Rorin Doombringer's page

Let me reiterate to be clear: The design objective is that if you want to be a better Wizard, all you have to do is learn Feats from Wizard trainers.

Oh, thank god, I did not want to have to take fireball, or dowsing or some other silly stuff if I truly want to be a brute force heavy armor wearing axe fighter and mine and toil away at the forges like a proper dwarf!!!!!

or just remove spaces and not replace it with anything....so...

/w balihi hi

One thing to consider in the "/who" is who doesn't want to be seen online. They should and will most likely code in the need to be able to not display your online status publicly and that is do to STALKERS.

Some may jest, but I was in a game where this became a problem with one of our guild members and she basically quit the game due to it. With this person stalking her and literally pm'g her and whispering her to death until after many many reports and in action by SOE's support team, she just quit the game altogether.

The ability to turn the show status function off, should be available, in the case of these situations where you do not want to be stalked.

Otherwise, I'm all for the /who, i used to use it constantly on my Jawa bounty hunter in SWG and loved it.

Have you ever participated in a closed beta for an MMO where there was no planned character wipe? What was the state of the game when player data became permanently persistent?

I've participated in many closed beta's but none that I can recall where there was not a player wipe at the end of closed beta.

However, In SWG live/gold after several years, that game basically did a 100% player wipe and made all previous characters (skill based) into a class based system effectively wiping everything you had done in the previous 5 yrs of game play. We called it being NGE'd.

As far as state of the game for it...well, They also changed it from a sandboxed MMO to a theme park MMO in the process adding millions of quests etc. Thousands of players dumped it like a hot rock, including my guild of 500 as I was one of the last 3 members of Knights of Kauri on our server before logging off for the final time myself.

To your point though, most mmo's when the reach the END of the closed beta state though are more or less feature complete minus a few here or there and then the roll up into open beta where they start doing stress testing and bringing in thousands of players to try to get a judge of how many servers they need to spin up for gold release and to wet the whistle of would be customers. No mmo is truly finished as its an always updating content system some devs are more apt to update more often than others though.

Graphics-wise the game is ok, not great but it could stand improvement.

Gameplay-wise-I Stutter constantly and it is nearly unplayable at times even against little goblins that are killing me left and right while I am trying to turn to fight them and end up with my back towards them because the game is catching up to my movement press of the keys and doesn't visually show what's actually going on.

I fear this is do to some settings I have set or something where i have to high level of detail for drawing graphics or something because it hinders game play considerably, even on my alienware laptop w/ a hi-end graphics card and memory.

Also, content/achievements-I think there's no way around the basic definition of MMORPG - Massive multiplayer Online role playing Grind! Most games doing it with levels and xp gaps grinding, some doing it with mob grinds, some doing it with skills grind.

The trick to developing the "no-grind" game is to mask it in such a way as let the playerbase play the casual game of killing and looting and exploring and add the functions of all those skills as part of the progression piece which is what they're attempting to do with the achievements but because they're gated to stop at a certain point they don't appear to be functioning 100% into the projected scope of what they're planning them to do.

As I've read above players are hitting the gate cap and can't progress further in their chosen skills without incessant grinding of mobs or skills or weapons or whatever. I have not hit this yet but there has to be a way to expand across the skill sets to allow for a smoother transition without the grind gate of skills or mobs. And make it fun, I just don't know what that is yet.

Personally I love the crafting system, but so far it has irked me as well having to have 100 different mats gathered in surplus to meet the requirements to grind a part which the parts feed into as mats for higher level items which then have to be created mutliple times to get to the next tiers to get to the next items to get to then ext parts to start over in the next level of your profession of crafting. it seems round robining the grind but i don't want to be a sawyer, woodcutter, gatherer, armorsmith, weaponsmith, smelter. I want to make a decent heavy armor piece, have and use a shield and have and use an axe, preferably ones that i've made. Unfortunately I have to do all those other things to get the pre-req parts to fulfil it...and that that 45 mins to craft a simple pine shield thing...hmmmmm

yeh no...

Well, totally missed this thread, glad someone necro'd it back to life.

Background-Gaming since Pong, if it's an MMO i've probably played, tested or dived into most of them since UO. My longest stint was SWG of course 5 accts for 5 yrs full 8 characters max'd. Most of my time there i spent running a brothel/strip club on tatooine on the Kauri server (Agamemnon my main and elder /bilcli on the euro server). Tasted most of SOE's products, EQ 1&2, CB, ps1/ps2, dcuo/champions/coh/cov, Vanguard, as well as many other regulars, Conan, Star Trek, Daoc,DDO, LOTRO, SWTOR and EVE.

