City of Heroes - Live Forum Archive

Ask a Dev: Matt Stults (The Television)

POST-ACTION

Quote:

Originally Posted by Retrogression

edit: also wondering if you were recently reading "Against the Day"

How embarrassing that The Television's reading choices would be so transparent. Yes, I was definitely thinking about Pynchon's style of "historiographic metafiction" and "Against the Day" in particular, though you'll notice I ended up leaving out some bits of his style like character development, magical-realism and, well, quality writing. Looking back, I hope it wasn't just the quaternion references that gave it away.
Good catch, Retrogression.
To everyone else: I apologize for my use of the term "historiographic metafiction" above. It won't happen again.

Ask a Dev: Matt Stults (The Television)

POST-ACTION

Good for you! Season two of your favorite shows are finally on the air. It feels like it's been Aions of tortured 3rd class, checkout-lane celebrity biography. You feel the need to sit down and watch some television.

1. Fuzzy Questions:
a. So, be honest, how much fun is your job, really? I mean, are you livin the gamer geek's dream, or is it way more work than you ever thought it would be?
I don’t know. I love my job, and I love CoV, but I’m not sure that there is much intersection between what I enjoy about either one. A big part of what I love about CoV is the amazing community of players we have. My job is about developing for that community and playing the game is about participating in it. There is some overlap in required knowledge, but not much overlap in the activity or thought process involved.
Example: The most powerful moments in my experience with CoV have been as much about the silly or serious conversations I’m having in-game as they are the content I’m playing. The content is necessary in order for those conversations to happen, but think how far abstracted programming is from the impromptu communication that comes out of it. Posting on the forums is the closest I’ve come to bringing the two experiences together, but with all the great stuff coming for Paragon and the prestige demands of my SG, I don’t always have the time I’d like to post.
b. What is The Television's favorite television program??
The Television is not so vain that it watches itself, though it does Netflix and Amazon Unbox some television shows, especially as research for its forum posts. Arrested Development and 30 Rock are pretty fantastic.
If we’re just talking relevant stories, not television, my favorite story about super-powered heroes is Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie.
c. As someone who is just getting into the game design industry as a hobby/possible career/possible company to start, I'm curious as to how you got into the industry. What was the first game you worked on?
This is the first real “game industry” game I’ve worked on, though I’ve done a tiny bit of programming for much smaller “games” or game-like software in the research and advertising. Some of that work turned out to be more applicable than other parts. If we’re talking about the first game that I’ve worked on regardless of size or distribution, that would be the town simulator game my brother and I created when I was nine. I did the world design with wooden blocks and action figures, he wrote the simulation part in Advanced Basic. The “city simulation” part was mostly a banking and gambling system for the city’s inhabitants. Typical of all my interactions with my brother, the simulation was written so that all of the city’s money eventually went to him, the banker, leaving my citizens homeless and destitute. Watching the last of my moneyed characters squander his wealth at my brother’s casino was pretty much when I decided I needed to learn to program.
d. What techniques do you use to make meetings shorter?
I try to identify when something is not directly applicable or relevant to the purpose of a meeting or some of its members and request that we continue that part of the discussion outside of the meeting. I’ll keep the rest of my tricks to myself to preserve their abbreviating power.
2. Technical questions
a. What kind of database does CoH use? (aka, relational, custom, open source like postgres etc, object oriented, flat files, some mix?) Is there a dev in charge of the data access layer of the code and if so, who is it? (I am particularly interested because in the early months of CoH, they did several data mining tasks that took ... exceedingly long times to run, and it made me curious to a degree that still has not much abated) When you joined the team and saw how they managed the data, what was your reaction?
b. What programming language is used for character management?

These questions are going to require some technical specificity, so please bear with me. Please also understand that I don’t really know why data mining tasks used to take so long, but the following is better than accurate/true, so I’m going with it.
How we used to do it:
Before what we now know as Mapservers, CoH used a set of machines called Minkowski Cartographs to store data and model characters’ interactions with the world.
What is a Minkowski Cartograph?
The Minkowski Cartographs—or MCs—were built in the early 1970s by a team of Nobel laureates in Mathematics and Cartography. The team’s goal was to build a functional map or “road atlas” of Minkowski Space—a pseudo-Riemannian manifold identified around 1907. Each MC is a room sized device constructed of thousands of independently sliding looms and millions of strings running between them. The strings are made of several tightly braided filaments composed of a patent blend of Polyolefin and Kevlar, inter-loom segments ranging in length anywhere between 10^-32 mm and 1 mm. Approximately half of the strings run between pernambuco-wood looms. The rest are incorporated into a vast conveyor mechanism that drags against the loom strings, causing them to vibrate at specific resonant frequencies, effectively “playing” them like millions of the worlds’ tiniest violins. When played, each string produces a unique four-space wave signature which resonates through its particular loom until it is converted by transducer into an electronic analog signal. Part of this signal is then recorded in a wax disk in much the same way as conventional sound is recorded by the displacement of the spiral groove in a LP record. The other part was filtered and sent through the network for real time exploration of the model by mathematical cartographers. When first created, this was the Network Control Program of the early ARPANET.
Outcome of the MC experimentation of the 1970s:
Though the MCs proved fairly unsuccessful in providing a functioning map of Minkowski space, the MC experiments resulted in two emergent and unpredicted consequences. First, they were very clearly the inspiration for String Theory. Second, as part of their efforts to map Minkowski space through the MCs, scientists began to uncover and chart what appeared to be various sections of a modern city complete with pedestrians and airship implied by the mathematical definition of Minkowski space as portrayed in the MC. Due to the use of hyperbolic quaternions in Minkowski space, physics as modeled by the MCs was significantly more flexible than what we experience.
MC Use by early CoH:
Intending to capitalize on the pre-existing city simulations provided by the MCs, City of Heroes purchased and reused the now renamed “Mapservers” to provide the persistent world of Paragon City. This created a number of problems. First: game engineers and even game administrators on the project required doctorates in math or physics as well as extensive textile industry experience just to maintain the Mapservers, let alone add new features. Second: due to the wear of continuous vibration in four-space, critical strings often broke or became “snagged” resulting in bugs and “Lost Connection to Mapserver” messages that were almost impossible to track down. Third: as you note, data collection was extremely time consuming as the entire mapservers had to be shut down and the wax recording disks carefully removed from each loom on every mapserver.
What happened to the MC devices?
Due to the above and many other problems, the CoH team eventually realized that the Minkowski Cartographs were un-maintainable. Sadly, once dropped by the game, these great loomed-machines were inexplicably destroyed by a group of self-proclaimed neo-luddites. The same group of history-deniers has virtually erased all record of the machines by continuously deleting Wikipedia articles written about them.
What we use now:
Now our mapservers are written in C and use everything from SQL databases to various in-house flat file systems to represent our data. Characters are pretty much created and maintained by SQL queries, but the specifics of the queries are generated by C.

Please let me know if the above raises any more questions.