70 replies to this topic

[Splatshot]

MeiSooHaityu, on 08 May 2018 - 03:17 AM, said:

BattleTech is good for MWO, MWO has been good for BattleTech, and both will be good for MW5:Mercs...and like wise.

More games in the BattleTech franchise is always a good thing.

There is a problem though, I am never buying anything from PGI ever again.

Harebrained, I will continue to buy from, as the Shadowrun and Battletech have all been great games.

[Leone]

I am always amused by folk who continue to frequent the forums, and one would assume the game, and then state they don't want to pay for something they obviously enjoy. It's not like we don't have two other battletech based forums to post in.

But yeah, with the advent of Battletech the Computer Game, my Saturday Lan gaming group has opted to get back inna MWO. Which is great news~♪

~Leone.

Edited by Leone, 10 May 2018 - 11:32 AM.

[Splatshot]

Leone, on 10 May 2018 - 11:31 AM, said:

I am always amused by folk who continue to frequent the forums, and one would assume the game, and then state they don't want to pay for something they obviously enjoy. It's not like we don't have two other battletech based forums to post in.

~Leone.

I paid into this game and not just a small amount, and I am highly disappointed in it, why then would I want then to purchase their next product.

If you buy a rotten apple from a vendor, would you buy a second apple from that vendor.

[LordNothing]

RickySpanish, on 10 May 2018 - 04:20 AM, said:

I can definitely get behind the sentiment of "kids nowadays!" but I think the ideal solution lies somewhere in the middle. For most games, building your own engine is impractical. Look at the the evolution of textures in your modern graphics engine - in ~1998 they were 128x128 images packed into .wad files in Half-Life. Now, they are materials governed by real world properties, often made from several different textures each describing the exact value of a property at a per-pixel level of accuracy. You've also got the recent explosion of games onto anything with a screen and a processor, which all have their own APIs and hardware to develop for. Thus, it's not unreasonable for developers to glue blobs together to make their game. BUT! As you point out, you run the risk of not fully understanding the thing you have built or rather, its underlying technology. Unity definitely is an expedient development tool, but it has some serious downsides which can give your game that "Unity" feel. I do get that vibe from BT, and yeah I sorta wish UE had been used instead, but not everyone understands its beauty or cpp for that matter.

With all that said, have you *seen* the amount of json data in the game's streamingAssets folder? I do wonder if maybe someone is reloading portions of that more often than is needed, and perhaps that's contributing to the slow loading times...

were still using the s3tc formats that were supported by my voodoo card. new formats exist (smartphones use them), and they are far superior formats, but because the current ones are good enough and support is wider, they often get used instead. only real thing thats changed is the resolution and also the number of bitmaps used for a material. shader programs handle all the blending. its not even new technology, its actually matured a lot. you can throw memory at the problem until your game looks pretty. you can do a smart system where uncompressed textures are used and then compressed into whatever the best supported format is, cache them, and greatly reduce load times, or you can use the ones that have been around for an eternity and have pre-compressed textures and reduce load times.

how files are archived doesnt really matter. most games that use archives, you can get into them just changing their extension to zip (incidentally it works in mwo). wads were just simple container formats. ive done some quake modding so its not really that complex. they mostly do it for organization and to reduce size on disk (especially with smaller files which have to allocate one allocation unit which is many times larger than the actual content of the file) and load times when compressed files are used. for many formats the cpu can decompress files faster than they can be loaded. bt probibly rushed out the release before they had time to put a little spit and polish on their file system. ksp has gotten its load times down a lot, but theyve been working on it since 2013.

one of the things that bugs me is how a simple system, like ammo switching, cant be done because people dont understand the code. its not like you are writing collision detection code or a bone based animation system, or ik, or even ui code. and ui code can be a bloody nightmare. they can do that but cant fix a simple problem like ammo switching. all your doing is say make the weapon do x and use y ammunition if a user does z. its like they dont know how to write an if statement. it just screams "we completely mismanaged our code" at me.

[Mystere]

LordNothing, on 10 May 2018 - 02:33 PM, said:

one of the things that bugs me is how a simple system, like ammo switching, cant be done because people dont understand the code. its not like you are writing collision detection code or a bone based animation system, or ik, or even ui code. and ui code can be a bloody nightmare. they can do that but cant fix a simple problem like ammo switching. all your doing is say make the weapon do x and use y ammunition if a user does z. its like they dont know how to write an if statement. it just screams "we completely mismanaged our code" at me.

Well, as the story goes, when the person who wrote the weapons code left, no one was able to decipher what he wrote. That obviously means no hand-over was done. So, yes, it's mismanagement alright.

[LordNothing]

Mystere, on 10 May 2018 - 06:23 AM, said:

Well, if you want to get into AI (deep/machine learning), the most popular tools use Python, unless you have your own toolset, of course.

i have about a third of a game written in lua, kind of an abandoned project but i sometimes work on it when im bored. anything it doesnt do i just build a new module in c. i also use it because i really like their iup library, can always make a gui in a couple hours that can talk to an arduino or whatever embedded project im working on. but i do see python used by a lot of things and i think i might be missing out on something.

[LordNothing]

Mystere, on 10 May 2018 - 02:42 PM, said:

Well, as the story goes, when the person who wrote the weapons code left, no one was able to decipher what he wrote. That obviously means no hand-over was done. So, yes, it's mismanagement alright.

if it were my game id just have the whole damn thing re-written from scratch and well documented. if pgi would post the offending code there are probably a dozen people in the community that could decipher it for them.

[Fox the Apprentice]

LordNothing, on 10 May 2018 - 02:49 PM, said:

if it were my game id just have the whole damn thing re-written from scratch and well documented. if pgi would post the offending code there are probably a dozen people in the community that could decipher it for them.

They might be planning on doing this in a different engine after MW5. Time will tell.

[LordNothing]

Fox the Apprentice, on 10 May 2018 - 06:15 PM, said:

They might be planning on doing this in a different engine after MW5. Time will tell.

maybe, or they will use profits from mw5 to fund their next game and cut their losses with mwo.

[Brain Cancer]

LordNothing, on 10 May 2018 - 02:49 PM, said:

if it were my game id just have the whole damn thing re-written from scratch and well documented. if pgi would post the offending code there are probably a dozen people in the community that could decipher it for them.

..and that's why there's an MW5 with a brand-new engine from scratch. It was apparently more cost-effective to do so.

[LordNothing]

Brain Cancer, on 10 May 2018 - 07:14 PM, said:

..and that's why there's an MW5 with a brand-new engine from scratch. It was apparently more cost-effective to do so.

it was a good move on their part.