Why not offline apps for COH?
By
Arcanaville,
Posted on: 2012-01-25 20:00 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
resource issue most likely.
That being said, I wouldn't mind a mobile app to access the auction house or vault. Or a way to pay base rent while I'm away.
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A mobile app to do administrative work while you're not playing? Seriously?
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Seriously! I would buy an app that did this, for up to $5.|
Originally Posted by BYiro
A mobile app to do administrative work while you're not playing? Seriously?
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Additionally, I'd love it if an app allowed me to use my account login to chat with people in my global friends list and/or already joined chat channels.
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Here's Will!|
Originally Posted by flipside
Seriously! I would buy an app that did this, for up to $5.
Additionally, I'd love it if an app allowed me to use my account login to chat with people in my global friends list and/or already joined chat channels. |
Kinda
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Because it wasn't designed into it from the beginning?|
Originally Posted by Crysys
This is a social game, if Zynga can figure it out, why not COH?
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Because it's not the same sort of "Social game?"
Because the last time they tried to drag data out of the game to the website, it was.... *not good* for the servers? (See also City Vault.) And that was just viewing character data.
Not saying it wouldn't be nice to have, but "If X can do it, why can't COH" doesn't really fly. It's like saying "If robins can fly, why not ballistic missile submarines?"
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Another thing is all of Zynga's games are web-based to begin with - not much is required to have an app hook in.
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Originally Posted by Stormbird
Because it wasn't designed into it from the beginning?
Because it's not the same sort of "Social game?" Because the last time they tried to drag data out of the game to the website, it was.... *not good* for the servers? (See also City Vault.) And that was just viewing character data. Not saying it wouldn't be nice to have, but "If X can do it, why can't COH" doesn't really fly. It's like saying "If robins can fly, why not ballistic missile submarines?" |
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As a professional developer myself, I had doubts about their reasoning behind why the City Vault was scrapped. There's just no way a simple SQL read query would affect game performance. I suspect it was more likely security concerns. I know our customers REALLY wouldn't like their database anywhere where a web browser can get at it, even as read only..
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Originally Posted by Stormbird
Because it wasn't designed into it from the beginning?
Because it's not the same sort of "Social game?" Because the last time they tried to drag data out of the game to the website, it was.... *not good* for the servers? (See also City Vault.) And that was just viewing character data. |
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It's not a simple SQL read query.
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Originally Posted by FloatingFatMan
As a professional developer myself, I had doubts about their reasoning behind why the City Vault was scrapped. There's just no way a simple SQL read query would affect game performance.
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They're not using SQL, they are using a custom-made database system created by the original devteam.
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Originally Posted by FloatingFatMan
As a professional developer myself, I had doubts about their reasoning behind why the City Vault was scrapped. There's just no way a simple SQL read query would affect game performance.
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I have no problem paying extra for more CoH bells and whistles.
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God yes.|
Originally Posted by BYiro
A mobile app to do administrative work while you're not playing? Seriously?
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They only way I am likely to actually "play" the auction house would be if I could play it through a web browser.
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I know there are (or used to be) third party apps that were able to tweet out your progress. "Awesome Guy just reached Level 29 in City of Heroes! #CoH" "Awesome Guy just got the Annoy All Your Twitter Followers badge in City of Heroes! #CoH" They're not nearly as popular as they once were as people figured out it was annoying, especially for people watching the #CoH hashtag for breaking CoH news.
Some separate apps would be nice. A costume designer would be nice. A web-based auction app would be spiffy for those of us that use them extensively. An opt-in site for displaying your characters would be pretty awesome. Of course there's always issues of time management for the dev team, and what potential cool in-game stuff are they taking time to work on to develop these extras.
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I just know I'm more likely to jump online to the game at time intervals I'm sure my friends will also be online. If I had an applet of sorts that pushed a notification to me saying "Player X is now online LFT" I'd be far more likely to jump online right then.
More logons = more chance for socialization = more community.
