Well, most people who will care already know this, but today was officially my last day working for Terralever. They’re a great company full of wonderful people. I learned a lot while here and worked on a lot of interesting projects. They’re actually hiring ActionScript developers (real programmers to do real programming, that is), and I’d recommend the job wholeheartedly.

I wasn’t actually looking for a new job. I’ve got a 3-month-old daughter and a mortgage only slightly older than that But, I also stumbled across an opportunity that was entirely too good to ignore.

No, I can’t pronounce it either. Nobody can.

See… I’ve always wanted to work in the video game industry (some times more than others), and I’ve been a big fan of Raph Koster’s work for a while now. I’ve read his book and agree with most of the things he says in it.

I’d actually read the news on the day Raph and John announced the company and was intrigued. I looked at their job postings and didn’t see anything that fit me very well, so I passed it up.

Then, a little while ago, a new list of job postings went out and I actually matched two of the positions… after a bit of bullying from friends, and a lot of agonizing over the potential heartache, I figured I may as well apply for both of them. I interviewed with the team shortly thereafter, got along great with people, liked the environment, and am absolutely in love with the project. It’s gonna be awesome.

I’m not doing this for any sort of perceived financial gain that might come from it. I have no illusions that I’m getting any measurable pay raise out of this. I’m doing it because it’s about as close as I can realistically get to my dream job. I’m doing it because I believe in the project’s goals. I’m doing it because I’m a great big dork who’s never really taken a chance like this before. I’m doing it because I don’t think I could ever forgive myself for not doing it.

Our house is 90% packed. We’ve done some minor repairs and painting in order to make the place more attractive to renters. We have a short lease on a medium-sized apartment in Escondido. If the place works out, great. If not, we’re not tied down to it.

We pick up the U-haul next Tuesday morning. If all goes well, we arrive in California early the following day.

I start work on the 30th.

Posted by Ammon as personal, work at 5:00 PM EDT

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This is a memo to myself more than anything else… but there has got to be a way to use UDP from a SWF running through your web browser.

Pieces of the puzzle:

• Flash 9 has binary TCP socket support, but no UDP.
• Standalone projectors like MDM Zinc can add UDP capabilities to the mix.
• A projector and a SWF in the browser can communicate together very happily via the LocalConnection interface.

But web browsers are understandably reluctant to download and run a 3rd party UDP proxy application for you It’s also not terribly platform independent to require something running in userspace outside of the VM.

Java has UDP support. You could write a UDP proxy in Java that uses a standard local TCP socket to talk to the SWF - both the SWF and the applet would have to load from the same page. Don’t know whether Java’s and Flash’s security policies would allow this sort of behavior… probably not. I know applets have difficulties connecting to anything but the originating server - so they probably can’t listen for traffic on the local host either. And if they can, there’s probably some big security certificate you have to sign in blood and offer to the Sun gods or something…

Of course, the dumb option would be to have a remote TCP->UDP proxy… but that eliminates any sort of performance gain that might have been achieved by using UDP in the first place, so that’s only valid in the weird case where you honestly need to talk to a UDP server for whatever reason and don’t care about the lag.

No, the proxy must run locally, somehow.

Posted by Ammon as flash, ideas, networking, sleep at 10:19 AM EDT

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So, it was announced today that NCsoft will be doing some MMO work with Sony. Both have major operations in Austin, so that makes sense. NCsoft is one of the better MMO studios on the planet, so that certainly doesn’t hurt my PS3’s prospects, either.

I’d link the actual press release off of NCsoft’s site, but they’re dumb and don’t seem to give permanent links to them? *mutter* Anyhow, the relevant portion reads:

Santa Monica, Calif., July 11, 2007 — NCsoft® Corporation (KSE:036570.KS), the world’s leading developer and publisher of online games today announced an exclusive game development deal with Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI) that provides for NCsoft to create several online games for SCEI’s PlayStation® platforms, including PLAYSTATION®3 (PS3™) and PSP® (PlayStation®Portable), accessible through PLAYSTATION®Network. The announcement was made today at the E3 Media and Business Summit taking place in Santa Monica, California.

