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Now that I look back on it, the number of brothers operating in the British computer games world in the '80s seems rather unusual. Ultimate Play The Game (now known as Rare)--the company almost single-handedly responsible for doubling the price of games from £5 to £10 and rumoured delayed Knight Lore for an entire year because the public wasn't ready for it--were founded by the Stamper brothers.

I don’t think the Bitmap Brothers were really related though.

The other "big brother" success story from the 80s is Warwickshire-based Codemasters. Taking perhaps the second-most arrogant name after Ultimate’s, the brothers Darling founded Codemasters (or Codies to employees) after some successes writing for the budget Mastertronic label. Helping them in their early days were the Oliver brothers who supplied several popular games, including the Dizzy series, which featured a walking egg (and more “yolk folk”) in some classic flip-screen adventures.

Flash-forward some 15 years or so and Codemasters is now one of the biggest publisher/developers in the UK and ready to chance their arm at the MMOG world. Which is, of course, where Stratics’s interest comes in, and I, having returned to the home country, was tasked with visiting their offices and getting a preview of their upcoming Dragon Empires.

So it was, after a journey of some five hours (the result of the inescapable fact that if you wish to travel between two places in England which are not within London, you still must pass through London) I stepped from the station at Leamington Spa to meet Peter Tyson (Calistas) who had kindly offered to drive me from the station and give me a tour of the offices (with a short stop at a local pub for a quick lunch).

The offices comprise a pair of unprepossessing buildings near Southam in Warwickshire surrounded by a car park. The first, where most of the administrative staff seems based and where I signed the non-disclosure agreement covering my visit, was almost maze-like in complexity. The second, where the games are coded, was more open-plan and where we sat at Peter’s desk for a quick demo of the current client.

Unfortunately, being a community manager means getting the suckiest PC going and, as a result, the client crashed before we got going. Given that Peter might reasonably be expected to show off the game to many people I think this is a sorry state of affairs and fans of Dragon Empires should immediately start a petition to get Peter a better PC.

We decamped to another PC for the demo instead which was running the latest build. At this fairly early stage of development there are many features missing from the client so I’ll not mention those-–except to note that I do hope the characters will be clothed in the game proper. The uninhibited avatar fits nicely into the world though and when he encountered rough foliage he could be seen reaching up to push the bushes out of the way. It was possible to reach the top of a nearby mountain (a process which should be slower and involve more climbing later) where the flow of time was speeded up to show the clouds scudding by below.

For the next demo we moved over to another corner of the office to see the “World Editor.” This is the interface used to “paint” the world with the various environments players will encounter. It is in effect a fully 3D view of the world through which a designer can move freely or switch to walk mode to get an idea of what it will look like for a player. At any time the section of landscape in view can be raised, lowered or flattened and various textures can be painted onto it. The textures are less a flat image than a complete environment-–plant and tree models are included in the effect and these are procedurally placed so that an area remains the same. Textures can be layered too, so that an area of pine trees could be placed and then given a further snow texture to make them look more alpine.

Of note too here is the weather system. Each area has it’s own settings for humidity, wind speed and temperature. These can combine to trigger localised rain and snow, including effective blizzards. Water in the area is also affected; at one point with humidity up to 100% and precipitation at its highest point the sea was doing a good impression of a roiling ocean. In calmer times the water is equally impressive, reflecting the surroundings realistically. These effects will come at a price though-–expect a top-notch card to manage them, although Codemasters do not anticipate requiring a T&L card just to play.

Graphics are the most immediate of draws to a game, but there needs to be some gameplay behind it, so we next moved to discussing the AI of the monsters in the game. Most MMOGs have a spawn system of some sort and DE is no different. What’s been added, though, is the ability to have the spawn points adjust in position or size over time. For example, a spawn point for a pack of wolves could be set to move east over time to give a migratory route and to expand during the night to give the effect of the wolves sheltering during the day and ranging out to hunt under cover of darkness. Other features include the ability to vary spawning in several areas according to the success achieved by the spawnees so the more kills they get in a particular area will draw more spawns from less successful areas (where they’re getting killed more–-a natural result of over-hunting).

