The Game Engnie of WildStar Online
While wildstar gold is guessed as the ingame currency name. People put their eyes on its engine. The game engine is often an unsung hero of modern MMOs. When it works brilliantly we hardly even notice it, focusing instead on the dramatic art style, sublime musical score or excellent narrative. It’s only when problems emerge that we sit up and take notice how our favorite games are presented to us.
With Carbine’s upcoming MMO entering closed beta, we were eager to take a closer look at this mystical device. Luckily, Lead Software Engineer Steve Moret agreed to give us a rare peek inside the box and explain some of how WildStar’s engine works. From those first lines of code to more recent features, Moret explained what goes into the software that will be sitting on our desktops.
What is the name of Wildstar engine? With creative names like this it may be a shock to know that all of the WildStar specific code sits in a project called Game. While the executable you use to connect to our servers is called Client. You’ll probably never guess the name of the Server executable.
Fancy names might have needed to be changed lest they cause confusion. Additionally, colorful names would make it hard to know where a piece of code was; or on what side of an interface boundary something should exist. With clearly defined lines, like Engine and Game, it gets easier to not mistakenly put player spell casting logic into the Network project.
Obviously every game is going to be different; but our technology at Carbine is broken down along 3 boundaries: Clients, Servers and Tools. The clients are things like our patcher, the game client itself and, strangely enough, our UI editor. The servers are made up of all the processes necessary to handle the back end of things, and the tools are all the tools we use to both make the game, and support customers once the game is running.
We had a simple terrain and model renderer first; a couple months later we had a basic server that let us run around and see each other. We then started layering in all of our complexities. At Carbine features are always added to both the client and the servers at the same time, usually by the same programmer.
After all, you will be able to feel the whole engine by yourself when the game is launched. At that time, the wildstar power leveling will be very popular because too many lazy players will let others level for themselves.