FreejackeR
12-14-2007, 00:36
Developer Profile: Demetrius Comes (Director of Technology)
Hi I’m Demetrius Comes and I am the technical director for Stargate worlds.
DC: I got involved with Stargate worlds threw previous technical director.
Chris Klug (Creative Director): He and I worked on Earth & Beyond at Westwood, he has been looking I guess to move on from where he had been working at Chicago, heard about us.
DC:He then let me know that the studio head was Dan Ellgren and the creative director is Chris Klug and these are guys I’ve worked with before, have pretty high respect for so I made myself available, immediately interested me to say hey I wouldn’t mind coming over and the rest is as they say is history.
CK: Well Demetrius is know as someone who is always honest and says what he thinks that’s my main memory of him at Westwood, is being in meeting with him and he would say the thing that other people where trying slot under the rug a little bit so that’s a good thing.
DC: I have to admit I wasn’t, I didn’t watch Stargate on a religious basis but I loved the movie but didn’t, properly cause It started on show time that I kinda lost it after the movie then when it came back to Sci-fi I was a little out of date with it so I wasn’t following it that well, but I’ve actually watched now up to season 8 and just huge fan now absolutely love it now I cannot wait to see what our creative team can do with comes incredible scene content that we can grow on its just going to be awesome.
DC: week in and week out responsibilities are to manage the engineering team to direct the technical direction of the game to help the team stay at a high level implement systems that help our customer and our customers are Art and Gameplay our customers says I need a system that can do abilities its my job to work with my guys and go well that same system that we built for abilities could possible also used for mission for items lets try to build one flexible system so that we can more quickly help our customer get up and running instead of trying to build four systems one for each one of those therefore it takes four times as longer to build it, that sort of thing that’s one of the responsibilities for us is the day to day management and task prioritizations and I still code on the project cause get grumpy if I can’t code.
Jason Bucher (Lead Gameplay Engineer): Not only is he very intelligent knows a lot about engineering and has a lot of experience he’s also not one of those managers that like to distance themselves from a process he like to get down into the trenches he likes to be aware of what sort of architectural changes the engineers want to make overall he’s just likes to be involved.
DC: The team benefits from having people who that are extraordinary passionate about building an MMO that is for lack of a better word right they really do have a passion wanting to make sure that what we are doing is best for the player best for our content team and is best for our artists they really believe its our job to build the canvass and then turn it over to the artists to produce the best painting or to build the best canvass and turn that over to world builders to put the world together on it there really passionate about building the best canvass they can not what’s on the canvass and I think that’s a important distinction for an engineering team.
JB: We where always laughing about something it seems.
DC: The hardest part proberly spans right now getting my head wrapped around how big this thing game actually is I’ve been here roughly 45 days now and am still drinking from the proverbial fire hose if you will of trying to get my head wrapped around everything that’s going on and try to get things flowing in a direction that they need be flowing in.
DC: From my prospective Stargate makes a excellent MMO because the seed data that has been left by the writers of the show they have all these like really interesting worlds that they have taken us to threw out the series in the movie and theirs every single on of those worlds we could build out because you can’t do it in half hour to an hour TV show To build it out as deeply as we can you see the tallona in the series now about three or four times maybe we going to take that and build that completely out and fill in the back story and understand what’s going on the Goa’uld is pretty well talked about in the series but we can go even deeper than that, the asguard there part of the show there is some interaction there but we can take it some much more deeper than the show simply cause we can take section of those piece and build the out really deep and make an immersion game play.
DC: The thing am looking forward to most is getting into beta the excitement goes around getting a product to a least closed beta and getting it out there so people start getting feedback watching the boards for me being a technical geek I love that portion of going from your alpha content to your beta content because that’s when all of the cracks in the dam start showing up that’s when you get to find out how good actually did cause things work great when you have a 100 people on sever when you start putting 5000 on the server all kinda of things can show up and its technically challenging and addictive at that point because the problems come up and your really get to test how quickly and how maneuverable you’ve built the system you find out something is a problem you immediately identify how much flexibility you allow yourself in that system so you can address the problem as quickly as possible and move on to what ever the next issue is going to be its a lot of thinking on your feet and I think its a lot and I enjoy that section of the scale of process a lot not as much as ship but cause shipping the game is always nice too.
Transcription by FreejackeR. (no connection with CME, just a forum member)
Source Stargate worlds Developer Podcast Demetrius Comes
Link:http://www.stargateworlds.com/download/11/598/
FreejackeR -out.
