Greetings all,
It is kind of interesting to imagine that after 15 years this plot is still being talked about. I am glad that I kept a lot of the original stuff as a memorial of my time with Origin. I will point out a couple of things that I see being bandied about.
1. We were almost at the alpha stage in 96 when we all got rerouted over to the UO team to pull their tails out of the fire. The original UIX team was pretty amazing, even to all others in the game industry. We tried to tackle some of the hardest ideas and on the bleeding edge of the hardware and we were doing very well at it and we kept pretty close to our milestones. That was one of the main reasons we got thrown at UO. When we started returning to UIX, things changed and drastically. I won’t go into the politics but it was kind of bad and almost all of it came from the dolts they put in charge of Origin at the time. A lot of people ended up leaving or changing around and the game suffered as a result.
At the time we moved over to UO all conversations were at full alpha state, many game systems including inventory, combat, plot event tracking, manipulation of objects, set scripting and the like were either in place or being integrated at the time. Nearly all the flicks, and cut scenes had been written, rendered, and were just being polished there were a lot of them, something around 13 or so. The world map was close to 80% complete, but still needed mucho polish. The towns were in place, but still needed polish. The dungeons were mostly in place, but there was a rush to complete thre of them. Some of the things we were still focusing hard on was magical special effects (the spells were already written), people schedules, adding npcs, fleshing out side quests (non-plot specific) and a few other things. In fact we joked that we might release before UO…well that is history now.
2. Most of the stuff I see people calling impossible or we couldn’t do it…we were doing it. We had techniques and ways we were going to handle the wars and the armies, etc.
3. The first main engine that Gary Scott Smith constructed for us to work with was a 3D engine. As reported before the UVIII engine just would not do what we needed. However even though the world was to be 3D we were going to have the camera locked at the “high” angle and just have a camera you could rotate around (like many games do now). The technology was new and we were coming up with new quaternion algorithms to handle displaying and manipulating 3D objects, stuff that is pretty normal now. Then Tomb Raider came out…
Well that did it and the technical guys went bonkers. As you can imagine displaying meshes top down limited the number that would be visible giving a good frame rate, moving the camera down changed everything. Several of us fought to keep the cameras up since waiting for Moore’s law to help wasn’t viable. However Herman Miller kept coding on the engine while the rest of us went to UO and he was able to increase it’s frame rate significantly, but still I think it was way to slow even when the released the game.
So what this boils down to is the 3D aspect of the game was almost in there from the start, at least it was ever since 94 when Richard took the helm again.
4. The mismatch between the dungeons and the plot you read is because versions have been lost over time. All of the dungeons in the plot doc of dungeons you have were still going to be included. It wasn’t until much later that changed.
