User Interface: An Important Factor for Games.

Some games require only a very minimalistic UI while others, like MMOs, require a more complicated UI to provide players with the large amount of information vital to their gameplay. The Lord of the Rings Online™ has quite a bit going on behind the scenes. While our engineers, designers, and artists have always tried to expose the appropriate information in helpful ways, our development tools and time restraints have not always allowed us to present this information to players in the way we truly wanted. In addition to those constraints, a truly “perfect” UI can never really be achieved without allowing user customization since every user has a unique vision of what their “perfect UI” might look like. The addition of a “UI skinning” system into the game way back in 2007 was a step in the right direction, but we (as well as many of you!) still wanted more.

Since becoming a game systems engineer on LOTRO in late 2007, I have formed a love-hate relationship with our UI and over time became the “go-to guy” for UI on my team. I’ve always wanted more from our system and would tell anyone who would listen exactly how much more I wanted. About a year ago, my complaints/requests/whining fell on the ears of “ForsakenArcher,” one of our talented internal tools engineers. The two of us were joined by my good friend “Agiclaw” (who also works as a tools engineer) and spoke at length about the shortcomings of our UI (both the system itself and its use in game) and how much of a massive boon a scripting system could be for us in that area. In our talks, Lua rose to the forefront given its successful use by many other games. Ever the ambitious fellow, Forsaken asked me to bring in the books I had about Lua scripting and its usage to investigate how we could get such a thing into our game. In a short time, Forsaken had what he needed to kick off our prototyping by creating a system by which Lua scripts could be loaded into our game and be given access to functions we could specify. So began “Lua in LOTRO’s” journey into reality.

Given the basic system in place, the long journey began to prove that a Lua scripting interface would, without a doubt, be worth the effort. Many an hour was spent researching (some of you may recall my forum post of “What drives you crazy about our UI?”) and writing pitch documents, presentations, comparisons, and all the fun things needed to prove the point that Lua could be a huge boon to us while our prototype anxiously awaited to be shown off.