Campaign Stats

We've been mulling over the campaigns and some upcoming rule changes in the office as we are wont to do and Bloo put together some nice charts I though I would share. The info from these is readily available at Battleground Tools.

Victories:

Average Campaign Length: All-Time: 36 Days
Moving Average Currently: ~42 Days

All-Time Total: 49
Axis: 29 (60%)
Allied: 19 (39%)
Truce: 1 (2%)
(Percentages rounded)

Last 10 Campaigns (back to 2/21/2007, during which 1.25 was released):
Axis: 3 (30%)
Allied: 6 (60%)
Truce: 1 (10%)

This shows the winners and losers of each of the campaigns and how long they lasted. We use this to cross check with RDP cycle times and what not and of course look for trends. Of course charts can;t ever tell the whole tale as they don;t cover things like morale but they are interesting. Longer campaigns tend to be won by the Axis. Shorter campaigns tend to be won by the Axis. Since ToEs the Allies have had their first real strings of victories. I love pondering these types of numbers. What are your thoughts?

Thanks to Bloo for the data.

WWIIOL Damage Video

This is an oldie but a goodie recently redone with some voice over by our resident croc wrangler, a.k.a. DOC. This video really shows the guts of the sim, showcasing our damage and ballistics. You'll notice no hitpionts or look up tables are used. This, gentlemen, is the real deal. We'll be redoing this with the new graphics engine upgrade and the new models in the near future.

Giga Gophur

It's all about exposure don't you know. I'll be on Giga TV this afternoon (night for you eoros) talking about BE or WWIIOL or whatever you wish to call this massively multi-player online first-person shooter strategy role playing game (MMO, MMOFPS, MMORPG ?) that we all so dearly love to live and breath.

I have no idea what they will ask me. I have no idea what the program format is like to be. I have no idea how to actually watch this from the office in Bedford...

What I do know is that for a small independent game developer and defacto publisher this is huge. I also know that Greni and Hofnarr will be on set to show off the game. Hope you cats can tune in.

Gallery of the Bizzare

Sometimes things just don't go right. A late check-in post data freeze, a QA pass that just didn't think to look in third person, a misplaced multi-texture comment in an art file, any of these can and do happen. And when they do, they are all my fault! Yup. I wear the pants in this family and as you can see, yesterday they fell off. Hehe. Wee, this shit will happen on occasion. Best to laugh. Oh, that's a French infantry man firing his weapon...in another dimension apparently. If you have more photos of this madness I'm collecting them for The Gallery Of the Bizarre.

10k Words PLUS!

Thanks eigenman!

1,28 Video Blog

I'm sure my mother would be so proud.

Radar Video Blog

BEGM: Battleground Europe Game Monitor

Technically this is a cool thing of the day. Even more, for you WWIIOLers it is probably the COOLEST thing of about any day. Oli created a dbase access set and the guys have been hard at work making very cool widgets. God I wish our UI tools were this sweet.

KFS1 says: Guys who have been developing stuff with WireTap are finally starting to release their tools. Apos520 has had one out for a while, Sres has been providing the High Commanders with TOE training tools using it, SLR released a Java-based (cross-platform) one a few days ago, and Xiper has just released his open source BEGM (Battleground Europe Game Monitor)

BEGM: Battleground Europe Game Monitor

.report

Just had to share today's gem of a report. Always so entertaining reading these. FYI I do read ALL of these almost everyday, unless we're in open testing and beta and then I tend to focus on those. Here goes:

2007-09-14 21:36:06  playerNameWitheld   German 8. Zerstörerflottille maniacm mission cell#145 near Dordrecht N51.49.11 E4.38.51
   "silent bombing/straffing should be an exploit"
2007-09-14 21:46:08  playerNameWitheld   German 8. Zerstörerflottille mwhitman mission cell#145 near Dordrecht N51.48.35 E4.38.47
   "WTF MFING PANHARD FIRING THROUGH A FING HILL AT DORD, ALLIED BIASM"
2007-09-14 22:01:34  playerNameWitheld   German brigade scrn last nearDordrecht N51.49.28 E4.39.4
   "rename the game to allied and crs loser idiocy online"

Ahh, Loser Idiocy Online. Now that's catchy! All from the same player; all in a row. I love my job...

Patch Day

Ah glorious patch day. Time was, this was a manic day. Running around screaming "I have the ball!" and hoping that the train is on time. No longer folks. In fact, I'm a bit bored today. We've patched so many times and despite being so small our process has gotten pretty refined and I am honestly, just sitting here, doodling, waiting for the server to get sorted out, which it will no doubt, with no need for hysterics on my part. What a great bunch of guys i get the pleasure of working with. Thanks yo.

