SOE Live Player Studio Panel

Player Studio panel starting…

Recap of info that has been posted so far.

[Editor’s Note: E-mail just received from SOE “Player Studio Now Accepting Game Item Submissions”]

From Submission to game
* Submission
*Evaluation
* Paperwork
* Art Finishing
* Item Design
* Item Creation
* Placement into world
* Testing
* Merchandising in Station Cash store
* Deployment scheduling
* Deployment
* Free item delivery [to creator] * Quarterly payments in US $ by mail

covic and Gnobrin talking.

* Cloaks

If this is successful, we want to open up to more advanced items.

The categories of items we have now — housing items for EQ2, cloaks, etc. are not the only categories we’re going to have. These are just the initial categories. We haven’t identified what we are going to roll out next but we’re going to discuss it.

Some exclusive categories will be mentioned in the Keynote.

Talking about the software players need to make 2D and 3D items. 3D Max, Maya, Blendr.

Talking about increasing the types of items that people can make.

Q: Will there be variable pricing?
A: We talked to Community Council yesterday and got some great feedback and are rethinking some things on pricing.

The EQ2 Marketplace will have a separate tab for PlayerStudio items.

Q: Are there any computers set up here to try out PlayerStudio?
A: From 11-12, we’re having a PlayerStudio Workshop in the ballroom.

[Editor’s Note: A lot of the questions would have been answered if people read the PlayerStudio website. 🙁 Making items is not easy and will require a lot of patience and reading websites full of info. Going to the forums and saying “Please tell me how to do this” isn’t going to work. *boggle*]

Q: Can we create avatars for dungeon maker?
A: (not something we have the tools for yet)

Q: I’ve already designed a cloak in 3D Studio Max. However I can’t see the effects of the diffuse and specular maps. Can you provide a tool of how it looks rendered in the EQ2 engine?
A: The tool we use is Composer that simulates how items look in-game. We want to provide something like that tool for players.

Q: ProSieben/Europe question.
A: Buying items won’t matter where the item was made. But the country where the artist is from matters. It comes down to tax laws and reporting income for the designers. Paperwork. Compliance with privacy laws. Rolling out other countries will happen over time. Some European countries are harder than others.

Q: How does the wildly different value of StationCash due to promotions, etc. affect how much money the playerstudio author gets?
A: We actually know how much we are earning, not just how much StationCash they spent. We are going based on the actual value of the money we received and sharing 40% of that.

Question about us making character animations. This is hard enough for devs with all the different races male and female and trying to get animations not to clip through an arm through your head, etc.

Lengthy discussion about players creating character animations. Right now, there is no way for animations to be overridden by equipping a certain item. [Probably a long term thing]

If you are preparing a submission and there are special factors you want to bring to the attention of the dev team, use the comments box at the bottom of the submission form. Let’s say you are making furniture for a house and you made a pot-bellied stove. You can tell the devs, in the bottom there should be a fire animation where the coals are. That’s something PS designers can’t make but they can ask devs to add to the item before putting it in-game.

Showing and spinning around a chair model in 3D.

Q: Can I download a file and start making armor for frogloks, ratonga, etc.

[Editor’s Note: The amount of work required for the EQ2 team to do this is indescribably huge. The armor snap-on system will take a tremendous amount of explanation and documentation for designers to grasp. Armor has to be made for all the races in both male and female edition.]

Gnobrin: We don’t create armor sets for specific races. We make armor for every race. On Frogloks, Sarnak, etc. pieces have to be shaped totally different. It is a hellish jigsaw puzzle to UV map all the pieces for all the races. Even as I have been doing this for a long time and I still miss things.

SmokeJumper: Maybe we can make items that are specific races and gender. We don’t; know if we can do it, we have to talk about it.

On future games, we are building this into the design. When EQ, EQ2, Vanguard, etc. launched, we had no idea that we might want to do this. But new games are being built to support PlayerStudio.

Q: When a player submits an item, after we do all the work to make it as an in-game item, do you submit it back to the player for approval?
A: No.

(totally off topic question about Star Wars Galaxies and a server glitch messing up someone’s house items?)

Q: I understand there’s a 2,000 polygon limit on items. Does this mean we’ll never have snap-to-fit doors?
[Editor’s Note: Polygons are the number of triangles or shapes within a shape. It does not affect the size or fit of an item. An item with 2,000 polygons can be 2 inches long or 20 feet long.

Q: Will we be able to create our own spell effects?
A: Definitely no because that would be really cool. I can guarantee you would blow our framerates out of the water with incredibly detailed stuff. Particle effects is not something we’ve discussed. The spell effects in EQ2 are all code.

Q: Can you make building blocks and put them on the marketplace?
A: Yes. Absolutely. Just make sure the item is unique and not the same as an existing in-game item.

(during the panel, a dev from FreeRealms is making a Valentine’s Day chair in a 3D modeler.

Seasonal items should be submitted months in advance to allow enough review and revision time to get them done in time for the holiday. Maybe July for a Halloween event?

Q: If a player submits a chair of a certain color, will SOE make different versions of that chair in different colors?
A: No.
Q: Do PS artists need to submit an item in every color they need?
A: Yes. There are legal reasons why SOE and other players can’t take someone else’s design and just recolor it. (SOE will be watching out for ripped off items)

It’s important that designers come up with a unique name.identity.

Q: Can we make an item that players can pick in different colors?
A: No. You need to submit items in all the popular colors that people will want. Color makes a big difference in what works and what doesn’t in popularity.

Q: Can we use any of SOE’s built-in textures to create our items? Some of those textures are great.
A: We want you to use your own textures. There’s also a concern about grabbing textures from other games. You can use our textures as inspiration, but we expect you to come up with original stuff. We aren’t going to use your stuff either.

Q: Can we have improvements to the StationCash store interface to handle all these items?
A: Yes we want to look at this.

END OF PANEL