Mounts

prettycelt · June 2016

I don't know if this has already been suggested, but having played both Champions and Neverwinter Online, would it be too difficult to import mounts over to CO? Or for that matter, have ground vehicles? This would open the door for motorcycles, choppers, muscle cars, 4-wheelers, horses, tigers, bulls...the list goes on and on. It would be a cash crop IMO, and wildly popular. It would also allow for those 'historical' or ancient-themed characters to find rides that fit their concept, and certainly wouldn't seem any more inconvenient than getting around with, say, Acrobatics as a travel power....

roughbearmattach · June 2016

The game engine does not support ground-based vehicles/characters/etc that have more than one contact point. Once a four-legged or otherwise wide/low moving object reaches a certain size, it's ground movement becomes floaty and it clips with slopes or semi-hovers.

prettycelt · June 2016

roughbearmattach said:
The game engine does not support ground-based vehicles/characters/etc that have more than one contact point. Once a four-legged or otherwise wide/low moving object reaches a certain size, it's ground movement becomes floaty and it clips with slopes or semi-hovers.

This isn't the same game engine as they use in Neverwinter? It's all Cryptic........

roughbearmattach · June 2016

It is not the same game engine, no.

soulforger · June 2016

roughbearmattach said:
It is not the same game engine, no.

Actually, it is the same engine, just that the version is different. CO, STO, and NW use the same engines at different versions. CO's engine version is basically the beta version. They could update the engine to make things work, but, that would take more work than anything they have ever worked on before, but, that will not happen for that would take to many resources they don't have.

championshewolf · June 2016

soulforger wrote: »

Actually, it is the same engine, just that the version is different. CO, STO, and NW use the same engines at different versions. CO's engine version is basically the beta version. They could update the engine to make things work, but, that would take more work than anything they have ever worked on before, but, that will not happen for that would take to many resources they don't have.

It's more of an investment issue than a time issue. Neverwinter also uses some additional plug ins as well that don't exist in the base Cryptic engine. Needless to say, I think a code merge and update to Champions would be an incredible thing at this point, but convincing the bean counters it would be worth the investment is the hard part. Champion is now, I believe 6 years out of date compared to STO or NW as far as code work goes.

soulforger · June 2016

championshewolf said:

It's more of an investment issue than a time issue. Neverwinter also uses some additional plug ins as well that don't exist in the base Cryptic engine. Needless to say, I think a code merge and update to Champions would be an incredible thing at this point, but convincing the bean counters it would be worth the investment is the hard part. Champion is now, I believe 6 years out of date compared to STO or NW as far as code work goes.

Yeah, that is true.

pantagruel01 · June 2016

CO had one time it was upgraded to main branch code; it was called the 'kitchen sink patch' and broke stuff for months. IIRC that was in 2010, so only a year out of date and already a lot of problems. Trying to upgrade CO to the main branch now would be a nightmare.

championshewolf · June 2016

pantagruel01 wrote: »

CO had one time it was upgraded to main branch code; it was called the 'kitchen sink patch' and broke stuff for months. IIRC that was in 2010, so only a year out of date and already a lot of problems. Trying to upgrade CO to the main branch now would be a nightmare.

Two times. There was the kitchen sink patch but they routinely were going to update it more often. They updated it again around the F2P update, but once On Alert hit, well, what I was told is that On alert basically f---ed everything up making a smooth code merge impossible.

Again, a code merge is desperately needed, the problem is convincing the bean counters it would be worth the investment (which I think many of us would say yes it would).

soulforger · June 2016

championshewolf said:

Two times. There was the kitchen sink patch but they routinely were going to update it more often. They updated it again around the F2P update, but once On Alert hit, well, what I was told is that On alert basically f---ed everything up making a smooth code merge impossible.

Again, a code merge is desperately needed, the problem is convincing the bean counters it would be worth the investment (which I think many of us would say yes it would).