I'm a long time table top gamer going back to RedBox during middle school lunch hour. I play every other Tuesday in a homegrown PathFinder ES Skyrim game and Saturdays in an Ashen Stars sci-fi game with close friends.

I'm also the former lead designer for the Mech mmorpg project Force of Arms (defunct). I have taken a little bit of a break in the amount of mmo's I play over the last few years (getting older I guess/have less time) so i'm down to one I play serious right now Ascent a free space mmo and soon this.

I've been to DragonCon 9yrs running, Thanks and shout out to the devs (jason?) that were there that reminded me of the PFO enrollment. I went first as a guest speaker for the aforementioned game. It's the best 4 days you'll ever spend for labor day weekend and well worth the trip to Nerd Mecca for anyone who has never been. Fortunately I live here close by and am a member of the local game dev groups as well as a few gamer groups.

I'm a Super Hardcore Casual PvPer who likes to Craft/RolePlay and run dungeons/raids and PVE content. - That bout sums it up for me :D

Look forward to seeing ya'll in game.

Why not copy what 90% of MMO's have done since EQ came out and create a multi-tab chat system that is configurable and moveable (including opacity) so that the user can create the "chat look" they like in whatever customizable way they want.

No need to re-invent the wheel for the simplest of things, copying is the best form of flattery... :D

I am new but can add a comment or two about graphics and PFO, although what i've seen so far is not bad, it's far from optimized.

That being said the unity engine can support a lot, for instance I'm right now playing another unity web game called ascent - the space game www.thespacegame.com for those interested. It supports 270 BILLION worlds that are generated within the engine. You can land on them, colonize them, put buildings and structures on them inside the domes and so on. 1 deed is 100sq km, 14000 domes fit inside one deed, the planets are generated to scale, from massive gas giants you can skim to rocky planets/moons you can land on and EVA. Enough about that game back to graphics in general.

Optimization-wise, although I'm not in yet, there are a number of things that can be done and hinder a game.

1. model triangle counts- In general viewable drawable terrain runs at about 1 million triangles on a card for most 3d games.

2. a typical human model runs anywhere from 2000-4000 triangles. a face (detail) can run from 500-1500 triangles. A lot has to do with the level of detail which i'll go into later.

3. Optimization of weapons, armor, smaller items- 100-200 triangles per item. So stuff like weapons and shield which add to your character at a hitch point on the model.

4. Background crap-wells, house, stable, cave (outside texture for an instance dungeon zone), barrel, blacksmith shop, anvil, all of these items have thousands of triangles for a viewable distance probably almost another million triangles.

5. Quadrilaterals-this is a big no no in game design where you have mostly models with triangles, sometimes a modeller makes a mistake and puts a connection point somewhere else that turns it into a 4 sided object. these hurt the graphics cards since they try to draw twice over the object in the graphics card and conflict between the 3 sided triangle and the rest of the model where 4 sides intersect.

6. Texture loads-you have the base model, you've got the textures for weapons and armor. These can be optimized as well as the shading and light sources that go along wit hthe textures, the type of textures (bump mapping etc to make it look 3d) all of this is done in the cgl shader writing the graphics code. This is likely not optimized yet. If you've ever sat an spun in a circle looking at an area and see your video card start massively humming/spiking and your FPS drop suddenly this is likely a result of a bad model in a draw scene.

and lastly

7. Level of detail, this is set in the graphics code as well. How far away do i tell the system to draw a model, the terrain, the tree, the building and what level of detail do i need to draw it so it looks like a model from the characters perspective.

at 1km that tree is a flat 2d plane with a tree texture painted on it and the size of a dot on a typewriter. at 1/2 km it maybe 2 intersecting planes and the size of a thimble. at 1/4km it maybe 3 planes or even 100 triangles (this is where u switch them) a lumpy 3d mass with a texture painted on it. At 1/8 its 500 triangles, at 100 ft its 1000 triangles, at 50 ft 2000 triangles, at 10 feet 5000 triangles. So you see what the level of detail is set to matters greatly. This is where you hear that dev term LOD and how its set up.

anyway, that's my 2 cents, i think they look ok so far, they could stand some improvement, i'm sure it'll get there.