Kickstarter

Oh if only I could like this post even more.

look out all mounts turn into various farm animals and meat beasts

dude, if you delete all the soga models, i'll totally send you cookies. those are a plague on the face of norrath.

I know they are optional to view but dont they present some sort of difficulty when trying to keep them up to date with regular model changes? I thought I remember something like that.

Yeah they don't animate as well because of how their joints were messed with.

You should figure out some optimization for reg models that 'dont work' with soga models so we can just get rid of them for the sake of performance hehe.

NOOOOOOOOOO! I LIKE SOGA models, at least for some of the races. If nothing else, it is more options in the Appearance department, and the default Barbarian Male model SUCKS beyond all hope of reason. Seriously. X-P

Uwk

I love the SOGA models. I use them with my half elves and they look beautiful.

On topic:
I have no opinion as I haven't looked to see what the engine is about.

I started reading this topic thinking it would be semi serious but half baked, and i was right. But then ttobey came and saved us with his unicorn rainbows and laser robot duck people

I don't know what's more unsettling.

-- players who think 10M is a lot in game development or
-- backward Developers who can't follow an act like Naughty Dog and never intend to

Naught Dog are at the top for a very good reason.
Porting their games from an insane architecture to -basically- PC x86 APU, for the reason of maintaining their games on subsequently better systems and a better way of presenting them; so that they do not "fade out". Its presence restored to new technology and a new generation of players.

However difficult it was to do that port from PS3 to PS4, it wasn't the Developers punishing themselves or their investors to get it done. It was to imprint their mark as a standard to reach for the games industry and a reminder to gamers they're more important than any thing else.

A benchmark.

EQ2 Staff playing to the crowd; that's when you know they're incompetent.
Not incompetent to themselves- or what they're capable of; but against the industry scale that has been reached (or at least trying to).

EQ2's micro-transactions, its fragmented "gifting" of content, the Game Engine, completely kills it for me; and likely, between 500,000 and 2.5M players in other MMOs completely disregarding any gimmicks you try and think up; mainly circumvented to veteran EQ2 players.

If nobody can see EQ Next -as it has been currently been portayed- as complete laziness, that's where the problem really lies.

"The players are the content!"
"Their contribution!"

But they have to pay for what they just made.
You're hiring beta testers and alpha developers behind the firewalls of copyright.

EQ2 Devs are cowards hiding behind kindly assignation, because -you know- it's a safe boundary to respond to players who they know aren't going to ever let them down, when you're spiralling down that drain and have nowhere else to go.

I do unfortunately, you've completely lost the plot between your original post and your latest diatribe which is so off topic that it alone is unsettling.

flameweaver,

You're probably referring to a Kickstarter, but I'm guessing that's really not the case.

Kickstarters are by their very nature, untrustworthy. But isn't that an indication of the truth behind the games industry and the people employed within them. You can use it for good or, bad.

Kickstarters are probably no.5 on the "what's the worse we could do" where Micro-transactions take the podium at no.1.

"allaccess" is the choice you take when you know Micro-transactions exist. Ergo, you have it ingrained to your profile as some sort of badge - knowing that Micro-transactions was a choice you didn't take and you're proud to display it.


Is this off-topic... maybe; lines are hard to draw and even harder to define.
But I'm still talking about the same thing, even if it might be difficult to grasp from a deviating context called "other people's opinions".

dcracknell, are you using an Ad Libs website to write your posts? Just pasting buzzwords into a form?

"thats not writing-its typing"

Unfortunately a lot of this conversation is gonna be lost on someone who doesn't know exactly how backwards the current game engine is and what exactly is involved in game development. The ideas proposed are both very unreasonable and have already been discussed at length before, that's why the thread just turned into screwing around.

As for microtransactions (which came up for some reason) EQ2 is one of the more well behaved MMO's when it comes to power items on the marketplace. It has recently went away from this in a small part with the lottery of rare harvestables and mercs but it still doesn't compare to what games like ArcheAge and neverwinter online do.

