#none of this is so simple as “players ask for thing and devs deliver in 1-2 business days”

[forcedhesitation]

the whole argument that the devs continually adding new content/features to the game is "pandering to fans" or "unhealthy for the game" is ridiculous in general. they're doing this shit for free, we aren't paying for any of these changes- changes & features that improve the overall quality of the game.

of course this doesn't mean you can't continue to ask for better! or continue to report bugs! or suggest changes that would improve quality of life! as previously mentioned, I still hope to see some improvements to wyll & karlach's routes, because they have so much less content than the other companions! but I'm not going to sit and pretend that what changes they have made have been unhealthy for the game or that larian is overall out of touch with their community.

you know what was out of touch with a community? bhvr nearly nerfing two addons on a killer in dead by daylight that almost no one plays. those addons do not make the killer OP, but simply more fun to play. this was all because whoever's in charge of deciding nerfs seems to only look at statistics without contextualising any of those numbers. that's out of touch. an entire community should not have to make a massive uproar and petitions just to prevent a change that any player with even a basic understanding of how the killer role works would never endorse. THAT is out of touch.

you know what's unhealthy? the way that dead by daylight has to consider profit when balancing perks. the fact that survivors had an obnoxious haste boosting perk that went untouched for MONTHS all because that perk came from a non-licensed chapter that they wanted to increase the profit from is unhealthy. the fact that bhvr has repeatedly stated that the most useless and weak killer in the game is "perfectly fine" is beyond ridiculous and unhealthy. the fact that certain extremely powerful perks with unfair features (like STBFL or adrenaline) have still not been nerfed is unhealthy. the fact that it's taken years for them to even entertain nerfing the numerous, outrageously strong addons of one of the most powerful killers in the game is unhealthy.

larian trying to improve the experience of a one-time payment game for new and existing players by acknowledging exploits in reasonable ways, adding additional content where it's relatively easy and feasible to do (unique kisses, the epilogue), and continuously implementing great quality of life changes (simplifying combat & indicating turns more clearly, the magic mirror) is not unhealthy. it's smart. it's more than you'll get from practically any other game.

so yeah. it could be better. but it's nowhere near as bad as it could be.

the “criticism” that larian should never have added good minthara recruitment and that that was just “pandering” to fans is so unbelievably ridiculous. what else were they supposed to do about the sheepthara exploit?? attempt to patch it out and likely fuck up plenty of people’s game files? the solution they offered literally just acknowledges the exploit without dramatically changing anything, other than the player’s ability to have both minthara and halsin in their camp. if you want to kill minthara, recruit halsin, and play an authentic good run, then do so. if you want to abandon halsin, attack the grove, and authentically recruit minthara, then do so. the sheepthara method being simplified and added into the game has absolutely zero bearing on anyone’s ability to play the game normally. some people are just making a problem out of nothing. perhaps go complain about something actually worthwhile, like the lack of content for wyll and karlach.

[fullymechanized-consoomer]

Most underrated game you’ve never heard of

Every so often I think back to MAG and shed a single tear

For those not in the know, it was one of the first multiplayer FPS titles to advertise itself based on its player count, which on certain maps could reach up to 256 players. It’s also the best.

What made it interesting from a gameplay perspective was that despite the average size of the games, the team who made it (Zipper Interactive of SOCOM fame) actually thought out how to organize such a clusterfuck into a cohesive battle without losing the sense of scale. 

At the start of the game players were asked to pick between 3 different factions:

Each of these factions played wildly differently and offered substantial differences in weapon loadouts, gear, etc. 

Raven, being based on NATO countries was all about high tech, sleek equipment. Their guns were accurate, low caliber, low recoil. Their gear was mainly focused on fucking up the enemy’s ability to communicate and fight

SVER - being based on all sorts of Commie-Block/Red China stereotypes was crude. Slow firing weapons that did tons of damage but lacked controllability and tended to have artificially poor accuracy. Their gear was almost completely focused on crude offense. 

Valor was the middle ground. Most of their weapons did ok damage and were alright in the accuracy department, but had the advantage of high-capacity magazines. Their gear was a mixture of pure offense and fuckery. 

Once you picked a side the uniqueness of the game began to show.

