-off would be fun. We had only three designers on the game at that time, and it was completely impossible for us to deliver "static" dungeons and play areas for everyone. I wish we had more people on this part, though; the data in the system is too repetitive, basically. The system itself can handle much, much more, and so it will! Just wait and see.

The Skin, Hair, and Eyes: The Client

Few things in AO have gone through as many steps of development as the client and control system. First, when we started development, we decided to go with a system of prerendered two-dimensional (2D) characters , such as those found in Diablo and Ultima Online ( UO ) . The point of view was supposed to be overhead isometric, and the control indirect (point, click, and run).

The first thing that became apparent was that we weren't happy with the quality of the models in the game. The graphic artists wanted real 3D, polygon characters. We stumbled about for some time on this issue.

One of the more funny things we investigated for the client was actually a totally weird technology called spheroids. We thought of, and used energy on investigating, having the characters rendered as a series of blobs stacked on top of each other. Happily, we only used four months to find out that a spheroid character was rendered slower than a polygon one. This was just at the time when 3D cards exploded onto the market. I'm glad they did ”those spheroids sure looked ugly.

One of the things we wanted to do was make the game more social than previous MMORPGs ”at least more social- looking . Luckily, Tommy really believed in motion capture and a great animation system. We invested in MOCAP equipment and he worked like a maniac creating the MOCAP studio. He did everything from working as a carpenter , building the stage, to setting up all the computers and equipment and actually starring as the actor in many moves. He is the male in the game. Every time I see a solitus, nano, or opifex male running around, it is him!

The vision was to give people the ability to express themselves with their bodies as well as with written text. The end resulting quality of animation is still some of the very best on the market today, well after AO 's launch. I especially remember "the emotes." Having worked at Funcom for nine years , those hours when we made that list of emotes were like a dream ”what being a game designer was all about. We stayed late into the night, climbed all over the chairs and tables in the meeting room, ate pizza, and played out emotes. We wanted emotes that interacted with the world, emotes that changed with time and breed, emotes you would have to do to ”and with ”another character (by the way, we didn't enact everything). We wanted the whole package. The end result was pretty good and quite fun, if not quite as lofty as creative minds can become late at night.

We also ended up with a good animation system, with the ability to split upper and lower body, to interpolate animations, and to have animations react to impulses from the world. That is why you may see your character walk, fire a gun, and get hit at the same time.

The problem here was not the technology, but the game mechanics. Some animations are simply so much more important than others. We needed to abort some animations to display vital things. These became vital as the game feedback was linked to the animations.

In the beginning of development, a character would basically "simulate" a fight, while the real fight was running in the chat box. That was no good. We needed to link it more directly. So, when we got a message from the server ”"You are hit" ”we ran a get-hit animation. That also meant that we "delayed" the message on the client. The system waited for the "keyframe" in the animation to appear before reducing health and printing a "You got hit" message in the chat box. This led to a lot of problems. Mostly, players felt their characters died for no obvious reason. Often, this came as a result of the hit keyframe simply being "smoothed" away. I don't know how many times that piece of code was rewritten to change the priority of animation smoothing.

If you make a system where visuals get priority over gameplay, or become gameplay, you should have a clear, well-thought-through priority system. You have to display a bullet entering your chest, even though the player wants to display "combing her hair" animation.