Although company officials did not divulge any details regarding the names or types of games in development, NCsoft officials did say the games would be created from both existing intellectual properties (IP) owned by NCsoft, as well as new IP.

… irrelevant self praise and other generic info snipped …

But I am a bit confused… after all, doesn’t Sony have their own MMO department? Are there implications for closer cooperation and eventual buying and merging in the future here? The possibilities melt my brain slightly. While I’m pleased to hear that NCsoft will be producing PS3 software and am especially pleased to hear that they’ll be building games from existing NCsoft IP, I’m very interested in seeing how the crossover with Sony plays out. [Insert silly visions of SOE becoming absorbed by NCsoft and producing City of Everquest's Lineage Wars]

One really interesting little side note to this whole deal is the future status of City of Heroes/Villains. After all, Marvel and DC both sued Cryptic/NCsoft over their use of the word ’superhero’ and all that fun stuff a while ago. Now, Cryptic is working with Marvel to produce an MMO for the 360/PC - a game that will come in direct competition with City of Heroes. With this news, NCsoft (who shares the CoH/V trademark with Cryptic) will possibly be working with Sony on their DC based MMO for the PS3/PC - another game that will likely compete directly with CoH. Interesting times.

I’m still kind of bummed that the 360 got the Marvel contract and the PS3 was stuck with the DC contract. I don’t like DC I mean, ok, fine, Batman’s cool… but that’s really about it. I actually buy and read Marvel comics Of course, nobody’ll actually be playing as either Batman or Spiderman, so I doubt the IP really matters all that much, but it’s the principle of the thing, ne?

Posted by Ammon as city of heroes, eq2, games, mmorpg, ps3 at 5:57 PM EDT

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It’s time for another one of my prediction posts re WoW. This time around will be several shorter predictions and may or may not be my last post of this type for a while

Prediction: The next expansion will focus on expanding Azeroth

I don’t think the next expansion will be the Emerald Dream - that’s expansion the 3rd. This time around, we’re going to come back to Azeroth and fill in the holes in the map. And there are numerous holes in the map of Azeroth right now.

There are at least 3 more continents we’ve not yet gotten access to: Northrend, Undermine, and Pandaria. There is also lore surrounding the Maelstrom and the associated bits of sunken Kalimdor.

Even on our existing continents, we’re missing several areas. A few of my favorites:

• Grim Batol is a potential overland zone with at least one high level instance east of Loch Modan and the Wetlands.
• Mount Hyjal is where the final battle of WC3 took place. It’s been a big closed off zone since the beginning of the game. In the last patch, they released two new flight paths essentially adjacent to the mountain border with Hyjal.
• Uldum is a big instance gate in southern Tanaris that taunted me every time i drove past it. Everyone’s expecting this one, just don’t know when it’ll happen.
• Dalaran is another obvious place for expansion. It’s the big purple bubble that all Undead players bump into on their way to Taren Mill for the first time.
• Gilneas is another big gate next to Silverpine. There were some pretty funny rumors going around before the Draenei and Blood Elves were announced that the zone was entirely peopled by werewolves…

Most of the smart money is on Northrend as the primary focus of the next expansion, and I tend to agree. There have been hints in the past that Arthas might be a level 80 raid boss. People have been begging for it for a while now - we’ve wanted this more than we wanted Outland

It also does nice things for bringing people back to Azeroth to do more than just shop or powerlevel alts.

How do we get to Northrend? I suspect that there will need to be boats installed. Viable locations for these ships might be eastern Azshara, Undermine, and northern Tristfal.

I actually really like the idea of establishing a settlement on one of the tips of Azshara, but it would be weird for a new city to magically appear out there overnight. Tristfal has the same problem, but to a much lesser degree - it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to imagine the Forsaken setting up a naval base out there to lead the charge in taking the war back to Scourge territory.

