a new start

[Tyhm]

Where I stand is, if you want a server that doesn't have the stupid "I can see all 4 walls" overhead view, if you want a server that has guns and lighting effects, if you want a server with better graphics than a MSPaint dragon and V shaped spaceship, go play Era. If Classic bows to such pressures, it becomes a horrid little compromise server.

And yes Rufus, it would be nice if everything worked 100% when it was released. It would be nice if Bowling was perfect and had a good multiplayer theme to it. It would be nice if fishing was more involved when it was released. These aren't subject to debate - Good is good, it's an argument from definition. What the debate is, is what should Classic's limited staff focus on? Making more stuff, or constantly rehashing the same old stuff? Would you rather they make the big announcement next month "Hey guys, we fixed Bowling balls so they can hit other players and baddies, we fixed baddies so they take the right ammount of hits again, and the fishing rod's a lot better in our opinions, have fun!", or "The pyramid quest's open, it ain't perfect but it's something to do"? Perhaps we're permanently in opposite camps; perhaps we must simply agree to disagree.

There's also the possibility they should dedicate their time to hiring and firing staffers; that's one of those RTS "Upgrade or buy another unit?" questions. Hiring, in theory, always works out to be a long-term gain; some developers lose some time now, but increase the developers' total output. Unfortunately too much of that has a diminishing return; While Com013 doubled the amount of work we were doing on GtA, Zero33 actually slowed us down uploading his house while he didn't really draw anything.

In any case, having read this last page of arguments, I still see no reason why Classic going Backwards right now would be Actually Progress. If all ye classic-lovers want to help make it awesome you should be allowed, sure, but why destroy Anything in the process?

PS - oh duh, here's a better analogy, Painting. Yeah, we missed a spot. Let's finish THIS coat and THEN we'll go back for it. I know it looks horrible, give it a bit, we're gonna have to put several coats down anyway and I wanna see what it's gonna look like with this color first anyway. Yes, I know it's not Really That Color because this coat's thin and patchy, whatever, I can get an idea.

[WhiteDragon]

I figure an response from an administrator is due at this point, so I'll interject some official opinions on here to hopefully clear things up.

Classic has, as previous noted, been losing players at an even faster rate than all the other playerworlds because of its lack of new content that the player can interact with (e.x., new quests, new weapons) and lack of replayable content. The server has also not been getting new players because of lack of quality content and highly undeveloped storyline.

There is a extrinsic balance we have to aim for when developing on the server to create new content and make sure all the content on the server is high-quality. This is because we can lose players if they aren't attracted in the first place because of low-quality content, and we can lose current players if there is no new content released.

After a good amount of content is released, a sort of safety net is formed where we have more time to improve on quality since there is more content already out there for the newer players to go through.

This safety net gives a false sense of security though because the general opinion is not as negative and the development team ends up doing something like rewriting the movement and ruining half of the content on the server.

The rest of the development team and I hope to reach the balance between quality and content and always keep in mind exactly where we are and not do anything to throw off that balance. This is at least what I have learned from the previous development teams and where they have broken down, and also from the success of certain other development teams before the NPC server.

Most of the storyline on Classic has already been thought out, and we are just attempting to strategically release the quests and still keep the quality up, while also trying to create replayable content such as bowling for the current players to entertain themselves with all with a very limited development team.


What I would really like everyone to do is let go of the grudges against the development team or any specific members of it, and instead try to guide us to hit this balance right on through opinion.
Thor and I have both been reading this thread and most of the posts have been helpful in doing so.

I would also like to remind everyone that we are always looking for potential new developers to help us out whether you specifically agree with our opinions or not: http://classicgraal.net/applications/development/

[-Ramirez-]

The single largest problem about trying to convert the built-in systems to a custom system was the fact that the built-in ones allowed a single player in a level to control where all NPCs moved and what variables they held. This player-controlled environment allowed NPCs to have data sent in 0.05 second intervals, rather than 0.1, and the movement was, for whatever reason, more fluid than what the NPC Server produces. Move() is a joke for NPCs that frequently change direction. It produces horrible results in comparison to what existed before.

Hit detection being done clientside before is also what contributed to the difficulty of trying to reproduce what we had. Everyone always tried to make it serverside, which just can't come close to what everyone played with before. I see that there's been a reversion back to clientside detection at the moment, but I don't know if this applies to both NPCs and players.

If any of this was unknown to those currently doing the script work, maybe this will give an insight into what needs to be done to allow reproduction of old-style quests. I wouldn't mind discussing various aspects further, if anyone is interested. Hopefully these things were already known though, as it was all pretty obvious if you ever scripted before the NPC Server.

Of course, all of what I've talked about is dealing with the core scripts of the server, as is usually the focus. I'm just assuming that these scripts are still a problem right now, if there's lacking content.



Btw, Tyhm, you should know that it isn't always possible to halfass things when scripting is involved. There are some things you just MUST HAVE in order to proceed, if you want something that's the slightest bit interesting, at least. For example, when I was actively rebuilding for the NPC Server, we could have made quests with no baddies, but given how integral they were to so many quests, it would have essentially been "walk through these areas and get a reward, then never come back because there's no reason to". That's a pure waste.

[Tyhm]

We can kvetch about how the movement of baddies ought to be one way or another until the cows come home; personally I think the very best way is to use move() serverside and very clever showani clientside, but that's me, and I can't even figure out destroy(); anymore, so. Plus they'd have to revise arrows and whatnot so it hits where the baddy Seems to be, bollocks to where its serverside self is.
But say they take our advice, redo everything clientside and clever, it takes 'em a month of no-new-content, and then something breaks and it's all gotta go back. So they take a month setting it back the way it was, and it kinda works, but whatever, it beats nothing. Then some old admin storms in, fires everyone and puts it back to the clientside way, takes a month again. Then he realizes it's still broken and sets it back, another month. Enough already, it's madness, I just wanna play the pyramid and the gravity tower (my version), oi. And birdshot around everywhere, that was fun. Never did get it working right in the gravity tower, but it's not a platformer server anyway...

[-Ramirez-]

Originally Posted by Tyhm

personally I think the very best way is to use move() serverside and very clever showani clientside

You wouldn't say that if you had actually seen it done. This is regarding attempts to mirror old baddy movement, however.

But say they take our advice, redo everything clientside and clever, it takes 'em a month of no-new-content, and then something breaks and it's all gotta go back. So they take a month setting it back the way it was, and it kinda works, but whatever, it beats nothing. Then some old admin storms in, fires everyone and puts it back to the clientside way, takes a month again. Then he realizes it's still broken and sets it back, another month.

I don't think that's ever even happened in the past, and it seems like a stupid thing to consider when trying to get things done. It's already evident that Storm does nothing anyway, so there's definitely no risk in this case.

[Bell]

We all know that hindsight is 20/20 vision but what everyone seems to be avoiding is the fact that everything humanly possible was supposed to be scripted to serverside for security reasons. It seems to me you get the choice of fun but abuseable or secure and annoyingly slow to develop due to constant roadblocks and issues.

[-Ramirez-]

Originally Posted by Bell

but what everyone seems to be avoiding is the fact that everything humanly possible was supposed to be scripted to serverside for security reasons

I was waiting for someone to bring this up. There's no danger to the server by having scripts done clientside. There's no danger to anything at all except for player fairness. This didn't stop people (presumably) from playing in the past, why would it stop them now? Having the threat of someone abusing the clientsided nature of the game gave the GP team a reason to exist.

Ultimately, it's very much worth the risk of cheating in some situations to get things functioning as they did in the past, which is what the majority of people want anyway.

[Tyhm]

Sure, but for a long time it Was a concern; if someone could auto-hack all the arrows to home in on their enemies, baddies to spawn in the bank, explosions to form giant symbols of hate in OnlineStartLocal...it's problematic.

What sucks is every time it shifts from "Serverside is important" to "Clientside is important", Classic loses a lot of time Rewriting everything...it's better with classes, at least they don't have to go level-to-level anymore, but still.

[-Ramirez-]

Originally Posted by Tyhm

Sure, but for a long time it Was a concern; if someone could auto-hack all the arrows to home in on their enemies, baddies to spawn in the bank, explosions to form giant symbols of hate in OnlineStartLocal...it's problematic.

It wouldn't be as "insecure" as the pre-NPC server days, but yes, there would still be things that could be "illegally" modified. Who cares? It didn't happen that often, and it's just not that hard to deal with. I think most people would agree that it's better than the alternative perfectly "secure" and horrible to play with version.

What sucks is every time it shifts from "Serverside is important" to "Clientside is important", Classic loses a lot of time Rewriting everything...it's better with classes, at least they don't have to go level-to-level anymore, but still.

This shift has happened one time thus far due to being forced and nobody really thinking about whether or not it was necessary, myself included. However, this was not the cause for the huge delay that's been experienced with the conversion to using an NPC Server.
I have no idea what you were referring to when you mentioned classes.

[Tyhm]

Probably a good thing we don't dictate policy, then. ;-)

Say they move movement from serverside to clientside.
Any script that edited movement - from defining the size of blocking objects to pushing the player away from or towards certain NPCs - has to be rebuilt to make sure it's moving the Client instead of/as well as the serverside.
Then if you get hit, your flying-backwards is clientside too. So everything that used to hit you serverside has to hit you clientside. Every NPC that does damage has to make sure the Client's in on the game.
And on it goes.
At least they don't have to edit 3000 levels in the level editor like we used to have to; For The Most Part they can just open the Classes pane and edit "baddies" and "sardon_vortex" right there in RC. For the most part.

[-Ramirez-]

Originally Posted by Tyhm

Any script that edited movement - from defining the size of blocking objects to pushing the player away from or towards certain NPCs - has to be rebuilt to make sure it's moving the Client instead of/as well as the serverside.
Then if you get hit, your flying-backwards is clientside too. So everything that used to hit you serverside has to hit you clientside. Every NPC that does damage has to make sure the Client's in on the game.
And on it goes.

I'm fully aware of what has to be done to make things work properly. At the moment, however, there's nowhere near what the old Classic had to convert if a change is made. It should be relatively easy.

At least they don't have to edit 3000 levels in the level editor like we used to have to; For The Most Part they can just open the Classes pane and edit "baddies" and "sardon_vortex" right there in RC. For the most part.

I also understand how classes work already. I just didn't see what you meant in the previous post with the way you had worded/structured the sentence.

[DustyPorViva]

I don't see why they can't use the default system. They're basically rebuilding the wheel with Classic, when it's not needed. Sure, it's not the most secure system but there are much easier ways to deal with that.

[-Ramirez-]

Originally Posted by DustyPorViva

I don't see why they can't use the default system.

If I recall, there's no way to allow for various things that're important to quests. (At least old ones.) Lifting, pushing, and pulling come to mind, but there's probably more than that to deal with.

[DustyPorViva]

Originally Posted by -Ramirez-

If I recall, there's no way to allow for various things that're important to quests. (At least old ones.) Lifting, pushing, and pulling come to mind, but there's probably more than that to deal with.

There are very, very few things that I can think of that they can't replicate with the default system.

[-Ramirez-]

Originally Posted by DustyPorViva

There are very, very few things that I can think of that they can't replicate with the default system.

That's easy to say if you aren't sure of yourself, but how about some examples to show that you are?

[DustyPorViva]

Originally Posted by -Ramirez-

That's easy to say if you aren't sure of yourself, but how about some examples to show that you are?

Push/pull/grab all have their respective functions that are called on the default system:

function onActionGrabbed() {}

so on and so forth. There's no need to even rescript it. Lifting? I don't think there is an action called for that, but I don't think it'd be hard to replicate with scripted items. There are functions and checks for items carried and such, though. I wouldn't be able to say if anything else could be as well without knowing exactly what is needed. Either way, while the default system itself is fairly limited, it's a lot easier to just rescript/tack on needed things with it instead of rescripting it all.

Either way, nothing on the server so far has showed me very much reason why a custom system is needed.

[Tyhm]

Ideal Compromise:
release the script for the default system, so Classic can edit and override it as necessary. The end.

[Tyhm]

I imagine it had a lot to do with development in stages; the custom system was built when
1) there was no default system
2) the "defaults" didn't work online
3) it sure seemed there never Would be a "defaults", and even if there were Classic wouldn't be given access to it.

Nowadays, sure, I guess you can do everything just using the defaults and some clever PSYCHIC GORRAM scripting (bonus points if you can tell me where ordinary mortals can look up function onActionGrabbed(){;...); that said, any of us could pretty easily take an empty server, an old Classic levelspack, and do a better job than Stormy, huh?

Well, go for it. You have my blessing. Iff you succeed, I'll throw my weight behind Your classic supplanting Stormy's classic, and Stormy's classic going back to the Under Construction tab.

[DustyPorViva]

Originally Posted by Tyhm

1) there was no default system

Err... what?

Originally Posted by Tyhm

2) the "defaults" didn't work online

UN has never had a problem with defaults working online. Eventually things did break down, but as you can see, UN is still up and running on the default system.

Originally Posted by Tyhm

3) it sure seemed there never Would be a "defaults", and even if there were Classic wouldn't be given access to it.

I believe Thor was given numbers to some specific defaults, but I don't believe he used them.

Originally Posted by Tyhm

bonus points if you can tell me where ordinary mortals can look up function onActionGrabbed(){;...);

It used to be documented in newfeatures. Nowadays you can usually search the wiki and find it. Not as easy, I suppose, but it's there.

[Crono]

Kat I can bet you this custom system is definitely NOT needed. How many years would you like to wait until I win?

[DarkCloud_PK]

There would need to be something ridiculously epic to come out of these custom systems to ever justify needing them. After being such a large component for classic's continuing failure, that would take a lot to justify them.

I don't really see that realistically coming about, not after the 4-5 year track record.

[Tyhm]

it sucks that you need to do this much work to, basically, carry a chicken outside of a level. :-P