The internet changed the face of MMORPGS too. Before the internet, hidden places on the MMORPGS were viable. Find a hidden vein of treasure, and milk it for weeks. Yes I know the internet is needed for MMORPGS, just trying to torque you off. But designers never thought their MMORPG would grace websites and all their secrets revealed. Newer MMORPGS are prepared for this, I hope.
If you use this product commercially, and feel its been of monetary value to you. Please donate a fraction of the value of the software. The value of this software is different for each person and company, please be fair. Thank you.
Everyone and their mom claims to be a game designer today. Artists and programmers can get in the industry, but if you are trying to enter as a game designer, good luck. There's only a handful of playable games created each year, so there really isn't that many game designers with a job.
So you can do the math. The market is already flooded with game designers, and most of them aren't very good.
I wasn't saying that short variable names help in run time. I was saying they physically take less time to type and less concentration. If you use a variable as a gear that you never need to worry about once its in place, then you can name it something short. Since its not named anything specifically, you know its not important. Its a psychological thing that I doubt many people know about.
Its a twofold gain:
A: Variables you care about aren't cluttered with the variables that you used and have no further use for.
B: Typing the variable is faster, and requires less concentration. This frees you up with more time to focus on your code.
I was just trying to say that its generally a useless affair to try and write 'compiler efficient' code on a regular basis.
Its better to write readable code, with nice and understandable variable names. Yet there are times you want to use single letter variable names for speed and uncomplicating things. If all your variable names are long, then it detracts from the ones that matter. I use i,j,k for my loops while someone else may use index_of_outer_loop.
Then to further matters, you have refactoring which says its ok to lose actual performance if your code is readable. It makes sense when you analyze the total time lost in runtime through all users as being millionths of a second, but minutes/hours in actual coding.
I don't worry about something, unless its NP complete, On^2, or running over and over. Its not about individual statements, unless they're nested deep in a loop... In which case its probably best to work in assembly. Its a high level programming language for a reason: You're not supposed to care for the running time.
If it does matter though, you want to analyze your code for where the slowdown occurs. Once you isolated the part, you can try several tecniques to speed up your code. Pick the one that runs the fastest.
My idea is: You start with Tekkenalike for gameplay. Add weapons. Add a huge world. Add MMORPG. Allow land control and warefare, RTS style(closest to explain is natural selection). So you want to control land to up your power and weapon/armor, but you need to defend it from others.
I tried coding it, but I quit because I realized it'd take me 15 years to code... But I should start back up because the key factor to it working is that the lag in the game needs to be less than it currently is. You see we can play FPS now, but we can't play Street Fighter 2 or Tekken online because the latency is too much. I guess it would be nice sitting on a killer game even if it did take 15 years of difficult development.
3d realms is hiring! Check out gamasutra.com
I applied. I figured my track record of spending half a decade on a video game and never finishing it would make me perfect material.
I was wondering something similar yesterday. I don't have kids yet, but when I do, I want them to have a wide variety of educational software to chose from. The educational software has to be fun and have some value.
The key between Free and Pay software, is that you can't stockpile a ton of pay software into a bundle to give out to everyone. With a nice standardized bundle, you have a great deal of educational and entertainment value to reap. Many of us play MAME or use abandonware, but that's not legitamate enough to give out in public or distribute to schools.
They'd syndicate television shows and movies, then broadcast them using a technology similar to bittorrent. Theres ALL sorts of old television shows that they could get for a song, but modern cable wouldn't play. And I'm not even touching on the fact they could show actually good stuff... I'm thinking as a partial archive to modern culture.
I wanted to write a Doom virus back in 92. It would force the infected computer's user to play through a level of Doom before they could see their desktop. I don't have the 31337 hacking skillz to pull off such a virus.
"Now what they need to do is impliment a ladder match making system like that in WCIII. That would get rid of the one(fastest) map mania plaguing bn today:("
The bad:
1)Warcraft3 ladder has one big problem: It rewards you for playing alot. In Starcraft, your ladder rating is good in 20 games. In Warcraft3, you need 200 games(which many people never have the patience to do). So Starcraft ladder matured, and Warcraft didn't much.
2) You're forced to play games against people with lame handles(in Starcraft I'd not play against people with offensive names).
