Posts Tagged links
Things to look at, and read
Posted by Rockjaw in Links of Others on June 29th, 2008
Links from the past, given to you in my future…
A slideshow gallery of Ralph McQuarrie paintings for Star Wars. (Link will go direct to a Flickr slideshow; click here if you’d rather see the set.)
If you like that, you’ll probably like Concept Ships, which is a blog all about… concept art. Of ships.
Superhero Nation: a website all about writing, and writing superheroes in particular. A lot of the advice seems aimed at a certain kind of superhero writing, but there’s good advice here regardless.
If you’re worried about the Watchmen movie, feel free to read this and see all your fears realised. Assuming you’re one of those people who basically feel that things should never be adapted, ever.
Some random linkage
Posted by Rockjaw in Links of Others on May 20th, 2008
Few things that caught my eye recently…
Developers within NCsoft are working in Java, and more specifically something called the jMonkey Engine. Don’t ask me any more than that, I’m not a programmer! Anyway, using the JME, some of the Austin programmers have been creating world-building tools, and got to show them off at a recent Java conference. Joshua Slack posted the time-lapse video over on his blog, so go check it out; it’s pretty cool.
Quite a few people asked me at Comic Expo whether they could get trial keys for Tabula Rasa; the reason I didn’t have any is that we had a lot of trial deals about to hit… and now they have. (Although right now I can’t see where the TVG key offer is, myself. If I find it I’ll update.)
While we’re talking Tabula Rasa, this is a pretty good time to try the game as Deployment 8 just hit the live servers. (‘Deployment’ sounds so much better than ‘patch’, don’t it?) Final bit of random Tabula Rasa news… our interview with some of the DG folk is in the can for Episode 3 of the podcast. It’s a long ‘un… by the way, Episode ’2.5′ is coming really, really soon.
Finally, given that there’s more than a few MMOs in active development right now and pure Darwinian science says that not all will survive, it was interesting to read this ‘intervention’ over at Elder Game. Essentially it’s a checklist of ‘trouble ahead’ signs that any developer should be looking for. As a reveal of not-unheard-of practices in the games industry, it’s a bit depressing (especially if you’re an MMO developer who sees their own project in it) but interesting, nonetheless, especially considering the author, Eric Heimburg credits himself with being a systems designer on the ‘upcoming’ Star Trek Online. Hmmm.
Does raise an interesting point to finish on, though. As Eric points out, MMOs have really long development cycles, so why waste your life working on a bad one? Good question, but if you ask me, more applicable to your life in general. You don’t get much time on this earth, relatively speaking – so don’t spend too long doing stuff you hate.
Which leads me neatly to my task of the day – getting together a workable ‘breaking into the MMO industry’ presentation….
Some random news and links
Posted by Rockjaw in Links of Others, MMO-related on May 14th, 2008
More Comic Expo recap stuff is coming; will probably be three posts now as I’m such a long-winded bugger. Just wanted to drop a few things here.
News-wise…
‘Podcast 2.5′ as we’re calling it, is about done and should be online very soon I hope. It’s mostly more recapping of the MiniCon, including chats with some TF Omega teams and a long talk between Alex ‘GhostRaptor’ Weekes and me. Who has a blog, if you haven’t seen.
Speaking of MiniCon, the first official video for it went live yesterday… go see it on Blip.tv. (Yes, there will be a downloadable version soon.) There’s a lot more footage and a lot longer video coming.
Speaking of the podcast, Episode 3 is also half-way done already because we did an interview with a couple of the guys from the Tabula Rasa team. I wasn’t in on it but Chris tells me it’s real good.
In the (probably extreme) off-chance that you aren’t frequenting the EU COH Forums, just FYI, all of the sketches from Bristol are now live on Flickr, along with a fine selection of ‘official pictures‘ too.
Also: I’m playing with this. You might like to play with it too. Or offer me suggestions on what to do with it.
Some random linkage…
Adam Martin, who’s one of our top programmers in the fledgling internal NCE development team, spoke at ION 08 yesterday, on one of his favourite subjects – MMOs and Web 2.0. Massively did a write-up which makes it sound really interesting; I’d say it’s worth a read.
Adam will also be speaking at the MMOG-fest thing that I’m going to be at in early June at Staffordshire University, so if you wanted to come quiz him, that’s a great opportunity to do so.
If you’re in a reading mood, this post on MMOG Nation has some great ideas about guilds and how to keep guilds alive. It’s sort of aimed at developers but you might be interested regardless.
That’ll do. Work calls!
You said what?