I rebooted and now I can post this (the last patch message)
Update Notes v48873
06/16/2003 01:06 PM
So far, this project has been a total of over 85,000 changes in 3 years.
Over 3,000 of these changes have been made since just the last update (2 weeks).
We're sure we've created bugs with this number of changes, please test everything, as we need to find and resolve anything we have broken.
Features: # Added lightning beams, particle beams, acid beams, and flame throwers # Player houses can now be used as cantinas # Faction HQs added. They're neat. # Lots of content: new static missions, caves, and more. # Water visuals improved - this is also now on a slider in the options screen # Flags now blow in the wind # Large and dangerous creatures now have area of effect attacks
Big Bug Fixes (we hope - please report if you still see these, we cannot be sure we fixed all occurances of these bugs): # Significant client performance improvements # Many fixes to improve server performance, especially at high load. # Fixed dozens of client crash bugs, client should be much more stable # Fixes for the "ghost world" problem # Fixes for harvesters not working # Fixes for extremely high lag situations # Swimming: all characters now swim faster # AI: under laggy conditions, AI will continue to attack at full speed. # Pets: You now get a pet control device that lives in your datapad. You get one device for each pet. # Pets: The pet follow bug is fixed. # Pets: Pets now grow up correctly; previously, there was a bug that kept them from growing. # Pets: You can heal your pet's wounds (not damage) with food and tricks. # Pets: You can heal both their wounds and their damage by storing/calling them. # Pets: Pets will also regen damage (slowly) over time.Pets: All pet vanishing issues should be resolved # Harvesters now take power correctly # Fixed wookiees not being able to walk into some rooms because they're too big # Travel: fixed travel eating your ticket but not taking you to your destination # Fixes for permanent death state # Fixes for permanent stat loss # Factory Hoppers are fixed # Smuggler Trainers are fixed # Bio-engineers are fixed # Surrendering skills is fixed # Improved bazaar performance
Exploit Bug Fixes: # Can no longer/split containers in someone else's house # Can no longer/loot someone else's kill # Can no longer offer items on your vendor, and retain them in your inventory # Can no longer/threatenshot forever to keep a creature from aggroing you # Can no longer/show corpse to heal yourself and make yourself invulnerable # Can no longer get multiple buildings with a single deed # Can no longer get infinite experience with/scentmask # Can no longer use/unarmedlunge to whack very hard creatures # Tutorial: fixed newbie-skipped exploit which allowed players to start with double equipment # Access Fee from the Balcony grief: If you cannot afford to pay the access fee on a house you will be teleported to the entrance of the house (even if you were standing on the roof). # Removed the aligned mission terminal as a faction perk - no, you were not meant to have your own personal mission terminal you could walk around with # No more exploiting the bazaar for infinite money. # Fixed: Surveying infinitely while sitting # Can no longer kite an AI into water and sit on the edge of the shore while they swim and you kill them. # Fixed: Characters named "bank" would get money when someone typed "/tip bank (money)". No more characters named "Bank" allowed.
All other bug fixes: # AI: Improved pathfinding # AI: Increased confusion duration for when AI is attacked by prone, kneeling, scentMasked and/or concealed players # AI: Though entertaining, will no longer deathblow incapacitated players that they weren't in c
Sounds reasonable, I guess the Lucas deal precludes such arrangements to save arguing about the split.
The do have a problem in that many of the subscribers are hoping that EQ2 will be their next stop. SWG is positioned nicely for those players. I reckon about 6 months of SWG will do then it's back to Guk 8)
last week we had a nice"/show corpse" bug which brought you back to life if you got killed, that was a fun night. s'been fixed now bah
Non of them are show stoppers really. Just a pain when you walk 2500m to find you mission has spawned inside another spawn and it you can't target it. Or theres nothing there at all except a way-point on your map.
However, if it was my software it would be labelled version 0.9 and I'd say it wasn't ready. Early adopters beware, you'll be getting regular patches.
I'm running in 1280x1024 with a GForce ti4600 on dual 1ghz with 768Gb RAM
When I tried to run it on my Voodoo5 it said "Directx9 not installed" even though it was. I tried finding some more XP drivers for it but lost the will and switched it off.
