Maps, resources, and design
By
Chase_Arcanum,
Posted on: 2011-06-20 10:15 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
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As you've said, though, it's much time-effective to just recreate from scratch rather than waste resources on conversion. It isn't surprising- parts of CoH date back a decade, given their production schedule. There've been several different versions of 3dS Max out there since then, and they haven't always given much thought to full reverse compatibility.|
Originally Posted by Zamuel
I found one of the Q&A replies on the previous Ustream rather interesting.
It was noted that one of the reasons why older resources aren't always reused is actually due to compatibility. Being made with differing versions of 3ds Max generally makes it easier to just rebuild from scratch than import. That's got me wondering if that has been where a lot of the struggle concerning implementing fixes that seem "easy" to us players is actually rather hard. However, that also has me wondering if it would be best to work towards converting these resources. It just bugs me when it seems like there's so many ways things could be reused yet they aren't though it's a lot easier to handle knowing just what the difficulties are. |
Not only that, but the entire tech behind resource tracking FOR reuse really wasn't that mature 10 years ago. At that time, there were relatively few MMOs. Relatively few game artists had experience with MMO's-- they'd often developed for "fire and forget" games where an asset is used once in one game and then was more or less discarded. Availability for reuse wasn't a big deal, so tracking resources and source files was relatively lax. "New" artists likewise hadn't learned the importance.
Now, the industry's more mature- in resource tracking, version control, and in developer practices... but 10 years ago? A LOT was still rather amorphous back then.
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It isn't just the developer tools, either. There was something a dev alluded to pre-Cryptic-departure that some "older" missions couldn't even be edited by the newer mission-editing tools. They'd been made when the editors were still very raw and they had some elements manually coded in- things that worked differently in the newer tools. Not only couldn't they safely update those with the newer tools, they couldn't even easily identify which ones would be problematic.
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I expect CoH to have a world of these problems. When they wanted to build out the city, they found that none of the current commercial engines covered the area they wanted to cover, so they opted to build their own. The costume creator required more of an "interchangeable pieces" system than a regular model, so their animation rigging had some nuances to it that were outside the norm. All these tweaks- elements that can make a game stand out from its competitors so well- add new upgrade, compatibility, and versioning issues that, given the game's age, HAVE to make upgrades and updates particularly problematic.
Personally, I'd really be questioning the value in updating assets here, where other aging parts of the system are bound to just give another barrier later, vs spending those resources on building a CoH2.0 with entirely new assets and a matured development process that'll better allow for another decade of updates.
Well, a lot of the worry is the feeling that "build from scratch" means a lot of things may fall into the "never get fixed" category. A situation where instead of "either/or" it's "neither/nor". Especially since some of it seems to be difference of view. Simply wanting new contacts in Dark Astoria and the Shadow Shard seems to get equated into the need to completely rebuild the zones.
Also, I have to wonder if this is why base builders have been neglected so long. No new resources and no adjustments to older ones.
Well they've said for years that when revamping an old zone it's like starting from scratch most of the time. I'm not sure why that's terribly surprising. Even so I've never wanted them to revamp old zones because I thought it would be easy, but because I felt they were going to waste in their current broken state. Boomtown, the Shards, and Astoria need help, even if it does mean starting from scratch.
"Null is as much an argument "for removing the cottage rule" as the moon being round is for buying tennis shoes." -Memphis Bill
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Well, look at Dark Astoria. |
Originally Posted by Zamuel
Well, a lot of the worry is the feeling that "build from scratch" means a lot of things may fall into the "never get fixed" category. A situation where instead of "either/or" it's "neither/nor". Especially since some of it seems to be difference of view. Simply wanting new contacts in Dark Astoria and the Shadow Shard seems to get equated into the need to completely rebuild the zones.
Also, I have to wonder if this is why base builders have been neglected so long. No new resources and no adjustments to older ones. |
1) Coming up with zone contacts there will mean creating a story in the zone that people could follow. It stands to reason that this story could best be reflected in some shifting changes in the the zone's appearance to support that story. Doesn't have to be major- maybe you want a scene using the zombies from the apocalypse crawling out of the ground.... its still new tech to add to the zone.
2) A full zone revamp that JUST applies to heroside content is bound to make some villainside folk unhappy, so either equitable resources need developed over there OR you need to make the zone somehow both hero/villain.
3) More than the "we don't have the assets to redo this" is more of a "we don't have the resources"-- meaning, the people.... not without pulling them from other stories they've decided to advance.
So it doesn't have to be about 'assets being missing" when you hear they 'don't have the assets' for that at this time. Sometimes its all about managing what you have for the biggest bang for the buck.
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Bases:
Ok, first you have to decide what a base's purpose is intended to be. If it's for raiding, then you need to make sure that all the tricks base decorators use to "wall up" things and use assets for unintended ways are closed off (or just turn a base into "raid-prohibited." If its for decorating, then you've got to come up with tools that make it so decorators don't have to jump through hoops to suspend item x exactly where they need it to be, then you need to get rid of the "raid" artifacts that impair base building. Until you get a consensus on that, though, you have very little direction to go forward.
Then you really need to determine demand. I LOVE building up my base... once... but the idea of re-doing it and removing the twenty bajillion desks that give me extra floors just so I can use their new-improved "floor tiles" ... well, it doesn't interest me much, no matter how nifty they are... I don't want to go through that again. Other base builders may feel similarly- meaning you have to attract new neurotic to make that niche big enough to justify the development effort.