The good:
1)Autonomous matchmaking prevents people from win trading and inflating their rating.
2)Map rotation as you said, prevents people from only playing their favorite map.
I played several maps, but none to the efficiency of dire straights. Most people played temple, and I played it ok, but nothing like dire. I would play against any race. Not playing against other races is cheese. And yes I'd want to play against high rated people, but I would steadily play against people up to 200 points below me, while many players were afraid of playing anyone but people above their rank. I think its because I started games: 1100+ only. And people thought smart players would only play people above them... If the game had no real skill, that'd be the case though.
"I would argue that playing on fastest involves more skill since you have to make quicker decisions and control your units more effectively, etc; fastest is not warp speed or anything."
Thats the core of the argument. Maybe people who don't manage their base mid-battle have an issue with the speed, but I was always issuing commands to my units/bases on fast. Fastest means less commands over time. You have less time to keep your units in formation, which favors skill less players who simply rush in and attack. You can no longer do fancy stuff either like micro 2 marines against a zergling, by having one run away and the other shoot.
Fastest favors a style of play that blitzes in attacks too. Fastest favors players who take complete control of their army and neglect their base because there's simply not enough time to build while doing a good combat in fastest. I'd regularly be placing buildings as terran while my units fought on fast... But on fastest, I'd question the even thought of playing terran because zerg can make units via hotkey, but terran takes actual time to click the build, have the screen on the base and find a placement.
There's less skill involved because there is a great deal that can be done in fast that can't be done in fastest. There's no such thing as 'click quicker' as a top player is already clicking as fast as you can. You simply 'do less moves' in the game. When you look at a game where one side can't think of extra moves to do, and the other side is
The race power question is answered this way:
Which map are you playing, and is it broodwar.
Broodwar islands has the most imbalanced race: Protoss. You can use a strategy I invented: DarkTemplar+ Shuttle + TONS of corsair. You can destroy any expansion with DT+ shuttle, and they can't run detection on you because the corsair defeat it. I went 72-0 on ladder with it, only to be defeated in semi-finals worlds (25,000$ tourney) because people scouted on me and the guy had good luck. If things get bad for this initial strategy, you mass expand to every island and put up cannontowers/templar for psistorm and its almost impossible to take out any of them.
If you're not on islands and start extremely close, its not zerg that wins, but terran. Do 4-6 marine + 4-6 scv, and nothing can stop it feasably. I dominated river styx with this opening strategy.
Like chess, Starcraft is all about who could get the upper hand fastest. Once you have the upper hand, you can use strategies to sure up your lead and theres little the enemy can do about it. I've played games that escalated the whole way up to Carriers and BattleCruisers before someone started to get an advantage, but those are 1/1000 games. Warcraft3 is a newb game, where you can lose half your army and come back to win if you click faster than your opponent. There was some solace in the rest you can do by changing up to a conservative strategy in Starcraft.
For the most part zerg has the upper hand though, especially on fastest. You need to be able to micro to stop a good zerg, and its unpredictability. To crawl up your forces with siege or microing psistorm, you need the game to be slow. The mass drop of zerglings/hydrolisks is the biggest imbalance in the game. Protoss and Terran have to pay for their dropships, but zerg gets theirs for nearly free. Terran almost has to put all their forces together to stop zerg, so when you spend time to push out from your base, and they drop way back inside your base, you lose all your buildings. Protoss's psi storm was weakened last patch so you can no longer rely on cannons/psistorm to stop the drop.
I also prefer traditional Starcraft over Broodwar. Broodwar's units completely cancel out the short game. You can have the upper hand early on, but the mid game units can level the entire playing field. Of course, most players aren't top notch and just like to use all the units in the game without earning them by playing a competitive game.
A majority of players aren't skilled enough to play a game of Starcraft and tech successfully against a good player, but teching is absolutely necessisary for Broodwar. So a majority of players like Broodwar over Starcraft because it makes them feel like they're using a wider range of units. They don't see that by being forced to tech to tier 3, they lose 1/3 of the game(tier 1).
I used to be a top ranked Starcraft player, I'd say changing the ladder speed from fast to fastest removes a great deal of micro tactics. So many tactics, I could make a good argument that there would be less skill involved. But I don't care anyway, I stopped playing because people started map hacking. If map hacking was stopped in its tracks early on, Starcraft may still be popular today.