Undermine, and the island it lives in (Kezan), are the most logical choice… unless they open up Gilneas.

Gilneas is fun. Since there’s no communication with the place, it’s entirely possible that everyone inside’s been killed and turned into zombies or what-have-you… or that it’ll finally be willing to join with humanity in the fight against the Scourge. Maybe the Scourge broke through the wall and they came crawling to Southshore for help? This would give the Alliance a potential starting point to get out there. But I doubt it’ll happen. If I had to bet on the fate of Gilneas, though, I say they’re the new Southern Plaguelands by now - especially since the Alliance already have a much more probable city up that way in Dalaran.

Undermine really is the most logical choice. Probably. It’s a sizable island dedicated to commerce. The goblins certainly would see a profit in allowing both Horde and Alliance navies to set up shipyards on their northern shores - so long as they behave themselves and don’t kill each other in goblin territory (just like any other goblin controlled city).

I’d like to see Undermine become the new Shattrath. It makes the most sense to connect it to Steamwheedle Port (esp since no other boats use the dock atm), but that’s a pretty inconvenient location for such an important travel route. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to also connect it to Ratchet or Booty Bay somehow. Possibly tie it into the zeppelin network and give the Alliance a boat out of Southsore?

By connecting Undermine to lvl 20-40 zones, it would be quite appropriate to make the Isle of Kezan actually contain a good bit of content suitable to that level range. Make it into several (4-5) areas that provide a viable alternative to Stranglethorn and Desolace. The game is currently weakest in the lvl 30-50 content range right now, this is a good solution. With no new races, there’s no need to introduce new pairs of newbie zones - that effort should be bumped up to mid-level content

So, if we allow Undermine to become a large travel hub and allow it to connect players to Northrend, what do they have to do up there? High level content. Mid level content. Max level content. Several new instances. Northrend is big - really big. The map shows 11 zones plus plenty of spots for instances. Perhaps it could be made suitable for levels 50 and above - or even levels 45 and above. The continent is big enough that they could easily add another 45-55 zone in addition to zones all the way up to level 80.

But… we need a lot more lvl 70+ content in the next expansion, right? Well… TBC introduced a total of 11 new overworld zones in addition to instances. If they considered 7 zones sufficient new high level content for this expansion, I don’t see why the next expansion should be any different. Add an extra chunk or two of lvl 70+ content to Outland, leave the rest in Northrend, and we’ve still got room to resolve the dearth of mid-level content.

Suggested overworld zone level breakdown:

• Kezan - 30-40, 35-45 x2, 40-50
• Northrend - 45-55, 55-60, 60-65, 65-70, 70-75 x3, 73-78 x2, 75-80 x2
• Outland - 70-75, 75-80

This is a total of 17 zones - 6 more than TBC introduced. As a reasonable trade-off, I’d like to think that not every zone needs unique world PvP objectives and multiple instances in the initial launch. They can do with these what they did with Ghostlands and Zul’Aman - that is, the instance needn’t be launched at the same time as the zone containing it. There is plenty of other precedence for this.

I think it is entirely reasonable to focus new instanced content on lvl 70+, so perhaps none of the lvl <70 zones get new instances?

Either way… I predict that the world will be getting a lot larger and that most of the growth will be on Azeroth this time. And I hope I hope I hope they do something about the lack of good mid-level overland zones in the game. They needn’t be huge zones, just interesting changes of pace for people hoping to get their 6th alt over lvl 50 w/o repeating the same blasted quests over and over again.

Prediction: Access to Outland will be improved

Since low level players can already get to Shattrath with a little help from a friendly mage, the level 58 restriction on going through the Dark Portal feels really arbitrary. Especially since it’s possible to enter the Ramparts at level 55, and the level requirement for Master crafting professions is only 50 but they must be trained in Outland. I’d like to see the gate opened to all players capable of driving across the Blasted Lands in the first place. That’s good enough of a restriction already.

