Forums » Suggestions
heres a list from an expert on what you devs need to fix:
1) get rid of the global mute system. if somone doesnt like hearing trash talk, they can easily set you as ignore.
2) remove all pvp trade. have all items and ships manufactured by players and only players, within station. to make an item you need its parts (could be base components, minerals, other items), a blueprint, which is obtainable by destructive analysis of same item from npc loot, or perhaps some sort of research. blueprints have limmited uses, so no player can stokepile and be idle. also, global item and cash is to remain constant. this will create a dynamic economy that wont stagnate, sort of like what they tried to implement in eve (unsuccessfully).
3) main professions will be miners, who get minerals from the various ore fields. their difficulties will be finding rarer minerals, avoiding npcs in such fields, and avoiding hostile players (no more disabled friendly fire). also you will have combat oriented players, who either hunt npcs for loot or to protect other players, pirates who attack players. manufactureres will also be crucial in this game, as all items sold in station will be sold in an auction type of manner, all player created. and lastly we need traders, who serve as a sort of middle man which can move desierable items in their fast, cargo ladden ships. you could also implement some sort of research system, for unlocking advanced item blueprints, although this might not be immediatly necessary.
4) the skill systems should be scraped. its stupid, given that in this advanced age, systems would be userfriendly enough to allow anyone to do anything. those who disagree, saying this would let noobs use advanced ships, ect simply dont know what your talking about. by balancing the economy (meaning no net loss or gain in global assets), players will REALLY have to earn their worth. having high priced items will help with this, allowing a pure system based on a realistic economic model, instead of having some lame silly skill system in which a terrible player can become a high level one given enough time. this will require real skill.
5) in order to implemint such a balanced economic system... well, it wont be easy i will have to admit. but if the devs put enough time into it, they should have somthing where items claimed by players from the environment have some sort of decay rate, to facilitate the recycling of items back into the environment, instead of letting things stack up in the station or cargo holds, and thus emptying the global environment. this decay rate could be based on time or usage, i have in mind somthing similiar to the game oblivion. after the item totally decays, it will be destroyed and will be reclaimed into the environment, to be spawned in a roid or npc bot. this sint practicle for player ships, so i came up with the excellent idea of limmiting the ships a player can have by ONE. this will encourage specialization, also, the global items could should be based on some preset amount multiplied by number of players registered. this will reduce the problem of scarcity, should this game suddenly become hugely popular.
6) lastly, the devs should redo the programming so that EVERYTHING in game is calculated by the client side program. when sectors load up, the client will make a request of server, but after this, everything is done clientside. when a movement is performed ( thrust or vector changing), or when equipment is activated, a signal is sent to server which is in turn routed to all other players. but unlike how it is now, the location of ships isnt taken from server, instead calculated based on initial sector loading conditions and thrust information taken by server. server-to-client sanity checks will only be done every few minutes, to clear up any corruption of data which could have occured. this will free up the network an unbeliviable amount, as i can testify for after doing somthing similiar on a modification of descent 2. this will also seem unrealistic, i know, as it will let plyers cheat freely. seemingly. but if you devs program the game so that all data files are compiled with the executable, this wont be a problem. in a sence, you will have one basic file which runs the game, supported by numerous uncrucial media files, like textures, ect. i know this seems far fetched, but if you program in a language like scheme or common lisp, i guarentee no hackers will be able to break the resulting executable, especialy if you manipulate the data values (such as hull, or energy) so that a hexidecimal reader wont be able to pick them out. this will be difficult to do, but if you can manage to accomplish it you will have a vastly cheaper server hardware cost and much cleaner system. and if the servers sanity check reports somthing suspicious, you can easily ban the players.
also you might want to look into a ray-tracing rendering system, but one that discounts the use of shadow rays. recent research in this has found such rendering method to be MUCH better quality (especially if distributed ray tracing is used, which allows motion blurr, depth of field, and prismatic colors), and, if coded in optimized C across several processors (todays dual-core and GPU for example) to be capable of reasonable frame rates. look for such videos of this on youtube.
1) get rid of the global mute system. if somone doesnt like hearing trash talk, they can easily set you as ignore.
