| 00:36.00 | Imhothar | so I finally figured out how to bypass stupid licensing bullshit and can watch netflix from Germany |
| 00:36.10 | Imhothar | pretty awesome |
| 00:44.31 | Amadeus- | I wonder if the 'build a better preset' contest produced the kind of thing that Trion was looking for. |
| 00:45.01 | Amadeus- | I looked at a couple builds for mage and rogue (the classes I play) and didn't see much that I would recommend ..hehe. especially all the hybrid builds. |
| 00:45.44 | Amadeus- | hopefully they have testers/devs that play the classes full time and will provide the top specs before they get to these fluff versions. |
| 01:32.36 | seebs | Hybrids can be super useful to a lot of players, because not all play is raiding. |
| 04:01.03 | seebs | Huh. |
| 04:01.11 | seebs | I am seeing people with @othershard in their names at AH. |
| 04:01.13 | seebs | I wonder how that works. |
| 04:43.14 | seebs | d'oh |
| 04:43.20 | seebs | So I found yet another quirk of the tooltip stuff. |
| 04:43.43 | seebs | If you are mousing over a crafting ingredient, the tooltip info does not allow you to perceive what size stack you are looking at. |
| 04:44.23 | seebs | So for ordinary inventory items, I can show prices for stack with a little (@...) after it for per-item price, but for recipe tooltips, I can't. |
| 04:45.10 | seebs | I am thinking about implementing Inspect.TEMPORARY.Craft.* using the XML. |
| 04:45.21 | seebs | I think it's Too Much Data. |
| 05:07.48 | ZorbaBeta | shouldn't be that bad, it's only, what, a thousand recipes? maybe two thousand? |
| 05:13.37 | *** join/#riftuidev Cairenn (~Owner@MMOI/Administratrix/Cairenn) |
| 05:13.37 | *** mode/#riftuidev [+o Cairenn] by ChanServ |
| 05:53.41 | *** join/#riftuidev Imhothar_ (~Imhothar@ppp-188-174-121-22.dynamic.mnet-online.de) |
| 05:55.43 | seebs | I am not sure, because I don't quite know how the augments interact with the recipe data. |
| 05:56.14 | seebs | Hmm. Augments aren't listed, so the list isn't TOO awful. |
| 05:56.49 | seebs | Is it reasonably safe to assume that vendor-purchased crafting mats (like thread) will have "reagent" in their category, and other mats won't? |
| 05:57.05 | seebs | BTW, I just found a lovely thing, there's a 30p runecrafter recipe which produces an item which is not used in anything. |
| 07:19.15 | ZorbaBeta | it's possible that recipe is no longer available |
| 07:19.38 | ZorbaBeta | if you're looking through the xml database, that'll list all recipes that have not been removed from the database - but if a recipe hasn't been removed, but is no longer attainable, it'll still show up there |
| 07:20.01 | ZorbaBeta | in theory I believe vendor-purchased crafting mats should be tagged as Reagent, but note that this is a human tagging process, not an automated one, and there may be errors |
| 07:39.14 | Amadeus- | I think the UI calls vendor purchased stuff as "Crafting Goods" and dropped/gathered stuff as "Crafting Materials" ....the Reagent thing is in ther somewhere...I think ...or maybe it's just the vendors that are now called "Regeant Vendors" |
| 07:39.40 | ZorbaBeta | I believe the thing seebs is talking about is the auction category |
| 07:40.20 | seebs | I mean the field in Item.Detail which is a list of words like "crafting reagent". Which I think is used also as the auction category. |
| 07:40.32 | seebs | And the recipe is still available in-game, but so far as I can tell, nothing *ever* used it. |
| 07:40.43 | ZorbaBeta | yep, that's the auction category |
| 07:40.44 | seebs | "Celestial Essence". I can't find any evidence that it has ever been part of anything. |
| 07:41.16 | seebs | I was under the impression that the auction category field was actually a set of tags, and there was no guarantee of, say, consistent order of those tags. |
| 07:41.55 | ZorbaBeta | well . . . officially, yes! |
| 07:42.16 | ZorbaBeta | unofficially, it's generated from the auction db, which is hierarchical - but some of the auction db categories map to the same addon tag |
| 07:43.02 | ZorbaBeta | so, in terms of implementation, "armor leather" is a completely different category than "weapon leather", and it's pure "coincidence" that they both contain the word "leather". in terms of API, "armor leather" and "weapon leather" are two categories that share a tag "leather". |
| 07:44.04 | Amadeus- | ah, ok .sorry ..didn't realize we were talking exclusively about auction :) |
| 07:44.04 | ZorbaBeta | all part of the fun of api design :V |
| 07:44.08 | seebs | As a side note: I still can't find a tag that distinguishes "artifacts". |
| 07:44.19 | seebs | Oh, I wasn't talking about auction, it's just a coincidence that the information I want is there. |
| 07:44.22 | Amadeus- | in auction tehy're called collectibles? |
| 07:44.22 | ZorbaBeta | I'm not sure there is one, I think they're under collectibles along with a few other things |
| 07:44.32 | seebs | I want to know how /a works. |
| 07:44.42 | Imhothar_ | alot of stuff runs under collectibles |
| 07:44.46 | ZorbaBeta | what's /a? |
| 07:44.48 | Imhothar_ | not to mention misc |
| 07:45.04 | seebs | If you do a bag search in the game, and enter "/a", it highlights exactly all artifacts and nothing but artifacts. |
| 07:45.05 | Imhothar_ | artifact search in bags |
| 07:45.14 | seebs | So the information is somehow known to the client. |
| 07:45.19 | ZorbaBeta | hah, cute. I'm assuming it's looking into the internal structures of the item |
| 07:45.27 | ZorbaBeta | at some point I have wanted to expose more of those |
| 07:45.35 | seebs | UI annoyance, BTW: |
| 07:45.46 | seebs | Artifact sets are listed in green (still accessible) and red (not accessible). |
| 07:45.54 | seebs | The "right-click to add to artifact set" text is always green. |
