Starsman

OK I see better what you mean you want to do. When you invoked MyBrute like I figured you meant something VERY MyBrute like (turn based and as far as I understand random skill selection.)

Many of the things you mention I have already dived into, it is indeed intimidating. Dont think 3k hours still. What may eat me is the time require to extract in a usuable format all animation and VFX and power data. With community help I may at least get some of that from the start, since it's already being extracted by the team maintaining City of Data.

I need to retract my 800 number btw, I did the math wrong. I meant to translate 40 weeks months into hours and for some stupid reason multiplied by 20 instead of 40 hour weeks. So I actually should have said 1600 hours.

Curse you. I had written a huge reply to your original question and you change the question on me!!!!

*grumble grumble*

If it's just an attack chain simulation... perhaps a couple of month of solid work. No graphics, no networking, just the attack logic being spit into a file or console.

I would have to come up with some interpreter for the conditions attacks have, I may need to find a solution that works to evaluate those from within the game and that may be the hardest part. It gets complex as soon as you try to evaluate pseudo-pets, though.

Arcanatime can easily be emulated by forcing the same clock timer Arcanatime represents (0.132 second increments.)

I can always hard code the recharge value (it's what i done in the past.)

Maybe 1 to 2 months if I dedicate my free time to it to this point... with pet and pseudopet handling and HP bag enemies that don't move, with defeat count and each having effect queues (to quantify things like -res that hit specific targets.)

Arcanaville was working on something like that from a week before the cancelation announcement. She said she would finish it regardless of the announcement, but she was doing a lot of simplifications, not an actual full on emulator. Still gets the work done, though.

IO and even SO handling would require a whole additional load of work, at minimum a GUI interface and all the conditionals required to handle the kind of enhancements you can slot and where, plus the cases of Unique IOs and the way to grant set bonuses.

If I had access to Mids source code I may be able to make the build "think" and generate attack chains (and survival chains that simulate clicking heals and the like.) Without that I would have to create a full character creator and it would take a bit of time. All depends how many continuous hours I dedicate there (you may do more in 8 continuous hours of work than in 8 hours split across 2 hour chunks over 4 days.)

Cant tell exactly how long it may take me to do that... much less doing it part time (something I really cant do if I want to stay married.)


Edit: I just realized you asked "how" not "how long"...

Hmm... I have a design document somewhere but dont know where...

I'm sorry I attempted to start retyping it now but it gets too long to write down without oversimplifying it.

Depends where you work. My mother used to work in a production line, and it was torture for her. Every time a younger kid got hired (rare, took a hard working kid that also was not smart enough to study or get a better job), they would suddenly outperform everybody.

The immediate reaction from every manager: determine this should be the new production standard and make everyone else kill themselves to match it.

I don't think it's selfish. Just realistic. For such an effort to be completed in a timely manner (and by timely I mean within a year) we will likely need a year of full time work from multiple coders with a solid grasp in multiplayer networking.

Even then, we likely end with a game that is just random enemies and combat, without actual content. There is a lot of stuff that only lives in the servers.

Perhaps within 2 years of a decent team working full time, you may get the AE back up and running so the community can start creating their own content.

It IS something I would attempt if I was still in college or highschool. As it stands, I may as well just try to do the best next thing: a knockoff. Even that sounds intimidating. I may simply try to make a single player game featuring Starsman, and THAT would be selfish me trying to keep the character alive.

In the same way that a with enough time anyone can turn this:



Into this:



By slowly tweaking around the edges.

Funny.... I was thinking the same thing!

If you are asking about the ones I linked, they were under-development special power pools. The first one of these pools we would have seen was the Sorcery Pool, currently available on the beta server.

Everyone can access these pools regardless of character orgin, but they were premium power pools you had to pay for.

The effort would be so large, and in my opinion so legally shady, that we may as well just steal the assets and make a whole new game. May be faster and just as legal (not legal at all.)

After all, if we are to reinvent the wheel, why not take as many liberties as we can and just make a game that does not have limitations we never really liked that much?

But at the same time, the amount of work needed is so great... anyone with the skill needed to do so would be sacrificing a LOT by engaging on such a venture instead of dedicating that same time to develop their own thing, something they can actually profit from.

Way better than it had any right to be. Perhaps I got that opinion due to my extremely low expectations... but I enjoyed the hell out of it.

I got a vibe that is what Wildstar seems to be shooting for. Only saw a cinematic trailer, though. It was cartoony but it made me think that is what a cartoon version of Firefly would look like.

I think your detector is broken.

This I think hits the perfect keyword. To dumb it down and hopefully to clear it up: I'm sick of "renaissance fair" settings.

I would love to play in a setting dominated with skyscrapers and modern buildings.
I would love to play in a setting reminiscent of Blade Runner (I’d kill for Deus Ex Online).
I would love to play in a purely Victorian setting full of steampunk (pure not added)
I would love to play in a setting full of space stations and interplanetary space travel.
I would love to play in a post-apocalyptic setting like the one we see in Fallout.


I don't want more castles, keeps, villages or tribal/shamanistic encampments. I may make a slight pass on the castle/keep thing for a pure 100% pirate/buccaneer themed game.

So far I am thinking to give The Secret World Online a try, also to Star Trek Online. May give Pirates of the Burning Sea a try since it’s free to play.

Darn missed that one... Updated the post to include it.

I can accept that overlap. Vampire the Mascarade: Bloodlines is one of my favorite games (up there with Deus Ex 1) and despite the magic, vampire and werewolves I would never call it fantasy.

Refer to my last post on genres. I actually feel the claims of "when will you fight a troll" to be silly, since that's just a race, and I would not stop calling Warhammer 40k scifi just because trolls started showing up there.

This is open for a huge ball of semathic fights, but for me:

A world dominated by magical creatures (don't have to be the standard variety) in a medieval-type setting (castles/keeps/forests/stone cities) where technology is either absent or the exception and not the rule. A world where travel is (most commonly, not exclusively) via domesticated creature mount or magical means.

A world where you fight dragons, golems, gods and magical entities (the later can delve into horror genre in a contemporary setting with the right approach, like TSW does) or perhaps other fantasy inspired races.

This is a topic books can be written about, but thats just the surface and overly simplified description.

I am not familiar with Earthdawn, my Shadowrun experience is mainly from some video games and has always seem to focus on the cyberpunk/bladeruner scifi side.

I am not saying you can't go 10 thousand years into the future of Middle Earth and kick start a cyberpunk game in the same universe, but should the game take place in the lord of the ring era, it would be a fantasy game.

Case in point (that I am slightly more familiar with) Warhammer and Warhammer 40k.

I would be interested in a Warhammer 40k MMO. Not interested at all in the current Warhammer Online MMO.

You accused people of dismissing fantasy for seeing an animal or seeing a tree.

Yea... I guess you didnt use the words... just trolled.

As an indie game developer I can vouch a bit here. The reason the Pay-ToWin/Nickle And Dime model is becoming so prevalent is because players don't want to pay anymore.

For a game to make any money they have to be played by thousands, hundreds of thousands. If it does not, it won’t get momentum, there won’t be word of mouth to spread it or sustain it.

You are forced to spend insane budgets into marketing that sometime exceeded development costs (marketing costs for new titles were between the things blamed for NCSoft losses last quarter.)

The alternative has become clear: just give the game away for free. People play it then, and the voice spreads more effectively. Plenty won’t pay, just as many pirate and never buy standalone single player games, but others will start sinking money into the game out of pure support or falling victim to those schemes we tend to come up with (despite me saying we, I have not shipped a game doing this... yet.)

If lucky, the free game becomes popular enough to the point where the 3% that end up spending money amount to enough people to cover development and marketing costs.

It's annoying; I hate it but at the same time feel forced to do this. Both large and small studios are being forced against a wall to do this. The piracy driven mentality of the newer generation is a huge reason for this mentality. No one wants to pay even 99c for a game they will play for a week or more.

There is still some money to be made off sales if you manage to get a viral marketing campaign going, but that’s as likely as winning the lottery without playing, by having the winning ticket accidentally be dropped on your lap while you are at the local junkyard.

Not saying you have to do the pay-to-win thing though. But it’s sadly a model that has proven a bit more effective than pay-for-cosmetic-trinkets.

If you don't consider it in the same vein, then the small changes have big impact on you. Thats all cool. But they are still small changes, not even evolutionary on top of the non-fantasy WoW has added from the start (guns? been there since launch, rockets, interdimensional aliens, etc.)

However, the point is it's still a fantasy game, and your post I replied to:

...some people see a tree with an animal running around and disregard an entire game universe.

Basically says everyone that does not care for fantasy and dismisses the game is retardedly simple minded.

People that are sick of fantasy don't dismiss the game because they saw an animal crawling in a corner. They dismiss it because it IS fantasy.

I would never call CoH a fantasy game for having a few fantasy-themed zones. Some may be able to build a fantasy experience around that, but I would never sell the game to anyone as anything but a super hero genre game. Doing otherwise would be a lie. CoH is no sci-fi, nor fantasy. Same goes for DCUO and Champions. They are super hero games, a genre of its own. Same way GW2 is fantasy game even if it/especially because it contains fantasy technology. Steampunk is fantasy tech and a derivative of tinkering, usually it's more categorized as such not for its nature but it's Victorian setting (another reason why despite inspiration I can't see the Engineers even as steampunk, but not the point here.)

I personally don’t want to go into another fantasy game because I'm sick of the setting and tossing a few trinkets into the game, guns here, traps there, dont change that.

You don't need to fill in the blanks. Call it gadgetry, tinkering or steampunk. It's all the same and WoW has it in spades. One race in wow are interdimensional aliens that arrived to the planet in a spaceship.

Just because you add some fantasy-tech into a high fantasy world does not make it sci-fi.

Edit to add:
If you love that, it's all more than cool. But saying "...some people see a tree with an animal running around and disregard an entire game universe" is a very trollish way of dismissing people's opinions and taste while at the same time saying they are narrow minded and stupid for not seeing and liking what you do.

Others have seen Warcraft do the same and more.

These are reasons I am extremely sad:

Did they do this after every single fight? After the battle in that icy planet of the Hoth system, did Luke start picking up useless junk loot from the defeated enemies that he then sold to buy a ride to another planet?

Selling the old pod racer, or old speeder is more akin to selling your trustworthy equipment and possessions. They had meaning; they were never "junk loot".

Even all the junk at Watto's shop was useful parts that can be used up to build or fix droids. But junk loot? The kind of loot that is only useful to dump into a vendor?

I agree selling useful stuff is not only something that fits the Star Wars universe, but it's the core of the existence to the extremely highlighted smuggler profession. But the key there is "useful stuff". Things others will find meaning on.