[News] An Interview with JP "GrimmOmen" Harrod

[UODevTracker]

Original Thread

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[TheGrimmOmen]

Good Lord, I hope he got combat pay for that

Heheh. They did/do. Mythic's been great.

-Grimm

 

[TheGrimmOmen]

Well Grimm....

I've probably been in the Chaotic Good category for most of my UO time. I've always been outspoken about what I don't like.... not because I want to be a jerk... but because I truly have a passion for UO and I want it to be the best it can be.

That said... I'm incredibly hopeful for the male paperdoll. And I probably have very high hopes but that's because I very, very much love UO and I love my character. Who happens to be a male. (Yes I'm female and I play a male character more often than not .... following my sons wise logic... "If I have to stare at something all the time while I'm playing I may as well be looking at something good!") So I expect my character to look VERY good and I tend to get a bit upset when he doesn't.

As for the art... often times I find that things in UO are scaled far too LARGE... Take the woodland belt for instance.... looking at it on a female character it looks VERY nice... and it has a nice hang and flow to it... however.... on the male paperdoll .... it is too large... it doesn't hang very well at all... and it lacks the "pizzaz" that the female version has. I've heard it often referred to as looking like a diaper... sadly.

One thing I have a wish for.... would be the ability to "modify" items appearance.... so if I wanted I could take my hunters headdress and "modify" it to be a circlet... Or a floppy hat if I wanted... And I could take my crimson and let it be a woodland belt... I honestly wish that the crimson had art dependent on the race of your character.... Odd that it has art that shows dependent on your sex.... but it can't have art dependent on your race as well....

And while others may like to see their headgear.... I miss my circlets. I truly hate seeing a dead deer on my head.

And I know I'm not alone but I miss clothes... I miss being able to wear pants. I wish someone would work on and address the layering issues with clothes. Really why do we have pants and short pants if you can't wear them without sacrificing armor... And gargoyles..... while I love! their outfits.... got the raw end of the stick deal when it comes to missing out on arties.... Can't wear the new soles of Provence.... can't wear a crimson..... can't wear any of the nice headgear.... it's rather sad.

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

 

[TheGrimmOmen]

Great interview and refreshing to read such detailed answers instead of the vague diplomatic answers you'll often find in interviews like these. Sounds like Grimm has been through quite a bit in his UO years so far and I can't say I envy the tougher times. In the end it must be however so satisfying to have such a vocal and passionate group of players to do all this for. No matter which category they fall into, they're all passionate aren't they!

I totally agree.

-Grimm

 

[TheGrimmOmen]

The images are rather large (1.5-2mb). I didn't want to compress them.

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.

-Grimm

 

[TheGrimmOmen]

I respect the work of grimmy, but the animation frames work, for what should this be usefull? I know i know smaller animation sizes and patches, BUT if you compare the rendering with Kingdom Reborn and the Enhanced Client now, the Kingdom Reborn had a much clearer faster animation rendering system, also on not soo strong PC's tested on my laptop.

This reduce is 500MB i would say, it is nearly 1 GB of installation size but you have to count the remove of the KR art too. But for this we got a lot of badder animations, also wrong sized animations, pixelation of objects. I know you are not a stupid man, so tell the engenieres to show your art in a nice rendered way!

I say it again, performance? You can forget this with this engine, enable the KR rendering again, it was as good as it is now from the performance aspects. KR never got a real chance to proof, you will see if you can intigrate the stability into this system, it is a very good nice looking game!

I'd like to make another request for a KR graphics toggle/option;
and if those graphics (tiles/animations/models/~all) make the size of the game too big for some to download, then please consider adding a separate download for KR (~SA) graphics that would be updated once more of the improved graphics make it thru the pipes.

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

 

[TheGrimmOmen]

This was a really good interview, Airmid and Grimm. It helps to hear about technical facets that make UO a challenge to execute. For my part, all I know is: I like the way this looks, but not that; or, I feel like this runs smoothly, but that doesn't. To hear reasons why this might be the case, for a non-techy like me, is enlightening.

Also, ARG! !@#$ (I don't want to be lumped into the "true good" category).

Thank you both.

LOL - You'll always be Chaotic Good to me.

And yes, Airmid did a terrific job with the questions! I really enjoyed answering them.


-Grimm

 

[TheGrimmOmen]

Couldn't you make a kick arse 3D version, and for those who simply can't run it, use that art to make images to use in a 2D version?
That way:
-everything looks the same, instead of two wildly different looks
-those who can run the 3D can, and those with more limited comps can run the 2D and still have a great looking game that's almost the exact same look.

Well, in theory, yes. It gets complicated given the fact that we have the original UO client, and the EC client. Both of these clients have 2 different processes (necessary because the technology is so different). The addition of a pure 3d Client is a daunting prospect indeed given that how 3d Assets and pipelines are managed would necessitate a 3rd process. While this doesn't make the prospect impossible, it is quite a hurdle. And the idea of supporting 3 pipelines makes my eye mist up a bit.

-Grimm

 

[Cal_Mythic]

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*

 

[TheGrimmOmen]

*bites his tongue*

LOL...

I would like to take this opportunity to clarify that when I say stuff like, "I'll add this to my list" or "Hang tight" or "I'll give this to the squirrel in my head to play with" I just mean that I've heard you and to please be patient and that I'm making mental notes to bring up in future discussions, not that I'm putting these on any "official board" or actually giving the ideas to any of the squirrels currently living in my skull. But FYI, I'm generally good about remembering them when the opportunity arises.

... in case there were any misunderstandings.
... and please do not email the squirrels in my head.

-Grimm

 

[TheGrimmOmen]

What's the SE Client??

Honestly, it becomes more and more obvious that the Legacy Client prevents not only the necessary graphical improvement of UO, but also makes it difficult (if not impossible) to control cheats/hacks/3rd party tools.

If you consider how many players really are using 10 year old computers that cannot run the Enhanced Client with low graphics settings, and on the other hand how many players are disappointed about the bad graphics, resolution and all the hacks... is it really reasonable to maintain the old stuff forever?

I totally agree with Trebr Drab. Why don't you make the Enhanced Client the default UO interface, and give us 2 graphics options:

1. The old classic graphics (which would look like the Legacy Client, just with a bigger screen and the hotbar feature), which runs on low-end computers.
2. Real good looking 3D graphics, which utilize the graphics power every mediocre PC nowadays supports.​

This way you could get rid of the outdated client technology, and still make all players happy. Concerning graphics, the Kingdom Reborn Client was a step into the right direction, only most of the graphics were very poorly done (but at least real 3D in good resolution).

If think if you'd improve the SA Client, not many people would continue to use the old Legacy Client.

Ah! Thanks! I meant EC... (corrections made)