Economy of Effort

Continuing my posts about the Austin Game Conference…

Friday was kicked off with a keynote by Dr. Richard Bartle, the co-creator of the original MUD (multi-user dungeon), and a professor at the University of Essex. Bartle is an exceedingly charming Englishman whose humor appealed to the geek crowd, without going overboard. Hopefully someone was recording a video of the keynote, because I want to see it again. Bartle titled his talk, “Why Are We Here?”. He informed us that “You are all going to die”, and with that knowledge of our own mortality, why did we find it so important to be there, in Austin, right then?

Bartle talked about MMOs (or “virtual worlds”, as he termed such games) as a powerful means of self-expression. MMOs empower players with a very strong sense of self, as their interaction with the world revolves around their created character. Also, their actions in the world primary effect the player’s character (generally, you don’t cause rapid changes in the game world through your actions – instead, the changes happen to your character). He also drew a parallel between MMO development and the old-school hackers of the ’60s and ’70s. He claimed MMO developers largely subscribed to the same ethos as the old hackers – freedom of access, the right to be judged by your actions in the technology instead of outside of it, etc. Some of it was a bit of a stretch, but it was interesting nonetheless. It sounded a lot more plausible coming from him, I assure you.

The first session I attended was Microsoft’s “Introduction to XNA Studio”. Microsoft appears to be doing some great things with the development pipeline. One thing they’re trying to do is provide the same kind of content control to art assets as version control systems provide code. The XNA toolchain tracks the use of art resources, so that you’ll know exactly what is relying on a certain model or texture, and will therefore be able to tell what changing that model or texture would affect. This has not traditionally been easy, and many developers have created in-house solutions to deal with problems like this. They also announced that an XNA beta will be made available at GDC in March 2006.

I only attended one other session on Friday, and that was the “Casual Game Evolution Summit: Tech Today for Tomorrow’s Hit”. Basically, this panel included people from Sun and Macromedia, and talked up the usefulness of Java and Flash/Shockwave for the development of “casual” games. The Sun guy insisted that Java need not be relegated only to small, lightweight games – with Java’s hooks into OpenGL, he stated that DOOM III could easily be written in Java. The discussion was focused on “casual game” development, though. Honestly, there wasn’t a lot of meat in this session. Basically, each side told us about how much more widespread their technologies are than in the past (and it’s true – Java and Flash and Shockwave penetration on home PCs is certainly up – especially Java, with the whole Microsoft VM deal behind them, and more and more Windows machines getting true Sun JRE installs). If you knew nothing about casual game development, you’d leave knowing that Java and Shockwave are good platforms for such games. Probably not news to most people at the conference.

The rest of my time at the conference was spent at the tech pavilion. Here’s a couple photo highlights:

I love this picture – Microsoft and Sony, right next to each other, living in sweet harmony:

The giant elephant in the room was actually a gorilla – a mascot for GameTrust’s “Go Casual” sessions:

Microsoft had a separate “casual games” booth set up, where they displayed Xbox 360s playing some of the casual games that will be available on Xbox Live Arcade. Frankly, some of the stuff looked really neat, and I could easily see myself purchasing a few casual games to keep on my 360. I know Stacey will enjoy some of them:

Hooray for PVS (potentially visible sets)!

Next conference, I will be certain to have a decent camera with me. Too many of my pictures came out blurry, and even worse were the ones that I had to delete.

I attended the 2005 Austin Game Conference this past weekend. As I am in my final year of graduate school (until I eventually go back for a Ph.D), it has become time for me to start attending the job conferences and expos for the industry that I wish to enter. This was the first such conference I have gone to, and it was quite a revealing experience. Much of what I had thought to be true was confirmed, and I also learned some new things and got some ideas for future reference.

I stayed at the Radisson on E. Cesar Chavez Ave., right in the heart of downtown Austin (and a direct 3 block walk down the street from the convention center where the conference was held). My 12th floor room had a view overlooking the Colorado River, and was right by the famous Congress Bridge which is the home to the largest bat colony in North America. I didn’t get a chance to see the bats, but someday soon I’ll be back.

The conference began with a keynote speech by Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) President John Smedley. Smedley offered his vision of online games in the future:

(Abridged and paraphrased): A kid walks into a Starbuck’s with his PSP. He turns it on and gets online in Untold Legends. No configuration hassle, the device just linked up to the T-Mobile hotspot and began. The kid plays with some net friends – but these friends are kids in Tokyo riding a train, playing the same game on their cell phones with GeForce2-level graphics chips (such phones are already on the market in Japan). Finally, the kid at Starbuck’s goes home, and fires up his PS3. There, he gets on the same game, with the same character, and can continue playing with his Tokyo cell phone playing friends. Obviously, the game looks different on the PS3 than on the PSP or cell phones, but the game remains consistant and universal.

Along the way in explaining this vision, Smedley dropped the “Leeroy Jenkins” clip on us, as well as the “chocolate milk kid” clip, as examples of how player behavior poses a challenge in the development of these games (as Smedley said, having an ogre in EverQuest with the screaming kid’s voice coming out of it would be incredibly distracting). He termed the challenge as “solving the ‘idiot’ problem”.

