Blog for Orion Elenzil at GarageGames.com

fun with SVG (scalable vector graphics)

Orion Elenzil — 2008-11-20T19:12:34+00:00

i've been thinking about making a puzzle game/toy centered around shallow water physics,
and i want it to be easy to play. since i don't know flash, and i do know javascript, i'm looking into implementing such a thing with SVG. SVG provides essentially the same sort of stuff as flash, but without a plugin and using javascript directly. it's now supported in most browsers (it worked well in Firefox 3, Opera, and Chrome, but i had some trouble with IE), and thanks to continued optimizations by the javascript folks, the performance is getting reasonable for things like physical simulation. in fact in my tests, rendering is still the bottleneck, not simulation.

eventually i hope to implement Kass and Miller's shallow fluid dynamics here.
i'm also thinking of using james cologan's Sylvester library for javascript vector and matrix functions.

anyhow.

here are some very, very early toys.
check out the source code if you're interested.

* (at least) three cheers for sine and cosine - just visual candy.

* fluid2 - a simple but entertaining waves-on-a-string simulation.

vSide beta 6 released

Orion Elenzil — 2008-07-31T23:19:30+00:00

vSide has just released Beta 6!

vSide is a Massively Multiplayer Online World for teens, centered on partying with your friends.
It's based on TGE 1.3.5, although with some fairly significant modifications here and there.

new user-facing stuff:

Apartments
--------------

* LGA Tower - a new, larger apartment.
Users in vSide own their own apartment, customizing the surfaces, choosing YouTube videos, placing furniture, etc, etc, and with Beta 6, there's a new apartment to own. LGATower is a much larger apartment than others, allowing users to build wild environments.

* Multiple layouts per apartment
Your apartment can now have three different layouts instead of just one

* Door Codes
You can restrict access to your apartment by setting a DoorCode. Throw private parties!

* Tons more surface materials and furniture for apartments, including customizable picture frames of your friends.

Games
---------

* Sumo! There's now a Sumo Wrestling Hall, where you wear a sumo suit and enter sumo combat!

* The Grind - a virtual arcade game you can place in your apartment. It's got the gameplay of a classic puzzle game, but the screen is a projected hologram so your friends can spectate.

* Other casual, open-ended gameplay enablers.

Shopping & Clothes
-------------------------

* Two new clothing shops and fashion lines: Modz-Podz and Kawaii, and additional gothic clothing and furnishings will be released each week.

First User Experience
---------------------------

* Not so exciting for existing users perhaps, but important for vSide as a product.
We've streamlined our first user experience by letting you design your avatar's initial look on the web, and making the introductory "Gateway" world even more streamlined and fun.

Under The Hood
--------------------

* Naturally the usual bugfixes and general improvements.

* We reduced the size of our installer by about 70MB by baking in only tiny versions of our textures, and dynamically downloading the full-size versions as needed.

* A technique to capture high-quality images of players complete with transparency allowed us to automatically generate the hundreds of images needed to "design" your avatar on the website, such as these:

some screenies:
the new kawaii store with it's t-shirt-flinging octopus!

kids getting crazy in the sumo ring!

playing The Grind in a dark alleyway..

the materials and surfaces browser

vSide released !

Orion Elenzil — 2007-08-13T23:19:24+00:00

We've been working hard at Doppelganger for the last few months on our biggest release ever,
and it's finally live today! Hopefully there'll be a dev-snapshot soon.

there's some words on wired about it,
and here's some from a dev-snapshot i submitted.

The Music Lounge has been rebranded, reworked, revamped, resized, and rereleased as "vSide".

Highlights:
* tripled the size of the environment by adding two entire new cities.
* rudimentary private apartments
* tons of new clothing items
* social gameplay ("respekt")
* other gameplay
* secrets!
* more clothing and entertainment brands
* new friendship model
* revamped look and feel
* redone website
* vastly improved load-times
* little myspace-embeddable badges for your avatars
* more music streams (18 different channels)

we've been working hard on this release for several months, and even tho we had to postpone many of the features we wanted to include, we're pretty stoked on the results.

some technical deetz:
The game-engine portion of vSide is a fairly heavily-modified TGE 1.3.5 codebase,
we host about three hundred players per server, and currently run about seven servers.
The backend is written in Java with a Hibernate connection to mySql.

also, Doppelganger is hiring a senior-level game engine programmer and other positions.
we're located in San Francisco, so if you know good people in the Bay area looking to get in on a hot startup, send them our way or check out the jobs section of our corporate site.

Tyra Banks in The Music Lounge

Orion Elenzil — 2007-02-20T23:11:43+00:00

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