Best posts made by Sparks

@Testament said in General Video Game Thread:

However, I will take my own opinion with a grain of salt because I'm a die hard defender of Mass Effect 1 and I'm under no illusions what a mess in terms of controls, combat, UI, and camera control that game is.

I mean, you will get zero argument from me here. As a former game developer, I can list dozens of things that should've probably been done differently in that trilogy, especially the first game! Yet my closet is literally filled with clothing emblazoned with the N7 insignia: 4 different hoodies, 2 jackets, a t-shirt, a scarf... (I admit I may have a slight problem.)

Conversely, I think I own one piece of Dragon Age-related clothing.

I enjoy the DA games greatly, but there's little question which BioWare franchise truly owns my heart.

@Testament said in General Video Game Thread:

The reality is, to me at least, is that BioWare's quality started to go down the moment they were forcibly married to using Frostbite.

I strongly suspect that there are a number of parts of Inquisition that would have been better if the team hadn't been fighting with their own tools throughout the development process. I am absolutely certain that Andromeda's problems were greatly exacerbated by forcing the engine onto a team who were both unfamiliar with Frostbite (and sectioned off in a different office, unable to learn from the painful experiences of the DAI team) and who didn't receive the same sort of support from the Frostbite dev team at DICE.

And there is absolutely no freaking reason that anyone should've played origami with that engine to try and squeeze it into a shape suitable to build anything remotely like what Anthem is now, much less what they originally planned for it to be.

I mean, aside from the fact that by all accounts writing code to match Frostbite's design is a literal circle of hell? And the fact that Frostbite's renderer apparently does not deal efficiently with third person POV, for several reasons?

Frostbite's design also supposedly pretty much demands heavy occlusion, especially if you use complex lighting. In DA:I they could use chunks of landscape to cut the view short—hills, cliffs, etc.—and it worked fairly well. But Andromeda had these big maps where you'd drive the Nomad around atop hills and see all the terrain around you; that isn't Frostbite's friend. Meanwhile, Anthem evidently takes one of the most complex lighting systems possible with the engine, and then lets you freaking fly. There are places on the map, especially right by Tarsis Falls, where you can see for miles; I have very little doubt situations like that contributed to why day one Anthem could consume all your memory and then crash in some situations.

I will give Frostbite credit: it is great for enterprising players when it comes to doing custom screenshot artwork; it's one of the easier engines to hook into and alter the camera position/angle, change the current lighting and/or fog state, manually adust the FoV settings, turn the landscape and shadow details up stupid high, etc. Many of my favorite screenshots I've posted on my screenshot blog over the years are from DA:I, where I'd freeze the game and then lovingly tweak things until the atmosphere felt just right. You can do just absolutely amazing screenshot work in Frostbite.

But despite how much I enjoy the way Frostbite can be manipulated for artistic ends, I do rather believe the engine should be put out of its misery for non-FPS games. (Or maybe put out of the developers' misery?)

So, yeah, I am certain BioWare could have done better on all three of those games if they had not been struggling against their own tools and had instead been allowed to use what they were already familiar with (i.e., Unreal).

But while I am sure DA:I would've been more like what we were used to from BioWare in many ways, I think that Andromeda and Anthem would still have been fairly troubled games even had they been built on an engine that was not the software incarnation of a medieval torture device. Yes, they probably would've both been more solid games technically, but I think they'd still have been rushed and flawed. Because, by all accounts, neither game had a consistent vision—or even a coherent design plan—until fairly late in their respective development cycles.

So I'm not sure the engine itself really is one of the worst problems; I suspect if the only thing changed was the technology used, we still would've probably seen a decline—albeit maybe starting a couple of years after Inquisition—and I suspect that's on BioWare's current management and leadership team.

Which, sadly, we can't really blame Frostbite for.

@pyrephox said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@roz And it might mean that people would have to think carefully about appointing Voices who cover their own weaknesses. If you're a fighty lord or lady, then your voice maybe needs to be social. If you're social, you might want a fighty Voice for war-time commanding.

Voices are also meant to be there to handle things in your stead when you can't be, so there's nothing wrong with appointing a voice with the same strengths as you. (Neither is there anything wrong with appointing people who have complimentary skills to you!)

But if you are Prince Fighty McArmorpants and, as a voice or military leader, you want to convince the populace that, hey, blood sacrifice is really what's going to save us from the abyss, honest, you're probably going to need the charms of a Popular Pretty Princess or a skilled Whisper or someone diplomatic/social in order to sell that. It's meant to drive you to involve other people in things.

