There are two new updates over on the Chronicles of Spellborn website today. The first is a Project Update
The update not only talks about a delay to the game to provide additional time for polish - pushing release back to Q1 of 2008 - it also talks about the recent publishing deal with Frogster, to bring TCoS to Japan.
Mirage also mentions a technical hurdle that has been conquered; anyone who's familiar with World of Warcraft knows what this is like in the crowded cities prior to The Burning Crusade release, so it's nice to see progress on this front in the MMO genre.
You most likely have encountered in your past or even present gaming experiences serious downtimes or even server crashes when many players gathered in the same place. This can be very frustrating and I dare say annoying if it happens on a large scale. Brace yourselves, because during one of our internal stress tests we simulated more than 500 players in real gaming conditions in one single zone (Hawk’s Landing/Hawksmouth) without any crashes or other downtime. This might not look so extraordinary at first glance, but trust me, for a game with heavy action-based combat and such AI; this is one heck of a feat for an MMO. This might even mean we might not need the “silent instancing/copying system” mentioned on the forums in the past (take that with great care, we still need to assess such possibilities). So not only is it a great achievement, it is also very, very, good news! This marks our truly professional and amazing cooperation between our in-house devs and the Korean reinforcements. Way to go guys!
There's also a new Developer Journal available. This one is a Tech Journal - Organic Programming - written by Maurits Fassaert. If you want a glimpse at the technical side of programming a game, this is a great journal to check out.
Images, music, stories. These things are thoroughly ingrained in our culture. Since the dawn of mankind, experts have honed these arts to trick our senses. Modern game developers apply samples and polygons where pigskin drums and dirty lines on a cave wall used to be the height of entertainment. Likewise programming can be said to come from mathematics, an advanced form of counting beads on rope, but the application of mathematics as entertainment is a more recent development, unless you think dividing by zero is fun. Because of this there is still a lot of catching up to do. A lot of processing power is spent in modern operating systems trying to make the interface feel more natural, more human centered. In games a similar process is happening. We're still shooting monsters as we were in Doom, but they are no longer facing only 8 directions. When we kill them they no longer frag in the same over the top animation, but they fly away from the grenade's impact, shrapnel sticking from the exact places where it pierced the body.
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