Arcanity Progress Report

We received a progress report on the upcoming massively multiplayer online role-playing game Arcanity. The game takes place on Earth after a spell cast by an evil wizard has devastated the planet. What remains has developed into a medieval fantasy world, filled with knights, sorcerers, and mythical creatures. The game is in development at Brick House Trading Co., a Los Angeles-based studio originally started as a day-trading firm. We talked with Brick House's Jason Jacobitz about the game's progress.

According to Jacobitz, the team has created a single mesh animation system that it tested at 35 frames per second on a 400MHz Celeron processor with 100 fully detailed characters on the screen at one time. Although not all of the processing power will be used for animation in the final product, the developers estimate that the engine will handle around 35 to 40 characters at a time while still retaining at least 30 frames per second.

Jacobitz went on to explain the differences between the animation system used in Arcanity and the systems used in EverQuest and Asheron's Call. "Asheron's Call uses an outdated method whereby every moving object on the character is a separate object that rotates," Jacobitz said. "That's why the characters come apart at the joints in AC. Everquest uses that same method, but they 'skin over the joints.' It's a sort of trick that makes it appear as though the characters don't come apart at the joints, but in computer code they still are. This method takes up almost no memory, but it's very slow and it doesn't look that good."

Arcanity uses what Jacobitz describes as a true animated mesh that provides high-quality characters but uses less memory than the meshes used in Unreal Tournament and Quake III Arena.

The team is also working on the landscaping techniques. They are aiming for the environmental equivalent of Black & White or Halo. The challenge is reducing the memory requirements in order to achieve a similar level of quality in a massively multiplayer online game. The team believes that it is possible and that Brick House will be able to keep the promises it has made regarding high-quality environments. Jacobitz is confident about the progress of the game. "Everything is worked out, and we're coding up our ideas," he said.

For more information about Arcanity, visit the official Brick House Trading Co. web site.