Recent content by RiotDave

Hm. Our game GemStone is still, to me, the greatest roleplaying experience I've ever had -- including tabletop gaming. And it has very wide area chat, almost global, in the form of crystal amulets that you can use to project your thoughts and hear others'. DragonRealms has a similar system...

Heh... when I first (and last!) played EQ, it was so dark at night in some places that I literally couldn't tell whether I was looking at the sky or the ground. I laughed so hard it hurt when people told me that was "realistic" :)

I guess it's just a matter of what you're used to. In some ways I really prefer the play.net forums to ones where people just create new threads willy-nilly, like the official WoW forums. It takes no time at all for there to be 1800 new threads about the exact same subject, and people wind up...

You beat me to it. :) I was going to point out that this is merely a map of the area built for the E3 demo, which is not a piece of the world intended for the actual release. It was just enough to show off a small variety of environments and a few creature territories, and not feel cramped...

Wiir. ::ducks:: That's cool about the Welsh word though; I don't think that was intended but is a nice coincidence. Unless Steph knows more Welsh than she lets on... :)

Mostly because we're too busy. :) We're much smaller than the likes of, say, NCSoft or Blizzard. This is why we're slow about things like major website updates, trailers etc. -- our resources have to be much more focused on the game itself. E3 is always an extremely hectic time of year. This...

I was very surprised myself at their reaction. I guess I'm just used to the blood; it just seems to me like a natural way to indicate a strong physical hit. We're not talking Mortal Kombat, controversial levels of blood and gore here. O RLY? If so, it's far easier to get tagged with an M...

Two of our supergroups at Simu when we played CoH were ourselves (my battle cry was "My cat just threw up again!") and the manga-style League of Extraordinary Schoolgirls. The Schoolgirls got a lot of double-takes and WTF?'s. My favorite was when The Bee Guy from the Simpsons ran past us...

Don't worry too much about race options yet. :) What we showed at E3 was limited due to time constraints. We recently redesigned our character system (from a technical/art standpoint) so that characters render faster on the client, and the artists took the opportunity to create awesome new...

Nope, there's some minimal clothing, we don't have nude skins. We don't want the ESRB to slap us around :rolleyes:

Hi all. I'm Dave Dean, a programmer at Simutronics, specializing now mostly in GM tools and the rendering engine. I'm not much involved in the design of HJ, but more so in working with the artists and designers to make their vision come alive. I've been with Simutronics since 1995, starting...