Goofy Goober
---
LMAO he ain't my lover I'm not into guys. -Ozz
Editor
found your problem lol
---
"There's a pony in the shop, but don't buy it. It might do something unfortunate to you." ~from the first Summoner's Seal topic
Liberal Arts Major
This seems like a good time to give everyone an update as to the status of SS. I'll do this in FAQ form.
Is SS dead?
Yes.
How dead is it?
Let's just say I don't even remember what fields the database tables have.
Why isn't it closed then?
Because why close it? If you want to wander around and look at all the sweet artwork, by all means, do so.
Will you fix X problem?
I have abandoned the current version of SS, so no, I don't think I will.
Why?
Two reasons:
(1) If you've been reading my topic where I bitch about grades - and let's be serious, of course you haven't! - you would know that I am currently getting destroyed in school. When I am not busy
(2) This version of SS is severely flawed on a conceptual level.
Will you ever work on SS again?
I graduate in March. I will resume work on TFN (and, presumably, SS) then. In the meantime, bugs like nobody gaining levels are probably caused by my tinkering carelessly then forgetting what I broke and not feeling like fixing it when I realize this several months later.
Summary: SOON.
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Provisional
---
LMAO he ain't my lover I'm not into guys -Tengu
Liberal Arts Major
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Liberal Arts Major
<->
"What the fuck is Alice doing in Wonderland anyway? Who the fuck told her she could leave the god damn kitchen in the first place?" -Random guy on Xbox Live
http://www.backloggery.com/kodan882
Liberal Arts Major
In retrospect, this shouldn't have been a decision at all!
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Provisional
---
LMAO he ain't my lover I'm not into guys -Tengu
Liberal Arts Major
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Provisional
---
LMAO he ain't my lover I'm not into guys -Tengu
Liberal Arts Major
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Goofy Goober
---
LMAO he ain't my lover I'm not into guys. -Ozz
Provisional
MMO - Yes, a feature that will be implemented in October or afterwards, if there is an afterwards.
Selling - Of course. It's not like it's hard to code or anything. I'm just going to be a sneaky little man and make shops specifically for selling items. Also, transports (mounts for your whole party) will only be available in their own specific shops.
___
~ Ogordemir ~
Buddha promised me Nirvana and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.
"Democracy is the bludgeoning of the people, by the people, for the people." ~ Oscar Wilde
I just realized you're a whore and a liar.
---
LMAO he ain't my lover I'm not into guys -Tengu
Liberal Arts Major
Oh. Scorp and Tengu?
Uh... no. The three guys in this topic. You, LD, and Kodan.
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Editor
---
"There's a pony in the shop, but don't buy it. It might do something unfortunate to you." ~from the first Summoner's Seal topic
Liberal Arts Major
<->
"What the fuck is Alice doing in Wonderland anyway? Who the fuck told her she could leave the god damn kitchen in the first place?" -Random guy on Xbox Live
http://www.backloggery.com/kodan882
Liberal Arts Major
Ladies and gentlemen, your webmaster!
Actually it was more of a... "I wanna play another RPG" type dealy, but, I've since filled that hole with FF12, and Ultima Online >_>
Regardless.
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Liberal Arts Major
This leads me to a question: why does someone other than myself actually use an alt on TFN?
In any case, nevermind about my fixing things LD. This crowd just became a lot less demanding!
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Editor
This leads me to a question: why does someone other than myself actually use an alt on TFN?
To get m@d l00tz by killing yourself over and over in SS PvP, of course!
---
"There's a pony in the shop, but don't buy it. It might do something unfortunate to you." ~from the first Summoner's Seal topic
Liberal Arts Major
Why... would you do this?
I would play SS if it was... playable
...OK guys, what are the problems, I will fix them to the best of my ability. Unless the problems are SS sucks. That one will take a while.
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Liberal Arts Major
<->
"What the fuck is Alice doing in Wonderland anyway? Who the fuck told her she could leave the god damn kitchen in the first place?" -Random guy on Xbox Live
http://www.backloggery.com/kodan882
Liberal Arts Major
And no. The database is different.
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Editor
I don't know. I maintain that it makes absolutely no sense on a fundamental level.
...OK guys, what are the problems, I will fix them to the best of my ability. Unless the problems are SS sucks. That one will take a while.
I think the big issue is one of content.
There's nothing to do, which is to say, there are no quests or objectives, which makes sense, because there are no enemies. But even if there were enemies, there still isn't any way to fight them, because there's no equipment or spells.
It's not really something you can just whip up a solution to, I think. v2.0 required multiple people making items, spells, and enemies, and that was with about 1/10th the number of classes. And even that system had issues, because there wasn't enough communication or any centralized design philosophies, so everyone had their own idea of what each class should do and of how far was too far. It also led to absurd power creep, but that might have happened regardless. <_<
---
"There's a pony in the shop, but don't buy it. It might do something unfortunate to you." ~from the first Summoner's Seal topic
Liberal Arts Major
Given that Summoner's Seal seems to be in more of a permanent beta (or alpha) it'd probably be "better" to only have a few classes at first, make sure they're well developed, and then once that's done slowly start to introduce a few more and get them up to speed, then repeat and so on.
A secondary issue is the lack of direction in terms of quest/objectives, but that is only an issue in the sense of keeping people playing (under the assumption that grinding for the sake of grinding will lose its novelty at some point). If treated as an alpha/beta, you could make the argument that we're more testing the existing features than trying to maintain a steady userbase playing it, but in practice it would probably be better to try and get those up too, probably in that first stage before adding more classes.
