Sigil’s Brad McQuaid and Jeff Butler chat about creating an MMO that maximizes performance and customization while minimizing server costs
By Michael Lafferty

“Anything that we can shift over the client like that to save processing power on the server side, bandwidth, we are doing as much of that as possible”

Getting into an interview session with Sigil Games Online CEO/Vanguard Executive Producer Brad McQuaid and Executive Producer/President Jeff Butler is like a feed frenzy in a piranha tank. Before exploring, please know that it is not a bad thing. But a question is tossed out there and then the two of them start feeding off each other. The ideas come fast and furious, often sparking other areas of discussion and it is tough to get the conversation back around to follow ups.

Not that that is a bad thing.

It is obvious they have a tremendous amount of passion for their work, and for Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, the massively multiplayer online game that Sigil is working so feverishly to complete and ship this year. Creative genius sometimes leads to tangent thoughts, which leads to new paths of discussion.

The conversation took place at the Sigil studios in Carlsbad, Calif., during an event in which a handful of media types were invited in to look at the game.

Vanguard is part of the traditional medieval-fantasy genre, but the game has notions to take the genre further than it has previously been. How? Well, how about weather that actually affects gameplay – such as magic casting? Or maybe that most of the visual information is being handled client-side to try to keep the server free of lag (as in if you turn on your personal light, it will only appear on your monitor and other players will not benefit from your illuminating presence). How about a quest that leads you to an area where you don’t want to be at night when a full moon is due to appear because a nice little family has a bit of an aversion to full-on lunar lighting (can you say werewolf? Werewolf … there, there wolf and there castle … oops, wrong story)? Then there is the ability to fly aloft on a drake steed and be attacked by other drakes, or to take your boat on the waters and be attacked by sea monsters and pirates.

Set to be published by Microsoft, Vanguard does have a release date sometime in 2006, “when it is ready” (according to Zack Karlsson, Director of Business Development).

But as for that interview …

Question: Vanguard was first shown at E3 a couple of years ago and then, true to your word in 2004, it was on the floor at E3 in 2005. Has the game changed in any ways between then and now?

Brad: “I would say, for the most part, the vision, the core design, has stayed very much the same as we planned initially. Certainly, in beta, as we have received feedback on our systems, what’s fun about this, what’s not so fun about this. We’ve made some changes but as far as the fundamental core of the game, I’m pretty proud as to how …”

Jeff: “We’ve gone through it so many times. These development cycles are so long that one of the biggest dangers you can fall prey to is a lack of focus in terms of what your IP is, your thought processes and your philosophies. So we sat down, and we were six guys in that 1,000-square-foot building, we could pull up the design schemes and I could show you that our ancient documents that dictate what our philosophy for how we wanted our ranged combat to be …”

Brad: “Some things got more fleshed out. We had come very original ideas. We said we want this, we want …”

Jeff: “Diplomacy is a great example of what we said we wanted to implement …”

Brad: “… when it came time to actually implement it in code, then you go from a high-level design to a lower-level design and adapting it so the designers can deliver it in the program. And then you look at those, talk to different people and actually implement them. But nothing fundamentally, as far as the realization or fleshing out of those ideas relative to how the game is progressing, relative to how technology is, what we hoped was possible with our engine that either turned out to be not as possible, or – more often than not – more doable. Oftentimes we were able to exceed our expectations, what was very rewarding.”

Jeff: “A good example of what we had spec’d out and what we were not sure we were going to be able to do, from an implementation standpoint, is the character customization ability. Back in the day, Keith (Parkinson) and I sat down and looked at things like (Star Wars) Galaxies that had massive customization, and I said to Keith, ‘why does every other man look like every man’s brother?’ And he said it was simple. Every man looks like a brother because the similarity of the distance between the facial features and the general shape of the face is why one guy looks like his brother. Or people within a family looks the same.

“ … for ourselves as players our interest are fulfilled with robust character customization. And as game masters, as dungeon masters, our ability to present you with diverse NPCs, where the crusty old baker, who gives you a quest looks different than the guard who stands outside his shop.”

Brad: “For me, as a player, it then switches over to how I look, and how I look should reflect my accomplishments.”

While the characters can be very customizable in the way they appear, Brad and Jeff pointed out that the armor was scaled accordingly so present a good look on each race and each piece of armor can tint three different colors to present a strong varied appearance and allow players to create unique looks.

Brad: “While our humanoid characters, fundamentally, share the skeleton, through morphing, through bone scaling, through technology, that skeleton is so flexible we can have a Vulmane, a wolf-like character, and a small little gnome all sharing the same skeleton but looking very different racially, looking very different by the way you customize them but also sharing the same armor types.”

Jeff: “Like every massively multiplayer game, you can get into a situation where there is 40 people on your screen. Every massively multiplayer game is going to cost you in terms of performance. But in Vanguard, proportionally, it is going to cost you less because from the neck down, every one of those people that is being rendered is really the same person. It’s like having 20 iterations of the same barrel on your screen and having the same barrel rendered over and over again as opposed to having 20 separate objects which is a whole lot more processing power.”

Q: So basically, you have found shortcuts to the optimization so that the sheer volume of what you are offering fits in the same scope as …

Jeff: “Yes.”

… and the subject wove over to optimizing the game engine for smoother performance.

Jeff: “In all games nowadays, the animation suite takes up a lot of memory, sounds take up a lot of memory …”

Brad: “Especially now that we need motion capture …”

Jeff: “… motion capture is held at 30 frames per second so that it looks smooth, but it takes a lot of memory, and people don’t have unlimited RAM in their machines.”

So one of the things you have done is drop a lot of that over to the client side, to the gamer’s system so that you are not going to inundate your servers with data requests.

Brad: “The easiest way to verbalize that is that while in theory … because of the customization, in theory we have an almost infinite number of variations. Well, you are never going to have an infinite number, but you could have thousands and the way an NPC looks, he could be No. 965, and then the only thing that has to be shot over the server to the client is No. 965, not all this extra data that really truly defines what the NPC looks like. The client then takes the 965, looks in a look-up table and says ‘Ok, here’s all the information that tells me how to display this character.’ So there’s lots of things like that that we’ve put on the client side.”

Jeff: “Anything that we can shift over the client like that to save processing power on the server side, bandwidth, we are doing as much of that as possible.”

Brad: “The more we can freeload, the more we can think ahead, extrapolate, the less data we have to send over the Internet pipe, the better performance we will get. When you are in a seamless world like our’s, that has to be the case.”

del.icio.us | Digg This | Glink It

---