Well, I don't know much about the technical aspects of the ICE engine yet, but I would speculate that PnC control was probably intentional form the start, even before the engine creation, in order to draw an even closer link between Wish and Ultima Online, sicne Wish so desperately wants to be the next Ultima Online.
I don't even know if that is possible anyway. The PnC control in Ultima Online worked so well because it was 2D isometric. And along with the PnC you had arrow movement along with freely macroable movement with almost any key you wanted. But, the PnC was the top dog there...
PnC often times doesn't work well at all in 3D games due to the camera perspectives.
Originally posted by Imperatorian I think the advantage to point and click versus WSAD is, is because of server lag, I think I heard somewhere it takes far lass bandwidth if the server know where you're going. If ignorance is bliss, you'd think people would be happier when you point out what morons they are!
By saying it is mostly corect, psychoduck was really pointing out how it would (or could) work to reduce lag in a perfect system (my apologies if I'm making an enormous and incorrect assumption on your part, psychoduck). The idea that PnC actually does reduce lag has not been proven in a live server MMORPG environment. Under controlled development conditions, it has been shown to produce less lag.
The problem is, a system that uses PnC has to deal with two inherent, lag-producing problems right off the bat:
1. If the game engine has implemented collision control to keep avatars from constantly smashing into objects when getting from point A to point B, it (normally) has to calculate a new course each time the avatar is corrected to avoid an object. That produces lag. In a world without zones/zoning or instanced dungeons, that normally increases latency as well, while the database attempts to supply the client with accurate location and environment information after each course correction.
2. If the game engine has NOT implemented collision control, the player ends up making multiple course corrections by clicking points along their projected path anyway, which is basically the same as WASD movement. One difference that may add to lag in this situation is that using WASD, you are normally following your character and thus, environment/NPC resolution occurs normally directly in front of you. This means that the environment and NPCs are being "unrolled" constantly as you approach an area, based on whatever your individual environment resolution distance is (or what the game engine) allows.
In PnC, you may not be looking in front of you... as a matter of fact, many times you may be looking at your character from several different camera angles while moving. That means that as you adjust your camera to face the direction you are going in, the game engine has to resolve the environment/NPCs on the spot. The same issue exists when you are zoomed out to choose your path and have to zoom in to control your avatar.
Shadowbane illustrated pretty clearly that the concept that PnC reduced lag was not borne out when dealing with thousands of client actions.
Abbatoir / Abbatoir Cinq Adnihilo Beorn Judge's Edge Somnulus Perfect Black ---------------------- Asheron's Call / Asheron's Call 2 Everquest / Everquest 2 Anarchy Online Shadowbane Dark Age of Camelot Star Wars Galaxies Matrix Online World of Warcraft Guild Wars City of Heroes
Originally posted by Copeland This is a great game. If your expecting EQ, EQ2 or WoW your going to be sorely disappointed. It's not like them at all. This is an RPG adventure game. It's brilliant! If you want a game that has a slower pace and is far more friendly to the rpg player you've found it in Wish. PnC is kind of annoying but thats the limitations of the engine and really when it comes down to games design PnC is just fine. PnC would never work in games like EQ or WoW but this isnt a thing like those. No FPS here !! WooHoo!
This guys on drugs, he keeps saying everything is a FPS. How are all the other games FPS' you fucking retard? :P Theres a difference between fast paced and first person shooter. Can you say first person shooter? What exactly are you shooting, in first person, in other MMOs besides Planet Side? And no its not the limitations of the engine, well, Wish's engine, yes, because like the rest of the game design its mediocre and half-assed. Dark and Light will havej ust as big and complex a world (much much more complex actually) and yet it allows for BOTH PNC and WASD movement. So much for technological limitations there, that little excuse is debunked. The wish dev team simply didnt invest the time or money into developing something that could handle what they wanted, instead they economized the game, and made a compromise, we want to deliver this feature so we'll restrict the movement options for bandwidth / latency issues.
Assuming DNL doesnt lag horribly at launch, then Wish's excuse is moot.
I'll not go into discussing what is bad and what is good in Wish, but I'll state one thing.
6 months left to fix crappy graphics, etc.? Well, 6 months is almost nothing for development process of any modern game, and especially for an MMORPG. They won't make it till release, so either they will postpone it, or we will get at the release what there is now in the current beta.
Originally posted by darkpastor I'll not go into discussing what is bad and what is good in Wish, but I'll state one thing. 6 months left to fix crappy graphics, etc.? Well, 6 months is almost nothing for development process of any modern game, and especially for an MMORPG. They won't make it till release, so either they will postpone it, or we will get at the release what there is now in the current beta.
Were in the open beta for EQ2? Did you see how much content they patched in the last 2 weeks before going live? An insane amount. Not just fluff either, essential stuff like class abilities.
Originally posted by Finduilas Were in the open beta for EQ2? Did you see how much content they patched in the last 2 weeks before going live? An insane amount. Not just fluff either, essential stuff like class abilities.
Yes, I was in the open EQ2 beta, and even in the closed one as well. And the engine in EQ2 didn't change much from the beta to the release, just more textures there and here, additional shaders, etc, but otherwise it remained the same.
And I guess, there were definetly more developers working on EQ2, don't you think so? And thinking how much money SOE could through in, if additional resources were needed, pfff...
If we compare the development of Wish to another game, let's compare it to EVE Online for example. The developers of EVE Online were new to game development as well. And the devs were promising tons of content and stuff ~6 months before the release. Then the release was postponed by a few months due to ennormous amount of time they had to spend on fixing lag and stability bugs, as all as numerous balance issues. And still on the release day they couldn't deliver even the half of what was promised to be there. But the EVE Online was looking awesome from the very start when it become available to outside testers over 2 years ago. Now it became even better graphics-wise, though the devs still haven't make everything what was promised in regards of content, etc. Well, the EVE Online survived because there was no good alternative to it. Earth&Beyond wasn't even half as good as EVE (but rather EQ in space), and even EA money couldn't help, so eventually E&B died, and its players partly moved to EVE.
And then there was Neocron... Project Entropia... Anarchy Online... Luckily, the last one turned out to be good after the first few months of post-release nightmare.
No, I don't want to say it is impossible for MR to improve the game dramatically. I really hope, that MR will proof me wrong and deliver eveything promised on time, but so far many other companies have followed the same sad path -- promising a lot, delivering barely half of it or even less.
Comments
Well, I don't know much about the technical aspects of the ICE engine yet, but I would speculate that PnC control was probably intentional form the start, even before the engine creation, in order to draw an even closer link between Wish and Ultima Online, sicne Wish so desperately wants to be the next Ultima Online.
I don't even know if that is possible anyway. The PnC control in Ultima Online worked so well because it was 2D isometric. And along with the PnC you had arrow movement along with freely macroable movement with almost any key you wanted. But, the PnC was the top dog there...
PnC often times doesn't work well at all in 3D games due to the camera perspectives.
By saying it is mostly corect, psychoduck was really pointing out how it would (or could) work to reduce lag in a perfect system (my apologies if I'm making an enormous and incorrect assumption on your part, psychoduck). The idea that PnC actually does reduce lag has not been proven in a live server MMORPG environment. Under controlled development conditions, it has been shown to produce less lag.
The problem is, a system that uses PnC has to deal with two inherent, lag-producing problems right off the bat:
1. If the game engine has implemented collision control to keep avatars from constantly smashing into objects when getting from point A to point B, it (normally) has to calculate a new course each time the avatar is corrected to avoid an object. That produces lag. In a world without zones/zoning or instanced dungeons, that normally increases latency as well, while the database attempts to supply the client with accurate location and environment information after each course correction.
2. If the game engine has NOT implemented collision control, the player ends up making multiple course corrections by clicking points along their projected path anyway, which is basically the same as WASD movement. One difference that may add to lag in this situation is that using WASD, you are normally following your character and thus, environment/NPC resolution occurs normally directly in front of you. This means that the environment and NPCs are being "unrolled" constantly as you approach an area, based on whatever your individual environment resolution distance is (or what the game engine) allows.
In PnC, you may not be looking in front of you... as a matter of fact, many times you may be looking at your character from several different camera angles while moving. That means that as you adjust your camera to face the direction you are going in, the game engine has to resolve the environment/NPCs on the spot. The same issue exists when you are zoomed out to choose your path and have to zoom in to control your avatar.
Shadowbane illustrated pretty clearly that the concept that PnC reduced lag was not borne out when dealing with thousands of client actions.
Abbatoir / Abbatoir Cinq
Adnihilo
Beorn Judge's Edge
Somnulus
Perfect Black
----------------------
Asheron's Call / Asheron's Call 2
Everquest / Everquest 2
Anarchy Online
Shadowbane
Dark Age of Camelot
Star Wars Galaxies
Matrix Online
World of Warcraft
Guild Wars
City of Heroes
This guys on drugs, he keeps saying everything is a FPS. How are all the other games FPS' you fucking retard? :P Theres a difference between fast paced and first person shooter. Can you say first person shooter? What exactly are you shooting, in first person, in other MMOs besides Planet Side? And no its not the limitations of the engine, well, Wish's engine, yes, because like the rest of the game design its mediocre and half-assed. Dark and Light will havej ust as big and complex a world (much much more complex actually) and yet it allows for BOTH PNC and WASD movement. So much for technological limitations there, that little excuse is debunked. The wish dev team simply didnt invest the time or money into developing something that could handle what they wanted, instead they economized the game, and made a compromise, we want to deliver this feature so we'll restrict the movement options for bandwidth / latency issues.
Assuming DNL doesnt lag horribly at launch, then Wish's excuse is moot.
I'll not go into discussing what is bad and what is good in Wish, but I'll state one thing.
6 months left to fix crappy graphics, etc.? Well, 6 months is almost nothing for development process of any modern game, and especially for an MMORPG. They won't make it till release, so either they will postpone it, or we will get at the release what there is now in the current beta.
Yes, I was in the open EQ2 beta, and even in the closed one as well. And the engine in EQ2 didn't change much from the beta to the release, just more textures there and here, additional shaders, etc, but otherwise it remained the same.
And I guess, there were definetly more developers working on EQ2, don't you think so?
And thinking how much money SOE could through in, if additional resources were needed, pfff...
If we compare the development of Wish to another game, let's compare it to EVE Online for example. The developers of EVE Online were new to game development as well. And the devs were promising tons of content and stuff ~6 months before the release. Then the release was postponed by a few months due to ennormous amount of time they had to spend on fixing lag and stability bugs, as all as numerous balance issues. And still on the release day they couldn't deliver even the half of what was promised to be there. But the EVE Online was looking awesome from the very start when it become available to outside testers over 2 years ago. Now it became even better graphics-wise, though the devs still haven't make everything what was promised in regards of content, etc. Well, the EVE Online survived because there was no good alternative to it. Earth&Beyond wasn't even half as good as EVE (but rather EQ in space), and even EA money couldn't help, so eventually E&B died, and its players partly moved to EVE.
And then there was Neocron... Project Entropia... Anarchy Online... Luckily, the last one turned out to be good after the first few months of post-release nightmare.
No, I don't want to say it is impossible for MR to improve the game dramatically. I really hope, that MR will proof me wrong and deliver eveything promised on time, but so far many other companies have followed the same sad path -- promising a lot, delivering barely half of it or even less.