Related articles

• A look at the NPD games sales charts for the month of March 2006 tells you everything you need to know about how consoles and PCs are dividing like drifting continents, with game genres split between them like separate species. The weird hybrid of anime and Disneyland, Kingdom Hearts II, took the lead spot again in the console sales charts, with mainly action combat games - among them, mostly first-person shooters - and sports titles following. Meanwhile, the PC games chart - whose titles now sell with one-third the quantity - is dominated by simulated worlds and gothic role-playing, with the add-on Sims 2: Open for Business leading the top spot, and Sims 2 itself at #7. Interspersed among them are all the major genre franchises we've come to know, with the powerhouse World of Warcraft clinching tightly to #5, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion at #2, and Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, D&D, Age of Empires, and Civilization IV all well represented. Are PC games becoming a minor player? Not really, believes Parks Associates' Michael Cai. While that continent may continue to drift, he believes it's in a state of transformation, and may yet have its just revenge. The secret is in the online component. Consoles and console games dominate the retail market today, he explained, and because of that, they command the spotlight. But as the online business models for PC games change, away from the "per-box" retail model and more toward subscriptions, gaming-on-demand, and ad-subsidized services (more on that later), the big franchise games and role-playing simulations that are already well established on the PC side, are perhaps best suited to these models. They fit like a glove. A "blood elf" - a kind of well-endowed Darryl Hannah/Christopher Walken hybrid, due to inhabit the long-awaited Continent of the Upgrades in World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade. Welcoming the new business models to E3 this year could be an absolute blitz of PC games franchises, all of which are battling with each other for the biggest splash. I would say there's a "blizzard" ahead, but that name's been taken already. Blizzard's The Burning Crusade expansion to WoW, expected at E3, actually will create an entirely new continent, called "Outland," where one might find a new race of so-called "blood elves." (Oh, you never will believe where those Keebler cookies come from.) Meanwhile, Namco - yes, the company that introduced the world to Galaxian and Pac-Man - will actually try to knock WoW off its throne, with its much-anticipated Warhammer: Mark of Chaos. The company describes it as dealing particularly with "WAR, focusing on the armies and battles while de-emphasizing the tedious aspects of base and resource management." Which should already win this title some followers at the Defense Dept. Sticking a finger in the notion that first-person shooters are entirely migrating to console-based platforms, CryTek is likely to demonstrate its even-more-perfected rendering engine, in a demo of its upcoming sequel to Far Cry, entitled Crysis. This is the game that should prove the viability of Microsoft's DirectX 10 rendering library, due to become one of the foundation components of its upcoming Windows Vista operating system. The difference between DirectX 10 worlds and DirectX 9 worlds (for Windows XP), gamers are led to believe, will be clearly visible. But if the first-person shooter crowd is all gathering together around consoles, and if shooter games are more adapted to the retail model than the online sales model (How long can a gamer go on subscribing to the right to keep shooting down the same thing?), then could Crysis be less well received among publishers and retailers than it's likely to be among fans? This could be a bright comet of a game that burns out fairly quickly, as franchise role-playing and strategy titles such as Midway's Unreal Tournament 2007 appear well positioned to command and conquer - to borrow a phrase - the resurrected realm of PC gaming. And there's one more little thing: While fans of the Star Trek movies will happily remind you that it's generally the even-numbered films that are the best, and the odd-numbered ones that are as cursed as a red-shirted security officer in a dark cave, they'll also tell you that there has never really been a completely perfect Star Trek game, for any genre, in the last quarter-century. So the question on at least some people's minds at E3 (they'll be the ones in Starfleet uniforms) is whether Perpetual's Star Trek Online - which is likely to be previewed on Tuesday - will break this curse. Set 20 years after the last "Next Generation" movie, with slightly updated ships, set decoration, and uniforms designed under the direction of no less than Trek veteran artist Andrew Probert, the screen shots of this MMORPG look perhaps even more stunning than some of the odd-numbered films (Trek V comes to mind). But with the promise of away-team exploration of multiple worlds, and true 3D combat among fleets of starships, manned by multiple live players simultaneously, the question transcends whether this game will feel like a Trek movie, and becomes whether it places the gamer in anything resembling his understanding of the Trek universe.