I get the whole priority thing. Just saying it would be nice is all and I think the dev team should consider ways to keep players coming back. New content/shinies is well, but the biggest attraction for me with this game has always been that I have friends playing it too. We will grind a lot of crap countless times as long as we are doing it together.
In its early days, Champions had an iPhone app that let me see my game email, and displayed my characters and their stats/bios, among other things. I used it a lot. And now with the Paragon Market, there's even more incentive to give them another way to part us from our money.
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Its probably still a SQL query.|
Originally Posted by Silver Gale
They're not using SQL, they are using a custom-made database system created by the original devteam.
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But it isn't just a simple SQL query. As a web developer who has some massive systems integration I really wish it was as simple as pull data in read mode from x. TADA.
The reality is its more like:
Read data from X
Read more data from Y using data from X.
Process data from X and Y against Z to output A.
Output A and write to B.
And that's just on the dev side, that's not counting any hardware or networking challenges that might exist or security issues between the systems and opening connections.
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Well, there is already Steam which shows you which of your friends are playing what game....
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Originally Posted by Crysys
I just know I'm more likely to jump online to the game at time intervals I'm sure my friends will also be online. If I had an applet of sorts that pushed a notification to me saying "Player X is now online LFT" I'd be far more likely to jump online right then.
More logons = more chance for socialization = more community. I get the whole priority thing. Just saying it would be nice is all and I think the dev team should consider ways to keep players coming back. New content/shinies is well, but the biggest attraction for me with this game has always been that I have friends playing it too. We will grind a lot of crap countless times as long as we are doing it together. |
^^ So are you saying I can accomplish what I'm looking for via Steam?
I have Steam and this is exactly the kind of feature I'm looking for, but in a smartphone app.
Actually, what got me wanting this was playing Xbox Live the other day. When I see one of my friends is playing a particular game, it often makes me stop the game I'm currently playing and go join them instead. For COH, I imagine its a good thing to get players to quit playing Game X for COH instead by using as many opps to pull players in as possible. Their community, IMHO, is one of their strongest incentives to play out there.
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Well, there are several possibilities here, but one of Cryptic's database guru's used to have a blog, and he talked there alot about using object-based databases, rather than relational tables, so its possible that our assumption that this is even sql-driven is incorrect.|
Originally Posted by FloatingFatMan
As a professional developer myself, I had doubts about their reasoning behind why the City Vault was scrapped. There's just no way a simple SQL read query would affect game performance. I suspect it was more likely security concerns. I know our customers REALLY wouldn't like their database anywhere where a web browser can get at it, even as read only..
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Granted, I don't buy the "too much of a pull" issue either. If it was, you'd compensate by not doing a realtime on-demand pull of the latest data. Rather than hit the database every time someone requests the webpage, publish a static webpage with the stats every time a character (for example) logs out. Nothing's going to change until the next log-in anyway....
HOWEVER- you have to remember that things like the database core would be some of the first pieces of code assembled, that CoH was the team's FIRST foray into building an MMO, and that the scalability of database systems back then was frequently in question.
You can still find press releases hilighting the odd innovations some vendors were doing to handle demand like using a full flash-memory system with a custom allocation system to get fast enough responses. I've also heard horror stories from a former MMO developer on how a database on a major title didn't reach a fraction of the vendor's promised thoroughput, leaving them "gutting every call they could" after their first stress went an unexpected direction (let's just say that they succeeded on the "stress" part).
It is very possible that the CoH database system is rigged enough that they can't be compared directly to what we work with in business or web development.
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BINGO. I have the "My Xbox LIVE" app on my iPhone. I can see my friends' activity. (Granted, Xbox is a hell of a lot bigger than Paragon, but doesn't mean I can't want.)|
Originally Posted by Crysys
^^ So are you saying I can accomplish what I'm looking for via Steam?
I have Steam and this is exactly the kind of feature I'm looking for, but in a smartphone app. Actually, what got me wanting this was playing Xbox Live the other day. When I see one of my friends is playing a particular game, it often makes me stop the game I'm currently playing and go join them instead. For COH, I imagine its a good thing to get players to quit playing Game X for COH instead by using as many opps to pull players in as possible. Their community, IMHO, is one of their strongest incentives to play out there. |
--NT
They all laughed at me when I said I wanted to be a comedian.
