Interviews:SG1-Radio Interviews lead World Builder Josh Kurtz

From Stargate Worlds Wiki (SGW)

Interview mp3 Transcript – by Khabarach

<Introduction>

DJTenchi: Josh, what is your role at Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment?

Josh: I'm the lead world builder, I head up the world building team that constructs all of the enviornments.

DJTenchi: Could you walk us through an average workday at CME.

Josh: Well an average workday for me..I usually come into the office, set up my email, check to see what i've got. I've usually got a list of things starting off in the day that I need to take a look at. The first thing I do is to grab a pad of paper and write down a list of everything that I think i'm going to need to work on over the course of the day. I then keep track of what information I need to get from other people and what information I need to get to other people. Things that are higher priority I work on first and then move my way down the list.

Generally the rest of the day is filled with various meetings to get things moving forward, making sure people have what they need from me and my team, and overseeing my team, what they are constructing, and what they have going.

DJTenchi: How did you come by your job at CME?

Josh: I used to work with Stu Rose who was a senior artist at Blizzard while I worked there. We knew eachother and were friends, and Stu was the original art director on the Stargate Worlds project. He brought me in to talk to people, and I met everyone over here and the fit was really good.

DJTenchi: So what were you doing before CME?

Josh: Well directly before CME I was working with a company called Rainbow Studios here in Phoenix. I was working there as a systems designer on a project that they didn't announce, and ended up cancelling after I left.

DJTenchi: What hardware do you use in your work, and are there any specific tools that you enjoy the most?

Josh: Well the hardware we use is, i've a pretty beefy PC, its a quad-core, fairly large amount of harddrive space to carry all of the maps and assets we've got going on. We've use series of servers and programs to keep all of our stuff on the servers in case something happens to the local machines and so that we can keep revisions of everything and go back to them if neccessary.

The software that we use is as we've announced, we are using the Unreal 3 toolset and we are using the Bigworld backend, and they each have their charms.

DJTenchi: You are literally using the whole server core from the Bigworlds game engine and literally slapping a new client based on the Unreal engine aren't you?

Josh: I believe so. The best answer you can get for that question is from one of our engineering team or one of our programmers because those guys work with that stuff on a daily basis and what they've done is really impressive. The simple answer is yes, the more complex one is I don't work with it myself so I don't know exactly what the details are.

DJTenchi: What part of level editing do you enjoy the most?

Josh: I really enjoy taking an emotional experience for a player, be it a story or a vista or something that will evoke an emotional response in a player when he sees it, and creating that in a three dimentional enviornment space. Knowing the player is going to come over that rise, and see that valley and that he is going to have that reaction, that is what I love doing. Creating that for the players.

DJTenchi: With me its always using the engine to trigger something, while with you its trying to create an emotional response.

Josh: Well I have to handle both of those things, I have to understand how to use the engine to get the response I want. So i'm kind of doing the same thing its just my goal is slightly different.

DJTenchi: What are the benefits of using the Unreal engine?

Josh: Oh there's a lot, its very pretty. It handles a lot of very artistic things in very pretty ways that makes it very shiny. There's some stuff that it does behind the scenes thats pretty decent too, things that we would have had to assign an engineering team to work on for months to get to happen, so those are really the big benefits on it.

DJTenchi: Can you compare the Unreal technology with the software used for World Of Warcraft.

Josh: They are very similar in many ways, the main difference of course being the engine for WoW was written 2 or 3 years ago, well actually it was written longer ago than that, but the time between when each one was written and the expected systems that would be availabe when each one is supposed to hit the stores, that is what I would say is the biggest difference.

DJTenchi: WoWs design is that of a closed MMO. Its not designed to be built upon or changed by a player, while what has been speculated on in many developer interviewers is that players will be able to mold the terrain in certain ways. Whats the difference been working with the two different perspectives?

Josh: Well when it comes right down to it the end goal is the same. What you are trying to do is build an enviornment where players can go into and really play the way they want to play. Some players want to go into an MMO and they just want to go kill things. Some players want to go into an MMO and kill the people who just want to kill things. Some people enjoy just sitting in a corner somewhere and chatting away or sitting at the auction house buying and selling. Theres so many different ways that people like playing these different games that when you build the enviornment you need to be aware of what the player is going to want to do, and you need to build the enviornment to support what they are going to want to do.

So, anything that our systems team decides that we want to let players do, on the enviornment team, we need to build that into our playspaces. And really whatever MMO you are making, thats something you need to accomplish.

DJTenchi: What would you say your playstyle would be?