Perhaps they’ll eventually add some easier transport methods direct to the Dark Portal? Maybe a portal from Dalaran? Maybe one each from Stormwind and Orgrimmar? Perhaps a faction-neutral zeppelin path from Booty Bay?

Prediction: Woodworking will finally be made available to players

They released Jewelcrafting in TBC with … interesting results. It was an expansion-only profession that was still able to benefit players who were too cheap/uninterested to grab the expansion. It is terribly useful to lvl 65+ characters, just like Enchantments and Alchemy have always been important to high end players.

However, launching a new profession also made for an awful glut of cheap goods on the market. I am a lvl 367/375 jewelcrafter now, and I have yet to break even. I doubt I ever will. I spent hundreds and hundreds of gold to get from 250 to 300. The economy is terribly wrecked as a result of the new demand for jewels, but shrug. It’s not like the incredible inflation from Outland didn’t have a huge effect on prices either

One of the most requested features from players has always been that they let us make our own bows and arrows. I think a profession that makes bows, arrows, staves, and shields would be great. This would fill the gap left by other crafting professions and make it possible to finally craft every type of equipment in the game.

The big problem with releasing woodworking is with the gathering aspect of things… do you add trees to herbalism? Do you make lumber drop off of certain common NPC varieties like cloth does? Do you make trees harvestable by anyone? Do you add a woodcutter/lumberjack gathering profession? Do you make woodworking a combination gathering/crafting profession? None of these options by itself is very ideal.

Enchanting and Jewelcrafting are already combination gathering/crafting professions, with the exception that improvement in the gathering aspect of the profession is only possible by improving the crafting aspect. I think this is a good starting point for Woodworkers.

Allow Woodworkers to break apart bows and staves in order to get special materials - but not their own work (you can’t DE something you just enchanted and expect to get the shards back). Allow them to harvest wood from certain npc corpse types just like miners and herbalists can now. Make plant type mobs likely to drop wood in addition to flowers. Make the numerous lumber mills around the game actually spawn piles of lumber that any player can loot - similar to treasure chests.

I think adding some basic types of lumber (reusing the enchanting wand and campfire materials) to common vendors would not hurt at all - every other crafting profession has to buy some of their reagents already, why not these too?

And if Blizzard does all of that… I think it might work. I don’t like the idea of generically choppable tree nodes like mines and flowers. There’s something about the size of things that just doesn’t quite work for me. Perhaps there could be a class of largish flowers that herbalists can gather if they carry a tool with them. Or, perhaps they could just go ahead and add small trees to the world map that can be cut down. Shrug.

Prediction: The crafting skill cap will be raised to 450, others skills will only increase to 400

This isn’t much of a logical jump here. They need a new tier to make equipment for lvl 80’s. They’ve actually caught themselves in a pretty vicious cycle by bumping character levels out of sync with the crafting levels. When the game launched, both combat and crafting skill caps were 300. When TBC launched, though, they only added 50 levels to combat skills while crafting caps went up by another 75.

If they make the next tier of crafting skill also have a cap of 450, they’ll have gotten 50 ranks out of sync unless they surprise everyone and bump the level cap in the game to 90 My money’s on increasing the imbalance between the skill numbers.

As far as other skills go… I don’t know. Adding another tier or two of riding skill works well, but what would they add at that point? Aquatic mounts? Mounts that work in certain underground Nerubian zones? I guess the current disparity between crafting and normal skills AND riding skills shows that they don’t much care about the actual balance between the numbers. But I wish they would - it would make things pretty again

Prediction: Secondary skills will get some love

First aid can do precisely two things right now. It can make bandaids and it can make antivenom potions. Mostly, it just makes bandaids since the antivenom is quite inconvenient. I’d like to see first aid have an easier time of curing poisons and have options for treating disease based debuffs - make healing poison easier and make healing disease about as difficult as healing poison is now. They also need to add some additional tiers to the poisons. Right now, the only way to make lvl 60 antivenom is through an Argent Dawn recipe. There is no lvl 70 antivenom - and besides, the ingredients they’d probably use for them are currently being monopolized by people who want to defect over to Scryers