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If I became a red name, I would be all "and what would you mere mortals like to entertain me with today, mu hu ha ha ha!" ~Arcanaville
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Its even more complicated than that. I suspect that when we talk about "the database" we may be more accurate than some realize. I think the runtime game database is monolithic, or nearly so, which means the same basic code that stores things like my character's hat size is also storing things like entity properties in the live game.|
Originally Posted by Chase_Arcanum
Well, there are several possibilities here, but one of Cryptic's database guru's used to have a blog, and he talked there alot about using object-based databases, rather than relational tables, so its possible that our assumption that this is even sql-driven is incorrect.
Granted, I don't buy the "too much of a pull" issue either. If it was, you'd compensate by not doing a realtime on-demand pull of the latest data. Rather than hit the database every time someone requests the webpage, publish a static webpage with the stats every time a character (for example) logs out. Nothing's going to change until the next log-in anyway.... HOWEVER- you have to remember that things like the database core would be some of the first pieces of code assembled, that CoH was the team's FIRST foray into building an MMO, and that the scalability of database systems back then was frequently in question. You can still find press releases hilighting the odd innovations some vendors were doing to handle demand like using a full flash-memory system with a custom allocation system to get fast enough responses. I've also heard horror stories from a former MMO developer on how a database on a major title didn't reach a fraction of the vendor's promised thoroughput, leaving them "gutting every call they could" after their first stress went an unexpected direction (let's just say that they succeeded on the "stress" part). It is very possible that the CoH database system is rigged enough that they can't be compared directly to what we work with in business or web development. |
I know there's a database that keeps track of various entities and spawns in the game, and their properties. I know that database is accessed whenever something like a GrantPower happens: that actually alters the entry for that critter or player in a live database.
The question is: is that ultimately the same database that would have to be queried to support the Vault, because there's only one? If so, then I know exactly why the Vault was scrapped. Consider the developers that wrote the Paragon Store, and then consider what would happen if Paragon were to contract out to a random third party developer to make the Vault, and consider what would happen if to make the Vault work they needed access to that sensitive runtime database. The one that keeps track of where we are and what powers we have at any given time. That database. The same database that, due to a tiny timing race condition involved in accessing it, caused Oil Slick Arrows to malfunction. Lets see what happens when the Vault randomly slows it down.
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I'll be impressed by the LIVE service when:|
Originally Posted by NuclearToast
BINGO. I have the "My Xbox LIVE" app on my iPhone. I can see my friends' activity. (Granted, Xbox is a hell of a lot bigger than Paragon, but doesn't mean I can't want.)
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Yeah, the Standard Code Rant seems to apply here at at some of the greatest levels of minutiae that exist in the game. We know they rolled their own object store, and that accessing it is not pretty.
Consider this. Unless something has changed, nothing is ever actually updated in the game's database tables directly by folks like powers devs. There's no tabular database interface anywhere that they can click on a field and change Marauder's Lethal Resistance cap to 0.9. Instead there's an excel spreadsheet that is itself somewhat nightmarish. And a perl program parses that spreadsheet and injects data from it into game piggs and, presumably, where appropriate, the "databases" the game servers read such attributes from.
While I wouldn't sit around and twiddle data in an on-line production copy of our application databases at work .... usually ... I would sure not need a process as arcane as that to pull data in and out of them.
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Doesn't CIT + Sentinel do this? I know there's options for doing forum signatures that show offline / online status and which character. Only thing I think it's missing is a friends list type function, but it does provide XML data feeds so someone might be able to build one...
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CIT runs on YOUR computer and accesses the information that CoH has already sent to your computer over the internet. If it does happen to cause lag, it only affects you.
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Originally Posted by Codewalker
Doesn't CIT + Sentinel do this?
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Now that the game is F2P, there is plenty of reason to create a "friends playing COH now" app. This is a social game, if Zynga can figure it out, why not COH?