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[Graknorke]

So my merchant ships' AIs work for a while, except they suddenly teleport to (0,0) every once in a while. Eventually, all the ships are stacked on (0,0), with only the lonely, frightened player ship wondering where all its friends went.

Is this your sailing/trading simulator-game?

[Skyrunner]

So my merchant ships' AIs work for a while, except they suddenly teleport to (0,0) every once in a while. Eventually, all the ships are stacked on (0,0), with only the lonely, frightened player ship wondering where all its friends went.

Is this your sailing/trading simulator-game?

Hit the nail on the head.

[Frumple]

Ok well how is this... Are you still a princess if the planet that you are meant to be a princess of is destroyed by a space station so fucking huge it is often mistaken for a moon, leaving only a field of asteroids and a disturbance in the force so strong that Obi Wan checked his pants before saying anything?

... why wouldn't you be? Leia is presumably (I don't actually recall how the books handle it, so whatevs) the princess of the Alderaan people. Or at least their nation-type entity, whatever. There'd still be plenty of... Alderaani? Or something. Running around, and there's probably still enough to count as a cohesive (if badly shaken) political entity. They'd still be around, the political entity'd still be around (albeit much smaller), ergo Leia is still a Alderaan princess. Leia'd kinda' be a like a Jewish princess (assuming such things exist, blazes if I remember or ever knew to begin with) circa diaspora or something. No homeland, still people, still political entity, still royalty.

They get a new planet eventually anyway, iirc. Space travel allows for this wonderful thing where your planet can blow up and your political entity just kinda' shrugs and gets a new one or forms a giant roaming space flotilla or something. Is one of those reasons extraplanetary or extrasolar colonization is a really great thing in the long run.

[Telgin]

On the subject of computer games, I'm currently trying to diagnose why my picking algorithm for an isometric game doesn't work like expected.  I'm using a manually crafted projection matrix to convert worldspace coordinates into screen coordinates for the tile and player sprites, which seems to work.  The unprojection matrix (or whatever term you're supposed to use) was crafted by performing the inverse operations as the projection matrix, and in opposite order. As far as I know that should work.

But for some reason the coordinates I'm picking seem to be rotated 90 degrees around the y-axis (which I never even touch with either matrix!), and offset by a lot...

I understood years ago why people say you should use prebuilt game engines.  This stuff is frustrating.  But half of the point of coding this is so I can increase my understanding of things, which means I get to experience the joy of debugging it!

Wish I could do that instead of having to work this morning. 

[XXSockXX]

Why do people hate the Star Wars prequels? Never really saw why.

The Troll is strong with this one....

Seriously. You want to know why? This man will tell you more than you ever wanted to know.

Thanks for reminding me of those. These reviews are funny and very insightful, even if you don't care about Star Wars, you can learn a lot about storytelling in movies from them. After watching those I really understood why I didn't like the prequel films.

[Flying Dice]

Ok well how is this... Are you still a princess if the planet that you are meant to be a princess of is destroyed by a space station so fucking huge it is often mistaken for a moon, leaving only a field of asteroids and a disturbance in the force so strong that Obi Wan checked his pants before saying anything?

... why wouldn't you be? Leia is presumably (I don't actually recall how the books handle it, so whatevs) the princess of the Alderaan people. Or at least their nation-type entity, whatever. There'd still be plenty of... Alderaani? Or something. Running around, and there's probably still enough to count as a cohesive (if badly shaken) political entity. They'd still be around, the political entity'd still be around (albeit much smaller), ergo Leia is still a Alderaan princess. Leia'd kinda' be a like a Jewish princess (assuming such things exist, blazes if I remember or ever knew to begin with) circa diaspora or something. No homeland, still people, still political entity, still royalty.

Hmm. I would have gone for a Druish princess. 


Also, fuck Star Wars III.

[MadMalkavian]

This post has been expunged. Reason: The author of said post misdirected their anger at Everquest when it should have been directed at the high school brat who was leading the author around and treating them with a condescending attitude that makes the author want to kill all who dare utter the words "YOLO" or "swag". Put simply the author is unable to tolerate anyone born after 1995 that he is not blood-related to due to reasons stemming from their own background. Addendum: Nenjin has further sold the author of this expunged post on Everquest.

