Monthly Development Update - 1st November 2013

[Esssch]

14b? LOL quite the exaggeration. 300 CSS goes for 1-1.2b a piece. At most thats 8.4b.

Agreed thats outrageous but it isnt 14b lol.

I did see pieces up to 1.5b each. That'd still only be 10.5b, but it's closer.

[-Zagadka-]

I'm kinda sure that they have to retag items for the new engine transfer anyway, adding a color scheme doesn't sound horribly off task.

[Genele]

I'm kinda sure that they have to retag items for the new engine transfer anyway, adding a color scheme doesn't sound horribly off task.

Re-exporting items is purely design (for the most part manual labor).
However, after npe is out, the next big design project is going to be systems changes.
And that will require a lot of items being re-exported. When I'm already making changes to an item, adding one row in the table doesn't really make any difference in workload or time spent.

It is not like I will set anyone full time on re-exporting all items in AO because we added item rarity. That would be insanely stupid. Over time we will have the most important items covered anyway.

[Trypha]

Color coding, sure, if you get it right. I won't hate on it just because its similar to WoW and its clones. Though I suppose you will have to mark at least a few items with some value as vendor trash, like the treatment rifle or complit pistols? Or do certain skills like treatment automatically earn it a rarer rating?

Ending the froob program, are you guys nuts? So much of modern play is built around having froobs for buffing and doing easier dungeons, powerleveling on RK, not just muling. If froobs were cancelled I would quit and never return because it would wipe away half the stuff I can do in one move.

Getting rid of credsellers is simple, other games have done it, namely making subscriptions a tradeable item and lowering the FC points cost of everything in the store. People raise the horrible spectre of "PTW" but at $12/bil thats what you have already, if you're so inclined. Meet or beat their price, eat up their profits, done.

[Gimpynoob]

Color coding is bad mmmkey? Cos they do it in wow, yeah?



I wish the devs did a lot of copying from wow and other games. The good things.
AO has a lot of broken game mechanisms that need to be fixed. Fixing them by copying similar mechanisms from other games is not a bad idea.

Color coding is a good step in the correct direction, however it is neither a big nor an important step. As pointed by many posters before, AO has a huge database of obsolete and worthless items, many of those will fall in different color code categories. Some items are useless even as shop food (High ql items selling for 20 or 40 creds). For the color coding system to be effective the whole database should be revised. Deleting most of the useless junk and improving the stats of the rest to make them useful again would help a lot more then color coding.


But once again I have to repeat myself. For the playerbase to grow the devs need to urgently:

1-Give players good basic gear for leveling. From start to finish. Just throw it at them. And make it good, not acceptable, just not as good as harder to find stuff. New players should be able to ignore the existing player trade system.
2-Make the whole twinking system more transparent, accessible to all and equally easy/difficult to accomplish for all players. As long as you allow veterans to make overpowered twinks overnight by just throwing huge amounts of credits at them and then force noobs to compete with them toe to toe, you will never have a decent population ingame.

What Genele is doing now, creating new content for veterans only, IS KILLING THIS GAME. New players cannot access most of the content and have to spend more and more time farming credits from repetitive and extremely boring content to buy from veterans the gear they need at prices that are inflated almost by the hour. Bored vets will be bored again after a few days spent farming that exclusive new content that takes much longer to create.

[Snakebite]

(I have heard too many sad stories about new players who sold grid armor to a vending machine...).

I'm 98% certain that I did this in my first couple of months, and anoyingly, never found one since..! lol.

[User1337]

Getting rid of credsellers is simple, other games have done it, namely making subscriptions a tradeable item and lowering the FC points cost of everything in the store. People raise the horrible spectre of "PTW" but at $12/bil thats what you have already, if you're so inclined. Meet or beat their price, eat up their profits, done.

Which is what some are suggesting here

Go bump that thread, please!

[Leetlover]

*mandatory 'where is rebalance and fix pvm team-content' comment*

Where are the balances changes? When will I actually be able to have fun playing my toons? Instead you waste time/effort on rarity? Now you want to copy colored purple and blue item system from wow?? You want to copy something from wow how about regular balance and system changes. This game is not fun.....

+1

All games who tried to follow wow has failed, miserably. Funny thing is that AO was so popular with the antiwow/anti-clichequest-theme. Bring on cyberpunkstuff and sci-fi imo \m/

[Leetlover]

If the anti-ao trend gonna continue; Exactly why am I playing AO and not WOW or AoC?

The main purpose of this is to provide an indicator to help you figure out which items you should blindly sell to a vending machine and which you should not. (I have heard too many sad stories about new players who sold grid armor to a vending machine...).

How carebear!11 Some actually think back and find it funny.

I for one like games with some learningcurve and you are eliminating the social mmo-aspect in AO.

btw...will GA-discs actually drop anywhere where new players play the game today? That was a rhetorical question with some kind of point. U should consider making team-dailes and just xfer the old lootfolders there.

needless changes to the whom-Pahs...

A change I think would be good was if grid became mouse-independent. So that you basicly just run to it and then hit enter or something.

[Mavritanic]

Yikes!
Edit: Quit copying WoW. If we all wanted to play WoW, we would be doing so...I highly doubt by copying other games you'll be able to do anything better than they already have...How about sticking to the things that made AO unique & stop diluting our wonderful game as you have been doing so for the last few years with these 'changes for the new players'.
Subscription rates & player activity over these last few years should show even you guys how effective things have been....

Don't mess usability and originality. Why linux users anyway use icon-style interface? Because it's some time more useful then command line.

And yes, it's classic newby problem about items in the AO

[Lheann]

It is not like I will set anyone full time on re-exporting all items in AO because we added item rarity. That would be insanely stupid. Over time we will have the most important items covered anyway.

Considering all these items are in a database adding the default yellow tag to everything in one pass should be pretty simple. I mean you do have a DB person staff somewhere that knows how to use SQL right? I have updated DB tables with over 100 millions rows using a SQL procedures in both Sybase and Oracle so I really don't see why all the items will not have the field defaulted with ease. And if you have item id's for items in certain categories that can be used as a data source for more advanced processing. There is very little need to edit each object manually and the task is far from labor intensive if you have any idea of how to use SQL procedures properly.

As for all the other stuff well how is that you are setting up beta server and still being delayed by a rendering bug? Not making anyone believe we will see a beta this year with that kind of info.

The limitation of DX9? WTFO? The engine is an upgrade and it cannot handle the number of bones your animations have? This really has some of us who do game dev for a living scratching our heads. I am going to assume that the old engine used a FC developed animation system that allowed for a stupid number of bones because the original animators actually where hired from a cracker jacks box and did not understand proper animation technique. I can say that in all the time working with DirectX (version 3.0 on) and OpenGL (back when it was an SGI only thing) I have never encountered the move forward limiting something from a previous version when talking about animation. I have to say that is a first I have ever heard that crap. You know stupid high number of bones being animated is probably why swarms of certain mobs lag computers out for some people.

On the data tools for tracking the market. I will just say it, you are just now making tools to track what is going on so you can make informed adjustments? Again with the WTF kind of design plan is that. The market is a key item and I can't see how any reasonable design process would have allowed such an overhaul to occur without proper data tools. Without such tools how was it ever truly QA'd? Oh wait all the issues it has had since launch explain that the QA process was just a hand wave at best. Especially now that we learn you are just developing data tools for it.

If anything the information provided to us tells me the dev team is still winging it at best and stumbling around in the dark at worst. Pretty disappointed with the news released today.

[Leetlover]

Color coding is bad mmmkey? Cos they do it in wow, yeah?

No, it could potentially just make u able to browse over an item to determine wether you move on or pick it up.

Which is good.

But, unlike wow...Power has traditionally been common and easy accesssible in AO. Implants for example...most rather be without AI-armor than implants/symbiants, which is easy to get your hand on.

I would dislike to see rarity indiqating the value of an item. And I don't want to farm rarities just to perform the obligatory functions (a nano for example) of my profession when I play the game.

AO is more and more going in a aoc/wow-direction despite the fact that the real deal always will rule/be best.

1-Give players good basic gear for leveling. From start to finish. Just throw it at them.

Agree 100%, more stuff in vp-shop from the pvm-world would be good too.

[valagar82]

Considering all these items are in a database adding the default yellow tag to everything in one pass should be pretty simple. I mean you do have a DB person staff somewhere that knows how to use SQL right? I have updated DB tables with over 100 millions rows using a SQL procedures in both Sybase and Oracle so I really don't see why all the items will not have the field defaulted with ease. And if you have item id's for items in certain categories that can be used as a data source for more advanced processing. There is very little need to edit each object manually and the task is far from labor intensive if you have any idea of how to use SQL procedures properly.

As for all the other stuff well how is that you are setting up beta server and still being delayed by a rendering bug? Not making anyone believe we will see a beta this year with that kind of info.

The limitation of DX9? WTFO? The engine is an upgrade and it cannot handle the number of bones your animations have? This really has some of us who do game dev for a living scratching our heads. I am going to assume that the old engine used a FC developed animation system that allowed for a stupid number of bones because the original animators actually where hired from a cracker jacks box and did not understand proper animation technique. I can say that in all the time working with DirectX (version 3.0 on) and OpenGL (back when it was an SGI only thing) I have never encountered the move forward limiting something from a previous version when talking about animation. I have to say that is a first I have ever heard that crap. You know stupid high number of bones being animated is probably why swarms of certain mobs lag computers out for some people.

On the data tools for tracking the market. I will just say it, you are just now making tools to track what is going on so you can make informed adjustments? Again with the WTF kind of design plan is that. The market is a key item and I can't see how any reasonable design process would have allowed such an overhaul to occur without proper data tools. Without such tools how was it ever truly QA'd? Oh wait all the issues it has had since launch explain that the QA process was just a hand wave at best. Especially now that we learn you are just developing data tools for it.

If anything the information provided to us tells me the dev team is still winging it at best and stumbling around in the dark at worst. Pretty disappointed with the news released today.

Right on!

[Spead]

FC team: Its nice to be updated still, keep up the good work im sure youre doing

People talking about credits and mules:

I have around 8 bank toons right now, 3 of which are completely full in bank and inventory, now you cant possibly tell me that they will make a bank that big.. I mean it would have to be double or triple that size as the number of items I loot or buy that wish to keep for the future continues to rise. But if they did somehow create a bug-free glitch-free bank this big, then sure.

And as for the credits coming in, 90% of you know the creds came from illegitimate ways, and thats the reason for the latest boost in prices - it was easy to see even from reading peoples neutnets from their mains(lol) "WTB RBP/ERBS, CSS/CC sets ql 75/225/300, ELLTS, PBPs, Igocs, pst with anything you have", and thats not even an exaggeration... But we cant talk about that on here and this post will probably be removed, sadly.

[Nusquam]

Considering all these items are in a database adding the default yellow tag to everything in one pass should be pretty simple. I mean you do have a DB person staff somewhere that knows how to use SQL right? I have updated DB tables with over 100 millions rows using a SQL procedures in both Sybase and Oracle so I really don't see why all the items will not have the field defaulted with ease. And if you have item id's for items in certain categories that can be used as a data source for more advanced processing. There is very little need to edit each object manually and the task is far from labor intensive if you have any idea of how to use SQL procedures properly.

You can use SQL to inject a lot of information quickly, yes. We could quickly add a rarity stat to every item in the game.
But the rarity of an actual item wouldn't be reflected because that is a manual process of identification and understanding how the item is used. On one side, a technical problem, on the other a design problem.

As for all the other stuff well how is that you are setting up beta server and still being delayed by a rendering bug? Not making anyone believe we will see a beta this year with that kind of info.

Honestly it is because we got some render coder help with the bugs earlier, but then they didn't manage to solve them in time and were pulled back to help on Lego. This one of my largest frustrations with sharing a core engine team across all products - no dedicated render coders.

