Building A Pipeline

[Nalates]

Yeah… This gets debated. How easy should adding clothes or other items be?

Whether it is in-game add-in’s (clothes, building, etc.) or other player ways to affect the game something will need to increase player participation and provide interesting things to do.

Games within SL are great research examples, somewhat like fruit flies to biological studies. Rivet Town is a very Riven like build in SL. In modern speak called Steampunk. The builder has modeling and texturing skills on par with the quality level of Cyan’s. The Steam Fitters Hall is a gorgeous Victorian build. Desks, chairs, Rubegoldberg steam powered computers are things that look like they are taken from Riven (they are all independent builds it is the similarity in style I find amazing).

However Rivet Town is puzzle free. There is limited possibility for exploration (2 SIMS = 8,000m by 4,000m). The only thing to do in game there is RP or shop. There is a big dance hall, a few great stores with some of the coolest Victorian dresses. But RP requires people and there is really nothing to keep people around while they wait for someone else to show up. The result is no people, nothing to do and the game will close the end of the month. It cannot support its very modest operating costs.

What is surviving is the builder’s store where she sells her ‘things’. The beautiful desks, rustic artifacts i.e., 1800’s expedition tents, retro looking telescopes and world globes… etc. and her SIM building skills keep the store paying for itself (her hobby).

This shows the problem MOOS will have once one has been through the puzzles and explored the new ages. Once one has done the puzzles and explored MOOS, it is much like a picture album to be taken out occasionally and enjoyed, but not a day to day thing. Uru fans have always been content hungry and no one to date has been able to supply that demand for content. Adding ages adds large amounts of data that everyone will eventually want to download a cost to consider.

Adding ages comes with the considerable development time and required skill sets, which limits the number of people that will learn to build and create ages. We have yet to quantify the supply side tube and anticipate a delivery rate. In general people seem to take it for granted that there will be a timely supply of new content. The community seems to have held to that belief from Prologue to today. It has never happened. How many age writers do we actually have? How prolific are they? How long does it typically take an age writer to learn the skill? Once learned how many playable ages do they write? What is the dropout rate for aspiring age writers?

I do not see the supply side tube growing at rates I think MOOS will need to survive. Obviously I can't know that but neither can one know the converse. Many resist learning programming, modeling and texturing even in simplified environments like Open Simulator, Open Life and SL. Even if they do, it is still a good sized step to being able to build for MOOS. I doubt many of the hundreds of THERE and SL builders will actually start building for MOOS when it comes to it. There certainly is a better chance they will learn and MAY come back to MOOS than if they never learn.

So, I see challenges for timely content delivery and lack of a growing builder community, at least on the scale we are likely to need. If we make it easy to build and add content we have one set of problems and if we don’t we have another set of problems. So, far the solutions I see coming are based on our beliefs of what will work and not an objective evaluation of what we have and what we will need. It seems to be a catch-22 of keeping content addition complex and controlling cost easily within an environment that is not likely to hold new players (ala GT/MOUL) and something wilder like OL, OS, and SL that runs away. I believe there is some middle ground. I am just not sure we know where it is and we seem to be going down the trial and error road that Cyan went down, with ‘down’ being a keyword.

[Mac_Fife]

I agree with much of what you say. Content delivery was, and will no doubt remain, a problem. MO:UL in its latter days with no new content was not that appealing: Sure, there was the social aspect which some people will say is a very important aspect of the game (and I'm not arguing with that view), but when you put it under a microscope you could pretty much achieve the same without paying for MO:UL. Content is key to attracting and maintaining players, and the downloading of content costs (although some hosting packages do offer no bandwidth cap, you're paying for it up front).

Quite a few people hold the view that now that "hundreds" of fans will be developing content we'll have quality material coming out of our ears. As you rightly ask, how many people are actually able to write new ages; and how many of those can approach the quality of Cyan material? Enthusiasm and good intentions won't be enough. People come to URU with an expectation borne of the Myst franchise, and the hard-nosed reality is that they won't judge fan created ages against a different set of standards, nor should they. Creating quality takes time and effort, and I think that was the hurdle that Cyan constantly faced: The Open Source benefit, however, is that the effort is essentially "free".

But new content doesn't necessarily mean new ages: Storylines managed to maintain interest without the expense of creating new game assets, but again that's a challenge for the shard operators and members, but one that is more readily manageble on a timely basis. Stagnation of ages bugged me; once you'd completed an age there was generally little to take you back there (OK, so sometimes it snowed in Delin). Drip feeding little bits helps to keep interest going in established ages, like checking back in Teledahn to see if the spy room link had appeared. I liked the way Ae'gura was gradually opened up, and often felt that other ages should have been given similar treatment (wouldn't it be a tease if you couldn't complete Yeesha's Journey straight off because part of the roof of Gahreesen 1 was fenced off?)

Time will tell - let's hope we're pleasantly surprised

[realXCV]

With no new content, MOUL is like a big 3D chat room.

