Fan Faire iPhone Web App

I've been working on an iPhone Web App for our upcoming SOE Fan Faire in Las Vegas. The goal of the app is to give iPhone users an easy-to-access reference for all information they might need while attending Fan Faire.

The app will have the following information:
- Full schedule of all events and panels browsable by game.
- A map of Bally's convention center
- Twitter feed from our @soefanfaire twitter account for up-to-the minute news
- Extensive list of restaurants around Bally's and Paris hotels.
- Travel information for getting around Vegas

I threw together the basics of the web app within a couple of evenings of work. Now I'm working on the polish features that make it really useful.

Being able to filter the schedule by game is a cool feature and will help attendees find panels without scrolling through the entire list of events.

Originally the list of restaurants was going to be very basic but my wife encouraged me to go the extra step and provide more info about the restaurants. So each restaurant now has a detail page that shows their location, hours, type of cuisine, cost and description. Clicking the phone number will initiate dialing on your iPhone. There's even a button to take you to the restaurants website if you're interested in browsing their menu. (Thanks Tiffany for typing all that data in!)

The news section fetches the RSS feed from twitter and displays the last several entries in a list. If the twitter entry contains a URL, clicking the row will open the browser to the web page.

There are still some things I need to finish before I can call it done but its coming together nicely. If you'd like to see it while its in development, you can check it out at http://www.gregsplace.com/fanfaire. Keep in mind it will only work in the Safari browser because it makes heavy use of their iPhone extensions.

Let me know what you think!

Coachella

I was checking out the lineup for Coachella this weekend and thinking how cool it would be to go some year. Having no idea where it is and just assuming it was out east, I decided to look it up. Oh cool, its in Indio California. That must be up in Northern California. Nope. It's an hour and 45 minutes from my house! Damn, now I want to take a motorcycle ride out there and check it out.

I'm constantly reminded how much I love living out here.

EverQuest II Welcome Screen

Today we launched one of the features I've been working on over the past couple of weeks, the EQII Welcome screen. Already this feature was met with a little friction on the official forums and I can certainly understand why some players may not be interested in seeing this new window. Something that might not be apparent at first is that you can dismiss it by just hitting your escape key.

However, I wanted to point out some positive aspects of the window. I've been an EQII player for a lot longer than I've been an SOE employee and I think the welcome screen is a great addition to the game. Here are some reasons why I like it.

For awhile now, the server message of the day (MOTD) has started to lose a lot of its impact. The MOTD often contains information that some people aren't interested in reading. This leads to people ignoring it altogether and possibly missing something important. One of the biggest reasons we created the welcome screen was to give each area of the game that often has its own announcements, a specific place for those messages. By segregating the MOTD's like this, it should be easier for a player to glance at the one they like and ignore the rest. If you're in a guild, your guild's MOTD can also get lost in all the text that is written to your chat window when you log in.

I don't play much Legends of Norrath and haven't purchased anything in the Marketplace, but I still want to see what my guild is up to. I also want to be made aware of any other server-related messages like unscheduled downtime when I might be playing on the weekend. With the welcome screen, I can glance at those specific MOTDs and then hit escape when I'm done looking at them.

I also really like having the friends list on the welcome screen. For some reason I never really used the Community window in the past, possibly because there's nothing else on this window that interests me. However, when I log in, one of the first things I want to do is see who is online that I might be able to play with. So having my friends list visible on the welcome screen is really nice. Kindricke made a great suggestion on the forums about showing only your online friends. So I've made a change this morning so that the welcome screen will share the same setting as the Community window. So, to see only you online friends, just open the Community window (Y-key) and check the box to ignore offline friends. This setting will save between your play sessions.

Whether you like the Marketplace or not, sometimes there is an item that might be of interest to you. The recently created gender and name change potions were big hits. I'm sure many people who have never purchased a Marketplace item took advantage of this feature that people have been asking for. Similar to our character transfer service, we've talked about adding a name-change service for a long time. Now with the addition of the Marketplace, we were able to bring that feature into the game and not require you to use an external website. Surely everyone can see this as a big win. The marketplace item is much more reliable and less prone to failure than a completely separate process. So back to my original point. Even if you don't like the Marketplace, there might occasionally be an item that you would consider purchasing. Having the list of new items on the welcome screen makes it easy for you to see when we add a new item without opening the entire Marketplace window and scrolling through all the items that are already there.

The other main section of the welcome screen is the community box. Our community department publishes on average 1-3 articles a day on the website. For many players, these articles provide valuable information about upcoming features, events and more. The welcome screen grabs the RSS feed for these articles and displays the titles right on the page. So now you don't have to open a browser to keep up with these articles. If you see an article that looks interesting, you can click the link and read it right from within the game.

