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Building the LEGO MMO
Gamasutra has a lengthy interview with NetDevil's Ryan Seabury, creative director for LEGO Universe, which is due to launch next month. He talks about some of the difficulties in graphically optimizing a game with so many discrete, interactive objects, and mentions that they'll be keeping an eye out for inappropriate contructs to avoid problems similar to those that cropped up with Spore. "One thing we can say is when you build models you have your own property, and you can share that if you want to. If you share something publicly, it will be monitored by a human before it's seen by other people." Seabury also explains their desire to keep the game simple, using players' creativity as a driving force, as well as NetDevil's decision to stay away from a micro-transaction business model.
One with little lego caltrops.
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
What do you expect to see as entrance to the MMO lego city?
1 - Two majestic statues of great kings of the antiquity.
2 - A large lego WOW-like portal.
3 - A giant penis.
If you answered anything but 3, please select "noob" difficulty, as you clearly know nothing of online gaming.
"Giant lego penises": while it seems like a foregone conclusion that this will eventually happen, I played pretty extensively in the beta for over two months and never saw anything offensive. The areas where you can free build are human-checked before they are open to the general public. Chat is limited to a pre-defined dictionary list. Every name you type in for either yourself or your pets is human-checked for offensiveness or trademark violation before it is approved. Hopefully I'm not overstepping the bounds of their NDA by saying all this - my point is that I had no qualms about letting my 7-year-old play unattended. And that's saying a lot for an MMO.
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
If they can make it open enough (and dialing the censorship back to a bare minimum) so as to harness the incredible creativity that's seen in all the Minecraft videos online, then they may be onto a winning formula.
Because that game is more than a little bit addictive.
Minecraft seems to be doing "fine", http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qss4uy6C_g0
"As a comparison, a two by eight LEGO plate brick, a very simple brick, is about twice the polygons of say, a World of Warcraft avatar."
Eh?
Ur doin it wrong?
Maybe they're not, and I'm sure that they know what they're talking about after such a long dev cycle, but that just doesn't seem right to me.
Legos are most fun for adults when you are making 12 inch long yellow and red block cocks.
My kingdom for a donkey!
Yeah, because this issue is completely new to multiplayer environments.... *cough*Second Life*cough*between 15,000 and 40,000 discrete objects per simulator*cough*.
We already have "Simpsons did it" but I think we should introduce "Second Life did it"
I got the feeling playing it that the developers just aren't competent. Sure, it was a Beta, but it was horrifically bad.
As I noted up-thread, the "child friendly" measures are so out of control that they offend the intelligence of even the most stupid people. It's almost an insult to humanity and the wonderful vehicle of verbal communication we have evolved. It's absolutely an insult to the spirit of Lego. I wonder if the upper levels of management have any idea how this game is dragging the good name of Lego through the sewer. It is absolutely antithetical to what Lego represents to many of us: creativity, fun, ingenuity and quality.
You can actually type improperly-spelled gibberish into the chat system, and it will allow this through, before it allows a properly spelled polite sentence. And it gets crazier. You can't even give this feedback and register your objection on the game's forums, because they have a ridiculous character limit, and anything meaningful that is said will be censored. Absolutely horrific.
... and then they built the supercollider.
and older kids who do won't be missed.
Censorship is sometimes a requirement in a society who use the anonymity of the internet to be dicks. People also forever underestimate the desire of many people to play in environments free from jerks. Let alone keep them away from their kids. When growing up jerks tended to be hauled off by parents or teachers. We have gone from real playgrounds to virtual ones but we still need supervision.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Just look at netdevil's other forays into the mmo world. If they don't shoot this one in the head, it will likely die from apathy.
That said, I sincerely hope this will be the first MMO they actually give a shit about, it has potential to be a lot of fun for a lot of people.
1. As someone who's dabbled into 3D modelling, you'd be surprised how fast the polygons go into something that actually doesn't look all that detailed. Especially if you make it for 1920x1200 screens, not for ye olde 320x200 VGA mode. You can sink a few hundreds into a face alone just so it doesn't look offensive, much less look good.
Then comes even the basic equipment a WoW character has. I'm not even talking about epic equipment. Just your basic curved blade can east up anywhere between a hundred and a couple hundred polygons just so it doesn't look like it's made of abrupt angles. Etc.
And generally, while the WoW characters do look cartoonish, they're not particularly low detail by my guess. Sure, they're not Doom 4 class, but they're not Quake 1 either, if you get my drift. At a wild guess, I'm guessing even a newbie avatar would have a couple thousand triangles.
Which brings me to the point:
2. How do you actually reach twice that with a freaking basic lego brick, other than sheer incompetence? I mean, Jesus Haploid Christ, I was feeling like a noob because my detailed weapons were in the several hundreds range, and these guys are talking several thousands for a freaking lego brick. How does one _do_ that?
I mean, let's do some maths. The bulk probably goes into the nubs on the brick. Let's make the cylinder actually a 16 sided prism, which from my experience looks smoothly round even for a gun barrel or polearm shaft you're seeing in first person. That's 32 triangles for the cylinder. The top is 16 triangles (think dividing by lines from the centre to the corners.) Let's round the transition nicely from sides to top, for which actually three steps of increasing slope is more than enough. (Heck, at the size of those even one is enough, but let's be generous.) That's 3x32 more triangles for that. Grand total: 80 triangles.
But wait, we have to do the hole on the other side too, and let's do it at the same level of detail. (Although here that rounded transition is really overkill with 3 segments, but ok.) So it's another 80, for a total of 160 per nub.