The limitation of DX9? WTFO? The engine is an upgrade and it cannot handle the number of bones your animations have? This really has some of us who do game dev for a living scratching our heads. I am going to assume that the old engine used a FC developed animation system that allowed for a stupid number of bones because the original animators actually where hired from a cracker jacks box and did not understand proper animation technique. I can say that in all the time working with DirectX (version 3.0 on) and OpenGL (back when it was an SGI only thing) I have never encountered the move forward limiting something from a previous version when talking about animation. I have to say that is a first I have ever heard that crap. You know stupid high number of bones being animated is probably why swarms of certain mobs lag computers out for some people.

Sure, I think it is safe to say that considering the game was in development in 1999 the render coders on the randy engine were not really thinking about the advanced use of shader techniques in the future, which is what the DX9 bone issue really is all about.
As for the quality of animators - sure, on every project they come and go.

By the way, which games do you work on?

On the data tools for tracking the market. I will just say it, you are just now making tools to track what is going on so you can make informed adjustments? Again with the WTF kind of design plan is that. The market is a key item and I can't see how any reasonable design process would have allowed such an overhaul to occur without proper data tools. Without such tools how was it ever truly QA'd? Oh wait all the issues it has had since launch explain that the QA process was just a hand wave at best. Especially now that we learn you are just developing data tools for it.

If anything the information provided to us tells me the dev team is still winging it at best and stumbling around in the dark at worst. Pretty disappointed with the news released today.

You sound sincere enough but developers working on live teams are not usually the ones who *design* the problems in the system. Generally, we inherit them.

I don't think it is ever a bad idea for us to try an improve things, and that is what we are trying to do.

[Armus]

I have around 8 bank toons right now, 3 of which are completely full in bank and inventory, now you cant possibly tell me that they will make a bank that big.. I mean it would have to be double or triple that size as the number of items I loot or buy that wish to keep for the future continues to rise. But if they did somehow create a bug-free glitch-free bank this big, then sure.

Why couldn't they? It's not as if we are talking massive ammounts of data here. We're talking about kilobytes in the age of terabyte hard drives.

The common org bank could help lower some prices as well. Take Kyr'Ozch Viralbots
for instance (240+ is now 20m each on gmi, used to be like 2 mil). You know you have tons and tons of them.. Somewhere! And most ppl do, but they don't know where (since most ppl don't use aoia still).. And so they just rot in a bag in their banks somewhere. With a common org bank that you can easily access anywhere, less stuff is "lost".

[Makeyascream]

I like the color coding.... will make items seem more 'mystical' in a sense....

[Ekarona]

You should just implement showing the item's sell value to shop at current CL (100%, people would learn to modify it to 75% or 125% depending on situation)...

[Vhab]

The limitation of DX9? WTFO? The engine is an upgrade and it cannot handle the number of bones your animations have? This really has some of us who do game dev for a living scratching our heads. I am going to assume that the old engine used a FC developed animation system that allowed for a stupid number of bones because the original animators actually where hired from a cracker jacks box and did not understand proper animation technique. I can say that in all the time working with DirectX (version 3.0 on) and OpenGL (back when it was an SGI only thing) I have never encountered the move forward limiting something from a previous version when talking about animation. I have to say that is a first I have ever heard that crap. You know stupid high number of bones being animated is probably why swarms of certain mobs lag computers out for some people.

Guess I'll make a short return from the dead to explain this.

The problem is really straight forward (as any game dev should know), the old engine uses software skinning which doesn't have strict limitations on bone count.
The new engine uses hardware skinning and is limited by the restrictions DX9 places on the amount of data we can send to the shader.
There were some old assets that used too many bones and are now causing problems. Hence they need to be fixed.

[Ekarona]

Guess I'll make a short return from the dead to explain this.

The problem is really straight forward (as any game dev should know), the old engine uses software skinning which doesn't have strict limitations on bone count.
The new engine uses hardware skinning and is limited by the restrictions DX9 places on the amount of data we can send to the shader.
There were some old assets that used too many bones and are now causing problems. Hence they need to be fixed.

So the old stuff was so advanced the modern hardware isn't there yet ;D