Statues

Oh? What like a contest with players? And the winning player gets their costume/character made into a statue? (It would be easy all they are is Up scaled static NPC's)

Oh who am I kidding that's a silly idea they would never do that! Or they would and it would involve Twiter some how...

Captain Den'Rath 53* Merk/Traps MM, Rivona 50Energy Blast/Time Cor,Victoria Von Heilwig 53* Dual Pistols/Traps Cor, Crab Spider Webguard 53* SOA, Accela 53* Bot/FF MM,Valkyrie's Executor 53* Broadsword/Shield Def Scrap. On FREEDOM! @Knight Of Bronze

Try Statesman and Sister Psyche, two incredibly influential heroes that have been saving lives for decades and would surely get some sort of monument to their memory.

On behalf of our Environment Art team...

There is nothing *easy* about changing world fixtures.

Ramble: It's tends to grind game developers gears when people make statements that "such and such would be easy..." without understanding the full impact or scope of work of said changes.

How do you really feel?

Mutter.. Grumble... Darn POS, backward, OpenGL, out of date, Cryptic engine.

To be fair I was only thinking about making the statue it self. Which appear to use the same model as the costume parts with a rock/granite texture applied. IT may also be baked into one piece. That much should be easy. I totally forgot about issues that might crop up placing it in the world-space, although if its that much of an issue it tells me that you guys need better dev tools. Maybe some sonic ones, eh?

Captain Den'Rath 53* Merk/Traps MM, Rivona 50Energy Blast/Time Cor,Victoria Von Heilwig 53* Dual Pistols/Traps Cor, Crab Spider Webguard 53* SOA, Accela 53* Bot/FF MM,Valkyrie's Executor 53* Broadsword/Shield Def Scrap. On FREEDOM! @Knight Of Bronze

But can't they just whip up a fresh batch of code? That seems pretty easy to me.

It's a reasonable guess about the statue but I'm unaware of any official lore that confirms that the statue is Peregrine, or what it is that she might have done to deserve a statue.

Of course, they'll just pull it out of the magic dev code hat where the game comes from. The devs actually just play ping-pong and skii ball most of the day. Once in a while someone stumbles across the hat and pulls out some magic updates to give us new issues.

I want cookies now

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.

Originally Posted by ShadowNate ;_; ?!?! What the heck is wrong with you, my god, I have never been so confused in my life!

Ugh. Please tell me you work on MMOs or some similar sort of 3D game world building occupation. Otherwise you remind me of people i deal with in daily life who think some things are easy because they know just enough about the abstract concepts and techniques of doing something to think that it's all easy to do in no time at all. And it's not a matter of outdated engines per se. Even things that seem straightforward and simple when you look at the basic design specs can involve many, many hours of work to actually execute.

Edit: Also, i'm not sure what OpenGL specifically has to do with editing the game world unless that was just a random "lulz@OpenGL" tossed in for extra denigration. Seriously, not a coder here, so i don't know how relevant the use of OpenGL is to editing zone geometry. Just because it seems irrelevant to me doesn't mean it is. Anyone?

No. But I have done some work on mods for Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout NV, Skyrim....

Yea, I'm one of those people ya got me. And I get that things can take many hours of work but what I said was based off of a lot of the things they said over the years. About how its easier to make a new zone than to re-make an old one and how slowly we get new mission maps for things like paper/radio missions. Really does sound like map editing is harder than it should be.

Still at then end of the day, I know NOTHING. And you can quote me on that.




(I may still argue my point tho, see sig.)

Captain Den'Rath 53* Merk/Traps MM, Rivona 50Energy Blast/Time Cor,Victoria Von Heilwig 53* Dual Pistols/Traps Cor, Crab Spider Webguard 53* SOA, Accela 53* Bot/FF MM,Valkyrie's Executor 53* Broadsword/Shield Def Scrap. On FREEDOM! @Knight Of Bronze

The issue is (usually) that code interacts with other code and that computers can't tell if code doesn't work unless we tell it in advance that code won't work (with other code.) New batches of code have been added to CoH for the better part of a decade now, and all of it is meshing together.

Furthermore, while some bits of coding are simple (see: Hello World!) other bits of coding are much more complex and require days or weeks to really get functioning properly. So if at a conservative estimate we say it takes two days for a "change the statues" code to be built at every iteration, you've got two days to build it, then some time passes to see if/where it interferes with the pre-existing code. Then you need to go back to the drawing board and rebuild it, possibly using another two days (though hopefully you'll have gotten enough right the first time that you'll merely be modifying the original product...but you can't count on that.) This cycle repeats itself through a number of tests, and if it finally appears ready then it can be subjected to Beta Testing where the players can/will break it, prompting you to rebuild it some more and find a new thing that'll work in a new way with hopefully the same result that'll be harder for the players to break. This cycle will also repeat itself until you finally have some code that you can declare to be "done." (Ignoring the very real possibility that, a few weeks after it being "done", players stumble onto new ways that it's broken, at which point you rebuild it yet again, assuming you haven't been put onto a different project by then. It may have to simply be "done enough.")

Now, this process is applied to absolutely every batch of new code that the developers whip up, and it uses a lot of employee time and resources to work on projects like that. Different issues are more significant to the game world than others, and so they need to prioritize how they're using their developer time. Will players have more fun in the game if they get a new power set? Almost certainly. Will players have more fun with new costumes? You bet! Will players have fun with a new zone or new stories? You bet they will.

Will players have fun if we take out some of the old statues and put in new ones? Well...maybe. I'm sure some players will appreciate it. Other players won't notice it at all. And, of course, then you'll get the players who get angry about the change being made to the game. They liked that statue, dangit, it was one of their favorite bits of scenery. Their character was going to fight a friend's character in front of that statue at the next part of their unfolding roleplay, it was symbolic.

Ultimately, the devs need to triage their projects. As such, most games wind up with a long laundry list of things that'd be really neat to see changed that, ultimately, can't ever happen, or at least won't ever happen, because there aren't enough hours in the day for devs to work on them all.





tl;dr version: whipping up new batches of code is tricky business.

Captain Den'Rath 53* Merk/Traps MM, Rivona 50Energy Blast/Time Cor,Victoria Von Heilwig 53* Dual Pistols/Traps Cor, Crab Spider Webguard 53* SOA, Accela 53* Bot/FF MM,Valkyrie's Executor 53* Broadsword/Shield Def Scrap. On FREEDOM! @Knight Of Bronze

It quite likely is- but that's probably not so much the fault of the engine or OpenGL, but of their in-house development tools. TES isn't really a fair comparison as those development tools are huge selling points for the games, which means there's more motivation to sink money into improving them.

I wouldn't be shocked if lots of their development tools are largely undocumented, with no one around that originally developed them (thanks at least in part to when Cryptic moved most of the development team off CoH). We know NCSoft/Paragon has put at least some money into improving them, as, IIRC, Mission Architect was actually a byproduct of a new tool to develop missions without going through as much effort as their older tools took.

Considering how fast recent development has been, I'd actually be a bit surprised if it was purely due to expansion of the development team. Major revamps have happened to the game's engine, so likely the tools used have seen some lov'n as well.

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.

Originally Posted by ShadowNate ;_; ?!?! What the heck is wrong with you, my god, I have never been so confused in my life!

HERE LIES AN HERO
WHO FARMED HIS WHOLE LIFE AWAY
HE BOUGHT THE FARM

HERE LIES AN HERO
WHO DENIED HIMSELF HIS REST
HE RESTS IN PEACE

YOU ARE A HERO
WHOSE LIFE IS NOT YET OVER
PLEASE GO OUTSIDE

And it runs terrible and it's unoptimized too. The game would run better and be less system demanding if it was direct x.

That's not true in the slightest. Except maybe for AMD's drivers...
(even then, not really... they just have bad drivers in general)


The official OGL spec hasn't been updated as frequently (although things have greatly improved), but new features can be added via vendor extensions until the functionality can be standardized (similar to how modern advances in the web are occurring). OpenGL is also the only option if you want to do development for OS X, Linux, PS3, PSP, Wii, 3DS, Android, iOS, and basically any other platform that isn't named 'Windows', 'Xbox', or 'Windows Phone' (with the latter two being the only platforms that are DirectX-exclusive).

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.

Originally Posted by ShadowNate ;_; ?!?! What the heck is wrong with you, my god, I have never been so confused in my life!

Indeed. All it takes is two easter eggs, a gigabyte of flour, a tablet of binary soda, two packets (in case of loss) of Yeast++, a cup of sugar, and a thermos of caffeinated beverage. Compile ingredients. Knead sleep. Let arise. Punch QA. Bake at 360 degrees until dizzy. And when all else fails: push muffin button.