LEGO Universe from the developer perspective

Today I installed the Lego Universe Beta but unfortunately the game is closed for some days,so I decided to analyze the game from the developer perspective.

1. Web site
   
2. Game network traffic  ... Lego NDA... oooppsss!
   
3. Game technologies  ....Lego NDA... oooppsss!

1) Web site
The web site is developed using ASP.net and aspx pages, it uses for client interaction JQuery 1.4.2  and other libraries. The pages loads resources from two addresses: http://universe.lego.com and http://cache.lego.com , this is a common strategy used to parallelize the browser load. There are some interesting JavaScript libraries used:

• fancybox: a simple lightbox alternative for JQuery
  
• colorbox : a light-weight, customizable lightbox plugin for jQuery
  
• cufon : custom fonts rendering library, used for changing fonts of your HTML elements.
  
• SWFObject :  flash detection
  
• SiteCatalyts : web site statistics
  
• jQuery UI Effects 1.8: useful for HTML effects like Blind,Fade,Slide,, Pulsate and many more.

Others libraries packed and minified in the same file:

• jQuery cookie: simple, lightweight utility plugin for reading, writing and deleting cookies
  
• jQuery Urls: used to read request parameters of the actual URL jquery.navigation.js
  
• jquery.rowheight.js
  
• jquery.updateable.js
  
• jquery.togglebox.js
  
• jquery.rounded.js
  
• jquery.ajaxload.js
  
• jquery.popup.js

It’s interesting to see the “weight”  of the different documents type used in the page: The “Old HTML code”  has the lowest impact on the weight of the page, first come images (as expected) with 900Kb, next Scripts (270Kb!) and CSS (64Kb)… the latest is HTML with 27Kb.

2) Game network traffic

Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA)... I will tals about this as soon as the game will be on market

3) Game technologies

Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA)... I will tals about this as soon as the game will be on market

This is a quick and facile analysis, the most interesting thing is that behind a game there’s a world build using different tools and technologies : ASP.NET, XML, VC++, Python, CruseControl, JQuery, Patch Management, Web services, Client-Server protocols and many other, a lot of arguments to learn!