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Title: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Endie on March 08, 2007, 01:59:13 AM I know that there is an Eve forum, but I suspect that this might be of broader interest.
Ten Ton Hammer just posted some GDC demo footage (http://www.tentonhammer.com/index.php?module=ContentExpress&func=display&ceid=485) of the upcoming Eve feature where players can see their characters, walk around a station (and do social stuff like gamble or even (possibly) karaoke). This element was sorta announced back at the Eve convention a few months ago, but the footage looks pretty good stuff. The holographic star map hovering over them is nice, the graphics and models seem right in character with the existing game, and everyone scowls a lot, which is as it should be with Internet Spaceship Serious Business. Warning, contains gratuitous nerd-attracting, tight, shiny, leather catsuits. Edit: for those who haven't seen it, the other huge element under development is planetary atmospheric flight. Some rather pretty youtube footage here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCQgSBne0jg&mode=related&search=eve%20online). Edit: this one is, indeed, probably misattributed. Further edit: Here is a definite Eve Online atmospheric flight demo (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Pg1dzAvL2M). This one also looks impressive - volcanos and stuff - but is shakeycam. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Falconeer on March 08, 2007, 02:28:44 AM What can I say? I won't hide here: *drool*
EDIT: Some guys claim the atmospheric video is a fake... Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Yoru on March 08, 2007, 02:31:38 AM They're not demoing this to us proles on the show floor.
Guess I have to buy 'em some hookers or something... Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: eldaec on March 08, 2007, 03:31:40 AM Whatever happened to 'we will never develop an interface where you control walk your character around a station because it would divert resources from the spacecraft game'? :wink:
Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Endie on March 08, 2007, 03:36:38 AM Whatever happened to 'we will never develop an interface where you control walk your character around a station because it would divert resources from the spacecraft game'? :wink: Or, come to that, "when you plug into a pod you are there forever". Times change. Hey, maybe there will be a use for all those exotic dancers I've had to ship around! result! Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Falconeer on March 08, 2007, 05:34:37 AM Let's hope they don't develop some diku mechanic about the damsels in distress.
Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: eldaec on March 08, 2007, 06:06:08 AM and space-elves ofc.
Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Soln on March 08, 2007, 06:20:40 AM pass
Eve == :dead_horse: Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Falconeer on March 08, 2007, 06:22:29 AM Pass? Just because the devs cheat?
Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Endie on March 08, 2007, 06:29:54 AM I'm pleased about the walking around and flying within the atmosphere things because, well, when I had that nice wireframe Elite on my BBC Micro model B, I remember thinking "wouldn't it be awesome if I could get out my Cobra Mk3" and "I wish I could flightsim in this thing, too". Those ideas are so deeply imprinted upon me that, even though the grown-up me realises the danger of retards with /dance emotes, I just can't help myself.
And I don't mind the sort of players that a real socialisation element might fleetingly attract to the game. That person that dances in the Jita cantina while cybering will eventually want to go to Kaunokka for some Gorean costumefest or something. I'll leave them a can saying "free furry ears and tails!", they'll loot it, and their screams of outrage at then being podded will resonate right out to the drone regions. Edit: spelling Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: tmp on March 08, 2007, 07:56:58 AM Or, come to that, "when you plug into a pod you are there forever". Times change. The "pod forever" thing is mentioned in backstory as something which affected the first experimental pilots -- once they got it they'd never go out. The players are free from that because it both happens some X years later (technological progress was made) and the players themselves are supposedly elite few of human race that are able to cope with psychological stress that comes from getting in and out of the pod.That station video is nice, if nothing else it finally gives some sense of scale to the ships in game. And I guess they have plans to reuse that (parts) of engine for their WoD game, so it will have to be rather flexible... not a bad thing. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Surlyboi on March 08, 2007, 08:25:40 AM Now, give me the ability to arm up with a squad of marines and do boarding actions and I'm there in a heartbeat.
Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Hoax on March 08, 2007, 08:33:09 AM Station video is pretty cool.
Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Ixxit on March 08, 2007, 08:38:47 AM Pretty cool. One of the reasons I never got into EvE was the sense of detachment from the game; it almost felt you were playing a RTS. Never felt that I 'was' playing my avatar.
Once this is in and if they ever introduce planetary type operations EvE could easily be the best virtual world ever. Until then.. meh. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: SnakeCharmer on March 08, 2007, 09:02:15 AM Now, give me the ability to arm up with a squad of marines and do boarding actions and I'm there in a heartbeat. Oh hell yes. I would as well. If the flight mechanics were flight sim-ish (a la JTL, or something similar), I'd be all over it. How DO you fly around in EvE? Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Dundee on March 08, 2007, 09:07:13 AM They look very nice.
And sitting! In chairs! Crazy. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Bix on March 08, 2007, 09:11:59 AM Wow, that looks very cool. I tried to get into Eve but the hour long tutorial got on my nerves, but after reading everything on these boards the game sounds like alot of fun. Is the PvP in Eve button mashing or is there actually some strategy involved??
Dundee - Your game looking this good? When the hell are you guys going to annouce somethin?? Bix Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Morat20 on March 08, 2007, 09:25:26 AM They look very nice. They have an edge, to be honest. They're developing it without much legacy requirements (other than having to be able model their crazy-ass collection of garments and facial structures from their character selection process), and they can instance the whole damn thing. AND they things just need to walk, talk, and interact. Combat's probably not even being looked at now.And sitting! In chairs! Crazy. So they get a "Looking good" social system that's utterly seperate from their combat system, and not even using the same resources. They can afford to make it look good. Hell, if they throw in a good market interface when in Avatar-land, I'd be thrilled spitless. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Dundee on March 08, 2007, 09:28:27 AM They have an edge, to be honest. They're developing it without much legacy requirements (other than having to be able model their crazy-ass collection of garments and facial structures from their character selection process), and they can instance the whole damn thing. AND they things just need to walk, talk, and interact. Combat's probably not even being looked at now. So they get a "Looking good" social system that's utterly seperate from their combat system, and not even using the same resources. They can afford to make it look good. Hell, if they throw in a good market interface when in Avatar-land, I'd be thrilled spitless. I think Earth & Beyond had that same edge. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Morat20 on March 08, 2007, 09:32:38 AM They have an edge, to be honest. They're developing it without much legacy requirements (other than having to be able model their crazy-ass collection of garments and facial structures from their character selection process), and they can instance the whole damn thing. AND they things just need to walk, talk, and interact. Combat's probably not even being looked at now. So they get a "Looking good" social system that's utterly seperate from their combat system, and not even using the same resources. They can afford to make it look good. Hell, if they throw in a good market interface when in Avatar-land, I'd be thrilled spitless. I think Earth & Beyond had that same edge. Still, I guess my point was -- it should look good. They're not dealing with a lot of the technical constraints avatar-based MMORPGS deal with, and since it's an add-in, it's not tied to their current engine. They can code it with a heavy eye towards looking good, using a lot of the new shinies -- rather than using an engine that's going to be a few years old by the time they're done. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Falconeer on March 08, 2007, 09:34:22 AM Earth & Beyond, yeah, with 3 ships to choose from and battling flying space skulls. Same thing. Wonder how come it sunk.
Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Yoru on March 08, 2007, 10:54:48 AM Now, give me the ability to arm up with a squad of marines and do boarding actions and I'm there in a heartbeat. Oh hell yes. I would as well. If the flight mechanics were flight sim-ish (a la JTL, or something similar), I'd be all over it. How DO you fly around in EvE? Doubleclicking in space makes you fly in that direction. And don't forget - this is all probably a prototype of their landscape system for WoD Online. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: ajax34i on March 08, 2007, 11:13:27 AM RE: Bix. It's not a click-fest, there is strategy, but most of the strategy happens before the actual fight, and it consists of deciding how to best fit your ship for the task at hand (keeping in mind what resists / ships the enemies are likely to fly) and also the movement before the combat, trying to gather intelligence about the enemy's positions as well as catching / holding him in place. Once the ships are in range and/or locked so that they can't run away, there's not much you can do (or have time to react to) to alter the outcome (this is because everyone shoots with everything they have from the first second, nobody keeps some of their weapons or electronic warfare modules "in reserve" so that they can "surprise" you halfway through the fight).
RE: SnakeCharmer. Flying around in EVE is "destination-based", I don't know the word for it. In order to move to anywhere, that location must appear either in your overview (like, for example, planets, stations, asteroid belts, etc.), or be given to you (most agents give you bookmarks, "click on this bookmark that has the coordinates to the mission area"), or you must scan for it (this is how you find enemy ships that are hiding, you scan for them and once you've pinpointed them, you can then use the results of the scan as a destination to go to). If you double-click in space in any direction, you start flying at sublight in that direction, but this is mostly used to get unstuck or to maneuver while in combat. Not that combat is manual flying; in most cases, you click the target and you choose "approach", "keep at x km", or "orbit at x km", whatever is best for the range of the weapons that you have. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Nija on March 08, 2007, 11:16:36 AM When Planetside goes bottom up within the next 2 months, they should buy the existing technology and use it towards planet colonization/assaulting.
Game within a game stuff. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Gutboy Barrelhouse on March 08, 2007, 12:12:22 PM Having never played Eve, is the actual space combat "twich" or what?
Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: ajax34i on March 08, 2007, 12:20:32 PM No, it's not twitch. It's not dogfighting... imagine World War II battleships shooting each other. Although you have direct control over the ship and its guns, shields, armor, and modules, the ships in EVE have crews and are sized from frigate to cruiser to battleship and larger. You get in position, activate guns, and hope that your turrets or missiles track and hit critically, while at the same time trying to boost your shields or maneuver to keep outside the enemy's range, etc. You also do Electronic Warfare, which involves modules that disable the other guy's targetting, or reduce his range, accuracy, speed, or ability to warp away.
Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: tmp on March 08, 2007, 12:45:02 PM Having never played Eve, is the actual space combat "twich" or what? Frigate fights can require/involve quite a bit of manual navigation due to high speeds and (relatively) small distances involved. Beyond that it becomes more of pre-planning (having robust ship setup able to cope with situation at hand) and quick tactical thinking (when to attack, when to run, at what range, who to focus fire on, what modules to activate when and for how long so your ship doesn't run out of energy used to power them all etc)Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: SnakeCharmer on March 08, 2007, 12:55:43 PM Bah. Boring (The combat/flight model).
I can see the other appeal of it though, especially the political pvp / economic pvp game to it. Hell, just reading about it here makes me want to play. But I think I'd grow weary of it rather fast, so I'll keep my fascination at arms length and just watch. I need my combat to be a different kind of engagement. Now, if I had the ability to twitch control a fighter or small freighter type (with friends manning the turrets, missles, etc), I would be all over it like white on rice. I *LOVED* JTL for that very reason, though I wish DS would have been 10 times its size with asteroid fields and blown up ship hulls to use as cover. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Morat20 on March 08, 2007, 01:03:07 PM Bah. Boring (The combat/flight model). There are really two models for space-sims:I can see the other appeal of it though, especially the political pvp / economic pvp game to it. Hell, just reading about it here makes me want to play. But I think I'd grow weary of it rather fast, so I'll keep my fascination at arms length and just watch. I need my combat to be a different kind of engagement. Now, if I had the ability to twitch control a fighter or small freighter type (with friends manning the turrets, missles, etc), I would be all over it like white on rice. I *LOVED* JTL for that very reason, though I wish DS would have been 10 times its size with asteroid fields and blown up ship hulls to use as cover. 1) Dog fights. 2) Modern Naval battles. EVE went with the latter. Why, I don't know -- although at least part of it has to be the problems with doing twitch on an MMORPG (freakin' lag). Interceptors come closest to twitch -- they specialize in nasty hit-and-run attacks. Combat can be fairly heated, as you have to make lots of quick (and correct) decisions if you'd like to win -- but that's more about keeping at the proper range, and managing energy (energy feeds your guns, keeps your shield and armor up), and knowing when to try to run. The deeper tactics involve choosing the ship and loadout that are best for your fighting style and skills, and coordinating large-scale fleet movements and logistics. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Viin on March 08, 2007, 01:14:19 PM Allegiance always had the online space flight twitch thing down, it's really too bad MS canned it - though the user community seems to be doing pretty well.
We just need an meshing of EVE and Allegiance to get a kickass space game, and then StarWars Battlefront for the ground game. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Lantyssa on March 08, 2007, 01:27:01 PM And sitting! In chairs! *cackle*Crazy. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Woody on March 08, 2007, 03:58:50 PM They look very nice. And sitting! In chairs! Crazy. Considering the last game you worked on featured toons floating in air off to the side of chairs they tried to sit on, that probably does amaze you. :-D Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Yoru on March 08, 2007, 03:59:47 PM Bah. Boring (The combat/flight model). There are really two models for space-sims:I can see the other appeal of it though, especially the political pvp / economic pvp game to it. Hell, just reading about it here makes me want to play. But I think I'd grow weary of it rather fast, so I'll keep my fascination at arms length and just watch. I need my combat to be a different kind of engagement. Now, if I had the ability to twitch control a fighter or small freighter type (with friends manning the turrets, missles, etc), I would be all over it like white on rice. I *LOVED* JTL for that very reason, though I wish DS would have been 10 times its size with asteroid fields and blown up ship hulls to use as cover. 1) Dog fights. 2) Modern Naval battles. EVE went with the latter. Why, I don't know -- although at least part of it has to be the problems with doing twitch on an MMORPG (freakin' lag). Interceptors come closest to twitch -- they specialize in nasty hit-and-run attacks. Combat can be fairly heated, as you have to make lots of quick (and correct) decisions if you'd like to win -- but that's more about keeping at the proper range, and managing energy (energy feeds your guns, keeps your shield and armor up), and knowing when to try to run. The deeper tactics involve choosing the ship and loadout that are best for your fighting style and skills, and coordinating large-scale fleet movements and logistics. From what I caught at the CCP talk this morning, they went with the latter at least partially for technical reasons; because of the way movement works in Eve, the deterministic naval-style combat is much easier on the network layer. From a design/player's standpoint, it's easier to handle that more sedate style of battle in a high-latency environment. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Fordel on March 08, 2007, 06:45:43 PM Sometimes I think EVE would've been better off as a turn based game, but keep the animations and motions fluid in between turns. Have some kind of global turn for everyone, where you have 10 seconds or so to choose your actions or have your previous actions continue.
Would that help with the lag EVE has or am I on armchair designer crack? Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Xerapis on March 08, 2007, 08:05:36 PM So they're transitioning to Freelancer Online, but flying and shooting will still be boring as hell?
Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Endie on March 09, 2007, 01:21:46 AM They look very nice. And sitting! In chairs! Crazy. Yep. Everyone knows you should sit next to, or near chairs, but not on them. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Hoax on March 09, 2007, 08:30:31 AM Now they are adding voice also, ripped from MMORPG.com:
Quote Game Developers Conference, San Francisco, CA - March 7, 2007 - CCP Games, the world's largest independent game developer, today announced the integration of voice communication into leading Sci-Fi Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG), EVE Online. Players will now be able to speak to each other for better coordination, negotiation, socializing and planning. The addition of voice adds a new dimension to the award-winning game used by over 160,000 active players. EVE Voice gives players the ability to communicate with each other directly from within the game without the use of third party communication applications. This will enhance coordination of players during intense gameplay such as battles, improve inter-player negotiations, enrich planning and bring a new facet to social interaction, as it will now be an integrated part of the game. "EVE Online is a deeply strategic, open-ended game in which thousands of players must cooperate and compete," said Magnus Bergsson, chief marketing officer at CCP Games. "We recently had a fleet battle with more than 1,000 players in one sector of the EVE universe. The amount of communication between those players in planning and executing these maneuvers is vast. Adding integrated voice will not just enhance gameplay by accelerating those plans and allowing players to react quickly as situations unfold in-game, but it will give combat pilots a strategic advantage." "Being avid EVE players ourselves, providing voice to the EVE community is a tremendous experience for us," said Monty Sharma, vice president marketing at Vivox. "The level of play in EVE is incredibly sophisticated. Adding voice to a world of this caliber, so that it is accessible to the thousands of EVE players simply and easily, will augment the game in many ways. We know that EVE's players will make the most of these new features, and we're excited to watch the creative ways in which the players will use them to reach their goals." EVE Voice features EVE Voice is fully integrated into the EVE client software, eliminating the need for third party applications, which take up computer resources, require a dedicated voice server, and pose a security risk. Features of EVE Voice include: - High quality - offers sound quality which is considerably higher than other IP-based communication applications - Player to player direct chat - with talk indicator to show which player is speaking - Group chat - allowing corporation, fleet, or alliance members to communicate one-to-many within a dedicated audio channel - Sub-group chat - allowing smaller groups within a corporation, such as a squad or gang, to discuss specific topics among themselves - Group leader talk - instantly mutes other players on the group's audio channel ensuring the leader's instructions can be heard clearly during crucial times, such as in the heat of battle - Map integration - shows where players are when speaking, allowing better coordination of tactical assaults, reconnaissance or search and rescue missions - Moderator controls - allows leaders to kick other players off the audio channel (in case of abuse, for instance), to mute them (so they can hear but not be heard), ban (prevent them from accessing the audio channel) and un-ban players EVE Voice has been developed in partnership with Vivox, the leading provider of integrated voice services for online games, which will also operate the service. See also partnership announcement from May 10, 2006 for details. EVE Voice will be available from late March 2007 as an optional feature for players at a price of $10 for unlimited usage for 12 months. Players can access the updated client software here: http://www.eve-online.com/download/ Players must use a compatible headset and microphone to take advantage of the call quality offered by EVE Voice. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Endie on March 09, 2007, 08:42:25 AM Now they are adding voice also, ripped from MMORPG.com: This one has twin advantages: first, it is actually useful in gameplay (albeit just as a replacement for TS etc), and second, you can currently try it out on Tranq if in the right corp. I wonder if it will cut down the problems with spying/bombing of TS channels through use of corp-only/invite-only etc rights on channels. Of course, the alt spy will still get in. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: tmp on March 09, 2007, 09:04:06 AM I wonder if it will cut down the problems with spying/bombing of TS channels through use of corp-only/invite-only etc rights on channels. Of course, the alt spy will still get in. Probably not since sensible corps/alliances already limit access to anytyhing but lobby channel with TS. On the other hand it may cut the amount of "omg meta out-of-game spying" whines because technically the spying would now happen in game.Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Viin on March 09, 2007, 09:55:57 AM I, for one, am real excited about the voice chat. If it works as well as Vent/TS then it'd be well worth the $10 for the year. (Plus that means one person isn't spending $20/month for a Vent server :-D).
I'm hoping others will see the success of this implementation and start incorporating voice chat into other MMOs - which are inherently social and group based, but yet the default is to *type* everything. Just because that's how we did it with MUDs doesn't mean we have to keep doing it! Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Numtini on March 09, 2007, 10:02:13 AM They should raise the price of the subscription rather than make it $10 a year.
And I guess i just don't get why you would want to get out of your spaceship. Though it looks pretty. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Viin on March 09, 2007, 10:05:23 AM They should raise the price of the subscription rather than make it $10 a year. And I guess i just don't get why you would want to get out of your spaceship. Though it looks pretty. So all the whiners who say they don't have an attachment to their ships (because there's not really an avatar) can stop whining about that and instead whine that there's only 5 card poker and not 7 card poker and blackjack. I assume (as mentioned by other foks) they are doing this more as a test/tech demo for their new engine pieces - might as well put it into EVE so that the above mentioned whiners stop whining. :-P Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Nija on March 09, 2007, 10:20:14 AM I for one wish they wouldn't work on all this flashy shit.
They need to work on getting 1000 person fleet battles working. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Yegolev on March 09, 2007, 10:46:22 AM Shiny sells subs.
Always avoid alliteration. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Afropuff on March 09, 2007, 10:47:27 AM Me likey teh new shiney. Avatars plus built-in voice is enough to make me want to re-up and try Eve again.
Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Morat20 on March 09, 2007, 10:55:58 AM I for one wish they wouldn't work on all this flashy shit. I'd imagine they are. (I know they're still working to change fleet structures, for one). There's a limit to how many developers you want to throw at a problem at a time. The technical hurdles involved in their fleet battles are pretty staggering, but there's a limit to how many ways they can approach it -- and throwing too many people on it is worse than ignoring it. They need to work on getting 1000 person fleet battles working. However, CCP has a large Dev team -- and since a WoD MMORPG is at least in the conceptual stage, CCP's got to have developers tasked solely with that. (Probably new hires -- their staff has grown a great deal over the last year or two) -- and using EVE as a testbed for that software is a brilliant idea. Unlike shit like the NGE, the "Walking in stations" stuff is going to have zero impact on actual game-play -- so it's low-risk. Secondly, they can prototype it on a real, life game meaning real, life customer feedback -- and that means real, live experience with loads and usage. Mostly, though, it's the sort of shiny that's going to attract more customers and offers a foundation for latter expansion. The biggest complaint I've heard about EVE is the sense of detachment potential players have from their character. Offering even a limited social space and 3D avatars is a big step towards rectifying that --- using people whose skills aren't remotely useful for things like trying to optimize combat and system code to handle an unbelievable node stress. I'm personally waiting for the gambling. It'll be fun to see how that evolves -- can you imagine a high stake game? Rich players wagering T2 ships, BPOs, modules? Perhaps even a POS or three? Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Nija on March 09, 2007, 02:27:43 PM Shiny sells subs. Always avoid alliteration. I don't think Shiny will pull in more Eve subs. It'll be like shiny hang gliders running into the plateau that is the Eve learning curve. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Hoax on March 09, 2007, 03:02:46 PM It wont really pull many true newbies but it will give people who have played EvE before and quit (which I bet is a rather large population) a reason to come check it out again.
Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Morat20 on March 09, 2007, 05:16:12 PM It wont really pull many true newbies but it will give people who have played EvE before and quit (which I bet is a rather large population) a reason to come check it out again. I've heard a significant number of "I'd like to try/I liked the game BUT" comments -- and the "but" I hear most is "But I feel like I'm just a flying ship, not the person inside it". Going walkabout on station would help players who want more of the "I am my character" feel.Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Yoru on March 09, 2007, 05:24:58 PM It wont really pull many true newbies but it will give people who have played EvE before and quit (which I bet is a rather large population) a reason to come check it out again. I've heard a significant number of "I'd like to try/I liked the game BUT" comments -- and the "but" I hear most is "But I feel like I'm just a flying ship, not the person inside it". Going walkabout on station would help players who want more of the "I am my character" feel.Picture this. Black walkway, cold blue lights running along either side, inside a hangar full of warships. Along each side are single-file lines of Goons at attention. Remedial walks slowly down between the rows, swinging a giant ham, the Imperial March playing over the local Vivox voice line; as he moves towards a massive ship at the end of the walkway, hands shoot up in salute. Ceasing at the airlock, he turns, salutes, and voices two words to the assembled Swarm: "Haven't brakes." And then a thousand-man gang undocks, for great fofofo. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: tmp on March 09, 2007, 08:48:29 PM And then a thousand-man gang undocks, Fixed.Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Daeven on March 09, 2007, 08:49:15 PM You know, I've never really thought about it, but Eve is starting to sound a bit like MMO Star Fleet Command.
Ok. Getting off my ass now. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Morat20 on March 09, 2007, 09:44:17 PM You know, I've never really thought about it, but Eve is starting to sound a bit like MMO Star Fleet Command. Unavoidable outgrowth of the fact that combat is based on the navy, not the air force. :) I'm waiting for BoB to cross D2's T.Ok. Getting off my ass now. If the Pacific War was like this, Pearl Harbor might have turned out better. When the Hawaii node crashed, I bet we'd have logged in first -- the Japanese are halfway across the world, after all. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Venkman on March 10, 2007, 03:50:42 AM The Eve/VIVOX (voice company) thing has been known since E3 2006, possibly before. It's just now almost ready for deployment.
Edit: Ah, here it is (http://www.tentonhammer.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2103) The avatar thing is really cool, but I agree this is more for current players than bringing in new ones. Because I disagree a bit with this statement: Quote from: Morat20 "But I feel like I'm just a flying ship, not the person inside it". Going walkabout on station would help players who want more of the "I am my character" feel. I think it's more disassociative than even that. You don't feel like you're flying the ship (unless you're, say, in an assault frigate fight). You feel like you're giving commands to your ship and it is doing the work of flying. So very different from space sims. But even more importantly, it's so very different from any other RPG-like experience. Eve is more like an RTS where you control only one unit. Walking around a station isn't going to help that, cool (and very nice looking) though it is. It's a nice little feature, and I'm hoping this is a precursor to them adding an incockpit view at least. At this point though, I don't think Eve will ever got true space sim. Too much of everything that happens is tied to the stats of the game. Adding too much player skill to combat would radically shift, well, everything. And while they've done nothing but grow over the last 18 months, it's been incremental. They don't have enough subs to pull an NGE, regardless of the skepticism their community already has of them. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Dundee on March 10, 2007, 04:31:48 AM They look very nice. And sitting! In chairs! Crazy. Yep. Everyone knows you should sit next to, or near chairs, but not on them. Yeah, ZING! ... Right, well... look how few MMOs implement chair-sitting. There's generally sitting and chairs, but they don't have anything to do with one another. E&B took a minimalist approach to implementing avatars: The only things they needed to implement were running and standing. The avatars were just an occasional reminder that you were not, in fact, a space ship. They were a tool for immersion: the belief being that players would not identify with a space ship, and so needed an avatar with which to identify, in order to feel immersed. But that intention or purpose doesn't require chair-sitting. That Eve's got that, implies their avatars are for a different purpose. It is significant, believe it or not. That's why so few games do it, and on the dev teams for the games that have it, there's only one guy who insisted on it, and everyone else thinks him an ass for squandering a considerable amount of art and code development time toward enabling what amounts to a way for avatars to "do nothing." It is considered so inconsequential that even if there's a ridiculous bug with it, that might go a year or two without being fixed. So what this implies to me, is that the Eve avatars are not being implemented as tools of immersion, but more for communication. Like emoticons, kinda. Other implications naturally follow: Robust noticeable customization options (for communication: intended for the sake of self-expression), over more subtle customization options (for immersion: intended to make identifying your avatar as yourself easier); and so on. From the little video showing two dudes (one pretending to be a girl) sitting, saluting, and walking, that's what I got, anyway. It showed me where to start building the pile of expectations, anyway. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: WindupAtheist on March 10, 2007, 07:37:29 AM I won't play an MMO that won't let me sit in a chair.
I'm not joking. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Morat20 on March 10, 2007, 09:21:50 AM I won't play an MMO that won't let me sit in a chair. No shit. What the fuck are the chairs for? I note that WoW's chair-sitting is pretty damn near flawless. I don't recall, in fact, ever having an issue with sitting near the chair, inside the chair, hovering over the chair, or -- to note one particularly fun SWG bug -- sitting on the chair then five minutes later sliding five meters to the left to hover in midair.I'm not joking. I always got the impression that in SWG, moreso than normal, there was often serious client/server disparities in location. Since my wife played on a PC five feet away, I often noticed that her client registered me in a different spot than mine did -- even when we'd both been standing still. It's not something I've noticed with WoW. (They seem to have a really solid feeling world -- you can still intersect with objects at times (some of the instances have a number of rocks that you can stand inside) but the buildings, tables, chairs, beds -- you rarely actually end up inside them. I suspect that's one small factor for their success -- nothing breaks immersion quite like running through a building or falling through a chair. Still, I agree with Dundee in the sense that EVE's major goal here is to faciliate communication and socialization -- a 3D chat room. One of the EVE devs said something like they're going for a bar or cantina feel -- a place to hang out and talk to other pilots, corp members, or whatnot in a way that's more immediate than chat. Looks like they'll have interfaces for meeting and planning rooms, and probably agents and the market -- and hopefully gambling (the MMO version of a bar, I guess). What I think is interesting is that the nature of this (an instanced 'other world') means they can add a lot more features without straining the game world -- like that big map in the meeting room. It'd be pretty cool if battle planners could access the map, draw up attack routes or patrol routes and activate them on the map during a meeting -- showing everyone in the room while talking. There's a lot of useful tools and neat things you can do in an MMORPG that no one does, because it takes a lot of CPU cycles in games that don't want to spare them lest they lag combat. Of course, if they're ultimately ending to add combat to the avatar game, they might not do that. I'm kind of iffy on if they plan to, to be honest. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Venkman on March 10, 2007, 10:44:36 AM WoW's world stuff never moves. All of SWG's stuff is built by an engine specifically designed to let that stuff move. I imagine keeping track of both avatars and every world object they can interact with at any given time is many orders of magnitude more complex in SWG.
