f13.net

So, I can't even pretend to believe this game is ready for release. BUT HERE IT IS.

So, who's taking the plunge? Comeon. Someone? Anyone? Please?

I would, but a magical orange cone prevented me from entering the store.

I have to say, seeing this thread appear made me laugh so hard I almost wet myself.

Now I need to go curl up in a corner and die.

The official Seed forums are both funny and sad.  Most of the posters are unflappably positive about the game, even while commenting that they're never able to stay logged in for more than five minutes before the client crashes.

Edited out the dumbass.

I work from home on May 2.  Let's see what happens.

I tried.  I don't have any excuse for why I gave this a shot, unless it's just because it's not Diku and I like independent developers.

I will just say, don't play this.  I did get three pictures before it crashed... and before I was able to get my mangina-cyber on as Stella, She-mechanic of the Future.

(http://www.yegolev.com/images/seed/one.jpg)
(http://www.yegolev.com/images/seed/two.jpg)
(http://www.yegolev.com/images/seed/three.jpg)

(http://www.f13.net/images/articles/seed01.jpg)
Money.

Money?  No... money is being forced to purchase a 1-month sub before you get the 14-day free trial.

EDIT FER SPEELIN

I am trying to contribute.  Really, I am.

I considered pressing the Unstick button.
(http://www.yegolev.com/images/seed/a.jpg)
(http://www.yegolev.com/images/seed/b.jpg)
(http://www.yegolev.com/images/seed/c.jpg)
(http://www.yegolev.com/images/seed/d.jpg)

Dammit.  You can't just jump feet-first into mangina cyber, you'll scare off the victim, but I don't get enough time between crashes to start talking about needing someone to seal my hatches.

I kinda like how it looks.  Cel shading is cute.  Too bad about the crashing every five minutes.   :roll:

It's clearly fake.  The chat window has dialog which is both intelligible and funny.  That or you've accidentally logged into a bizzaro-general-chat.

Most of those comments are mine.  The first response to my "does this make me look fat" was "No, your fat makes you look fat"... at least they are trying.

I have more pictures, up to "k.jpg" I think.

I kind of like the graphics but yeah, the game looks like it has err...issues. Heh. Thanks for saving me the time and money!

pardon me, but this is bullshit

the only thing interesting is to monitor if they get and sustain paying subs.  Because if people are actually willing to play a game that can't get out of Beta -- with showstoppers that shouldn't have even allowed Beta to start -- then we should all step away from our desks, take a breath, and consider how to make an MMO -- ANYTHING -- because there's obviously more demand out there now than anyone has ever imagined.  Or gullibility.  Or pathology. 

I took the plunge along with Yegolev. It's... umm... well, the server appears to be staying up for around a half hour at a time today.

So the server finally hit 100% CPU utilization and bombed after staying up for a little over an hour. Getting better... While I was on, my character noticed that something was... missing...

(http://i66.photobucket.com/albums/h260/iwparker/seed1.gif)

Apparently, I am a floating head now. I don't know if this is a beta tester perk or what, but while I do feel godly at times, more often the other kids just point and laugh at me.

Go uhm.. go talk to the fountain in the garden.

It's a bulletin board I think, and has advice for your floating head problem. I believe that advice is "delete that character and try again".

It's trickier than that. Seed positively reeks with potential. There are great snotty gobs of potential dripping off of every stilted, broken part of it. Not just "ANYTHING" will do. MMO players are waiting for somebody to come along and break the mold... you need good art, a solid design team, unique backstory, a sense of community, and lots of features which promise that (while not available now) they'll eventually change the way these games are made. Many players will tolerate buggy, laggy, crashing monstrosities for years (though this is an unfair comparison: witness UO and WoW) if they think there's a good game around the corner.

Story, art, bells, gameplay, theme, whistles: CRITICAL
Basic code infrastructure: OPTIONAL

Reminds me of an old joke.

Scientists take two kids and put them in two rooms. The first room has hundreds of brand new toys in it. Plastic, battery-operated wonderland. The second room is full, four feet deep, of horse manure. They leave the kids in there for an hour. When they open up the first room, the kid looks bored and frustrated. "What's wrong?" "Well this one is broken, and this one is too loud, and this one doesn't move, and this decal is coming off, and I don't like fire trucks..." They open up the second room and the kid, positively filthy,  is leaping around, laughing, throwing clumps of manure around. "What are you doing?!"