Josh: I love being able to jump in when I have free time available to me and accomplish something. Whether that accomplishment is financial in the game or finishing quests or killing a few things, I want to be able to take an hour of time that I have available to me and jump in and do something. Really thats whats most important to me.

DJTenchi: Who conjured up the idea of dancing Asgard?

Josh: I actually don't know, I don't know where that originated.

DJTenchi: In the Stargate universe the Asgard are naked.

Josh: Pretty much, yeah if you watch the show the Asgard aren't wearing any clothes in the show.

DJTenchi: I really don't want to see them dance.

Josh: <laughs>

DJTenchi: How do you plan on handling boundaries on your world maps?

Josh: Theres actually a lot of ways to handle boundaries. First of all you have to determine what your boundaries are and why you have them. Different kinds of MMOs have different kinds of boundaries, you mentioned WoW a couple of times and if you look at WoW the boundaries tend to be oceans. Thats because its a very large worldspace.

We've got a number of ways that we are planning on handling boundaries, we've had to come up with a list of really good ones because instead of one world we wanted to do lots of worlds that you could go to. We couldn't just say the oceans are your boundaries, we had to come up with something else so we are using quite a few different methods to hem you into the playspace that we have created for you and the experience that we hope the players will enjoy in that playspace.

DJTenchi: One of the methods the CryTek engine were going to use to stop people getting away from the main islands and such in Farcry was literally as shark that randomly came along and swallowed you. Will you be using any interesting methods like that?

Josh: We do have quite a few interesting methods in mind, but I can't say a giant shark that comes up and eats you is one of them. We don't want to just outright kill the players for wandering too far away from where we want them to be, we want to give them a little more warning than having a shark swim up and chomp them.

DJTenchi: Oh so you could do something like the developers of Star Wars Galaxies and teleport random protesters into space..

Josh: I really hope we don't do anything like that. More like, once again back to WoW, when people swim too far in the ocean they get a fatigue bar and the fatigue bar tells them they have gone too far. Something like that that gives people an idea that they are headed in a direction that they really don't want to be going in and should head back to the playspace. Thats just one idea in a whole list of things we are planning on doing.

DJTenchi: Does the stargate as the method of travel make your job simpler or more difficult and why.

Josh: Yes, it does both actually. On one end its a perfect mechanism for transfering someone between maps or into an instance or out of an instance from one location to another very quickly which is great. But it has a lot of interesting side effects that can make using it very challenging. We've had to come up with a lot of design answers to solve that. One of those being that if you have multiple different factions coming to a world, how do you do that when there is only one stargate per world? Thats an idea of the kind of problems we've run into.

DJTenchi: Thats in my opinion where ships come in.

Josh: Thats is a good answer. Theres lots of things in the stargate universe that you can use for that kind of stuff, theres the Asgard teleporters, theres the ring transporters that the Goa'uld use, theres the ships, Prometheus, Asgard ships, Goa'uld ships, all kind of things like that that provide us answers to that problem.

DJTenchi: Will NPCs give a dynamic feeling, moving around and interacting with other NPCs and so on?

Josh: Thats the goal we're working towards. I don't want to go into too much detail on that at this point. First of all i'd like to save it for any future interviews, and I really want to see what we can do before I talk about it.

But our goal is to get to the point where the NPCs feel like they're at least alive or they are trying to accomplish something in the world or there is something to them other than i'm standing in this world.

DJTenchi: I do like it when roleplaying games used NPCs that actually had daily routines, but of course thats not as feasible on an MMO because that requires lots of runtime. Technology is growing of course so hopefully we'll be able to get more dynamic NPCs in the MMOs to come or even Stargate Worlds.

Josh: Well its not just about the technology its also about the amount of time it takes to make an NPC to do something interesting like that. If you have the right set of tools and the right kind of person doing it, they can set up a nice scripted event where an NPC does something or goes about a routine in half an hour or 45 minutes, but if you consider some of these MMOs have upwards of 90,000 NPCs that suddenly turns into a whole lot of time.

DJTenchi: A good interesting feature for me in the game would be the kawoosh which fully worked. I would like to be able to see an idiot approach the stargate, a big kawoosh comes out, the person vanish leaving nothing but smouldering shoes. What feature would you like?

Josh: To be honest most of the features I like I work really hard on getting into the game, so I really don't want to get into it too much because if I did that might give something away that we'd want to talk about later.

DJTenchi: Thank you ever so much for doing this interview.

Josh: You are very welcome. I had a good time, thank you for having me.