Talking In-Game Widgets With PlayXpert CEO Charles F. Manning

By Ryan Plas | December 16, 2008 | | Filed under: Features, Interviews | Tags: Charles F. Manning, Interview, PlayXpert

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In our latest interview, Ryan Plas spoke to PlayXpert CEO Charles Manning. PlayXpert is a company providing in-game widgets and browser, claiming that “Alt-tab is a thing of the past.” Hit jump to read the interview.

The MMO Gamer: First off, let me say that the PlayXpert program is a very full-featured and handy. What was the original inspiration to create something like this?

Charles Manning: Thanks Ryan, and thank you for the opportunity to share more about PlayXpert with your community of readers! We’re really proud of what we’ve built – and feel like it’s a long time coming to be where we are today.

When we first started the company, we, like many startups, had big plans and a big vision, but not a lot of execution history. We were a core team of very smart engineers who were passionate about coding and about gaming. Today, we stand two years into developing our overlay platform and we are extremely proud of what we’ve accomplished. Our original vision was to be the in-game operating system for players. Our goal was to be totally player-centric. Instead of providing middleware that would/could be licensed to publishers and studios for matching services, chat, or voice, we wanted to flip the problem toward the player perspective.

In our view, having an in-game operating system that was independent from any one game and could deliver an extensible portfolio of tools was the Holy Grail for us. In addition, we’ve found that the communities and developers who build cool tech may not always have the patience or engineering background to bring that tech “in-game.” Given these two facts, we set out to marry the best in-game overlay platform with the most open of architectures for any third party developer to contribute.

The MMO Gamer: PlayXpert has a number of different applications for gamers. In-game web browsing, game-to-game voice communication through Vivox, chat applications such as Google Talk, MSN and AIM/ICQ. What kind of impact does PlayXpert have on actual in game performance?

Charles Manning: Interestingly, the only performance questions we have received (with the exception of a few off-machine profiles) have been around memory. PlayXpert as a program runs the various third party programs as widgets. The result is that if you use the web browser widget, the chat widget, and the music management widget, PlayXpert ends up consuming the same memory footprint as those three applications normally would as separate processes. So, although it may appear that PlayXpert is consuming more than it should – when you think about the widgets it’s loading into memory it’s understandable. For this reason, we provide the ability to disable certain widgets so that you don’t consume more memory resources than you have the capacity for.

With regard to game performance, this is where our TrueOverlay technology really shines. Our overlay platform is the only one of its kind – it overlays on top of any DirectX 8 and above game by interlacing our UI natively into the DX command stream as it goes to the GPU. The result is that we’re not interrogating shared memory of the game, competing for game-specific resources, or having to develop game-specific logic in our system on a per game basis. With the high volume of games that people play, it seems crazy not to build a universal overlay system the way we did. The reality is that it is really hard to build overlay as a kernel driver the way we have – and that’s fundamentally why we’re the only one that has done it this way.

The MMO Gamer: Do you have any specific companies lined up to help develop widgets for PlayXpert? For example, a widget that would allow players to peruse the World of Warcraft Armory or SOE’s line of Player’s sites without going through the in-game web browser?”

Charles Manning: We do. Not only do we have companies – we also have individuals. The community has built widgets like Pandora, a Gmail notifier widget, an audio controller widget, and an IRC widget, to name a few. Our internal team has built an Armory widget (available on our gallery) because we have a number of WoW players among us. As for companies, we have a few that have not yet been announced…but, for those that have been announced, we have GuildLaunch building a clan tools widgets, HLSW building an rcon widget, and a few publishers building game-specific widgets for a customized distribution of PlayXpert.

The MMO Gamer: Besides the in-game browser, are there any plans to incorporate so PlayXpert into specific social networking site widgets within the system? Say MySpace, or Facebook?

Charles Manning: We actually built a Facebook widget about a year ago. We never released it to the general public. It’s useful like the iPhone version of Facebook is useful. We’re still trying to identify what the best approach should be for social sites with regard to gaming. Honestly, the most social activities related to gamers are related to the interaction within clans. As a result, we’re focusing our time with partners who can provide cool solutions in this area.

The MMO Gamer: Are regular gamers able to program their own widgets for titles?

Charles Manning: Sure. We’ve worked very hard to allow developers ranging from hard-core programmers to “script-kiddies” to be able to build widgets. This is done via our .net approach. Any .net language can be brought into our framework. In addition, we have a few widgets that are sandbox-widgets which allow third parties to build in other languages like Flash, html, and Adobe Air.

The MMO Gamer: Where do you want to see PlayXpert go in the future?

Charles Manning: We’re excited to be positioned as the in-game platform for all players. The growth dimensions for us are really found in new innovative widgets. We have a lot of ideas that we’ve been working on. We look forward to making them available to the community over the next year.

We encourage players to get more information at www.playxpert.com. Thank for letting us talk with your readers!