The player built houses & shops will really change this game as time goes on. Not enough time on the beta for a massive building plan, "player citites" are said to be the first post-launch big new feature. The characters all seem pretty individual because there's not the "the best armor for Trolls at level 15 is the Chainmail" feature.
It's "do something over and over for XP" & yes, you can macro your way to the top/sample/sleep 500/stand/sleep 500/sample/sleep 500/stand/sleep 500 etc.
The client kicks you out after about 30 mins afk (although I've never timed it but I have been kicked)
You can buy machines to do the harvesting for you but it can be a bit of a grind fest making 500 pointless items for the XP and then destroying them.
After 10,000 or so XP you have to go to a trainer or PCs can train each other in all but Master & Novice and for this the PC gets 20ish Apprentice Points (APs). For some disciplines you need 600 or so APs to become a master.
I'm sure you'll see the skill tree on the fan boards soon, it's not that complicated.
You are given 250 skill points to spend at the start of the game & each discipline takes 64 skill points to Master all 4 branches. There are about 20 disciplines. You can surrender a skill at any time and recover your skill points so if you're fed up of something you can switch.
They've done a great job at trying to appeal to all types of MMORPG players from chatters to fighters. I think the game is a success already despite the minor flaws I've seen.
I'm told that EQ was pretty much the same at this stage of development.
I think I will be moving from tester to player. I played EQ for 3+ years, I'm pretty sure SWG will grow enough to accommodate long term players.
The game is more fun and dying isn't such a pain. Navigation is easy and so is finding your group. (open you datapad, click "create waypoint" and everyone in the group can see it on their maps)
Advancing seems steady and you can group with players of all abilities and still participate (you need to do at least 5% of the damage to a MOB to get any XP)
They've tried to take the pain out of the game and I think, on the most part, they've suceeded.
Is $15 too steep? We'll see.
At launch Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided will offer four subscription plan options: Month-to-month - $14.99; three months - $14.00 per month; six months - $13.00 per month; and 12 months - $12.00 per month.
I really hope that when EQ2 comes out they'll say "$20 a month for SWG & EQ & EQ2"
Incapacitated - this is generally what happens to you, MOB takes you down and you fall over until your hits/action.mind points recover (typically about 60 secs but I've had 128 & 4)
Sometimes a MOB will come in and give you a death blow and it's back to town.
Even then you can insure your belongings so that you wake up in town with everything you've insured and the stuff you collected since insuring yourself will be on your corpse with your money.
There is a galactic bank (but you have to return to your bank's planet to get to your items [you can move banks]. Cash transactions are available at all banks.
As for the underpants - the reliance on fancy armor has been removed. You start with some clothes but I took them off for fun.
I look much like this atm. although last night I found a new hat but I don't have any good screenies of it.
I'm not very powerful atm. because we had to start again this week because Sony wiped the server ready for the start! [without warning just "Oh. we've wiped the servers, could you start again please". Nuff ppl were getting mardy in the forums but thats the life of a tester]
As well as that most of the MOBS are random spawn so if you come back tomorrow chances are they will be gone.
hehe twice now I've been trying to do a good post and different family members want my taxi services !
The game isn't finished but that doesn't stop it being fun. It's not a shoddy product but it doesn't shine like the first day I played EQ (admittedly in June 1999 which was about 3 months after launch).
Having seen the changes from the last few (no doubt panic stricken) weeks I'm pretty confident this game will matrure into something pretty good. I don't think it raises the benchmark that much. Some of the grind has been removed but not all of it. Best thing is that you are not stuck with your initial choices (important on a one character per server game). You can surrender skills and try new ones and adjust your base stats.
where they said they'd pay any fines you got speeding on the day of release
I went through some speed cameras at a fair lick but it wasn't my lucky day. I was looking forward to the incredulous looks I would get but it never happened.
You want to have a personalised skin so you pick a Marvel Comic Character, that's so lame!
I think Josh said it best [about making fps mods]: ----------------- Step Two: Pick a Hot Property
You have to base your mod on something, and nothing works better than somebody else's copyrighted property. Heck, George Lucas isn't going to mind if you steal his beloved characters for personal use. Neither is old Tolkien, who is probably burning in hell for writing such blasphemous nonsense. Here are a couple suggestions for possible mod material:
Star Wars
X-Men
Harry Potter
The Matrix
Lord of the Rings
Dragonball Z
Denver the Last Dinosaur -----------------
someone ought to get a good beating over the head with a large cluestick...
Yes, the webmaster that wrote a website relying on USER_AGENTs being reported and didn't offer a fallback option for when User_agent is blank / misleading
Which would be ironic as an auction is the only place where one can legally launder stolen property, that's why there's a public display of the goods before the sale.
Legislation usually steps in to take up the slack.
Now if *every* website was retroactively forced to carry a guestbook imagine the delight of the scores of newly trained HTML monkeys being churned out day after day from 16+ colleges across continental Europe.
Next step is mandating that the posters use some sort of Europe wide centralised identification database to validate them.
One of the early applications will be chat rooms where the participants will be validated as children.
We'd then have a situation where anyone can say anything about anyone but as a matter of public record and where both parties are validated.
If I meet a new person I can then review their posting record and make judgements about them.
The implication being that having to live in the open tends to make people more honest. Besides you'll be able to cross reference the record of the people making any accusations to see if it's a habit etc.etc.
As for my position well, I want either the freedom to be anonymous or for everyone to be forced into the open. If it thought it was feasable I'd support the idea of a droid that records your every move used in Ian M. Banks' sci-fi novels concerning "The Culture".
If I can access the every move and utterence of *everyone* else and they have access to mine then where's the problem?
Sadly the implementation must be all or nothing from day 1 as the evolutionary steps make the place worse not better from the disparity on who can watch whom.
the police get to use a proportion of the fines on dealing with road safety issues in their area.
If I recall *all* the profits from camera fines etc. have to be spent on the road safety budget. This could well mean sometimes that officer overtime for such things is taken out of it but they are not supposed to offset the cost of anything else against the money made from speed cameras.
My impression is that NT was supposed to push the device drivers out of the kernel and use the HAL but their attempt failed due to performance issues and stuff got put back inside.
So the NT kernel* is a bit of a compromise
* I had to laugh about kerlen in the subject, I saw the typo when I hit preview and when I corrected it turns out I'd repeated the same typo!
We all want the right to try and get away with doing 100mph in residential areas.
I'd rather have a government mandated GPS/Galilleo regulated speed limiter then I can forget about the whole stupid business of speed regulation and just drive with my foot to the floor.
The lessons of your own eyes a pretty simple.
There is some class of people that will *always* drive too fast and endanger the rest of us no matter what the road conditions and if 15 years of jail time doesn't stop them and $50,000 dollar fines don't stop them then why not add culpability as well as capability to the vehicle.
I'm sure we'd all welcome a "who pulled the trigger" monitor on every gun.
They are everywhere, I end up spending half my driving concentration making sure I'm not creeping up to 50 from 40.
The road that runs outside my house has "average speed" cameras for 5 miles. The cameras span your registration at regular intervals (about 500m) and the fine plops through your door.
Am I right that in thre US there is no more consequence for a ticket than repeated fines?
If we get 3 speeding tickets in a 3 year period we are automatically banned from driving for a year. Also, our car insurance premiums increase.
Slashdot Mirror
I rebooted and now I can post this (the last patch message)
/split containers in someone else's house /loot someone else's kill /threatenshot forever to keep a creature from aggroing you /show corpse to heal yourself and make yourself invulnerable /scentmask /unarmedlunge to whack very hard creatures
Update Notes v48873
06/16/2003 01:06 PM
So far, this project has been a total of over 85,000 changes in 3 years.
Over 3,000 of these changes have been made since just the last update (2 weeks).
We're sure we've created bugs with this number of changes, please test everything, as we need to find and resolve anything we have broken.