This was your standard conquest map, and what really separated the game from the likes of franchises like Planetside. Though big, the maps were tightly packed and carefully designed. Every game essentially worked like a big Rush game mode, with one side defending their base from an assault on all corners of the map by the attacking team. Each team was subdivided into platoons who were commanded by platoon leaders and given a general sector to accomplish objectives in, with further subdivision happening at the Squad level. The whole thing was overseen by a single commander on each team, who broadly coordinated the attack, set objectives, and gave out abilities. Notably, only they could see the full extent of the map and all of the objectives in real time. Platoon leaders were given the ability to call in airstrikes, EMPs, call in vehicles, etc, while squad leaders could call in smaller mortar strikes and set goals for the squad. Every ability was limited to cooldowns, so it was up to each teams Commander to actually decide whether or not those calls for abilities would be approved or ignored if they thought it was a waste. 

The on the ground gameplay was ingeniously designed. By giving each platoon a general sector to focus on players were encouraged to work together on a map and do something useful, while their squad leaders generally set the smaller objectives inside their sectors. When the situation called for it a platoon leader could call up a few squads and allow them to mark objectives in other sectors, meaning players weren’t locked down to a map. 

Playing objectives was also extremely important as they actually did things beyond progressing the round. Each sector had their own “main” objective and a bunch of optional side objectives that could drastically change the outcome of the battle on the map. Knock out the AA and suddenly the attacking team gets to call in more airstrikes. Knock out the radar and the enemy is blind. Send out and secure a vehicle spawn and suddenly the defenders have a new bunker, etc. All of this occurring real time on a single map.  Along the way players were given generous XP bonuses and status buffs for fighting near the objective their squad mates - something that was very important for the games’ downright decadent character customization and loadout-system, which allowed you to practically build your own guns from the ground up, customize your armor, apply different clothes, etc. 

MAG’s robust ping, leadership, and reward system meant that team play wasn’t reliant on direct coordination between individual players so much as a careful directing of group-think. Give the grunts a goal and the means of communicating simple ideas and you’d be surprised how spontaneously organization and problem solving occur among the mass of humanity. 

Unlike so many other multiplayer games which offered the feeling of participating in a big battle, MAG was the only one that seemed to accomplish it. 

Unfortunately the game was too ambitious for the hardware, and there were some cracks in the general game design. MAG launched on the PS3, and despite having some fun art direction looked like, well, a heavily optimized PS3 game:

. 

The devs made the conscious (and correct) decision to heavily downgrade the game’s textures and effects for the sake of ensuring good performance, and to their credit they pulled it off. The game ran remarkably well for a 256 player PS3 game, but its looks were not a selling point. Many took it to be some kind of cheap shovelware and wrote it off. 

Secondly, the game had a critical balance problem. For whatever reason the game had an obnoxiously long time to kill. It was not uncommon for a player with heavy body armor to tank an entire magazine’s worth of ammunition and still have 2/3rds of their health. This was further compounded by the fact that player characters were not limited to classes, meaning anyone could carry heavy body armor, an assault rifle, and a medic kit due to the absurdly generous weight limits. After a certain level you could even unlock perks in your skill tree that eliminated movement penalties due to over encumbrance, meaning everyone was a damage eating, machine gun toting, rocket launcher using medic. In short, it was hard to die. 

RAVEN disappeared almost overnight due to everyone figuring out their guns amounted to super accurate airsoft guns, and only those with deity-like tracking skills could manage to pull off enough headshots with their super-soakers to justify their accuracy-over-damage philosophy. Valor performed decently well, and their higher magazine capacities over all could roughly compensate for the TTK imbalance. However, only SVER had the offense oriented gear and high-damage guns to do meaningful damage. Yes, you had difficulty hitting stuff, but in a game like MAG where accuracy is compensated with via the sheer volume of fire from a maxed out server it didn’t matter. About 2 years into the game the vast majority of players migrated to SVER, and it became harder and harder to play the large games that made MAG so exceptional. 

Unfortunately a poor marketing campaign and its exclusivity on the infamously underappreciated PS3 had already capped the playerbase to a dedicated few thousand. There simply weren’t that many players to hemorrhage. Zipper Interactive went under in 2014, and with it MAGs’ long abandoned servers shut down.

So why am I and others who played it so obsessed with the failed title? Because it was perhaps the only game to live up to the promise of what a multiplayer shooter could deliver. Looking past the rather mundane balancing flaws, MAG’s comprehensive approach to organized chaos, detailed level design, objective play, free-form character customization, and simple communication tools are still second to none. In many ways the game was way ahead of its time, and so forward thinking with its solutions to certain problems faced in large multiplayer game that it feels like other devs are just now figuring out some of the tricks that Zipper already had. I constantly find myself playing other games and thinking “MAG did that better.” 

TLDR: now is the time for MAG 2

[rabidsquabbiteldewrito]

ElDewrito Dev Update (Jan 10, 2018) Part 1

Three days late, but late is better than never. With the holiday season being over, we’ve been hard at work on trying to get this thing wrapped up. We’ve made some incredible progress over the last two weeks, and while we still have 2 things to finish (I’ll go into more detail later) before we release, we have some very good news, as well as a few surprises for you :) Note: This blog post is a long one, and is two parts (You can only embed 5 videos per post, so make sure to scroll down to the next post when you’re finished reading this one). 

The AMD Freeze

It’s done, finished, fixed. All versions of AMD GPUs on any firmware version will no longer get the AMD Freeze. While the code to fix this issue is amazingly simple, the process to track it down and fix it was the most challenging bug we’ve faced, due to the sheer amount of reversing that needed to be done to figure out where the problem was rooted.  So what was the problem? If you recall from our last post, we had narrowed down the cause of the problem to contrails.

When contrails are rendered, geometry is sent to the GPU through what is called a vertex buffer. Once the geometry is in the vertex buffer, you can render as many instances of that geometry as you want efficiently instead of constantly sending it to the GPU every frame. One of the things you can do with vertex buffers is specify a start offset in which to start plucking vertices from for the draw calls. This Allows you to store multiple kinds of geometry in the same buffer. You set offset to where the geometry you want to render is in GPU memory and make the draw call, instead of having a separate vertex buffer for each different piece of geometry which would have to be bound/sent to the GPU with every draw call. 

The problem was that this offset somehow ended up negative, which doesn't make any sense. Nvidia seem to ignore this, but amd does not like it one bit. The device driver crashes and the device goes into the hung state. Halo online doesn't deal with hung devices. When a device is in the hung state only two functions work: CheckDeviceStatus() and Release() therefore, while the game was still rendering, all the draw calls were being ignored, and hence the "freeze". What's the solution? Intercept the function that sets the vertex buffer stream offset and make sure that it's not negative. If it is, set it to 0. Done. 

To give you an idea of what unk_1 and those of us testing had to go through, here’s a video of real-time contrail debugging that he had to implement. 

One of our testers, Xennma, has a card so freeze-prone, it would freeze immediately on the main menu because of the Valhalla tower beam contrails. Here’s the video of the actual freeze being caught in action by Xennma. As you can see, there’s a negative offset. Once we saw this negative offset, it was game over. 

To show you how confident we are that this is 100% fixed, check out this very short clip of Mosh Pit Fiesta Guardian that I took using the flycam. Look at all of those contrails. We had three freeze-prone AMD cards in this game, and not one freeze occurred. 

Q: Why haven’t you released yet? What is preventing you from releasing right now?

0.6 is at it’s most stable point yet in terms of crashing or freezing, but there are just 2 things left to do. 

The new updater has made even more progress, but isn’t quite finished, and we still need to rigorously test it. 

As you probably see on every single bi-weekly reddit post, there’s a bug in 0511 that gets mentioned a lot: ‘The dedi connection bug’. This has reared it’s ugly head for some of our testers recently, making it impossible to join testing sessions. We’ve already started troubleshooting this one and have some leads, and we believe this is the last real ‘bug’ that has to be fixed before release.  

Misc/Small Bug Fixes and improvements since last post:

Fix 'none' game variant weapon option

Fix 'change gametype' and 'change team' h3 ui spinner display values

Fix crash when render model materials block is empty

Improved ragdoll fix: restore death animations, h3 ragdoll backflip

Add sanity checks in TagInstance::GetGroupTag (was causing crashes)

Fix simulation damage aftermath acceleration properly

Fix incorrect voting time remaining (for real this time)

Cache http server response - Reduces CPU usage

Dedicated server cpu/ram optimization (cuts the dedi’s cpu usage in half)

Added bottomless clip as a player trait 

Updated the forge selection render (picture below)

Since some of us have had some downtime while the updater and dedi bug are being worked on, we’ve added some more bad-ass features. 

Gravity, Fog, and Snow have been added to the map modifier and can be completely customized for any map. 

You asked, and we delivered. You can now add and customize snow and fog to any map. Gravity is a slider. Snow is a toggle. For fog, you can change the fog visibility, fog density, fog color, and fog brightness. 

Here is a short video showing how to customize the lighting, fog and snow using the new forge; 

Here’s a video showing how to use and change the gravity settings.

Here are a couple pictures of other examples. 

For footage of new gameplay on maps using these new features, continue reading the next post below, which is part 2 of this blog post (Since I can only embed so many videos).