[News] An Interview with JP "GrimmOmen" Harrod

[Martyna Zmuir]

When we get new artists in, I always hear something like this "You know, I thought that since UO was, like 12 years old and a 2D game, that this would be a piece of cake. It's WAaaay harder than I thought." A lot of folks don't realize that we have all the artistic and technical challenges of game development sprinkled with all the problems and challenges of an animated series. Just with animations alone, most modern games animators just do the animations to aesthetic guidelines and let the engineers worry about animation compression. But since we work with actual rendered frames, we have to count every frame because it translates to larger file sizes, and larger patch sizes. When we add something in UO, I usually do a cost analysis so that we know that adding X number of assets translates into an XXX increase in on-disk footprint. I even go into each animation of each asset and figure out how to optimize our rendered frame count to save as much disk space as possible. In addition, I had to write a custom render farm-like application that would allow me to process (render out) the colossal number of frames for UOKR and again for UOSA. For the EC client for UOSA alone, I rendered out and processed over 1.3 million frames of animation several times over - this is the frame count equivalent of about 20 episodes (roughly one season) of an animated series getting rendered out several times over in the course of development.

Le Sigh.

I'll buy the patch size issue for more detailed animations; however, the HDD footprint issue is moot. When we routinely download and play games exceeding 8gb I think we can handle a larger download for UO. This argument could also be rendered useless if we could purchase DVDs of the game.

At any rate, the option for a fully loaded EC would be nice, as the compressed animations look pixilated, blurry, and awful.

Hahah, welcome to our world Zym!!! I don't want to compress my images either, but unfortunately graphics cards have a tendency to explode when you shove the amount of data required to draw UO in an uncompressed format down their throat.

[/FONT][/SIZE]

Really? Modern 512mb to 2gb graphics cards *blow up* from UO? Is this 2D or EC? If its 2D, I call BS on that statement. If its the EC, then the wrong engine was chosen, or its being used poorly.

Why not give us the actual 3D models in the EC and let modern 21st century tech do its thing? Modern cards shouldn't choke on UO sprites...

Lets stop coding for mid-90's video cards.

Circlets? Really? I know, and actually I've heard of that before. I'll add to my list "Figure something out about circlets." Although I suspect I'll just be adding a headache for the designers.

As for race related versions of the crimson, etc. That's an interesting idea, originally, we were of the opinion that players would want to see the same crimson on the elf that they loved on the human... Well, I'll give this to the squirrel in my head to play with. Thanks for the suggestion.

As for the Gargs, well, just hang tight!

-Grimm

*bites his tongue*

*sighs*
Yeah, 'cuz god(s) forbid that you give us any concrete information about what you're working on. The cone of silence went out in the 60's. Communication is good.. Look! All the other game companies keep their p(l)ayers informed... Try it, it’s fun!

As for the crimson.. uhm.. love it? Seriously? The half apron of one of the ugliest pieces pf clothing you could have chosen. They love the STATS on the crimson cincture, NOT the art. Originally it was supposed to be a woodland belt... As an elf, I would rather wear that. I'm sure people would love the chance to change it into something else for the belt slot. (like the belt that exists but has never been used...)


If you hadn't noticed, nearly everyone looks the same these days.. Crimmy and a robe of some kind... So boring visually. The ability to change which piece of art is used (same slot of course) would bring back a diversity of fashion again.

 

[Ezekiel Zane]

(Too bad there isn't an option to zoom to 1:1 with just hitting one button. It is a pain zooming around until you hit 1:1 every time you log in.)

- Press the * key on your keypad

The * key zooms to the default zoom level, which (unfortunately) is not 1:1.

This irritates me to no end every single time I log in. How hard could it be to make the default zoom level 1:1 and let the adjustments begin from there?

 

[Dermott of LS]

...

Thanks for the compliments on the UOKR animation set. Allowing players the option of downloading those high resolution animation is something that's on the list of stuff we'd like to do.

YES, PLEASE!

 

[PowerFullPete]

Yes please too for KR anims!

 

[Nok]

Thanks Airmid and GRIMMY!

 

[Jhym]

Thanks for the interview, I'm glad we're getting interesting questions and answers out of these.


As for the client art --

Comparing to other games:
I have to say that for the time I played Tabula Rasa, one thing that drew me in was the absolutely beautiful artwork. I mean stunning, like "wow, I HAVE to take a picture of this" type of rendering and artwork. I specifically went and bumped up the power on my desktop to handle it.

I have -never- done that for UO. Why? Because the rendering and scenes are not even close to cinematic. I accept this from the game perspective -- yet I really really yearn to be able to truly SEE parts of the game as they should be seen.

Like some of the spots in Ilshenar that would probably be incredible rendered in full 3d. Or some of the spots in Britannia that I can sit and imagine how they would have to look from an eye's perspective.

I know it's tough to do such things, that's why TR cost a huge amount of money and time to make. However, the end result was a game that was incredible to just WANDER around in. There were places I liked to just go to, sit and just LOOK at.

In UO there are places I would LIKE to look at and be amazed, but I have to imagine them.


I know how much trouble your artwork pipelines are and how the engines are such a mess to work with, but perhaps you all need to do a little 3d rendering now and then of certain spots in UO just to get your creativity churning.

I can't show people my screen and feel like they will be excited by what they see. They understand some of the underlying game mechanics and why I have stuck with it for so long, but they don't SEE anything to get excited about. How do you excite somebody who was doing a game in fully rendered 3D, watching the play of the light through the trees onto a field in front of an alien obelisk as native creatures wandered through it? Or a hellish expanse of rock and lava with fumes billowing up as a mass of magma drips into a seemingly bottomless chasm nearby, while winged manta-like creatures rode the heatwaves nearby? I love UO, but it's hard to show it to people these days.

Maybe I'll get a bug up my bottom and try to do some artwork of places I know and see what MY imagination makes them look like. Perhaps more of us should.

 

[hawkeye_pike]

Or some of the spots in Britannia that I can sit and imagine how they would have to look from an eye's perspective.

I absolutely agree with you that nobody (I repeat: nobody!) will ever get excited about UO when he sees the game window.

However, you have to know that UO is a game specifically made for an isometric view. I think you cannot allow both isometric and 1st person perspective in the same game, as it will affect game mechanics a lot. (For example, in 1st person view you could turn around see things from behind, while in isometric view you can see them only from one direction.) Not to metion the effort that would be necessary to render the whole game in 3D with 1st person perspective.

Still, games like Diablo III show us what fantastic graphics are possible with a 3D engine and an isomtric view. People are drawn into that game just because its graphics. It would be nice if UO only had a scintilla of this quality.

 

[Fink]

Thanks for the compliments on the UOKR animation set. Allowing players the option of downloading those high resolution animation is something that's on the list of stuff we'd like to do. There are a lot of considerations that have to be made (nothing's ever easy, is it?) about what this means to development, but thanks for weighing in on the topic.

-Grimm

I would absolutely love to see the full-resolution KR art in EC. I thought the new map/structure tiles were terrific, and the mobiles were stunning.