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In the past years, we've tried different ways of doing the awards...
This year we decided to sorta weave the awards into the sessions.
So I'd like to start today with giving away a couple of the Duke's Choice awards.
Lets have a demo.
On Tuesdays session you saw sortof a slice of this
I'd like to call up Mark Gerhard. He's the CTO and CEO of RuneScape.
So on Tuesday you gave us, you know, sortof a run-through of RuneScape the game.
- Ya. But you guys do more then the game in Java.
- Yes this is the bit that gets me really excited actually.
So you couldn't actually bring a demo
because you actually had to bring your whole office
cause it's all tied in to your network and the rest of it.
But you brought a video.
- Yeah, it's a complete infrastructure, software tools, the works
I've got a video of some of that tools
So modellers, mesh editors, animators
obvisiously all created in Java
doing exactly what we needed to do
So that's on steroids going ready for us
Kinda just shows you how we, you know, quickly we can actually model up.
Right, so you basicly build your own Maya, Lightwave, whatever.
- Absolutely
If Maya bring out universe kinematics, we build in universe kinematics.
So we make sure we maintain future parity
with pretty much any and professional enterprise product that's out there.
Right, so you can import like, Lightwave skinned models with skelegons
- Absolutley, and we can export to the same formats.
Vice versa
I mean, we actually use our own propiarty graphics format...
...to make sure it's incredibly efficient and incredibly lightweight.
cause you guys care about every last vortex, every last... - Absolutly
cause I think you have to make very very - Every polygon matters to us.
- And you know, we spend months carefully crafting every bit of software to make sure it's über efficient.
And that's our passion.
Like specialised algorithms for polygon reduction. - Spot on.
- Procedural texturing
Again to make sure we can actually do basicly the entire RuneScape game in about 64MB memory and about 45MB total size.
So this is a video of somebody bulding a character. - Yeah
And then dropping it into RuneScape is pretty easy.
- Absolutely. So because it all ties together so well.
We're busy animating this water troll here.
And in a moment we'll drop it into game...
bring up our Mesh editor, knock up some scenery, copy and past some assests. And it goes straight into real game.
So we can actually see and how does that look with everything else.
So you actually manage, I mean, it's not just a modeller it's the whole thing
So you got the process, you got the background scenes and all the ...
Yeah, as you just said it's the entire process of development.
Our content creator has the idea, does the story running.
Pretty much everything from our scripting engine through to the actual tools is created in Java.
Here we are busy doing a quick animation. Just checking it out.
We will then compile that or pack that onto a test world.
That is an entire game source that gets build there.
So we can actually see how that impacts any other assets, light shaders, etc..
Unlike other tools we actually have to operate everything in isolation,
and kinda pass it onto the next team and pass it onto the next team
We try to write our tools very easily. So a content creator is also producer.
He sits with all our tools, and kinda pulls all the stuff together.
Right. So that's one of the challenges of doing a demo here right.
Because you learned a bunch of stovepipe tools that you kindof of cubble together
We want a set of tools which is fully integrated for the developper
Which is very easy to use, which is crucial.
So.. That is creating a package and building some scenery.
Boy I wish I could build scenery that fast. -Hehehe
-Yeah this has been sped up quite a bit
Basicly what we're looking at here was probably created in about 30 mins.
The thing been sped up, probably about 3 times.
At any one point we can have the game in hardware mode, software mode.
So they can actually check how everything looks.
- Right, so when you wanna add a new level, a new.. you know..
Cause you got this sort of free level and the paid level.
And the way you keep the paid level folks interested
- We keep trading them more content
It's kindof like the planet with infinite surface area.
-Spot on.
It's kindof like ??world
Where you can sortof start adding adding adding to it.
-Absolutely right.
And you'll never ever ever run out a real estate.
Spot on. So the free game is like North America. Pretty equated to that.
The member game, if you will members expansion, is like the rest of the world.
But it's not spherical, it can just keep growing and growing and growing.