| 07:46.12 | seebs | This prevents quick visual scanning of inventory for usable artifacts, because every artifact has green text. |
| 07:46.28 | ZorbaBeta | huh. yup, that's kinda annoying. |
| 07:46.32 | seebs | Also the tooltip stuff is maddening. |
| 07:46.46 | seebs | I have a notion that it would be really nice to have a new Tooltip event that's more accessible. |
| 07:46.59 | ZorbaBeta | well, really, I just want to fix the existing Tooltip event |
| 07:47.06 | ZorbaBeta | which is not going to be easy >_< |
| 07:47.23 | seebs | Issues I know of: |
| 07:47.26 | Amadeus- | I stopped reverse engineering Rift before I got to items ..but, if it's like other modern games ...the client stores an item type in memory ...I'm sure artifacts are a particular item type ....the "collectibles" section of the auction probalby just includes several item types :) |
| 07:47.30 | seebs | * No events for clicking links. |
| 07:47.39 | seebs | * Lots of spurious empty events. |
| 07:47.40 | ZorbaBeta | honestly you could just list one issue - "it's pretty thoroughly broken" - and be done with it |
| 07:47.48 | seebs | * Especially very strange events with comparison tooltips. |
| 07:48.18 | seebs | I hypothesize that a "fixed" tooltip event would need two arguments: The thing being tooltipped, and a handle for the frame showing that tooltip. |
| 07:48.27 | ZorbaBeta | the link-click tooltips will probably pick up their own event type or parameter, they're a different thing entirely (they're actually persistent windows) |
| 07:48.40 | ZorbaBeta | I might do the same thing with the comparison tooltips |
| 07:48.40 | seebs | BTW, there's a one frame delay between when Event.Tooltip happens and when UI.Native.Tooltip:Get*() produce meaningful results. |
| 07:48.46 | ZorbaBeta | huh, that's strange |
| 07:48.54 | ZorbaBeta | probably just need to reorder things a little |
| 07:49.09 | seebs | And, of course, the other one: You don't get stack size from tooltips in the crafting window. Which was what got me thinking about crafting stuff. |
| 07:49.19 | seebs | Huh. |
| 07:49.27 | seebs | You know what would be super handy, but may not be exposed to the client? |
| 07:49.30 | Amadeus- | talk about a UI window that needs revamped....that crafting window |
| 07:49.31 | seebs | "usable". |
| 07:49.54 | ZorbaBeta | heh, that's a funny one - it's exposed to the client far more easily than it is to the server |
| 07:50.03 | seebs | Like, whatever is happening when the AH returns results for "show only usable". |
| 07:50.17 | seebs | Although that wouldn't quite solve the "known recipes" problem, which I really want to solve. |
| 07:50.53 | seebs | Okay, time to see whether that event ended while I was AFK. |
| 07:53.25 | seebs | Nope, and this wardstone is dull right now. Which is okay by me. |
| 07:53.33 | seebs | Oh, Zorba, another thing that I don't know whether the client knows. |
| 07:53.43 | seebs | Many objects are displayed as "Binds to Account". |
| 07:53.51 | seebs | If you *have* an item, and it says "Binds to Account", you can trade it. |
| 07:54.05 | seebs | If you are looking at an item in a link, and it says "Binds to Account", it *might* be tradeable. |
| 07:54.13 | seebs | Or it might be Binds to Account on Pickup, and not be tradeable. |
| 07:54.24 | seebs | Which results in people getting into huge arguments about whether or not a given item can be sold. |
| 07:54.27 | ZorbaBeta | ah, that makes sense |
| 07:54.42 | seebs | e.g., Coal-Stained Backpack: Binds to Account. Jolly (a squirrel pet): Binds to Account. |
| 07:54.45 | seebs | But only one of them can be traded. |
| 07:55.07 | seebs | I don't know whether the client could in principle extract that data, but boy would it help if it were displayed, people get SO confused. |
| 07:55.31 | seebs | Interesting trivia point: In DDO, binds-to-X is settable per-item, not per-item-type. |
| 07:55.59 | seebs | So you can have three identical items, one of which does not bind, one of which is bind-to-account, and one of which is bind-to-character. |
| 07:56.55 | ZorbaBeta | that's kinda neat |
| 07:57.19 | seebs | They have a mechanic where item repair can permanently damage items. |
| 07:57.34 | seebs | And items which are bound to either character or account are immune. |
| 07:57.37 | Amadeus- | DDO is not a bad game ...I enjoyed it, especially after they adde dthe mercenaries |
| 07:57.53 | seebs | I quite enjoy it occasionally. |
| 07:58.18 | Amadeus- | yea, I liked that I could solo most everything ...was one of the things I liked bout SWG before the fail combat revamp |
| 07:58.32 | seebs | The reason I mention this is in part that some of the fae yule gifts drop raid items... which may or may not be of use to a given character. But they can't be made bind-to-account, because then the raid items would be bind-to-account and that would upset people. |
| 07:58.45 | Amadeus- | I saw that thread |
| 07:59.01 | seebs | The other thing that would be sort of neat would be a mechanism for items which bind to account on pickup, and bind to character on equip. |
| 07:59.16 | Amadeus- | honestly, I don't know why everything shouldn't be bound to account and all currency shouldn't be sharable amonst the same account too ...but, that's just me |
| 07:59.50 | Amadeus- | seebs, perahps the best answer should be an item on the Rift store that could transform an individual item that is Bind-on-Pickup to Bind-On-Account |
| 07:59.52 | Amadeus- | :) |
| 07:59.55 | seebs | Trivializes gearing up on alts. |
| 07:59.55 | Amadeus- | MONEY MAKING! |
| 08:01.05 | Amadeus- | actually, I don't mind the gear so much ...but I really wish I could share all forms of currency with alts ....all these warlord marks, freelancer marks, and slayer marks |
| 08:01.28 | Amadeus- | and, the other direction too ..be nice to send my main the T2 gear currency from the alt |
