Dr. Aeon's Studio Movies

AHHHH! I getcha, I see... thanks!

I still think Penny should be Psi Melee Girl. If anyone manages to save the game, think it over, seriously. Pure gold there.

CC

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.

We don't rick roll here but we do rikti roll.

I am currently only seeing 'QUEUED ON BETA SERVER, 19 OF 23'

I'm going to keep trying daily to play there as there are story arcs I still haven't tested, powers I haven't tried that are/were coming.... some of it I didn't want to play on beta because I wanted to wait until it went live and play them with my regular group. But in case they don't make it to live, I want to play them on beta. I hope you can get through to someone on Tuesday to give the server a kick. Thanks for trying!

Is SSA 2 Part 4 & 5 available there? I really wanted to see where the story ends.

It is, if they ever get Beta working again.

Yes, Aeon got me with the last one also, the shmuck. But still, LUA scripting. The devs wouldn't have been able to keep me out of that if they deployed Hercules Titans at their front doors.

Hercules woulda been insulting.

I'd accept no less than a couple of Kronos.

EmperorSteele was referring to this:


(the right image is probably still cached for you)

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!

Bah.

Want me to really blow your mind?

I believe that Tim (Black Scorpion) had the work done prior to I23. It just took time to train everyone up on it.

It allows mission designers to make complex scripted events without having to have support from Programming.

It allows power designers to make complex server-side mechanics without having to have support from Programming.

Basically it lets the large number of people in various departments do creative things with the engine without having to go through the small, overworked department, where even small changes to the engine code mean lots of testing due to how risky it is.

And lets them devote their time to other things, like fixing the UI... oh who am I kidding.

And, as demonstrated in the video, apparently with their setup, they can do extremely fast iterative development (no need to recompile the whole client and/or server for an update! Some code bases can take hours to compile, even on relatively fast machines!), they can just modify the file and try it again. Also, in the past, the Devs have said their cutscene system was a nightmare to work with (which was why we weren't getting it).

LUA is a very popular scripting language for embedding in various engines (including game engines... I think WoW helped make it extremely popular, not sure how popular it was before WoW started using it). Being a high level language, it's relatively easy to pick up, and can be made quite safe for those that aren't intimately familiar with things like memory management.

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!

I'm kicking Tim's *** the next time I see him for keeping that one to himself.

Edit: wait, Tim's a designer. Wouldn't Matt have been the one to add that to the engine? I need to make sure I kill the right guy.

I figured I'd come on here to talk about more of the cool, non-flashy LUA stuff that was going on behind the scenes before going to sleep. I want to emphasize that this wouldn't be possible without the work from Black Scorpion, Neon Walker (did we ever give him a proper redname? Our new lead programmer), and one of our other programmers who was the one responsible for re-programming the character creator UI for Freedom launch.

First, we had the ability to do branching cutscenes, in a sense. This was done in the Issue 24 villain arc. Wu Yin, at the end of the first arc, issues a live broadcast to announce a bounty against the villain. If you had done Dean MacArthur's arc and talked to him at a specific point in the mission, the cutscene would be interrupted and play Dean's portion of it instead. If you didn't do it, then the cutscene would play as it would normally. It's a cool feature, but one that could have caused a metric ton of work to be added if not used carefully.

There are a few other cool things too, such as creating zone event-like UI bars in missions fairly easily. This was heavily shown off in the Brickstown story arcs to give a feel that you're working together with the rest of the New Praetorians.

LUA also helped us make several scripts that did tasks that normally required several steps to do in one simple, easy step; handing out challenge badges, for example, required about 4 steps, which means 4 places where stuff could break. With the LUA script hooks set up, I wrote a reward script that would always reward a specific item set by a designer to all members of the team. The time of the reward would be based upon several requirements, and this time not objectives; it could be based on the clues you had, tokens you had, AT, etc. etc.

So in closing, LUA, as Arcanaville and a few other pointed out, is an extremely cool language. Before, I would have to have bugged one of our programmers to stop fixing crashes or other high priority things to do something like write a script to change the sky file. With LUA, it was a matter of just asking them to create a hook into that code - from there it was on me. The LUA scripts streamlined the design process to help prevent bugs from cropping up in doing common place things, allowed QA to focus on more iterative testing, let programming focus on bigger tasks, and allowed design to implement cooler things faster.

LUA. Awesome.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

My version:

When the game was new and shiny, and we players ignorant and retarded, a lot of players would ask silly questions like "why can't they subclass Absorb Pain and add a new feature to it that is different for Defenders than Controllers?" And we'd have to take these people aside and say that first, we were not doing their college homework for them, and second the game is not constructed out of C++ classes. It was surprising how many people just couldn't, or wouldn't accept that. Games don't work that way: games have engines written in code, and data written in whatever - Excel in this case for the most part. Most of the devs, including the powers people, the mission designers, the map designers, even the animators, created data that was fed into the engine. They did not write code.

The game engine originally supported surprisingly little procedural capability in all areas. You couldn't tell the game "if this then do that." Even in the powers engine that was and is very clumsy in many respects. Until recently we could design an effect of a power to do X if the target was Y, else do nothing. In that way we could have powers do different things to different kinds of targets - Scrapper criticals work that way. But we couldn't say "burn less endurance if the target is a boss." We couldn't change the attributes of the power itself, only its effects. Only recently the code became available to do that, and its still kind of ugly. The Insta-Snipe that was being developed for I24 uses the same code that Titan Weapons uses. Based on a mode flag, a power would actually be an indirect pointer to two different powers, each with its own totally independent definition. In that way, we could change things like cast time. But not by saying "if this then cast time equals that." Rather, we had to build two totally different fully complete powers and jump between them.

In the game at large, the same thing was true. In theory the programmers could hard code the engine to do anything. But what was exposed to the mission designers was far less powerful. It was basically, in many respects, only a slightly more sophisticated Mad-Libs version of the AE: fill in the blank design. It was more complex than that because they could feed the system certain kinds of scripts, but they were clumsy to use.

The implication here is that LUA was integrated widely throughout the game engine sometime back in I23ish. LUA is a non-proprietary scripting language optimized for embedded applications. Its actually the language Angry Birds is coded in (and fascinating to me professionally, its embedded in the "Flame" malware toolkit). And it has a reputation for being very fast.

Our game engine might be limited, but there's an enormous amount of things it could do, but it doesn't for the simple reason the devs have no way to tell it to do that. If the player has this badge and kills that target, award this reward. Really easy to say. Really hard for the game to do, because the code doesn't offer that as a direct option. But with an integrated embedded scripting language, almost any behavior you can describe you can get the game engine to do, provided the LUA scripts didn't take up too much computational time.

LUA would have made this a whole different game. It would have been a larger leap in functionality than Ultra Mode was in graphical fidelity, than Power Customization was to the character creator, than the invention system was to build meta-gaming. The difference between the I24 engine with LUA and the I22 engine without LUA is like the difference between a giant crate of LEGOs and a giant castle made out of LEGOs that is glued together.