Project Entropia Interview 2
Original Interview[edit]
Project Entropia Interview #2
September 12, 2000
Long ago, the human race embarked upon a new era of wide-ranging interstellar exploration and colonization. For the last century, robotic space vessels called Odysseus Probes have been sent far across the galaxy to find and prepare suitable planets by creating outposts and supply facilities. In the depths of space, far beyond the Colonial Frontier, one such Probe discovered the planet Calypso and built up a vast robot community to await the arrival of the first human settlers. After they landed, however, the robots refused to give up control as they were supposed to, and the ensuing Robot Revolt nearly wiped out all the pioneers. Now, the colonists face a new robotic threat, mutant humans and the world's native creatures as they struggle to build their future.
Jonric: The first question is pretty straightforward. In your own words, how would you summarize Project Entropia?
Patric Sundström: I see Project Entropia as more than just a new online game. Even if the actual playing is a large part of it, Project Entropia will offer much more. We offer everyone the possibility to start a new life in a future world and to be present during the construction of a civilisation in a four-dimensional world without any borders. When I say four dimensions, people often wonder what I mean; after all, there are only three. In Project Entropia however, we have included a time axis as the fourth dimension, one that follows the total development of Project Entropia.
As a player of Project Entropia you will find a world in constant development, a world continuously growing in player numbers as well as area, a dynamic world that will allow players themselves to discover new land areas.
Jonric: Cool. Please introduce MindArk. When and how did the company get started? How many people are working on the game, and who are the core team members? What backgrounds do you have making games?
Patric Sundström: MindArk has existed since spring 1999. The production of Project Entropia however, has been going on for about three and a half years. MindArk is located in Gothenburg, Sweden, and currently employs 26 people in the development of Project Entropia. I couldn´t name any core members directly as I see Project Entropia as a well chosen group of people working together to reach the same goal, that being the construction of the world's best virtual world, Project Entropia. Project Entropia is the first game developed by MindArk. Several of the people at MindArk however, have worked in game development before.
Jonric: Please describe the game universe. Was its design affected in any significant ways by other persistent online worlds?
Patric Sundström: When we started working on Project Entropia, we sat down together to consider what we didn't like about other online games. One of these problems was that all of the servers could not take very many players. The fact that you must stay at the same server you began your character with and stay there. We responded to this by taking the decision that all players would be able to live in the same virtual world. This doesn't mean that Calypso will be the only planet, in the future it may well be possible that new worlds would be discovered.
Jonric: Given that there will only be one gameworld, what is your target player capacity? Will the game world be zoned, and will there be any situations that require load times?
Patrik Holmsten: A fundamental point with Project Entropia is that everybody should be able to communicate with each other. Thus, we will definitely not have shards. Our target player capacity is "unlimited". As the number of players grows, we will scale up the server farm while expanding the geographical extent of the game world. The world is seamless, so you can walk across a stretch of land or through buildings with only "glitches" for loading. There are enclosed "dungeons" that are not reached seamlessly. If you teleport to a place on the surface or in a dungeon, there is some load time.
Jonric: How large will the game universe be? Will there be forms of travel aside from just walking and running; for example, will there be portals, transporters, ground vehicles, etc?
Patric Sundström: Our goal is to have more than one million players online at the same time. As to how large the world will be in square meters, that is difficult to say now. The world will, however, be dynamic, meaning that new areas will be added as the game progresses. The players will be involved closely in this process. The players themselves will be able to buy new platforms in different sizes, which they can then place permanently on the map.
When it comes to transport, it will of course be possible to walk over the entire world. This would take too long on a world the size of Calypso, as not many would have the stamina to just walk for five to ten hours to cross from one side to the other. There will be transport - portals, ground and air vehicles.
Jonric: What is the backstory leading up to the start of the game? And what is the storyline within the game itself?
Sundström: We have a complete backround story on the Project Entropia website. It would be far too long to go into here, but a summary would be like this. Mankind has sent out probes into space to find new planets to colonize. After a few years of searching, a planet called Calypso was found and deemed suitable for Man. The probe was designed to prepare the planet for human colonisation, which meant it started to build an infrastructure, and began terra forming the planet to make it as adaptable as possible. When the probe had completed this mission, it was programmed to search for a new planet and begin the same process. When the first people would arrive on Calypso, it would be ready for them. They even discover new animals and plants, which are not always so friendly to humans.After the probe had done its job on Calypso, it continued to a planet it found called Akbal-Cimi, where it began to build a robot community. For some reason something went wrong and these robots rebelled against their human creators. These robots developed a mission to destroy Mankind, and the nearest place to do that was Calypso.