EQ2's engine is not backward.
It's no different from Forgelight.

Since none of you understand the problem anyway, let me explain it to you:

When developers say anything these days, they're just avoiding spending any money.
This is fine. We all know they're saying that, but meaning something else. Nobody wants to break PR and give them a headache.

It can be translated in another way - No Risk Taking. The bottom line is, is that developers keep adding a stack to the top of a mile-high tower, trying to keep the whole thing from toppling over and destroying itself, leaving the bottom foundation the same as it was before.
The same problems.
The same results.
Nothing really gets better or worse.

You can't change the bottom without the whole thing coming down.
That's where taking the top and transplanting it to a new foundation comes in.

And it's relatively simple: depending on the risks you're willing to take and seeing it through.

There's no difficulty in porting standardised code and an identical API to a modern game engine with advanced tools in comparison to what exists developed in-house (I would imagine that EQ2's tools are fairly advanced by now, but nothing on the scale you get with UE4 or, Forgelight for that matter -- but no, I don't know for sure with Forgelight).

You guys are completely out of date.
And you're referencing developer-talk from a historical scale.
"It can't be done!", "It's so much more complex than you think!" (internally, "I could lose my job")
Then the users chime in:
"Yeah, this guy has no idea!" (internally, "I'm frightened that this will go wrong and then my game dies")

Porting EQ2 from its own in-house engine to Forgelight would be easy.
It's just paying people to do the work. We can do anything as long as we're paid to do it. That's life.

But you're also doing it to increase a static population density that has remained unchanged for probably a decade.
Good enough reason if you ask me.
DBG'll be happy to hear that.

You're moving to far more advanced net code and better development tools.
You're moving to an engine that can handle 90 players on-screen at once with nary a problem (I get 16ms to Miller and Cobalt Servers on Planetside 2: with it never going over 61ms in really big battles). I'm using an Intel i5-2500k and a nVidia 660Ti and I get 60fps locked.
I know that you have to lock your frame rate to 59 and that the max frame buffer should be 60, and that you need to engage Adaptive V-Sync so that you get no tearing or mouse latency when the screen is drawn.
I know that you have to disable all netsh TCP values and use a MTU of 1450+28>1478 and not [1492] from the driver to the router, because I really understand the limitations of network IPv4 and TCP networks and fibre-optic networks.
The difficulties with Forgelight is only the ones made by the user.
There's very little the developers can do (well they can: they just need to spend money) because PC x86 and the dxAPI is the "this can't be done" end-all that developers are really talking about when they say "it's too difficult".
That's why game consoles are preferred and better.
But no PC developer is going to say that.

Here's another truth.
Game Console developers are deliberately making their games fit within the expected PC model so as not to affect software sale of the PC.
But, I'm betting none of you will ever believe that.
The way the Xbox One and the PS4 work, is something that PC x86 can't do at the moment.
Their CPU and GPU can access the same space in memory... at the same time.

This means that a 1.6Ghz CPU with a fraction of the power (literally, power-draw and performance) of an i5 (never mind the i7) can do the same amount of things at the same time as a PC CPU at 4.4Ghz.
All a PC is extreme brute-force with a massive power-brick, until APU become an architectural standard.
What the current gen consoles are, is a 400% improvement in doing the math and the rendering that much easier.
But, I'm betting none of you will ever believe that.

Foregelight changed everything in terms of massive scale action. I've never seen anything like it.
It might not work for everyone. But eventually it will. We're still in the early stages of 2 Billion people world-wide having Gigabit connections connecting to networks with 100 Terabit bandwidths and 1 ping with no copper cable in sight.
But it will happen sooner than you think.

We're on the brink of a revolution in terms of power density and moving data from one place to another at the pico-second.

