Foundry seperate from the game servers

setorian · May 2013

Hey developers fantastic game and im simply in love with the foundry tool so keep up the good work

Since the game is in beta atm and thus have "allot" of down time i wondered if it would be possible to seperate the foundry from the game servers so that when there is down time ppl can work on there player made content.

if the map editing or at least the play map got disabled it would still allow us to create dialog etc.

dunno just seems like a great use for otherwise "wasted" game time :P

Cheers
Setorian

ahkronnemesis · May 2013

Well, you can always work on dialogs on a text editor. hehe

But I agree, foundry as an offline tool would be fantastic.

zandarin · May 2013

The foundry should absolutely be available to use when the game servers themselves are down. Maybe not a full offline version, I can see the concerns regarding that, but if the foundry used a separate login/path/channel/whatever, so we could work in the foundry while the game servers are being worked on, that would ROCK!

Great game by the way devs/artists/PW/Cryptic/Wizards of the Coast.....

That reminds me, I can go play magic right now while the servers are down.

aggropotato · May 2013

Yeah, a DM's work never stops!

bulvyne · May 2013

I, too, would DEFINITELY love to see the foundry available when the regular game server isn't.

chili1179 · May 2013

The issue with this would be that Cryptic would have to manually upload the foundry published work to the server as they did with the beta foundry and closed beta weekends. Which took a significant amount of time and risked not working once transferred.

thestoryteller01 · May 2013

Since the game is in beta atm and thus have "allot" of down time i wondered if it would be possible to seperate the foundry from the game servers so that when there is down time ppl can work on there player made content.

A wet dream of mine but definitely not coming. They'd need a seperate server just for the foundry and a reliable way to have them published on the regular servers, which would cost a lot of money and open up another source of bugs and errors.

soulemerging · May 2013

Thank you for making this thread Setorian! I still can't start threads for some reason so I posted this idea on 2 or three dif. ones.

GJ^

eldarth · May 2013

chili1179 wrote: »

The issue with this would be that Cryptic would have to manually upload the foundry published work to the server as they did with the beta foundry and closed beta weekends. Which took a significant amount of time and risked not working once transferred.

They could easily require the main servers be up for any Foundry "publishing."
Even if they allowed publishing to a Foundry specific server, they could easily automate it to publish to online servers without any manual intervention.

bardicstorm · May 2013

My thinking was this:

I could be wrong, but it would seem like most of the assets and the client would be available on the local computer, and that the only thing that really requires logging in is account verification, publishing, saving, and getting the statistics (plays, tips, reviews, etc.)

The only one of those things really necessary for building is the saving part. It would also seem to me that there wouldn't really be any downside to saving a work-in-progress off-line, except that when the user went to publish it, you might have to do some additional verification and file checking. (This would also allow the potential for other developers to make adventure building tools). Additionally, it would seem that this could cut down on server space required to house the multitude of unfinished adventures in addition to the thousands of published adventures.

Once an adventure is published, then it's a little more difficult, and probably wouldn't be available offline.

Probably a pipe dream, but it would probably allow foundry users to spend a bit more time working on their content.

wingedkagouti · May 2013

bardicstorm wrote: »

you will have to do lots of additional verification and file checking.

Fixed the sentence.

The Foundry does a lot of sanity checking for you, if you allow for upload of files you open up for a lot of potential issues. As a developer you simply can not trust the end user with stuff like this, you also have to check those files for anything that might break a database link (or do something worse).

bardicstorm · May 2013

wingedkagouti wrote: »

Fixed the sentence.

The Foundry does a lot of sanity checking for you, if you allow for upload of files you open up for a lot of potential issues. As a developer you simply can not trust the end user with stuff like this, you also have to check those files for anything that might break a database link (or do something worse).

For what it's worth, I am a developer, just not for mass media games, and yes, there would have to be verification, but I doubt it would be much more than what currently happens under the hood when a project is published. Not saying it wouldn't take work to implement, however.

Keep in mind you'd still be using the Foundry, and while you'd open it up to other developer writing tools for editing the project files, ultimately it would still have to be successfully loaded into the Foundry before you could even think of publishing.

Edit: As an example, Everquest 2 has player housing... publicly available instances where you can add and position furniture objects. Initially you were limited to placing objects on a surface, at their default size. Eventually they added x,y,z positioning, rotation and scaling. Then they added the ability to save the layout (in XML format), edit the file and re-upload. Other developers then made tools to modify these files. Then players could upload those files and the instance would rebuild to the layout (provided the objects specified were there). Yes, it's a simpler case because it's just object positioning, and it was an easy to use file like XML, but it's not impossible to do.

raphaeldisanto · May 2013

I believe the Foundry uses Cryptic's stream-on-demand tech for art assets and models, the same way the full game does. I only say this because I've noticed it dynamically streaming/downloading things during testing. This leads me to believe that much of the art and other in-game assets aren't actually on our hard drives until we need them.

I'd love this feature, but I don't see it coming any time soon.

bardicstorm · May 2013

raphaeldisanto wrote: »

I believe the Foundry uses Cryptic's stream-on-demand tech for art assets and models, the same way the full game does. I only say this because I've noticed it dynamically streaming/downloading things during testing. This leads me to believe that much of the art and other in-game assets aren't actually on our hard drives until we need them.

Well that would certainly make it more difficult, if not near impossible without major work.

However, I was under the impression the stream-on-demand was more a way of updating content only when necessary so as not to have huge patch/launch day downloads. Art, objects, and other assets would be huge to always be stream-on-demand, not just in active memory, but also bandwidth. I'd need to check the actual install files, but 13+ GB on the hard drive would lead me to think otherwise, especially since after turning off patch on demand, I just have a big patch file to download, then virtually no content streaming in the game.

Perhaps the foundry is different, but I doubt it.

Foundry seperate from the game servers

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