"SOMEWHERE UNDER HERE THERE'S JUST GOTTA BE A PONY!!"

Room #1: DDO
Room #2: Seed

Warning: There's no pony.

No, there isn't a pony.  I was going to try to remember the website that serves as the manual, but I spent all day being a jackass on the F13 forums.  Maybe tomorrow.

Any praise you might try to attach to Seed will fall away when it crashes.  Seems like the client has a memory leak, or so Cacheman leads me to think.  I get server errors, too, such as the obvious lie: "too many connection attempts".  Well, maybe they can only handle ten people at a time.

My man Tito, he's a real trooper repairing those hatches.  I see him on occasion.  I did accidentally do a bit of repair work on a hatch, but I was trying to figure out if I could take off my jumpsuit.  I told Tito that the situation was hopeless, then left the little hatch-ridden room for more desolate pastures.  I wandered around for, I guess, seven minutes, before the next crash and I didn't find so much as a trashcan.  The ship, it is very pretty.  The people... they haven't given up hope for some reason.  Nooblers.  I will continue to see how much of a detriment I can be on this community.

Yeah, beta character carry-over caused the bug. I wasn't looking for tech support as I do that for a living (in addition to beta testing shitty MMOGs). I was posting it more as a statement on the current state of affairs. Not that I expected them to move beta characters to live, but they chose to wipe skills instead of characters and it turned out that inventories were wiped as well and bodies were removed. I attempted to remain a godly head for a bit, but eventually had to cave in and delete and remake as I could not repair pipes with my teeth. *sigh* Pity. In any case, still plugging along as Yegolev is. The halls, they are many.

I demand an update on this fascinatingly broken game!

I'll give one when I manage to work up the balls to log in again.  It is really quite painful.  In fact, the only reason I am able to tolerate it at all is because I am not attempting to play the game as intended.  I figure every lonely space flight need a Baltar.

Still, it's frustrating to find out that the person you have been making rude/insane/lewd comments to for the past ten or fifteen minutes isn't really AFK or ignoring you... instead your client has silently disconnected, leaving you in a room full of mannequins performing idle animations.  I should have figured that one out more quickly.  Thankfully, once my rig ran out of memory, the problem solved itself.

I got an email...


Hooray?

From STRATICS E3 AWARDS (http://www.stratics.com/content/portals/e3/content/goldencogs/2006/golden_cogs_2006.php):

"Best Persistent World: Seed
Developer: Runestone

The foundation of Seed must have been built with the idea of a persistent world in mind because Seed is the textbook definition of what a persistent world should be. Previously we used to thinking that interacting with the world was a great accomplishment (and in many games it is), but building the world and the objects in it the extent the astonishingly freeing experience that Seed offers. Players can affect, and shape, almost every aspect of the game. Many have criticized this game for lacking content, but that’s only because players haven’t taken the time to truly utilize the in-game tools to build the content they desire. "


........... ? ? ?

I'm more shocked by Stratics still existing.

I am starting to think they are more like a parodistic gaming website.
Look at their "Best of Show" award from that link.

Seriously:
Best peristent world: Seed
Best MMO of Show: Vanguard

I expect Stratics to announce "Elvis is alive Online" by the end of the year (developed internally and published by SOE, of course).

Wait a minute...

Am I getting this right?

This is a MMO where the entire point is to wander around a ship as a repair person turning a fucking wrench? And people are going to pay for that?

Wow maybe McQuaid is a genius, because if people will pay for turning wrenches then camping trees to make table legs seems like utter Einstein territory.


Edit- OMG their forums are comedy gold! No sound? No in game ability to adjust sound or graphic settings. You crash EVERY time you walk through a door way. This almost makes AO's release look good!

Yeah... it's... interesting to say the least.

Well if I actually spent some time thinking about it though it would drive me bat shit insane furious. Why? Because players of this "game" Seed are exactly why we keep getting games in the MMO genre released in utterly buggy ass states.

The Dev's ADMITTED!?! in their forums that they released it to bring in more money to keep working on the game! (ie it was a "business decision") And people still bought it!!!! It actually infuriates me that idiots such as this continue to inhabit my planet. Would these same bone headed walking sacks of smegma buy a car with no engine and wheels?

Until customers in the MMO genre stop paying money to game companies for bugged alpha stage games they will NOT stop releasing them as such! Why bother?

Im going to be quiet now because it is getting me pissed.