I’d also really like it if they could give inoculations that act as long-term disease/poison prevention buffs. It would give priests a reason to train first aid. But a 30 minute buff with say 5 charges of poison curing? Good stuff. Rogues would probably throw a fit, but shrug, I play a hunter. I dislike rogues

At present, cooks can only manufacture food. The skill can’t make drinks - even if a handful of cooking recipes do give +mp5 from their well fed buffs. I think allowing players to manufacture their own drinks would be fun and would entice more people to drop time into the skill. Right now, if people rely on secondary skills for out-of-combat healing, they’re 99% likely to be using bandages anyway…

Besides, it’s not like adding drinks to the skill will in any way unbalance things. Mage water’s still free, ne?

Currently, the worst secondary skill is fishing. It requires an insane time commitment to level and is actually quite dangerous at times. This makes it terribly unattractive to anyone but hunters and cooks. And since there are very few people who train cooking in any meaningful way… fishing gets even less attention. I like fishing, but… I’ve not really engaged in any fishing since hitting 300 a while back.

I want to see net fishing. I want to see more fish that come out of the water and attack you. I want to see fishing with dynamite and shotguns and traps. Fishing could easily be made into an interesting mini-game. All crafting could. EQ2 did a great job with that, and WoW could really use a new type of gameplay right about now.

Posted by Ammon as games, ideas, mmorpg, play, warcraft at 5:00 PM EDT

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I will be documenting plans for my tsrpg character classes in individual posts like this one. Since this is the first class post, I will include a bit more in the way of explanation of terms this time around.

Cleric (tier 1)

Original Summary

Robes-medium armour + shields, blunt weapons. Low mobility, medium offense, medium defense. Primary healing class.

Related Classes

Tier 2: Mystic, Knight, Druid, Warlock
Tier 3: Paladin, Summoner, Necromancer

A Cleric may multi-class with any one of these seven other options - provided it has been unlocked by the player.

Stat Advancement

Strength: 4 (increases strength of physical melee abilities)
Speed: 2.5 (increases turn order and frequency of turns, increases ability to evade attacks)
Defense: 4 (decreases physical damage taken from melee/ranged attacks)
Will: 8 (increases strength of magical and ranged abilities)
Resistance: 6.5 (decreases magical and status effect damage taken)

A character gains this many points in each of their core stats every 10 levels. The value is rounded up and all stats have a minimum value of 1. Thus, at level 10, a cleric has 4 strength and 3 speed. At level 25, the cleric has 10 strength and 6 speed. At level 100, a cleric would have 40 strength and 25 speed.

Health: 6
Mana: 6

A character earns this many maximum health and mana points per character level. Thus, at level 1, the Cleric has 6 mana and 6 health. At level 100, they have 600 mana and 600 health. A character’s health or mana may never exceed 999.

Movement: 3 (base movement points in hexes per turn)

Movement is a constant value that never increases except with equipment or special abilities.

For purposes of class balance for all tier 1 classes, the advancement values in the 5 base stats should add up to 25. Health, Mana, and Movement values for all classes should add up to 15. Tier 2 classes get 2 extra points in addition to these 40, and Tier 3 classes get an extra 5 points.

Allowed Equipment

Clerics are allowed to wear robes, light, and medium armour. They are also allowed to use shields if they have an available hand. They are restricted to using only blunt weapons, but may use any blunt weapon, whether light or heavy, one or two handed. This includes staves.

There are 4 basic classes of armour - robe, light, medium, and heavy. Shields are a separate category. Weapons are divided up into several different categories based on weight and handedness - which may or may not be related (it is possible to have a 1-handed heavy weapon). Weapon weights come in 3 classes - light, medium, and heavy. Staves, bows, and polearms are separate categories. Additionally, some weapons are flagged as appropriate for individual classes on an item-by-item basis.

