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TooMuchAbstraction posted:C'mon, guys, in this day and age you should not be running into the limits of your numerical precision.
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May 3, 2015 08:15
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The maximum of long is much higher than that. Only reason is because they didn't think it would bloat so fast and refactoring is drat hard in such a large project.
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May 3, 2015 14:34
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dis astranagant posted:Aren't like 90% of the skills anyone actually uses on Cursed passives that just make the hitting dudes and moving away from dudes stuff faster? A lot of them are, but the majority of the passives have interesting, dynamic effects, and the class has a handful of extremely valuable activated skills that offer powerful and interesting tactical options - Blindside is an amazingly good situational murderport, Dominate prevents an enemy from moving and inflicts a damage vulnerability debuff, Reckless Charge lets you smash directly through groups of enemies and hit everyone along the way in a single action, etc. The class-defining "passive" skill, Rampage, is also an active skill, in that it can be manually triggered in an emergency in exchange for being placed on cooldown. I use Cursed as an example because it's a great middle ground between straightforward positioning-based combat and ability-based tactical variety.
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May 3, 2015 16:09
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Cerepol posted:The maximum of long is much higher than that. Only reason is because they didn't think it would bloat so fast and refactoring is drat hard in such a large project. Switching everything to longs instead of ints also makes the memory footprint much larger overall. A long has double the size of an int thanks to how this stuff works. An int has 32 bits; a long has 64. It doesn't sound like a massive difference but when you are dealing with large numbers of them (which when it comes to games you always, always, always are) that adds up real fast. From the sounds of things Garrosh can't even be represented with unsigned ints which actually has its own issues when it comes to implementation. The old 65,535 issue comes from a similar place. In the days of SNES things memory was a precious, precious commodity that you used absolutely no more of than you had to. That's also the limit of what you can represent with a 16 bit number. Once again using 32 bit numbers would have double the memory footprint. Programmers are always looking for ways to do this by necessity especially in the game world where people are trying to wring every last bit of performance they can out of the systems. Granted this is less of an issue these days now that we have "two guys in a garage" types of game companies but even so...major AAA games constantly push hardware as far as they can. Like was said though WoW is over a decade old and I guarantee that the code base is based on assumptions based on the hardware at the time. Updating things isn't a matter of "just replace everything with long!" that can make poo poo break in unforseen ways. This is especially true if there is old code lingering that nobody remembers what it does, it isn't commented, and you can't change it without breaking everything (I'll give you a hint: literally every project ever has this problem).
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May 3, 2015 18:51
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Angry Diplomat posted:A lot of them are, but the majority of the passives have interesting, dynamic effects, and the class has a handful of extremely valuable activated skills that offer powerful and interesting tactical options - Blindside is an amazingly good situational murderport, Dominate prevents an enemy from moving and inflicts a damage vulnerability debuff, Reckless Charge lets you smash directly through groups of enemies and hit everyone along the way in a single action, etc. The class-defining "passive" skill, Rampage, is also an active skill, in that it can be manually triggered in an emergency in exchange for being placed on cooldown. To add onto this, the gloom aura they get is amazing and debuffs everything in an AOE around you, as well as protecting you. It gives a great thematic feeling of being a walking avatar of vengeance when you terrify people just by running up to them. It's entirely a passive ability, but it's the good kind of passive ability where you not only get great bonuses, but the bonuses aren't just "hit mans harder" and make the class feel more cohesive.
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May 3, 2015 19:58
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Man, I loved cursed too. Absolutely awesome design. It could probably use another look and some modernization to fit with the newer material better, though. Still been meaning to go back and win one on nightmare. I ran into a stairboss that was absurd on my first shot way back when. He was a Temporal Mage/Archmage/Summoner. He hit me with time skip as soon as I came into view and then flooded summons + aether trap right on top of me. Came back and took thousands of damage instantly. I couldn't even get the dude far enough away from the stairs to bypass him before I lost all my lives to time skip + dropping everything. I really don't know how I feel about rares/randbosses and such, in terms of game design. It's really neat to have to fight the player abilities on one hand. It's really frustrating to have to stop and inspect things all the time rather than just recognizing the sprite and knowing it's super dangerous on the other. The whole uneven difficulty thing can be really frustrating, too.
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May 3, 2015 20:51
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Anytime ToMe is criticized, it's inevitably either about the bizarre difficulty curve (98% boring, 2% kills you in 2 hits) or its crappy murky tiles. I don't understand why neither has been fixed yet.
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May 3, 2015 20:55
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Bouchacha posted:Anytime ToMe is criticized, it's inevitably either about the bizarre difficulty curve (98% boring, 2% kills you in 2 hits) or its crappy murky tiles. I don't understand why neither has been fixed yet. I think I hear (and complain about) it being too long the most often. Then again, I think that ties into the difficulty curve fairly directly.
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May 3, 2015 20:59
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The tiles have been fixed: ToME has an ASCII mode.  (I've never actually heard anyone complain about the tiles before. "Too long" is absolutely true though, ToME's dungeons could be about four times shorter each and give the same experience and loot and the game would probably be just about right, then.) Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 21:08 on May 3, 2015 |
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May 3, 2015 21:05
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I think they're pretty hideous, and yeah, length + tons of boring chaff with occasional spikes of 'haha ur ded' was not fun. Tome is also massive, hilarious stat overload.
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May 3, 2015 21:16
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:The tiles have been fixed: ToME has an ASCII mode. ASCII is not useful when you have literally thousands of different enemy types (I counted!) to keep track of, each just slightly different from the other.
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May 3, 2015 21:21
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victrix posted:I think they're pretty hideous, and yeah, length + tons of boring chaff with occasional spikes of 'haha ur ded' was not fun. What do you expect? It used to be a -Band and now it has even more poo poo glommed on.
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May 3, 2015 21:30
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Bouchacha posted:ASCII is not useful when you have literally thousands of different enemy types (I counted!) to keep track of, each just slightly different from the other. It's actually really well-organized with types of enemy all clustered on the same letter and variants distinguished by color. Not to mention that ToME doesn't believe in hidden information bullshit and will happily give show you your opponent's entire stat screen if you 'l'ook at them.
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May 3, 2015 21:51
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The problem is that you then need to wade through the whole drat stat screen, and be intimately familiar with every class in the game, to distinguish uniques which are chumps from uniques which will one-shot you.
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May 3, 2015 22:28
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One shots in general need to die a horrible death. I want to see someone do an rpg where enemy damage is largely handled via %s, with flat damage used very carefully. If you're going to have some sense of progression, it's fine to have a line where if the player crosses it, they're going to get splatted - as long as such is telegraphed fairly clearly. Dying because you encountered a new enemy at your level, didn't know its capabilities, and discovering 'welp, guess I needed to quaff a potion of resist bullshit to survive that dude' at the cost of several hours of playtime is pretty lovely. It'd require a significant rethink of standard encounter design and progression, but I think it'd be a worthwhile direction to explore. (And on a related note, flat damage/% scaling is something that gets hosed up in a ton of rpgs - yes, thanks '+3% to X' on low level gear is real useful when X is 5. Same story for skills and passives with '+5% to X'. I think there are some rpgs that use flat + % in a smart manner, I can't recall any off the top of my head though.)
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May 3, 2015 23:22
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victrix posted:One shots in general need to die a horrible death. Honestly, for me as a player, any game who's gear/levelling is just +3% to <stat> +3% to <otherstat> can eat a dick. I get that it makes the spreadsheets easy to design, but it makes for a completely hollow play experience. At least *try* to hide the raw underlying spreadsheet.
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May 3, 2015 23:31
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If I know it's what I'm going in for, I can appreciate it... ... but I don't appreciate that bullshit specifically. If I'm in the mood for a Diablo lootsplosion game, cool, but you get those stretches where you're filtering out a bunch of chaff, partly because of the nature of loot driven games, and partly because of the lovely design math. It drives me a little bonkers because it shows up in a ton of places, not just a Diablo loot tooltip. It's in mmos, it's in all types of rpgs. It's like the designers saw how it was done elsewhere and went 'well that works!' and just c/p and be done with it, without looking at the nitty gritty and seeing cracks in the systems.
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May 3, 2015 23:35
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So I'm burnout on crawl til the next tournament, I've had enough stonewardens get one shot and I'm giving TOME a break, and I'm waiting for dungeonmans to get more content before firing it up again. Can anyone recommend me a newish roguelike? I lurk this thread constantly so I know the bigger new releases like Necrodancer or Risk of Rain... I'm looking for something simple and classic-y feeling like Powder. Any ideas?
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May 3, 2015 23:49
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Happylisk posted:So I'm burnout on crawl til the next tournament, I've had enough stonewardens get one shot and I'm giving TOME a break, and I'm waiting for dungeonmans to get more content before firing it up again. Can anyone recommend me a newish roguelike? I lurk this thread constantly so I know the bigger new releases like Necrodancer or Risk of Rain... I'm looking for something simple and classic-y feeling like Powder. Any ideas? Have you played Sil?
