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JackedIn.com Radio Interview

Interview with Chris "Mo" Sherland, Senior Producer

Q. Right now, game developers, online game developers, seem to be realizing the need to cast a wide net for players instead of focusing on just first person shooters. You guys seem to be headed in that direction since your simulation will encompass air, sea, ground forces. You've announced plans for huge server capacity to accomodate thousands of players and everybody says that's the future. Having several servers tied together - how will that system work, Chris?

A. Well, technically, right down to the bones of it, I can't give too much of that away. But you said stuff like that is going to be the future but it's actually really happening now. Games like EverQuest and Ultima Online are all supporting multiple server architecture where players can seamlessly enter and exit different server hosts, so that technology is on us right now. We're developing it from the ground up to make sure we avoid any development mistakes made in the past and add our own little features that we're looking for to support the kind of traffic we are looking for in World War 2 Online, so it's definetely cutting edge and it's definetely going to be multiple server architecture that is basically seamless and invisible to the player when they switch from server to server.

Q. Is there something different in your game technology that will tie it all together that you can't at this point?

A. Yeah, there's a few things. A project of this scope requires that we get our techology together before we really bring the game to the total fruition. A couple of things we're doing - one of them is the graphics engine, called the "Unity Engine", is a full featured, cutting edge graphics engine that supports trilinear filtering, lighting, huge array of special effects - it's a really powerful engine. The big feature about that is it enables us to port huge worlds , so far in any online gaming industry there's been a limit on how big these worlds can be. Our first arenas are 1,700 kilometers from east to west and 1,400 kilometers north to south. It's really the biggest thing that's ever been tried for... Another thing is we're modelling a very complex vehicle system. In other words, sims in the past have either been a tank sim, a ship sim, or an aircraft... air combat sim. What we're doing is we're supporting any type of vehicle. We've got it worked out to where when we input vehicle data, it's on a scale that will support anything from a submarine to a bicycle. I mean, we can put anything in there we want and it'll all interact in the same graphics engine. There other thing we're doing is really kinda raising the bar in the physics department. We've got Jonathan Hoof from the old Warbirds crew and he's kind of a physics genius in his own right. We're modelling all kinds of stuff, I mean, just flight model alone, we're modelling stuff to where we've got angle of attack, numbers ranged all the way to 360 degrees for air foils, and really advanded ground handling - all kinds of stuff. So the three basic things we're kinda forging ahead on our graphics engine, our ability to model just about any type of vehicle, and the physics model.

Q. The most common gripe among internet game players is of course connectivity. How will Playnet raise the skids for customers in that area?

A. Well there's been a lot of stuff going on in that area. Multiplayer online internet games have been developing for quite a long time so a lot of the big questions are being answered already. Our stuff, er, our internet connectivity on this side is going to be as flawless as we can get it. Basically, the way the internet works and the basic, kind of, physics of it is that it's an imperfect thing. It depends on how many hops you get to somewhere and how many packets you exchange when you get there is to what your connect's going to be like. There's not much we can do about the entire internet, but our side is going to be clean as a whistle.

Q. You know, that's really a big point. A lot of players just don't understand that most of the problems, the majority of the problems, occur before they ever get to a gaming site. Isn't that right?

A. Yeah, it's true, I mean if you, if you're... Most of the internet guys are pretty savvy, I mean you can run a ping and a traceroute to any address and you can really get a good idea of what's going on. There's a lot of guys who just never take that into account, you know, and they're like 'Hey, my connect is terrible and it must be somebody else', but, it's... those two tools right there can shine a lot of light on how dynamic the internet actually is as far as performance goes.

Q. You've got a really ambitious project, Chris. It takes a lot of coding and you've got a large team working. Any kind of projection regarding the alpha or beta versions?

A. Yeah, actually, we're running an alpha, umm, well, the rest of the guys are running an alpha while I'm on the phone here. We just started that tonight so we're compiling a bunch of screenshots to put up on our site and distribute to let the world know we're actually moving forward. Beta is scheduled right now for first quarter of 2000. We still have enough technology on the stove here where I can't give much of a more solid date that just the first quarter. We've got to slog through and see how long the basic systems take us, but the way I've got it mapped out, we should be in closed beta in the first quarter and open beta after.

Q. That's great, that's good news. I know everybody's looking forward to it. We're going to be doing multi-part in-depth series with Playnet in the near future along with the Cornered Rat software division. We're really looking forward to it Chris.

A. Yeah, I am too, it's gonna be great to do this again in more detail.

Signing off: We thank you for joining us and we look forward to talking to you in the future.

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Much thanks to Sixxo for providing the transcript!