Since Earth Eternal is finally heading for full release with the open beta in progress we thought it was time to get the scoop on the background of the game and see how things are going at Sparkplay Media.

[GDN] Earth Eternal just hit Open Beta, how long has it been in development and how does it feel to finally get to this stage?

MATT: We started playing around with what became the technology that underpins EE in early 2006. We started really building the game in earnest a couple of years later.

As for how it feels to get to this stage - are you kidding? It feels fantastic!

[GDN] The motto is ’Finally a Real MMO for your browser’ how does EE stand out  among other browser-based MMOs? How is it differentiating?

MATT: It stands out in the sense that it’s real, full-on 3d, large, open-world MMO. There are few to no other browser-based MMOs that feel like ours.

[GDN] What are the fundamental issues with creating an MMO in a browser? Was there a lot of new technology used or old tech used in new ways?

MATT: Putting a game in a browser is not a particularly huge challenge. What IS difficult is getting the game to behave like a browser game does. You could wrap a browser around Warhammer, for instance, but a user would be sitting through the download of most of the game before it could be played.

That could be an hour+. Chunking up the game and the game content so that players are, as much as possible, downloading only what they need in the immediate future is the tough part. We can get players into the game in as little as 3 minutes the first time.

[GDN] Speaking of tech, was all of it built from the ground up for EE or was it an outgrowth of other tech that you already had?

MATT: Well, we use the Ogre 3D engine on the rendering side but beyond that we mainly developed our tech from scratch.

[GDN] Is it a single or multi-server environment? Is everyone playing in the same instance of the world?

MATT: Everyone isn’t playing in the same instance of the world, but the world instances are easy to transport between, unlike in most MMOs. If you want to move from Europe2 to Europe3, just go to a Sanctuary and switch world instances there and then, without logging out.