UI Customization and Capital Ships In Jumpgate Evolution 41
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the make-mine-look-like-an-x-wing dept.
from the make-mine-look-like-an-x-wing dept.
ZAM got a chance to speak with NetDevil's Scott Brown at the recent LOGIN 2009 conference about various aspects of upcoming space MMO Jumpgate Evolution. He mentioned that massive ships will be limited in scope and role to begin with, but may expand and evolve as they figure out what users like. He also made some interesting comments about UI customization:
"We built it with the goal of letting people mod the UI. There's still a little bit more work to do that, so I don't know if it'll be ready at launch, but all of our UI is built in Flash. This is with the idea that anybody can build something with Flash and put it in the game. Now, there are problems, for example, if you do certain things in Flash that might cause the game to perform really slowly. We've still got to figure out how to educate people or how we verify this so that you don't make a mod that I download and my game experience is destroyed. We want it to be easier than that. I think that there will be some work to do, but the goal is that, eventually, people will be able to, using Flash, make their own UI."
Don't let users mod the UI! (Score:3, Funny)
We all know what happened last time [google.com] an online world allowed that.
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World of Warcraft allows modding of the UI. That hasn't exactly destroyed the user experience.
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WoW is xml not satan's tool Flash. I wonder how long until all the flash vulnerablitites allow for hackers to 'pwn' the game ?
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Commas (Score:2)
I really think, at the moment, that there are, in reality, too many, you know, excessive, unnecessary, and redundant commas, typically, in this quote.
Not Flash! ARGGGHHH (Score:5, Interesting)
To be honest, my interest in this game just dropped by 30% upon hearing it uses Flash.
Flash for me is slow, buggy and proprietary. I would much prefer something like WoW where UI addons can be scripted in Lua.
I applaud the idea of making the UI totally customizable, really thats a great thing. But I really don't like that it uses Flash.
I guess only the beta will tell if it sucks or not...
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Scaleform Flash interfaces have been used in a number of titles including:
* Crysis
* Mass Effect
* Dawn of War â" Dark Crusade
* Sid Meyer's Railroads
* Sid Meyer's Civilization 4
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All of those games are slow and buggy.
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The artists like it though because it's familiar to them, so it can be a bit of a fight to get them to switch to another system.
The last article I saw about it suggested that most MMO artists aren't in fact familiar with flash... it's just not a tool that's ever been used in that particular business before, so there really is little advantage in using it over other cross-platform UI toolkits. It's a buzzword that managers like, though, so it's probably getting a foothold that way.
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This is not the adobe flash your thinking of!
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You can go about your business.
Move along.
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In other news, Java is really slow and no-one would use JavaScript for anything serious.
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how is this 5, interesting?
this is pure flame bait, and that's what its gonna get because the author is terribly informed.
First of all, flash is no slower than javascript, which is your only real alternative in a browser( silverlight/java have very low market penetration by comparison). On some tasks, such as image manipulation, it is much faster.
As for being buggy, this is really a problem for flash developers, not for the technology itself. The flash libraries themselves are extremely polished and well d
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first, as the OP, I'm as surprised as you are that I got modded up to 5. However, I was not attempting to start a flamewar.
I am simply speaking from experience. In my experience (using adobe flash with firefox, and internet explorer) Flash is slow and buggy. Things take much longer than they should and use more CPU than they should. I would happily switch to a 3rd party flash plugin but none exist that come really close to providing the same functionality. So I am stuck with using this buggy piece of c
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The problem with flash isn't the technology, it's that it's so easy to develop something with it a lot of people that don't understand it use it. Is that Flash's fault? If it is, we should also throw away PHP for being insecure when you don't sanitize your inputs.
If you want to make a fully customizable UI Flash is currently the very best tool available. Whether it works well or it's slow on buggy depends on your coding skills.
Jumpgate? Gate Ship One? (Score:1)
I guess the ships that go through the gate will be called Gate Ship 1 [aol.com], Gate Ship 2, etc.???
Re:Jumpgate? Gate Ship One? (Score:4, Funny)
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What are you saying? Half the pixels are white and the other two are black?
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Yeah, there really needs to be a wooden table involved in there somewhere.
Missing the point (Score:4, Insightful)
You know as much as it sounds cool to fly the bigger ship, I'm imagining it's kind of like one of those Battlefield games where you could drive the aircraft carrier around the island. Well it turns out that aircraft carriers are slow and they don't move very fast, and it's not that exciting a thing to do in an action game.
As far as military sci-fi goes, aren't capital space ships supposed to be responsible for coordinating the battle, kinda like a mobile HQ? If you want to make it exciting for people to choose the "slow" unit, give those players an expanded view of the battle field, the ability to give orders, coordinate supplies, handle communications, and other stuff that the fighter pilots wouldn't be interested in, or have the time to do.
There's more to do in a space battle than just fire lasers.
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Such as finding space-sharks on which to mount said lasers!
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There's more to do in a space battle than just fire lasers.
Like photon torpedoes! <csi type="miami">YEEEAAAAAHHHH!</csi>
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Have you tried the X series of games?
The latest, X3 Terran Conflict includes capital ships in the data but aren't used in the game. The things are just too damned big.
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Don't M2 and up count as capital? Sure, they may not be Freespace sized but in most games anything larger than a fighter counts as capital. Basically in sea battles the actual ships would be the equivalent of capital ships in space and the air support would be the fighters and bombers.
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If you look at Egosoft's X-Universe series you'll find 2 capitol ship classes, destroyers and carriers.
When you head into a big fight you'll usually ride in a destroyer with a handful of corvettes (light capitol class) as your escorts. Once you're in sector and a few km from the jump gate, you'll bring in your carriers with lots of heavy fighters (scouts and medium fighters go splat too quickly). All in all you can coordinate a fight with 60-80 ships under your control.
I would love to see something like thi
What a newb (Score:3, Funny)
You know as much as it sounds cool to fly the bigger ship, I'm imagining it's kind of like one of those Battlefield games where you could drive the aircraft carrier around the island. Well it turns out that aircraft carriers are slow and they don't move very fast, and it's not that exciting a thing to do in an action game.
Talk about being inexperienced at BF42. The purpose of sailing the aircraft carrier is to run over other ships or ram the enemy carrier into an island. If spamming "RAMMING SPEED" and then pushing the enemy carrier onto land, causing it to teleport around and kill everyone in the vicinity, isn't considered exciting and fun, then this guy has no idea how to design a game.
Will I like this game? (Score:2)
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Yeah, probably. You can always play the first Jumpgate to get an idea of what it will be like.
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If they succeed with what they are trying to do you should like it, and so should I :-)
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You might also like Vendetta Online, which is an MMOFPS/RPG, in space, which runs on Mac and Linux, as well as Windows.
http://vendetta-online.com/ [vendetta-online.com]