by NorseGamer, HSM Publisher

One thing that Home consumers (myself included, prior to jumping over to the development side of things) don’ t really see is just how complicated it is to get the EOD to work inside Home.

Streaming video isn’t a big deal, right? Well, it can be when you’ve got dozens of users in the same space, with LMOs, companions, outfits, dances, etc. all having to be downloaded and displayed at the same time, plus make sure every account is seeing the same synchronized video stream. This isn’t the easiest thing to pull off. And that doesn’t even take into account all the back-end stuff going on with the EOD.

Suffice it to say that while the EOD is one of Home’s most technically complex innovations, which countless users benefit from every day…it’s also probably one of the trickiest systems in Home to maintain, because the slightest change can cause quite a ripple effect.

And, from time to time, things have broken.

There is no magic button that you press to fix everything. You have to check out what’s going on in the live environment, determine the steps to reproduce, switch over to a dev kit, see if the same behavior shows up, capture the output logs, and study a lot of lines of code to see what’s going on. Then, once you find the problem, you have to figure out how to fix it. Sometimes it’s easy to identify a problem, but the solution may require a significant amount of work.

Meanwhile, in the live environment, consumers are waiting.

So, when the EOD recently malfunctioned, we decided this was a golden opportunity to give the community a small behind-the-scenes look at us fixing things in Home. Because it was late at night, after hours, and we were still there, in the office, determined to get things working before we went home.

We also decided to cover another Home discussion topic: the issue of whether or not Hollywood Hills House Night was just a reskin of the Daytime estate.

This, again, is another example of what the consumer doesn’t see. Hollywood Hills was a huge project for LOOT in 2013: a new estate, two new clubhouses, an open house, all of it spread over two different Home regions. And then we get into the logistics of not just making the lighting as photorealistic as possible, but adding in swimming (not trivial) and the ability to hear RadioIO music throughout the entire scene (*very* difficult). It is so far from being a reskin that it’s almost humorous. LOOT estates always push the bleeding edge of what’s technologically possible in Home, which means a lot of internal QA time to get everything right. And nobody better say anything about the pricing structure, since we went back and retroactively added these new features to the original daytime estate, which is one of the bestselling estates in the history of Home. Which means that a whole lot of people got free upgrades that cost us…well, let’s just say a lot of money to research and develop.

So this particular episode turned out to be quite a Home-centric one for us: EOD fixes, Hollywood Hills, introductions to basically everyone involved with Home development at LOOT, and more. It’s also a massive expansion for the show, as this episode features damn near the whole LOOT team. The first few episodes were much smaller in scale, with fewer setups, whereas now things have broadened out considerably. LOOT is still the only Home developer with an ongoing video dev diary series, and we want to show you just how zany it is to work here. Hope you enjoy the new LOOTcast!

Share

One Response to “The LOOTcast, Episode #3: Technical Difficulties”

1. scamp_73 says:

   November 23, 2013 at 3:22 pm

   Olivia has a killer gaming job and loves blueberry Pop Tarts, I think I’m in love!

   Reply