Guild Wars game notes
I had the opportunity to interview Mike O’Brien and Pat Wyatt, founders and lead developers for ArenaNet, makers of Guild Wars. This led to two lengthy posts on the technology of Guild Wars (overview) and the database technology of Guild Wars. Those were really, as the titles suggest, tech-focused. This post, by way of contrast, is just to share interesting game-related tidbits with fellow Guild Wars players. I came away with three key notes:
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Don’t hold your breath for an auction house. (The reasons are spelled out near the end of the database post.)
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Cartographer titles really are calculated based on what fraction of the total possible pixels you’ve opened up, of course with a few grace percentage points so that you don’t need to really open EVERYTHING to get the 100% title. It’s that simple. (And it makes sense. They store the character’s map anyway; there’s little effort in also noting its size.)
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Persistence (non-instancing) isn’t as hard as they thought, and they didn’t think it would be all that hard anyway. So in Guild Wars 2 they will have “more sense of a world,” even as there are also plenty of instanced areas ala the current Guild Wars.
There also is tons of cool stuff in the tech posts, and I hope you have a chance to look at them!
The technology of Guild Wars (overview)
Being an analyst has its perks, the main one being that you get to have some really interesting conversations. And so I recently had the chance to interview Mike O’Brien and Pat Wyatt, two of the founders and lead programmers for ArenaNet, makers of the Guild Wars MMORPG (Massively MultiPlayer Online Role-Playing Game).
If you play games of this sort, it’s surely obvious to you why you should care. But if you don’t, maybe you should be interested anyway. After all, Guild Wars is a graphics-intensive SaaS offering that easily supports 100,000 simultaneous users, while managing a gig or so of fat client even over dial-up speeds. Every user is a potential hacker, whether for fun or actual real-world cash profit, although we didn’t actually talk about security very much. And ArenaNet provides all this on a relatively shoestring budget; in particular, Guild Wars subscription fees are precisely $0.
| Categories: ArenaNet, NCsoft, and Guild Wars, Fun stuff, Games and virtual worlds, Online and mobile services, Software as a service | 4 Comments |
Don’t use Office 2007. But do steal its ideas.
You probably shouldn’t use Microsoft Office 2007. Even so, you probably should install and look at it, and then rip off its ideas. I’ll explain.
Microsoft Office Word 2007 is, so far as I can tell, seriously flawed. Specifically, it has been eating way too much of my work for me to happily keep using it. This has been going on long enough that I’m convinced the cause is not simple user error. The final straw yesterday was when changes I’d saved in a draft blog post (about Filemaker) weren’t there five hours later, with no intervening crashes, no messages about “Do you want to close w/ unsaved changes?”, and so on. Naturally, Microsoft (or rather the excellent consultant/expert they’ve provided me to talk with) has never heard of these problems before and is highly perplexed. Anyhow, I plan to keep using Word for highly formatted work – i.e., white papers and Monash Letters – but using it for general note-taking and blogging has turned out to be quite the mistake. (I guess I could go back to Word 2003, but now I’m intrigued by testing the cheaper alternative.)
But all glitches notwithstanding — Office 2007’s “ribbon” is one of the five greatest general UI advances in the past 10-15 years*. Just as the traditional Office menu/icon-row look-and-feel dominates business computing, the ribbon is likely to soon take its place. And deservedly so, at least in two broad classes of application: Analytic and composite. And those two, taken together, happen to comprise the vast majority of the innovation going on in enterprise applications today.
*Three of the other four, in my opinion, are:
- The screen-division aspect of dashboards and portals.
- Dynamic text-link navigation, also popularized via portals.
- Search boxes.
The last slot is left open for personal-taste additions to the list.
| Categories: Enterprise applications, Microsoft, Usability and UI | 1 Comment |