Recent content by Aradune Mithara_foh

I"ve posted now several times that I wish we could have launch a bit later, but that it was out our hands. Fiancial realties, being what they were, made that decison for us.

It has to do with the quality of the medium used to create the immersion. A brilliant writer can do it with words. A movie director with how he shoots, uses sounds, and even what he does"t show. It can be done using realism, or be heavily stylized. It can be surreal, or over the top in your...

Thanks for addressing the Bog And I agree with you -- some of our biggest problems are LFG, performance, some PvP tweaks, and low server pop. We messed up, as I"ve said before, and were so worried that noob areas would be over crowded, that we should have launched with fewer anyway and people...

I should have said was mainstream, my bad. When EQ 1 was released most people didn"t have a Voodoo 1 because a. not many games took advantage of it and 2. price point. Both issues, however, resolved themselves. And many good cards for Vanguard have been available since late 2005/early 2006...

I don"t think either the EQ 1 or EQ 2 launch suffered significantly from their hardware specs and the tech level they used. Many people want a more immersive and technically advanced engine, especially when it comes to virtural worlds. Does this mean these games won"t achieve WoW numbers as...

To be clear, we don"t expect everyone to upgrade because a lot of people don"t need/require running on the highest settings, or at 30fps, or at 1920x1200 resolutions. The specs I listed, which while not inexpensive, they are also not crazy expensive either, are for systems that will run the...

1. What we have done with the Unreal 2.x engine is astounding -- major props to the programming team, etc. It *is* a fast engine and it was also relatively easily modified to add bump mapping, specular, per pixel lighting. And we were also able to make it seamless, although I wouldn"t say that...

What"s missing are environment shadows -- character shadows are there, although they need some tweaks. We are waiting on a hardware solution for environment shadows which should happen in the next couple of generation of cards. So right now you have character soft shadows unless there are too...

With all due respect, I absolutely remember issues. Until the Voodoo 2 came out, there was a lot of complaining. Until the Voodoo 2 SLI and Voodoo 3 came out there was some complaining. Different people like to run at different resolutions and also have different thresholds in terms of how much...

Yeah, if you go p4 I would do a minimum of a 2.8ghz,and preferably a 3.0 aor 3.2. And make sure the motherboard is pci-express.

I have to respectfully disagree. It used to be that to buy a top of the line computer you were looking at 3-4k. It"s dropped considerably, and I"m only talking about a top of the line computer if you want to run at high resolutions and at high graphical settings. Many, many Vanguard players run...

1. 6 months isn"t enough lead time to make major fundamental changes to the architecture of the game (even had we wanted to). In a 4.5 year project, you simply can"t do something like that and make you ship date even if, like I said, you wanted to. 2. I still think, especially longer term...

Plus I still truly believe that casual, core, and hardcore can co-exist and even be interdependent in an MMOG. I think VG made a good stab at it and will get even better at it, and future MMOGs will do even better.

I think it would be great to have a RL economist on staff -- it"s just a matter of budget. MMOG economies mirror RL economies in many ways, although not all, and having that insight would be very nice.

The plan, as I understand it, is to use lower poly/texture LOD models of player and NPC characters (especially PCs) when too many players and mobs are in your view. The visual quality will go down, but at least you will have framerate.