2) remove all pvp trade. have all items and ships manufactured by players and only players, within station. to make an item you need its parts (could be base components, minerals, other items), a blueprint, which is obtainable by destructive analysis of same item from npc loot, or perhaps some sort of research. blueprints have limmited uses, so no player can stokepile and be idle. also, global item and cash is to remain constant. this will create a dynamic economy that wont stagnate, sort of like what they tried to implement in eve (unsuccessfully).
3) main professions will be miners, who get minerals from the various ore fields. their difficulties will be finding rarer minerals, avoiding npcs in such fields, and avoiding hostile players (no more disabled friendly fire). also you will have combat oriented players, who either hunt npcs for loot or to protect other players, pirates who attack players. manufactureres will also be crucial in this game, as all items sold in station will be sold in an auction type of manner, all player created. and lastly we need traders, who serve as a sort of middle man which can move desierable items in their fast, cargo ladden ships. you could also implement some sort of research system, for unlocking advanced item blueprints, although this might not be immediatly necessary.
4) the skill systems should be scraped. its stupid, given that in this advanced age, systems would be userfriendly enough to allow anyone to do anything. those who disagree, saying this would let noobs use advanced ships, ect simply dont know what your talking about. by balancing the economy (meaning no net loss or gain in global assets), players will REALLY have to earn their worth. having high priced items will help with this, allowing a pure system based on a realistic economic model, instead of having some lame silly skill system in which a terrible player can become a high level one given enough time. this will require real skill.
5) in order to implemint such a balanced economic system... well, it wont be easy i will have to admit. but if the devs put enough time into it, they should have somthing where items claimed by players from the environment have some sort of decay rate, to facilitate the recycling of items back into the environment, instead of letting things stack up in the station or cargo holds, and thus emptying the global environment. this decay rate could be based on time or usage, i have in mind somthing similiar to the game oblivion. after the item totally decays, it will be destroyed and will be reclaimed into the environment, to be spawned in a roid or npc bot. this sint practicle for player ships, so i came up with the excellent idea of limmiting the ships a player can have by ONE. this will encourage specialization, also, the global items could should be based on some preset amount multiplied by number of players registered. this will reduce the problem of scarcity, should this game suddenly become hugely popular.
6) lastly, the devs should redo the programming so that EVERYTHING in game is calculated by the client side program. when sectors load up, the client will make a request of server, but after this, everything is done clientside. when a movement is performed ( thrust or vector changing), or when equipment is activated, a signal is sent to server which is in turn routed to all other players. but unlike how it is now, the location of ships isnt taken from server, instead calculated based on initial sector loading conditions and thrust information taken by server. server-to-client sanity checks will only be done every few minutes, to clear up any corruption of data which could have occured. this will free up the network an unbeliviable amount, as i can testify for after doing somthing similiar on a modification of descent 2. this will also seem unrealistic, i know, as it will let plyers cheat freely. seemingly. but if you devs program the game so that all data files are compiled with the executable, this wont be a problem. in a sence, you will have one basic file which runs the game, supported by numerous uncrucial media files, like textures, ect. i know this seems far fetched, but if you program in a language like scheme or common lisp, i guarentee no hackers will be able to break the resulting executable, especialy if you manipulate the data values (such as hull, or energy) so that a hexidecimal reader wont be able to pick them out. this will be difficult to do, but if you can manage to accomplish it you will have a vastly cheaper server hardware cost and much cleaner system. and if the servers sanity check reports somthing suspicious, you can easily ban the players.
also you might want to look into a ray-tracing rendering system, but one that discounts the use of shadow rays. recent research in this has found such rendering method to be MUCH better quality (especially if distributed ray tracing is used, which allows motion blurr, depth of field, and prismatic colors), and, if coded in optimized C across several processors (todays dual-core and GPU for example) to be capable of reasonable frame rates. look for such videos of this on youtube.
wc
I've moved this to the Suggestions forum.
I'm curious... what are you an expert at? Space flight? Do you perhaps work with ship design, space flight mechanics or astrophysics?
Or are you an expert at software design focused on space MMOs? With the very low number of existing non-browser based space MMOs, you must have either worked on EVE or Jumpgate, then? Or are you a part of one of the upcoming space MMO titles (X Universe, Jumpate: let's try that again, that other game I can never quite remember the name of)?