[nenjin]

Everquest. Just, Everquest. In my opinion it is the worst MMORPG I have ever played. It took sixteen hours just to complete the tutorial and then three hours to realize that it is the most cryptic and vague piece of garbage I have ever had the displeasure of associating myself with. This game should be made illegal save in situations of war where we must torture people for information. This game made me want to kill myself because of how painful and horrible it is. I think I now know how the Angry Video Game Nerd feels as a result and may perhaps start drinking because of those feelings. God fucking damn it all to Hell I hate Everquest.

Ha!

When it came out, it was the most magical thing ever. The last, to me, of games that required you to know anything, read anything or pay attention to anything. Now EQ went too far plenty of times. Even diehard fans will admit that. And yet, at least among all the geezers on another board I frequent, our best memories are getting lost in Freeport. Picking fights with random NPCs because the game would let us punch a shop keeper as easily as a skeleton. Being lost in an unfamiliar places in near pitch darkness of midnight, surrounded by bears and the horrible cackling of skeletons that you can hear but you can't see....yet. Praying for dawn, or even someone to run by so you can find the road again.

EQ was made in a time before WoW, before highly structured rules of play, efficiency, balance, all the bells and whistles and highly accurate spoiler sites. (At least, people were less inclined to take guides at face value because of the "mystery" of the game.)

EQ (along with the other MMOs of that era) were making the mistakes that today's games avoid like the plague. Yet there was a freedom to game play that was no one really does now. Dungeons? Everyone played in the same one. Bosses? Not locked for the most part to group or guild, not until way later in the game's life. Instances? The point was to play with anyone, everyone, at the same time. It was almost like a sandbox, rather than a game sometimes. Trains of mobs murdering people in the zone was a study in Chaos, and it was awesome. I can't tell you how nerve wracking and yet thrilling it was to sit invisible as a rogue while 50 or more things that could pancake me a few hits would go tearing through the zone, obliterating everyone who didn't flee for their lives. A chattering, living zone full of players snuffed out in 3 minutes, crowds of people at the other side of the zone in rating the train on how bad ass it was. The shouts and /ooc's on those days...priceless.

I mean, I get it. There's reasons why it doesn't work today, no one has that high of a pain threshold anymore. (The entire game being a public, shared space, corpse retrieval, corpse decay, concepts that are completely gone from MMOs today.) But it was, by far, the most immersed I have ever been in a game, any game. The sheer terror of dying in an unfamiliar place, with no one to help you out, and running naked back across the world, praying you could reach your corpse so it didn't rot away to NOTHING as you were offline in defeat. I didn't PvP, my freaking heart couldn't take it.

EQ came as close to making me feel real terror as any video game ever has. Granted, it was due to some really, really, REALLY hardcore rules with  potentially subscription-ending consequences...but I've never found its like since. The elation at succeeding in an environment like that.....is also a high I've never found in any other game since. It's a game that had actual consequences, and it was amazing what it did to your mindset, how it affected the way you played and felt. There weren't many flat out terrible players in EQ. Even the dimmest and dopiest of them all learned something by the time they were high level. They had to. You couldn't hack it in EQ if you didn't want to really be there, there was just too much. Enemies deadly for far too long after you'd out level'd them, too many penalties for dying, no in-game maps, tons of traveling by foot, too many mobs that are too tough to solo (read as: damn near everything for many classes). It was a game without a quest log and without an emphasis on quests, so you actually EXPLORED! You grouped with other people out of necessity, and like war survivors, you formed pretty close bonds. Closer than the "wham bam thank you maam" grouping that's popular in MMOs today, at any rate. As a melee, your life was measured in seconds without a healer, a minute tops. You needed people, and they needed you. (Except Wizards and Druids, the fuckers.) The people that bought high level accounts stuck out like a sore thumb because of what they didn't know.