• TG Daily interview: Chat with a World of Warcraft bot programmer

  Earlier this month, we ran a preview of an exclusive interview with Mercury, a developer of a World of Warcraft bot - a cheat program to accelerate the player's progress within the game. In this full interview, Mercury talks to TG Daily editor Humphrey Cheung about his motivation to create WoWglider, how it works and avoids detection, and his future plans for the bot. TG Daily: Were you an avid World of Warcraft player before writing the program - and what inspired you to write it? Mercury: Definitely. I'm one of the many lifelong Blizzard game owners out there. I started with Warcraft and have played all of their titles. When WoW was finally released, I got it immediately and I've been a fan since. The inspiration behind Glider was really what it's for now - to catch up to level 60 without spending so much real time. I'm in a small guild and my guildmates reached 60 while I was still in the mid-50's. I wanted to get to 60 as well to come along on the instance runs, but I had no time to grind it out between work and social life. When I did finally log in for a few hours on weekends, it was frustrating to see them orgranizing pickup groups for Scholomance and the Blackrock dungeons. I'd be off killing Shardtooth Bears and Crystal Rumblers solo. The original version was very unstable and simplistic, but it allowed me to get my warlock up to 60 pretty fast. My Canadian guildmates knew what I was up to and they encouraged me to turn it into a more well-rounded product so I could sell it. After I showed a few friends the rough version, they all collectively badgered me into marketing it. I promised my guildies that if I sold enough copies of Glider, I'd fly up to Toronto and buy them a round of beer, which I plan to do in January. TG Daily: Did any other programs give you inspiration or a template for developing Glider? Where did you learn the programming skills required to write the program and is Glider a full-time gig? Mercury: None in particular. I ran across a few tools that did some game automation, but nothing struck me as very professional. This was back in April, mind you, and things have changed a bit. But even then, our idea was to use my technology and my partner's marketing/design to position it as a very professional, clean app. So avoiding links to "hax0rs!!11" sites and keeping the design clean was the closest we had to a template. As for my own skills, I've been a full-time developer forever. I started with C, switched to C++ when it came out - that should date me - and just went from there. It doesn't take an enormous amount of talent to make something like this, but you do need to have a solid understanding of software development in general, like understanding business needs, prioritizing issues, source control, and so on. And, no, Glider's not a full-time gig. I've lowered my contracting hours to have more time for Glider, but it's still not making that kind of money. A big part of Glider is still the fun factor of working with the game and the users on our forums. TG Daily: How popular has Glider been? Do you have any estimates on how many times it has been downloaded? Mercury: It's been fairly popular, but not a huge, smashing success. In other words, I've never had to get more bandwidth or upgrade my small server. Without looking at the logs, and I don't want to reveal hard numbers, I'd swag it's been downloaded for evaluation around 3000 to 5000 times since the hard launch in late July 2005.

• TG Daily: One of the things I've see with bot programs is that they try to appear more human (to lessen the chance of being banned). What are some of the technical measures that Glider tries to do? Mercury: Avoiding detection is rather exciting, to be sure. Since Blizzard does not want bots running at all, it's a violation to use them. Detection is cleanly divided into two methods: software and human. Avoiding human detection is fairly difficult because, let's face it, if another player gives Glider a Turing test in the game, it's not human. Rather than attack that problem at its strength (I'm a big Art of War fan), Glider tries to attack it at its weakness by not causing a player to become curious at all. We try to add little mannerisms here and there, like jumps and random strafing and bits of randomness to combat. For instance, if you tell Glider to use the Bloodrage skill with your warrior, it will sometimes use it before shooting the gun, sometimes after. If it's charging, it'll sometimes use it after the charge - and sometimes not at all. We try our best to make it not set off that first curious look from another player, but it's very difficult. Of course, a good part of avoiding player detection is, ironically, detecting players. Just like if it was your 10-year old nephew, Glider will alert you if there is another player following around for too long. So you can configure to play a sound clip at high volume so you can come and investigate - or simply log off. When it comes to suspensions or bans, discretion is more than just the better part of valor. TG Daily: How difficult is it to stay one step ahead of Blizzard? Also, can you empathize with the GMs who try to catch botters? Mercury: Staying one step ahead of Blizzard is just about impossible because you never know what they're going to do next. The technical nature of the game is that the Warden, which is where Blizzard's hack-detection code lives, is dynamically updated. The code itself doesn't even exist in the game client, but is sent down when you connect, just like your spellbook is. Given that agility and the fact that the game can update any time on a regular or hotfix patch, it's tricky. With all of the focus on the Warden lately, it wouldn't surprise me at all if Blizzard decided to bury a few simple checks in the game code itself. Some clever engineering would make that virtually impossible to find, as nobody can disassemble the entire enormous game client. XOR a few values together to make disassemblers miss the pointer reference and you've got some very stealthy flag-setting happening in the guts of, say, an item trade. So we have to make sure that Glider won't get picked up by anything that simple, which means we can't do a lot of things, like putting code into the game directly or altering its data structures. For us, staying ahead is really about the business decisions for Blizzard. What we do is figure out what's easy for them to detect, such as by changing a simple parameter in the Warden or adding a small bit of code. Then we make sure Glider is not detected as passively as possible, such as using regular Windows security to limit the game's access or randomizing process names. The trick here is that Blizzard has a finite amount of development and test resources, so we want to make it bad business to spend that much time altering their detection code to find Glider, since Glider's negative effect on the game is debatable. A number of people, including myself, are still playing WoW and have even activated second accounts solely because of the opportunity to use Glider to create a level 60 character of another class. When the Blizzard project managers sit down with the issues list, we want Glider to slip down the list behind other work. The bottom line is that Blizzard can detect anything that's available to the public with enough effort, since they control the client. So rather than attack that strength, we attack the weakness and try to make it a bad idea or make their changes very risky, since they don't want to risk banning or crashing innocent customers. As for GM's, it must be an interesting part of their jobs. Being a WoW GM seems like it would be one of the toughest jobs in the world, since they're effectively a level 1 help desk for gamers - and playing a game that they probably love. I imagine a GM has a little more fun when shadowing a suspected botter than simply helping someone get their lost Arcanite Bars back. I know I would. We don't see them as "the cops" or "the enemy" or anything like that. They're just guys doing their jobs.