This is my freaking idea, so if someone institutes it, its on Slashdot, and its copywrighted. Ok that settled. Have quests for in game items that translate to real life rewards. I just killed the ultimate monster, and I now I won a trip to disney world! Kill 100 orcs and get a personal pan pizza. Win coupons for the grocery store by baking. Etc etc.
Your first MMORPG is the worst. You get all caught up in the leveling aspect and wonder,"What wonderous thing can I find next?". Then you eventually learn that all the quests fit a mold:A) Kill X monsters B) Talk to some NPCs C)Find a treasure(which means look up a website on google, so no one does this anymore)
Late game content is generally PK, and PK is rarely competitive since most games aren't balanced around it. WOW claims their PK is top notch, and it probably is knowing how Blizz balances things. PK is generally more fun if you play Quake or Halo2 or something though.
MMORPGS have a great way to go still. Theres tons of avenues to take, but they're still stuck on: Leveling Grind. A proper MMORPG doesn't have the fun a pencil and paper RPG can bring you. MMORPG is fun because you can always play it and it has statistics. A pencil and paper RPG has more sense of adventure, and you have impact on the game. MMORPGS are more like an amusement park, you can take roller coaster ride, its fun, but you need to stay on the tracks. Theres other rides to take, but they won't change because you rode them. RPGs let you play the role of a hero, but in MMORPG everyone's a hero. MMORPGs are fun, and I recommend playing one if you haven't already, but if you stop and think about it, theres only so much to experience in them...so far.
Thats why I'm a video game addict, a person who's also written his own pencil and paper RPG, and a huge Blizzard fan: Yet I'm not playing WOW. I had all my fun in Asheron's Call. A MMORPG that had some action paced elements in it.
Slashdot Mirror
The internet changed the face of MMORPGS too. Before the internet, hidden places on the MMORPGS were viable. Find a hidden vein of treasure, and milk it for weeks. Yes I know the internet is needed for MMORPGS, just trying to torque you off. But designers never thought their MMORPG would grace websites and all their secrets revealed. Newer MMORPGS are prepared for this, I hope.
I would have loved to make games for PS2, but they never released the SDK to the public. I'm not saying my games would have been too cool though.
3d Realms recently posted an ad for developers on gamasutra.
I replied,"I too have worked on a game for over 10 years and refined my skills yet never completed it. I think I'd be perfect for your team."
If you use this product commercially, and feel its been of monetary value to you. Please donate a fraction of the value of the software. The value of this software is different for each person and company, please be fair. Thank you.
Everyone and their mom claims to be a game designer today. Artists and programmers can get in the industry, but if you are trying to enter as a game designer, good luck. There's only a handful of playable games created each year, so there really isn't that many game designers with a job.
So you can do the math. The market is already flooded with game designers, and most of them aren't very good.
This can mean only one thing. Japan wants to use the moon to control the tides.
I liked it at first, but it really seems like some element of depth is missing.
Before I start the operation, do you by chance have an extra life?
I wasn't saying that short variable names help in run time. I was saying they physically take less time to type and less concentration. If you use a variable as a gear that you never need to worry about once its in place, then you can name it something short. Since its not named anything specifically, you know its not important. Its a psychological thing that I doubt many people know about.
Its a twofold gain:
A: Variables you care about aren't cluttered with the variables that you used and have no further use for.
B: Typing the variable is faster, and requires less concentration. This frees you up with more time to focus on your code.
I was just trying to say that its generally a useless affair to try and write 'compiler efficient' code on a regular basis.
Its better to write readable code, with nice and understandable variable names. Yet there are times you want to use single letter variable names for speed and uncomplicating things. If all your variable names are long, then it detracts from the ones that matter. I use i,j,k for my loops while someone else may use index_of_outer_loop.
Then to further matters, you have refactoring which says its ok to lose actual performance if your code is readable. It makes sense when you analyze the total time lost in runtime through all users as being millionths of a second, but minutes/hours in actual coding.
I don't worry about something, unless its NP complete, On^2, or running over and over. Its not about individual statements, unless they're nested deep in a loop... In which case its probably best to work in assembly. Its a high level programming language for a reason: You're not supposed to care for the running time.
