In this issue of the Dev Diary, James Casey takes us through the blood, sweat and tears of one of 1.1's most exciting new features: Player statues!


Who’s the Man (or Woman)?
The central theme of WAR is well, just that: war.  It’s everywhere.  Defending your realm and taking the fight to the enemy requires blood, sweat, and tears.  Players in WAR are rewarded for their efforts through the accumulation of renown.  Renown gives you access to training, equipment, and abilities that show off your dedication to the cause.  But sometimes you need more; sometimes you need recognition.  After all, what good is fortune without fame? 

With that in mind, WAR tracks player accomplishments and we currently have a number of great leaderboards available on the Warhammer Herald to track your character against other characters in the Realm War.  (Check out the Realm War and Leaderboards here.)

That’s fine and dandy, but how do players in game know who’s number one?  You might know it, but it’s no fun if no-one else knows it. (If you’re like me, you like to tell them as often as possible, even if it’s being the best at dying…)  But it’s not like you can tell everyone right?  You can’t just put a statue up to yourself and have people praise you… can you? Wouldn’t it be cool if you could? We think so!

Coming in December, patch 1.1 will introduce an in-game Top Ten leaderboard system that will put up statues for the best of the best right smack down in the middle of the Cities!  But, before we go into that more, let’s talk about the blood, sweat, and tears that it took to get this system into the game.

The Blood
The desire to add in-game recognition has been an ongoing project for some time. The idea for the statues came about as a way to tie the recognition into our living cities and have it seamlessly integrate into the game and remain in-character.  To accommodate this, art was commissioned for statues of every class in game in both male and female varieties (where applicable).  With plan in hand, the artists went to work and created some great statues that look very much at home in the cities.  Check out some shots here…

From there, we needed to figure out how to set up the statues to be dynamic.  We wanted the Top Ten statues to update themselves as players clawed their way into the list or got pushed violently out.  To do that, we enlisted some clever coders to work out how we could setup a system to do this that would be self-sufficient.  The coders worked it out, but it brought us to a point where we needed some additional help pulling this off…

The Sweat
With artwork in hand and a system in place, the next step was to approach Operations: those fine folks who operate the servers and run all the back-end stuff that basically keeps the game going.  We needed a way to translate the metrics that are tracked for the server (the same ones that fuel the leaderboards on the Realm War page mentioned earlier) and make that same information available in game for our personalized statues.  

Operations worked there magic to transform the data compiled on the leaderboards and in metrics to transfer the information needed back to the servers (typically metrics are a one-way street.)  Once we were able to get that worked out with our fine folks in Operations, we were almost home free.  

We then got content to wire up the statues, which are static objects in our world, to the new dynamic code, and voila; we have a system.  Now, we just needed to test it all out, which brings us up to date basically, as the code, data, and content are now in the final stage: testing…

The Tears
Now that we’ve got a system, all that is left is the testing.  This involves putting the code and content together with the data.  It’s like a Reese’s peanut butter cup.  You’ve got your data in my code! Etc.  I think you get the image.

To test, we are taking data pulled from a live server as our test data for our internal servers.  Using this leaderboard information, we then have the new dynamic statue system read it in and modify the statues based on the current leaders.  Voila! Instant notoriety on our internal server.

Before we move to the final section and wrap up, you might be wondering why this section is called “The Tears”.  Well it boils down to two things: One, tears of sadness that we couldn’t get this to you sooner; and Two, tears of joy that such a wonderful plan has come together and will soon find it’s way into your hands.  

The Reward!
After all of this hard work, 1.1 will launch a new way for players to brag to their friends and realm-mates.  These dynamic statues will call out the best of the best and give you something to shoot for!  Plus, if your name on a statue wasn’t enough, there just might be other things in the works for players who are the best of the best.  Heck, there might even be rewards for taking out the best of the best… Bwahaha.

In any case, get cracking on your renown and you might find yourself looking at yourself in statue form very soon!