Hi I’m Demetrius Comes and I am the technical director for Stargate worlds.
DC: I got involved with Stargate worlds threw previous technical director.
Chris Klug (Creative Director): He and I worked on Earth & Beyond at Westwood, he has been looking I guess to move on from where he had been working at Chicago, heard about us.
DC:He then let me know that the studio head was Dan Ellgren and the creative director is Chris Klug and these are guys I’ve worked with before, have pretty high respect for so I made myself available, immediately interested me to say hey I wouldn’t mind coming over and the rest is as they say is history.
CK: Well Demetrius is know as someone who is always honest and says what he thinks that’s my main memory of him at Westwood, is being in meeting with him and he would say the thing that other people where trying slot under the rug a little bit so that’s a good thing.
DC: I have to admit I wasn’t, I didn’t watch Stargate on a religious basis but I loved the movie but didn’t, properly cause It started on show time that I kinda lost it after the movie then when it came back to Sci-fi I was a little out of date with it so I wasn’t following it that well, but I’ve actually watched now up to season 8 and just huge fan now absolutely love it now I cannot wait to see what our creative team can do with comes incredible scene content that we can grow on its just going to be awesome.
DC: week in and week out responsibilities are to manage the engineering team to direct the technical direction of the game to help the team stay at a high level implement systems that help our customer and our customers are Art and Gameplay our customers says I need a system that can do abilities its my job to work with my guys and go well that same system that we built for abilities could possible also used for mission for items lets try to build one flexible system so that we can more quickly help our customer get up and running instead of trying to build four systems one for each one of those therefore it takes four times as longer to build it, that sort of thing that’s one of the responsibilities for us is the day to day management and task prioritizations and I still code on the project cause get grumpy if I can’t code.
Jason Bucher (Lead Gameplay Engineer): Not only is he very intelligent knows a lot about engineering and has a lot of experience he’s also not one of those managers that like to distance themselves from a process he like to get down into the trenches he likes to be aware of what sort of architectural changes the engineers want to make overall he’s just likes to be involved.
DC: The team benefits from having people who that are extraordinary passionate about building an MMO that is for lack of a better word right they really do have a passion wanting to make sure that what we are doing is best for the player best for our content team and is best for our artists they really believe its our job to build the canvass and then turn it over to the artists to produce the best painting or to build the best canvass and turn that over to world builders to put the world together on it there really passionate about building the best canvass they can not what’s on the canvass and I think that’s a important distinction for an engineering team.
JB: We where always laughing about something it seems.
DC: The hardest part proberly spans right now getting my head wrapped around how big this thing game actually is I’ve been here roughly 45 days now and am still drinking from the proverbial fire hose if you will of trying to get my head wrapped around everything that’s going on and try to get things flowing in a direction that they need be flowing in.
DC: From my prospective Stargate makes a excellent MMO because the seed data that has been left by the writers of the show they have all these like really interesting worlds that they have taken us to threw out the series in the movie and theirs every single on of those worlds we could build out because you can’t do it in half hour to an hour TV show To build it out as deeply as we can you see the tallona in the series now about three or four times maybe we going to take that and build that completely out and fill in the back story and understand what’s going on the Goa’uld is pretty well talked about in the series but we can go even deeper than that, the asguard there part of the show there is some interaction there but we can take it some much more deeper than the show simply cause we can take section of those piece and build the out really deep and make an immersion game play.
DC: The thing am looking forward to most is getting into beta the excitement goes around getting a product to a least closed beta and getting it out there so people start getting feedback watching the boards for me being a technical geek I love that portion of going from your alpha content to your beta content because that’s when all of the cracks in the dam start showing up that’s when you get to find out how good actually did cause things work great when you have a 100 people on sever when you start putting 5000 on the server all kinda of things can show up and its technically challenging and addictive at that point because the problems come up and your really get to test how quickly and how maneuverable you’ve built the system you find out something is a problem you immediately identify how much flexibility you allow yourself in that system so you can address the problem as quickly as possible and move on to what ever the next issue is going to be its a lot of thinking on your feet and I think its a lot and I enjoy that section of the scale of process a lot not as much as ship but cause shipping the game is always nice too.
Transcription by FreejackeR. (no connection with CME, just a forum member)
Source Stargate worlds Developer Podcast Demetrius Comes
Link:http://www.stargateworlds.com/download/11/598/
FreejackeR -out.