Who's with me and prepared to show support?

Good for you?

And how about the 30k other NON-industry people who were shown that as a "DEMO" of what the game would be like to get their money?

Just because you know it to be what it is, does not automagically make it so for all those who didn't.

I do not consider it a proper demo either, but I've been doing this for over 20 years. And no, there were no disclaimers saying what it was, or what to consider it, it was sold as "this is where we are going".

N.B. the recent angst over the overland map. Sold one thing, given something else, queue the people who do not understand (or care) about the problems, just want what they were sold.

Cheers.

 

Definitely agree with this.

One thought regarding the earlier comment on software prototyping -- my personal opinion on this is that prototyping is an important first step to developing a new feature but integrating it into the product as such is not a long term solution. I've worked at a startup where pretty much every feature was prototyped and then immediately integrated into the product. It worked for couple of years but as the code grew the developer churn got worse and worse, and eventually lead to a nightmare for maintenance, and integrating new features. On the flip side I've worked at gigantic companies where they attempt to plan out every detail before writing a line of code. Anyway, this thought is completely tangential to the topic, and your point, but it got me thinking there is definitely a balance that has to be made between writing code quickly to demonstrate proof-of-concept for the purposing of demos, vs. writing "production quality" code. So, in the end I don't think prototyping is a complete waste, it just has to balanced out

 

A lot of the design seemed to pull in community feedback. Many of the systems weren't even locked in from a design perspective, let alone ready to be coded on day 1.

It seems like a lot of the first year was developing the server/client infrastructure for instances. The artists worked largely on models for houses and crafting. Now that design is locked on more systems, we'll see them get implemented quickly.

 

I shoukld start probably new discussion for this, but I would love to see procedurally generated dungeons. They would consist of hand made blocks but the routes and elements would change. Also puzzles (like the lamp puzzle) should be randomly generated and more complex so you have to actually solve them, instead of finding a way in a walkthrough that is always the same. I think that procedurally generated dungeons would help a lot with replayability, because you would be visiting different dungeon each time, even though some elements would be the same.

 

□□□ □□□□□□□ □□□□□□□, the problem with procedural generation is actually in its advantages; the idea of repeating patterns.

Houses, for example, tend to be built the same way. There's a behavior that you can reverse engineer.

I'm not saying that procedural puzzles aren't possible, but I'd say the odds of them being similar to one another is extremely high (that's a bad thing). It risk being to the point where the puzzles wouldn't necessarily challenge you as much as merely slowing you down once you figured out how a couple of them worked. Traditionally, you offset that predictability with randomness (and there are tons of techniques to do that) but puzzles and random are two things that don't go well together.

Unless you're asking them to create unique procedural code for every puzzle that might be in the game... which kind of defeats the purpose of procedural generation not to mention the amount of effort it takes to create it. I wouldn't recommend it, if you ask me.

We can definitely start a new thread about procedural content, for those interested.

 

Don't Diablo, Torchlight and the like have procedural dungeons? But making a 2D procedural dungeon has to be easier than a 3D one.

 

Being 3D or not doesn't make too much of a difference from a logic point of view, in my experience. If you're doing a game in first-person or 3rd-person, you just have to take into account that you have a ceiling to draw (and possibly extra walls, as some isometric games completely skip the walls that would block your view). Whenever you draw 2D sprites or 3D models changes nothing.

Diablo and Torchlight have very little procedural content. Remember, procedural doesn't mean random and vice-verca. In the case of Diablo 3, for example, outdoor maps are static and some pocket areas within those maps are filled in randomly from a list. Dungeons are composed of randomly selected chunks that are handled by procedural code to ensure that you always have a set amount of chunks (so that the dungeon isn't too small), an entrance and an exit, a loot chest, etc. Each chunk of dungeons snap in like puzzle pieces and are designed to match no matter the combination of chunks. Which chunks it uses is completely random. Most rogue-likes operate that way.

Minecraft is probably the best "most known" example for procedural generation. Each areas have their own biomes that have rules that determine how the terrain, vegetation and etc was formed. Eldritch, a rogue-like that looks like Minecraft, is more akin to how Diablo handles its dungeons.

 

Dude, that's horrible... Who "hacked" that together?

 

RG also get drunks some times.

 

See all those papers on the pole topped by an armadillo? That is the UO2 code, design documents, etc printed out



This is what they did to it:

 

Thanks for find this! And now I have a new idea...

 

Really it wasn't that bad for late 90's... a lot of people compare these things to current standards.

 

I will make something with these photos anyway in my site. Poor photos! XD

 

Apparently you and I have worked for some of the same companies

 

Too many free time XD

http://www.energyvortexllama.com/2014/05/fast-history-of-uo2.html