Does that matter to the user though? No. They only see broken or not broken. And that's been SWG's problem all along. Only a small group of players want to pay for the privilege of building a game alongside people paid to do so. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Endie on March 10, 2007, 10:54:49 AM They look very nice. Yep. Everyone knows you should sit next to, or near chairs, but not on them.And sitting! In chairs! Crazy. Yeah, I thought you were deliberately trailing that feed line. But I think you were right there, that what we saw points heavily to a socialisation emphasis from this development. The people wanting to storm stations will be waiting a long time (although the Eve devs have dreamed out loud about planetary combat in the far future. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Yoru on March 10, 2007, 12:13:40 PM I won't play an MMO that won't let me sit in a chair. I'm not joking. I remember betaing Ragnarok Online so many years ago. Not enough levels. Unable to sit. Yeah, you had to level up to get the SITTING ability. Koreans. :x Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Baldrake on March 10, 2007, 01:27:01 PM Eve is a game I've wanted so much to love. I've subbed on three separate occasions now, the last (and by far the best) being with Yoru and Yegolev and the gang. But I just can't get past that so much of the game is spent waiting for the good stuff - mining, hauling, docking, travelling all over the universe to buy stuff, bleah. Despite this, seeing that video has me itching to resub yet again.
I don't know how to design a game with Eve's open-ended, strategic nature that doesn't take so much real time to play. I wish someone would figure it out, though. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: tkinnun0 on March 10, 2007, 01:36:24 PM WoW's world stuff never moves. They have elevators, trains, ships and zeppelins to move players around (I don't consider griffons in this category, because you're not in control for the duration). They also have few short-duration objects (a pillar of light, target dummy, repair bot) players can place in the world. So they have the technology, they're just not using it, much, yet. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Yoru on March 10, 2007, 01:58:13 PM WoW's world stuff never moves. They have elevators, trains, ships and zeppelins to move players around (I don't consider griffons in this category, because you're not in control for the duration). They also have few short-duration objects (a pillar of light, target dummy, repair bot) players can place in the world. So they have the technology, they're just not using it, much, yet. It's less a question of being able to put collidable nonstatic objects in the spatial partitioner (that's not too hard) and more being able to do it efficiently with large numbers of objects of varying density (i.e. to be able to efficiently store and process a small, densely-packed area of collidables while also being able to efficiently store and process a large, very loosely-packed area of collidables). But WoW in general has very few collidable nonstatic objects. Elevators, the tram, ships and zeppelins are the only examples I can think of. Players, spell effects, and target dummies are noncollidable, IIRC. Collision calculations during movement brunch on your CPU. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Morat20 on March 10, 2007, 02:03:05 PM WoW's world stuff never moves. They have elevators, trains, ships and zeppelins to move players around (I don't consider griffons in this category, because you're not in control for the duration). They also have few short-duration objects (a pillar of light, target dummy, repair bot) players can place in the world. So they have the technology, they're just not using it, much, yet. I think SWG's warping, pathing, and "sliding out of freaking chairs" problem was due to some issue involved with synching client and server data on toon location, and not some technical problem with moveable chairs. I know that the times I find myself forceably dismounted off my speeder, or flying through buildings, were caused by my client zipping me around and through a building before the server got around to telling me the building was there -- which tells me either the speeders moved a HELL of a lot faster than was originally assumed to be max toon speed, or the engine wasn't up to handling fast moving characters. Or both. I suspect engines that start developing towards multi-core systems and modern graphic cards will have less problems. I did notice GreenMaring got the bloody chair problem fixed -- then it got patched back in a few publishes later, with snappy movement. (Seriously, what the fuck was up with snappy movement? Making my character look like he needs to take anti-convulsants does NOT actually make combat feel faster paced. Just look stupider). Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Lantyssa on March 10, 2007, 02:32:49 PM But WoW in general has very few collidable nonstatic objects. Elevators, the tram, ships and zeppelins are the only examples I can think of. Players, spell effects, and target dummies are noncollidable, IIRC. Some of these are instanced in some form or fashion. The Tram and Boats for example.Collision calculations during movement brunch on your CPU. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Venkman on March 10, 2007, 03:26:35 PM Exactly. The points of movable elements which characters interact are relegated to their own specific spaces, limiting the collision needed to relatively small spaces. This is way very different from SWG. Sure that had static locations all over the place, but the engine for that is, iirc, the same engine that worked inside a fully configurable house interior, being separate only by privileges.
Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Ratadm on March 10, 2007, 04:29:53 PM I don't see eve voice catching on at high levels. It's not free unlike the current options (talking about your average joe here and not the server owner obviously) and there are benefit of having a chat not connected to the game such as if you crash I doubt eve voice will continue to work while third parties will continue to. Just a guess though.
Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Comstar on March 10, 2007, 05:14:51 PM If it works (and that's a mighty big iF for me with the time it takes to fix some bugs) some alliences and corps will start *demanding* that players use it. At least, that's probably CCP's hope.
It is a great idea to have an ingame chat, and if it's not effected by the in game lag you get, I'd use it, just to be able to have everyone but the FC shut the frek up when he gives orders. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Venkman on March 10, 2007, 08:46:30 PM The cool thing Vivox brings to Eve is the ability to see who's talking. afaik there's no overlay mod to highlight the ship doing the talking (I hear there's something like that for TeamSpeak and WoW but never bothered to confirm).
Vivox is also in Second Life. There you can actually make RL phone calls as well (or at least that was the promise). Vivox was created by folks from telecom, so their service is both voicechat and telecom integration if you want it (ie, CCP did not want the telecom part). Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: MahrinSkel on March 10, 2007, 09:44:49 PM Well, looking at this, I have to wonder "Where's the gameplay?" Why does my corp want to pretend to hold meetings under a galactic map hologram? Why do I want to pretend to walk from there to my ship? In the flight stuff, I can see potential with planetary exploitation and fighting over the resources, but the avatar stuff seems like they're building a technology they'll use in some other game. It just doesn't fit.
--Dave Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Margalis on March 10, 2007, 10:13:03 PM I agree with comic book guy. Why are people going to *want* to go the cantina? Just to shoot the shit? Is there anything you can really *do* outside of your ship?
