Grapple Swing

Exactly and that's why it's foolish for someone to claim that coding something into a game that it wasn't designed to do from the get go "shouldn't be that difficult" and is "relatively easy to implement". Whether they say it out of ignorance, or arrogance they lose their credibility.

We've all seen the simplest things turn out to be nightmares for the devs after something was added caused completely unexpected problems in completely unrelated areas, and that's only the stuff that turns up after it's been put on the test servers and gone live. We've all watched things get delayed or pulled from an issue for unexplained problems.

Actually, there are many parts of the game engine or client that were created by people who for all intents and purposes no longer exist in our dimensional reality. The coders who wrote the original physics engine, for example.

In fact, I'm not sure if *anyone* who worked on the original release game is still on the code team.

On the general subject of what is possible and impossible, technically speaking practically nothing is impossible literally. But lots of things are infeasible. Grapple swinging ranks high on the list of things I believe would require so many changes in so many areas that its infeasible to add to the game. Completely separate from that fact is the independent problem that the most direct way to do it would probably conflict with a lot of ways existing things work that would require ad hoc solutions.

I once discussed with Castle the idea of having a "charge-up" attack. You hold down the button and the longer you do, the more damage it does when you release. But after discussing that very simple idea with him, it quickly became clear to me that was infeasible. Would it be impossible to add the code to do it? Of course not. The problems were that:

1. You would need to invent a whole new user interface widget to allow for that, because the current UI doesn't support that functionality.

2. You would have to figure out a way to document that new functionality.

3. You would have to deal with players that use macros or keymaps to activate their powers instead.

4. You would have to deal with the fact the powers database doesn't have data that could describe that functionality.

5. You would have to deal with the fact the powers system doesn't have a way to scale damage in that way.

6. You would have to invent a scheme to deal with the mechanics of tohit and line of sight for a such a power analogous to how interruptable attacks work.

I can go on, but the list doesn't stop there. It doesn't stop at 10, or 15, or 20. All for an attack that lets you hold down the button to charge it.

Grapple swinging is like that. Its a thread you pull that starts unravelling the rest of the game with it, forcing you to expand that one little thing into an excursion to make changes across so wide a cross-section of the game mechanics that its hardly worth it.


I will also repeat The Rule. In the history of this game, no player without direct inside or first hand knowledge has ever correctly guessed the precise way the game engine works, the way the developers work, or the relative effort required to add a feature. People still keep forgetting the data side of the game is implemented in Excel, or that there even is a separation between the code and data teams. Even people who have worked on other games consistently get pretty much everything wrong.

It took me several weeks to figure out how the animation system in this game worked, and that was with BaBs help, and to the best of my knowledge the system is practically unique to this game. The physics engine is unique. The way the powers system works is unique in many ways. The reward system appears to be unique. I think most MMOs have a lot of unique features to the way they are developed, but I think this game moreso is not a good place to be testing your guessing skills.

And not one in a thousand is any good at it.


The game engine was written with a higher emphasis on efficiency than being a textbook example of structured code.

One of the most pernicious class of bugs that this game engine has had over the years are bugs where players zone into the wrong instance. Over the years some of those bugs have been extremely odd: sometimes only affecting certain kinds of characters, or only affecting characters doing certain things. Historically, these bugs have been extremely difficult to find and fix.

Imagine how its possible for that bug to even exist. And now imagine its possible for player activity *within* an instance to affect how they zone into *another* instance. And now imagine a way for this bug to exist that wouldn't be blatantly obvious.

When you do, you'll have a better idea of the state of the game code.

You aren't giving an example and I'm fairly awesome at figuring out where bugs are even if they don't make much sense for most that they're there so there is no way for me to accurately measure what you call obvious to what i call obvious.

Also that is one of the skills good testers have... guessing where a bug might be based on what they are experiencing in game.

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.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

Yeah I thought that too at first, but then there's magic carpet and hover board...that are fly variants.

There is ninja run and beast run that are hybrid jump/ss variants.

So this would be one more...like I said I was addressing the ridiculous cables to nowhere problem but still providing the same movement.

TPN seems to be having one of these now. Start guessing.

That's an example of the bug... it's not an example of where the fix is which is the thing in question which is your point.

And there's Phoenix Wings which have no flapping animations so anyone that wants to glide can just use them.

Also if the devs were to reconsider their decision and work on a Swing power it will be as a non combat power. Clockwork O1 has flat out told us that

Translation: He has no idea so he's going to avoid answering.

You want an example of a bug fix to a subtle bug so you can declare if you would have thought it was obvious or not?

Um, nice try.

The best way to demonstrate the skill of being able to identify and suggest corrections for bugs in code without having to see or review the entire codebase would be to do it. Its possible. I have about a half-dozen of those. But I genuinely doubt there are more than a handful of people capable of actually doing that.

He isn't even mentioning the issue with normalizing the sequencers to deal with different modes.

Fail to do that properly, and you get the situation where if you trigger Elude while simultaneously falling, you whirlwind instead of backflip.

No. You're saying the fixes have not been obvious. You expect me to imagine a way for something to be "not obvious" which is nearly impossible to do for yourself but you're asking me to imagine what you find "not obvious" which since I don't know what you find obvious or not is an impossibility given the current situation. The only way to remedy such a situation is to show examples of a solution you think is not obvious which I know you can't do so we're left at going nowhere with that argument.

Why would you think this was nearly impossible for me to do? I can think of lots of examples, because I have practical experience to draw upon.

For example, both prior to and during I14 beta - aka Architect beta - I did *a lot* of testing of critter behavior. Lots of things struck me as weird, but a long standing issue that was generally known for a long time was the fact that critters did not always use all of their attacks. This was most troubling when it came to mastermind pets. Sometimes you'd upgrade a pet with an attack only to discover it never used it, ever.

Turns out a major part of the problem was recharge buffs, but that was a very non-obvious bug. There's no logical reason to expect that improving the recharge of powers would make a critter not use certain ones. The *obvious* logical thought process was this: since the critter's attacks were recharging faster, it might end up using the same attacks over and over at the expense of other attacks. But it often happened that the critter stood around and did nothing when recharge buffed, even if it attacked just fine when not recharge buffed.

That was a very non-obvious bug, and it took a lot of very careful testing to figure out what was ultimately happening.

Din't mean yourself in specific, meant it in general more referring to me...should have used myself but whatever...

That sounds fairly obvious to me... not the first thing you'd think of, but something that if you looked at all the things that are similar between the mobs and whats happening you'd pick up on it almost instantly as to where the problem is coming from...though you might say that i'm just saying it's obvious to piss you off or seeing it as obvious in retrospect, but i'd say given what i know that'd be one of the top 5 or 10 things i'd likely try to check.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Arcanaville. Doing what Durakken thinks is impossible.

Nice. Trying to premptively cast aspersions on anyone calling you on what you did after reading her response.

Shame on you.

No. I am preemptively saying that what she or others might think is not what I'm saying as it can come off that way and re-affirming that I'd consider it one of the obvious things to look at. When someone says it isn't obvious I take that they're talking about one of those odd bugs that once you exhaust every possible thing that it could be on the surface, looking at the data and code, you still haven't figured it out and the solution ends up not having to do with any of the parts that you could point to but some part that is several times removed like say the problem isn't in the new code itself, but in some other piece of code that interacts with the same code that your working with that is triggered by a tertiary piece of code within the new code so that when the tertiary call and the secondary call somehow create the bug by way of messing with the same memory space and producing a result that is different than one would expect.

and this is where I point out that this is why you can not come up with something that is not obvious to you, because what I'm describing, the bug becomes obvious as to where it's from. Something is not obvious only when you don't know what is causing it and everything you can think of from the data presented isn't the solution. This is also why "obvious" is subjective...

So basically I'm saying that what Arcana is calling not-obvious, to me, is fairly still within the obvious range, though maybe not the first try.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

.....*breathe*....


HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!! HAHAHAHAHA!!!! HAHAH!!!!!

They didn't even know how taunt worked! A player had to tell them how!!

HAHAHAHAHHAHAAHAHAHAHHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAA

*dead*

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

I think the only Cryptic programmers left are Positron (and he's a Team Lead so may not actually do much coding anymore) and a couple non-rednamers. Almost all of the current programming team was hired on after the buyout...and certainly the ones that would be working most with it (powers and world-interaction) are "newbies" - Synapse as the "powers guy" (formerly Castle's role) and a few others.

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

OMG! She's dead!

Quick we have to shock her so her heart starts again. Durakken take off your pants!

Damn. All that did was make her eyes explode.

You can believe what you want, but you should consider the environment.


Any way to display deductive abilities would require more than what anyone would be willing to do on either side and even if I wanted to show that I do work that way I wouldn't for second care to do it in this community because I don't believe for a second the people that would even remotely want "proof" would be honest and it wouldn't solve anything either way.