In that sense, it's not all that different than how if you want to go scouting in the woods for an elusive enemy, you probably want Lord Terry "Treehopper" Ashford of the Vista Glades who has perception 5, survival 5, and stealth 4 out there scouting the path for you, rather than having Prince Clarence "Clanky-Tank" Valardin in plate armor with perception 2 and zero stealth (but one heck of a set of combat skills) rattling along as the party lead.

@roz Hrm. I suppose I could split the AP cost (or just charge the amount to each).

But I think it'll be alleviated somewhat when AP assists go back in, once the AP is separated into "your own AP" and "assisted AP" so some things can just draw from your own AP, where assists don't make sense. But healing could then use even assisted AP to represent others helping you tend to the fallen party member. Thus the party, not just the healer, would bear the AP cost of healing off-timer.

@Ghost said in General Video Game Thread:

going away like Ion Storm did

Oh, geez, that takes me back; that whole mess went down while I was still in the games industry. When the infamous "Stormy Weather" newspaper article came out, the group who had defected from Ion Storm en masse to start their own company were actually at my company's office at the time, being trained on technology of ours they were licensing.

The whole situation with Ion Storm was... uh, interesting.

@kanye-qwest said in D&D 5E:

Once @pax is done with her exploration room system for Evennia, a game that automates adventuring would be totally doable!

The trick is having enough templates for the exploration/adventuring system to actually generate variety.

I'm even more confused; this post is literally just a copy of a chunk of the first section of the "Game Planning" page from the Evennia developer wiki.

https://github.com/evennia/evennia/wiki/Game-Planning

@saosmash said in General Video Game Thread:

@Testament Wow I love both of those DLCs, that's a hard call for me.

Seriously. Just go ahead and ask people which of their children is their favorite, why don't you.

One thing I do think D&D 5e works really well for is avoiding overtuning encounters when you have coded combat.

There's a problem that crops up on Arx where you have to eyeball a group of adventurers when making a coded combat mob, guess how hard it should be, drop the mob, and then potentially watch the mob steamroller them (when you didn't WANT the mob to be quite that deadly)... or watch them steamroller the mob (when you wanted the mob to be a challenge).

5e Challenge Rating is a well-understood mathematic; by having your mob spawns based on challenge rating, you could easily look at the party present, go, "Okay, they're these spread of levels, that means for an encounter I want to be hard but survivable, the challenge rating of the mobs should total X." You could even have code to calculate the encounter difficulty for you!

@Herja said in What Types of Games Would People Like To See?:

My kingdom for a Sunrunner game.

+1

(Though there's probably like two or three other people in all of MU'ing who would join us there.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GLbwkfhYZk

Hello yes please I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

"Single-player story-driven RPG" already has my interest; setting it a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away merely seals the deal for a Star Wars fangirl.

I probably shouldn't get my hopes too high, but... Star Wars. I can't help it; give me a lightsaber and my good judgment goes out the window.

@meg said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

How about that prestige, eh?

There's a public Github project board for the planned prestige rework, which details the plan that we put together.

@jeshin said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

I'd be super interested in how staff envisions AP sharing/transfer/selling to come back to the game.

The current thought is that it might work better with a differentiation between "your own AP" and "assisted AP", as separate pools. Then a lot of things would require using your own AP, so when you're out, you can't get someone to assist you for that thing, even if they could assist you for other things.

@Atomic said in What Types of Games Would People Like To See?:

@gryphter I think at that point you are almost at Rising Stars.

Which would also be an interesting setup for a game. A town where a mysterious light from the heavens hits a town, and every unborn child is born with mysterious powers? Where you could basically chargen a really messed-up adult, and then periodically play flashback scenes with other folks to flesh out past relationships (because you've all known each other all your lives, being born in the same town and being known globally as having unique talents).

If you want to be PvE you leave it there and let them deal with things the staff runs (maybe even more of their own, who are using their powers for ill). If you want to be PvP, you just introduce the 'each one of you who dies, the power is distributed among the rest, making you that much stronger' element...

It's worth noting that Octopath Traveler's use of 3d makes it feel visually very different in play than an old school SNES game. There actually something quite beautiful about the way it looks in motion, and I think it's almost more because of the pixelated retro textures than despite them. It's the best example of HD-2D I've seen, I think.

It is also multiple RPGs kind of smashed together. Each party member really has their own entire storyline; you pick one to start with, but as you travel the world you will gradually find the other characters and thus can also play their stories, their own arcs. Only once you've done all those stories can you start to see the common threads that tie all eight travelers together, and what the story that will affect all of them is... and then resolve that one.

@jeshin said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

Why not just remove the scoreboard thus obfuscating prestige during tuning?

Because at this point the system seems irrevocably tainted by bitterness and general unhappiness, as people have worked themselves into a froth. Removing the scoreboards would not stop this; people would still be unhappy with the current system even if they no longer had numbers to point to. Gutting it and restarting with a system that implements all of prestige (fashion, tournaments, etc.) in an extensible manner to start with, rather than a foundation of one system (fashion) with others (tournaments, etc.) coming later seems like the best way to balance things out.

It seems odd that staff would halt the development of magic, possibly the most sought after system or shardhavens (automated dungeons)

Dealing with people arm-flailing about prestige is eating a not-insignificant amount of staff time at this point. People argue in the threads here, get more and more worked up, and then come to staff with (often contradictory) pages or @mails of "this is how I think prestige should be redesigned right now".

Hence, prestige got bumped up the list of things to deal with in order to reduce the staff workload in the longer term, so we can get back to story.

Conversely, magic is eating rather less staff time, because generally PCs don't have access to magic right now; people can try horrifically dangerous experiments through @action and eat up one of their GM slots, or try to attach themselves to one of the NPC teachers in advance of the magic system going in, but that's pretty much it at present.

As much as I'd really like to get into the stories of people learning magic and all—because that's where my interest as a GM really rests—it's something that can wait because the current state is not a drain on staff like the prestige system has become.

@secretfire - it depends on what you mean by D&D inspired, I think. If all you want is a game set in Faerun or Eberron or whatever, then that's easy to do in Ares as long as you either don't want combat to involve magic, or as long as all conflict is resolved via dice told rather than combat code.

(Magic and the FS3 combat system don't go together well; you can do it, like Tat did with Spirit Lake, but the range of what can feasibly be coded to work in FS3 combat imposed limits on Spirit Lake's magic system which are far more restrictive than any tabletop magic system I've ever used. This isn't said as a criticism, just a note that the range of magic you'd expect in a D&D setting is not possible under FS3's coded combat.)

If you mean with the same sort of feel to combat and everything, though, I don't know if anyone has made a d20 plugin for Ares, and I think if you wanted to truly include even a decent subset of spells and feats, that would be an incredibly difficult coding challenge. (Not that doing full d20 with that sort of range would work a ton better on Evennia, mind you; tackling a d20 implementation with any sort of wide variety in spells and feats will be an immense task on any platform.)

@Sunny said in General Video Game Thread:

Triple Triad is one of the best things about FFXIV, too. I spent waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much time at the casino lol.

I have a friend who plays FFXIV where I swear literally 90% of what he does is wander around the world challenging NPCs to Triple Triad games and trying to collect rare cards, and then head back to the Manderville Gold Saucer to challenge other players to Triple Triad games.

@Testament said in General Video Game Thread:

while FF6(or 3 depending who you are)is arguably the best.

I'm sorry, arguably? No. FF6 is factually and objectively the best.

Joking aside...

• It has some of the best music; Terra's Theme remains my favorite FF theme and leitmotif out of all the games. For all that the orchestral versions are amazing, the original version was an absolutely freaking unbelievable song for the hardware it was running on. It is still the most iconic piece of FF music for me. (Though I will admit FFXIV's Sultana Dreaming—the night music for Ul'dah—is a very close second for my favorite.)
• It has some of the best lines of any FF game. Both funny and poignant. And the dramatic/climactic Patrick Stewart Speech about 'there is good in the world and in people, it's all worth saving' being met with "Bleh! You make me sick! You sound like chapters from a self-help book!" is probably one of my favorite villain responses of all time.
• It does something I don't think I've seen any other RPG do, at least none I can think of offhand: ***Major story spoilers***
  click to show

  
  The villain actually wins. He wins. You put together a party, you go through what honestly feels like more or less an entire game story arc... and you lose the final battle. He ascends to godhood, the world basically freaking ends... and the rest of the game is literally these now-damaged people dealing with their own horrible tragedies and traumas in this post-apocalyptic world, still managing to come together to rekindle hope and try to rebuild things.
  