Or are you, perhaps, an expert at having opinions?
I'm also curious how you get these two sentences to fit together:
"have all items and ships manufactured by players and only players, within station."
"it [the item] will be destroyed and will be reclaimed into the environment, to be spawned in a roid or npc bot."
And yes, about the skill system... It doesn't measure you skill at handling different technologies and pieces of equipment. I'm surprised that someone who has played the game long enough to reach gray space (for you HAVE played the game for more than a few hours, right?) hasn't noticed that the exact same kind of equipment has lower license level requirements on the black market.
Your "skill" levels are actually license levels, and reflect what kind of equipment you will be ALLOWED to purchase in that region of space. Thus the discrepancies in license level requirements between gray space and nation space.
Well, unless black market equipment come with much better manuals. If so, I stand humbly and disbelievingly corrected...
Or are you an expert at software design focused on space MMOs? With the very low number of existing non-browser based space MMOs, you must have either worked on EVE or Jumpgate, then? Or are you a part of one of the upcoming space MMO titles (X Universe, Jumpate: let's try that again, that other game I can never quite remember the name of)?
Or are you, perhaps, an expert at having opinions?
I'm also curious how you get these two sentences to fit together:
"have all items and ships manufactured by players and only players, within station."
"it [the item] will be destroyed and will be reclaimed into the environment, to be spawned in a roid or npc bot."
And yes, about the skill system... It doesn't measure you skill at handling different technologies and pieces of equipment. I'm surprised that someone who has played the game long enough to reach gray space (for you HAVE played the game for more than a few hours, right?) hasn't noticed that the exact same kind of equipment has lower license level requirements on the black market.
Your "skill" levels are actually license levels, and reflect what kind of equipment you will be ALLOWED to purchase in that region of space. Thus the discrepancies in license level requirements between gray space and nation space.
Well, unless black market equipment come with much better manuals. If so, I stand humbly and disbelievingly corrected...
I do not agree with the initial post.
Also, modifiyng it so it can be read better would be a good idea. My eyes just seem to glance off the text.
Furthermore, a balanced economy with no net loss or gain is pretty impossible when thinking about it with a bit more reason.
Also, modifiyng it so it can be read better would be a good idea. My eyes just seem to glance off the text.
Furthermore, a balanced economy with no net loss or gain is pretty impossible when thinking about it with a bit more reason.
for ion, who asked what im an expert at, well i was being sarcastic but i feel i have alot of talent when it comes to designing 360* fps maps (for descent 2 and 3), and im quite good at modding for those titles as well. i currently go to college and have a great deal of time to ponder concepts such as how to improve (in my opinion) what is currently a very good, but somewhat flawed fps mmorpg. the reason i like this game alot is because its done something very difficult, and so far the only thing i can think of thats come anywhere close to it is sony's planetside, but thats old and sony doesnt listen to college video game gurus.
as for my statement about a closed and balanced economy, ive thought alot about this and no, it isnt impossible if the devs impliment the system well enough. in fact, the only thing about my previous post that might be impossible is my suggestion to get rid of the rasterization renderer and instead use a raytracing system. it may take too much system resources. i deffinately dont expect my post to be taken litteraly, if its taken seriosuly at all, but i hope it serves to guide the devs to develope in a direction most benificial for the game. and if my writting is hard to read, sorry. my english is somewhat poor and my writting is even worse
as for my statement about a closed and balanced economy, ive thought alot about this and no, it isnt impossible if the devs impliment the system well enough. in fact, the only thing about my previous post that might be impossible is my suggestion to get rid of the rasterization renderer and instead use a raytracing system. it may take too much system resources. i deffinately dont expect my post to be taken litteraly, if its taken seriosuly at all, but i hope it serves to guide the devs to develope in a direction most benificial for the game. and if my writting is hard to read, sorry. my english is somewhat poor and my writting is even worse
I suppose I'll respond to your points one at a time.
1) The main reason for the mute system is for people that do things like spam general chat with a constant flow of messages. Newbies don't know how to use /ignore, and they aren't going to get any learning done if their communication is being blocked by somebody obnoxious. I don't personally know of many cases where mute was used incorrectly, but if you know of any, you should probably e-mail John [incarnate], the lead developed.
2) This seems to want universal crafting. There are both good and bad points of this. One of the worst is that with the current player count, it would not be even vaguely usable. Another is that you seem to indicate that all trade (including actual trade goods) would be crafted, which turns out to be terrible for basing a non-insanely-detailed economy on. We still want the game to be playable, you know.
3) You seem to have deviated from this game here. This is a combat-oriented game, not a mining-oriented game. The main profession will never, ever be mining. I'm sorry, but it's just the way the game is designed and played. Having more diverse player groups, such as people who actually did mine and trade in the game, is certainly not a bad idea. Hopefully, as the player population increases and the sort of missions available becomes more diverse, this will happen naturally. But suggesting that we rebase the entire game is a little... much...
4) Have you ever taken a good econ course? This is a game, not a simulation. Requiring a real (closed, balanced, player-driven) economy is effectively impossible. It just... is. The devs are improving the economy, but it will never be able to be the sole basis for item availability. It's true, some of the grind of levels is tedious. That's why new items are being released with missions instead of levels as their requirements. Take the new Corvus Widowmaker as an example --- it requires a mission to obtain, then separate crafting-type missions to build. This is, in my eyes, a good thing. Missions require skill. Getting money (or levels) requires no skill whatsoever and would be a terrible base for all item availability.
5) I'm sorry, but I can't even parse this point...
6) Having everything calculated client-side would be stupid. Sanity checking is done server-side for many reasons; if a client gets temporarily disconnected/lags, the server can at least approximate their position; if somebody tries to cheat, the server can block it, etc. I don't know if you've actually played the game, but if you had, you'd know that bandwidth isn't a problem. It's currently in the bytes-per-second range. So all of your vaunted client-side improvements would amount to nothing in the real world.
Your next point, about having "one basic file which runs the game, supported by numerous uncrucial media files, like textures" indicates a fundamental lack of understanding about how the game works. Why do I ask? Because that's how it works already! You seem to have very little knowledge of actual programming, as well. Coding in a language like "scheme or common lisp" won't do much of anything at all! For one thing, those are interpreted languages, so the distributed program file is easily editable. Furthermore, even if you do compile them into some bytecode, that offers no particular security over compiled C++, and, in fact, is usually much easier to reverse-compile.
Ray tracing. Jeez, have you actually read up on the things you are presenting? Ray tracing is BARELY possible, at minimal frame rates, on massive systems. It won't be replacing conventional rendering for many, many years. I assume that you are referring to [1]. If so, you should note that they were able to manage 16fps at 256x256 resolution on a quad-core processor, and with pretty much everything set up for minimal resource usage. Ray tracing is awesome and has the potential to make games look truly incredible in a few years. But it won't be ready for prime time for a long, long time.
And now a few words on your post in general. I understand that as a college student you feel that you're starting to come to grips with real-world design. However, the good folks at Guild Software have been doing this for a long time, and they know what they're doing. Every few weeks somebody comes in here and gives a long (and usually poorly-spelled) post about what they think should change in the game and why. And, pretty much every time, their argument is dissected, disproved, and dismissed. I'd recommend reading over those past posts to see what you can garner from them. Since you have so much free time (which tells me that you need to take more classes or something), consider it extra study.
(too mean?)
References:
1: http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=334
1) The main reason for the mute system is for people that do things like spam general chat with a constant flow of messages. Newbies don't know how to use /ignore, and they aren't going to get any learning done if their communication is being blocked by somebody obnoxious. I don't personally know of many cases where mute was used incorrectly, but if you know of any, you should probably e-mail John [incarnate], the lead developed.
2) This seems to want universal crafting. There are both good and bad points of this. One of the worst is that with the current player count, it would not be even vaguely usable. Another is that you seem to indicate that all trade (including actual trade goods) would be crafted, which turns out to be terrible for basing a non-insanely-detailed economy on. We still want the game to be playable, you know.
3) You seem to have deviated from this game here. This is a combat-oriented game, not a mining-oriented game. The main profession will never, ever be mining. I'm sorry, but it's just the way the game is designed and played. Having more diverse player groups, such as people who actually did mine and trade in the game, is certainly not a bad idea. Hopefully, as the player population increases and the sort of missions available becomes more diverse, this will happen naturally. But suggesting that we rebase the entire game is a little... much...