This is the world that will be met when you come to Calypso. A new planet that has almost everything you could wish for. Spectacular nature. Interesting cities. Oceans, mountains, etc. Everything can be experienced here from the concrete jungle to the open wilderness.
Jonric: Please describe the player characters. What starting choices will players have in regard to customizing things like abilities, race, class, sex, clothing, physical features et al?
Patric Sundström: You will only be able to play as a human, but you will be allowed to decide your appearance to a degree. Skin color, hair and eye color as well as sex and other aspects will be available for the player to decide. There will be opportunities to alter your appearance during the game with the help of surgery; lets call it a kind of character redefinition.
Jonric: How will the character development system work? Will all skills and abilities be available to a given character, or will there be some that are exclusive to particular classes or professions?
Patric Sundström: Project Entropia is skill based. You must accumulate knowledge. This means you must have a complete knowledge and that this knowledge needs to be renewed to be able to advance through the levels of skill. We will not be using classes or trades in this area, which means that it is possible for everybody to learn everything. Just like reality. The players themselves can decide what skills they want to train depending on what they want to do.
Jonric: Will weapons play a major role in Project Entropia? What are you willing to reveal about them at this time?Patric Sundström: Weapons will play an important role if you want to live out in the wilderness. You would need something to defend yourself if you came across some monster, robot or mutant. There will be different types of weapons, like, traditional close combat weapons, laser, shock and plasma weapons as well as electric and projectile versions. Then there will be a number of different weapons of each sort. There will also be a couple of not some common weapons as well as even a few totally unique weapons on Calypso. Details about weapons will be posted on the Project Entropia website this autumn.
Weapons are not essential for playing Project Entropia as certain players may decide to never leave the cities and choose to develop their characters in the weapon free cities.
Jonric: Okay, then can you talk a bit about other types of items such as ammunition and armor? And what about money or some form of currency?
Patric Sundström: Concerning the ammunition for the weapons, there will also be variations. Certain weapons will be able to take different types of ammunition according to different needs and situations. The target is the deciding factor.
Armour is strongly recommended when entering combat. Humans are quite vulnerable when compared to the hardened steel of a robot. Armour of all sorts from simple devices to very heavy equipment will be available.
Players will discover that there are loads of other elements to Project Entropia. Certain things may not have any direct use but could make nice decorations or maybe a present to somebody Other things will have a direct impact on your game such as the training of skills and the development of MindForce.
There will be a currency. This is part of our economy system, and important. We want to give the user a possibility to earn and spend money on making or buying, and to gain and lose money. The currency in Project Entropia will be convertible to major real world currencies, so that money can be entered from the real world, or withdrawn to the real world.
Jonric: Please tell us about the monsters and opponents in your game. Will there be many different types, and what can you tell us about some of them?
Patric Sundström: In Project Entropia there will be three types of monsters or opponents. For one, there will be robots from the planet Akbal-Cimi - robots bent on taking over Calypso and ridding it of its human population. To achieve this, they try to build bases on Calypso, which the humans must destroy. There will be different types of robots on Calypso and new ones being developed back on Akbal-Cimi.
There will also be four to five different types of mutants. They have varying strengths and characteristics according to their sort. Some are small helpless creatures that will help you just for not killing them, while others will be so dangerous as to be avoided until you're really sure you can deal with them.
Calypso even has a wide variety of wildlife that have lived there a long time before humans arrived. There is still a lot to discover in this area and new discoveries are made all the time. There are examples like the Gazonk, a small harmless animal, or the Katang, a large four-legged monster that will hunt anything that moves and has an enormous appetite for meat. Then there is the Molisk, a comparatively safe stone-eating creature. These are just some of the animals that can be met on Calypso.
Jonric: Since it's an issue related to specific opponents, do you have plans to address the practice of camping?
Anders Berg: The main reason why people camp is to be able to find out where creatures respawn. This can be easily avoided by allowing a respawn engine to analyse the area. If there were no players in the area, we would find it unnecessary to send a load of creatures there that nobody is going to meet. If there are a number of players in an area, the engine will respawn a creature depending on the skill and number of players. On the other hand, the engine will not continue to send in more creatures if other players were to arrive. This would lead to certain areas becoming overpopulated and others becoming under populated of both players and creatures. The respawn engine's objective will simply be to find a balance between action for the players as well as avoiding overpopulation of an area.