A two by eight brick is 16 such nubs, for a total of 16, which needs 2560 triangles. Add a few more for the plate and you're still under 3000.
Note that so far it's just assuming the most basic 3d rendering engine. With normal maps you can make things look equally round with half that number of polygons. You just model it in this high polycount, generate the normal map, then reduce the count of the actual model.
So, really, how does one reach twice the polycount of a WoW avatar other than sheer cluelessness? It reminds me of the daikatana story where a newbie artist was asked to draw an arrow for the crossbow, and painted an IIRC 2048 pixel wide bitmap for it.
3. And, really, anyone who's played WoW or any other MMO can tell you that things can get really annoying when you have 1000 characters on your screen. Think the old Ironforge, back when it had the only auction house. There were people who had a slideshow there or their computer crashed. Or I remember an event on Anarchy Online, waay back, when they actually told people to look at the ground to avoid a crash because of too many people. (Yeah, smart idea to have a major event where everyone only sees their own feet.)
The prospect of having several creations made of thousands of bricks, each of which has several thousand triangles, on the screen should make anyone who has a clue wonder if they're doing it right.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Is pretty much how this looks like it'll play out. I might - might - give this a brief trial, if it's free, but paying even a month ahead looks like a recipe for losing money in the inevitable shutdown when it collapses under the 4Chan lulz.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
This just in: LEGO MMO against penile erections.
1) Create a set of objects representing the letters of the alphabet.
2) Produce as many of these as necessary
3) Use to form words bypassing the chat censorship
4) ????
5) Profit!!!
I'm sure 4chan can come up with some variations of p3|\|15 that will make it through the filter.
Care to give an example?
Choke because you swallowed a brick, being transported to the hospital, and having your older brother yell at you because he didn't get that brick back and you weren't old enough to play with HIS legos.
My 12 year old plays it, a lot. I can't get into it (it seems horribly broken sometimes), but they have managed to keep it fairly clean, the chat hasn't yet gotten out of hand, some of the creations are quite nice, and my son can now type about 60-70 wpm. Its crazy the number of Games kids have created, and the apparent ease that a kid can pick up the tools and get creating. Its even getting my son interested in Lua scripting, which is quite neat.
A parent shouldnt have to make a choice for a 5 year old between being a sociopath and a bubble boy. There is no free speech right
to show virtual wangs to children. In fact the free speech right is on LEGO's side. Its their content and their right to make editorial decisions about how their game should function. That IS free speech, the right of the editor to decide what they will publish and not publish.
This is not an adult MMO it is specifically designed for kids. Mmos are part of life now, and there should be some
kid friendly ones. Its no different from an editor of a childrens magazine deciding to not publish someones graphic artwork.
Blockland is more LEGO-like than Minecraft, and has been doing this since 2007.
Vehicles and a character designer are the main advantages that Blockland has over Minecraft.
What it lacks over Minecraft is you don't craft stuff so much as interact with bricks in the environment.
The lights and guns and bows and what not are a nice touch though. It feels more like the LEGO Starwars/Indie games than a Minecraft clone.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Actually, it still sounds stupid to me, although more in the way of whatever were they thinking when they based an MMO on that.
Even if you remove the bits used in connections, there will still be plenty which aren't. As a trivial example, any sloped roof made of Lego bricks will still be a huge brush of nubs.
Basically think even a small city like Stormwind, if it were made of Lego. Even after removing the bits used in actual connections, you're still left with several million polygons just in nubs and cylinders, on top of what the same city would have if built otherwise.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I have recently been a part of two MMO betas: the Lord of the Rings Online F2P beta test, and the LEGO Universe private beta. I'm posting anonymously because I have no desire to get sued, and because I'd like to not get blacklisted.
Turbine did a great job with the LOTRO beta. Pretty much all of the bugs I reported in the early phases got fixed. The forums were very active, and while there was a predictable amount of bitching and moaning, nobody was censored and people were allowed to voice their concerns. Turbine, to their credit, made several adjustments based on the feedback.
LEGO Universe is a complete mess. Basic problems that even 15-year old MMOs have addressed (i.e. kill stealing) are unaddressed. The entire game's content can be completely mastered in a weekend or two. Posting in the beta forums is useless because the forum is moderated and limited to 600 characters per post. Moderation is inconsistent, as posts similar to mine got through but I had several posts rejected with no reason given.
I was interested in LU on the premise of building stuff and sharing creations, but this feature seems to have gotten the least amount of work. Building is a complete disaster. You put the pieces together with your avatar ("Minifigure"), so whatever you build has to be assembled from the bottom up. You can also build with models, but the model pieces don't fit together properly. The action scripting is hilariously bad, allowing you to assign actions that are physically impossible with the pieces.
Another user has already hilighted the hilariously bad chat filter that blocks out fun things like game character names and numbers. Yes, numbers. No digits, or spelling out digits. This makes it impossible to coordinate teams together.
Lego Universe is going to go the way of APB, shut down within a month or two because there is not enough content to support 30 hours, much less 30 days of play.
So it'll be minecraft but the blocks will be replaced with brightly colored plastic?
Never underestimate the power of 4chan. They will drown you under their flood of shemale anime porn.
I know it is by designed for young people, but is it fun for adults without kids/children? I have beta access, but read that it isn't fun. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
My lego creations were often militaristic, rarely if ever sexually perverted. :P
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
From TFA:
"We came up with this idea of best friends, which I think is a really cool, innovative concept."
You had better patent this "best friends" idea before Jeff Bezos does!
it will be monitored by a human before it's seen by other people.
Oh good.