The creatures themselves can be smarter than the average bear. They all have a memory of who’s done what to them and some can have larger memories than others, which should provide for interesting tactics depending on the abilities of the creatures. Not that the memory is purely about who hit them, it also takes into account colours and other stimuli. So if you’re about to wander past a normally quiescent creature you may find that your red armour reminds it of the red armour worn by the person who gave it a near drubbing a few minutes ago and it’ll not be happy to be reminded. The opposite effect offers some intriguing possibilities too-–how do you catch a creature that wants to always run away? Plans for sound and line of sight to be taken into consideration allow that dynamic to be played out as well as, in dungeons, stealthy movement playing a greater part in adventuring.

From AI we moved onto the focus of player characters. A perennial issue in MMOGs is individuality and Codemasters is hoping that Empires will provide the major differences between characters. Character design is somewhat limited, with three sizes of body and a choice of head and tattoos, but post-creation changes will be available through both some form of experience gathering and changes over time and the heads are designed to be uniquely identifiable. Some high level skills will allow players to take on the form of a creature or even a tree temporarily. The modelling system behind this is impressive. Instead of simply wrapping the character model in a new skin, the armour is a separate model on top of the characters body. This allows the various pieces to move independently and realistically as the character walks. An example movie I was shown had the shoulder pads and breastplate sections moving as they would in reality.

Other movies I saw were of the titular dragons. Or at least one dragon. Though players won’t probably be directly able to face one of the big five dragons, they are still likely to encounter them at some point, so the dragons have been hand-animated (motion capture is difficult-–you can’t fit them in a room and sticking balls to them is problematic) in various ways to take-off, land or come to a hover in various ways. Each of the dragons will have its own personality (and that of their Empire) visible in these mannerisms – the Monkey Empire’s dragon for example will be more clumsy and fidgety than other dragons.

For a final visual demo, we looked at a mock-up of the user interface which, as is the style these days, overlays the 3D window. A thin bar occupies two-thirds of the width of the screen at the top-right showing the players current health and energy, five icons from the most powerful skills the player possesses and no less than two XP bars. Intrigued by that, I asked why. The bars represent your current and your “unlocked” XP. If you’re killed in PvP (and possibly PvE too), a portion of the unlocked XP will be lost. You can prevent this by returning to town before you lose it though. There were several movable windows as well. One contained skill icons whilst the others were there to show how the floating windows could be combined into one window with a set of tabs to switch between them.

To end the tour I sat down with Peter for a few more questions. Sadly for some members of the Stratics staff, I have to report there are no plans for Dragon Empires to have either fezzes or underwater cities [Must give Peter more cookies--Editor]. However, they do plan to have an extensive crafting system powering the economy. Crafting starts with resources such as coal or iron. These are converted into precursors like steel, which are, in turn, used to make items like swords. To facilitate the sale of the resources players will sell to a central repository in cities that will then supply the people who’ve bid on buy that particular resource in order of how much they were willing to pay. This lets players pay above the average and be guaranteed a supply, or below and get less but make more profit from it. Sales of finished items are handled in a similar manner; again items are sold to a central agency in the cities from where other players can browse and purchase, the seller then being credited.

We wrapped up the day with a discussion of the administrative side of things. Codemasters expects to have GMs situated on both sides of the Atlantic as well as a system of volunteer players. As a British company, they don’t expect to see the same problems that affected US companies from using volunteers in game but are aware of the issues. In any case they hope to supply both volunteers and GMs with fairly hefty powers, including the ability for the GMs to set their own spawn points. They are also confident that macroing will not be a problem in the game nor will third party hacks; though they have thought about providing a certification program similar to Ultima Online's for useful and balanced programs.

That about wrapped things up and, after dropping off my badge at reception, Peter drove me back to the station to begin my journey home. I left intrigued by Codemasters' vision for the game and hopeful for its future.

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