The grind was hellacious by today's standards, unthinkable. Weeks spent in one spot, LFG, pulling mobs because that was the best place to level. Not everyone played that way, but most people did. Usually those without some high level wizard friend helping them clean out content. And even then....but it was cool. You got to know people because you spent a lot of time around them, both in group and in zone. Raids were fun and terrifying at the same time; it was like just pulling mobs except with a really huge group and the stakes much much higher. You'd clear sections of these really interestingly laid out zones and try and make your way to the boss. And the chaos of those places.....delicious. Panic. Madness. Death. Recovery. Victory. I suppose raids today are flat out better in terms of mechanics and flow....but they tend to take place in very sterile environments to reduce friction and possibilities. Corridors and flat spaces with few visual or pathing obstructions. And then you had to deal with other players, too. My favorite raid quote ever: "Oh god, the Japanese are here. We're fucked."

I mean, this is a game where it took WEEKS to find a new weapon, a new piece of armor. Between drop rates, how and when things scaled and just plain old opportunity, when you got a new piece of gear to use, it freaking meant something. It wasn't like Diablo or WoW or even a game like Borderlands where you're just having rewards spewed at you constantly, until they become a din. By contrast, I used a goddamn Slime-Coated Harpoon for probably a year straight in EQ, because it was just flat out the best weapon I could use given what I was likely to see drop at that point in time. Even trading could be thrilling. It was all player run for the longest time, shouts and tells, haggling, both sides wondering if the other is going to try to screw them over. Going to the trading hub of a server was truly like a bazaar, you just never knew who would log on that day to sell their hard-earned treasures, or what was going to happen when they did.

I can't make any real excuses for EQ's gameplay. It's just not possible in today's world. But when it was new, and playing by a completely different set of rules than games today, it was truly amazing despite how much as we all hated the grind, and the corpse retrievals, and the LFG and the mortal terror of corpse decay. Which is why the game will never really recapture that wonderment for me. I've changed along with the rest of the world. But EQ gave me some of the best video game-related memories of my life. It's literally Nintendo/Sega games --> Everquest --> The rest of my life.

So yeah. Hate away, I hear you. But something pretty amazing and special happened in EQ, that I see happening much less often and in much less interesting ways today.

[Lagslayer]

That sounds glorious.

[Xantalos]

Sense I a tad of nostalgia there, nenjin?

[Bdthemag]

Sense I a tad of nostalgia there, nenjin?

Although the gamplay for a lot of old MMO's were largely hardcore and grindy, one of the things they did do right were foster a good sense of community. You can't really find good MMO communities anymore due to prevalence of theme park MMO's, so I think he has a right to get pretty nostalgic over it.

[nenjin]

Sense I a tad of nostalgia there, nenjin?

Maybe just a smidgen.

Although the gamplay for a lot of old MMO's were largely hardcore and grindy, one of the things they did do right were foster a good sense of community. You can't really find good MMO communities anymore due to prevalence of theme park MMO's, so I think he has a right to get pretty nostalgic over it.

What eventually led to me quitting was breaking with my original guild and doing some raiding in a designated raiding guild. After I got disillusioned with that, I quit. Ironically, that's pretty much how WoW ended for me too.

[Remuthra]

I just spent a couple of hours remembering why I don't like Windows Vista, during which it stubbornly refused to acknowledge my router's existence. My daily tolerance for irritation is spent.

[Bauglir]

Go to play cards, only play one game because my opponents keep dropping out before pairings are assigned. They couldn't have even been avoiding me, given that! MINOR RAGE

Still, I spent 2 hours in an uncomfortably warm room waiting to play a game that never materialized. Frustrating.

[Kadzar]

-Everquest stuff-

I think I kind of know what you're talking about. I never Everquest, but I did log a significant amount of hours in Anarchy Online, which has been described as Everquest in space (even though it really only takes place on one planet). Although death penalties weren't as bad (I think even at it's worst it was that anyone could freely loot anything on your corpse that didn't have the NODROP tag, you lost all your XP gained since you last used an insurance terminal, and you took a debuff that lowered all your stats, which lasted about a minute I think. I'm pretty sure now the only difference is that you can't lose items from dying). But I know what you mean about public dungeons; they were rather large and filled with mobs, and you would spend dozens of sessions trying over many attempts to get farther and farther in a single one.