Then there's the expectation of what we might get. Notice that many of the lighting and office pieces were probably not developed in-house. They're from a licensed library of models, from what I can tell (I was on a project that had many nearly-identical pieces and recognized em from the base builder). They didn't spend the time developing all those assets-- many of them were licensed... so any "expansion" of assets that was purely in-house would likely be much fewer than what we as players would come to expect.
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Perez, Boomtown, Dark Astoria, Eden, and Crey's Folly aren't as much "broken" as they are "outdated." They existed as they did solely to accomodate the "pack-hunter" MMO players- people that would just band together and sweep through zones, killing whatever they encountered. They didn't want to be slowed by quest-givers or mission locations. It was "gather a large team and smash stuff."|
Originally Posted by Lemur Lad
Well they've said for years that when revamping an old zone it's like starting from scratch most of the time. I'm not sure why that's terribly surprising. Even so I've never wanted them to revamp old zones because I thought it would be easy, but because I felt they were going to waste in their current broken state. Boomtown, the Shards, and Astoria need help, even if it does mean starting from scratch.
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Problem is, that was appealing (in part) because it was great XP. In CoH, you often get better XP off of missions (which have mission rewards and will (almsot) always scale to your level and team size. They spent a lot giving this player-behavior several playgrounds, as they saw that conduct so frequently in other MMO's of the time .... then made it extinct by their other innovations.
They do need a revamp... but I think they all DO need a total revamp. Pasting a few story arcs atop a zone designed for an extinct style of play isn't going to make the zones a whole lot better- its just going to bring more people in to see zones that have outlived their designed purpose.
I was gonna write a couple paragraphs explaining my use of the word broken and why I think it's valid. But really we're in violent agreement about what needs to be done in those zones and it's just a quibble over semantics. 
"Null is as much an argument "for removing the cottage rule" as the moon being round is for buying tennis shoes." -Memphis Bill
All you need to do is look at the difference between Praetoria and Atlas park.
Atlas uses copy-paste buildings that feature in other zones. Some of them look terrible but, worse than that, they look impractical. Some of them have no windows except on one side! Some of them are wider at the top than the base! I mean, honestly? Did the person who design them even bother thinking of basic architecture?
Praetoria might be a dystopian other world, but it looks and feels like a city. Its like a high-tech version of...well, a real world city. Its great!
That level of quality should be made available in the standard game, not just for those that pay for the expansion.
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Originally Posted by Zwillinger
GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.
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Originally Posted by Captain_Photon
NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.
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Are we talking about Peacebringers and Masterminds again?|
Originally Posted by Zamuel
means a lot of things may fall into the "never get fixed" category.
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/em reads thread
Oh ... we're talking about art and why the Base Editor will never get any better. Carry on.
It's the end. But the moment has been prepared for ...
Weird. I was the player who actually came up with the question to Second Measure because I'd been following the chat about revamping old zones (which is really what Galaxy City is all about, btw) and wondered just what difficulties there were in doing this stuff.
I fully acknowledge and sympathise with the devs for the reasons both Second Measure and the OP listed, which is primarily the age of the game. Whilst I also acknowledge that in terms of overall performance, this might push up the game specs a touch (anything that adds to a game's complexity in terms of graphics is going to make a hit on performance however small), it's the best way to go with a game this old.
I'd like to see this approach continue across the board; people may complain that legacy costume pieces may disappear for example, but it may quite simply be the case that they have to because of the same compatability issues.
Bases are tricky, given how much work some have put into them, but I think if compatability isn't too much of an issue, I'd want to see replacements come into existence where possible, such as more furniture pieces, stairs and so on. I think base builders would appreciate having actual pieces to work with as much as they've invented their own.
S.
Part of Sister Flame's Clickey-Clack Posse
They also mentioned another aspect of the difficulty of 'sprucing up' the old: Feature creep.
If you re-do Atlas Park Town Hall in hi-rez ultra modality how are you going to just stop there and not update the surrounding buildings... and their surrounding buildings?
They mentioned how with Faultline, the original plan was just a few neighborhoods, and yet, they couldn't help themselves and did a full makeover... which would have been the same amount of time as starting from scratch.
So, the problem is compatibility and comprehensiveness.
And before someone pipes up and says "I can live with them updating only Neighborhood X" you *know* there will be loud wailing from players about how Neighborhood X looks so out of place and the Devs *must* update everything else. It's just not the Devs who are stricken with feature creep.
I just hope that the 'low level zones' update is with the contact chain and implementing my oft made suggestion to model the arcs like the zone-arcs of Praetoria: One contact per arc; move all the doors to one zone (and one adjacent hazard zone); move all the one-off missions to a perpetual mission giver... or the police band radio; and pare down the arcs with multiple street sweeps or fedexes.
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I found one of the Q&A replies on the previous Ustream rather interesting.
It was noted that one of the reasons why older resources aren't always reused is actually due to compatibility. Being made with differing versions of 3ds Max generally makes it easier to just rebuild from scratch than import. That's got me wondering if that has been where a lot of the struggle concerning implementing fixes that seem "easy" to us players is actually rather hard.
However, that also has me wondering if it would be best to work towards converting these resources. It just bugs me when it seems like there's so many ways things could be reused yet they aren't though it's a lot easier to handle knowing just what the difficulties are.
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Mission Architect Handyman