[GPNMilano]

I think what a lot of people are are misappropriating is the lack of content for the latter days of MOUL was not Cyan's doing. Even at the time of Prologue, when the subscription base was at its highest, conservative estimates by Ubi and Cyan put the beta at the least 10,000 players, the content pipeline for Uru was staggering. Testers were, at the time live was being cancelled, testing just the basic stuff we saw in PoTS (from what little I've read) This included Ahnonay and E'rcana. Cyan's content pipeline at the time included Negilahn, Kveer, Minkata, Descent (the Myst V version if I'm correct), Todelmer, and Noloben, which were all anywhere from 70 - 90 percent. Negilahn and Kveer were the closest to release, with Todelmer on the horizon. This assumption is based upon the fact that even today, there are footprints of these ages left behind in Uru: Ages Beyond Myst/To D'ni/PotS. References in the python.pak and the actual PRPs for the Museum and K'veer that indicate that these were to be the next places to be released in the pipeline. The linking panels for Negilahn and Todelmer are in the PoTS prps, and their books are already modeled in the city PRP files, and the python files include the start of the linking info for both ages.

On the horizon were the other ages that I listed, with a conservative estimate of my own that they were somewhere in the 50 -70 percentile range of completion. With some of the other Myst V ages already being modeled, and started. Then live was shut down. All of the above content, with the exception of Minkata was then retained by Ubi to be used in Myst V, as Cyan did not expect a revival of MOUL. When this happened, they were in the problematic position that all of their content pipeline was gone. Contracted out to Ubisoft for Myst V, and no longer able to be used in MOUL. So they were literally starting from just the original PotS stuff. At which point some deal was arranged that allowed them to use a few things from Myst V. This included K'veer and Negilahn as they were the most complete at the time of the shutdown. So they basically had little in their pipeline when GT bought them and had to provide new content fast, hence the ages we got in MOUL. They were cookie cutter ages that only needed some texture changes and additional modeling to make them somewhat unique (The pods and the Pubs) and only three ages that were started from scratch (Eder Delin, Tsogal, and Jalak).

Now, we are in the unique position that unlike Cyan, all content created by the fans isn't being paid for. Cyan, in order to generate the content necessary to rebuild their old pipeline would have to employ modelers, texture artists, audio artists, and programmers. Financially they were unable to do that with the budget given to them and still provide top quality stuff in vast numbers. We have a community of people that can build these ages. Of the current 96 ages that have been released since the start of Fan Created Content (meaning from the first age ever released, to today) there are at least 10 - 15 that are of the quality that non-fans are looking for. This doesn't include ages that aren't even released ( I have about four ages and areas currently in development that are all at least 70 percent complete, that are a package deal of sorts, meaning that like Yeesha's Journey they are all tied together, and the story demands that they be released one at a time as if the DRC was opening them up)

As far as how content creation for MOOS will go, that is a question that is difficult to answer. It is nigh impossible that you will ever see cookie cutter created content on the fly like in SL. Its just not possible, and shouldn't be. Plasma's engine is much more advanced than SL's, even for its age. Content in Uru is meant to look realistic, its meant to draw the user in and look and feel visually awe inspiring. The last thing Uru needs is to look, visually, like SL. That being said there are parts of SL that I'd be happy to see merged with Uru. Avatar Customization in Uru could be optimized, as well as the interface. Importing and Exporting of images and music would also be nice, and can be done without much work. This would allow for players to import their own images and music into Uru so that they can play music on their Cannens in Relto, and post non-KI images in the hoods, and anywhere with a working imager.

There's alot that can be done to make Uru more playable, and draw people in AND most importantly keep them without sacrificing what makes Uru unique. On the fly content creation should IMO never be one of these things, unless you want ages that look like the ones created when Age Creation was in its infancy, and so few Plasma Classes coded into the toolset. (I can point you to some of these ages if you want a trip down memory lane.)

[rarified]

The "pipeline" that GPNMilano describes is intriguing...

An unstated assumption for all the user provided content seems to assume that an individual constructs an age from conception to implementation.

Is there some sort of division of labor (that would work in the community) that could pipeline the delivery of ages? There already is the two steps of construction and testing. But I'm looking at a finer granularity. Concept art -> wireframe -> mesh -> texturing in parallel with Puzzle design -> sequencing/animation -> coding and then merging of the two.

Jamey's speciality, for example, seems to be textures. Maybe there are other folks more skilled (and interested) in a particular aspect of age construction.

Thoughts? How to propose it to the wider community?

[GPNMilano]

An unstated assumption for all the user provided content seems to assume that an individual constructs an age from conception to implementation.

Is there some sort of division of labor (that would work in the community) that could pipeline the delivery of ages? There already is the two steps of construction and testing. But I'm looking at a finer granularity. Concept art -> wireframe -> mesh -> texturing in parallel with Puzzle design -> sequencing/animation -> coding and then merging of the two.