Smedley also had some interesting things to say about the upcoming console generation. When it comes to storage, Smedley said, “Guess what? Hard drives are optional on the next generation of consoles too. That doesn’t make our job any easier, but we adapt.” He offered some alternatives to hard drive storage, such as networked storage and streamable content. “We hope we can get people to buy the hard drive kits on the next gen consoles, but we’re not relying on it.”

He finished his keynote with some thoughts on the business model of MMO games. Subscription costs have not gone over well in the console world. Alternative solutions, however, have something to offer. He first talked about the contraversial topic of item sales for MMO games. He spoke of Station Exchange, an auction service by SOE for EverQuest 2. He said that 33% of EQ2 players are signed up for the service, and that the “secondary market” that Station Exchange is a big part of pulls down $300-$500 million a year. What was once something that was banned and shunned has instead been embraced and turned into a proft stream. (That last sentence is my editorializing – Smedley left out the part about SOE’s initial reaction to the “secondary market”).

Station Exchange is just an example of what Smedley called “added value services”. The idea is to make the game subscription free, but offer added value services to provide the income streams (beyond the initial game sale). He gave an example of a “velvet rope” bonus subscription for $5/month as something that could be offered.

After the keynote was a break, and then the first round of seminars. I attended a seminar named “Relational Database Chices for MMOs”. The panel featured four developers from companies that produced some major MMOs, including City of Heroes and Dark Age of Camelot. They talked about where they use relational databases, and equally important, where they do not. I was surprised to hear just how much many of their games rely on “flat files” for a number of data storage purposes. The major issue with relational databases, they told us, is the delay between the request for information, and the successful retrieval and return of that info. The databases are too slow for looking up information on-demand in real-time gameplay. Players expect their button press to be followed with action instantaneously, not button press, then a heartbeat’s time, then action. In game elements where the instant response is not so important (such as an in-game auction house), then relational databases are an option. An interesting topic of conversation was the specific relational databases each company uses – two (including the devs for Dark Age of Camelot) use MySQL, while the other two (including the devs for City of Heroes) use Microsoft SQL. The guy from Mythic relayed a story about their inquiry on pricing for an Oracle database, which used to only be determined by number of users (which, for an MMO, is outrageously large). Oracle has since begun offering pricing per CPU, which makes it feasible for new MMO design now. One final note was something that the Mythic guy said about the industry’s need for DBAs (database administrators). He said he knew plenty of companies where a DBA could walk into HR and say, “I’m a DBA. Hire me.”, and HR would answer, “OK.”

At the end of that session was a lunch break. There was another round of sessions after lunch, but I sat that one out, as none of the lectures interested me, and I wanted a chance to roam the Tech Pavilion floor without the heavy traffic that exists in-between sessions. I got a chance to talk to some recruiters from a recruiting agency (“As soon as you finish that master’s, call us”), as well as to some guys from BioWare and Microsoft. Alas, the BioWare guy pointed out that Canada isn’t an option for me at this point due to visa laws (I have the requisite degree, but not the 2 years of industry work experience needed). The Microsoft guy asked for a copy of my resume and told me to be sure to hit up the recruiters that come to Fresno State.

Also at the Microsoft booth was an Xbox 360 kiosk. Let me tell you: that stuff you’ve been hearing about 360 games looking like “current gen” games? Hogwash. Granted, it’s not the monsterous leap forward that the current gen systems were from the hopelessly grainy and barely-able-to-do-3D systems like the old PSX, but the difference is obvious. All of the playable demos were running at a blazing 60 frames per second in 720p. You don’t see that in screenshots, but the difference it makes when seeing it in action is obvious. It’s silky smooth enough animation to confuse with reality, rather than just smooth enough to not be “choppy”. It’s about time. Having games that don’t dip down into choppiness during high action sequences is an important hurdle to get past in order to get closer to that ever-popular buzzword, “immersion”.

The next session I attended was ATI’s “Demo Team Secrets: The Next Generation”. The ATI guy showed their Toyshop Demo, and went over some of the techniques used to create the effects in the demo. The demo uses a technique called Parallax Occlusion Mapping, which was developed by one of the ATI engineers and was a topic of a good chunk of the session. The demo also highlighted DirectX9 HLSL, and some neat ideas for rendering rain in realtime cheaply. Hopefully, the presentation gets posted to their Tech Papers & Presentations section of their website soon.

The final session I attended on day 1 was “IBM Processors and Technologies”, in which the topic of discussion was not the Cell processor, but rather the CPU used in the Xbox 360. A bunch of details on the processor was released within the past few days, so this presentation was pretty close to the debut of a lot of information. I’m not a hardware engineer, so this wasn’t all quite up my alley, but I did get something out of the session. One of the topics of discussion was the contraversial decision of using inorder execution (as opposed to out-of-order execution, which allows for the rearrangement of commands at the instruction level, in order to minimize pipeline stalls and such.) IBM made it clear that this was a customer requirement (as in, Microsoft, and Sony for the Cell). They also said that inorder execution permits more predictable performance for the processors, and that multi-threaded processors like these benefit less from out-of-order execution – instructions that would stall everything behind it on a single core chip can be executed on a different core, while the instructions behind it can execute on a different core.

After the conference ended, it was time to hit the streets of Austin. Though, without any vehicle transportation, I wasn’t really going far. But I did enjoy some sights on the way back to the hotel:

Those id guys roll in style:

Austin is truly a beautiful city:

I’m not used to a city downtown that’s so… clean:

I hold the line: