Congrats on being put in charge. I can't decide if it is a good or bad thing to have someone who used to do testing, then be in charge of testing, being in charge of the whole thing. Ordinarily I'd say this would be a good thing (get someone with grass roots experience of the pain involved with bugs in charge) but MA have a shocking history of releasing stuff that has really obvious bugs that should have been picked up in minutes worth of testing, so I can't help wonder who was responsible for that... still, none of us can judge another person's working conditions or pressures to get something out the door since we simply don't know the scenario. The facts remain the facts though, regardless of the cause.
Okaaay... on to the camera milarki first off, credit where credit is due. Well done for posting videos and for starting a thread discuss ahead of time. Doubly well done for coming back and answering question/responding to feedback. Most people MA who've started threads before tend to post then go and hide under the desk AFAIK in the past, never to be seen again, often to be replaced by some new community rep a year or more later. Please keep posting.
I've been around since 2003 and one thing that attracted and hooked me was the open world and ability to go to almost any landmark.
Players have spent many hours climbing mountains just for the sake of exploration. We have travelled to out of the way vistas just to marvel at the world before us.
The ability to climb mountains and explore endlessly is not something I have found in other games.
It is not something I ever expected to lose in this one.
Avatar run speed had too many variables and one of our goals is to speed up many aspects of avatar control. It felt like the avatar stuttered sometimes due to uneven terrain. For climbing I can understand that pushing yourself up a cliff was a bit fun but not for content when trying to create the world where we are not sure if the player can traverse or not. Future terrain changes will now have this in mind and it is easier for a player to know if they can/should follow a specific path or not. Climbing, jetpacks or tools are a better way of solving this in the future instead of avatars very slowly walking up steep hills.
Let's cut to the chase. MA removed item dropping because they couldn't fix bugs relating to it (or exploits or lag or whatever the reason was). As such they killed an absolute TRUCK LOAD of quality emergent game play, the extent of which they will never be able to fully understand or quantify. Game play that had been present since 2003.
Reading the above response it very much conveys the same message:
"letting people go up mountains can lead to bugs like people getting stuck in the landscape, so, rather than fix the landscape so this can't happen, we'd really rather just remove the feature altogether, OK?"
No, very much not OK. Lets break this down a moment:
Avatar run speed had too many variables and one of our goals is to speed up many aspects of avatar control.
Too many variables? Too... maaany.... vaaariables....????
Let's consider this, it is 2019, the era of "big data", people are solving all sorts of problems with thousands of influencing factors. The avatars themselves have a ton of variables just in how they appear. I've heard the phrase "too many variables" in the context of things like machine vision. To hear it in the context of something as comparatively simple as how fast something is allowed to move in a computer game.... well. I... I just don't really know how to respond to that.
It felt like the avatar stuttered sometimes due to uneven terrain.
So... you knew this, and you didn't fix it? Did you check it was really uneven terrain to blame? I've known this occur due to lag with lots of avatars around and due to vehicles appearing. Also due to traversing between server squares... I don't remember ever encountering a run speed issue due to terrain though.
For climbing I can understand that pushing yourself up a cliff was a bit fun
a "bit fun" is a gross over reduction of the freedom delivered in a game by being able to traverse almost where ever you please. It also grossly underestimates the value of the emergent game play derived from such an ability
but not for content when trying to create the world where we are not sure if the player can traverse or not.
Then... (and I realise I repeat years of sentiment here...)
FIX IT. Don't make it worse! Three options:
- Remove restrictions on climbing ability, make it so we can walk up anything regardless of slope (unless 90 degrees - because that would be daft) until you have time to sort things out properly.
- Add a new feature to the game, a simple option the teleport 2 meters to the left instantly. This would allow us to get out of all "stuck" scenarios, without the annoyance of having to go back to a RT.
- Fix the landscape: to do this, program up some sort of search that finds and highlights all vertices in the map over a certain angle to the ground plain. Then you will be able to clearly see where people can and cannot go. This would actually make a great addition to the Sandbox editing tool and would be very useful for your designers.
Future terrain changes will now have this in mind and it is easier for a player to know if they can/should follow a specific path or not.
All well and good for new terrain, but what about all the previously created terrain? You just stuff it in one foul swoop and make it inaccessible now? Is that really how you want to treat your own content? Something that some artist has spent ages making just for you to come along and make if so no one can access it anymore? Really? REALLY?
Also does it matter if we don't immediate know if we can climb something or not? Half the fun of exploring and "mountain climbing" is not knowing what you will find. The joy of seeking out a route where the terrain is "just about" climbable and finding a way that no one else knows about. This is the joy of exploring. You may dismiss this as just "a bit of fun" but you hurt yourself by removing this fun.
Climbing, jetpacks or tools are a better way of solving this in the future instead of avatars very slowly walking up steep hills
I would agree but lets be clear, this is MA. Such things are promised, talked of but are commonly forgotten and never heard from again. This too, once you have deleted access to vast swathes of the terrain, will also be forgotten. I challenge you to deny this.
Yes absolutely, a climbing animation would be better than the slow walking up a steep incline with your nose pressing against a low poly/texture wall but, trust me, you are never going to implement it. So lets not suggest this as a solution to a problem you are about to create please.
Lets avoid creating the problem in the first place
Anyhow, back to the main thing here, specifics about the camera change. Some questions:
- If right click is some sorta extra context driven interaction button now, then how the do we open the system menu? I find myself wondering why would right click ever be used for anything other than opening a menu? At a guess we are going back here on approx 30 years of expected interface behaviour that is being abandoned here.
- When in a car, currently holding the right mouse button and moving the mouse left and right allows for analogue steering using the mouse. Similarly, pressing both buttons and then continuing to hold the right one, makes the avatar run and allows mouse control of direction. Will both these (essentially the same) features continue to work after the "camera update"?
- What is wrong with aiming at a mob, shooting it (with left mouse button) till it is dead then looting it (with left mouse button)? Why do I need to use the right mouse button now? (I'm confused as to why this helps/is good)
- I was going to ask about being able to carry on using the zoom mouse wheel for mode transitions but I see that was already answered (seriously WELL DONE! more please!). Instead I will ask, can we map the camera speed control to buttons instead of the mouse wheel? I don't think I'll want to adjust the speed too often (but its a definite "nice to have" so thanks) whereas zooming in and out is something I do constantly
- I note in the videos you never zoom out much. Will we still be able to zoom out as much as we used to?
- Currently zoom out/in limits in vehicles in 3rd Person are different to those when viewing an avatar in 3rd Person. They are not particularly good at the moment as the limit on zoom in (before switching to 1st Person) is actually quite far from the vehicle (I think this is only on the flying vehicles actually) will this be fixed so we can get in closer to our flying vehicles?
- When in car, there is a bug in that the avatars head ends up turning in weird directions when viewing in 3rd person (depending on where you view from) will this be fixed by the new system?
Thanks if you can advise on these, and sorry if I over ranted on the terrain stuff. I'm sure you understand it is because I care. If I didn't, I wouldn't take the time to write stuff here and would simply drift away from the game. It really is a shame though to see someone with a computer science degree claiming something has too many variables and so should therefore be removed. I mean... you guys have walking multi-legged robots in game. They have to be more complicated than the avatar run speed algorithm surely?
All the best and I hope to see more responses to these questions/comments.
Wistrel