So to wrap up this rather long blog post, the welcome screen is more about convenience and getting the information that's important to you quickly and easily. Hopefully like me, you'll find this feature helpful and a nice addition to the game.

--- Optional Reading ---

As a side note, our original design idea for the welcome screen included an interface similar to iGoogle where you could move the widgets around and even decide which widgets were visible and which were hidden. We eventually opted for taking a simpler approach so the feature wouldn't take as long to implement. At some point in the future we might still look into a more customizable interface. For now, it'll be interesting to see what our modding community comes up with.

EQII Shadow Maps

If you log into the Test server you can see an early implementation of shadow maps for EQII. I'm really excited about this feature going in and its something we've been wanting for awhile. Ryan Favale has done an excellent job adding this new shadow system to EQII. Now you'll have a choice between shadow volumes (CPU) and shadow maps (GPU). There will certainly be situations depending on your computer hardware and the zone you're in where one might be faster than the other and vise versa. But this option will at least let you choose the shadow system that works best overall for your system.

There are some inherent differences between the two shadow technologies and if you're interested to read more about how they work, there is some decent information on Wikipedia. We are using something similar to the cascaded shadow map system described below.

Shadow Maps (GPU)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_mapping

Shadow Volumes (CPU)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_volume

If you get a chance to try these out on the Test Server, please give us your feedback in the following thread. Ryan is still tweaking for performance and quality as well as fixing bugs as he's made aware of them. So the more feedback we get, the better!

http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/posts/list.m?topic_id=444895

EQII Update

Well, its been quite awhile since I've blogged about work. It seems that since November I've been working only on big projects that I can't talk about until they are released. Then, once they are out there, they aren't near as exciting to talk about. :)

Lately the team has really been focusing on performance optimizations to try to combat lag and improve overall performance both on the client and server. Josh (Autenil) has been making some great improvements to the server which should hopefully go out in the next week or so. Ryan Favale, our graphics guru, has been working on some really amazing things for the client but unfortunately I can't talk specifics. I was given the task to try to improve how our servers provision hardware for zones. Without going into too much detail, our zones are dynamically created when a player needs them and our server software determines which piece of hardware is best suited for the zone based on memory usage and CPU activity. This is working as it should, but I was able to make some optimizations that should improve this process a bit. Hopefully these changes will go out today or Tuesday and if all goes well we will see some improvement to the lag spikes.

Lately I've also been able to focus some time on improving the user-interface and provide more capabilities to the modding community. The group window was modified to include the pet health bar. The raid window was modified to include an advanced mode that will show detrimental effects for the entire raid. Hopefully these changes will help the healers out there. :)

One of the big changes that I made to the user interface will go out with GU52 and if all goes well, players won't even notice the difference. Currently, all of your UI Settings are stored in INI files in a binary format. Binary is the most efficient when it comes to space, but it can be a real pain to work with. I've recently modified the client to store the settings in XML format. The advantage from a code-standpoint is that its now much easier for us to add and modify the values that we store without breaking older versions of the file. Previously every change had to have a version number associated with it and the code had to be prepared for loading a file of any previous version number so we could properly deserialize the binary information. Now with the XML format, its much simpler. The big advantage for players is they can now easily see what information is stored there and manually tweak this file if they wish to. You can easily do things like remove pesky chat channels or modify the channel number that is associated with them. This change also paves the way for giving modders the ability to store custom data in the settings file for their UI mods.

In addition to these changes I've been quite busy with random bug fixes and improvements to the game. I'm also working on another "big" project that isn't due for release until GU53, so again, I'm being a tease and can't really talk about it. :) EQII has some of the richest lore in any MMO out there and one the most creative groups of players I've seen. I think it will be a very fun addition to the game.

Happy Birthday EverQuest II

Today is EQII's 4th birthday. I started playing EQII 4 years ago today when myself and several of my guild-mates from EQ created characters on Crushbone. Four years ago I was working as software developer at a consulting company in Memphis Tennessee. I'm really lucky to have been part of the EQII development team for the past 2 years and I look forward to many more years in the industry.

Not much to report...

Things have been rather quiet since the introduction of guild halls and I haven't had much to report.

I haven't had any huge tasks related to the expansion since my main focus had been the guild halls for past several months. However, I have been busy working on two other features that you should see in the next month or two. Unfortunately neither of them have been announced yet, so there isn't much I can say about them. One of the features is a new UI element that will give you insight into information that previously has remained somewhat of a mystery. I think everyone will really like this feature and I'm looking forward to it going live myself.

Other than that I've been working on the occasional bug fix or random new feature. Today I added a feature that many people have requested for houses and guild halls. This feature will allow anyone with Trustee access to return a No-Trade house item to it's owner through the mail system. I also added the item level to the Supply Depot window so you can sort the items by tier/level.

