Friday with Means - August 5th, 2011 - Magnetic times

[Technogen]

When will we hear more about the Content Designers Positions! I am sure we are all equally as eager to hear more about it!

The position is still open on the website, so they haven't chosen someone else for it yet.

[Demoder]

IMO, the best strategy seems to be: Don't say a thing 'till it's ready. Otherwise, you'll never hear the end of it.

[Alternity]

Well they added content that was fun for the 10 year birthday, they just decided to remove it again. Logic behind it? Well it's 2012 soon.

[Nobeznohoney]

The unshielded lines is a good start but do you have any night cleaning staff that bring any devices(music machines) with them to work? Unshield speakers(think magnets) might be a problem.

As for the supposed Star Wars desertion rush the only way I would join in is if players could only hunt Ewoks with pitchforks and be able to make Ewok bacon from their babies hairless bellies cuz they've been fire roasted clean. Mmmmmmm Ewok bacon!!

Its painfully obvious that some of the people that make comments in here regarding code have never ever ever tried to make flow charts out of undocument and untitled subroutines that get called from not even god knows where to do god knows what. Its strange but true, take 50 village idiots, put them in front of keyboards and they can type out one forum post for AO and THEN post a reply as well! Must be a reason for their existence other than puzzling their mothers relationship with God.

Whatever.

[omegahealer]

indie devs can make great games from scratch or have well documented engines to work with and have a clear overview of what does what so it can be done on a timely fashion.... from what we've heard from the AO devs, they still get amazed every day with what the gameengine and the database does really.

the only thing you can blame to the devs is that the news about the new engine came out too soon.... and that happened so get over it.

i laugh with the people using the star wars argument as that game does not appeal me in any way and i know many that also think it's just another MMO jumping the failwagon of wannabee wow clones that try to be a little different, but not too much.

AO is still playable(for most... not for me since dell has to update their custom nvidia driver asap) to this day thanks to the great dev team we have... cut them some slack since they are working as hard as they can. They are not our private slaves that should only work on AO and have no lives outside that. Enjoy the game and be social.... i have refreshed my friendlist a few times over the years to make sure i only have people online in them and can do everything that i want, so i'm sure others can do the same.
No need to remind the devs every day about something obvious >< it gets boring and you're not out here on a holy crusade against an ancient evil.

and yay for exploding towers again.... been too long

[Warhammer]

Mine is actually mostly windows and blinking lights.

Really? Dont they give you real workstations? That explains alot...

[Warhammer]

All you need from a case is proper airflow if you're doing aircooling, and you likely are. Windows, lights, those things don't interfere, but it's not the thing you usually see in an office landscape.

You must have never heard of EM-shielding. A proper case not only keeps the high frequency fields inside the case, it also keeps those from the outside out. Cut a hole in the side and put a window in, and your shielding literally went out the window.

A "boring" case is not merely an end in itself, you know, especially not in a professional environment.

But thats just one aspect of EM-shielding, the other is a proper power supply.

[Gatester]

Never would have thought the hamster food overseas was better than Canada's.

[OfabRk2]

...and in the next update Notum Wars towers should once again explode properly as they used to...

\o/

[Vhax]

Mine is actually mostly windows and blinking lights.

Posting to confirm Macrosun's case lights sped up compiling by 15%

[Siyra]

Posting to confirm Macrosun's case lights sped up compiling by 15%

So get him one of those old movie computers with 600 lights on them to make em look like they're working and he can compile stuff instantly!

{Edited by Yarkona}
it's not their game after all. A lot of the code is old stuff left by some old employee that people now just get to figure out how it works.

[omegahealer]

just let it be... there are always the ignorant ones that think their words is the truth, while it aint.

i enjoy FWM as they are
the devs get a face cause it's not always bussiness.

also since you did pull in DNF... how many years does that mean that the devs have until they reach the ...14 years?(right that many i think?)... of developing on the new engine before we can cry it's worse then DNF?

