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Any hope for future powerset revamps/revisions?
barbados
Posts: 7 Arc User
I feel the time has come where instead of speculating, or trying to make suggestions and discuss powerset revamps - for what feels like more than a year (or almost even two), we need to ask if there will be any, at all. A dev comment would be greatly appreciated, if possible.
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My theory as to why we got them so rapidly in 2016-2017 is that they had a bunch of ideas for things to do already, and possibly even some partially complete assets to work with. They likely went with the power frameworks that they just had the most stuff prepped for. For the remaining powersets it's possible they need more time to think up ideas ( cause they don't just wanna do the same things over and over again ) and generate assets.
Also 2018 seemed to be the year of "under the hood" changes, which means digging through spaghet code, which was bound to be taking up a lot of their time.
I made a thread where I actually explored the whole "power updates slowing down" thing. You can see it here if you want to see exactly how updates have been proceeding. Figure I'll keep updating that list as power updates come just to have it handy.
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It was a phrase that appeared more in 2018 PTS patch notes than any other year. That's the only reason I present it as a theory. The nature of that phrase actually means they can't point to anything because "under the hood" changes always came with the stipulation that they should have no visible player-side effect. They're always something that allows the devs to more easily implement something else. Hence, the only thing we would see as a result is things that were more easily implemented due to those changes, and I've never seen the devs point out if something we got was.
Well except that time they mentioned that they have a thing that can wholesale update content. I think that's how we got the updated Destroyer's Factory lair, and also the updated Andrith, maybe.
Well by this point it's confirmed that "spaghetti code" is a thing in CO, which means that code is often intertwined in ways that makes it very unpredictable to change anything. Unwinding and resetting spaghetti code means making the code more modular, and hence more predictable when you change it. Predictable is good.
As an example, say I have 5 people, and all of their internal organs are intertwined with each other. Like literally, all their organs are coming out of their body and into someone else's. One person's stomach is combined with another person's. Five people are sharing one kidney. Three people are sharing a brain. If I make a change to anything in this mess it is guaranteed to have unpredictable effects somewhere else. Diagnosing a medical problem on this mess of intertwined human bodies is at best a nightmare, at worse a guaranteed malpractice suit.
If we first go through the process of separating their bodies, making sure that each individual person has their own organs, and turning them each into a modular individual who isn't intertwined in weird ways with someone else, then we clean up this mess. When something goes wrong with one person, we don't have to wonder if some insane network of interconnected organs is to blame, we can just look at that one body.
To turn this body horror example into something more relevant to CO, imagine each person is a power, or a UI element. Long story short, these under the hood changes seem to have primarily been done so that the devs can change something without worrying that it's going to cause something that should be unrelated to go nuts. You know, the old "lol, they made Fireball do 1 more damage, and now the chairs in rencen are killing npcs" joke. It means lower development time for changes, and possibly making some changes possible that weren't before.
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We know CO has spaghetti code. The largest piece of evidence came when vehicles were first introduced - and something in vehicle code managed to kill global chat, a completely unrelated system. It took almost two weeks, IIRC, to fix it. If they're slowing the progress of power revamps in order to recode the software so it's easier to maintain, I can certainly get behind that. (Although I'd also appreciate it if, in that case, someone were to come right out and say that's what they're doing.)
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Often, code makes a "call" on code in another section or sub-routine. Sometimes multiple "calls". Other times, there are 20 lines of code that can get streamlined to 4.
Rewriting these doesn't actually change any functions, but makes the code easier to navigate and decipher (when others have to look at it).
Harder to explain, but sometimes that streamlining now allows new functions that were nigh-impossible before.
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Such as the upcoming weapon devices and ability to individually color device slots. Something tells me with how the code was before, they might not have been able to do that in the past. But, under the hood stuff now allows it. Same with the character select screen. I just hope they expand on the character select screen mess and either make it optional, or, add options beyond sorting based on last played or creation date (such as, alphabetical, in a SG, or, my personal favorite idea, manual sort, like what WoW allows). But, that is not what this thread is about.
I just look forward to what they can do in the future. Who knows, maybe they'll be able to stream line the code enough to make adding in new advantages on powers that do things not possible before, such as adding a second damage type to powers (and maybe with FX to go along with it), example would be, any single blade attack that would now deal half slashing and half fire and have a flaming blade FX. But, I am not holding my breath for something like that. That is, at best, wishful thinking.