Posts with tag Physics

Following the pattern held in previous years, Blizzard will again be loaning out some of their top developers for panels at this year's Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco, CA. WoW's former Lead Producer Jeff Kaplan, a.k.a. Tigole, presented the keynote speech at last year's GDC, and this year two top developers will be on tap to give horribly esoteric panels.

Brian Schwab, Blizzard's Senior AI/Gameplay Engineer, will be presenting a lecture on AI architecture ...

"AI programmers rarely use a pure architecture such as a State Machine, Planner, or Behavior Tree in isolation. Rather, several symbiotic architectures are mashed together, resulting in an overall architecture that is unique and powerful in its own way. This lecture is designed as a series of three mini-lectures where you will hear about several mashed up AI architectures along with intriguing lessons and insights."

... and Erin Catto, Blizzard's Principle Software Engineer, will be presenting a workshop on physics engines.

"This one-day tutorial continues the 10-year tradition of the Math for Programmers and Physics for Programmers tutorials by bringing together some of the best presenters in gaming physics. Over the course of a day they will get programmers up to speed in the latest techniques and deepen their knowledge in the topic of physical simulation."

More information, including panel times and availability, can be seen on BlizzPlanet's writeup of the announcement. This is basically total nerd talk -- it's very unlikely that we'll have any new WoW-related info from these panels, unlike Kaplan's keynote, but anything is possible. We'll keep you posted.

3D seems to be making a reemergence lately -- there was a 3D commercial on the Super Bowl last week, I'm going to see Coraline in 3D this weekend (Neil Gaiman and stop motion for the win), and Nvidia's 3D Vision cards have recently been integrated with World of Warcraft. But not so fast there: apparently while the system does make WoW stereoscopic (sends a different picture to each eye), and while it does work for some media (apparently watching 3D HD content with the system "feels like your monitor is a window"), analyst Rob Enderle over at TG Daily says WoW in 3D isn't all that amazing.

Let's not forget, of course, that this is a game going on four years old, and while it has a terrific art style, and has recieved multiple graphic updates since then, we're still dealing with old technology in terms of a graphic engine. So Enderle says that the 3D really makes you realize that there are no real physics in the game -- "the objects," he says, "look like flat cutouts fanned out in a 3D field." The physical limitations are there, too -- you need a special monitor, apparently, and it's only 22" big, which might seem fine for most, but anyone who works all day on a computer (like yours truly), is used to a little bigger screen.

Not to mention that, as he says, any technology that requires you to wear glasses isn't quite as cool as it could be yet. But 3D is obviously making progress, and the more popular it gets, the easier it'll be to make and experience. Maybe someday we'll all see Azeroth as a 3D world around us.

Piping hot from the WoW forums comes the tale of an interesting experiment: Psychosheep, a troll warrior on Anvilmar, decided to jump off of the Aldor rise with 15 seconds left before server reset. Best comment comes about half way down the thread, in my opinion: Renault, a BE Pally from Suncrown, says " ...mein Gott. It's Schrodinger's Jump. Considering we do not know the state of existence until you log back on, your char is both simultaneously alive and dead at the same time. Until you log back on to confirm the state."

Now, that idea right there just tickles me, both because it's very apt and it's the kind of metaphor that tends to extend itself. It's weird to think about your character in a state of quantum uncertainty when you disconnect or the server goes down, essentially in limbo while you try and get back. Does he or she even exist when you're not playing? The Armory would seem to offer us some solace in these uncertain times.

Have you ever done anything similar when your server was about to shut down? The closest I've ever come personally was when I, not paying attention to general or announcements, was farming furbolgs in Winterspring and I managed to charge one just as the server came down. I spent an hour trying to get back in, and finally managed it to discover the furbolg dead and my character at half-health. But I don't think I would have deliberately done so, as was the case here. I'm not a big fan of dying from fall damage.