I have zero knowledge on programming a video game. So i am curious, how hard is it to "code" in the any race any faction that is in the CE? Would it have to be done way in advance, lets say 4 months ago or could it be done in just a couple weeks? Thanks
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Probably a couple hours depending on how you have races set up. For instance if you have elf, dwarf, and basic humanoid races your going to have a template and doing the actual code to put in an orc would be pretty easy since you could just use the elf template and change things to orc. Of course this doesn't take into account models, animation, racial items or lore, starting areas etc just the actual code to put in the race. If all you did was take humans and make them green using assets that the game already had in place it could be done in a couple hours.
Now if you didn't have races and all you had was default humans it would be a much bigger undertaking since you would have to code in every time you wanted to look at what race something was.
CircleMUD adding a race
Using mud code in c++ as an easy example you can see what would need to be done.
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Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com/Simply allowing to select it, or the appropriate NPC offering the quest etc. should be a matter of minutes at most. It should be a simply check for which race the player has and then enable/disable the button or hide the dialog option.
The question is whether there has to be done something custom to each race/faction combination.
Disclaimer: I don't know much about ESO itself, so the examples might not hold true for ESO.
Like, if each faction has it's own armor, and if the rmodels differ greatly in size and build for each race, they would have to make sure the armor does look good on the other models, especially regarding clipping. If races got special skills that differ for each faction (or the other way round) they obviously would need to create new skills. They can save work if they mostly copy another, depending on how unique such a skill would be.
Generally, the more unique features a specific race/faction combination has, the harder it would be. Art (skill icons, textures, models, animation) would have the biggest impact on how long it would take, after that probably sound, and then adjusting some text here or there. Skill balancing and stuff is done all the time, so no need to test it overly, the ones responsible for balancing should have a good notion if a skill is straight out overpowered/useless or only needs a bit adjusting anyways.
So:
Technically being able to join all factions with each race - 5 mins.
Getting a race themed instance in the faction capital (or the other way round): Several weeks if it's done shoddily, several months if it's supposed to have the same quality as the other instances that had been planned long ago.
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Any race on any faction. Should be as simple as flipping a switch, just have that particular race bypass the check for faction lock in whatever few lines of code they put it in.
For adding a playable race, that depends, is it completely new to the game? If so the animation would take a while and all the other stuff that goes with it. But if you have NPC's of that race, then models and animation are already done, so you just make it available to players. And in the case of the Imperials, the armors and skills are actually open for everyone to learn in-game. It's purely a cosmetic thing, but people are huffy because they enjoy the outrage.
Allowing any race for any faction isn't likely adding code, its removing code. The biggest modifications would be to any changes on the UI to limit the classes for certain factions, basically code that would of had to be added in to do those limitations.
In coding, it takes more work to restrict what things can be done then it does for allowing things to general happen.
LOL. there is most likely no code actually being re-written..
See, Professional games have these things called "Editors" or "toolkits".
Changing a dialogue box to set an objects factions would be as simple as that, and by doing that, the object will inherit all it needs.
All the dialogue in game is going have scripts something like:
Hello, #.race . Ready to serve the #.faction ?.
So there is no issues on that front.
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