The Persona window was also expanded to include quite a bit more statistic data about your character. Some of these new stats are related to the expansion like Critical Mitigation but many of them are existing stats like Spell Cast/Recovery/Reuse percent.

That's about all for now. I'll try to post again as soon as I have more to add. Thanks for reading!

It's all relative.

I feel pretty lucky to have a cool job as a game programmer. However, today I get to watch the Blue Angels making passes over our office as they perform for the Miramar Air Show. When I imagine what kind of view the pilots must have from their cockpits looking out over San Diego and the ocean I think now THAT is a cool job!

Is 34 too old to start flying jets? :)

Guild halls announced at Fan Faire

We just finished the guild hall panel here at Fan Faire and received an extremely positive response. I'm really excited about them and very happy that we're able to talk about them now. If you missed the panel, don't worry there will be lots of information circulating about them now.

Musings

I think its safe to say that at some point in everyone's life they look back at the past and wonder how they got along without things like the internet, cell phones and computers. I know I've even felt sorry, for lack of a better expression, for generations of the past that didn't have what we have today. I have no doubt that at some point in the distant future I'll look back at this exact time and wonder how I ever got along without "device x" or "feature y". But at this point in my life, everything seems wonderful and I couldn't be happier with where I am and where life might take me. It's a great time to be alive.

I'm an iGeek

I've never been a huge fan of Apple products other than the iPod. I'm pretty much a PC and Windows guy. Although I have to give it to them when it comes to UI and usability, they do a great job.

With the introduction of the iPhone 3G, I considered moving from T-Mobile to AT&T. I've had cell service with T-Mobile for 11 years, but it was time for a change. I used to carry a T-Mobile PDA when they first came out, but they were pretty big and bulky, so I went back to using a normal cell phone. Once again, I want to be able to get emails on my cell phone, and with Apple now supporting Exchange servers, I gave the iPhone a hard look.

Last week we moved our phone service to AT&T and I ordered white 16gb iPhone from the AT&T store. It arrived yesterday, so while I was waiting for repair people to finish some repairs on the house, I ran out to the store and picked it up.

The iPhone is much, much cooler than I thought it would be. Not only does it do all the cool and nifty things that I was expecting, but I've found so many other great apps and utilities. I'm really impressed with this and it definitely lives up to all the hype.

I had reservations about how easy it would be to use with the touch screen. I mean, the thing really only has 1 button on it. I'm so used to right-clicking, left-clicking, holding shift while clicking, ctrl-alt-clicking. I was very impressed with how easy it is to navigate just using the screen and from my experience so far, the keyboard isn't near as hard to use as some people make it out to be.

Good job Apple! Now I just have to come up with a good way to integrate EQII into the iPhone.

Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.

As of 8:20am CST this morning I became a proud Godfather.

Our close friends back home gave birth to Chloe Isabella Sutton. These friends mean so much to me and I'm really excited to be a part of this child's life.

Welcome to the world baby Bella! I shall have you an EQII account as soon as you can hold a mouse.

EQII In-Game Help System

One of the changes rolling out with GU47 is an overhaul of the in-game help system. This was one of those pet-projects that I wanted to do, but wasn't on the schedule so most of the work was done outside of my workday.

The help window was modified to use our integrated Mozilla browser and all of the existing help files were converted to HTML. I went through all of the help files and updated any content that was out-of-date to the best of my knowledge. This update also includes the new integrated voice chat, so a new section was added to cover this feature.

One of the other things I've wanted to do for awhile is add context-sensitive help buttons to most of the game windows. So, all of the major UI windows now have a help button in the upper-right corner next to the "close" and "window settings" buttons. This button opens the help window and takes you directly to the topic related to that window.

The other challenge was that every game window didn't already have a help topic that specifically addressed how to use that window. Rather than having some windows link to existing topics and others link to new topics, I created a whole new section under "User Interface" called "Game Windows". This topic is like an index to every window in the game that has context-sensitive help. Where it made sense, I moved existing help content related to game windows to these new topics.

The new HTML-based help looks a lot better than the old text help, and now we have the ability to include images, screen-shots, etc. Originally I was going to try to add more visual elements to the help topics, but just reading and updated all the existing help text took a lot more time than I expected. For now, I think this is a great change to the help system, it looks good and the content is now up-to-date. With the new context-sensitive help buttons on the windows, it should be even easier to get help on specific features. In the future I still hope to go back and make the help topics even more visually appealing.

Logitech G15 on sale at Buy.com

I've always been a fan of Logitech products and love their G15 keyboard.

My wife pointed out that Buy.com has the G15 on sale right now for a great price. If you don't have one yet, you should pick one up. And of course, EQII has full support for the LCD display. :)

http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=205510529&dcaid=15970