Friday with Means - March 13th, 2009

[Klodovik]

Sure, here's some taken on my old P4 2ghz with a single harddrive. How's that for playing at gross framerates?

I meant, fraps that "50FPS with 16xAA", on 120 people raid. And BTW, that's NT play style (pressing 1-2 buttons on shortcut bar - easy mode, compared to MP/engie/crat/doc/trader style). Try with 3 pets and active debuffing on several targets.

That looked like 5-8 FPS at best, which is... Meh.

[Mastablasta]

I meant, fraps that "50FPS with 16xAA", on 120 people raid. And BTW, that's NT play style (pressing 1-2 buttons on shortcut bar - easy mode, compared to MP/engie/crat/doc/trader style). Try with 3 pets and active debuffing on several targets.

That looked like 5-8 FPS at best, which is... Meh.

I'll make sure I install fraps so that next time there's 100 people I'll record it for you

[Hacre]

I'll make sure I install fraps so that next time there's 100 people I'll record it for you

Just follow kbeast

[Klodovik]

I'll make sure I install fraps so that next time there's 100 people I'll record it for you

I want FPS counter on video as well.

[Windguaerd]

Intelligent discussions are for gamers. Flame wars are for trolls.

Now show me some new avatar heads please.

[Noxira]

Intelligent discussions are for gamers. Flame wars are for trolls.

Now show me some new avatar heads please.

QFT! Less arguing, more goodies!

[Gastastic]

Intelligent discussions are for gamers. Flame wars are for trolls...

I'm not sure where any of us lands on this scale, nor which would be the greater honor or insult.

The old opifex head is much sexier because of the subtle nose, the eye makeup, the full lips with the slightly insolent part to them. The newer head looks much more accurate, real. If Funcom can combine the accuracy with the mood of the originals it would be great. Be even greater if emotes could show on the face (fear, anger, love, hate, orgasm, etc).

Farming out construction tools to us, allowing us to help design new stuff for the game, might save Funcom some time and money - presupposing administering such a plan would take less time than the successful creations it would gather - and tap hitherto unknown skills in our community.

[Kaylinne]

I would like to see some new solitus heads please

[Trebie]

Tomorrows friday. Wonder if they'll be smart and keep posting new stuff on the engine or not.

[Windguaerd]

Be even greater if emotes could show on the face (fear, anger, love, hate, orgasm, etc).

Farming out construction tools to us, allowing us to help design new stuff for the game, might save Funcom some time and money - presupposing administering such a plan would take less time than the successful creations it would gather - and tap hitherto unknown skills in our community.

Visual face emoting is unlikely to happen. The engine may be able to do it, but it wouldn't be a priority on the probably already long to-do list.

Means may like the idea of player-submitted graphics content (meshes, textures, etc) however FC is not likely to approve it.

Why?

How does FC know 100% that something submitted is not a direct rip from another game? there are thousands of games out there that anyone could go "oh I like that, would be great in AO... let me rip it, rename it and send it to FC". They know their artists are doing original stuff, they can't be sure about that with player submissions. The risks of a lawsuit for copyrighted material is too high for a company these days, specially one which is not a juggernaut.

It's not about how good/professional the players who can create original stuff are, it's about the risk Funcom would have to take in accepting and using what they receive.

It would probably take one lawsuit to royally screw FC. This is just my personal opinion on the matter.

Please continue posting original art, we all enjoy it.

[Noxira]

There's also the issue of how much the MMO format restricts content. Everything has to load as fast as possible, and with dozens of characters in the same playfield full facial emotes would simply be too huge a strain for most computers. Model poly count and texture size has to stay under control to keep a good framerate. Everything needs to stick to the general theme and atmosphere of the game, and as a roleplayer, as much as I'd love being able to create my own custom junk for my character, seeing Dragonball Z characters or Klingons running around Newland would completely ruin the immersion.

There'd inevitably be so much badly done crap submitted that it'd take way too many volunteer work hours to be worth the trouble. While I'd absolutely love custom content, I can perfectly well see why they wouldn't want to implement it. Us wonderful talented people are free to go to Second Life and create anything we want, or play Fallout 3 or Oblivion (fun as hell to mod).

[Mastablasta]

There's also the issue of how much the MMO format restricts content. Everything has to load as fast as possible, and with dozens of characters in the same playfield full facial emotes would simply be too huge a strain for most computers. Model poly count and texture size has to stay under control to keep a good framerate. Everything needs to stick to the general theme and atmosphere of the game, and as a roleplayer, as much as I'd love being able to create my own custom junk for my character, seeing Dragonball Z characters or Klingons running around Newland would completely ruin the immersion.

There'd inevitably be so much badly done crap submitted that it'd take way too many volunteer work hours to be worth the trouble. While I'd absolutely love custom content, I can perfectly well see why they wouldn't want to implement it. Us wonderful talented people are free to go to Second Life and create anything we want, or play Fallout 3 or Oblivion (fun as hell to mod).

Everquest 2 has emotes on faces that appear relating to smileys you type in the chat it's not that stressful to run, that's mostly because their engine is just pretty bad. Since the faces already have the complexity, throwing in some animations isn't all that intensive.

[Windguaerd]

Everquest 2 has emotes on faces that appear relating to smileys you type in the chat it's not that stressful to run, that's mostly because their engine is just pretty bad. Since the faces already have the complexity, throwing in some animations isn't all that intensive.

Ok, 371 faces alone will be a task, multiply that just two, that is 742 faces... do you have any idea of how big a job that would be?

[Mastablasta]

Ok, 371 faces alone will be a task, multiply that just two, that is 742 faces... do you have any idea of how big a job that would be?

In Everquest 2 you can generate your own face, and in every other random game these days, and they have facial emotes. You don't think they sat and animated a version for each combination of facial values, do you? No, they animated one (if even that, Oblivion/Fallout3's speech animation is generated on the fly by the animation software "listening" to the audiofile that is being played), then each face has points that are noted, like left side of mouth, right side of mouth, chin, eyelid, etc., and the animation, like smile, would be something like "move corners of mouth and lip up and widen eyes", this then applies to every head, as long as they have those locations specified. That is the crude explanation.

[Tryqz]

NT play style (pressing 1-2 buttons on shortcut bar - easy mode, compared to MP/engie/crat/doc/trader style). Try with 3 pets and active debuffing on several targets.

That looked like 5-8 FPS at best, which is... Meh.

The trick is, playing a DD class like NT at 1FPS when you need to hit the button every 3 seconds to attack to max your damage output, and can't just tab-q then hit your specials every 20 seconds...

[Mastablasta]

The trick is, playing a DD class like NT at 1FPS when you need to hit the button every 3 seconds to attack to max your damage output, and can't just tab-q then hit your specials every 20 seconds...

Hitting any number of buttons is the same just because the framerate is low doesn't mean the game doesn't accept key presses.

[irmo]

Hiya Means!
its friday! hurry hurry
oo.. and screenies! screenies!

[Tryqz]

The trouble with my NT was, when I played her, if you hit the button for your nuke within the cooldown period, about once a week it would decide to lock up with "already executing nanoprogram" until I next zoned.
I did hear they'd fixed that though. However whenever I played on my old laptop this is what caused me to switch to my agent as a main. Hitting AS/flingshot/concentration every minute or so is much easier to time right than a nuke every 3 seconds when you are never sure where you are in your cooldown because the bar keeps jumping randomly due to low framerate...

Hiya Means!
its friday! hurry hurry
oo.. and screenies! screenies!

This

[Boltgun]

I'm not an expert of it, but putting a few animation bones in the head will increases load a bit (not a lot it's little data) but allows well... animations making emotions little more then having you char running.

Also if instanced models really work like Means said, it means that player models aren't taking as much calculation. I'm having a hard time imagining 120 players taking the memory of... 12 models ?

Edit : I like the latest head picture, now I have the feeling that you are going to do real AO graphics. Not generic, ugly or mismatched ones.

I'm not looking to be negative, but since SL many armors aren't matching the player models. Few recent armors is matching the joint and crotch area (even ofab does that). Don't ask me why I talk so much about the crotch, but it feels poor seeing armors that will smash your balls.

Also the new ground textures, the ai buildings really don't match the ambiance (and it's plain ugly). So if you didn't do that already, it may be good to look at some original material, these handbrushed textures and all. Sometimes it's good to look at all the details on the plasteel armor before designing new stuff.

[Chrys]

Ok, 371 faces alone will be a task, multiply that just two, that is 742 faces... do you have any idea of how big a job that would be?

Imagine what the guys at Spore had to do!