Arcanaville

If I want to be rooted that much I'll turn into a tree.

Yes it does. Assuming you PL it to 50. If you actually play your characters instead, Titan Weapons only wrecks MA if you don't kill yourself first. Death is the ultimate debuff, especially when it happens on that side of the keyboard.

If we're talking about how I would actually conceptualize an MMO from scratch, it would be like this. That idea includes the basic idea of a content store like you describe.

In terms of things like game play and systems, I'm a believer that gameplay and systems should be designed simultaneously, with one supporting the other, and not designed completely independently. I don't believe in building the engine that can do almost anything, and then the game that uses the engine that can do almost anything. I don't think that works well myself. All these systems are, ultimately, one system.

We were just talking about reproducing the engine's effects complexity in a reasonable manner. To do so in a way that would actually work in an MMO? It depends on who's doing the coding. I am no slouch when it comes to algorithmic efficiency (its my programming forte) but actually banging out the couple hundred thousand lines of code to make an engine? While miracles are possible, I would guestimate a full engine minus effects artwork and clients to be about two FTE years if you were starting from scratch with really good coders. If you knew exactly what you wanted to do and also had cracker jack coders, maybe half of one FTE. But the truth is everyone thinks they are cracker jack coders, and only one in ten thousand actually is. To get it done in six months would essentially require winning the lottery. Based on what I've seen, its five FTE years plus or minus four and a half FTE years.

It does imply the poster thinks "computer science" is actually a thing.

And I would hate to think the poster meant he was planning on coughing on NCSoft executives as hard as possible.

If I'm going to play something with both Titan Weapons and Shadow Meld, I might as well play a Stone Tanker so I can be immobile while I'm being inactive.

If I'm going to solo Giant Monsters, it'll be on my Ill/Rad while eating a sammich and watching TV.

When you're using the secondary that caps out three times higher than those buffs? Its possible I might blink once or twice. There might be some actual eyebrow ascension.

I'm afraid I can't be that generous.

This is a no-no, and in a professional setting I would not treat the work with kid gloves for this. Four independent statements offered with apparently extremely high confidence, and one tiny disclaimer used solely as an escape hatch. This is why I use Gartner Group reports for barbeque starter.

Its normally not considered kosher to state with certainty things that are not remotely certain, even with an initial disclaimer of speculative license. Its not normally considered reasonable to state something is occurring at all, but possibly in an immaterial manner. Observe:

NCSoft's shutdown of City of Heroes has almost certainly contributed to a number of deaths in North America although evidence for this may require additional study and may end up being statistically immeasurable.

I understand the desire for advocacy, but its important to realize that the currency of persuasion is credibility. You don't need it to preach to the choir, but it is the primary language that works outside of your own supporters.

Now that you have a computer capable of capturing video without exploding, like all gaming rigs not made by Keebler Elves, that would be my recommendation yes.

So what you're saying is, someone should try to spawn Kronos onto NCSoft's headquarters.

Obviously, this proves Tankers need a buff.

What would?

My best guestimate is that City of Heroes needed about 50,000 subscribers to roughly break even. I believe at no time did we have less subscribers than that.

Since we were using NCSoft's server hosting, publishing, and other internally fungible resources, its impossible to know what we looked like internally without literally seeing the internal books at NCSoft. They could have been charging a million dollars a minute against City of Heroes for internet services; internal accounting is sometimes the best fiction in the corporate world.

I upgraded my (registered) Fraps from 3.2.x to 3.5.9 this past weekend and holy moley the recording performance jumped upward dramatically. Also somewhere between 3.2 and 3.5 they added circular buffer recording, which means it will record the last X seconds of video with circular overwrite, and "starting" a recording will keep the last X seconds from the past, which is a really nice feature: you can record something that already happened. And turning it on doesn't really slow my client down noticeably. And X is adjustable based solely on how much disk you want the buffer to eat up.

If we all knew what we had early enough, the correct thing to do in my opinion was to adopt something close to STO's reward model** of backloading most of the rewards for mission or task completion, and far less for killing things. That way, killing is only a means to an end, not the end itself. The guy that sneaks to the end of the mission and kills eight things could level just as fast as the guy that herds the map and wipes everything out with a nuke - maybe faster. Doing that would reduce the impact of "unbalanced" powers, and free the devs to restrict only the most abusive effect, not the broad middle ground of just stupidly powerful effects.

The difference between running solo and running in teams would be more interesting opponents, in an analogous way that zone events scale up the spawns when there is a higher density of players. You can obliterate your way through a mission map solo, but you might never see the Big Baddies that can spawn when you run it with eight. But you could still genocide your way through scores of foes if you wanted to, because that wouldn't skew the reward curve very much if at all.


** Disclaimer: I haven't logged into STO since about six months after launch: I have no idea what its reward systems look like today

Test again.


I don't see why. An attribmod calculation engine should be able to, given a list of attribmods, determine what is going on at time t, for all t. Otherwise, as I said, its not an attribmod calculator. Its just a calculator with a lot of rows.


I haven't had a chance to analyze the code completely yet, but what I meant was that resistable buffs are resisted by the resistance of the target after unresistable buffs are accounted for first.

You're going to special case resist modifiers separate from all other modifiers?


You can't rely on City of Data for order of operation. But in any case, that's your explanation of the effect: I'm asking what your calculator says, not what you personally know.

I'm still not sure what you mean by "power resolution method" vs attribmod calculation. The order in which attribmod effects are computed is a necessary requirement for the attribmod engine to function properly.

You seem to be stripping all functionality out of the attribmod calculation engine except AttrValue = Min(Max[(AttrValue + [Attribmod(Abs) + Attribmod(Cur)] * (1 - Res)),AttrMin],AttrMax)

That's not really what I was talking about at all, but in any event, that's about 1% of the work of the entire combat engine. So: assuming I'm looking at about 10 hours of work, with testing and debugging, at this rate about a thousand hours of work and you'll have something maybe close to the complete engine done.

I can't address what "makes sense" to any particular person, but its worth noting that the original conceptual metaphor for City of Heroes' "powersets" was that the set name was the actual power, and the powers were "skills" - ways to use that power. So the power is "Energy Manipulation" and within the game universe players with that power can train themselves to focus that power into a melee strike that knocks targets away, into a punch that has a chance to stun the target, to empower themselves to use less energy when using their power, etc. The fact that Dark Melee wielders can learn to use that ability in conjunction with a punch and Energy Manipulators can learn to use that ability in conjunction with a punch is conceptually coincidental. We have two different sets because Dark Melee cannot learn to extend its range and Energy Manipulation cannot learn to focus energy to terrorize a foe.

Shadow Punch is not "punching with darkness" in the weird conceptual sense of taking darkness, forming it into a punch, and then shooting it out of an arm-shaped cannon. Its me, the Darkness wielder, throwing a punch that projects my darkness wielding ability into the target. I am a focal point for dark energy, but to affect targets with it requires skill. The first skill I learn is to punch someone in the face while yelling "spoon!" and that darkness affects the target. At level 83, I could probably just sit on the sidewalk and go "suck it!" and point with my index finger and the target would just drop dead. But at level 1, I have to punch the target to make it happen. That's not a limitation of darkness, its a limitation of me.

I think its more precise to say that control and debuff are almost ludicrously powerful in City of Heroes, and virtually nowhere else.

I did that as well my first day.

My biggest problem with C++ is that everyone does, for everything. C++ is a language, but saying you code in C++ is like saying you speak in syllables. Any real project large enough to require more than one programmer starts to get into serious coordination issues unless the programmers are clones. Its actually easier in direct C for everyone to do their own thing and meet in the middle than C++.

I am in fact a student of programming languages. If you are a compile-time type-checking fan, you'll like templates. If you prefer runtime binding, and if you're using Objective-C and you don't like runtime binding you're insane, templates are usually a redundancy.

The reason I mention Objective-C is because, for the most part, MMOs are written with static game engines and dynamic but conceptually encapsulated data. Many was the college student who came onto the boards thinking the Freakshow was a C++ class of which Dreck was an instance. Not only is that not done, there's no really advantage to doing it.

But in a language like Objective-C (or Smalltalk, or most other object-based runtime bound environments) there is the crazy-but-interesting idea of converting data to objects at runtime dynamically and using the environment itself as a part of the game engine. A game engine written in Smalltalk or LISP wouldn't need special Requires expression handlers, it could just meta Eval them. Attribmods would convert to methods, and attribmod stacks would just be method stacks. Powers and entities could be redefined on the fly and all interactions would rebind automatically through dynamic dispatch.

The problem is, of course, you lose some control over the engine to the environment. You've probably made something a little less like City of Heroes, and a little more like Corewars.

For the record, not a fan of templates.

Scream's behavior is not a bug. As I explained above, the reference to "My Brute" wasn't intended to imply tremendous oversimplification, but rather eliminating all of the surrounding effort required to create a 3D engine, mapservers, and all of the other trappings surrounding the core engine that correctly computes what happens when a set of entities N activate a set of powers P over time.

If you prefer, to eliminate the question of unintended delay, I can rephrase the question as calculating what happens when a target is hit by Shriek, and then three seconds later is hit by Fire Blast.

A significant amount of the complexity of the attribmod system is in the fact that attribmods can have durations and activation periods. An attribmod calculating engine must be able to handle those, or its not an attribmod calculator, its a calculator.

At first glance, there seems to be issues with this being a true attribmod calculation engine. It appears to be more of an attribmod calculation toolbox. The main loop explicitly creates effects, which in and of itself is fine because any incomplete engine has to inject those somehow, but then also *explicitly* calls functions to compute the things you know are changing: resolve(brutesResistance, &brute, &brute); resolve(brutesResistanceBuf, &brute, &brute); for example.

I'm also concerned about this sort of thing:

Without analyzing the code completely, I have a feeling you don't understand the difference between Cur and Abs modifiers. Especially since:

Heal inspirations are Abs. Also, Curs expire, Abs don't. That's why they require separate handling.

One other thing:

I have a feeling your calculator doesn't work in the presence of resistable and unresistable effects simultaneously.

If you handwave this away, you eliminate one of the mechanisms for the game engine to reduce the effectiveness of another entities buffs. The original MoG required this behavior for example. There are other instances of this as well. Eliminating it forces you to create new mechanics to replace it.

This is ironically a case where you're making it harder than it needs to be, or would be if you handled resistance as the game engine does.

It is also not a good idea to "test sign" to determine what is a buff and what is a debuff. Mez protection buffs are negative for example. You're rolling the dice that a lot of your simplifications won't break something important somewhere.


Here's my first test of the attribmod engine. Take the Brute and the Corruptor and shoot the Brute with Scream. What happens?