Jonric: What will happen when your character dies? Will you suffer any penalties such as loss of items or decreased experience points?
Patric Sundström: When you die, it will not affect your character. You can, however, lose the things that you were carrying with you. To avoid this happening, you can take out certain insurance in the city. There will be different types that cover weapons and equipment available there. You may also choose to sign a full insurance. The prices will be just like real life, depending on how much you want to be insured for.
Jonric: What thought have you given to handling disruptive behaviors such as harassment?
Anders Berg: You cannot decide that people will be friendly to each other. A player may decide that his character is nasty and therefore act nastily to the other players. There is not a lot we can do about this when it is a role playing game. When a player begins to harass others for whatever reasons, it will be considered as in real life as a crime.
And crime will not be tolerated. Project Entropia will contain a lot of rules like the law in the real world. Harassment, forbidden in the real world, is forbidden also on Calypso. There will be different zones; in some zones the use of weapons will not be allowed. This is like in the real world. In areas already civilized, the laws of society govern; in not yet civilized areas, weapons may be used.
Jonric: Please describe the major features of your game engine, both on the server side and the client. Will it allow high character and environmental detail?
Patric Sundström: The real workhorse of the engine is the server. It is designed to scale really well with growing numbers of players, items, NPCs, events and playable area. Because of the economy aspects of Project Entropia, the security of the databases and integrity of the users are vital. For those who are hoping, unsolicited duplication of objects will not be possible.
As for the client, we will be using NDL's 3D engine, NetImmerse, which allows the so-called continuous level of detail that reduces the number of poly counts depending on the distance from the camera, the number of objects on the screen as well as the client computers capacity. This gives us the opportunity to make characters with high poly counts. A character can have a poly count of between two and three thousand with full equipment and fully zoomed in. The reason we have made such an effort with the characters is because we know this is a deciding factor in role playing games and a unique presentation does a lot for the overall reception of the game. What is the reason in giving a character twelve different attributes when it's just going to look like everybody else anyway?
Jonric: What sound format are you using? Will you support 3D sound? Are you planning on or considering voice communication?
Patrik Holmsten: Sound will definitely play an important part, in more ways than one. First, sound is a very important component when creating the atmosphere and immersion for the player. The sound system uses 3D positioning and effects. Second, our engine supports "hearing" for NPCs, which means that they can respond to sounds your character makes. As for music, you can expect it where it adds to the atmosphere; eg. in a bar, but not as muzak (!) when adventuring in the forest.
We are currently evaluating voice technologies for speech synthesis, speech recognition and voice tunnelling. Due to our modular engine design, neither is very difficult to include. We are not sure yet whether the technologies are mature enough to heighten the user experience in proportion to the effort and resources involved.
Jonric: When did the idea for Project Entropia first arise, and when did you actually begin work on it? What is the current status of development?
Patric Sundström: The idea to create a massive multi-user game was born in 1995. The technology was not available at that time to achieve this practically without building a MUD. The vision has always been to create a real 3D game.
Production began about three and a half years ago. It began with a little team that started sketching ideas. More people gradually joined the project, and as I mentioned, there are now twenty-six people working at MindArk.
We know today that Project Entropia works and are working to fill this world with interesting things.
Jonric: Before we end, please tell us and our readers a bit more about your plan not to charge for the game.
Patric Sundström: Access to Project Entropia will be free, downloaded over the Internet or as freely distributed CDs via magazines, journals and through game-sites. In Project Entropia, we will have a completely developed economic system that will allow players themselves to construct things, create shops to buy and sell different products or possessions. To provide this service we will take a percentage commission. About the same amount that credit card companies take to avail of their services.
Jonric: That certainly seems to be a very innovative approach tied to an interesting and ambitious game. Along with thousands of other gamers, we'll look forward to learning more over the coming months as Project Entropia moves forward. For now, our thanks to Patric Sundström and friends for giving us their time and all this information, especially during an extremely busy period.
Richard Aihoshi - "Jonric"
12 September 2000; RPG Vault
Links, references, contributors, categories[edit]
- Discussion thread: http://www.entropiaplanets.com/threads/very-old-interview-with-mindark.8503/
Contributors:
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