So you also do like, the ingame servers..
You're telling me about this chatroom thing that you guys have.
That's that tiny little box?
-Oh yeah, so, we operate the worlds probably 2nd biggest forum.
2.8 million posts a week.
And that forum, again got it's own Java enterprise webserver
runs on a little Celeron 2.4 with 2 giga rams. Probably about 5 years old.
Redicilous spec but you know, it's stable. Hasn't been rebooted for years.
The way we like it.
It hasn't been rebooted for years.. -It's incredible, it's incredible
It doesn't have a firewall so in front of it.
It just get's the full brand of everything the publics got to offer.
-So you use all the security features and all the rest of that
to make it so that your game universe is a safe place to play
-Absolutely
Even a game world.. never mind
the entire RuneScape game is actually sever based.
We're only streaming in assets on demand.
Obvisiously that allows us to update content very easily.
-And that's ofcourse one of the reasons why you had to build your own toolchain.
because the toolchain needs to be able to understand..
how to package things for streaming.
-Absolutely right
You gotta bear in mind that we were talking about on Tuesday..
..about 10 million active players in a month period.
You know that's hundreds of thousands of simultaneous connections.
Everything being done serverside.
And all of this is probably done on about 20 commodity servers.
-Right.
20 servers, 10 million people.
-Something like that.
-That's a pretty good number.
You know, a lot of the server systems that people talk about...
they get
I'm not gonna name names but you hear about people..
..just eating huge numbers of servers.
For, what turned out to be mostly silly reasons.
You get by on a remarkably small number of servers
and a remarkably small IT-staff.
-It's just a..
a tension to detail, a passion for doing everything well
I got my support team,
my entire support team for my public infrastructure is 3 guys.
-So a 3 person IT-staff..
-That's it. It's stable, it's secure.
-For 165 million accounts, 10 million active and uhh..
-175 million
-175
Yeah, how many people can say that their ratio is 3 to 175 million.
-Plus 400 guys back in the office.
-Yeah. Who are actually building the content right.
That kinda the key to making this really cool
That you guys can spend your energy on building the content.
Thinking about what kind of situation is gonna been set up in the world..
..that will be fun!
-That's where we're wanna spend our time. Spot on.
We don't wanna be maintaining infrastructure..
I mean, we have to maintain infrastructure..
but with far other ?? enery and brainpower to that.
-So which version of the JDK do you guys run on?
Uhh.. interesting to say
-That one is a secret isn't it..
That's a secret.
Well the machine hasn't been rebooted in 3 years.. I'm sure..
-You can probably work that one out yourself.
That one is just math.
Most of our ?? libaries and ?? have actually been build inhouse.
Which we run two different languages inhouse on top.
But again, all of that is on top of Java if you will.
-Right
It makes it all a little easier for us to work because it's a lot more agile.
You guys go to like outlandish length you were describing to me the other day.
To make sure that the game itself runs on unspeakably ancient hardware.
-Absolutely right.
We wanna make sure, as a browser based game
this is accessible globally.
I think it's a P3 500, 125MB on minimum spec.
We maintain compatibality back with Java 1.1
-And you just have the sort of quality of experience kindof scales up with that.
Indeed.
On Tuesday.. the guys from LG had a television..
the TV's controller was this 2 dual core mips machine with Open GLS.
We'd put RuneScape on that no problem.
You kinda looked at it and said; we can run on that.
The way that the cellphone world is going..
the upcoming generation of cellphones..
Open GLS is kinda gonna be standard on new phones in a year.
-That's an incredible oppurtunity for us
We can't wait till that
-Yeah and the netbooks are getting interesting..
and all of a sudden it's like..
That's a really really really big market. A really good big place to have fun.
-There is no place a game shouldn't be.
And we're quite confident, with the technology we have using Java..
we can pretty much do that.
-Yeah. Well thanks a lot!
Thank you very much.
-You guys been doing really really cool work.
Subtitled by Jeffb87