If they are going to be doing remakes on the apparent quality level of that FF7 remake they finally showed off at E3? Give me one of FF6.

@pyrephox said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

So, I guess I'd turn it around and say, when you say you want social characters to have meaningful systems to interact with, what sorts of systems do you envision as "meaningful" in the context of the sort of game staff wants Arx to be? Like, if you didn't have to code anything, and could just wave your hand and declare, "This is what social power MEANS in this setting," then what would it be?

That's a fair question. What I as a system designer would like is that prestige—both legend and fame—boils down to "you have influence with the NPC populace in various ways".

Now, note that prestige may not be from social sources; it might be because you're a Champion who just won a prominent bout and is enjoying your fifteen minutes of fame in the aftermath, or it might be because you're a social maven who spends a lot of time keeping yourself in the public eye. Where the prestige comes from should be irrelevant in this sense; social characters should just find it easier to maintain that fame.

As for how that influence looks?

• I want people who are high in prestige to be important to the dominion system; if you are trying to influence the NPC populace, it's easier if you have a "celebrity endorsement" to sell your plan to them, as it were. So I want you to be able to have someone with a lot of prestige 'endorse' a dominion action when you're taking it, and how much prestige they have will be used to lower the effective difficulty. (But dominion's further down the road, and so right now that would really limit people to GM'd actions.)
• I would like people who are high in prestige to have at least some benefit at the market while they're high in prestige, because a merchant can go "this celebrity shops at my stall!". (Think of Mass Effect; "I'm Commander Shepard, and this is my favorite store in the Citadel!")
• I would like people who are high in prestige to have a chance to throw their weight behind societal trends in some form while they're in the limelight, but I'm honestly not sure how; we don't have a good 'social trends' system or anything like that, and trying to add one would be a horrible headache to maintain. This is the one I'm really stuck on. Sure, we could have them lend their weight to an org and give it some benefit by making that org the 'in thing' for one or two weeks, but as soon as there's any meaningful mechanical benefit to an org—like income, or resource generation—I currently feel like that's just going to circle back to this frothing "now it's necessary to grind prestige or else you're doing it wrong" mentality, which isn't what we want.

ETA a reply I missed before!

@three-eyed-crow said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

@sparks said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

Without answering that, the prestige list will not matter to people, and houses will go back to "no, you can't have money for clothes or jewelry, we need to keep the funds for weaponry" (which is what happened before).

Can't staff make it clear this isn't cool and punish people who do it when they are reported?

Sure, but I would rather have a system that makes people want to fund and facilitate the fun of their social characters than having to constantly police it and have the house leaders resentful about the social characters "sucking up money for stuff that doesn't matter".

A system is more work in the short term, yes, but a lot less staff work in the long run.

@Caryatid said in What Types of Games Would People Like To See?:

Adding to the list: Dragon Age: Inquisition.

Oh no, I've created a monster...

@seraphim73 said in Spirit Lake: An Original Modern Fantasy Game:

I've been thinking big-city cop who transfers to Grand Lake to get away from the stress. Because that will totally be stress-free. No, his name will not be Nicholas Angel.

The greater good...

If you don't need a lot of custom code (beyond like, a new dice engine module for your specific system), I would honestly recommend AresMUSH. As noted, Ruby is a more modern and less niche programming skill than MUSHcode, and you get the benefits of the awesome web portal and scene system.

If you need a ton of custom code, go Evennia; it's way more bare-bones than Ares, but it's designed to be a platform on which you build a more customized game. And if there's some way in which Ares' great web portal doesn't match your usage case, Evennia's built atop Django (a fairly widely used system for building custom web applications) and is thus easily changed in drastic ways. Plus, like Ruby, Python is a modern and widely used programming language, so it should be easy to find coders for it.

If you want to get really weird, Python is right now arguably the most common language for machine learning work; you could do things like use a GAN to generate dynamic PBs for your characters in chargen like this does! (I might have prototyped doing this on my Evennia sandbox. It's an incredibly dumb idea; loading a GAN into a game server is not what I'd call "the best use of resources". But that has never stopped me from prototyping off-the-wall stuff before.)

If you have an existing codebase in MUSHcode, of course, just use Rhost or MUX2 or Penn or whatever.

But lacking an existing legacy codebase, for quickest time-to-open with the most modern interfaces? Use Ares, and either use one of the existing modules to replace FS3, find a way to use FS3 for superpowers, or get a Ruby coder to write you a new module with the system you want to use.