And if you didn't like dungeons, you could go out into the wilderness and hunt dynabosses, which dropped some very nice loot, or certain high xp mobs like cyborgs, which also dropped some nice loot sometimes. Or you could gen up a procedurally generated instanced mission, which would have it's entrance located somewhere among Rubi-Ka's hundreds of mission entrances, and you would have to figure out a way to get there without having to run too far (which is why it helped to be a Fixer (a class that is basically a bunch of submachine gun-wielding hackers) who had completed at least the first Fixer Grid quest, since you got access to way more Grid exits than anyone else, though I guess that helped with dynabosses and certain dungeons too). Too be honest, the randomly generated missions weren't all that great, but they did give good loot rewards and were useful for Clan and Omni (two of the three factions) to upgrade their token boards, which gave them health and nano (basically AO's version of mana) and various other things at higher levels.

And speaking of factions, I like how in AO, joining a faction is a matter of choice; you make it after entering the gameworld by signing a form to be part of Omni-Tek or the Clans, or you can abstain from choosing and remain Neutral. Neutrals don't get token boards or to use certain faction restricted items, but they can freely enter any town without guards shooting at them, except for a certain part of one clan city (I think it was Tir?). And in the process of looking it up, I am reminded of another part I liked about this game, which was that the devs sometimes change things around based on the roleplaying community's actions, like when they moved Omni-Tek soldiers out of Borealis (a Neutral town) in response to player-initiated riots. There was also another time before that I remember where possession of an entire city switched (well, actually it was just a mining outpost, but it was somewhat important in that around there you could gather a certain quality level range of carbonrich rocks, which were integral in the creation of nano crystals (items that give you AO's version of spells, which all classes use).

And that reminds me that, in AO, leveling up didn't guarantee you any new special powers. You got more skill points and the ability to spend them past your previous level cap, plus the ability to wear some of the few item that were actually level-locked, but if you wanted cool new abilities, you had to pay for them. Nano crystals didn't come cheap (though you could occasionally get one you needed from a dynaboss drop or as your mission reward), and in some cases they weren't buyable or loot-able; you or someone you knew would have to acquire a nano instruction disc (which was loot only) and go through the long and convoluted process of nano crystal creation.

Now crafting in AO (which is known as "tradeskilling") was an interesting animal indeed. For one thing, unlike in later MMOs, you don't level up crafting separately; you put points into tradeskills at level up just like any other skill, and just like any other skill, there are item and nanos that can be used to boost them, and they also have a few uses outside of the crafting system (such as the Engineer's use of Trimmers, which are items that can adjust various aspects of their androids). In addition, with tradeskilling, you often want to be mindful of the quality levels of the items you are using, so that you don't waste a high quality item on something that will turn out to be crap. This also ties into the fact that many parts used in crafting can be simply bought in stores in town (although you will often have to retrieve at least a base part from somewhere out in the world), though shop inventories are randomly generated every so often, and, though the crafting parts will always be the same, the quality levels for sale at the time will vary from time to time from store to store, so it often pays to shop around. And finally, the part the makes me think AO has the best crafting system around: you can craft anywhere you want. You don't have to stand around some anvil that has a bunch of other player crowding around it; if you want to you can bring your Bio-Comminutor with you and convert Monster Parts into Blood Plasma fresh off the corpse. And you got to use specialized tools were your tools and put them their own backpack named "Toolbox" (I'm not sure if WoW has this, but in AO you can rename your backpacks). Oh, and you get xp for crafting (though you're not allowed to level from this for some silly reason).

I will say that the crafting system did lead to at least bad things. For one, the presence of class-specific tradeskill nanos does lead to a lot of botting, since, unless you're in a very active guild, it's not likely there will be someone available to give you the necessary buffs when you need them. Also, the fact that there are so many quality levels of items leads to a level of hoarding unparalleled in any game before or since, or at least it did for me. I don't want to even mention how many backpacks I had full of just various QL's of pure carbon crystals I had in my Engineer's bank; it was unseemly (also, I have forgotten the exact number). No game should every again implement anything like quality levels unless it also has a very robust inventory management system (it would probably also help not to have 200+ quality levels possible).