Features:
# Added lightning beams, particle beams, acid beams, and flame throwers
# Player houses can now be used as cantinas
# Faction HQs added. They're neat.
# Lots of content: new static missions, caves, and more.
# Water visuals improved - this is also now on a slider in the options screen
# Flags now blow in the wind
# Large and dangerous creatures now have area of effect attacks
Big Bug Fixes (we hope - please report if you still see these, we cannot be sure we fixed all occurances of these bugs):
# Significant client performance improvements
# Many fixes to improve server performance, especially at high load.
# Fixed dozens of client crash bugs, client should be much more stable
# Fixes for the "ghost world" problem
# Fixes for harvesters not working
# Fixes for extremely high lag situations
# Swimming: all characters now swim faster
# AI: under laggy conditions, AI will continue to attack at full speed.
# Pets: You now get a pet control device that lives in your datapad. You get one device for each pet.
# Pets: The pet follow bug is fixed.
# Pets: Pets now grow up correctly; previously, there was a bug that kept them from growing.
# Pets: You can heal your pet's wounds (not damage) with food and tricks.
# Pets: You can heal both their wounds and their damage by storing/calling them.
# Pets: Pets will also regen damage (slowly) over time.Pets: All pet vanishing issues should be resolved
# Harvesters now take power correctly
# Fixed wookiees not being able to walk into some rooms because they're too big
# Travel: fixed travel eating your ticket but not taking you to your destination
# Fixes for permanent death state
# Fixes for permanent stat loss
# Factory Hoppers are fixed
# Smuggler Trainers are fixed
# Bio-engineers are fixed
# Surrendering skills is fixed
# Improved bazaar performance
Exploit Bug Fixes:
# Can no longer
# Can no longer
# Can no longer offer items on your vendor, and retain them in your inventory
# Can no longer
# Can no longer
# Can no longer get multiple buildings with a single deed
# Can no longer get infinite experience with
# Can no longer use
# Tutorial: fixed newbie-skipped exploit which allowed players to start with double equipment
# Access Fee from the Balcony grief: If you cannot afford to pay the access fee on a house you will be teleported to the entrance of the house (even if you were standing on the roof).
# Removed the aligned mission terminal as a faction perk - no, you were not meant to have your own personal mission terminal you could walk around with
# No more exploiting the bazaar for infinite money.
# Fixed: Surveying infinitely while sitting
# Can no longer kite an AI into water and sit on the edge of the shore while they swim and you kill them.
# Fixed: Characters named "bank" would get money when someone typed "/tip bank (money)". No more characters named "Bank" allowed.
All other bug fixes:
# AI: Improved pathfinding
# AI: Increased confusion duration for when AI is attacked by prone, kneeling, scentMasked and/or concealed players
# AI: Though entertaining, will no longer deathblow incapacitated players that they weren't in c
not what it's worth
that's how economics works
the value is in the mind of the purchaser
Sounds reasonable, I guess the Lucas deal precludes such arrangements to save arguing about the split.
The do have a problem in that many of the subscribers are hoping that EQ2 will be their next stop. SWG is positioned nicely for those players. I reckon about 6 months of SWG will do then it's back to Guk 8)
There's some really nice scenery. I often find myself wandering round with the HUD turned off just admiring the views.
The indoor stuff is admittedly dank but you spend most of your time outside. Mind you I've not been to Jabbas Palace that might excite.
last week we had a nice" /show corpse" bug which brought you back to life if you got killed, that was a fun night. s'been fixed now bah
Non of them are show stoppers really. Just a pain when you walk 2500m to find you mission has spawned inside another spawn and it you can't target it. Or theres nothing there at all except a way-point on your map.
However, if it was my software it would be labelled version 0.9 and I'd say it wasn't ready. Early adopters beware, you'll be getting regular patches.
I'm running in 1280x1024 with a GForce ti4600 on dual 1ghz with 768Gb RAM
When I tried to run it on my Voodoo5 it said "Directx9 not installed" even though it was. I tried finding some more XP drivers for it but lost the will and switched it off.
My current character (that's the wiped one on the wall)
The player built houses & shops will really change this game as time goes on. Not enough time on the beta for a massive building plan, "player citites" are said to be the first post-launch big new feature. The characters all seem pretty individual because there's not the "the best armor for Trolls at level 15 is the Chainmail" feature.
There's plenty of entertainment
It's "do something over and over for XP" /sample /sleep 500 /stand /sleep 500 /sample /sleep 500 /stand /sleep 500
& yes, you can macro your way to the top
etc.
The client kicks you out after about 30 mins afk (although I've never timed it but I have been kicked)
You can buy machines to do the harvesting for you but it can be a bit of a grind fest making 500 pointless items for the XP and then destroying them.
After 10,000 or so XP you have to go to a trainer or PCs can train each other in all but Master & Novice and for this the PC gets 20ish Apprentice Points (APs). For some disciplines you need 600 or so APs to become a master.
I'm sure you'll see the skill tree on the fan boards soon, it's not that complicated.
You are given 250 skill points to spend at the start of the game & each discipline takes 64 skill points to Master all 4 branches. There are about 20 disciplines. You can surrender a skill at any time and recover your skill points so if you're fed up of something you can switch.
They've done a great job at trying to appeal to all types of MMORPG players from chatters to fighters. I think the game is a success already despite the minor flaws I've seen.
I'm told that EQ was pretty much the same at this stage of development.
I think I will be moving from tester to player.
I played EQ for 3+ years, I'm pretty sure SWG will grow enough to accommodate long term players.
The game is more fun and dying isn't such a pain.
Navigation is easy and so is finding your group. (open you datapad, click "create waypoint" and everyone in the group can see it on their maps)
Advancing seems steady and you can group with players of all abilities and still participate (you need to do at least 5% of the damage to a MOB to get any XP)
They've tried to take the pain out of the game and I think, on the most part, they've suceeded.
Is $15 too steep? We'll see.
At launch Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided will offer four subscription plan options: Month-to-month - $14.99;
three months - $14.00 per month;
six months - $13.00 per month;
and 12 months - $12.00 per month.
I really hope that when EQ2 comes out they'll say "$20 a month for SWG & EQ & EQ2"
nah, there are two forms of "death"
Incapacitated - this is generally what happens to you, MOB takes you down and you fall over until your hits/action.mind points recover (typically about 60 secs but I've had 128 & 4)
Sometimes a MOB will come in and give you a death blow and it's back to town.
Even then you can insure your belongings so that you wake up in town with everything you've insured and the stuff you collected since insuring yourself will be on your corpse with your money.
There is a galactic bank (but you have to return to your bank's planet to get to your items [you can move banks]. Cash transactions are available at all banks.
As for the underpants - the reliance on fancy armor has been removed. You start with some clothes but I took them off for fun.
I look much like this atm. although last night I found a new hat but I don't have any good screenies of it.
I'm not very powerful atm. because we had to start again this week because Sony wiped the server ready for the start! [without warning just "Oh. we've wiped the servers, could you start again please". Nuff ppl were getting mardy in the forums but thats the life of a tester]
As well as that most of the MOBS are random spawn so if you come back tomorrow chances are they will be gone.
hehe twice now I've been trying to do a good post and different family members want my taxi services !
I've been beta for about a month
The game isn't finished but that doesn't stop it being fun. It's not a shoddy product but it doesn't shine like the first day I played EQ (admittedly in June 1999 which was about 3 months after launch).
The AI can be dumb with NPCs standing there clapping as you pummel their friends.
Here's me killing a very red MOB by getting it stuck behind a small rock
Having seen the changes from the last few (no doubt panic stricken) weeks I'm pretty confident this game will matrure into something pretty good. I don't think it raises the benchmark that much. Some of the grind has been removed but not all of it. Best thing is that you are not stuck with your initial choices (important on a one character per server game). You can surrender skills and try new ones and adjust your base stats.
And you you look for it there is certainly plenty of action with groups of up to twenty
Many people will like it on it's own merit but I'm sure for many people it will be a welcome stop-over on the way to EQ2.
where they said they'd pay any fines you got speeding on the day of release
I went through some speed cameras at a fair lick but it wasn't my lucky day. I was looking forward to the incredulous looks I would get but it never happened.
because I have absolutely no idea who Denver the Dinosaur is but I'm glad it gave you a nostalgic buzz.
You want to have a personalised skin so you pick a Marvel Comic Character, that's so lame!
