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Friday, September
12:
Localizing
MMOGs by Eric Heimburg
One of the great aspects MMOGs is that they permit a global community
to come together and play a game together. But to attract audiences
from different countries, your game needs to elegantly handle other
languages. This article explains the system Turbine Entertainment
developed for Asheron's Call 2 that let their MMORPG support
different languages.
Monday,
September 15:
Postmortem: Oceanus
Communications' Legacy Online by Hipólito Iroel
Pérez and Marco Cultrera
Legacy Online is one of the first MMOGs to involve
elements of city building and strategy. What makes this game's story
interesting is that it was created by students from a decidedly
uncapitalistic country: Cuba. Here's the saga of a MMOG that went
from Cuba to Canada, through two publishers, and a name change to
emerge as a marquis title for Sega.com.
Tuesday,
September 16:
Relational
Database Guidelines For MMOGs by Jay Lee
A
relational database is an ideal solution for many of the issues
facing MMOG developers: handling game state persistence, account
management, billing, and even game logic. Lee, who works at NCSoft,
provides tips on a wide range of topics including naming standards,
table indexes, physical data structure, schema maintenance, referential
integrity, stored procedures, and more.
Wednesday,
September 17:
The
Sims Online
Evolution: A Case Study by Jessica Lewis
Since its launch last December, the The Sims Online
the development team has taken various steps to move the game in
a direction that would bring in more subscribers. The question was,
what new target audiences should they go after, and what new features
would those audiences want in the game? Here are the processes that
EA went through to analyze where the TSO was, and what direction
it needed to go.
Thursday,
September 18:
Enabling
Player-Created Online Worlds with Grid Computing and Streaming
by Philip Rosedale and Cory Ondrejka
Linden Labs' MMORPG, Second Life, uses a home-grown distributed
server grid for computing and streaming the game world to players.
The grid allows the company to scale the size of the game world,
and makes it possible for the game to handle the huge number of
unique, editable items that player characters create on a monthly
basis. This article describes how their grid works, and how it benefited
the design of the game.
Friday, September
19:
The
Birth Of The Mobile MMOG by Tommy Palm
Mobile phones increasingly resemble networked computers, with more
processing power and better displays. As such, they're becoming
more interesting as platforms for MMOGs. Yet application development
for mobile phones is still in its infancy, so mobile platforms lack
many of the resources that more mature gaming platforms offer. This
article describes the state of the mobile MMOG genre today, explains
the unique technology challenges facing MMOGs, and lays out design
guidelines for making a successful game.
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