New Expansion? No...

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Buster_Shruggs, Jul 17, 2020.

  1. Zamiam Augur

    lol smaller expansion .. they cant get much smaller than they already are ..

    I would rather they not come out with a "smaller expansion " and just wait till next year and have a slightly bigger expansion than we are used to..

    I agree that with the current pandemic going on and how long the country has been in quarantine that getting an expansion this year will either be null and void or be delayed by 3 to 6 months .. so instead of it usually being released in nov/dec im expecting (if we get one this year) feb/march around anniversary ..
    Skuz likes this.
  2. Catashe Augur

    ohhhhhhhhh yes it can.... Come on lets face it, EQs code is held together with spit, gum, and prayer most of the time.. you lose all the vets who remembers when this goes and well... boy are you screwed then.. Absor still seems to be around though maybe? No offense Absor if you are and read this... I always thought you were gonna either die or retire a EQ dev so if you go.. we all screwed ;)
  3. Jumbur Improved Familiar


    Otoh maybe some new devs will be forced to replace the wonky code with something that is easier to maintain. Sometimes, "it works, if we pray hard enough", is not a good reason to keep old code...

    We will get some buggy patches, but it could be a blessing in disguise, in the long term... :)

    Who knows how much the old code has limited our expansions...? maybe 90% of all the good ideas the devs had, has been shot down with "it won't work with the old code-base"...
    Nadisia likes this.
  4. Kobra Augur

    I assume they have documentation...

    I work in IT and we have a very large infrastructure. I spend part of my work day documenting what I do for the next guy who has to take my position someday. Hell, I document for myself when I have to come back and touch a system I haven't had to deal with on a daily basis.

    I find it hard to believe they don't have documentation for what to do and what not to do and how things work. If they don't they are even more incompetent than we ever imagined.
  5. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    For recent stuff yes, a HUGE chunk of the early code was very wild west seat of your pants coded in a cupboard with only self-taught experience to begin with, and no documentation on a majority of it.
  6. Benito EQ player since 2001.

    I think there are some steps that can soften the blow of a curtailed expansion (or different schedule):

    1. Acknowledge limitations due to COVID19 by August or September.

    2. Set out the road map. Will it be a phased release? How many zones and raids are projected?

    3. Do away with Premium and Family-Friend Editions for the year. Return to Standard and Collector Edition only to avoid the perception of profiting. But, increase the cadance of Heritage Crates and other marketplace (bundles, subscriptions) promotions within the year.

    4. Front load the expansion. Load the expansion with goodies (illusion/merc /claims). Put the best zones ahead for first phase release.

    5. Include more bonus content (GMM-type zone, Hardcore Heritage) on the back end (if time and resources permits). Leak and whet the appetite.

    Edit: Or keep the Family and Friend Edition but update it so it actually sells multiple tradable expansion tokens (but at a slightly higher price if otherwise bought individually).
  7. Captain Video Augur

    I would expect that by this point in the annual development cycle EQ has been following, the principal design work for the next expansion has already been done, i.e. zones defined, raids enumerated and mechanics defined, progression track laid out. Itemization and artwork not done yet, but nevertheless actual coding about ready to start. A lot of this is simpler with no level increase. We could still see a December release.

    The bigger problem is the ongoing infrastructure performance. A lot has been written about how hard hit the newer TLPs have been, but I think we've all seen deterioration on live servers as well. I even see it on Test, which I believe is now the lowest population server. It looks and feels as though a lot of existing code is not well optimized to work with this new shared database thing they pushed through. That means a lot more coding work upcoming, unrelated to new content. So which is more important... getting performance back to what we've been used to, or having a bright shiny new expansion before the end of the year?

    I really really hope one or more of their new hires has database expertise.
  8. Nennius Curmudgeon

    New expansions=influx of capital. I don't know when their fiscal year ends, but adding to the bottom line is a good thing. I hope it will happen.

    Well put. If the game can't be accessed easily or doesn't run well then all the great content in the world is essentially meaningless. On their website it shows they are looking for a

    "Senior Software Engineer - Game Engine/Tools" I am not really sure what that entails. Have to pardon my ignorance in that.

    I don't see a job opening for server infrastructure or the like. Perhaps they can move folks? I do hope that server stability is a high priority.

    We can all hope. My mother-in-law used to work on databases for a large US defense contractor. She often remarked about the complexity of the job and how others came to her for advice. Perhaps finding folks with sufficient experience at the rate of pay offered will be difficult. I, and I assume others here will agree, want this game to persist and grow. Just the fact that they are hiring is a good sign. I think.
  9. Pawtato Augur


    All they need to do is another bag sale...
  10. MasterMagnus The Oracle of AllHigh


    As a software developer, you often work on small programs ('tools') to service various aspects of the software (game) creation or maintenance. Tools to wrangle assets before finalizing, tools to tweak databases, tools to monitor things you hadn't imagined initially, etc.