| 08:01.35 | Amadeus- | the little that the alt gets anyway |
| 08:01.45 | seebs | gah |
| 08:01.58 | seebs | Somehow Rift has developed a feature where you randomly get disconnected from zone channels when porting. |
| 08:02.40 | Amadeus- | hey ZorbaBeta, do you think we'll ever have Rift 2? Or, is Trion done with MMOs after this? |
| 08:02.49 | Amadeus- | wait, nm ..I think we talked about this already |
| 08:03.11 | Amadeus- | I think you thought that upgrading Rift to look like a new game would be easier than creating a new game. |
| 08:04.32 | Amadeus- | I guess the only thing we mmoers have to look forward to now really is EQNext ....I tried ESO beta...it was crap (imo) |
| 08:05.08 | Amadeus- | FFXIV is ok ...but, that long global cooldown + simplified combat system (i.e., very few skills) is a turn off |
| 08:05.18 | Amadeus- | hell of a lot better game than FFXI though imo |
| 08:07.32 | seebs | Wow. |
| 08:07.38 | seebs | I got completely, totally, lost in Dendrome. |
| 08:07.52 | seebs | Like, I could not find any means by which I could find any path that even led to a path that led to a place that was not this strange cavern. |
| 08:08.18 | seebs | There is something inherently upsetting about knowing that there is a zone event in your zone and not being able to find a way to any part of it. |
| 08:10.35 | seebs | This event strikes me as poorly designed. There are goals like "open and defeat earth great hunt rifts: 1/2" |
| 08:10.41 | seebs | So there's 10+ rifts open on the map. |
| 08:10.42 | Amadeus- | heh ..I'm pretty good with Dendrome as a whole ...but Hailol ...I never figured htat place out |
| 08:11.02 | seebs | There is no way to find out which ones are hunt rifts (probably all) or great hunt rifts (some maybe?) or which ones people are at unless you are already in a party. |
| 08:11.07 | Amadeus- | I think Richard Simmons designed Hailol |
| 08:11.26 | Amadeus- | seebs, great hunt rifts have to be opened with lure ...they're never open by nature |
| 08:11.38 | seebs | Okay, but that doesn't help me find them. |
| 08:11.52 | Amadeus- | yea, it's not very well designed from a map perspective |
| 08:11.54 | seebs | Because the entire zone is full of rifts. If I'm not already in the party that's doing them, there's no way to find the goals. |
| 08:12.03 | Amadeus- | great hunt rifts will say that htey're "minor" though...so that helps |
| 08:12.12 | Amadeus- | I usually just hover over all of them until I see that there are people there. |
| 08:12.17 | Amadeus- | then I assume that's a good place to go |
| 08:12.45 | seebs | There's 10 rifts, none of which say they have people at them. |
| 08:13.06 | Amadeus- | yea, so may not be anyone doing hte event ...people tend to wait until boss spawns befoer getting interested nowadays |
| 08:13.18 | seebs | Oh, there's a group. They just did 1/2 of the great hunt rifts. |
| 08:13.23 | seebs | I just don't know which one or how to find them. |
| 08:13.30 | Amadeus- | ok...look for raid tears |
| 08:13.35 | Amadeus- | and wait for one to turn into a rift |
| 08:13.57 | Amadeus- | or "disappear" |
| 08:13.59 | Amadeus- | which is the same thing |
| 08:16.49 | seebs | Oh hey. |
| 08:16.55 | seebs | I just realized what causes the channel problem, I think. |
| 08:17.01 | seebs | Porting within a zone. |
| 08:17.20 | seebs | This seems to result in leaving the channel but not joining it. |
| 08:28.25 | ZorbaBeta | amadeus, in general, I wouldn't expect for MMO sequels to be a common thing, especially on computer. All the sequels I can think of are either console (sequel kinda necessary for a major revamp), Korean (that market functions under different rules anyway), or *long* after the original (EQ, Planetside - long enough that they couldn't improve it incrementally) |
| 08:29.15 | ZorbaBeta | if you abandon the old product to work on the new product, you get a ton of bad publicity, which is death for an MMO. if you *don't* abandon the old product then you have to spin up an entire new team, whcih is horrifyingly expensive and very difficult to pull off. |
| 08:29.24 | Amadeus- | I suppose that's true. |
| 08:29.51 | ZorbaBeta | So yeah, I wouldn't expect "Rift 2", but I *would* expect for a continuing series of improvements such that at some point you look up and say "hey I'm basically playing Rift 2 right now". |
| 08:30.04 | Amadeus- | well, that would be OK I think |
| 08:30.08 | Amadeus- | it's not happened yet though :) |
| 08:30.52 | ZorbaBeta | true. maybe by Rift 3.0 or Rift 4.0 :) |
| 08:31.30 | ZorbaBeta | although I do strongly believe that Rift 2.0 is a far better game than Rift 1.0 was. |
| 08:31.46 | Amadeus- | I agree with you |
| 08:31.53 | Amadeus- | it feels like a very good expansion |
| 08:32.50 | Amadeus- | My suggestion would be to revamp current souls rather than making new souls for 3.0 ...then spend all the time/resources on engine, other feature requests, and content ...and someone really needs to work on UI improvements :) |
| 08:33.14 | Amadeus- | for example, I'm a rogue ....rogues don't really need a "physician" soul ....make bards a full blown healer, make tactician the support ....and done :) |
| 08:33.40 | ZorbaBeta | I believe the new souls come mostly from wanting to fill holes in the calling/role cross product |
| 08:34.00 | Amadeus- | yea, that's pretty obvious ....just seems like it's making things really complex ..especially with regard to balance |
| 08:34.01 | ZorbaBeta | redesigning an existing soul to work properly in those roles would be as big a project as just making a new soul |
| 08:34.05 | ZorbaBeta | and at the end you'd have fewer souls :V |
| 08:34.26 | Amadeus- | I'm not sure I agree ...I think the "stance" mechanic is all you'd need to make a soul easily fulfill two roles |
| 08:34.35 | ZorbaBeta | honestly though, in many ways that's two souls |
| 08:34.47 | Amadeus- | right ..but, seems like it would be a lot less work ..lol. |
| 08:34.56 | ZorbaBeta | here, let me phrase this a different way: making a set of abilities for Rogue that can properly function as a raid healer is a huge amount of work |
| 08:35.11 | ZorbaBeta | the name you attach to those abilities is pretty irrelevant |
| 08:35.15 | Amadeus- | a bard already works pretty much like a chloromancer |
| 08:35.33 | ZorbaBeta | chloro's got a pile of dedicated healing abilities, which AFAIK bards mostly lack |
| 08:35.34 | Amadeus- | just have a buff that beefs up the heals ...while lowering the "utility" that a bard does |
| 08:35.58 | Amadeus- | hmmm...dunno ..i play both and they feel about the same ...just bards don't heal as much ..hehe |
| 08:37.03 | Amadeus- | but, you're probably right. |
| 08:37.41 | ZorbaBeta | I may be wrong, note, I'm not a soul designer :V but that's the gist as I understand it |
| 08:38.00 | ZorbaBeta | Also it should be pointed out that the soul designers have a very different set of skills than would be needed for things like UI improvements |
| 08:38.04 | ZorbaBeta | you don't want a designer writing code ;) |
| 08:38.41 | Amadeus- | true ...but, me personally ..I'd rather hire 2x coders than designers :) |
| 08:39.05 | Amadeus- | make 3.0 more about new code than new design .....revolution! |
| 08:39.29 | ZorbaBeta | "lol trion sux no new content in 3.0" |
| 08:40.18 | Amadeus- | like, each current coder needs at least 2 new minions ....like sou chefs |
| 08:40.23 | Amadeus- | sous rather |
| 08:40.41 | Amadeus- | "here's an example ....go make more!" |
| 08:41.14 | ZorbaBeta | that doesn't work great with coding :V duplicate code is bad mojo |
| 08:41.41 | Amadeus- | well, I didn't mean it that way ...haha. |
| 08:42.16 | ZorbaBeta | understood, just generally "go make more" is tough to do with code. If you can model it off the existing code, you just use the existing code; if you can't model it off the existing code, "go make more" doesn't work :) |
| 08:43.15 | Amadeus- | I was thinking more like "here is how I expose game information to the addon API ...study it and do the same thing for x ...let me see if you did it right" |
| 08:44.10 | Amadeus- | btw...i was just looking through old header files where I reversed some of Rift's code back when it was released ....interesting stuff. I mostly did the entities/actors and ui windows it looks like. |
| 08:44.33 | Amadeus- | ironically, Trion put in a compiling mechanic that made it more frustrating than it was worth :) ...something no other game had done. |
| 08:44.35 | ZorbaBeta | that might work, though unfortunately it can be pretty painful to introduce those hooks - there's actually some points where it is now easier to do something through the addon system than through the game code |
| 08:44.36 | Amadeus- | so I quit. |
| 08:45.34 | ZorbaBeta | I'm kind of surprised nobody else has done it - it stopped a lot of the hacks overnight. |
| 08:45.40 | Amadeus- | yep |
| 08:46.20 | ZorbaBeta | (and they all said "well, not enough people play rift, it's a dead game, so it's not worth our time" . . . pure coincidence that it happened within a week of that going live, I'm sure) |
| 08:46.26 | Amadeus- | I mean, it didn't make it impossible, but refinding every discovered offset every hotfix was more of a pain than it was worth. |
| 08:46.39 | Amadeus- | lol ..not me ...I flat out said why I stopped :) |
| 08:46.50 | ZorbaBeta | yeah, it's definitely impossible to make it impossible. the goal was always just to make it not worth the effort anymore |
| 08:47.12 | ZorbaBeta | admittedly, mostly targeting malicious people and not just experimenters, but of course there's no way to distinguish between the two groups in code :V |
| 08:47.17 | Amadeus- | yea, it's a better solution than Blizzard's Warden ...from a PR standpoint. |
| 08:48.16 | Amadeus- | I'm typically interested in expanding the client to provide the information/functionality that I want ...to reduce tediousness in the grinding ....not malicious, but not politically correct either :) |
| 08:48.42 | ZorbaBeta | yup, fair. although note that a lot of the info isn't even contained on the client - the client has a surprisingly small amount of game data |
| 08:48.55 | Amadeus- | it's a fine line ..but I always considered hacking when you change something ...and reverse engineering when you just use what's there to your advantage ..haha. |
| 08:49.14 | ZorbaBeta | all the interesting stuff is sent down from the server on need (and not on request - there's no way to request most of it, and the few things that can be requested require that you'd seen it before) |
| 08:50.10 | Amadeus- | yea, of course ....what's useful though is basically being able to create your own version of the minimap, etc. ....and, honestly, I do it sometimes just for fun and see how things are designed. Every game is a bit differnet. |
| 08:50.29 | Amadeus- | but...I will say that the drawback to C++ is that it's very organized ...even on an assembly level ...so it's easy to pick it apart once you have a handle. |
| 08:50.47 | ZorbaBeta | *nod* yeah, very true |
| 08:50.53 | Amadeus- | it's like an onion ..once you get a good hold..it all comes apart. |
| 08:50.56 | ZorbaBeta | doubly so with inheritance, and doubly so again if you enable RTTI |
| 08:51.03 | ZorbaBeta | (which is why games don't enable RTTI ever :V) |
| 08:51.20 | Amadeus- | yea.....i'd be amazed at anyone enabling RTTI..lol |
| 08:51.34 | Amadeus- | Vanguard (by SOE) was crazy ...they used the Unreal engine and left ALL the dlls exposed on release. |
| 08:51.39 | Amadeus- | so yea. ..that was like candy from a baby |
| 08:52.08 | ZorbaBeta | that said, it all depends on how visible cheating is and how much resources the company is willing to put towards enforcement |
| 08:52.10 | Amadeus- | Aion is a lot like Rift ...except they pack with Themida ...so, you have to actually write the files out from a memory snapshot. |
| 08:52.31 | Amadeus- | that's true. |
| 08:52.44 | ZorbaBeta | World of Tanks uses scaleform UI elements, like we do, except you can extract theirs easily from game data and replace them through a semi-supported addons system |
| 08:52.46 | Amadeus- | the best thing to do is create a game where cheating is not necessary :) |
| 08:52.54 | ZorbaBeta | and there's a whole list of things that you're not allowed to do with those addons |
| 08:53.12 | ZorbaBeta | they're *possible*, but if they catch you, they'll ban you. Apparently this works well enough for them. |
| 08:53.49 | ZorbaBeta | with some really weird dividing lines |
| 08:53.55 | ZorbaBeta | it is permitted to change the model of any tank in the game |
| 08:53.56 | Amadeus- | well, to be fair, most "cheaters" are not in it as "gold farmers" ...they just enjoy controlling multipel characters ....and, they bring in a lot of money ...so, it's a little bit of a cat and mouse game. |
| 08:54.05 | ZorbaBeta | it is permitted to paint hotspots on tank skins to indicate where vulnerable areas are |
| 08:54.17 | ZorbaBeta | it is *not* permitted to replace a tank with an "x-ray model" showing the vulnerable zones in 3d space |
| 08:54.38 | Amadeus- | I have no sympathy for people that spam channels, or affect the game in any way that negatively affects other gamers. |
| 08:54.54 | Amadeus- | I've actually never played World of Tanks ..hehe. |
| 08:55.14 | ZorbaBeta | it's pretty fun if you want a squad-based tank simulator. gets really grindy at high levels, unfortunately, but given that you're "grinding" something that is theoretically fun, it works out |
| 08:55.36 | Amadeus- | the worst game I reversed was EVE |
| 08:55.46 | ZorbaBeta | they've done some clever design to work around the fact that they don't want healing or respawning in-battle |
| 08:55.46 | Amadeus- | everything is in python :( |
| 08:55.50 | Amadeus- | stackless python :( |
| 08:56.26 | ZorbaBeta | hah, yeah. and given that stackless python is basically dead now, it wouldn't surprise me if they have their own implementation |
| 08:56.35 | Amadeus- | they're the ones releasing it ..hahaha |
| 08:56.48 | ZorbaBeta | *laugh* well, that works |
| 08:56.54 | Amadeus- | that client is the messiest thing you've ever seen |
| 08:57.03 | Amadeus- | embarassing really. |
| 08:57.06 | ZorbaBeta | if it wasn't for the fact that the Lua is publicly available, WoW's UI would probably be even worse to reverse engineer |
| 08:57.11 | ZorbaBeta | they have a thoroughly custom Lua implementation |
| 08:57.24 | Amadeus- | of course, to be fair I don't think CCP ever expected EVE to do as well as it did ..hehe. |
| 08:57.36 | ZorbaBeta | yeah, eve's gone through a lot of changes |
| 08:57.45 | Amadeus- | I never messed with WoW because of the Warden business. |
| 08:57.56 | ZorbaBeta | I do think they should tackle cleanup - it's kind of embarrassing by proxy that it has so much downtime - but they seem to keep it working |
| 08:57.59 | Amadeus- | reversing THAT is another level above me. |
| 08:58.58 | Amadeus- | and there aren't that many folks in the world actually that would have the skills (and interest) to reverse Warden ...so, it's easy for Blizzard to keep it contained. |
| 08:59.48 | ZorbaBeta | *nod* yeah |
| 09:00.00 | ZorbaBeta | the key to a lot of this is that you're not trying to make it impossible to hack |
| 09:00.14 | ZorbaBeta | you're just trying to make it hard enough that anyone with the skills to hack it would just apply for a job instead |
| 09:00.38 | Amadeus- | lol ..that, or just make a game where there isn't much of a benefit in hacking it (i.e., include everything they would want/need in the game.) |
| 09:00.55 | ZorbaBeta | the guy who did a lot of our protection code used to hack MMOs for fun, and he took all that expertise to Trion to protect us against him ;) |
| 09:01.37 | Amadeus- | I've often wondered why more companies didn't do that ..hehe. |
| 09:02.17 | Amadeus- | includes as few string literals as possible in the source, and that compiling trick you did ....will avoid 95% of folks. |
| 09:02.18 | ZorbaBeta | well, keep in mind we didn't hire him directly off that - he'd been working in the game industry for a while before that |
| 09:15.58 | seebs | So I've died >12 times in a row and don't even know where to FIND a healer. |
| 09:16.42 | seebs | Apparently the zone event boss did not thoughtfully spawn near a soul mender. |
| 09:20.14 | Amadeus- | heh ..you don't have the summon soul mender ability? |
| 09:20.35 | seebs | Nope. |
| 09:20.40 | seebs | That was sorta cool. |
| 09:25.12 | seebs | Zorba, is there anything other than Command.Message.Send or Command.Message.Broadcast that an addon can do that ought to trigger "you have sent too many messages"? |
| 09:28.16 | seebs | Oh, this may not be addon-related. |
| 09:28.37 | seebs | Okay, I now know about another aspect of Rift's anti-RMT-spam stuff. |
| 09:29.47 | seebs | Someone ran into this by coincidence right after I'd added a new feature which would use the message/broadcast feature, so I thought it was triggered by my code. |
| 09:32.32 | seebs | That feature is unduly smart, and has some tricky edge behaviors. |
| 09:44.59 | seebs | I do not get the thing where people complain about having no reason to leave cities, for two reasons. |
| 09:45.05 | seebs | Reason #1: If you want to, that's a reason. |
| 09:45.12 | seebs | Reason #2: There is a ton of stuff you have to go out of the cities for. |
| 09:48.57 | ZorbaBeta | Reason #3: if you force people to leave the cities, they complain about it |
| 09:50.50 | seebs | wtf |
| 09:50.58 | seebs | This guy is complaining about how much better it was at launch. |
| 09:51.05 | seebs | You know, when you had to group up to go to merchants. |
| 09:51.33 | ZorbaBeta | group up to go to merchants? |
| 09:51.41 | seebs | I have *no idea*. |
| 09:51.49 | seebs | I have never heard of such a thing at any time in Rift's history. |
| 09:52.53 | seebs | Sooo I am pitching people http://www.l2pnoob.org/ |
| 09:53.05 | ZorbaBeta | I know there was some point super-early-on when the PvE guards weren't strong enough and so PvE quest hubs could get camped by PvPers |
| 09:53.10 | ZorbaBeta | but I think that was fixed before 1.0 |
| 09:53.15 | seebs | Beta 5. |
| 09:53.28 | ZorbaBeta | yeah, sounds right |
| 09:53.36 | seebs | Beta 5, some GM told a player to group up with friends to deal with the PvPers. Beta 6, wardstones weren't killable and guards were heavily buffed against players only. |
| 09:53.48 | seebs | Beta 7, guards were heavily buffed against players only, only on PvE shards. |
| 09:53.56 | seebs | That was really the point at which I became a fan. |
| 09:54.00 | ZorbaBeta | hah, yep |
| 09:54.12 | seebs | Because I had watched Blizzard spend *five years* saying it was technically impossible to have the shards use different rules. |
| 09:54.23 | seebs | And then I saw Trion not only do it, but do it in *under a week*. |
| 09:55.03 | ZorbaBeta | I assume we had to add some tech for that, otherwise it would have been in Beta 6 |
| 09:55.07 | seebs | Since that time, I have had a general model. If I want to predict how Trion will handle complaints, I assume that the Rift team will try to understand the problem, figure out whether there's a real issue, and if there is, try to understand the underlying issue and solve it as well as possible. |
| 09:55.08 | ZorbaBeta | but it probably wasn't complicated |
| 09:55.27 | seebs | Well, Beta 6, it wasn't obvious at first that the PvPers would be unhappy with the guards. But they complained a lot, so something got done. |
| 09:55.42 | seebs | This has been a surprisingly effective predictor of outcomes. |
| 09:56.50 | seebs | In general, not a lot of time goes into one-time stuff, mostly. So there's been a few high-profile cases of people exploiting en masse, and not much done to/about them, but most of the time, if a thing is likely to be a recurring source of player unhappiness, it is very likely to get fixed. |
| 09:57.02 | seebs | Can't make everyone happy, though. One player quit over the removal of Exposed. |
| 09:57.48 | ZorbaBeta | I think that person was crazy :V |
| 09:58.33 | seebs | His argument was that it meant the game was being nerfed/dumbed-down. Which maybe it was. |
| 09:58.41 | seebs | Although Trion is the only MMO company I've ever seen tune things *up*. |
| 09:58.58 | seebs | 2.4 made higher-level pre-SL mobs tougher. |
| 10:00.00 | seebs | The launch Exposed was just a Bad Mechanic, it mostly just meant that you couldn't take large enough groups that they'd spread out enough to impose it. |
| 10:00.09 | seebs | The run speed reduction had almost no effect and was just annoying. |
| 10:00.23 | seebs | It may have gotten me killed once. |
| 10:00.56 | ZorbaBeta | yep, I don't know if you've seen the Riot game design antipattern post |
| 10:01.10 | ZorbaBeta | but basically, if something's annoying, it needs to provide enough gameplay to be worth the annoying. Exposed didn't. :P |
| 10:01.39 | seebs | That sounds interesting, yet unfamiliar. |
| 10:01.47 | ZorbaBeta | http://forums.na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?p=3470475 |
| 10:03.02 | seebs | That Burden of Knowledge thing is a thing Rift has some trouble with, MHO. |
| 10:03.11 | seebs | Specifically, the horrific Gutting Of The Tooltips some many patches ago. |
| 10:03.47 | ZorbaBeta | in PvP, absolutely. In raiding, also agreed. In solo and expert, I'd say the difficulty curve is low enough that you don't really need to care, and the soul templates were built to help this |
| 10:03.52 | seebs | There are a lot of things which used to give extra threat, and which *probably* still do, except it got taken out of their tooltips, and maybe that means they don't. And a lot of information just went away. |
| 10:04.02 | seebs | For instance, harbinger eldritch armor. |
| 10:04.10 | ZorbaBeta | ah, yeah, that's fair - if there are things that flat-out don't mention what they're doing, that might be an issue |
| 10:04.18 | seebs | Did you know that, in addition to reducing cast times, this *reduces GCD*? |
| 10:04.20 | seebs | I didn't. |
| 10:04.22 | ZorbaBeta | (honestly I think threat is a bad mechanic and should go away, but that's another issue) |
| 10:04.46 | seebs | Better yet! Consider Vorpal Slash. It has a cast time, unless talented. Fully talented, it's an instant slash with a 1 second GCD. |
| 10:05.01 | seebs | Because it is a cast-time power, eldritch armor procs reduce its GCD by 0.5 seconds to... 0.5 seconds. |
| 10:05.09 | seebs | But because it's talented and instant, it doesn't consume eldritch armor. |
| 10:05.27 | seebs | So! If you want best Harbinger DPS, you have to hit vorpal slash if it's up, plus some cast time power, when eldritch armor procs. |
| 10:05.49 | seebs | But there's *no possible way* to find this out from reading the tooltips, since they don't even mention the GCD reduction, let alone the weird special case of vorpal slash. |
| 10:06.13 | seebs | The tooltips got somewhat better with the SL redesigns, mind. |
| 10:06.17 | ZorbaBeta | yeah, I'll agree that's not so good |
| 10:06.31 | seebs | The worst point was when LGV and LBV said *nothing at all* about how much healing they provided, except "best for group heals" or "best for tank heals". |
| 10:07.00 | seebs | You just had to find someone who had read the tooltips before they got simplified and had done the math and could tell you how much %-of-damage each of them would heal with your spec. |
| 10:07.28 | seebs | That said, overall, I think Rift's tooltips are solidly decent. In particular, I *very* much like that they give accurate (or at least accurate-ish) numbers for their damage. |
| 10:07.49 | seebs | Although there is a very subtle bug in that introduced by the ranking system. |
| 10:08.56 | seebs | Log in on a low level cleric, add Inquisitor, and look at the tooltips for Scourge (54 points) and Vex (0 points). |
| 10:09.06 | seebs | Note how Vex does 229 damage, and Scourge does 1456 damage. |
| 10:09.25 | seebs | So, obviously, you are going to have *awful* damage if you don't get 54 points into Inquisitor, because Scourge does nearly *seven times* as much damage! |
| 10:09.46 | ZorbaBeta | ah, yeah, it's tough to figure out what to do about that |
| 10:09.54 | seebs | But... If you look at the tooltips for those powers on, say, a level 54 cleric? They are not nearly that far apart, because Vex has ranked up. |
| 10:09.58 | seebs | Well, I know *my* answer. |
| 10:10.03 | ZorbaBeta | although the plus is that you look at it and say "zomg 1456 is so much damage this will be awesome once I'm up there" |
| 10:10.21 | seebs | Eliminate ranks entirely, even as an internal mechanism, and just have all abilities have values which scale smoothly with level. |
| 10:10.49 | seebs | I've had a person get really discouraged over it, though, because she wanted to splash a few points of something, and had established that it would be useless because it wouldn't be able to meaningfully contribute to damage at higher levels. |
| 10:10.57 | ZorbaBeta | *nod* I can't stand ranks either, myself |
| 10:11.02 | seebs | BTW, I also think the pet scaling quirk should Go Away. |
| 10:11.26 | seebs | I think all pets should scale to level cap, but it's fine if the first tier ones scale *poorly*. |
| 10:11.35 | seebs | I just don't like the hard wall at 24-30. |
| 10:11.49 | seebs | Pet's fine, pet's fine, pet's fine, pet's fine, pet's completely worthless. |
| 10:14.51 | seebs | That is a fascinating article. |
| 10:14.58 | seebs | The point about the WoW warrior tank mechanic is a very good one. |
| 10:15.12 | seebs | A friend of mine who played warrior tank would have to *take off armor* to tank old instances successfully. |
| 10:15.25 | seebs | If she didn't reduce her defense enough, she couldn't successfully tank. |
| 10:15.52 | ZorbaBeta | yep, I did the same thing on more than a few occasions |
| 10:15.57 | ZorbaBeta | it was traditional to remove your pants first |
| 10:16.55 | seebs | Yes. |
| 10:17.12 | seebs | Have I told you the funny story of my WotLK-era tank gear? I probably have, but can never remember. |
| 10:17.27 | ZorbaBeta | doesn't ring a bell, but I might remember it |
| 10:17.33 | ZorbaBeta | er, recognize it |
| 10:18.05 | seebs | This was during the peak of the Gearscore meltdowns. Which I loved, because it let me automatically avoid unpleasant groups. |
| 10:18.19 | seebs | So, I had a DK tank, heavily geared and all. |
| 10:18.25 | seebs | And I had spare money and time. |
| 10:19.08 | seebs | So I carefully assembled a set of ilevel 200 blues, with no purples at all except for engineering self-only stuff, which *precisely* hit the defense cap, and also hit the minimum required health for exp^Wheroics pretty closely. |
| 10:19.19 | seebs | Well, not quite no purples at all. The chest piece was a purple, technically. |
| 10:19.27 | seebs | It was a [Lovely Purple Dress]. With a +5 health enchant. |
| 10:19.53 | ZorbaBeta | hah |
| 10:20.08 | seebs | So I would equip this, and queue to tank randoms. And I'd zone in with a gearscore of something like 3600, *exactly* 540 defense, and ~20,500 health (they said you needed 20k). |
| 10:20.20 | seebs | And some people would ragequit or votekick me. |
| 10:20.36 | seebs | Thing is, as a tank, my queue time ran a good solid 10 seconds on average, so no skin off my nose. |
| 10:21.06 | seebs | But the way I figured it, no one remotely competent was going to look at that and conclude that I was incapable of tanking, because there is *no way* that it's an accident. |
| 10:21.11 | ZorbaBeta | I've never understood the instaquit thing. I mean . . . at least give it a chance! I've had great runs with undergeared teams and terrible runs with ultrageared teams :P |
| 10:21.14 | seebs | Given that, usually, the chest armor is one of your big +def things. |
| 10:21.29 | ZorbaBeta | yeah it would be pretty clear that's intentional |
| 10:21.31 | seebs | So if someone with a Lovely Purple Dress has *exactly* the required defense, the chances are that they did that on purpose. |
| 10:21.48 | seebs | There was some raid tank who used to hang around in Dalaran with a complete set of top-tier raid gear, fully gemmed out for spellpower. |
| 10:21.59 | seebs | A death knight tank. No, they did not use spellpower. |
| 10:22.43 | seebs | I actually loved gearscore. I had plenty-overgeared healers and tanks, so when I zoned in, I'd look at the other person whose ability mattered, and if they were undergeared, offer to run as many dungeons as they wanted to help them gear up. |
| 10:22.55 | seebs | I never once had a bad experience with a self-proclaimed newbie tank. |
| 10:22.58 | ZorbaBeta | as I recall, the first guy who got Frostmourne tossed a cheap old-world enchant on it and the three worst gems he could find (carefully avoiding the socket bonus) |
| 10:23.03 | seebs | Heh. |
| 10:23.28 | seebs | Had one time a tank ragequit so one of the party members volunteered to try. She had exactly one +defense gear, but I was overgeared to heal, so we did it that way, and it was a blast. |
| 10:23.32 | ZorbaBeta | I assume he regemmed and reenchanted it for actual combat :V |
| 10:23.36 | seebs | Could well be. |
| 10:23.54 | seebs | I am *just* getting to the point in Rift where I may start doing heroi^Wexperts. |
| 10:23.56 | ZorbaBeta | yeah, people also overestimate how important +defense is |
| 10:24.11 | seebs | Well, it was *potentially* very important there. Although I think Toughness is a better-designed mechanic. |
| 10:24.14 | ZorbaBeta | you could easily make up for it with just lots more HP and an overgeared healer, it's not like an instakill |
| 10:24.54 | seebs | I now have a 60 who can heal-and-support, and my roguelet's 55 and climbing. Mostly I spend my time running around farming materials and doing zone events. |
| 10:25.29 | seebs | I haven't tried to heal any experts yet, waiting until I can arrange to have a competent *and* well-geared tank so I can get used to all my buttons. |
| 10:26.25 | seebs | I did heal a chronicle with someone who was... Friendly, and not exactly incompetent, but maybe inattentive. |
| 10:26.38 | seebs | It took me a while to realize that the reason I wasn't healing him was that he had kept his own veil up. |
| 10:27.14 | seebs | I did notice that he wasn't getting the heals, and managed to keep him up with other heals, but it didn't occur to me that someone who apparently levelled as chloro wouldn't know about the veil interactions. |
| 10:33.14 | seebs | The spec-swapping thing is going to make Fake Bad Tank even more fun. |
| 10:33.42 | seebs | The difference in observable traits (like health) between a 39-point riftstalker and a 61-point riftstalker will be pretty noticeable, I bet. :) |
| 10:34.04 | seebs | Anyway, bedtime for me, gaming in the ... morning/afternoon/whatever that is. |
| 10:34.05 | ZorbaBeta | probably :D |
| 10:34.11 | ZorbaBeta | sleep well and enjoy gaming :) |
| 10:34.27 | seebs | I imagine I will. D&D always stays fun for me. |
| 10:37.01 | seebs | http://forums.riftgame.com/general-discussions/general-discussion/405191-fae-yule-fireworks-achievement.html#post4640302 <-- I really like the degree to which Rift devs are willing to offer actual explanations of things. |
| 10:39.48 | seebs | BTW, apropos of nothing much, Namco High is out, and if you want to see what surrealist art looks like as a video game, this is it. |
| 10:40.06 | seebs | It's a high-school themed dating simulator with mostly namco characters and a few homestuck characters. |
| 10:40.35 | seebs | In the few minutes I played, the Galaga ship was revealed to be really insecure because it didn't even have to try out for the part of Juliet in the school play, it just got assigned the part automatically for being so beautiful. |
| 10:41.19 | seebs | And yes, this is... the galaga ship. It's maybe 50 pixels, although they are very very large pixels. And at least one student comments that it's stupid of you to claim that the Galaga ship is in detention, because obviously you couldn't fit a spaceship in a classroom. |
| 10:41.32 | seebs | It's art. I am not sure whether it's a viable game, but it's definitely art. |
| 10:42.02 | ZorbaBeta | oh man I definitely need to try that |
| 10:42.19 | ZorbaBeta | yeah, I have a bit of skepticism about Andrew Hussie's ability to make a good game, but no question whatsoever about whether he can make art |
| 13:25.33 | Repo | indy: lokyst serverbased * v1.1.4-server (19 files in 3 directories): [new, +1 commit] Changed SavedVariable tracking from global to shard. |
| 13:25.33 | Repo | indy: lokyst v1.1.4-server * 1767026 /: [new tag] Tagged as v1.1.4-server |
| 16:06.35 | seebs | Well, I slept *well*, if not for very long. |
| 17:14.39 | ZorbaBeta | That's something, at least. |
| 17:14.47 | ZorbaBeta | my wife was woken up by cats wanting food |
| 17:14.56 | ZorbaBeta | then, two hours later, by cats wanting to play :P |
| 18:15.21 | *** join/#riftuidev Thorarin (marcel@D57DD135.static.ziggozakelijk.nl) |
| 18:35.22 | seebs | I have been teaching my cat to wait for me to get up, then mew plaintively by a dish. It actually works. |
| 18:35.34 | seebs | When I say "cat" I mean "the animal I have which is shaped just like a cat but we don't know what it actually is." |
| 18:35.36 | seebs | brb |
| 18:40.57 | *** join/#riftuidev seebs (~seebs@home.seebs.net) |
| 18:40.58 | *** mode/#riftuidev [+o seebs] by ChanServ |
| 18:41.31 | seebs | I just noticed that the topic includes a sort of future-tensey claim about F2P. |
| 19:07.05 | *** join/#riftuidev Imhothar (~Imhothar@ppp-188-174-121-22.dynamic.mnet-online.de) |
| 19:08.17 | *** join/#riftuidev seebs (~seebs@home.seebs.net) |
| 19:08.18 | *** mode/#riftuidev [+o seebs] by ChanServ |
| 19:08.52 | seebs | And today I get to find out what happens to the Rift client if the machine it's on hibernates while it's running. |
| 19:09.02 | seebs | Answer: disconnected from server, clean addon shutdonw. |
| 19:09.11 | seebs | I am somewhat impressed. |
| 19:09.17 | seebs | shutdown, even. |
| 19:12.13 | seebs | Zorba, I feel you should know: |
| 19:12.27 | seebs | The Rift client handles a system unexpectedly hibernating out from under it better than the FF14 *launcher* does. |
| 20:49.19 | Imhothar | hmm interesting. got this comment on riftui: "I use to know a guy that was able to bypass the API somehow, and change different things on the UI that usually wasn't possible and he showed me a video of him doing it, but I just can't comprehend it, and I can't get a hold of him anymore, otherwise I'd send him your way and see if he can't improve this by getting it to do what the API won't allow currently." |
| 21:34.30 | Thorarin | Sounds rather vague... |
| 21:45.06 | seebs | Zorba, if/when you're around: |
| 21:45.19 | seebs | Should I be able to send a message directly to someone in response to a broadcast/channel message from them? |
| 21:45.33 | seebs | The requirements on command.message.send seem ambiguous. |
| 22:03.38 | *** join/#riftuidev Noshei (~quassel@24.9.171.99) |