If it does matter though, you want to analyze your code for where the slowdown occurs. Once you isolated the part, you can try several tecniques to speed up your code. Pick the one that runs the fastest.
My idea is: You start with Tekkenalike for gameplay. Add weapons. Add a huge world. Add MMORPG. Allow land control and warefare, RTS style(closest to explain is natural selection). So you want to control land to up your power and weapon/armor, but you need to defend it from others.
I tried coding it, but I quit because I realized it'd take me 15 years to code... But I should start back up because the key factor to it working is that the lag in the game needs to be less than it currently is. You see we can play FPS now, but we can't play Street Fighter 2 or Tekken online because the latency is too much. I guess it would be nice sitting on a killer game even if it did take 15 years of difficult development.
3d realms is hiring! Check out gamasutra.com I applied. I figured my track record of spending half a decade on a video game and never finishing it would make me perfect material.
That web browser seemed to work well for me. I don't know much about Linux either.
I was wondering something similar yesterday. I don't have kids yet, but when I do, I want them to have a wide variety of educational software to chose from. The educational software has to be fun and have some value.
The key between Free and Pay software, is that you can't stockpile a ton of pay software into a bundle to give out to everyone. With a nice standardized bundle, you have a great deal of educational and entertainment value to reap. Many of us play MAME or use abandonware, but that's not legitamate enough to give out in public or distribute to schools.
They'd syndicate television shows and movies, then broadcast them using a technology similar to bittorrent. Theres ALL sorts of old television shows that they could get for a song, but modern cable wouldn't play. And I'm not even touching on the fact they could show actually good stuff... I'm thinking as a partial archive to modern culture.
Make that 94 or something. My dates are generally not accurate.
I wanted to write a Doom virus back in 92. It would force the infected computer's user to play through a level of Doom before they could see their desktop. I don't have the 31337 hacking skillz to pull off such a virus.
"Now what they need to do is impliment a ladder match making system like that in WCIII. That would get rid of the one(fastest) map mania plaguing bn today :("
The bad:
1)Warcraft3 ladder has one big problem: It rewards you for playing alot. In Starcraft, your ladder rating is good in 20 games. In Warcraft3, you need 200 games(which many people never have the patience to do). So Starcraft ladder matured, and Warcraft didn't much.
2) You're forced to play games against people with lame handles(in Starcraft I'd not play against people with offensive names). The good:
1)Autonomous matchmaking prevents people from win trading and inflating their rating.
2)Map rotation as you said, prevents people from only playing their favorite map.
3)Autonomous matchmaking also gets games faster
I played several maps, but none to the efficiency of dire straights. Most people played temple, and I played it ok, but nothing like dire. I would play against any race. Not playing against other races is cheese. And yes I'd want to play against high rated people, but I would steadily play against people up to 200 points below me, while many players were afraid of playing anyone but people above their rank. I think its because I started games: 1100+ only. And people thought smart players would only play people above them... If the game had no real skill, that'd be the case though.
"I would argue that playing on fastest involves more skill since you have to make quicker decisions and control your units more effectively, etc; fastest is not warp speed or anything."
Thats the core of the argument. Maybe people who don't manage their base mid-battle have an issue with the speed, but I was always issuing commands to my units/bases on fast. Fastest means less commands over time. You have less time to keep your units in formation, which favors skill less players who simply rush in and attack. You can no longer do fancy stuff either like micro 2 marines against a zergling, by having one run away and the other shoot.
Fastest favors a style of play that blitzes in attacks too. Fastest favors players who take complete control of their army and neglect their base because there's simply not enough time to build while doing a good combat in fastest. I'd regularly be placing buildings as terran while my units fought on fast... But on fastest, I'd question the even thought of playing terran because zerg can make units via hotkey, but terran takes actual time to click the build, have the screen on the base and find a placement.