1.27 Open Test Vlog

PoTD

Something just isn't right here. Also, note to self, Sheep need AI.

WWIIOL How To: Spiral Climb Kill a Spit in a 109

Very nice tutorial on the classic sucker punch on a Spit. Someone should add this to the Wiki if it isn't already up there. *hint*

INCOMING!

Sweet bombing run from WWIIOL (as if you needed me to tell you where it was from). This is what it's all about. I'm really hoping that some changes to victory conditions and adding enemy planes to the map will make this one of the coolest things ever.

Toto Talks Mortars on the Vlog

The (Naval) Love Patch

So we've been talking in beta a lot about what to add to the naval love patch this fall. Apparently this is all we've come up with. Thanks Chris for the "Player produced argument for naval play."

Ramp on the Vlog

Happy Birthday WWIIOL!

Yeah I'm a week late. Like you're up late at night watching for me blogz to grace the tubes. Whatever. Posting this largely to remind folks that 6 years in the MMO business is actually quite an achievement. The ones that didn't make it seem to outweigh the ones that did, which is honestly a complete turn around from when we started. Back then it was UA, EQ, AC, and well...us. DAoC and AO come in there at some point but I think that was post our miserable launch.

Well what do ya know. We're still here and despite not becoming the raving success our pre-launch would have led one to believe we're still kicking with almost the exact same number of customers. And when I say customers, I mean that in a bottom up kinda way, or tp rephrase, the people who dig what we do enough to give us money and allow us to do it. No mean feat let me tell you.

A heart felt thanks to you all.

WWIIOL: Battleground Europe Free Special Event
By news@mmosite.com
WWII Online: Battleground Europe will be holding a special event to celebrate the six-year
anniversary. they will give out a 7 day free trial.
MMOsite Gaming News - http://www.mmosite.com

IGN: Battleground Europe Free Special Event

June 8, 2007 - Matrix Games and Playnet are marking the 6th anniversary of the

award-winning MMOG, WWII Online: Battleground Europe ...

Battleground Europe: WWII Online : Battleground Europe: WWII ...
To celebrate its sixth birthday, WWII Online: Battleground Europe will be holding a
special event simulating battles over bridges during the closing days of ...

PR: WWIIOL: Battleground Europe Free Special Event
Matrix Games and Playnet are marking the 6 th anniversary of the award-winning
MMOG, WWII Online: Battleground Europe with a special historically-based event.
Armchair General - http://www.armchairgeneral.com

WWIIOL: Battleground Europe
By wwiiol_newzguy(pc)
Hi guys, I noticed there was some age old threads about
World War II Online: Battleground Europe. Just in case anyone haven't tried the game,
there is a 7-day free trial starting tomorrow with a special event to celebrate the games ...
PC - http://forums.gameinformer.com/gi/board?board.id=pc

WWIIOL: Battleground Europe
By wwiiol_newzguy(games)
Hi everyone, I'm new to these forums but I didn't find any older threads about
World War II Online or Battleground Europe as it's now known. I just wanted to
let you know that if you're interested trying it out, there is a special 7-day ...
Games - http://lithium.1up.com/zd/board?board.id=games

WWIIOL: Battleground Europe - PC - Game Informer Forums
Game Informer Forums : PC : WWIIOL: Battleground Europe ...
WWIIOL: Battleground Europe. Options, Options. wwiiol_newzguy
Newcomer Posts: 1 ...

Battleground Europe Free Event
By Blue(furn@base6.com (James Furness))
Battleground Europe celebrates the sixth anniversary of the WW2
MMORPG with a special event called BRIDGES. Free seven-day accounts are
available for the event, though confusingly, the game also...
Blue's News - http://www.bluesnews.com

WWII Online: Battleground Europe Free Special Event
Game marks anniversary with free special event.
GamersHell.com - PC News (Most Recent) - http://www.gamershell.com

I Need This!!1

Lately we've been looking for some middle ware on which to base our next terrain editor. We've got some pretty steep requirements. Need to build a half scale map of Europe with several thousand towns with roads and rivers and satellite digital elevation data as the foundation.

In the past we've looked at many editors but nothing really designed to do what we need. I want it to be automated as much as possible. I'd like a cross between Sim City and Combat Missions. I don't need what most MMO engines have and shoe box shooters can't make stuff on the scale I need. Take a look at Blueberry or Terrex for something close for sim applications. Trouble is I don't want to use satellite pictures and I really need to have playable spaces out of all this.

Those guys have some cool stuff. I think we can work something out of it that might give us quick production and good results. Then I see this:

1 - Good screens of progressive generated interiors with objects.
http://forums.introversion.co.uk/introversion/viewtopic.php?t=566

2 - Mostly chat about the game history:
http://forums.introversion.co.uk/introversion/viewtopic.php?t=571

3 - Procedural cities. Code generated in a few weeks into the project....AMAZING! http://forums.introversion.co.uk/introversion/viewtopic.php?t=586

4 - Using the same basic algoritrhms from street and river and building placement you can do interiors as well.
http://forums.introversion.co.uk/introversion/viewtopic.php?t=600

5 - Chicken and the egg, need a dbase for the buildings before you can define the rules to build them...DOOM FTW!
http://forums.introversion.co.uk/introversion/viewtopic.php?t=683

6 - The buildings and streets...
http://forums.introversion.co.uk/introversion/viewtopic.php?t=733

To turn a phrase...F. Me.

1.27 Features Vlog

Doc on the Vblog

Cool Thing of the Day

With the Unity II engine underway and our last mediocre success at lighting and weather we've been looking for an off the shelf solution a la SpeedTree for our sky. We have some pretty unique requirements for an MMO such as realism, vast zoneless land mass, time and season progression and oh yeah, you can fly through it! We'll I'll be daqmn4ed if this thing doesn't look HAWT.

Oli on the Vlog

1.26 Squad Auto Recruiting Vlog

YouTube - WWIIOL

Hot off the heels of my first video podcast (Rafter got a new camera natch) I got this link in my Google Alerts. Looks like Kbar and the boys have started a new YouTube group for WWIIOL Cool. Maybe we can get all those clips floating around up there. Reminds me I want to get the pre launch video interviews posted up along with WWIIOL in 60 Seconds which is always a hoot.

As for my ugly mug, look for it in the newsletter this week. w00t... er, NOT.

P.S. When did I turn into such a sour puss fat ass?

YouTube - WWIIOL

The Sky is Falling!

Just had a pretty interesting meeting. We've been aware for some time, since we introduced it actually, that the weather changed for the game rocked for the ground game and pretty much blew for plane guys. Lots of issues but the main issue is the loss of horizon when at altitude. We're gonna try some new stuff, largely changing colors but Killer thinks it will work pretty well as he's been playing with it for a couple weeks.

Speaking of planes, well and all vehicles, DOC made a good prod note this weekend covering the changes he's been up to on the vehicles. You should go have a look if that's your thing. I was most pleased about the new planes coming along so nicely. The VC pits may be a challenge as ANIMAL hasn't done a lot of planes but if things look to be coming together for 1.27 we may need to bump up the priority of a couple plane features to have a combo patch. I'd like to shoot for radar but that largely depends on how the rewrite of the pending ToE system gets done and how soon it gets into beta from dev. Hope Oli is stocked up on his espresso. He's gonna need it.

So hopefully we'll have some better fly boy sky for 1.26. If the color isn;t enough, I'm prepared to get the whole thing torn out again. Weather is a cool idea but we just can;t get where we need to with the limits of our first graphics engine. Unity II to the rescue on that front I hope.

10 Minutes to Success!

Bloo sent me a link to an article up on Gamasutra that goes through a 10 minute process to determine the market potential of a title you might be thinking about making. Let's run BE through it real quick shall we?



1.Is the Game Distinctive?
I think so, let's tun through the test to find out.

1.1 Does it stand out viscerally?
I have to go fifty fifty on this one to be honest. Certainly nothing beats the feels of being in a massive combat arena when all the boom boom boom is going on. It is heart pumping adrenaline stuff. And while the trees and foliage are very nice the overall game world looks a little too sterile. The content needs an upgrade to be up to modern standards and that has to start with an upgrade to the game engine. Good news, we're on that. Redoing all the content is still a big hurdle.

1.2 Does the gameplay stand out?
I have to say yes here. Though I still think that the experience needs to be more directed for many people to "get it", however, the openness that it does have is compelling in many ways. Some design work here that still needs to be fully realized.

1.3 Does it involve the player socially in a unique way?
Looking at our community and the deep love they hold for this title I have to say yes.

2. Can the Game Reach a Large Market?
Ahh, the money shot.

2.1 Is the idea behind the game easy to communicate?
Fight World War II in real time on a half scale map of Europe with infantry, tanks, planes and ships from Allied and Axis players in a full on PvP virtual battlefield. Check.

2.2 Is the game based on something the market already knows and loves?
Let's see, WW2 first person shooters, tank and plane sims, RTS games, TV shows, movies, action figures, models, and about a billion books that largely contradict one another. The greatest conflict of any generation. Ahh, yeah, check.

2.3 Is the target market large?
Personally I'd say HUGE.

That’s it. The more questions you answer “Yes” to, the easier your game will be to sell.
Huh. Guess I better get cracking on that content and engine upgrade and go get my ass a publisher. Check.

Gamasutra.com - The 10 Minutes Game Sales Potential Test