:
I think Josh said it best [about making fps mods]
-----------------
Step Two: Pick a Hot Property
You have to base your mod on something, and nothing works better than somebody else's copyrighted property. Heck, George Lucas isn't going to mind if you steal his beloved characters for personal use. Neither is old Tolkien, who is probably burning in hell for writing such blasphemous nonsense. Here are a couple suggestions for possible mod material:
Star Wars
X-Men
Harry Potter
The Matrix
Lord of the Rings
Dragonball Z
Denver the Last Dinosaur
-----------------
My money is also proximal to my mouth
someone ought to get a good beating over the head with a large cluestick...
Yes, the webmaster that wrote a website relying on USER_AGENTs being reported and didn't offer a fallback option for when User_agent is blank / misleading
that'll show 'em!
Which would be ironic as an auction is the only place where one can legally launder stolen property, that's why there's a public display of the goods before the sale.
$5 please
if it was such a cover up, how come *you* know about it.
It would be my guess that the most spectacular cover ups are the ones that get covered up not the ones that get uncovered.
before somebody else manages
so you only need 1 PC
mind you, he might be using an transmeta XP laptop
Because Innovation is not doing it on it's own.
Legislation usually steps in to take up the slack.
Now if *every* website was retroactively forced to carry a guestbook imagine the delight of the scores of newly trained HTML monkeys being churned out day after day from 16+ colleges across continental Europe.
Next step is mandating that the posters use some sort of Europe wide centralised identification database to validate them.
One of the early applications will be chat rooms where the participants will be validated as children.
We'd then have a situation where anyone can say anything about anyone but as a matter of public record and where both parties are validated.
If I meet a new person I can then review their posting record and make judgements about them.
The implication being that having to live in the open tends to make people more honest. Besides you'll be able to cross reference the record of the people making any accusations to see if it's a habit etc.etc.
As for my position well, I want either the freedom to be anonymous or for everyone to be forced into the open.
If it thought it was feasable I'd support the idea of a droid that records your every move used in Ian M. Banks' sci-fi novels concerning "The Culture".
If I can access the every move and utterence of *everyone* else and they have access to mine then where's the problem?
Sadly the implementation must be all or nothing from day 1 as the evolutionary steps make the place worse not better from the disparity on who can watch whom.
the police get to use a proportion of the fines on dealing with road safety issues in their area.
If I recall *all* the profits from camera fines etc. have to be spent on the road safety budget. This could well mean sometimes that officer overtime for such things is taken out of it but they are not supposed to offset the cost of anything else against the money made from speed cameras.
Microsoft play the feature tickbox game.
My impression is that NT was supposed to push the device drivers out of the kernel and use the HAL but their attempt failed due to performance issues and stuff got put back inside.
So the NT kernel* is a bit of a compromise
* I had to laugh about kerlen in the subject, I saw the typo when I hit preview and when I corrected it turns out I'd repeated the same typo!
for the info
it's one of those weird things isn't it
We all want the right to try and get away with doing 100mph in residential areas.
I'd rather have a government mandated GPS/Galilleo regulated speed limiter then I can forget about the whole stupid business of speed regulation and just drive with my foot to the floor.
The lessons of your own eyes a pretty simple.
There is some class of people that will *always* drive too fast and endanger the rest of us no matter what the road conditions and if 15 years of jail time doesn't stop them and $50,000 dollar fines don't stop them then why not add culpability as well as capability to the vehicle.
I'm sure we'd all welcome a "who pulled the trigger" monitor on every gun.
They are everywhere, I end up spending half my driving concentration making sure I'm not creeping up to 50 from 40.
The road that runs outside my house has "average speed" cameras for 5 miles. The cameras span your registration at regular intervals (about 500m) and the fine plops through your door.
Am I right that in thre US there is no more consequence for a ticket than repeated fines?
If we get 3 speeding tickets in a 3 year period we are automatically banned from driving for a year.
Also, our car insurance premiums increase.
If anyone's interested there's plenty of info here
http://www.speed-trap.co.uk
It's quite simple really.
Big kernels have more potential for disaster.
Run everything you can in user space and you reduce your risk.
That's a great theory but in practice you need a great kernel and some suitable userland support.
Don't think HURD, think plan9