00:06I'm the senior brand manager for the EverQuest franchise. Welcome to the round table. With me today is lead building
00:13and UI designer, Jake Sons.
00:15So we asked the question, which of our tools in Landmark needs a little bit of love or are you
00:21having a difficult time with any of them? So why did we ask this question?
00:24Well, in the team internally, we don't really have a good outside view because we've been so focused on everything
00:32internally, we don't know where the player base is at.
00:35So every once in a while we like to ask these questions and take a poll and see if there's
00:39any glaring errors that we're missing or we're overlooking.
00:43Just basically making sure that because we're so used to using tools in so many different iterations of them that
00:49we don't miss anything.
00:50Exactly.
00:50And so what did the poll say? What did you take away from that?
00:55I was shocked at how even everything was. I thought for sure somebody was going to be like, you guys
00:59missed this one thing right here.
01:01I can't believe you screwed this up. But no, everybody's like pretty happy with what everybody has like feedback of
01:07where things are.
01:08But it's not laser focused on one thing. It's kind of spread out across anything, which is which is really
01:12good.
01:13Right. And I mean, it's to say like, we're really looking to see if if one of the tools needed
01:18more work than the others, right?
01:20Right. Right.
01:20And so in your blog posts, you talk a little bit about tweak mode. Can you tell us a little
01:24bit about that?
01:25Yeah, tweak mode was born out of a problem that we had with pasting large volumes, like pasting things from
01:31copy paste or from placing a template.
01:33And the issue is that in 3D space, it's really difficult to tell where exactly the thing that you're placing
01:38is going to be because it's attached to your mouse cursor.
01:40And as your mouse cursor moves around the 3D world, you can't get a good like sense of like, yeah,
01:44you can't look around the sides and things like that.
01:47That's precisely the problem is you can't look around the sides. So the only way to do that was to
01:51detach the preview from the mouse cursor.
01:54So that's what we do. When you hold down shift and click, the preview cursor will stay in the world
01:59at its current location.
02:00And then you can rotate around it and like inspect exactly where everything is. And then you can adjust it.
02:05When you do that, you have the same translate handles that you have on the prop tool.
02:10So you can translate it or rotate it and you have a little menu that lists out all the different
02:14things that you can do.
02:14And when you've adjusted it or tweaked it and exactly where you want to go, you hit OK and then
02:19it's committed.
02:20Yeah. And this is going to help people like me, I think a lot. So I'm always like off by
02:23one.
02:24Right. You know, just a little bit because, you know, I'm pretty terrible at building.
02:28Well, it's a difficult thing to do. You can't see everything from every angle.
02:31Yeah. Yeah. And so one of the other things I noticed a lot and not just on the round table
02:36question, but everywhere we see it is a request for more tools.
02:40Specifically one that was asked for or is asked for a lot is the cylinder tool.
02:44Yeah. And so where are we on that? What do we think about that?
02:46We actually have kind of like an internal debate on the team right now where there's a camp that really
02:50wants a cylinder tool.
02:51And there's a camp that says we've got all the tools that you can use to make a cylinder.
02:56Why do we need to add more? Because it is kind of a slippery slope.
02:59As we add the cylinder tool, then what's to stop us from adding, you know, four or five other tools?
03:03Yeah. A hexagon tool.
03:04Right. Exactly. We don't want to overwhelm you with things that you have the ability to do already.
03:08So on the other hand, we don't want to take too many steps to create a cylinder.
03:14Like if someone was new to the game and they don't know how to use all these different tools in
03:18conjunction with each other,
03:19they might not find a cylinder. So it's weighing these two different camps and trying to figure out exactly where
03:24we want to lie on that one.
03:26Yeah. And one of the argument points that I've heard internally that really resonated with me is if we had
03:33these like super specialized tools,
03:35players may never have discovered micro voxels.
03:38And, you know, like I'd love you to tell us a little bit about what those are because they took
03:41us completely by surprise.
03:43Yeah. We didn't know that the game could do this at all.
03:45And what it is is when you have a voxel and you continually smooth it down, it gets smaller and
03:50smaller into like this really teeny size.
03:52And once you have this teeny voxel, you can use it to make really detailed and intricate patterns that we
03:59didn't know that the system could handle something that finely detailed.
04:02Yeah. And players had been sort of requesting, you know, the ability to do more detailed work.
04:07Right.
04:08And, you know, our tool just wasn't, you know, allowing for it, but, you know, they found a way to
04:12make it work.
04:13They did, yeah.
04:13Right. And so, you know, one argument is if we stay with these more general tools, people will find ways
04:18to use them that we never would have.
04:20Right. And that will, you know, spur our development forward.
04:23Right. We want to have tools that people can experiment with that don't do just one specific thing, but have
04:29lots of uses.
04:30And so that's really what's kind of spurring this debate.
04:33And like you said, we love that people are playing around with these and the things that they're discovering are
04:38just seriously blowing our minds.
04:41Yeah. Yeah. And so what's next for the building and UI team? What are you guys working on in the
04:46short term?
04:46Well, in the short term, we're going to continue to look at all the tools that we have and continue
04:49to polish them and focus on each one tool at a time and make iterations on those until they're like
04:56super easy to use and flawless.
04:58And from there, we're just going to listen to the community and see what they're saying about that and which
05:03direction they want to go.
05:04Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, like this question was one of those first requests for feedback.
05:08And, you know, certainly through Twitter, through Roundtable, through a lot of different ways, you'll see us asking for more
05:13of these.
05:14So, you know, thank you very much for joining us, Jake.
05:16And thank you guys for helping us out with the Roundtable.
05:18Thanks, guys.
05:19We'll see you next time.
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