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Tyra Banks in The Music Lounge

Name:	Orion Elenzil
Date Posted:	Feb 20, 2007
Rating:	4.0 out of 5
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hey all - this is my first blog post, and should really be a devSnapshot, but i don't have the time to make it all pretty-like.

The Music Lounge is a TGE-based free massively multiplayer online environment in which teenagers can hang out, dress fancy, dance, make friends, chat, listen to the latest chart-climbing tunes, and if that wasn't enough, meet celebrities !

We've had a few appearances by The PussyCat Dolls in the past, but the event i'd like to talk about was yesterday, when Tyra Banks appeared to her adoring fans for a couple hours. We've been developing a relationship with Tyra, and the most recent release of The Music Lounge included a virtual reproduction of the real-life set of her talk show. Yesterday's show was specifically the ten-year anniversary of Tyra's first Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition cover, and as a tie-in, on the show Tyra announced that she would be appearing in The Lounge that evening, complete with an avatar dressed in that first swimsuit!

As the television show aired at different times across the country, we were able to see user traffic spiking way, way up, but the servers held ! Tyra spent about two hours in the world, fielding questions from the audience, dancing, and generally partying. The fans had a great time and i hear Tyra did as well.

At the event peak, we had 936 users simultaneously logged in across five or six TGE-based servers, with a per-server maximum of 250. Inside the app, framerates definitely felt the load of having a few hundred avatars in view, but by and large it went very well.

The music lounge is a moderately modified version of TGE 1.3.5 (Plus lighting pack, plus pieces from 1.4, plus optimizations and new features by us), together with a java-based webapp which handles registration, login, inventory, etc. I should also add the it's not exactly a small project: many very experienced professional engineers, artists and businesspeople have been working hard for nearly two years to bring the product where it is today. Some names you may recognize from the Garage Games forums are: Clint Brewer, Tim McClarren, LateralPunk, John Klima, and Corvus13. - There are many more folks on the devteam, but those are the ones who tend to post on GG.

On to the screenshots !

(sorry about the large format - you'll have to scroll to the bottom to get the horizontal scroll bar,
or just "view image" on them each individually..)

moderators prepping the crowd in the virtual Tyra studio

Tyra fielding questions

hundreds of people ice skating!

looking around the plaza..

mob scene in the dance club. - you can see tyra in the distance by her logo

.. mob scene at the hot tubs

tyra hanging out with fans

Recent Blog Posts

List:	07/31/08 - vSide beta 6 released 08/13/07 - vSide released ! 02/20/07 - Tyra Banks in The Music Lounge

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Ishbuu (Feb 20, 2007 at 23:21 GMT)

Now THAT is something else!

Congrats!!

Vashner (Feb 20, 2007 at 23:25 GMT)

Awesome. So what's next the GG commerical on Americas next Top Model?

:)

Clint S. Brewer (Feb 20, 2007 at 23:41 GMT)

she did show some in game footage on her show, which was pretty cool to see, even if it was only a couple seconds.

personally, I wanna see America's Next Top Game Designer :)

oh also check out the new website, I particularly like looking at this page:
profiles and people online now
Edited on Feb 21, 2007 01:48 GMT

bank (Feb 20, 2007 at 23:52 GMT)

you guys do a really cool/great stuff!!
keep it up, I really love your project!

Anthony Rosenbaum (Feb 21, 2007 at 00:47 GMT)

Snap , that is nice

Unsung Zero (Feb 21, 2007 at 01:13 GMT)

Out of all the great stuff that happened during the event, I bet it felt best that the servers held up and everything went without a hitch.

@Clint: If I thought a game designer show would help the Indie industry, I'd be all for it!

Ramen-sama (Feb 21, 2007 at 02:42 GMT)

What kind of frame rate are you getting with all them people? what tricks do you use to keep the FPS up?

Joshua Dallman (Feb 21, 2007 at 06:29 GMT)

What is so cool about this is the idea of creating real memories for gamers through games. Look at that last snapshot of the person excited about taking the virtual photo, it was as real to them as taking a real photo. That this is Torque tech is all the more cool. :) I dropped into The Lounge a few days ago and was impressed and am very much looking forward to the stable final release. Keep up the great innovative work guys, this is awesome stuff.

Orion Elenzil (Feb 21, 2007 at 18:08 GMT)

ramen - actually if you view some of those images whole, you can see that Fraps is reporting like 5 FPS. so this isn't really an ideal situation, and for future events we'll have to improve this.

some stuff we are doing, which has helped a lot, is culling out the rendering of players based on occlusion. ie we cast five (count em) rays to each player, checking for intersections with DIFs, and if all five hit a DIF, we don't render the player at all. this is actually saving us quite a bit in some of the above images where there are a large number of players occluded by some DIF geometry.

other optimizations we're working on are dynamic LOD biasing based on the framerate. this seems promising, but we've got a ways to go.

Clint S. Brewer (Feb 21, 2007 at 20:19 GMT)

the other big thing we did that really makes this usable even at low framerates is get rid of the torque cursor and use the hardware cursor for everything. Without that change, things would have been very unusable on my desktop. With the hardware mouse it's amazing that I can even tolerate sub 5 fps almost. Before I wanted to chew my wrist off anytime that happened.

Ramen-sama (Feb 25, 2007 at 01:23 GMT)

oh, i didn't see the fraps counter because the pictures were cut off till i scrolled them over.

Orion Elenzil (Feb 25, 2007 at 06:19 GMT)

yeah; sorry about that!

Teromous (Apr 27, 2007 at 18:34 GMT)

Cool deal with the toon shaders. This reminds me of Second Life ...I used to play it but figured that if I was going to create content it might as well be for my own game o_O

Nice score with Tyra Banks. Publicity is key.
Edited on Apr 27, 2007 18:42 GMT

Orion Elenzil (Apr 27, 2007 at 18:43 GMT)

Thanks for the comment. Yeah - the toon shading was written by Clint Brewer.
It uses the good old inside-out black shell method.

David Williamson (Jul 07, 2007 at 11:17 GMT) Resource Rating: 5

You mention handling 250 users per server. A big question for lots of us is what server specs are good enough for certain applications... What kind of specs did your servers have during the Tyra event (e.g. processor, ram, etc...)? Do you have any recommendations or lessons learned on deciding on servers?

Congrats on everything you guys have accomplished so far. Very inspiring stuff!

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