4) Have you ever taken a good econ course? This is a game, not a simulation. Requiring a real (closed, balanced, player-driven) economy is effectively impossible. It just... is. The devs are improving the economy, but it will never be able to be the sole basis for item availability. It's true, some of the grind of levels is tedious. That's why new items are being released with missions instead of levels as their requirements. Take the new Corvus Widowmaker as an example --- it requires a mission to obtain, then separate crafting-type missions to build. This is, in my eyes, a good thing. Missions require skill. Getting money (or levels) requires no skill whatsoever and would be a terrible base for all item availability.
5) I'm sorry, but I can't even parse this point...
6) Having everything calculated client-side would be stupid. Sanity checking is done server-side for many reasons; if a client gets temporarily disconnected/lags, the server can at least approximate their position; if somebody tries to cheat, the server can block it, etc. I don't know if you've actually played the game, but if you had, you'd know that bandwidth isn't a problem. It's currently in the bytes-per-second range. So all of your vaunted client-side improvements would amount to nothing in the real world.
Your next point, about having "one basic file which runs the game, supported by numerous uncrucial media files, like textures" indicates a fundamental lack of understanding about how the game works. Why do I ask? Because that's how it works already! You seem to have very little knowledge of actual programming, as well. Coding in a language like "scheme or common lisp" won't do much of anything at all! For one thing, those are interpreted languages, so the distributed program file is easily editable. Furthermore, even if you do compile them into some bytecode, that offers no particular security over compiled C++, and, in fact, is usually much easier to reverse-compile.
Ray tracing. Jeez, have you actually read up on the things you are presenting? Ray tracing is BARELY possible, at minimal frame rates, on massive systems. It won't be replacing conventional rendering for many, many years. I assume that you are referring to [1]. If so, you should note that they were able to manage 16fps at 256x256 resolution on a quad-core processor, and with pretty much everything set up for minimal resource usage. Ray tracing is awesome and has the potential to make games look truly incredible in a few years. But it won't be ready for prime time for a long, long time.
And now a few words on your post in general. I understand that as a college student you feel that you're starting to come to grips with real-world design. However, the good folks at Guild Software have been doing this for a long time, and they know what they're doing. Every few weeks somebody comes in here and gives a long (and usually poorly-spelled) post about what they think should change in the game and why. And, pretty much every time, their argument is dissected, disproved, and dismissed. I'd recommend reading over those past posts to see what you can garner from them. Since you have so much free time (which tells me that you need to take more classes or something), consider it extra study.
(too mean?)
References:
1: http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=334
Wow Rogue you just bashed the crap out of him.
shall we move on now. :)
shall we move on now. :)
Any successful MMORPG will never be mining oriented... Sadly...
Dissection FTW
Dissection FTW
English majors...
I still don't see what this "content" stuff is. Content here to me would be more stuff to blast in new and exciting ways. But that's just me. It is a First Person Shooter style game.
DescentPro, don't take the responses as an indication of how players feel about you, only about your ideas. As Roguelazer said, some good, some bad.
BTW, welcome to VO... I'm KMAonna from the MacClan of D3. Good to see you again!
BTW, welcome to VO... I'm KMAonna from the MacClan of D3. Good to see you again!
The more there is in the way of crafting, the more traders and miners and (dare I hope?) stations there are to blast.
FAIL
damn! i missed the bashing. well i agree with the others and think that most of that list was bull****. we need a section for these rants geez they're annoying. we could just go to the "How stupid do newbs think guildsoft is?" message board whenever ur bored and wanna beat the **** out of somebody's ideas.
i just print out stupid posts, tape them to an old piece of furniture or shelf in the garage and smash it to pieces with a sledge hammer.
i was thinkin in terms of intellectual bashing not physical but that works too.
Excellent reply Roguelazer.
Ecka
Ecka
The rogue AI hives are a constant nuisance for travelers. However, they've literally transformed the mining industry into a scavenging industry, as collector bots make easy prey.
Um. I played decent 2 and three when I was eight.
This almost has to be a fakepost.
This almost has to be a fakepost.