[Spartanx9]

12 years i think Omega. so they still have a decade or so

[S33D]

Whats HDD? Go ssssolid sssstate. Now's a good time and excuse

[Armus]

and yay for exploding towers again.... been too long

Yeah thats's what needed to be fixed about NW.. Totally!


Same with the BS changes. They did tons of stuff that noone was asking for, yet they couldn't do a simple thing that everyone wanted. Namely putting a score table outside. Or a simple green light outside if it's running.

But I guess it just follows the logic we've gotten used to: If it's reasonable and if a player suggested it then it can never ever be implemented.

D'oh.

[AGPEcko]

Yeah thats's what needed to be fixed about NW.. Totally!


Same with the BS changes. They did tons of stuff that noone was asking for, yet they couldn't do a simple thing that everyone wanted. Namely putting a score table outside. Or a simple green light outside if it's running.

But I guess it just follows the logic we've gotten used to: If it's reasonable and if a player suggested it then it can never ever be implemented.

D'oh.

In a way, spawn camping is bad. But now, people can be virtually anywhere, anytime. If you kill someone, they're debuffs are still running on you by the time they can get back. Which is bad for business.

Bump the scoreboard.
And I won't let a FWM go without asking about the GFX engine, it's whats most dear to us all.

[Armus]

In a way, spawn camping is bad. But now, people can be virtually anywhere, anytime. If you kill someone, they're debuffs are still running on you by the time they can get back. Which is bad for business.

Yup and it's something that anyone who actually plays the game realizes as soon as they try it. Or as soon as they hear about it. The question is why FC can't figure even the simplest of things like this out.

[Mastablasta]

You must have never heard of EM-shielding. A proper case not only keeps the high frequency fields inside the case, it also keeps those from the outside out. Cut a hole in the side and put a window in, and your shielding literally went out the window.

A "boring" case is not merely an end in itself, you know, especially not in a professional environment.

But thats just one aspect of EM-shielding, the other is a proper power supply.

In a world full of damaging electro magnetic fields and devices not capable of absorbing them accordingly, maybe that would be an actual problem in an office environment. If anything, failing drives all the time sounds like either a software issue present on each PC or, more likely, something to do with the powersupply. If it fluctuates, it ends up breaking the drive.

indie devs can make great games from scratch or have well documented engines to work with and have a clear overview of what does what so it can be done on a timely fashion.... from what we've heard from the AO devs, they still get amazed every day with what the gameengine and the database does really.

Well, that's not too surprising, since at the start of such a project, you either have a very well documented engine, like Unreal Engine which a lot of indie or small time developers use, or you build your own from scratch to suit your purposes, and thus know what's going on inside it.
AO engine, database structure and everything else was developed in the late 90's, over 10 years ago, by newbies, and meant only to last 4 years, which meant that a bunch of hacks was good enough as long as it would keep on running. There were no plans to make new graphics engines or expand anything beyond what it could do at the time.
Then those plans all changed, the teams changed, and there was a constant requirement to keep producing new things, new code support for new things, etc., and noone ever had time to sit down, go through all the code, write proper documentation for everything and so on and so forth. Even though there was a couple years back the work done about rewriting a lot of AO, done by Enno ("No more old code lurks in the depths of AO" or some such in his signature, so no idea what that actually was or resulted in. But obviously nothing that made it any more helpful to use
I spent 1,5 hours last night watching John Carmack's Quakecon 2011 keynote, and he stressed that rather than spend loads of time on developing new gimmicky effects and what not, he'd started focusing on writing extremely correct code, down to now getting no warnings or errors at all in several compile time analysers on Rage. The end goal being to not have a single exception in the code. But hey, that's probably part of the reason why developing that game has taken 7 years

[Armus]

IMO, the best strategy seems to be: Don't say a thing 'till it's ready. Otherwise, you'll never hear the end of it.

It would indeed be the best strategy if you just don't know if it's going to take 1 more year or 3 more years.

[Mesa]

many players keep paying because they believe/believed in the promised dates. Thats why FC announce them even if they are unrealistic.