(04-22-2019, 01:54 AM)Acyl Wrote: At this point it probably falls within "we all suspect this by now", but chances are the first, uh, public private server... that's still an odd sentence. That'll be Leandro's "i25" code with the Sentinel and everything. There's likely not enough time to figure out an i24 state in the few days remaining from now to the 27th of April, especially since all testing thus far has been on i25. Current thinking is that, at least.
And once that server is live with Sentinels and whatnot, there's no taking it back. The larger issue is that the various SCORE additions in powersets and so on were largely remixes of existing assets, and it appears nobody was ever able to put in new animations, art, models, and the like.
Chiming in on this a few days late and probably several dollars short, but I may be able to shed some light on why that situation exists. Simply put, having looked at the server source code quite a bit, it looks like the client and the server have to be in lockstep for everything to work properly -- and that includes the server having an exact copy of all the assets that the client has. I mean, the piggs are there, there are references to them (and the assets they contain) in the code. I don't know *why* that is, yet, but that's the situation.
(Probably something to do with globally unique identifiers and hard-coded references, but I haven't dug deep enough yet to be sure.)
So what this means is that any asset changes would require updating the client codebase at the same time (unless I'm way off base somewhere, which is possible). And I don't know if we have the client source available. The files I snagged look like they might, but then again, who knows.
Obviously some assets are modifiable without having to muck with the client source -- Kallisti Wharf, for example. But that one doesn't use any new art assets, and the maps have always resided server-side. So it's not equivalent to adding new weapon models, animations, vehicles, etc. The powerset changes are similar -- all of that has always been calculated server-side, so changing what they do is possible. Adding new ones probably not so much, because the client wouldn't be aware of them.
The TLDR version of this is that the original devs didn't make this very dynamic; whether that was a bad decision or not is impossible to say. From my POV it makes this frustrating, but from the POV of a company wanting to sell a product (and get it into saleable state as quickly as possible), it could be a legit decision.
All that said, if we DO have the client source available, I don't think it would be terribly difficult to add things in. If I didn't have to worry about my day job, I'd be happily tearing the source apart and rebuilding it, because there are already a lot of things I see in there that really need to be Done Right(tm) rather than the quick-n-dirty hack that currently exists.
--sofaspud
--also, uh, hi. I'm back.
