monumental
11-09-09, 11:13
MotoGP 0910
Leaderboards
Following up the discussion on Leaderboads on the Podcast thread, I just wanted to talk about GP 09/10’s approach to Leaderboards and rankings.
http://www.playmotogp.com/#/podcasts
First up, let’s talk about Rankings; Microsoft, at the start of our development cycle had the notional concept of ‘Ranked’ games, but there were a number of limitations, which for me made them less favourable.
The main problem is that it divided the online pool into two, which distinctly meant that if you created a ranked game, then those searching for unranked games would never find you and vice versa. This felt wrong for GP as when you enter into the online arena you want to find as many online games as possible and get many players into single session.
The other problem is that there was no real, ‘understandable’ way to display your rank; it was basically some long number which had no meaning (unlike GP2 overall leader board ranking or the seed in MG3). So we decided not to use Microsoft’s ranking system and focus more on the leader boards. This is what Tom (Lead designer) means when he referred to there being no real way to display your ‘rank’.
So let’s talk about the cool things we are doing with Leaderboards. First up, Ticker-Tape boards. This is a system where at the top of the screen, you get a constant feed of all your friends lap times, cycling along the top. Wherever you are in the front-end, you can always keep an eye on those times. So if Mush, or Walken happen to beat you in Losail, you will get an opportunity to spot that while you’re doing ‘stuff’ in the career mode. This is a really cool feature because as soon as you put the disk in the game, you’re being bombarded with leader board times.
Next up is Ghost Leaderboards, which you may have heard me mention in some of the articles that went around at Gamecom. The basic idea is that the top times on each track can upload there (Ghost times), which other players can download.
Nothing new there I here you cry!
Well, hold on a moment, we taking Ghost leaderboards much further. Firstly with a ‘Worlds Best times’, this is the top 10 times from around the world, which also include ‘Monthly Times’. These times allow most players the chance to upload a Ghost to track and then permits their friends download it. This is because it was rinsed once a month, always giving players the opportunity to have fresh monthly battles. The ‘World Best Times’ focus on players getting the best ghost times possible.
Yeah...but....
Wait, there’s more… In addition to the Ghosts we’re also doing an exciting feature where you can download the racing line from both these above leaderboards. This means you can see the actual breaking points and racing line which a player has taken, so you can actually learn these lines yourself.
In addition to this, we are having normal leaderboards for all the tracks and special ‘time left’ leaderboards for arcade mode. This means that there is going to be total of 300+ leaderboards when you take into account all of the different class, track, leaderboard type permutations.
Finally, we also loading these leaderboards into all the track select screens, so you can see your friends Leaderboard times as you’re cycling through the track selection.
There’s fair amount of other things we would like to do, but at the moment I’m trying to push 2.5l into 1.5l bottle. Rest assured we are reading and listing, and I am pushing and choosing which battles to fight on the development front.
Leaderboards
Following up the discussion on Leaderboads on the Podcast thread, I just wanted to talk about GP 09/10’s approach to Leaderboards and rankings.
http://www.playmotogp.com/#/podcasts
First up, let’s talk about Rankings; Microsoft, at the start of our development cycle had the notional concept of ‘Ranked’ games, but there were a number of limitations, which for me made them less favourable.
The main problem is that it divided the online pool into two, which distinctly meant that if you created a ranked game, then those searching for unranked games would never find you and vice versa. This felt wrong for GP as when you enter into the online arena you want to find as many online games as possible and get many players into single session.
The other problem is that there was no real, ‘understandable’ way to display your rank; it was basically some long number which had no meaning (unlike GP2 overall leader board ranking or the seed in MG3). So we decided not to use Microsoft’s ranking system and focus more on the leader boards. This is what Tom (Lead designer) means when he referred to there being no real way to display your ‘rank’.
So let’s talk about the cool things we are doing with Leaderboards. First up, Ticker-Tape boards. This is a system where at the top of the screen, you get a constant feed of all your friends lap times, cycling along the top. Wherever you are in the front-end, you can always keep an eye on those times. So if Mush, or Walken happen to beat you in Losail, you will get an opportunity to spot that while you’re doing ‘stuff’ in the career mode. This is a really cool feature because as soon as you put the disk in the game, you’re being bombarded with leader board times.
Next up is Ghost Leaderboards, which you may have heard me mention in some of the articles that went around at Gamecom. The basic idea is that the top times on each track can upload there (Ghost times), which other players can download.
Nothing new there I here you cry!
Well, hold on a moment, we taking Ghost leaderboards much further. Firstly with a ‘Worlds Best times’, this is the top 10 times from around the world, which also include ‘Monthly Times’. These times allow most players the chance to upload a Ghost to track and then permits their friends download it. This is because it was rinsed once a month, always giving players the opportunity to have fresh monthly battles. The ‘World Best Times’ focus on players getting the best ghost times possible.
Yeah...but....
Wait, there’s more… In addition to the Ghosts we’re also doing an exciting feature where you can download the racing line from both these above leaderboards. This means you can see the actual breaking points and racing line which a player has taken, so you can actually learn these lines yourself.
In addition to this, we are having normal leaderboards for all the tracks and special ‘time left’ leaderboards for arcade mode. This means that there is going to be total of 300+ leaderboards when you take into account all of the different class, track, leaderboard type permutations.
Finally, we also loading these leaderboards into all the track select screens, so you can see your friends Leaderboard times as you’re cycling through the track selection.
There’s fair amount of other things we would like to do, but at the moment I’m trying to push 2.5l into 1.5l bottle. Rest assured we are reading and listing, and I am pushing and choosing which battles to fight on the development front.