The games music site, Music4Games has published a new article by Dave Steinweidel, Audio Manager of Flagship Studios entitled “Building an Adaptive Music System for a Dynamically Generated Game”. Here’s a snippet:
Hellgate has a number of unique design elements that greatly affected how the music control system was built and hooked to the game. First is randomization—the game is completely randomized from top to bottom and, in a sense, we wanted music to follow this tradition. Second is that Hellgate’s fundamental client/server design limited our ability to use Level Zones, the Questing System, or AI as music controllers. We decided to work as best we could with the given design limitations and base our music control strictly on player actions.
It’s a fairly long, and technical article with all sorts of information you might be interested in if you’re a composer, or simply a music enthusiast, so be sure to check it out. The rest of the article can be read here.
A review of the Hellgate: London soundtrack by the Sonic Mayhem duo can also be read here, also at Music4Games.
Computer and Video Games website has just published up the full version of the interview with Bill Roper where he talks about the mistakes that FSS made with the game.
Bill Roper talks about things like taking on too many things at once, as well as a lack of testing.
“As for development issues,” continues Roper, “we simply tried to do too much with the game. Vista, DirectX 10, being both a single-player boxed product and a multiplayer online game, a simultaneous launch in seven languages across Europe, the US, and South East Asia, and creating our own fully-featured online destination on top of all that.
“We’ll take the blame for not getting enough testing done while working to meet our committed ship date. There were so many issues that came up just before launch that just compounded the things we were working on, right up until the game launched, that we didn’t get fixed. Or that we thought had been fixed, but came up again when we had tens of thousands of players online concurrently.”
Issues like items for level 70 characters being dropped by mobs, when the level cap is 50 - as if the loot’s taking the piss out of you - was one example of the maddening wrongness that riled players into such a frenzy they coined the scathing term ‘flagshipped’, and the hypercritical ‘fansite’ www.flagshipped.com.
Bill also talks of whether they were pushed into the release date.
“Yes and no,” claims Roper. “We made a commitment to ship the game on a certain date, and that decision was made jointly between us and our publishing partners. We wanted to stay true to that date because of all the marketing and sales work that had been put into a timed launch.
“We also thought we could get everything completed by that date. In a different situation, we could have said, ‘Let’s delay this until we get these last things hammered out.’ But that’s not as easy as people think when you don’t have the hundreds of millions behind you that a publisher’s development team does.”
Well I woke up to a pleasant surprise this morning. Got a PM from Sounder, who is one of Flagship Studios’ staff in charge of the audio! The PM linked me to an Amazon website that currently has the Hellgate London official soundtrack for sale. What’s more awesome, you can buy not just the CD, but the separate songs from it or even use promotional pepsi points in the US to grab them!
To add to the awesomeness of this post, this is my 200th news post for Hellgate Guru, so hooray! Thanks to Sounder for the news in helping me reach the target!
Personally owning the soundtrack, I’d say it’s very worth it, as the music in Hellgate is one of those things that many people enjoy about it.
Bogustus, Flagship Studios’ Director of Technology, has just posted up the most recent patch notes as well as their release date.
Patch 1.2 Notes
6am PDT March 17, 2008 - Shulgoth
6pm PDT Match 17, 2008 - Sydonai
Here is a snippet:
Hello everyone!
This patch is has some major skill changes, a few vital balance tweaks, some pesky bug fixes, and a highly-requested new feature.
First and foremost is the introduction of our in-game mail system. This is something that we know is of vital interest to our community, and is the foundation for our consignment / auction house system. Players can not only send and receive messages with anyone in the game, but they can also attach Palladium and items to their mail. This makes getting items from one character to another – even your own – much simpler and more convenient. And while you need to be in a Station to attach or receive items and Palladium, you can read your messages anywhere, anytime.
You can see the rest of the patch notes on our forums.
GameMeca has recently been reporting on a number of events in Korea which some of the Hellgate employees have attended (I think it’s Max and Erich there, but I could be wrong). There appear to be interviews with the employees, but these are in Korean so while links are provided below, there is no translation for them.
The thing that will get most of you excited though is a whole bunch of concept art pictures that have also surfaced on Game Meca from what appears to be the same event.
Our astute Hellgaters here on the forums have been noting that we planned to release Patch 1.2 onto the live servers early this week and have been politely asking about it. The update was initially delayed by the service outage experienced on Tuesday and a major bug which damaged your data files if you had installed the game’s patches in a certain order. When the service was restored and the bug was dealt with, a new hold reared its head, one that caused characters to lose their world map information (the M button map).
Test Center should see a new build tomorrow which fixes this but we will have to wait until Monday to release it. This is to make sure that the office is populated when a new build hits the live servers should an unforeseen evil lurking in the build surface and start crawling through our players’ monitors and being generally unpleasant towards them. By all accounts, however, this is the last hold before Patch 1.2 can be pushed to the live servers.
Would like to say a quick thanks to all our Hellgaters who are trying out the builds we put on Test Center and reporting the issues they find.
– Scapes
The folks at our Data Center performed some unscheduled maintenance this morning, and it caused Shulgoth, Test Center and our website to go down for a couple hours. We are sorry about this inconvenience – it caught us completely by surprise as well. Whenever possible we try to alert you about server downtime, but we had no way of predicting that this would happen.
Patch 1.2 is looking pretty good, but we are fixing some last-minute issues that prevent us from releasing it. (There is a problem in the current Patch 1.2 build that really messes up your data files if you install the game and install patches in a certain order.) I’m just as anxious as you are to see the e-mail, Marksman rebalance, the Desicator and the long list of bug fixes go out to the big servers. I’m hoping that Patch 1.2 will be ready to release on Wednesday or Thursday, but until we have these issues solved and tested we shouldn’t release the patch.
Today, Scapes, Hellgate: London’s Community Manager, revealed that Patch 1.2 will be installed on Shulgoth and Sydonai next week ! In case you did not know yet, Patch 1.2 is the biggest non-Chronicle patch since HGL was released, with huge changes for the Marksman, an ingame mailing system, new bosses, new Unique items, functional pets, dye kits with properties, and dozens of bug fixes and improvements. The full patch notes are available on our forums.
Just a quick update:
After two weeks on Test Center, Patch 1.2 is nearly ready for the live servers. There are a few holds which will push the launch to early next week.
The remaining issues include balancing the new boss found in the Deepest Wilds, the Desiccator (Dessy for short), integrating some language string adjustments, and other important bug fixes.
– Scapes
PlayHGL.com just got 50 more access codes to giveaway. 25 have been given to the people who asked for it previously, so they’ve got another 25 remaining.
If you play on the South East Asian server and would like a premium code, check out this thread.
Hellgate Guru was founded in mid-2005 and has ever since been one of the most popular fan sites and forums devoted to Hellgate: London, catering to a wide range of interests, as well as having a dedicated team of staff members who keep the website full of constant updates, news and generate activity and hype around the game. More