There's less skill involved because there is a great deal that can be done in fast that can't be done in fastest. There's no such thing as 'click quicker' as a top player is already clicking as fast as you can. You simply 'do less moves' in the game. When you look at a game where one side can't think of extra moves to do, and the other side is
The race power question is answered this way: Which map are you playing, and is it broodwar. Broodwar islands has the most imbalanced race: Protoss. You can use a strategy I invented: DarkTemplar+ Shuttle + TONS of corsair. You can destroy any expansion with DT+ shuttle, and they can't run detection on you because the corsair defeat it. I went 72-0 on ladder with it, only to be defeated in semi-finals worlds (25,000$ tourney) because people scouted on me and the guy had good luck. If things get bad for this initial strategy, you mass expand to every island and put up cannontowers/templar for psistorm and its almost impossible to take out any of them.
If you're not on islands and start extremely close, its not zerg that wins, but terran. Do 4-6 marine + 4-6 scv, and nothing can stop it feasably. I dominated river styx with this opening strategy.
Like chess, Starcraft is all about who could get the upper hand fastest. Once you have the upper hand, you can use strategies to sure up your lead and theres little the enemy can do about it. I've played games that escalated the whole way up to Carriers and BattleCruisers before someone started to get an advantage, but those are 1/1000 games. Warcraft3 is a newb game, where you can lose half your army and come back to win if you click faster than your opponent. There was some solace in the rest you can do by changing up to a conservative strategy in Starcraft.
For the most part zerg has the upper hand though, especially on fastest. You need to be able to micro to stop a good zerg, and its unpredictability. To crawl up your forces with siege or microing psistorm, you need the game to be slow. The mass drop of zerglings/hydrolisks is the biggest imbalance in the game. Protoss and Terran have to pay for their dropships, but zerg gets theirs for nearly free. Terran almost has to put all their forces together to stop zerg, so when you spend time to push out from your base, and they drop way back inside your base, you lose all your buildings. Protoss's psi storm was weakened last patch so you can no longer rely on cannons/psistorm to stop the drop.
I also prefer traditional Starcraft over Broodwar. Broodwar's units completely cancel out the short game. You can have the upper hand early on, but the mid game units can level the entire playing field. Of course, most players aren't top notch and just like to use all the units in the game without earning them by playing a competitive game.
A majority of players aren't skilled enough to play a game of Starcraft and tech successfully against a good player, but teching is absolutely necessisary for Broodwar. So a majority of players like Broodwar over Starcraft because it makes them feel like they're using a wider range of units. They don't see that by being forced to tech to tier 3, they lose 1/3 of the game(tier 1).
I used to be a top ranked Starcraft player, I'd say changing the ladder speed from fast to fastest removes a great deal of micro tactics. So many tactics, I could make a good argument that there would be less skill involved. But I don't care anyway, I stopped playing because people started map hacking. If map hacking was stopped in its tracks early on, Starcraft may still be popular today.
This is my freaking idea, so if someone institutes it, its on Slashdot, and its copywrighted. Ok that settled. Have quests for in game items that translate to real life rewards. I just killed the ultimate monster, and I now I won a trip to disney world! Kill 100 orcs and get a personal pan pizza. Win coupons for the grocery store by baking. Etc etc.
Your first MMORPG is the worst. You get all caught up in the leveling aspect and wonder,"What wonderous thing can I find next?". Then you eventually learn that all the quests fit a mold:A) Kill X monsters B) Talk to some NPCs C)Find a treasure(which means look up a website on google, so no one does this anymore)
Late game content is generally PK, and PK is rarely competitive since most games aren't balanced around it. WOW claims their PK is top notch, and it probably is knowing how Blizz balances things. PK is generally more fun if you play Quake or Halo2 or something though.
MMORPGS have a great way to go still. Theres tons of avenues to take, but they're still stuck on: Leveling Grind. A proper MMORPG doesn't have the fun a pencil and paper RPG can bring you. MMORPG is fun because you can always play it and it has statistics. A pencil and paper RPG has more sense of adventure, and you have impact on the game. MMORPGS are more like an amusement park, you can take roller coaster ride, its fun, but you need to stay on the tracks. Theres other rides to take, but they won't change because you rode them. RPGs let you play the role of a hero, but in MMORPG everyone's a hero. MMORPGs are fun, and I recommend playing one if you haven't already, but if you stop and think about it, theres only so much to experience in them...so far.
Thats why I'm a video game addict, a person who's also written his own pencil and paper RPG, and a huge Blizzard fan: Yet I'm not playing WOW. I had all my fun in Asheron's Call. A MMORPG that had some action paced elements in it.