Reminds me of E&B. You could get out of your ship and walk around but there was no point. You could take to people and go to quest dispensing machines but they could have just done that from an in-ship interface. I never saw anyone talk in a space station any more than they did in thier ships. Unless there are mobs to fight or cargo to get or something like that I can't really see why I'd bother getting out of my ship. The idea of having a cantina to just hang out and relax in is cool but it seems like a *lot* of work to make avatars about to walk around just for that. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Morat20 on March 10, 2007, 10:34:36 PM I agree with comic book guy. Why are people going to *want* to go the cantina? Just to shoot the shit? Is there anything you can really *do* outside of your ship? I suspect they're doing it now because it's a tech demo for their WoD engine. It's been requested by a minority of players for quite some time, and this way they get to test their WoD engine and tools with a real live playerbase, in a way that won't impact the actual EVE game.Reminds me of E&B. You could get out of your ship and walk around but there was no point. You could take to people and go to quest dispensing machines but they could have just done that from an in-ship interface. I never saw anyone talk in a space station any more than they did in thier ships. Unless there are mobs to fight or cargo to get or something like that I can't really see why I'd bother getting out of my ship. The idea of having a cantina to just hang out and relax in is cool but it seems like a *lot* of work to make avatars about to walk around just for that. Mahrin: I suspect all you'll be able to do "in person" rather than "in ship" is something like gambling. Mini-game type stuff. Meeting rooms I can't see being used unless they also code in some useful tools to make it worthwhile. Perhaps instutiting killboards inside, something like that. In short -- there is no gameplay to it. It's a shiny feature that's being added because a small number of players want it, because another small group of possibly players are turned off by NEVER being able to leave their ship, but mostly because they have to develop the tech anyways and because of the way EVE is made -- it can't actually harm the game. At worst, it's just a novelty no one uses after a week. At best, it's a base for future expansion of gameplay -- combat, tools that players would like but CCP doesn't want eating up CPU cycles out in "the real game" -- that sort of thing. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Dundee on March 10, 2007, 11:36:51 PM I agree with comic book guy. Why are people going to *want* to go the cantina? Just to shoot the shit? Is there anything you can really *do* outside of your ship? Not a frequent thing, but I'd assume a number of guilds or clans or whatever they are will insist on avatar-meetings, for the same reasons others will (really, already do) insist on voice: because sometimes the people in charge of such organizations are unreasonable. :P That said, yeh, it's fairly disconnected from the game, as a purely social thing. On an unrelated note, cafe.com has avatars in much the same situation: I can't quite figure out what they're for... and there's no place to sit. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Trippy on March 10, 2007, 11:45:42 PM I agree with comic book guy. Why are people going to *want* to go the cantina? Just to shoot the shit? Is there anything you can really *do* outside of your ship? Crafting and shopping was all done outside your ship as well. I didn't join the E&B beta early enough to see it when they didn't have avatars but I liked being able to walk around in stations personally.Reminds me of E&B. You could get out of your ship and walk around but there was no point. You could take to people and go to quest dispensing machines but they could have just done that from an in-ship interface. I never saw anyone talk in a space station any more than they did in thier ships. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: tmp on March 11, 2007, 04:21:53 AM Well, looking at this, I have to wonder "Where's the gameplay?" It's not gameplay enhancement, but rather improved ability to better connect with one's in-game character which can be important to some players (RP'ers and whatever). It can be argued this is fluff that isn't useful for everyone, but then things like game lore (or to lesser degree PvE or PvP or resource gathering) are also technically not for everyone, but only these who take interest in such things.Plus it allows them to develop technology for a new game, yeah. There's GDC podcast at VirginWorlds with interview that goes in bit more detail on the whole thing... http://www.virginworlds.com/pg.php?n=5840 Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Arthur_Parker on March 11, 2007, 07:08:01 AM I can't quite figure out what they're for... and there's no place to sit. You can sit in UO and WoW. I'm not saying it's impossible to create a good game that doesn't allow you to sit on a chair, but I do think it's a good indicator of how much love (for want of a better word) went into creating the game. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Morat20 on March 11, 2007, 09:19:19 AM I can't quite figure out what they're for... and there's no place to sit. You can sit in UO and WoW. I'm not saying it's impossible to create a good game that doesn't allow you to sit on a chair, but I do think it's a good indicator of how much love (for want of a better word) went into creating the game. However, if your game is on a serious time and budget constraint, I don't doubt sitting gets the axe. So one can probably look at tiny things like "sitting in chairs" as keys to how fully developed a game is. If you can't sit in the game, even though there's chairs everywhere -- or when you sit you end up sliding out the door five minutes later -- it's a good clue that there's a probably a lot of broken and rushed crap everywhere. Sitting's just immediately visible. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Venkman on March 11, 2007, 09:37:29 AM What is actually the added expense of sitting? I could easily see it for UO (you need that many more assets). But for polygon based games isn't it just a matter of ensuring whatever is attached to an avatar has the proper hooks to the skeletal structure? I'm certainly no Maya/et-al expert, but it'd seem to me that if you've done all the work of having a character walk, run, fall, get knocked down, and take dozens of actions in combat, scaling the resources to add something as rudimentary as sitting should be cakewalk.
The complexity seems to be mostly about the collision with the chair, but then characters already properly collide with everything else, so how hard is it here? I am niave and would love to be educated. Oh, and WoW has lying down. Incredible! ;) Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Hound on March 11, 2007, 10:06:07 AM It wont really pull many true newbies but it will give people who have played EvE before and quit (which I bet is a rather large population) a reason to come check it out again. Works for me, I am an admitted graphics whore. The question I have is this, have they made the endless jumps tolerable or at least less boring somehow? Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Endie on March 11, 2007, 10:23:31 AM You can sit in UO and WoW. I'm not saying it's impossible to create a good game that doesn't allow you to sit on a chair, but I do think it's a good indicator of how much love (for want of a better word) went into creating the game. Of course, in Wow the horde can sit in chairs: they just don't have any seats in the vast majority of their towns and cities. It is a fearsome technology jealously guarded by the undead. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Dundee on March 11, 2007, 12:14:12 PM What is actually the added expense of sitting? I could easily see it for UO (you need that many more assets). But for polygon based games isn't it just a matter of ensuring whatever is attached to an avatar has the proper hooks to the skeletal structure? I'm certainly no Maya/et-al expert, but it'd seem to me that if you've done all the work of having a character walk, run, fall, get knocked down, and take dozens of actions in combat, scaling the resources to add something as rudimentary as sitting should be cakewalk. There's a little bit of work to enable the player to sit in a chair, just as a UI thing. So you need a /sit (whether slash-commands are exposed to the user or not), so ok, now chairs are all targetable. You have a the target next/nearest/previous whatever, now that needs to skip chairs, probably. And you need a new posture, so when you look at my avatar sitting in a chair, you see my avatar sitting in the chair. And it isn't enough to know where a chair is, you need to know where the avatars ass goes when he sits in it - so there's at least one new piece of data, "asspoint", that probably none of your objects had already. Maybe footpoint, too. And yeah, animations and all that, plus just some design there to answer questions about what happens when you get hit, attack from a chairsit, what if you get knocked-down while sitting in a chair - stand up and then fall down? Any task that has you dragging in design, art, and code is not a trivial task, especially if the game is all about bashing rats with swords and there's still work to be done on the rats, swords, or bashing. Variable character height is a big problem too. Like... you might get to pick one: chair-sitting and everyone* is the same height, or variable heights but no chair-sitting (*everyone, that is, within pretty broad categories such as race and gender). I'm always a little disappointed to discover that a game does not have chair-sitting, too. Though, I never think it's because the devs just couldn't love enough. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Signe on March 11, 2007, 12:23:36 PM Not being able to sit bothers me, too. Not being able to jump drives me completely out of control crazy mad.
Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Morat20 on March 11, 2007, 12:53:09 PM Not being able to sit bothers me, too. Not being able to jump drives me completely out of control crazy mad. SWG's "jump" was amusing as hell. WoW's jump, however -- let us just say that nightelves need to lose XP everytime they jump. :) Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Merusk on March 11, 2007, 01:02:59 PM You just don't understand how fun flipping in the air is until you roll a night elf. It's like a little mini-game. "how many flips in a row can I get.."
It was the same with dwarf barrel-rolls in EQ. I didn't run places, I rolled there. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Arthur_Parker on March 11, 2007, 03:58:13 PM I never think it's because the devs just couldn't love enough. I still can't think of a better word than love. Do you get a better game with a development team of 6 or 60? On average which team's members will likely love the game more? Do comedy shows get better if you add more writers? There's something wrong somewhere when we expect players to stare at their avatar for 6+ months and not consider sitting to be that important. Next thing you know we will not value singing, dancing, juggling, swimming, eating, drinking, climbing, riding, piloting, flying, falling, sleeping or varied visual appearance to be important. So one can probably look at tiny things like "sitting in chairs" as keys to how fully developed a game is. If you can't sit in the game, even though there's chairs everywhere -- or when you sit you end up sliding out the door five minutes later -- it's a good clue that there's a probably a lot of broken and rushed crap everywhere. Sitting's just immediately visible. Exactly. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Margalis on March 11, 2007, 04:37:51 PM Sitting is the canary in the coal mine.
