STO and NW get brought down to our level as their Foundry's explode in source code. From the ashes rise some badges, a jungle thing, and a nice light for trekkies, and a cape for larpers, done in the style of 'killed 5000 anvil enemies perk in CO'.
https://arcgames.com/en/games/star-trek-online/news/detail/11102923-foundry-sunset-april-11%2C-2019
Join them, at.... wait crap that was an hour ago when they streamed, oh. Well, here's the playback of the livestream, featuring 40 minutes of fireside chat
https://twitch.tv/videos/390451312##
Anyways, no official news item on this was posted here because our foundry was super-dead before theirs even was thinking of dying.
With the one distinctive feature of these MMOs now dead, what'll happen to their playerbases, I can't help but wonder?
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- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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Geez, they really are down to our level. If only somebody had documented that knowledge. Pattern detected.
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Or however they no longer available
They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends
Jim: morning sir
Supervisor: what are we working on this day?
Jim: well I just created a new feature for the game; it’s going to revolutionize the industry. We will be the GOLD standard in our genre.
Supervisor: that’s amazing! Say...do me a favor and do NOT forward me step by step instructions on what you have done and how someone else could care on if you are not here. I want to be left complete in the dark. In fact, delete all note. Good work Jim, carry on.
Epic Stronghold
Block timing explained
Bob: Nuke codes? Oh no....Jim!!
Bob: And we have a cure for aids! Well...we have a 10% cure, the other guy quit to manage a In and Out.
Bob: we are getting ready to launch this new website, except the main designer decided to say F U and deleted everything. Gooooood thing we had it backed up and had another employee working with him, that would have been stupid.
If this is the way things are done.....maybezzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz they are doing it wrong?
It is also worth noting that this is really a resourcing decision. It's certainly possible to bring in new people and either get them up to speed on the existing code, or just rip out the old code and replace with something new, but it's expensive and slow and it's quite possible that the benefits don't justify the cost (my experience with UGC in games is that it's problematic even if it works perfectly).
Epic Stronghold
Block timing explained
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"Sorry sir, it's pretty complicated and I'm not sure anyone else really knows the ins and outs of the system like me."
"Yeah, I had some other guys look at it and they couldn't make heads or tails of anything. Since you know the code so well, I think I'll make you project lead."
"Heh heh, it worked. Sucker!"
It's shitty, and while I'm not saying that's what happened with the Foundry, this is a thing that happens sometimes.
I have, sadly, on more than one occasion, refactored somebody else’s job security into maintainable code. Then again, one of the cases was written in VB6 by a guy who wasn’t too bright and quit without giving two weeks notice, so maybe it wasn’t really intentional.
They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends
The only reason we were able to do our job was because it was a military shop, and you don't have to pay overtime to enlisted personnel. Now, change this around - it's a civilian shop, located in a state with solid overtime laws. Something in the interface broke during the last game update, and now this feature doesn't work. The players are screaming for blood. This needs fixed now!! So somebody kludges a quick hack to make it work, and the suits then demand that they turn their attention to the next update, because the "slow" rate of game updates is looking bad in the media.
There's no time to comment, there's no time to document, and then suddenly you're not even on that team any more, you're working on this other project or just plain fired. So the spaghetti just gets more complex over time, until the only way to fix it is to cut the whole thing out. You can't recode it, because the budget just isn't there. Welcome to the wonderful world of software development.
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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more seriously there's a pretty fine line to walk when documenting between "Nothing is commented what does this even do" and "you wrote a J.R.R. Tolkien novel about your code, tldr lol."
The only excuse for this falling apart is that the original coders actually did, in fact, not do a good job probably because Atari rushed them. There's ways to make games with formulaic, sensible, re-used components. You can have a commonly-defined entity object; plan for the future by making each feature of a game act as a 'machine' you can pump other parts through, and in the process doesn't endlessly obfuscate or over-complicate what the result might be. In a perfectly-coded CO, it'd probably take the team less than a day, if they wanted, to tack a completely arbitrary advantage like "Concussive Escape - Knock back enemies within 15 feet of you" on to every single power as a choice with zero confusion as to whether any unintended bugs will happen.
Then we have the reality of CO where the reason that this game never even got a Foundry in the first place, from what I remember, was "we forgot to tag static objects with human-readable names ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"
Quick GameDev story: When I was much younger, I made a game where I had just coded maps as hard coded strings (terrible I know) because I was on a tight time budget. underscores denoted passable tiles, and plusses were impassable ones. The player character would then A* search their way through that static map. The strings also were hard-coded to transfer between static different sets. Later on they wanted me to add randomly-generated map sequences and elevators. That wasn't happening with that kind of setup.
Especially if you think Expansion Packs and DLC are gonna be happening in your game please design them with expandability and reuse in mind! And also with clear understanding of what parts connect to what, that lack of last point is probably how we ended up with the death animation on enemies being replaced with a cheering animation for a month and a half.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
Epic Stronghold
Block timing explained
I've encountered that once, and some of the old documentation was for the system as it looked two major versions ago.
https://youtu.be/ai3ZGU4hXU8
Some people in the comments are asking him to do Death of the Game: Champions Online next
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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People: Man, it's a shame that grandma died.
Person: What? Grandma's not dead, I just talked to her.
People: Nope, grandma is dead, you can tell because she no longer bakes cookies.
Person: Um...she's literally walking in the room with a plate of cookies right now. Look, there she is.
People: Mmmm, nope, maybe if it was a tray of cookies. Plate of cookies means she's dead.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends