In late June, one ‘kinix’ popped up on the jME forum, making the community aware of an amazing looking game called Urban Galaxy.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=JfG7n7eSPYI
No doubt this is one of the most impressive jME2 projects yet. I decided to get in touch for an interview, and we decided it would be best to do this by e-mail so that our questions would be answered by the Urban Galaxy team as a whole. Get comfortable in your seat and enjoy these elaborate answers!
What does the Urban Galaxy pitch sound like these days?
Urban Galaxy (UG) is our first effort in the MMO gaming field. Inspired from science fiction movies such as the “Blade Runner” and the “Fifth Element”, we tried to create a unique world setting, never seen before in the genre: Space-like MMORPG in an Urban environment, with fast paced action battles, car chases and a strong storyline to glue them all. Our goal is to try to implement all the “standard” MMO features (Ship advancement, reputation, PvP, PvE, raids, guilds, crafting, auction) and add some “cool” features such as random or player-driven events that globally affect the gaming world. For example a player completes a quest that requires robbing a bank. This action “triggers” an event that makes the police appear in the area trying to interrogate and chase down players with criminal record that happen to be in the area of the incident.
Your website does not reveal any details about release date, pricing or means of publishing. Does that mean all of the above is ‘to be decided?’
We are working towards a Q1 2011 release date, with a closed and open beta phases a few months before that, hopefully around Christmas. This is our current schedule but it is opt to change as the development progresses. Regarding pricing, it is yet to be decided, but we are leaning towards the F2P/Microtransactions or the pay-once “Guild Wars” model. We are also planning to self-publish the game through our web site but the final decisions will be made when we are close to beta.
In reply to a jME forum poster, you said your team consists of only 3 people. 3 people and you have a polished MMORPG put together! How did you successfully scope for such a feat?
Our team consists of a very strong core, with distinctive roles and responsibilities: a programmer guy (working on server/client code and tools), an art guy (responsible for concept art, 3d modeling/texturing and web site development) and a story/quest guy. We are very close friends in real life with many years of professional experience in game development and although we are currently split apart into different physical locations, we have created a strong development framework that allows us to work remotely and collaborate through Internet.
Did the idea of making an MMO come before the Urban Galaxy (space-) concept?
We were initially motivated towards a “browser based strategy multiplayer game” but as soon as ideas started to pour in, the game was “transformed” into an MMO. Given the development constraints and the limited resources of a small team, we came up with the Urban Galaxy idea, inspired from film-noire detective stories taking place in a futuristic city, an idea that is not over-used (if used at all) in existing MMORPG games.
What libraries, free or otherwise, does Urban Galaxy use?
The Urban Galaxy client is written entirely in JMonkeyEngine 2.0 and Netbeans. On top of JME we have written a custom GUI tailored to the game, since the existing solutions available were not good enough for our purpose. From the JME library we are using a subset of the features available, such as the scene graph API, the material system, the .obj loader, the particle system, text drawing and the sound API. The server is written in pure Java, PHP and MySQL.
Could you go into some detail about your art pipeline?
After deciding the generic look and feel of the environment and the vehicles, we lay down and split the city into neighborhoods of different themes and styles. Each theme set consists of a list of assets (ships, buildings, shops, ads, fillers etc). After a few visual and performance tests we come up with the modeling and texturing specifications in order to keep the polygon and texture count budget as low as possible for faster downloading and higher 3D framerate. Theme sets are built using diffuse and emission textures that are re-used into multiple meshes (building blocks) using “smart” texture mapping. Those building blocks are combined together in various ways during level editing. Ships are more straightforward to develop and we are using uv mirroring to add extra detail without sacrificing extra texture space. Meshes are exported into the .obj format and each asset is described into our own XML format which contains material, mesh, animation and gameplay information.
What in-house tool suits have you made or acquired to speed up your development?
Our assets, the database and the testing environment are stored in a remote server that allows us to collaborate remotely. We have a very powerful level editor written in JME and our own game API, that runs through the browser window as an applet and allows remote level editing directly on the server (see attached image). We are also interfacing with our database through a set of admin pages (PHP) to easily add new items, ships, quests etc and to help us balance the game as fast as possible. Our development cycle is “truly” remote and cross-platform oriented and we are always kept synced in a matter of seconds.
Best and worst parts of jMonkeyEngine 2.0?
Best parts:
- Very clean and solid API
- Strong community
- Friendly license
- True cross platform solution
- The best solution for rapid development of browser based 3D
- Contains all the basic engine features someone would need out of the box
- The HTTP loading of textures and meshes is sweet
Worst parts:
- The wiki and doc pages are incomplete or out of date
- Lack of GUI in the core system
- Lack of support on previous versions from the devs (e.g. we had to patch the sound API for OpenAL to work with the latest LWJGL using a fix mentioned in the forum).
- A few work arounds needed to make JME2.0 work correctly without using the multithreaded Task Manager.
- The “leaking” of unused textures (which is fixed in JME3.0) is an issue.
Besides from the just mentioned, what would you like to see in a next-generation Java engine like jMonkeyEngine 3.0?
JME3.0 seems to be heading towards a more complete solution, targeting next-gen hardware, which is good. Each game has its own requirements that cannot always be addressed in a “global” wish list. For Urban Galaxy for example, the features of JME2.0 are more than enough. Usually top-notch engines have some kind of “scripting” support for AI and/or game code. Although not required, since java could be used as a scripting language itself, it could possibly be a plus.
Lastly, any chance of some beta-key give-aways to the jMonkeyEngine community? (Possibly arranged by means of contest)
I guess this is something that could be arranged!
Thanks for reading!
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