james_joyce

I hate any map that's pointlessly labyrinthine, including certain cave maps - the mineshaft cave maps, as you call them. There are actually quite a few cave maps I enjoy, like the Cimeroran tombs, and small wide caves (even though they're a bit boring).

But as I see it, the problem is really any map that forces me to take some circuitous route that doesn't serve any game play purpose.

The office maps with the obvious hallways leading to dead ends and small, out of the way doors providing the way forward. The Council maps with the huge, sectioned-off bunker rooms and weird, multi-layered water chambers where the map is actually counterproductive. Lab maps with forking elevator paths and long, time-wasting dead ends. Sewer maps that circle me back to the direction I came from.

I think they all need to be re-done. Every map they've created in the last few years has been great. Very linear, not confusing at all, and mostly logical. The university tutorial map, Cimeroran caves, Midnighter Club, and the Preatorian underground and lab maps. Remake the remaining maps with that same mind set. The most disappointing thing about Praetoria in my opinion was that the office maps were just re-skinned rather than re-done.

My point of view on this is that the game is not a maze game, and even if it were these are not good mazes. There's no point in having anything complicated about the way maps are laid out, except if it serves a specific game play purpose. I shouldn't wander down a hallway and find out it's a dead end - the fun here is not to find my way to the objective, but to actually engage the objective. The map should provide a satisfying story context for the mission, and facilitate leading me to the objective while engaging spawns along the way. If they want to get fancy, I can encounter rooms where the layout plays into the engagement, but until they provide meaningful environmental interaction, which I'm guessing would take some engine work, don't make it complicated or difficult for me to reach the room's spawns.

I'll be there, but we should really get the hell out of midtown afterwards. After party in the village?

Here's an entertaining account of it, including the fact that apparently at some point it was raining horseshoe crabs.

In my relatively uninformed opinion, a Fire/Dark Corruptor would fit. /Dark is great for teams (self AoE heal, best rez in the game, group stealth, tohit debuffs galore), and Tar Patch + Rain of Fire + Fireball + Breath of Fire = Farming heaven. It's a great PvE build.

Someone should come by and correct me if I'm wrong, though, because I'm really bad at tricking out builds, and I haven't even got my Fire/Dark to 50. Still, it sure seems like it to me.

I'd personally vote for option 1, though I'd caution you to tread lightly. I think changing the wrong piece in the wrong way will cause an uproar from people who were using it in certain specific ways. I'd echo Serpine in saying that sometimes low res textures lend themselves to some creative interpretation, and increasing the quality removes that.

I also want to point out that the costume creator is in desperate need of reorganization, regardless of whether or not you make these improvements. Organizing costume pieces into categories should be somewhere near the top of the priority list, and doing so would give you a good opportunity to put legacy pieces in their own category as some have suggested. I understand it probably wouldn't be worth it if it were just for this change, but you guys need to do it anyway, badly. Those lists are just getting way too long.

I'm guessing we will get more in I20 than end game content, but I'm guessing the end game content and systems are what require the big hulabaloo. I'm not expecting anything else revolutionary out of it.

My biggest two are Super Strength and Ninjitsu for Scrappers.

You are my god.

BTW, happy birthday!

If you're intent on using Windows, the best compiled language you can probably learn is C#.NET. It's in wide use, and it's actually a really good language for a MS product. It's a proper OO language with all the trimmings - generics, delegates, lambdas, garbage collection, etc; and without the headaches of something like C/C++. As of 4.0, there's even a limited form of dynamic typing.

The downsides are, having an IDE is pretty much a requirement, and all the open source IDEs for .NET pretty much suck (you can check out SharpDevelop if you want). Your best bet is to pick up VS.NET express, which is free, but it has a subset of the features, and you wont be able to install Resharper, which I find so helpful as to be nearly essential nowadays.

So if you're serious and you don't mind spending some cash, I would buy VS.NET 2010 and Resharper. But if you're just doing it as a hobby, VS.NET Express by itself will do fine.

For web development, I would start off with ASP.NET MVC, which will teach you some important design patterns. I wouldn't bother with Web Forms anymore, which just encourages bad habits. WPF is the fat-client app framework of choice, though as a web developer I haven't used it much and can't give much guidance there. If you're creating something with a database, I would highly recommend using an ORM like NHibernate, which should be generally less painful and less error prone than using ADO.NET, at least in simple cases.

I'm not sure where to point you for a basic OO primer - probably just Googling something will do, but after you pick up the basic concepts of inheritance, polymorphism, and encapsulation, and have played around with OO in C# a bit - I would start yourself off on the right foot and pick up the book Head First Design Patterns, which is a more accessible version of the seminal work by The Gang of Four. I would read up on Uncle Bob's SOLID principles, Unit Testing, and Test-Driven Development.

Obviously how much of these things you pay attention to is going to depend on how serious you are. If you want to just hack out some code every once in a while on the weekend, then many of these things probably don't apply. But if you want to actually learn the proper practices of software craftsmanship, then I believe those concepts put you on the right path, and you'll probably discover more as you go along.

Having said all that, I would at least consider using Linux for this, and going with Ruby on Rails. Ruby is a better OO language than almost anything else around, and the Rails community typically have the best practices and standards regarding high quality design and coding. Ruby on Windows, is, however, a huge pain - so I wouldn't recommend it unless you go with Linux or Mac.

some good ones:

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