Raph Koster is back with another set of blogs on his upcoming MMORPG sandbox Stars Reach, this batch focusing on something that seems mundane but is actually pretty important to a game’s feel: camera and movement. During the ongoing pre-alpha testing, most of the game world is blocked off since it’s just not ready, but the testers are able to dip into the basics of talking and moving around.
Stars Reach will have two different camera modes beloved by MMO players: free cursor and fixed reticle, with zoom options, the “twin stick shooter” feel of “moving in one direction while firing in another,” and camera modes that aren’t locked to activities. As for player movement, it runs the gamut from sliding and grappling to clomping over grass trying to hinder your progress.
“We always knew we would want to support fun traversal. Our planets are generated using procedural techniques, and they are also modifiable in runtime. This means that the tricks you use for statically created terrain just won’t work. We also can’t guarantee that the map is all navigable – just like the real world isn’t all walkable. So we decided pretty early on we had to support climbing and flying, so that players could get themselves out of trouble. Every time we improved the visuals of the terrain, we would find ourselves wrestling with challenges around the avatar poking through the ground, or actually managing to fall through the world. To be honest, we are still wrestling with this last problem, because we keep adding ways to change the world on the fly!”
A follow-up piece on Koster’s personal blog shows a few screenshots from the earliest prototype playtests, as the devs were testing jump distance and inertia though rudimentary climbing and ramp structures – basically a jungle gym.
