Gadgetory

hey everybody i'm steve from gamers access net and i am joined by richard garriott AKA lord british and me talking about shroud of the avatar got a couple of other topics as well that'll go up in separate videos so check the channel for those before getting to that content all of our pact coverage is brought to you by cyberpowerpc who were awarded the reader's choice for best desktop gaming pcs by pc magazine richard with trial the avatar so we've done a couple of these videos can you give a really brief recap for everyone sure sure so you know most people who know me would know me i'm not only his Lord British but as the author of the Ultima series I made nine altimas and an ultimaum line after I went independent created the only science fiction game have made called tabula rasa but I've now gone back to medieval fantasy for my latest offering and it really is sort of the spiritual successor to ultima but it's merging both what i think are the best features of solo player storytelling out of the Ultima series about virtues and the best aspects of Ultima Online where the the massively multiplayer world is not just about level grinding and combat there's a full life to be realized as a crafter or as a role player that is I would argue very very deep and while most memos have continued to chase the world of warcraft model we're going back to the Ultima model which we think has some at least personal interest and we think still has some some lasting value so if you liked altimas or if you have friends who told you about them if you're too young come treasure out of the avatar and we we also just spoke with warren spector an old friend co-worker of yours and he worked on alta might as well oh yeah absolutely hey we worked many in fact I would argue that the best solo player altimas definitely the best told stories in the solar player ultimate where times when Warren and I work together he you know I think he would have in fact I think then the piece I've seen you guys talk about you know he gives us a lot of credit me and others at origin for teaching him some of the game design the industry nuts and bolts but what he definitely brought in day one from outside the computer gaming industry was story crafts and so I'm very proud of the story craft in the Ultima is you know kind of five six seven era where Warren and I work together on those games and now with shroud of the avatar so you've you've been pushing for a while now it what's the sort of release timeline what's the schedule yeah we we've been going a little more than 28 months the reason why no 28 is because we're on release 28 and one per month and so we had a few months where there were no really before there was released one but but for 28 months now on the third Thursday of the month we released at twelve noon central time the latest version of the of the game and it's been live now 24 hours a day seven days a week not since episode one but I camber which episode we started that in but long ago and and we've actually have a service now that has had zero unscheduled downtime since the beginning we talked about that before and when we last thought it may have been six or more months ago and we last talked out that so you've kept with that record that record and we we've we've launched within a minute maybe two minutes of the you know but pointed our and we've had no unscheduled downtime which we keep you know knocking on wood because we've come close to unscheduled downtime we've actually had the login servers fail so no one knew could join it but if you were in it was still alive so we've technically still always been up still counts but I mean there will come a time when it goes down I'm sure but but it actually has to do with the architecture we've chosen which is why it stayed up you know if you think of most massively multiplayer games especially or online games generally you you're playing on a central server you're you're in a client-server kind of architecture which means if the server goes down everyone is disconnected shroud of the avatar doesn't operate that way shroud of the average are operates where everyone who's playing their machine is part of the web of servers that the game is using to operate and so that foundational change made to important changes what does it means our servers are small what we have in house is just the login server and some authentication inter activities the majority of what's happening with the game being processed is happening in the cloud of people and so we've already prepared it for what happens when you just turn off your machine or somebody balloons blue screens or somebody's trying to hack it or cheat and or has a really slow machine that just doesn't perform well since the fundamental architecture assumed all those faults we had to make a really fault tolerant system that accepts the fact that individual pieces go offline now and then and that turned out to work much better than we had anticipated and kept the service running 24 hours a day seven days a week so is this it doesn't sound quite like p2p but it actually does have some PDP peer-to-peer you know concepts in it you know not only do our updates actually spread in a actually peer-to-peer torrent you know kind of way but it's the the the way it sort of works is if a group of people is in a common area of geography that it can portion off and say I know for a fact these the only people in the region I care about their machines then start to operate in a synchronous fashion and so actually all of us are doing the processing of the whole game but one of us is chosen as the the metronome you know the this the the synchronizer you might say but if you go offline or have a hiccup of one kind or another it just falls down to the next one of us to be the the synchronization heartbeat and the one that verifies that the truth is happening does the game look at systems Baxter or performance it does yeah we don't we don't we try not to push that on somebody with a weak machine we actually we do that analysis and we say whoever's got the strongest machine is going to do it because the thing they're going to pick up on their machine that others don't have to pick up is AI and so everyone everyone's machine is independently tracking every AI but one person is saying the reality is that rabbit moved lat and nobody else goes yeah I get it and I they update their position but as soon as your heartbeat goes down suddenly go oh I'm the one now running the rabbits now the rabbit moves right you know whatever it might be and and then the exception to this sort of round robin synchronization is for things like trades of gold or for victory conditions I me know if I kill the rabbit then we need to go let's make sure nobody's hack their client let's make sure you know you're not trying to steal gold from me and so that type of activity then is verified back at our central server and and you know I'm sure some people will find some way to hack it eventually and will in the arms rate will end up in an arms race with the players but so far it's actually this method again because everyone is still synchronized everyone's machine is literally synchronized so it's sort of like the the Bitcoin you know process where you know to to defeat something at that public you have to overwhelm you know the public belief is to what's happening which is a bit harder right what about the target release timeline seems like that where should people go to find out more yeah so the websites easy WWE shroud of the avatar calm come join us if you haven't already if especially if you understand ultimate history or frankly a lot of the other histories of Warren and there's so many of us to work together on so many games anything from origin and you know a lot of the Star Wars Galaxies folks are really X origin also so anyway there's a common thread through a lot of our history that for those we remember those days a lot of that is what we're trying to recover but in a modern way so come join us if you if you are so inclined and the real main release was really at the end of the year so if you're if you don't want to get involved in a beta process you can wait til December but if you like having an impact on the game then join us sooner and and after that we hope to release new episodes which while the features will just keep adding over time month by month but the new releases of major segments of content including new entire continents to go explore we're gonna do that on one year cadence so you know Christmas time every year we should have a nice package of wrapped up content for you expansion content something like that very cool so as always information in the description below a shroud of the avatar calm if you're interested in learning more we've done a few of these videos so if you search the channel for shroud of the avatar or richard garriott or if you're interested in till the other folks chris Roberts or inspector that's all in the channel but thank you for watching we'll see you all next time