And PvE cannot exist for long without PvP. Developers will just have to work out how they should interact where it's sensible. Planetside 2 starts that equation off quite well.

A Kickstarter is a great idea.
250-300k players contributing $5 to $25 - it's easily done.

Hi dcracknell, welcome to EQ2!

Let me teach you a new word. The word is Producer. Pro-duce-er. Say it with me. Pro-duce-er. What is a producer? That is one of the people that direct a large project, like EQ2 or any other game made by a large company. Producers are the bosses of developers, and make all of the decisions about where a project will go in the future.

Though to be honest, you don't need to learn the word Producer because the person you want to talk about is the President of DBG. Producers make decisions about their games, and what your talking about is starting a whole new project. Lets call it EQ 2.5.

M.M.O. are large projects that take a lot of talented people. I suggest you learn more about what each of the jobs involved in producing a MMO are about, since you seem blissfully ignorant. Especially the way you unknowingly contradict yourself! Asking for a direct port, except with major game changes. Fantastic! Did you know that the EQ2 team considered this several years ago in 2 different forms? After nearly 2 years of work the entire project was dropped because the Producers felt that it would be too expensive and that EQ2 would never recoup the investment of capital needed to accomplish the graphics upgrade. Isn't history interesting!

I suppose not since it directly contradicts your wishes! But it should give you a bit more perspective.

OP, you need to lay off the Wikipedia for a while. You sound like a gibbering conspiracy theorist yelling at passers by.

Given that you are an experienced player, I'm almost certain that you are aware that you can adjust your settings to only see non-SOGA models. Since you can affect what you see, all your suggestion would do is affect the play of others - and anyone that tries to affect my play will be cordially invited to [expletive deleted] off.

I'm not saying that you are wrong to want control over what you see. I am saying that you are wrong to want to control what someone else (that isn't you or one of your immediate relatives) sees.
__________________________________________________

Back on topic, I think that the OP should consider backing up the claims made with reliable data. Claiming something without supporting information from a trusted source isn't usually effective in convincing anyone that is not gullible. I'm not claiming that the OP is necessarily wrong, but lack of supporting information tends to result in claims being viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism.

It's a shame that the community has to try to eat this guys lunch just because he's got bad ideas. Yeah they're pretty terrible ideas, and they don't really make sense, but you can disagree without being a snarky inbred about it. But frankly, nobody here really has any idea what it takes to run an MMO (I'd chuck the DBG team into that, no offense, since they haven't managed to run a successful one for about 15 years) so his guess is as good as ours I reckon, even if he's getting his terminology all messed up.

For the record though, there was nothing wrong with EQ2, or EQ1, there was nothing wrong with SWG, okay maybe Matrix online was pretty ******** but that wasn't really your fault. But you always try to push in these wide sweeping changes that just piss off the people that actually do care about your games. TAKE RAPH KOSTER'S ADVICE ALREADY, stop trying to make your game's something they're not. It will never work. No matter how many times you do it and admit it was a mistake, and swear never again, you're like that cheating spouse, compulsive gambler, or overweight infant, you have to keep going to the cookie jar/methadone clinic.

I'll still play EQ2 and even give you $15 a month, just so I can continue to watch this trainwreck in FPS mode.

I didn't know that.

But I bet you didn't know that the whole point of everything I've said about "Kickstarter".
It's the Game Producers ticket Outta wherever they've put themselves Inna.

The part about "Pro-duce-er".
Producers will have an understanding from a bottom line from "whence they came".
They are, after all, an evolution of the gamer: with a road-map in their head that forgoes dumb ideas from other sources (not naming any forums or twitter pages... oops).

The problem with Gamers, is that they're listening too intently to what they're being told: completely missing all the PR Control Tower, towering overhead because they have their heads stuck in their a-ss.
The only difficulty that ever exists, is the people that have control of a situation they're trying to control.

It gets to a point where you'd be better off reading a mainstream newspaper.

Such is Economics.