Chris's Release 10 Ramblings!

I have just received a message from the Sheep clan, They are considering joining forces with the Chicken clan, might want to be unguard if approaching sheep or perhaps chickens as well

 

Here they come

 

Like the move towards encunberance. I hope exhaust is also a option for replacing slugs.

 

I also hope spells will be deflected more with heavier armor as well, if it takes more focus for us to cast in heavy armor we should be able to take more magical damage if we are wearing heavy armor fair is fair!

 

A good armour carries itself!

 

Hmm,my appraisal skill detects shoes of running +3 as the weak spot of your gear...

 

Plate Rogue, sneakers for sneaking

 

Metal will always be a great conductor for lightning, though. Water + Metal + Lightning = buh bye *waves* You have a point though. Earth and Fire spells could be reflected easier in heavy armor.

 

Well, a quick footgear is important in every swordfight!

 

That way you can "dance" better when i shoot my arrows at your feet!

 

SOTA, where men are men and sheep are scared!

 

Thank you for the update, Chris.

I love that there's no leveling with quests. I've been avoiding quests (except for the unique release quest, ofc), as I only want to do them once the game is ready to play.

 

Hrmpf, I read that as "shared" first, then did a double take read it again and phew, that would have been awkward.

 

Hurray!!! Even if you aren't able to 'sneak' it in for R11 - I'm very happy that this change will happen!

 

I Like the plate sneakers! maneuverability in its finest! must be Knightkis!

 

Not necessarily... A normal suit of armour will have a padded hauberk and padded leather pants, then optionally a light chainmail (for spots like under the arm, and other joints), and then the plate. If the plate also has pieces of chainmail attached, it basically becomes a Faraday-cage... Providing almost complete protection from Heat (padded undergear) and Lightning alike!
A concept I'd expect SotA people to be familiar with given the state of technology...

(Of course that only works if you wear the plate shoes as well... The shoes of triple speed work as isolators and will melt at low temperatures, and kinda screw that protection up!)

 

I love most of what you mentioned, but do you really have to drag us through the same old tutorial as every other MMORPG? Is there at least an option to skip? I'm sure plenty of your customers are old enough to read a manual if they decide they want to (like back in the days ).
And do you have to force people to start out with the 'locked' deck (read as in: is there an option to start with random deck)? I'm not sure how tricky 're-skill-ing' is going to be, but I'd hate to be forced into 'wasteing' points early on when I know I'd go for the random deck later on.
As for getting level 5 at the end of the tutorial, that already sounds a bit 'WoW-14000 damage' like. Wouldn't it be better to reach level 2 at the end of the tutorial? It kind of appears to be 'overkill' to get dozens of skillpoints in the matter of a few minutes.

Really looking forward to R11, keep up the good work and thanks for all your effort!

 

Wow! Have you been incredibly lucky so far! Anyone with networking experience (it just happens to be one of my areas of expertise) will tell you this is a bad idea for anything that needs to be reliable. (Which is why TCP uses scalable windows, ACKs, checksums, etc. and FTP and HTML have gotten commands to allow resumes!) Surely a single confirmation every so many items won't slow everything down as much as having to resend everything!
I'd rather wait 0.25 seconds (if it *is* that much anyway...) longer on a successful instance load, than wait 5 minutes and get stuck in an unplayable situation! (PS: Define "significant"?)
Another option would be multiplexing multiple streams of partial scene data, so they'll take about as long, and their confirmations would be more or less around the same time at the end of the scene load, unless one of them is incomplete, and only *that* stream gets resent...

Let me explain the process in a real life example, and anyone will be able to see what I mean:
I need to send you 1000 pictures.
I send all of them and at the end ask you whether you have 1000 pictures. You have 998, so you say NO.
You delete the 998 pictures you have, and I send all 1000 again. Now you have 999 (and the missing one is a different one), so you say NO again...
You again delete the 999 pictures you have, and I send all 1000 again. This time you have 997 (and the missing 3 are different ones again), so you say NO again...
After 3000 pictures I am getting pretty irritated!

In this example I could also either ask you every 100 pictures whether you got all of them, and only resend that section if incomplete... (Which is an example of confirmations every so many packets/objects)
Or I can ask you which pictures you didn't get (assuming they're numbered sequentially that should be easy to determine) and only send the missing one(s) (Which is an example of splitting up in multiple streams and resending only the incomplete ones)
Yes, in ideal situations that adds an itty bitty extra time to the process, but in less than ideal situations it will save a LOT of time...

(BTW: A third option would be to try the "all at once" first, and if it fails, fail back to a more secure delivery method... And while you are at it, allow a toggle for players to enable that permanently, with a speed/load-time disclaimer attached to it...)

TBH the biggest "questionable implementation choice" I've seen so far to me seems to be to sending everything with only a single confirmation at the end!

That's a (questionable) workaround, not a solution guys! Seriously!

 

ugh all the balance talk.... make it like old ultima -> DONE, working and fun!

 

But Old Ultima didn't have multiple players playing together (or against eachother)...

And if you mean Old Ultima Online, that sucked for many players who did not have the macro's/helper programs and/or lots of time to train finger-muscle reflexes... I'd NOT like a game with the old UO inbalance... Ofcourse this one will have it's own balance issues, but at least we'll get to see REAL LIFE players during the development phase, so a lot of it should get ironed out *before* it gets important (i.e. before persistence)...