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UI Customization and Capital Ships In Jumpgate Evolution
ZAM got a chance to speak with NetDevil's Scott Brown at the recent LOGIN 2009 conference about various aspects of upcoming space MMO Jumpgate Evolution. He mentioned that massive ships will be limited in scope and role to begin with, but may expand and evolve as they figure out what users like. He also made some interesting comments about UI customization:
"We built it with the goal of letting people mod the UI. There's still a little bit more work to do that, so I don't know if it'll be ready at launch, but all of our UI is built in Flash. This is with the idea that anybody can build something with Flash and put it in the game. Now, there are problems, for example, if you do certain things in Flash that might cause the game to perform really slowly. We've still got to figure out how to educate people or how we verify this so that you don't make a mod that I download and my game experience is destroyed. We want it to be easier than that. I think that there will be some work to do, but the goal is that, eventually, people will be able to, using Flash, make their own UI."
We all know what happened last time an online world allowed that.
To be honest, my interest in this game just dropped by 30% upon hearing it uses Flash.
Flash for me is slow, buggy and proprietary. I would much prefer something like WoW where UI addons can be scripted in Lua.
I applaud the idea of making the UI totally customizable, really thats a great thing. But I really don't like that it uses Flash.
I guess only the beta will tell if it sucks or not...
--IronHelix
Scaleform Flash interfaces have been used in a number of titles including:
* Crysis
* Mass Effect
* Dawn of War â" Dark Crusade
* Sid Meyer's Railroads
* Sid Meyer's Civilization 4
You'd be surprised by how many games, even a lot of console (I've seen flash used on the PSP, PS2, Wii, 360 and PS3) games, use flash for their entire front ends. Most just don't allow you the access to change the content... at least not easily. That said I agree flash is horrible and it tends to eat way more CPU than it should, which is why I've seen a lot of people moving away from it. The artists like it though because it's familiar to them, so it can be a bit of a fight to get them to switch to another system.
You know as much as it sounds cool to fly the bigger ship, I'm imagining it's kind of like one of those Battlefield games where you could drive the aircraft carrier around the island. Well it turns out that aircraft carriers are slow and they don't move very fast, and it's not that exciting a thing to do in an action game.
As far as military sci-fi goes, aren't capital space ships supposed to be responsible for coordinating the battle, kinda like a mobile HQ? If you want to make it exciting for people to choose the "slow" unit, give those players an expanded view of the battle field, the ability to give orders, coordinate supplies, handle communications, and other stuff that the fighter pilots wouldn't be interested in, or have the time to do.
There's more to do in a space battle than just fire lasers.
A link to an AOL portal of a youtube video of a camera recording of a VHS copy of SG1? Seriously?
You know as much as it sounds cool to fly the bigger ship, I'm imagining it's kind of like one of those Battlefield games where you could drive the aircraft carrier around the island. Well it turns out that aircraft carriers are slow and they don't move very fast, and it's not that exciting a thing to do in an action game.
Talk about being inexperienced at BF42. The purpose of sailing the aircraft carrier is to run over other ships or ram the enemy carrier into an island. If spamming "RAMMING SPEED" and then pushing the enemy carrier onto land, causing it to teleport around and kill everyone in the vicinity, isn't considered exciting and fun, then this guy has no idea how to design a game.
What are you saying? Half the pixels are white and the other two are black?
In other news, Java is really slow and no-one would use JavaScript for anything serious.
You might also like Vendetta Online, which is an MMOFPS/RPG, in space, which runs on Mac and Linux, as well as Windows.
http://vendetta-online.com/