---
xp1337: Don't you wish there was a spell-checker that told you when you a word out?
Liberal Arts Major
We should clarify what "unplayable" means then. The content problem is not an issue I am presently in a position to fix, but if there are actual bugs, I should be able to fix them. If anyone wants to play the game in its current content-less state, then I can attempt to make that work, but part of the reason I haven't bothered to keep track of what's broken and what's not is that I couldn't imagine anyone would want to do this.
It's not really something you can just whip up a solution to, I think.
This is correct, given what I have to work with in terms of development overhead when implementing... anything.
v2.0 required multiple people making items, spells, and enemies, and that was with about 1/10th the number of classes. And even that system had issues, because there wasn't enough communication or any centralized design philosophies, so everyone had their own idea of what each class should do and of how far was too far. It also led to absurd power creep, but that might have happened regardless. <_<
Lack of community input isn't even really a problem. People would be making stuff, presumably, if I was adding stuff. But I'm not adding anything right now because it takes a billion years to do so. The issue is further complicated by the undefined classes, because I have to basically make something for everything in order to define the mechanics and design space for each tier and class before you all can design more. I mean, there are whole game mechanics central to each tier's identity that I never even got around to implementing. The time commitment that I can't possibly provide is one of the reasons I said this version is conceptually flawed.
Power creep is probably inevitable anyway. You can't judge power creep until you have some way to test the power to begin with, which is something SS lacks. >_>
I have theoretical solutions to these problems, by the way, but I haven't found a way to code them in yet.
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Liberal Arts Major
Given that Summoner's Seal seems to be in more of a permanent beta (or alpha) it'd probably be "better" to only have a few classes at first, make sure they're well developed, and then once that's done slowly start to introduce a few more and get them up to speed, then repeat and so on.
This was my mistake in the sense that I vastly overestimated the strength of the improvements to the back-end of the spell system I made for version 3.0. Vastly. The root of the problem is really that I have absolutely no hope of maintaining any reasonable pace of development when I have to hard-code everything. The level of automation needs to be drastically increased before I can even keep up on 10 classes in addition to everything else.
A secondary issue is the lack of direction in terms of quest/objectives, but that is only an issue in the sense of keeping people playing (under the assumption that grinding for the sake of grinding will lose its novelty at some point).
My assumption appears to be that this is impossible.
If treated as an alpha/beta, you could make the argument that we're more testing the existing features than trying to maintain a steady userbase playing it, but in practice it would probably be better to try and get those up too, probably in that first stage before adding more classes.
The existing features don't need really need testing beyond the level of "woops, this is broken". And that's an ongoing problem.
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Liberal Arts Major
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Provisional
---
LMAO he ain't my lover I'm not into guys -Tengu
Liberal Arts Major
I'm defining this rather loosely. Take me, for instance (a questionable example, but let's go with it) I've effectively run out of tasks to accomplish. My entire party is at max levels in their final class, I believe I've defeated every enemy type in the game. ...There's really just nothing else I can do. I could, theoretically (I think) make new characters in other classes, but because of the sheer abundance of classes, I think I'd basically have two options. Pick a class that is developed or one that is not. In the former case, it is almost guaranteed that someone else played a character in that class to a high, if not max, level, as the extent of design for a class seems to relate directly to "Was that class played by someone?" and in the second option, if the class had no real development placed in it, there's barely anything to test, so I can't imagine what purpose it would serve. I suppose if the class was developed later, I could retroactively take a leveled character in that class and test them immediately, but...
...tl;dr: It's not so much that I mean "We need to implement a story and NPC/Plot-driven quests" as much as "Once you level to max and beat everything, you're left in a pretty tricky situation"
While the former might help in some sense, I fully acknowledge that it's likely rather implausible at this point. The latter might not be something that can be avoided at a certain point, but the way I'm thinking about this is once that point starts being reached is when you start putting in the other classes and start work on them, so that once that point is met you can come up with something else to do. Alternatively, you could develop things further on the high-end level side I suppose.
The existing features don't need really need testing beyond the level of "woops, this is broken". And that's an ongoing problem.
Which, and I may be wrong, I'd think would be a bit easier if you only had a few classes at first (and hence less possible problems) and once those were straightened out, add a few more to deal with.
---
xp1337: Don't you wish there was a spell-checker that told you when you a word out?
Liberal Arts Major
Well, I actually do have a direction in which to take the story and quests; my goal is not to make grinding the only purpose of the game. That's just how it ended up because I never developed a backend that would allow me to make all those quests in a satisfying way.
Basically, last February (2010), I was actively working on an update to all this, when I ran into two realizations:
(1) This sure is taking me a great deal of time!
(2) Considering how much time this is taking, I might finish this update, but I have no idea how I'll ever finish everything I want to with the current system. So I'm going to have to drop development at some point in the (probably near) future anyway. But if I keep working on the current system then rewrite the backend I'll have to remake all of this.
So I stopped working on content and started trying to find solutions to these problems.
The volume of classes is a problem, yes, but the factor that ground development to a halt was simply that I couldn't do it consistently enough.
Which, and I may be wrong, I'd think would be a bit easier if you only had a few classes at first (and hence less possible problems) and once those were straightened out, add a few more to deal with.
Eh, well, then the bugs are introduced during the course of development, so it's kind of like a treadmill. >_>
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu