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Margalis
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Reply #70 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.

vampirehipi23: I would enjoy a book written by a monkey and turned into a movie rather than this.
Morat20
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Reply #71 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?

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.
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.

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.
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Reply #72 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.

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Reply #73 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?

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.
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.
tmp
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Reply #74 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
Arthur_Parker
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Reply #75 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.
Morat20
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Reply #76 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.
Maybe not love -- perhaps a better phrase is "Development time and money". In a virtual world setting, sitting is important -- the idea is to make the world seem "real". In a highly polished game, the idea is to make the game feel complete and working -- sitting is a useless little feature that bugs a lot of MMORPG players if it's not there.

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.
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Reply #77 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! ;)
Hound
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Reply #78 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?

Given the number of failures we've seen in MMORPGs, designers need to learn it's hard enough just to make a fun game without getting distracted by unnecessary drivel.
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Reply #79 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.

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Dundee
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Reply #80 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.
« Last Edit: March 11, 2007, 12:18:10 PM by Dundee »

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Reply #81 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. 

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Morat20
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Reply #82 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. :)
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Reply #83 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.

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Arthur_Parker
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Reply #84 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.
Margalis
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Reply #85 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.

vampirehipi23: I would enjoy a book written by a monkey and turned into a movie rather than this.
Venkman
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Reply #86 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.
Margalis
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Reply #87 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

vampirehipi23: I would enjoy a book written by a monkey and turned into a movie rather than this.
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Reply #88 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.

Jeff Freeman
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Reply #89 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.
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Reply #90 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.
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Reply #91 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.

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Morat20
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Reply #92 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.
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Reply #93 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.

Morat20
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Reply #94 on: March 12, 2007, 01:00:41 PM

If I can dance, I'll play it. 

Both WoW and Guildwars are better for having dancing.
It's the little stuff that really makes the game. It shows thoroughness and quality of effort, for one thing.
HaemishM
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Reply #95 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?

Baldrake
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Reply #96 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.
Morat20
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Reply #97 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.)
HaemishM
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Reply #98 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.

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Morat20
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Reply #99 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.

Snoring in the Vaccum of Space
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).
Fordel
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Reply #100 on: March 13, 2007, 09:08:46 PM

Sad to see how much some things haven't either :(

and the gate is like I TOO AM CAPABLE OF SPEECH
Baldrake
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Reply #101 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.
WindupAtheist
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Reply #102 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.


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Slayerik
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Reply #103 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! :)

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Reply #104 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

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