As you've probably read, seven fansite operators were recently invited to visit Westwood in Las Vegas. Now this is quite a journey for me as I live in the UK. My trip started off on Tuesday, 31st July at around 10am when I got the train down to London. I was at the airport by 14:00, after an hour long journey on the London Underground -which was pretty boring to be honest. After queueing for over an hour, I finally checked in and had a bite to eat before setting off on the seven hour flight to Newark, NJ. Pretty average flight really, I'd already seen the decent films that were being shown, and the chap sat next to me didn't speak English - so I listened to my MD player, and carried on reading my latest book - Last Light, by Andy McNab. The flight from Newark to Las Vegas was pretty unevenful too, I did manage to get some sleep on it, and watched a shockingly bad film called 'Big Fat Liar' - this had to be the most predictable film ever. As we approached Las Vegas, it was 22:30, and the pilot flew us over The Strip, where I marvelled at the site that would be my living quarters for the next three nights - The Luxor. The first thing that shocked me as I disembarked the plane was the instant gambling opportunities - within metres of the plane were slot machines, hundreds of them! I had been told about this, but I didn't visualise it until now. After a brief walk, I found my driver to take me to The Luxor. To my pleasant surprise, the car I was in was a limo, the first time I'd ever been in one.

After a brief drive to the hotel, I checked in and headed to my room. Now if you haven't been to The Luxor before, this place is incredible. It's a huge black pyramid, with one of the (if not, the) brightest lights in the world on top. So bright, that it's visible from space, and if you were to go into the same room as the lights, you'd be fried alive! Inside, the whole place is styled like ancient Egypt. My room was in one of the towers, and was pretty large - again, styled like ancient Egypt. I decided to get some sleep, and after my long journey that was no problem at all :)

Next day, I woke up around 5am (thanks to my messed up body clock). After watching some quality early morning US TV, I headed down for a large all-you-can-eat buffet breakfast. A successful stuffing lead to a the start of my discovery of how amazing/weird/diverse Las Vegas really is. I left the hotel around 8am, deciding to walk down The Strip and take in the sites. Even at that time of day, it was about 95F, and being from the UK this weather is pretty unusual for me ;) The walk down The Strip was pretty incredible, the amount of money lost here must be enormous to pay for all these places. By the time I got back to the hotel, I was pretty tired still and slept most of the afternoon.

At 19:00 I took the short walk down to Gameworks to meet with the Westwood guys, and the other webmasters. Whilst queuing to find out where they were I met OmnicronX, the webbie from OmnicronX. The lady at the desk didn't seem to know what was going on, and just left us by the bar to find our own way to the Westwood party. Fortunately, I knew what they look like, so I quickly went up and introduced myself to Craig "Arcturus" Elliot, Jennifer "Niobe" Lane, and Chris Klug - one of the lead content designers, who is working on the developing storyline that we'll be seeing once the game goes live. At this time, I also met Ulyydian, from the IIA, and Gwaendel, from Beyond EnB. We were all given two hour playing cards for Gameworks, but fortunately they are valid for three years, because I didn't use mine one bit - I was just chatting all night. Pretty soon, Lord Of Dreams from Stratics came along and introductions went all around again. By this time we were chatting away about Earth and Beyond, computer science degrees, legalising marijuana, foreigners, languages, prostitution and a whole load more :) We also got to talk to Chris about the new items that had appeared in the patch the day before, and their naming conventions. Along came Maria "Cerdith" Hamilton, and we all introduced ourselves and got into more discussions about empowered users, in-game reporters, EA's legal department, the release date, and loads more. Now one from Universal Earth and Beyond had a longer flight than me, and had slept in the afternoon, but didn't wake up! After a phone call from Arcturus, he came along and we all introduced ourselves again. A few people went off to use their Gameworks card, and Ulyydian 0wnz0r3d Niobe at air hockey. However, I was getting pretty hungry by then, so grabbed some of the food we'd been provided and knocked back some more Coke (I did say it was damn hot, didn't I?). At around 23:00, the Westwood guys headed off and the rest of us stayed on to chat for longer - discussing why we started our sites, our thoughts on Earth and Beyond and how we think it could be improved, other RPG games, and how Sony are being stupid in the Star Wars Galaxies community. We all headed back around midnight, and I went straight off to sleep ready for the day we had ahead of us.