Aye, its player base would say it is, but, I doubt the bean counters would listen to us.

roughbearmattach · June 2016

So not a different engine, but such and older version that might as well be.

squirrelloid · June 2016

Just because land-based mounts wouldn't work doesn't mean we couldn't have flying mounts.

I'm holding out hope for a unicorn death pony who rides through the skies on a cloud of rainbows and sunshine. With Kaiserin, it may even happen!

(At the very least, could we have some 'vehicles' that weren't machines? Magical constructs? Flying animal mounts? Bound qlippothic tentacle barges? something?)

soulforger · June 2016

roughbearmattach said:
So not a different engine, but such and older version that might as well be.

True, it might as well be.

squirrelloid said:
Just because land-based mounts wouldn't work doesn't mean we couldn't have flying mounts.

I'm holding out hope for a unicorn death pony who rides through the skies on a cloud of rainbows and sunshine. With Kaiserin, it may even happen!

(At the very least, could we have some 'vehicles' that weren't machines? Magical constructs? Flying animal mounts? Bound qlippothic tentacle barges? something?)

Good point, flying mounts might be doable.

eiledon · June 2016

Neverwinter uses a later branch of the game engine and a lot of improvements are not backwards compatible, on top of this the code to get ground mounts working was specially written for that branch.

The only ground mounts we could really get that wouldn't look strange would perhaps be Big Wheel type vehicles (like Grievous cycle when fleeing from Obi Wan in prequels) which have a single point/small area of ground contact

As for animated flying mounts - the issue here i believe is getting animator time which is very limited commodity in Cryptic.

squirrelloid · June 2016

eiledon said:
Neverwinter uses a later branch of the game engine and a lot of improvements are not backwards compatible, on top of this the code to get ground mounts working was specially written for that branch.

The only ground mounts we could really get that wouldn't look strange would perhaps be Big Wheel type vehicles (like Grievous cycle when fleeing from Obi Wan in prequels) which have a single point/small area of ground contact

As for animated flying mounts - the issue here i believe is getting animator time which is very limited commodity in Cryptic.

The skeleton animation should be portable between versions. At least NWO uses emotes that were part of CO. So it should take only limited work to port the horse skeleton movements from NWO to CO, i would think. At which point, once it doesn't have to be on the ground (because its flying), that should be mostly sufficient.

championshewolf · June 2016

squirrelloid wrote: »

The skeleton animation should be portable between versions. At least NWO uses emotes that were part of CO. So it should take only limited work to port the horse skeleton movements from NWO to CO, i would think. At which point, once it doesn't have to be on the ground (because its flying), that should be mostly sufficient.

Neverwinter uses a completely different skeletal animation system which has more bones in it to, from my understanding, so not exactly portable.

squirrelloid · June 2016

championshewolf said:

Neverwinter uses a completely different skeletal animation system which has more bones in it to, from my understanding, so not exactly portable.

That's strange, since they use some of the same emotes we have.

But regardless, CO doesn't even have a horse animation, so there's no quantity to be greater than in CO. Just use whatever skeletal animation for horses they have.

championshewolf · June 2016

squirrelloid wrote: »

That's strange, since they use some of the same emotes we have.

But regardless, CO doesn't even have a horse animation, so there's no quantity to be greater than in CO. Just use whatever skeletal animation for horses they have.

As I said, Champions engine needs an update and desperately. Not just on simple animations and such, but on the sheer number of systems that the other two games have that work so much better. But again, we have to convince the bean counters it would e worth such an update in man hours to convert the code over.

flechus · June 2016

Hold on

The game engine does not support ground-based vehicles/characters/etc that have more than one contact point.

then, how about mono-bikes?

chalupaoffury · July 2016

FYI, if you wanna see *why* this won't work, go over to the institute just to the west of ren center, and stand at the top of the ramps that come up from west side. Watch the cars as they get to the top of the ramp, and you'll see why we'll never get ground vehicles.

I think this and wall crawling/running are historically the 2 most common requests, so of course they're also the hardest to do.

Mounts

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