Jamey's speciality, for example, seems to be textures. Maybe there are other folks more skilled (and interested) in a particular aspect of age construction.

Thoughts? How to propose it to the wider community?

This has been proposed several times, the idea that a team, is better suited to create a full age rather than an individual. The wall this idea hits, unfortunately, is that without proper management a team effort will hit a wall. RL gets in the way for everyone, and if you have say your texture artist, having a crisis that needs more attention than age building does, losing that person can have a ripple effect on the entire project. Also there are some, myself included, who'd rather create an age from concept to completion, as they see it as "their baby" and wish to nurture it to completion themselves. I am not above asking for help when I hit a roadblock, or if I wish to make the entire community have a chance at contributing something to a particular area or age. I proposed a challenge to texture artists here for example: Banner Challenge. It's just that somethings I'd rather do myself.

The age creation process, at least for me, usually goes like this Concept ---> Modeling ---> Texturing ---> Lighting ---> Sound and Animation---> Programming. Puzzle design falls into the category of both modeling and programming. You need to have a clear idea of what you want the puzzle to do at the modeling stage, and later program it, and change if necessary your model to suit the changes. When I design an age I model it, and then texture it, at the same time I'm adding in my lights wherever necessary, as well as all the necessary things required for the sound and animations. Both for object and avatar animation. At the Sound and Animation stage i program the objects that were created during the modeling stage with the necessary alcscript to get them working. These can include anything from wavesets, to oneshots to multistagebehmods to linking books. The programming stage I almost always save for my python scripts, and when needed go back and change whatever I need to in blender to get it working the way it needs to be.

[rarified]

Also there are some, myself included, who'd rather create an age from concept to completion, as they see it as "their baby" and wish to nurture it to completion themselves. I am not above asking for help when I hit a roadblock, or if I wish to make the entire community have a chance at contributing something to a particular area or age.

As would be expected, there probably are individuals all along the spectrum, from those capable of constructing an age by themselves, to those folks in the MOUL forums who have an idea, but are not skilled in the various tasks that constitute age creation.

Maybe the best answer is to open a bazaar thread of skilled individuals that may want to offer their assistance (on an as-available basis), and point those looking for help to that list.

Or maybe this really isn't a problem but a solution in search of a problem

[JWPlatt]

A "renaissance man" building his own age from scratch to finish is not excluded from also working on the pipeline for people who need his talent.

[GPNMilano]

Also there are some, myself included, who'd rather create an age from concept to completion, as they see it as "their baby" and wish to nurture it to completion themselves. I am not above asking for help when I hit a roadblock, or if I wish to make the entire community have a chance at contributing something to a particular area or age.

As would be expected, there probably are individuals all along the spectrum, from those capable of constructing an age by themselves, to those folks in the MOUL forums who have an idea, but are not skilled in the various tasks that constitute age creation.

Maybe the best answer is to open a bazaar thread of skilled individuals that may want to offer their assistance (on an as-available basis), and point those looking for help to that list.

Or maybe this really isn't a problem but a solution in search of a problem

This actually exists today. It has for awhile now: Forming An Age Project Team Its not like its not out there, its just that no ones taken advantage of it, or if they do they do so in private.

A "renaissance man" building his own age from scratch to finish is not excluded from also working on the pipeline for people who need his talent.

A pipeline, in my definition is any new content, either ages, clothing, additions whatever you want to call it. Every person that is contributing, wether in a team or alone is participating in the content pipeline for Uru, IMO.

[Nalates]

Andy at GoMa started a model archive to allow small... well actually any items/3D models to be built and shared.

Somewhere I saw something about a texture library, a similar idea.

There are bits and pieces of things coming into place. But none of these make it easy to write ages.

96 ages from start until now. With 15 of the quality... needed for professional presentation, I'll call it. That means roughly 15% of the work is reaching Cyan level quality or near. I find that remarkable. How many people worked on those ages? How many man hours are in each of the top quality ages? How many hours does a non-modeler need to put in to approach the quality fans want?

@GPNMilano, if you were to quantify the 'actual' work time and ‘elapsed’ time to build your ages from start to finish, what would it reveal?

You seem to typify what I think of as a core fan; fully engaged and willing to help the community. But, your enjoying age development and probably exploring and solving puzzles all in a solo fashion. That is neither a good or bad thing just personal preference. The personality test many of us took on one of the forums seems to fit with your preferences. So, you may typify the majority of the fans/age writers. If that is accurate (not so much you but the community) then we would see more ages written by mostly solo efforts than not. That tells us something about possible production rates.

As of now I'm pretty sure no one has a handle on what fan production will be. Some age writers like you can probably make the best educated guesstimates possible. While we could try to quantify the time for the age development from the 96 ages and decide on a rate, that does not handle the changing motivation factor. Prior to December I think writers would have one general level of motivation. Once open source was announced, I think that stepped up. So, my belief is only productive age writers could give us reasonable estimate of production rates and time requirements. It is just a matter of how many can we get to think about it and tell us.