Quote Crafting and shopping was all done outside your ship as well. I didn't join the E&B beta early enough to see it when they didn't have avatars but I liked being able to walk around in stations personally. Both the crafting and shopping could pretty easily have been done from your ship. Also in E&B you could only ever have one ship at a time IIRC so your ship basically *was* your avatar. I didn't mind the walking around but it was a waste of resources that could have gone towards something like making combat not suck. Also the avatars were pretty awful looking. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Venkman on March 11, 2007, 04:55:04 PM (explanation) Being niave again, that mostly sounds like the problems with adding sitting into a game later on in it's life. I still wonder how much it really requires if you planned for it up front, while doing all the rest of the skeletal movement/collision-point stuff (I'm making up words now ;) ), particularly for the static world that is the Stage set of a normal diku.SWG is a whole different ball of wax for lots of reasons of course. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Margalis on March 11, 2007, 08:37:40 PM I think Dundee's point was just it takes appreciable work to get chair-sitting in order.
Work that would be better spent on say the HAM system or the NGE... :evil: Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Dundee on March 12, 2007, 12:53:18 AM (explanation) Being niave again, that mostly sounds like the problems with adding sitting into a game later on in it's life. I still wonder how much it really requires if you planned for it up front, while doing all the rest of the skeletal movement/collision-point stuff (I'm making up words now ;) ), particularly for the static world that is the Stage set of a normal diku.SWG is a whole different ball of wax for lots of reasons of course. Some things you could guess at, other things you need to wait until there is such a thing as sitting, and you can't test anything against it until it's done. You run the risk of planning details that won't apply by the time you get to implementation, and taking too long to get to implementation on account of all that time spent planning every nitty gritty detail. Variable character height was the real challenge. That slipping-off the chair thing was just a run of the mill sort of bug. I'm a real big fan of getting core gameplay at a high level in, working, and fun. Broad strokes on paper, fine detail in-game. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Afropuff on March 12, 2007, 05:35:30 AM IIRC in SWG (and how did this turn into another SWG thread?) everyone shrank to one standard size for the purposes of sitting in chairs, mounts and spaceship seats. When you stood up, you got your real height back.
Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: ajax34i on March 12, 2007, 08:59:29 AM Maybe they're thinking of pairing it with voice, so that you hear and can talk to anyone in your near vicinity, or something. Then you could have meetings.
Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: eldaec on March 12, 2007, 09:05:01 AM Quote from: Dundee Variable character height was the real challenge. That slipping-off the chair thing was just a run of the mill sort of bug. In eve everyone is broadly the same height. In fact, everyone looks broadly the same once you strip out clever use of lighting, backgrounds, and 'flair'. So they really ought to be able to go wild with the sitting/lounging/handstands etc. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Morat20 on March 12, 2007, 09:06:12 AM IIRC in SWG (and how did this turn into another SWG thread?) everyone shrank to one standard size for the purposes of sitting in chairs, mounts and spaceship seats. When you stood up, you got your real height back. Everything goes back to SWG, because if there was a way of fucking up in an MMORPG, SWG did it at some point. Dundee: You know what, honest to god, was the single biggest reason I quit SWG? It took something like 18 months to fix that damn chair bug (I think it was when GreenMarine came on board and promised to squish some of the more annoying and outstanding bugs -- sometimes it's the trivial shit that matters to players). It was fixed for a few months -- and got reintroduced in a patch. Then the CU came and I thought: "If these guys can't even keep a known and fixed bug out of the damn game, how the hell is this mess ever going to get better?" Now, in retrospect -- maybe it was two different bugs causing the same behavior. But what it looked like was the world's most piss-poor quality control. Something that tiny destroyed any faith I had in the team to actually fix anything over the long run. Core gamplay is good, but without fucking quality -- I don't care how fun it is. All those tiny little bugs will end up spoiling it anyways -- it's a minor bug from a gameplay standpoint, but a MAJOR irritant to players. I heard more people bitching about that chair bug than people complaining about the fact that the entire Pistoleer profession was literally broken (with maybe a third of the specials working), or the fact that Carbineers were so fucked up they killed themselves playing the class. Fixing that chair bug won you more customer goodwill than you probably realized -- leaving it so long cost you even more. Ajax: I want some freaking tools. I want to be able to go in station, bring up some nifty tools, and make me the equivilant of an EVE powerpoint presentation -- where I can display invasion routes, patrol routes, where I want reserve forces -- set up macros so I can zoom in and out on specific sections. Like a real military briefing. Now that would be worth leaving the ship for. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Xanthippe on March 12, 2007, 12:20:43 PM If I can dance, I'll play it.
Both WoW and Guildwars are better for having dancing. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Morat20 on March 12, 2007, 01:00:41 PM If I can dance, I'll play it. It's the little stuff that really makes the game. It shows thoroughness and quality of effort, for one thing. Both WoW and Guildwars are better for having dancing. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: HaemishM on March 12, 2007, 02:15:12 PM but the avatar stuff seems like they're building a technology they'll use in some other game. You mean like a World of Darkness game or something? Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Baldrake on March 12, 2007, 04:13:00 PM Haemish, do you still have your original review of Eve around somewhere? That was a candidate for most entertaining review of a game ever.
Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Morat20 on March 13, 2007, 09:16:27 AM Haemish, do you still have your original review of Eve around somewhere? That was a candidate for most entertaining review of a game ever. I would like to read that. I started EVE around Cold War, and I've heard some horror stories about EVE's launch. (Heck, I joined because I read the story of the GHSC's massive inflitration/assault of some corp....that was too fucking cool not to try.)Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: HaemishM on March 13, 2007, 12:17:39 PM Shit, I'd forgotten that way way back in the Waterthread days. I found it on The Way Back Machine.
Snoring in the Vaccum of Space (http://web.archive.org/web/20030811180611/www.waterthread.org/news/105114386413735.html) Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Morat20 on March 13, 2007, 12:59:31 PM Shit, I'd forgotten that way way back in the Waterthread days. I found it on The Way Back Machine. It's interesting to note how much things have improved. :) I've only mined a handful of times -- mostly to see if I liked it. (Not really).Snoring in the Vaccum of Space (http://web.archive.org/web/20030811180611/www.waterthread.org/news/105114386413735.html) Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Fordel on March 13, 2007, 09:08:46 PM Sad to see how much some things haven't either :(
Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Baldrake on March 13, 2007, 09:18:07 PM Thanks for finding that, Haemish. It was actually even funnier than I remembered it.