And I can't help remembering you that Stratics actually gave Seed an award and said that: "Seed is the textbook definition of what a persistent world should be."
ahahaha I can't stop laughing, cause I agree with you. I'd pay to have the writer of that article in front of me:

Me: "Say it again, now with a straight face"
Stratics guy: "Seed is the textbook definition of what a persistent world should be."
(rofl)
Me: "No, please, once more. Now with a girly voice..."

I would, so long as there was a game in it. It doesn't matter what I do necessarily, but how I get to do it.

That being said, Seed still doesn't interest me.

Seed as a game idea interests me very much.  But Seed as an actual piece of software appears to be a steaming pile.  Oh well.

Maybe if I launch a website with my own game idea and some mocked-up screenshots I too can be a Stratics Game of the Year or whatever.  Then I can write a stub application that pops up a dialog with the text "game goes here" and sell subscriptions to people who are hoping I'll actually implement my game.  BRILLIANT!

Seed has sound.  I haven't really figured out what the source of some of those sounds are, though.  It's either an error noise, or what happens when you repair a hatch, or maybe when you attempt to use your tool... I don't know since I have never tried to repair a hatch... aside from that one time I accidentally started repairing one.

I have never attempted to play anything as bad as Seed.  AO during beta was one hundred times more complete than Seed.  That said, it's fun to pester the other players in between crashes.

Thats the whole sad fucking point! Because what you just described??? Seems to be 99% of the fucking MMOs out there!
Sam, you probably could make money from some of these fuckign mongloid retards and have your own fan boys!

I can see your official forums now! "Stop bashing Sam's game! He has a vision and we believe in it! All MMOs come out with bugs!"  :-D

Broughden, some of your posts are incredibly hard to read.

Yes, that needed to be said - out loud.

Im sorry.  :oops:

Let me try again.

Sam said:

So my reply was:
{paraphrased} A) That seems to be 99% of the MMOs currently out; and B ) Yes you would probably make money at it and have a forum full of fan boys since it seems people are dumb enough to pay money for anything in the MMO market.

(Sometimes I do 24 hour shifts at the office, so my posts arent the shining examples of clarity I actually mean them to be or think they are.)

I'm prettty sure 99% of MMORPGs don't crash every 5 minutes.

Just got an email, which I won't bother to paste, giving me one more free day to "enjoy" Seed.  I wonder if they aggregate all of the tiny outages caused by the client consuming all of my RAM?

I have gotten one more free day.  Also, a "tutorial" has been added, as well as a few NPCs.  These work about as well as everything else, not quite on par with foliage in other games.

http://www.yegolev.com/images/seed/tutorial.jpg
http://www.yegolev.com/images/seed/tutorial_npc.jpg

Your new avatar is awesome.

Hey!
That
is
a
cool
text
balloon
for
conver-
sation!

Schild - I'd make it an animated GIF, except I'm ignorant of the tech and too lazy to google it.

Sky - yes.  However the speech balloons are pretty fucking low on my list of complaints.  I'm just happy that they removed much of the ass from the camera... well, except that now it will put my CPU at 100% if I swing it into the wrong spot.

Since Seed's patch executable is slower than anything I have ever seen, how about I warm everyone up with a link to the Seed game engine's web site:

http://www.qubesoft.com/

Be sure to check out the commercial titles link.

Why? I don't see anything interesting here.

You answered your own question, however I think it's a bit funny that this seems to be a webbish engine, and that Seed is the star of the clients.

Rise from your grave!

He's dead, Jim (http://www.seedthegame.com/news.php?page=1).

At least they seem to 'get it':

Here's a lesson. If you don't have the money to "finish" a game before you release it, MMOG or not, DON'T FUCKING RELEASE IT. Save the money you'd have spent on trying to bail out a sinking ship and do something useful with it instead of pissing it out the backdoor for MMOG fans who will crucify you for releasing an unfinished game. I suggest pr0n and booze.

hmmm... booze ...

I'd like to see Valve do a MMOG.  They have a very good track record of not releasing games that don't make the cut.

No no no! Don't you understand? They had a Vision! Nay A Dream! Of world peace and fun and fantabulous super-duper cell-shaded Role-Playing Gamery! And anything that stood in the was of that -  like well actuall game play or cashflow or any of that mundane crap would be best handled by the stupid ignorant saps... er, incredibly loyal fanbase that was moronically gullible.... umm..... had enough faith to be suckerd in.

Or something.