Categories
games industry massively multiplayer

MMOGchart.com gets first update in 8 months

http://www.mmogchart.com/charts/

At long last, the new version of my charts and analysis is now online! I don’t have numbers for every game, but there are quite a few updates, most notably to World of Warcraft, RuneScape, Dofus, Tibia, and NCSoft’s various titles. Also included are preliminary numbers for Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, Lord of the Rings Online, and Tabula Rasa.

A new look and feel to the site as well, I noticed. I’m glad to see the site back and running, and just in time for GDC too :). I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the numbers, but it’s a hugely valuable service to all of us in and around MMO development to have a detailed comparison like this and to see historically how each of the games fares against its predecessors. Even if 95% of the opinions people form from this analysis seem to be wrong … (remember any of the “no game will go above a couple of million subscribers because the charts show them all stealing from each other and none growing the total market” arguments of yesteryear?).

Categories
computer games

My Dungeon Runners character

http://threeplanetssoftware.com/software/dr/adz

(not our website, but something the community did with the XML data we released freely)

EDIT: or even better, here

Categories
computer games system architecture web 2.0

Game data accessibility and XML feeds

Sometimes, it’s the little things you do that get noticed

Last year I would have ranted about how retarded it is that game data is either entirely inaccessible to the web, or only accessible to an “official” website. …This year, however, is all about the positive. Rather than rant about no one providing such a feed, this is an un-rant about someone providing such a feed.

Dungeon Runners!

I found this via a news post about character sheets being viewable online at 3rd-party sites, making the assumption this meant an XML feed was available, and then digging through the forums until I found the post with a link.

This is really cool, I should tell you, just in case you don’t get that.

Receptions like this help keep us motivated to keep doing more of them :).

Categories
java tutorials networking programming

Java NIO Server Example

I’ve made a small simple but complete java NIO server (with full source included) that is free for anyone to use for anything. At the moment, it only deals with sending and receiving strings, and isn’t optimized, but if anyone wants to improve it and send me the changes then I’ll post up an improved version here.

Download, documentation, license details, tutorial etc after the jump…

Categories
games industry programming recruiting

Self-learning guide for Game Programmers without a degree

The following are hand-picked sections from the syllabus of the 3-year Cambridge University CS course. These are just syllabus, i.e. describing what you need to learn / teach yourself.

Categories
computer games conferences massively multiplayer web 2.0

GDC08: Web 2.0 + Games meetup

After the success of the totally unofficial and informal meetup at AGDC, I thought I’d ask around if anyone wants to do another one of these at GDC…

a couple of us are going to get together and chat about the head-on-collision between games and Web 2.0. Come along
and see if you can outdo everyone else by picking an even larger number and sticking it on the end of a word (why stop at Games 3.0? Let’s go to a hundred!).

There will be no free drinks. No free food. And definitely no cabaret/live entertainment/superstar DJ’s. But hopefully there will be some interesting and friendly people with a shared interest here.

Have a look at the quick report I did for the AGDC07 meetup to get an idea for what this might be like.

At Austin GDC, I expected about 5-10 people, and we had about 30. I have no idea yet how many people would be interested at GDC.

EDIT: details…

Time: 20:00-22:00
Day: Wednesday 20th February

Courtesy of Mike Leahy (http://www.egrsoftware.com): The space is called “The Bubble” @ 73 Langton St. SF 94103 which is near 7th/Folsom.

If you’re coming and haven’t emailed me (amartin at ncsoft.com) please drop me a mail to say so – we should have plenty of spare room, so RSVP isn’t required, but on the off-chance we get lots of people, RSVP’d will get priority.

Nice and easy from the convention center: go south-west along Howard St for 3 blocks, then take a left on Langton St (circa 10 minute walk) :

Google maps directions

Categories
conferences

Leaving myGDC

To: every “friend” on the GDC08 myGDC system
Subject: Quitting this

myGDC sucks donkey. It keeps deleting my pasword, the system seems to be a hand-crafted proprietary nightmare, the usability is awful, many of the links are broken even months after the site went live.

And, of course, this is a CMP system – so you can guarantee they will delete it and start again from scratch next year. Just like they have done every year since I can remember :(.

So, I’m deleting my account on here. Bye-bye!

NB: yet-another-stupid-bug from the myGDC system: it is impossible to mail more than one person at once.

Even better, if you click “compose message”, you get taken to a compose screen with an empty to box and *no way* to select target friends.

Hey, CMP! – the 1990’s called; they want their pre-gmail user-interface-designer back.

Categories
amusing games industry

I now work on The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen … Online!

Allegedly.

Hmm. Maybe not.

Categories
alternate reality games computer games photos

Perplex City 2005 launch

I was just formatting an old hard disk over xmas, clearing out old junk, and found some files from when I was working at Mind Candy on Perplex City – probably a backup of my USB key when I was re-formatting it while still working there (we tried a couple of different keys for doing passwordless auth which we were thinking of rolling out to all staff to make life easier and in some areas more secure).