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Thoughts for the future.
Thoughts for the future.
#1
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So, there's extras floating around the server that're apparently Leos doing. Including an entire new class called Sentinel. Haven't tried it yet, and I suspect I might not get to before the devs manage to pull it out (Apparently they're aiming to restore it to an I24 state). This means that even if the code is as big a mess as all the old stories claim, improvements are possible. Which makes me wonder what people will come up with, and want we want. Personally, I want more weapon models.
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RE: Thoughts for the future.
#2
(04-21-2019, 07:02 AM)Matrix Dragon Wrote: So, there's extras floating around the server that're apparently Leos doing. Including an entire new class called Sentinel. Haven't tried it yet, and I suspect I might not get to before the devs manage to pull it out (Apparently they're aiming to restore it to an I24 state). This means that even if the code is as big a mess as all the old stories claim, improvements are possible. Which makes me wonder what people will come up with, and want we want. Personally, I want more weapon models.

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.
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RE: Thoughts for the future.
#3
(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. Smile
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RE: Thoughts for the future.
#4
SPUD! How goes? Also hurry up and just win a lottery, that'll solve your money issues and then you can rip all the code apart that you want!
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RE: Thoughts for the future.
#5
(05-06-2019, 04:23 PM)Terrenceknight Wrote: SPUD! How goes? Also hurry up and just win a lottery, that'll solve your money issues and then you can rip all the code apart that you want!

Hi Terr!  It goes.  Just been working.  I'm in a lot better place now than I was back when CoX died, but it was a wild ride and I lost touch with a lot of friends.  My fault, there.

As for the lottery... my current job doesn't preclude gambling, but it would be looked at a bit askance -- and it has only reinforced my opinion from before that gambling is a tax on people who are bad at math Big Grin

--sofaspud
--
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RE: Thoughts for the future.
#6
heheh, I always called lotto tickets "the Fool's Tax" and I am one of those people bad at math. Doesn't take too much to understand tens of thousands of tickets (and add another digit or two for the big multi-state ones like Powerball) versus buying one or five or even ten yourself is not likely to be a profitable investment of resources.

On the subject of the game code, well, that's the kind of thing that's always on a time crunch and with the accounting department breathing down everyone's neck, so hacking this one feature that we promised for the update into a functional state right now taking precedence and dealing with maintaining it later being a problem for Future Me is kind of understandable, if (as above) predictably a less than optimal strategy long term. Cruft accumulation is a lot of the reason long-running games like that tend to bog down and turn into resource hogs until there's a major rebuild or they just shut down, from what I understand.
--
‎noli esse culus
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