And I enjoyed the immediate political de-rail in the comments thread. Waterthread indeed. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: WindupAtheist on March 14, 2007, 08:13:02 AM Ajax: I want some freaking tools. I want to be able to go in station, bring up some nifty tools, and make me the equivilant of an EVE powerpoint presentation -- where I can display invasion routes, patrol routes, where I want reserve forces -- set up macros so I can zoom in and out on specific sections. Like a real military briefing. Now that would be worth leaving the ship for. Hologram projectors please. (http://www.fiendish-thingy.com/images/endor.jpg) Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Slayerik on March 14, 2007, 08:30:23 AM This is just an evil CCP ploy to sell hundreds of thousands of Character portrait transfers!
those Icelanders are sneaky bastids! :) Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: DataGod on March 14, 2007, 12:42:20 PM Couple of observations:
SWG: Yeah chair sitting was annoying, however the whole warping in combat thing was worse Basically yeah chair sitting is likely a pain to impliment but its very appealing, sitting and crafting, sitting and chatting, sitting and messing with your UI/Macros/Mods, sitting and modifying your avatar etc. If someone cant see the value in that to players then they dont know thier players CCP: 3 words: Avatar Based Combat Why own a station when you can own a planet? (or conquer one), instanced cities, mining operations planetside, player owned housing, .....its not rocket science.... Vivox: I talked to Vivox at GDC they have a solid product and are developing others, I expect to see them on other games and other spaces shortly The CCP people I met were all very cool, I dont get a whole lot of time for EVE but avatars are needed for a certain segment to build identity....I bet theyve had a good % of churn because they havent had it. As to the WoD testing, I hadnt thought of that but it makes sense to work out bugs live for the next mmog on deck Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Yoru on March 14, 2007, 01:09:22 PM CCP: 3 words: Avatar Based Combat Why own a station when you can own a planet? (or conquer one), instanced cities, mining operations planetside, player owned housing, .....its not rocket science.... This is all in the works and/or on their board of "we really want to do this in the future" megafeatures. Well, except the instanced part. That's not very Eveish. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Morat20 on March 14, 2007, 01:24:55 PM CCP: 3 words: Avatar Based Combat Why own a station when you can own a planet? (or conquer one), instanced cities, mining operations planetside, player owned housing, .....its not rocket science.... This is all in the works and/or on their board of "we really want to do this in the future" megafeatures. Well, except the instanced part. That's not very Eveish. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: HaemishM on March 14, 2007, 01:49:32 PM Does that come with foreplay?
Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: ajax34i on March 14, 2007, 02:15:12 PM Of course! What do you think all the smack talk and forum warrioring is? They just open a planetary channel in-game, and a Planets forum, and voila, foreplay 4 u.
Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Endie on March 15, 2007, 05:07:47 AM Eve Tribune has a fairly lengthy update and opinion piece (http://www.eve-tribune.com/index.php?no=2_11&page=1) on the proposed station-walking changes in the current issue.
It's pretty crap, actually. Just a "wouldn't it be nice if..." piece for much of it. If you'ev not read the developer's blog though, the link at the end is worthwhie. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Venkman on March 15, 2007, 06:34:06 AM Doesn't Eve have instance analogs though? I thought those "Deep Space" places you'd jump to for missions were the same thing? Or could just anyone show up to them if they could find the gate you flew though? Heck, even if that is the case, imagine trying to find that gate without being directed there by the NPC... needle in a haystack.
Question: Last E3 or thereabouts CCP was talking about a major vamp for DX10 including a new user interface dashboard. Is that still in the works? I would love to check out Eve again when my new rig arrives, as already it is one of the prettier games out there (with appropriate ambient sfx/music in my mind). I actually like Eve alot even if I don't feel like I have the sort of time it takes to maximize growth in it. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Nija on March 15, 2007, 06:52:19 AM The "deep space" things are actually just that - deep space. When you can jump to anything farther away than 150,000 km you do a lot of jumping. Some systems are 100 AU across, with 1 AU being 14,000,000 km. (or so) Plus you can only jump to objects you probe out or preset locations like planets, moons, stations, and asteroid belts. Some complexes (space dungeons) are actually not listed either, so you'll have to have a probed out bookmark or have a gang member who does.
A popular griefing tactic is to use probes to find people in level 3 and 4 missions tanked a specific way for a specific type of damage and warp to them and blow them up using a damage type they're not tanked for. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Endie on March 15, 2007, 08:01:53 AM Am I right in remembering that the missions spots aren't even completely random, and that they were reachable even before scanning was improved? I'm sure that I recall seeing a griefer talk about his mission bookmarks, saying that he would check out the ones for a system one by one and often find victims...
Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Nija on March 15, 2007, 09:09:39 AM Yep, that's correct. You'd get the ________ Extravaganza missions from certain popular agents and they'd wind up in the same handful of places. Same with Worlds Collide.
Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: dwindlehop on March 15, 2007, 09:31:47 AM A popular All joking aside, I would bet for every Joe Blow who enjoys running some L4s after work to blow off steam there's five 0.0 alliance alts farming isk in empire via L4s. Especially in times of war when the ratting isn't so good. I couldn't approve more of the devs' plan to move more missions into lowsec. If they'd make player corp membership a requirement to get past a certain level (say, 3), I think that'd be pretty much the bee's knees.Personally, my lowsec PvP tends to turns out wonky because sentry guns and I do not get along, but I approve of the concept regardless. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: TripleDES on March 18, 2007, 11:30:51 AM Works for me, I am an admitted graphics whore. The question I have is this, have they made the endless jumps tolerable or at least less boring somehow? To answer that one, warp to 0m for manual warps. As in, implied instas.Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Secundo on March 18, 2007, 05:21:49 PM Here's a novel idea; How about if you earned access to top secret super efficient gank weapons by helping a newbie? For every newbie you helped you could get access to hardcore weps that would surely blast another hardcore player to kingdom come two times at least.
I know, I know.. this goes against the established dichotomy that you should endure shit to pass on the same shit to others. Maybe I'm just another malcolm x waiting to be shot down but maybe.. just maybe it could, you know, work? Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Calantus on March 18, 2007, 07:55:50 PM Shit, I'd forgotten that way way back in the Waterthread days. I found it on The Way Back Machine. Snoring in the Vaccum of Space (http://web.archive.org/web/20030811180611/www.waterthread.org/news/105114386413735.html) Haemish, I just realised while reading that again that you are the main reason I never tried Eve until last year. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: squirrel on March 18, 2007, 07:59:01 PM Shit, I'd forgotten that way way back in the Waterthread days. I found it on The Way Back Machine. Snoring in the Vaccum of Space (http://web.archive.org/web/20030811180611/www.waterthread.org/news/105114386413735.html) Haemish, I just realised while reading that again that you are the main reason I never tried Eve until last year. Heh, he did you a favour then. Until 18 months ago it wasn't really worth trying :P. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Endie on April 04, 2007, 06:15:00 AM An interview here (http://mmog.onlinewelten.com/interviews,id1756,4,tech_iii_schiffe_rev_20_alles_ueber_nahe_ferne_zukunft_eve.html) on the next major (free) update to the universe. Besides wandering around in stations, it mentions the upcoming factional warfare, constellation sovereignty, the new graphics engine, higher-level missions for groups and capital ships (and grouping for lower level missions) and more stuff like that. Due out "in the summer".
Pages 4, 5 and 6 are the English version (1, 2 and 3 are the same article in Ubermensch). Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: dwindlehop on April 05, 2007, 01:28:59 PM Quote We’ve got 2.0 slated for release sometime this summer. Kali 3.0 should be out before the end of the year and the graphics upgrade should be early 2008. Revelations Part 2 is all about warfare and player infrastructure and lays the groundwork for Factional Warfare. I'd expect changes to sov, POS warfare, and missions in the summer. I'd expect graphics upgrade in 2008.If the new group-friendly mission mechanics were in place when I started Eve, I might have actually run missions. Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: Endie on April 06, 2007, 02:05:42 AM Yeah, the lack of formal grouping for missions is a problem. I have friends who join Eve, but there is no meaningful way for me to group with them. we can form a gang and run through that Worlds Collide mission they're having trouble with, or I can invite them into a level three mission and let them jump in once I have aggro, but the standing and loyalty points all go to one person, so it makes it seem a bit pointless.
Title: Re: Eve Online - toons go walkabout at last Post by: ajax34i on April 06, 2007, 05:23:59 AM What do you guys want? "Formal Grouping"... What's next, "Industry Standard NPC AI", with aggro lists and all that? Just play the game, sheesh!
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