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No, BookLady! I hate those innocent looking things that have the creepy face pop up . Tranquility is a gorgeous game! Hypnotic music and graphics. You can change the music, color, etc., to suit you. Very creative. I haven't figured out how to play it yet, but I was captivated just trying to learn. ********************************************************************* Meet the developers... tranquility wasn't developed by a corporate media giant with unlimited funding and legions of programmers and designers. Instead, tranquility was completely funded, designed and written by two software engineers and one graphic artist living 4000 miles apart.
Development of the current version of tranquility began in May of 2000 and is still being expanded today. The two programmers, one living near Indianapolis, Indiana and the other living near Hilo, Hawaii designed the entire game remotely, over the internet, using servers housed in Houston, Texas.
During the entire development process, they had never met face-to-face. tranquility is truly a product of the digital age, the Internet is an integral part of it's DNA
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The section below introduces the developers and lets them describe the game in their own words. We also would like to introduce our graphic artist who created the tranquility logo, website graphic elements, icons, and tranquility cards.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Meet Bill Romanowski... game designer and Mac-side developer --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In 1991, my friend and partner David Cook was working on a 2D paint system that ran on SGI workstations. He was fortunate enough to have a Personal Iris and later one of the first Indigo workstations (still one of my favorite machines, almost perfect). SGI boxes always came with killer demos that helped to sell lots of hardware; the flight simulator, the jello demo that let you play with a springy blob inside of a cube, and that cool polygon robot insect thing. Most of the demos had one thing on common, stuff fluidly moving around in 3D space. It was so cool I just had to write one. I managed to get hold of an Indigo of my own and so now, what to write? I think the process took a couple months. Like a graphics "hello world" program, I wrote "open a window and display a square". Good. Now change it's color. Nice. I want to get a better look. Write "move the square with the mouse". That's ok but it would be more fun to move me around. Write that, wow this is fun!
More squares! They kind of look like steps... write collision detection (oops, too slow, write it again and again and...). I wonder what it would look like to have the platforms move? The background is black, I think putting a star field out there would look cool... Awesome, I'm floating in space! Hey David!! Check this out!
That was the origin of tranquility... built for an extremely expensive workstation... and minimally distributed on one of their CD's. But the game received quite a bit of play and caught on. Years later I continued to receive email from people who had played the game and wanted to know if a port was available. Since 9 years had passed, computer technology had improved enough that a pure OpenGL based game would run fast enough on a mass market computer.
The possibilities were really interesting, and because of tranquility's demands of fast math, precise graphics, and clean 64 channel audio, the only reasonable choice was to write it for the Mac.
When I started to design this "new" tranquility, I based it around the feel of the original tranquility however, it's not the original game. There's little similarity between the two down at the code level. The new tranquility, while keeping with the conceptual space and physics of the original game, is based on completely new technology.
I sincerely hope you enjoy the game, it's been a labor of love.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Meet David Cook... Server side developer --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As one of the designers of tranquility, my "garage" is actually an upstairs room that overlooks my backyard. Quite a bit of what I see in my backyard, even as I type these words, are expressed in the tranquility game itself. Hawaii is a paradise of calm and beauty - where different exotic shapes and sounds are always presenting themselves. From the rolling ocean waves to the worlds most active volcano - the island expresses wonder, astonishment and beauty. Bill's vision of the tranquility game was sort of like bringing a bit of paradise to each and every player. What a wonderful vision that is... a place to go where time suspends and where you become lost in the visual splendor that is around you. This was certainly a project worth doing and one which I wanted to be a part of!
One of the immediate problems that Bill and I faced in designing a game together was the problem of collaborating over such a huge distance. Hawaii is roughly 4,000 miles away from Indiana, and 2,500 of those miles are ocean! Sending huge experimental executables back and forth would be tedious and prone to problems. Since I already had web-delivery network servers positioned in Texas, and was well acquainted with the web and html-delivery mechanism, it seemed to make sense to engineer tranquility as a game-browser than just as a game.
To engineer tranquility as a browser, Bill developed a tq language. The language expresses 'how a level looks' to the browser. We then built a huge system on the server (currently at 41,235 lines of C code) to support the ability to take database elements and modify them dynamically to fit a players ability, and then compile the results in real-time and send it to our game-browsers.
This method of implementation turned out to work very well. We could both modify the server databases and programs and produce instant changes in our game browsers - all without having to re-download huge programs or level data. Being separated by 4000 miles of ocean and land did not matter anymore. Changes were represented in hundreds of bytes not hundreds of megabytes.
But as we worked with our own creation we also discovered another major advantage.... that is, just as a web browser can display the content of any site... our game browser now had the same capability with games. One browser could play many games, and the games could be changed and expanded dynamically without having to bother the user. Furthermore, bugs we encountered in the games, or new features we add to the game generators are INSTANTLY available for the players - an incredible advantage.
This was the birth of the idea of networked tranquility. The major thought is that, as time progresses, we can offer more and more capabilities. For example... early this year we introduced the ability to build and play your own rooms using TQbuilder. We also are building a tranquility universe which allows you to let others play the games you created. By taking advantage of the internet in our development, we also ended up taking advantage of the internet in how the game itself is played.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Meet Aaron Romanowski... graphic artist --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I've been taking on freelance design projects since 1996, and have worked on a variety of projects, from rave flyers to educational software, to industrial design illustrations. The first piece I made for tranquility was the eye logo. Work on the logo actually began while I was studying in Japan, and was finalized after I returned to the United States.
The logo set the tone for rest of the work that was done for the game. All of the graphic elements produced for the website drew from the logo. My biggest contribution to tranquility, aside from the logo, would be the set of rank and realm images. I had always liked the ranking system in original SGI version of TQ, and it was exciting to work on their graphical representation.
© 2002 TQworld LLC.
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