After the tsunami, the first thing I checked for in the news was whether one of my favourite writes was okay. Today I found confirmation that Arthur C. Clarke and his family are okay. He’s suffered some material damage, but no personal loss. The email mentioned in the article is here
Which reminds me that I need to finish reading Time’s Eye.
The Dreamfall website has been updated with some new screenshots.
Eressea didn’t run this morning. It looks like the new code I made for this year’s christmas gift causes some endless loop in the routine loading the data file. Remember: Code made at 2:30 in the night does not stand a good chance of running the first time you use it. Which is bad news for the rewrite of the movement code I did during the night from saturday to sunday.
Work has been slow this last day before the holidays, so I’ve been looking at the profiler for lack of other really pressing tasks – well, I have tasks, but I depend on people who have already gone on vacation, so I can’t work on those. Anyway, the profiler tells me what I already know, we need to reduce the number of synchronous resource loads on the client even more if we want to get a more steady framerate (duh), and it’s a shame I lost the code I once wrote for that. And a shame that I won’t have time to do it when we’re all coming back after the holidays 🙂 Because there’s going to be something more important to do then, I’m sure.
“Free” is the magic word.
In just one day, we’ve had 15,000 downloads of the Anarchy Online software through bittorrent. And our ftp link has been maxed out for the last 24 hours, I have no idea how many downloads that adds up to.
AO is the most popular link at suprnova with over 7000 peers at the time of this writing, beating even all the pirated stuff that’s usually found there. Bittorrent is cool – as a protocol, that is. That it’s usually associated with piracy doesn’t mean it can’t be used for good, just like email is not a bad thing simply because 90% of my mails are spam.
I’m digressing, though. Interesting times, indeed. The newbie areas are full of people, we run lots of instances of them, and Alex said he hasn’t seen this kind of crazyness since the launch day. Except this time the servers aren’t going down all the time 🙂
Meanwhile I’ve been working on version 15.8 (fixed some exotic item code) and 15.9, where I was getting really tired of the launcher code and thinking of merging it with the main game into a single executable. If I find the time, that is.
I had to disable comments after getting spammed with 1000 casino-advertising comments. I’m going to re-enable comments as soon as I find a way to fight the spam – until then, why don’t you comment in your own blog and use trackback?
We’ve all compared MMORPG subscriptions to phone subscriptions at one point, and now it’s becoming even more so. We have decided to give Anarchy Online away for free, no charge, no monthly cost, no nothing.
Check out the details here. Free Crack.
Why are we doing that? For free, you get the game that launched 2 years ago, with all the bugfixes, improvements and freebies we added over the years, but without the expansions. We’re hoping that some of the people who play for free will say “uh, this is fun, now I want that expansion thing”, and become paying customers. But if they don’t, well, they still get an MMORPG.
This is for you if
– you can’t afford two MMORPGs at a time
– you have no credit card (we don’t require one for free accounts)
– you want to check out AO at your own time, without being forced to pay after two weeks.
I’m expecting people to say “yeah, desperate attempt at getting customers after WoW and EQ2 launched”. The truth is, we’ve been thinking about this for a very long time, because like the cellphone market, we think there’s room for more than one business model. Requiring a credit card has been a major obstacle in many markets, for example. We probably lost some customers to them, but not dramatically. And we don’t know if they’ll stay lost – after SWG, which is a much more direct competitor in the SciFi genre, we saw a drop, but a pretty fast recovery when people found that they the depth of the game, their friends or whatever drew them to AO particularly.
I think that like UO, Anarchy is here to stay. We’ll continue to be creative, both in-game and sales-wise.
And now go play!
The opinions in this posting are my own, not those of Funcom. And if I get the facts wrong, you can’t sue either me or them.
I’ve changed teams. fter two years working on Dreamfall, the new game in the Longest Journey universe, I’m back on Anarchy Online.
Why? I guess mostly because I felt drained. I’ve been working on that game for two years, including preliminary research, and I needed a change. I felt consrained by the role of lead programmer, too – it meant too little freedom for me. Whenever I ended up actually programming something, it was either some piece of glue that someone else needed, or I felt guilty because I was not doing one of a million other things.
So, back on AO now, and I’m falling into the nice after-expansion time when all the plans for what’s next are new and good, when the reality of time & money hasn’t destroyed all the high-flying plans yet, and the possibilities for what we could do next seem endless. Well, not endless, actually. Anarchy means working on a product that’s already out, for which the player’s idea of what kind of game it should be and what we are allowed to change is often frustratingly narrow, and you simply cannot do everything. In a way, I like that, too. Sometimes constraints are good.
First thing I’m doing: Port the whole thing from VC6.0 to Visual Studio .NET. No way am I ever going back to Visual C++ 6.0.
Here.
Für alle, die sehen wollen woran ich arbeite, und warum ich momentan kaum etwas schreibe.
Tumiki Fighters. Ein 2D Shooter mit 3D Objekten. Man steuert ein Flugzeug aus Bauklötzen, schiess auf Gegner aus Bauklötzen, und wenn man sie abschießt, kann man sie an das eigene Flugzeug dranstecken, um ein größeres zu bekommen. Weird.
Das Spiel ist in D geschrieben. Eine Art C++ Derivat, dass ein wenig wie Java aussieht. Cool, was man damit machen kann.
Wie ein werdender Vater bin ich gestern den Flur auf- und ab gelaufen. Unser Demo für TLJ2 ist fertig geworden, und am letzten Tag sind natürlich noch tausend kleien Dinge zu machen gewesen. Auf der Konsole lief es plötzlich aus Speicherplatzgeünden nicht, auf dem PC hat eine Textur gefehlt, Animationen haben nicht gepasst, ein Shader war falsch, und jeder der Beteiligten hatte irgendwie noch “ein klitzekleines Ding” das unbedingt rein musste in die Version. Und dann haben die Designer sich entshclossen, die Kameras nochmal umzustellen… Das alles unter einen hut zu kriegen, unwichtiges abzulehnen, Versionen bauen, nebenbei selber etwas fixen, und zusehen dass jeder tut, was er soll, hat meinen ganzen Tag ausgemacht. Auf dem Flur zwischen den Grafikern und Programmierern kann man heute sicher einen Trampelpfad sehen, wo ich gestern langgelaufen bin.
Heute ist ein schöner Tag. Die Ruhe nach dem Sturm. Ich komme dazu, die nächsten Wochen zu planen, mir Gedanken zu machen, was wir nächstes Mal verbessern, und werde vor 19 Uhr daheim sein. Ich könnte mal wieder Wäsche waschen. Wenn man erst nach Mitternacht daheim ist, ist das keine gute Idee, dementsprechend habe ich nichts mehr anzuziehen.
Ach ja: Zeigen kann ich leider nichts. Geheimhaltung. Das wird wohl noch mindestens bis zur E3 so bleiben.
Man gehe zur MSN Suche, und gebe als Suchbegriff xfree86 ein. Das Resultat ist verblüffend. Sowas gibt’s bei Google nicht.