The next morning we all got picked up by a limo, but we were missing a person... TreKain, from Maps By Trekain hadn't arrived until 22:30 the night before so didn't go to Gameworks. As such, he didn't know we were meeting at a different entrance, so was waiting around the front of The Luxor. After a few calls by our driver, we drove around and picked him up and went through the whole introductions thing again :) We all got chatting again, this time about US TV if I recall correctly. After a 15 minute drive we arrived at Westwood. "Head through the blue doors", instructed the driver - it was like something out of Alice in Wonderland. After walking through the blue doors, we were met by Niobe and Craig again and taken through to the demo room where we collected some goodies and dropped our stuff off (most people were actually leaving at the end of the day, so had all their bags with them). Now began the tour - first let it be said, the walls of Westwood Studios are 'interesting' to say the least, with various greens, purples, and other non- coordinated colours. Apparently, this is a zone thing, to help you find your way around the building. First up various corridors with all the Westwood games along the wall - even those from the C64 days. We headed along, bumping into various Westwood staff along the way, including Brian Heins - once of the main guys responsible for all the new items going into the game. We also got to have a look around at some of the fantastic toys that the staff had, this place was very well decorated! Round the corner and there's Cerdith answering a few of the hundreds of emails they get, she'll be joining us later. We get a brief glimpse of the server programmer's slave area, where they're chained up 24 hours a day to provide us with the gaming pleasure that we all know and love, and poke our faces into Eric Wang's office (although he wasn't there at the time). Off we head to the QA room, past the official Westwood basketball court. This is where we got our first glimpse into the next patch, but the best was yet to come. Next up was the Westwood studio, where they record all their video, and motion capture film. It's basically a huge blue-screen room, but impressive none the less. Up a few stairs, and we're at the Westwood prop room - every single prop for the Westwood games are stored here, from the stillsuits from Dune, to all the hats from C&C uniforms! We all laughed about how much money we could make on EBay, but sadly it was all behind lock and key. Down some more stairs, and we get to see the huge workshop where a lot of the props are made. We were told that some of the props are bought from prop suppliers, but a lot are made in-house, and this was where they made them.

That was pretty much it for the tour, so we went back to the demo room and had some breakfast. This was where the really interesting stuff began, as the first of the day's demos began. This time with one of the lead content designers, John Comes. John showed us the Earth and Beyond sector editor, which is the tool they use to create sectors, add scripted items to objects, add random spawns etc. One of the cool things about this is that you run it with a local server - as you update the sector in the editor, the game updates itself. This allowed us to see the immediate effect of John putting Earth within metres of Neptune. We also saw how they create random spawns of mobs, allowing you to generate a cuboid that x number of mobs can spawn in at a time, in groups of however many is chosen. One of the real eye openers was learning that each sector alone takes one man-month to produce. After showing us the way the sector editor works, John went on to show us possibly one of the coolest things in the game - one of the enormous events that we'll be seeing more of in the live game. We've all heard about Nathan Zhao, the level 168 Red Dragon. Up until now, noone has actually defeated him. Well, upon his destruction you can 'loot' his escape capsule at hand him into the authorities at (IIRC) Earth High Command. You get to have a good long chat with an NPC, who at first doesn't believe you have him, but once they scan you they get very excited. Now the real fun begins - you're going to need 40-50 very high level players to complete this next part as a huge Red Dragon capital ship and fleet wormhole in. The Earth NPCs get worried and invite you to attack the capital ship as it starts blasting away. The battle is huge, with LOTS of ships zooming round, and the capital ship is incredibly well shielded. I wish I could remember more of the details, because these sort of events are really why I signed up to test this game. Fortunately on the dev server, there's a /kill command, so we didn't all need to fight it out :)

It was now time for some more food, and joining us was executive producer, Eric "Radrac" Wang. Eric gave us the chance to ask him a load of questions about the game, including some cool things that would allow fansites to have information on the game such as total players online, etc. In a random brain-fart, I also suggested to Eric that it would be cool to allow us to 'suit up' and take our avatar into space - possibly to repair our hulls manually. I've no idea why I thought of that (nor why I even opened my mouth and said it!), but he said it hadn't been suggested before. I also spoke to Eric about possible expansions for E&B. It's something they know they will have, but they really haven't thought too much into it with regards to what might be in them. The night before, we'd been talking about making our avatar have a more involved role in the game - so that we could land on planets and build houses perhaps. We suggested this to him, and he seemed interested in the concept. A lot of the new content will be provided online, and the limit to where they would need to release an expansion is where a download would be several hundred megabytes - so we can expect a lot of new content even before the first expansion pack comes out. Continuing with the story conversation, we also spoke about how player activity will affect the evolving storyline - ie, will prominent players perhaps get involved in the storyline to the point where they are featured in it? Eric seemed keen on having the game like this, but we later discovered from Chris Klug - one of the lead content designers I believe - that due to technical limitations this was not possible as the storyline needs to be the same on all the servers.

After some more chatting, we had a presentation from Naty Hoffman regarding the particle engine used for the effects in the game. These include the beam, missile, shield, and engine effects, and the flexibility of his tools are incredible. The artists who use it can generate pretty much any type of particle effect they want, as well as overlaying them. We got to see what the new psionic shield looked like, which is far less annoying that the previous version (you can actually see with it on :) Different types of particles can be moved in different ways. For example, the missiles can follow an arc, a spiral, or a straight line very easily. What was interesting was Naty's description of how the client knows which explosion to show. For example, if a missile misses its target then the screen shows the missile overshooting and exploding away from the target. Essentially the client sends a packet to the server saying you've fired at the selected target, and the server does a 'dice roll' to see whether you hit or not. The server then sends pack another packet telling the client to show the appropriate graphics. Naty played around with some of the in-game effects, showing us some that are not currently in the game right now, or have not been attached to an object. The ease of use of his effects tools allow the artists great flexibility in their creations, which is why we are now seeing much nicer effects (such as the newer engine trails). I asked Naty about why they chose Direct3D over OpenGL, and he basically said it was about driver support - they wanted the game to be able to run on as many machines as possible, and the Direct3D support in older drivers is much better than the earlier OpenGL support. Naty also explained that although there were currently no DirectX 8 effects in the game (pixel and vertex shaders, bump mapping, etc.), he said they would very possibly go into a future expansion pack. Personally I think bump mapping would be superb on the planets and the ships.

Next up on the agenda was a talk from art designer Alan Blouin. Alan was really cool, and showed us how they created the avatar system, the very first avatars, how they skin them, and a few hints for the future will I'll cover later. He explained how the graphics artists used Maya and 3D Studio Max to do their modelling, but always finished with 3D Studio Max for connection with the motion capture data. We got to see the very first avatar design, which was less than visually appealing ;) The original avatar design was not going to do much, and sit behind a desk. As such, he didn't have any lower body. This avatar was designed about 3-4 years ago IIRC, as back then the avatars were not very high on their priorities. However, the later avatars started showing more form and had legs. Their movement was still very unnatural until they moved to a motion capture system. The mo-cap data could be attached to the skeleton structure of the model, and moved very easily. There's cleaning that needs to take place, which seems pretty boring, but once it's done the effect is superb. I asked Alan how the mouth movements were done, and he explained that they have a library of sounds and their associated mouth movement, such as Os and Us. He then went on to explain that they originally had a system in place with a text interpreter that would make your avatar actually mouth the words you had typed, along with a speech generator! However, they took it out for various reasons, but he did hint that we may get to see it again in the future. Alan also showed us some possible improvements for much better character customisation, where you'll be able to select the emotes that your character can do. For example, you could get a Jenquai female to act like a Progen male when they are angry. This type of flexibility will allow literally thousands of unique characters to be created, and means that you'll never look the same as someone else.

After Alan's talk, we took a short walk and met up with Paul Mudra - one of the sound designers for the game. Paul explained that there's still quite a lot of sound and music to go into the game, and we should start seeing some of it soon - such as the new starbase music in the latest patch. I asked Paul about how they generated the sounds, and he explained that they had a huge library of sounds from previous games, as well as generating new sounds on their synthesizers. Paul took us to meet Dwight Okahara, who was busy attaching new sounds to some ingame objects, so we didn't chat for long. We then went to meet Frank Klepacki, who wrote all the music for Earth and Beyond - he showed us some of his latest music for the game, which came across very well. I asked him how different Earth and Beyond was from previous games he had scored, and he said it was actually very similar because of the way each race has a theme.

By this time we were all on information overload, and having a hard time taking it all in - so Cerdith brings along Chris Klug and Brian Heins. Chris is one of the lead content designers who we had met the night before and we sat down for a question and answer session with him. As I discussed earlier, Chris explained how the dynamic story system will not really allow per galaxy customisation, so players will not likely be featured in the storyline. Chris did say that the missing classes already have their leaders in the game, to allow for a realistic entry for the Progen trader, Jenquai trader, and Terran explorer. He also said that if you read all the story that's been written so far, you can get a pretty good idea of where the story is going - and that the ? mobs may have something to do with it ;) This game really does look like it's going to be the biggest story driven MMORPG out there - the devs are very keen on getting the story done correctly, and it's starting to sound very cool. Brian Heins is the guy responsible for the renaming of the items, and all the new items we get in the game (still lots more of them to come apparently!). We asked him how the new naming scheme had been developed, and he explained how each manufacturer has a theme. For instance, InfinitiCorp has a very military naming scheme, Nishido has a very Japanese naming scheme, etc. This made all the items in the game make much more sense. Brian confirmed that these are the final names, although the InfinitiCorp names will be tweaked so they are not just letters and numbers -they'll have an identifier name with them too.

Next up was a play on the QA server - where we got to see the patch that was released today. This gave us the chance to see the new stargates, the faction rating system, and the new skills interface - all of which look very good indeed. We also had a chance to talk to Janus Anderson - lead designer. I asked him about PvP, and he said that they really want to get PvP done correctly. There will probably be story elements where PvP is required, which sound very interesting, and that PvP will definitely be in, but most likely post-live. By now, everyone was getting pretty tired, and it was soon time to go. We all said our goodbyes to the Westwood staff and got picked up in a limo again. After dropping Lord of Dreams and Ulyydian of at the airport (Gwaendel had already left), the rest of us went back to the hotel and discussed the days events over dinner.

The next day TreKain had left at 4:30am, so Terran Drone and I spent most of the day playing arcade games and I managed to win $25 in a slot machine :) At around 14:00, we got picked up by Cerdith, Niobe, and Arcturus to go out to lunch. Along the way, we chatted more about the game. Over lunch, I asked Cerdith about whether Earth and Beyond would have any merchandising. She said she'd like to see T-Shirts produced with the various advertising that is now appearing in the game, such as the InfinitiCorp "We own everything in the galaxy, yes even this kitten". 'A cool idea' I thought, and suggested that it would be very cool to only be able to purchase them through terminals at stations. We also discussed the idea of in-game postcards, which is something else that would really add to the role-playing aspect of the game. After lunch I was dropped off back at the hotel and I headed to see the space show at the IMAX 3D in the Luxor. This was very impressive, and really worth the $8.95 I spent on the ticket.

Overall, I can say I had an absolutely amazing time at Westwood Studios - everyone there was very cool, and really keen on hearing our thoughts and opinions on the game. From what I saw, there's still a lot more to come in this game, and a lot will be added post-live - so the released game will still be improved upon by the large staff that will continue to think of these great ideas.