    Many devs love tool making, it's a great way to practice your craft in little bite sized chunks. Or at least automate tedious tasks.
    Xyphen and Nadisia like this.
  11. Nadisia Augur

    It's also a good way to make the code more easily maintainable.
    The days of monstruous chunks of hideous monolithic code are over for the most part.
    Time has come for ultra modularity.

    But it still needs to be properly documented, cuz sometimes ... :confused: ... o_O ... :D
    Skuz, Xyphen and MasterMagnus like this.
  12. Nennius Curmudgeon

    Thank you. My knowledge of coding ended in the early 1980's when I took a class on Pascal. It was fascinating, but my life followed another path. BTW, is C++ the standard nowadays for these sorts of things?
    MasterMagnus likes this.
  13. Waring_McMarrin Augur


    Last year they didn't announce the expansion until mid October so I don't think we will hear anything about it until around the same time this year.
  14. yepmetoo Abazzagorath

    If they stop wasting time on stupid or questionable value things that take up a lot of resources and just focus on making zones, making quests and raids, they can make a lot of content when they are regurgitating old content.
  15. Captain Video Augur


    In the early '80s, the paradigm of "structured programming" was all the rage, and Pascal was used as an instructional language for that purpose. It was never widely used in commercial software development for performance reasons. C was already quite popular in the commercial world by then; for example every new programmer hired at Microsoft was required to be proficient in C. When object-oriented programming methods became more in vogue a decade later, C++ was suddenly a standard, although very few commercial developers actually use the object-oriented constructs that the ++ represents.

    Nowadays it's more like a tower of computer Babel. You got your Java. You got your Python. You got your Azure. You got whatever the bleep it is that Amazon is using these days. And yes, you still got your basic C++, although now there are things like C# and Objective C... well I could go on. There is even a kitchen-sink language called (wait for it...) "D", which purports to be able to do everything you find in everything else. Of course nobody uses that.

    In the game development world, pretty much everything has migrated to an all-in-one development system such as Unreal 4 or Unity, where art assets, scripting, world topology and etc are all coded in a proprietary system. One big advantage to these systems is they are cross-platform: code once and then compile/build for your target platform, which can be Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, or even Chromebook. Blizzard uses its own proprietary system which is a lot like Unreal; EA has its own system as well. For all the lower-level tasks, the development environment will generate the underlying C/C++ code for you as necessary, unless of course it generates Java, unless of course it generates Python. You get the idea.

    For those EQ devs who have left the studio recently and have been working exclusively on the legacy EQ code base, I hope they have been doing a lot of background reading and/or home programming exercises on the side, otherwise when they land at a place like Blizzard, they are in for a pretty dramatic culture shock...!
    Nadisia and MasterMagnus like this.
  16. Kobra Augur

    The basics of coding are all you really need to master though. Then its just about learning language specific stuff.

    I write bash scripts at work, but I could easily convert them into python for example.

    Anyone who codes in C++ professionally could master the dev tools of Unreal in very little time at all. I am not a C++ coder myself, but I was able to pick up the unreal script very quickly when they came out with the initial UDK. It reminded me a lot of java actually.

    Granted, I have never coded a game engine, but from what I have seen the real challenge is using the right data structures and crazy math optimizations and not so much writing the code itself. There is a pretty funny comment in the quake 3 engine source code for a fast inverse square root calculation if you're into that sort of thing, but that is an example of the arcane optimizations that were needed (at least back in the day). With today's hardware, maybe its not needed so much.
  17. Captain Video Augur


    Two words: Tensor cores. Separates the pros from the neophytes when it comes to code optimization for anything with an AI component. I don't profess to know how to do it properly, but then I'm retired. :) I am expecting the next big leap in MMOs to occur when someone develops procedually-generated raid content using machine learning trained by prior player behavior. The tech is there now, but not the availability of coding expertise. The ones who know the tech are all earning mid-six figures at Amazon/Google/Oracle/etc, not lurking in the gaming industry. In a couple more years, perhaps.

    Of course a trained machine-learning raid engine could end up giving us content that can only be beaten by an army of bots, because that's who it learned from...
    Kobra likes this.
  18. Sikkun Augur

    Wish more companies would actually post expected salary ranges. Not that having done several rounds of layoffs in the last couple years is going to help with recruiting anyway....but it’s a lot of time to waste if a company is thinking $60k and you are thinking $100k.
  19. Kobra Augur


    I have always thought proceduraly generated content would be a great fit for the right MMO (a space based MMO would be ideal for it).

    I would never work in the game industry. Not enough pay and too many hours.
  20. Kobra Augur


    From what I read on glassdoor they offer free drinks! That totally makes up for lack of wages. I bet they have pool tables too and other meaningless gestures to convince people they aren't getting screwed over when it comes to their salary.