Class Availability

Clerics are available from the beginning of the game.

16 of the 20 classes in the game must be unlocked by performing certain quests that will vary wildly in difficulty and time commitment required to complete.

Skills

Every class should have approximately 20 skills at their disposal. Some classes that gain more equipment options or which get better base stats may wind up with less actual skills than some of their lower tier counterparts.

Healing Abilities

• Lesser Heal - Low mana cost short range healing ability that allows the cleric to quickly cure minor wounds on a single target up to 2 hexes away. Starting ability.
• Antidote - Cures poison and similar weaker status effects from a single target within range. Rank 1 at Lvl 1.
• Revive - Revive an adjacent dead or dying ally. Additional ranks improve the amount of health the comrade is raised with. Rank 1 at Lvl 10.
• Heal - Restores a large amount of health to a single target up to 3 hexes away. Rank 1 at Lvl 10.
• Far Heal - Costs more mana than Lesser Heal, restores a comparable amount of health at a much greater range (3-10 hexes, each rank improves range by 1). Rank 1 at Lvl 20.
• Group Heal - Restores a large amount of health to multiple targets up to 4 hexes away. Rank 1 at Lvl 30.
• Greater Heal - Restores a phenomenal amount of health to one or more targets up to 3 hexes away. Rank 1 at Lvl 40.
• Regeneration - Cures the target of a few hp every turn until the spell expires. Rank 1 at Lvl 50.
• Panacea - Cures any negative status effect from a single target within range. Rank 1 at Lvl 60.
• Resurrection - Revive all fallen allies within 3 hexes to full health. Ultimate Ability (Lvl 100).

Support Abilities

• Defense Up - Increases the target’s defense score. Higher ranks yield even more defense points per casting. Stacks multiple times. Rank 1 at Lvl 20.
• Resist Up - Increases the target’s resistance score, just as Defense Up improves defense. Rank 1 at Lvl 20.
• Will Up - Increases the target’s will score, just as Defense Up improves defense. Rank 1 at Lvl 30.
• Amplify Healing - Increase the effectiveness of all future healing effects on the target. Rank 1 at Lvl 60.

Passive Abilities

• Receptive Healing - Healing spells that affect the Cleric cure more health than they would normally. Rank 1 at Lvl 30.
• Field Medic - Restorative items used by the Cleric (on himself or an ally) are more effective than normal. Rank 1 at Lvl 40.
• Aura of Relief - Attempts to cure up to 1 negative status effect from any 1 friendly target within range each turn. The aura’s radius increases with ranks, but in the event that the aura has a greater range than the cleric’s equivalent Antidote/Panacea spell, the spell will not be cast. Rank 1 at Lvl 50.

Several classes offer an aura passive ability. These auras are always on once learned and may not be shut off by the player. Auras will deactivate upon the death or unconsciousness of the character. It is possible for a character to have two active auras - one from each of their classes.

Offensive Abilities

• Silence - Prevent a target from casting spells for the duration of the debuff. Rank 1 at Lvl 40.
• Brimstone - Heavy damage, long range, single target fire/earth damage spell. Rank 1 at Lvl 70.
• Repel - Knock any enemies within 3 hexes of the Cleric back 2-7 hexes and stun them for a few turns. Rank 1 at Lvl 80.

If you look at the distribution of new abilities, their availability is spread out fairly evenly into a moderately boring bell shape with 2 abilities unlocked at each of levels 1 and 10. Three abilities are unlocked at each of levels 20, 30, and 40. Two abilities are unlocked at each of 50 and 60, and levels 70 and 80 (and 100) each unlock one more ability. Most classes will follow a similar curve for their distribution of abilities.

Posted by Ammon as games, ideas, mmorpg, play, tsrpg at 3:38 PM EDT

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