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May 4, 2015 00:00
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victrix posted:It's like the designers saw how it was done elsewhere and went 'well that works!' and just c/p and be done with it, without looking at the nitty gritty and seeing cracks in the systems. Yeah. RPGs are a genre that treats 40 year old hobbyist solutions as gospel. I mean, that it mostly works is a pretty strong testament to the rigorous play-testing that the original RPG received before the growth of the genre. And it's also a strong testament for niche genres to always have a place and be self-perpetuating. But, 40 years of game iteration and design and we're still counting gold pieces in every game to buy incremental equipment upgrades? Not even FPSes have stagnated that much.
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May 4, 2015 00:05
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Happylisk posted:So I'm burnout on crawl til the next tournament, I've had enough stonewardens get one shot and I'm giving TOME a break, and I'm waiting for dungeonmans to get more content before firing it up again. Can anyone recommend me a newish roguelike? I lurk this thread constantly so I know the bigger new releases like Necrodancer or Risk of Rain... I'm looking for something simple and classic-y feeling like Powder. Any ideas? Have you played Sil or Brogue?
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May 4, 2015 00:10
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EAT THE EGGS RICOLA posted:Have you played Sil or Brogue? Played both, love 'em. Something along those lines (but one I haven't played before) is what I'm looking for.
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May 4, 2015 00:38
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 Got a win with Melody! With perhaps the most broken string of luck I've ever seen. I had seven hearts midway through zone 3, along with a Crown of Thorns, Plate Armor, Boots of Levitation, a Bomb Spell, and two hamhocks in my backpack just in case. Made it to the boss, and very nearly didn't figure out what was going on in time (it's possible, I think, to "time it out" pretty quickly, which I suspect would count as a loss for you, though it's possible I misunderstood the mechanics). It's amusing: the zone 4 ghost enemies require precisely the opposite reaction from Melody vs. with Cadence. With Cadence, you have to pick a specific tile to move to; with Melody you have to pick any other tile. Naturally I still got hit by them.
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May 4, 2015 04:31
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Bouchacha posted:I don't understand why neither has been fixed yet. For a long while you could use a mod called old_rpg to turn everything 8-bit and sprite-y, which had the bonus effect of giving everything really distinctive colours and profiles. Then the new textures and paperdolling hit the game and it broke completely, and I didn't have the heart to play with the new tiles.
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May 4, 2015 06:33
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Unormal posted:Honestly, for me as a player, any game who's gear/levelling is just +3% to <stat> +3% to <otherstat> can eat a dick. I get that it makes the spreadsheets easy to design, but it makes for a completely hollow play experience. At least *try* to hide the raw underlying spreadsheet. I agree with this for leveling, but I feel like there's room (+stat) gear in games. +% feels lame when it is your One Big Choice, like spending a talent point while leveling up. You can't feel it unless it's something like +50% to stat. Having smaller bonuses on gear though is fine because you're not supposed to feel a huge difference for putting on each piece of gear unless it's a super powerful weapon or armor piece. Dmans has two (three?) rings, boots, shoulders, pants, chest, gloves, hat, two hand slots and a ranged slot. The majority of those are incremental upgrades, some steeper than others, with the occasional super glowy hot shot item that has a cool unique game effect.
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May 4, 2015 18:03
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Stelas posted:For a long while you could use a mod called old_rpg to turn everything 8-bit and sprite-y, which had the bonus effect of giving everything really distinctive colours and profiles. Then the new textures and paperdolling hit the game and it broke completely, and I didn't have the heart to play with the new tiles. While, from a modding perspective it might be possible to rectify both these problems (the wierdass difficulty curve/the rather ugly tiles) I have no idea how much work it would be to do the former. The latter however basically would require a ton of work, even with cutting corners. For a short time I considered it, but even just counting the character tiles alone, each race/sex has like 500+ images associated with it--though it's been a while since I've checked that, so I'm not entirely sure on the number. But even considering that the robes and leather armors are basically recolors that's still kind of a discouraging amount of work to do.
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May 4, 2015 19:04
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Sprite recoloring is indeed tediousBouchacha posted:This is some of the progress I was able to make on the Crawl>ToMe tileset:
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May 4, 2015 19:17
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madjackmcmad posted:I agree with this for leveling, but I feel like there's room (+stat) gear in games. +% feels lame when it is your One Big Choice, like spending a talent point while leveling up. You can't feel it unless it's something like +50% to stat. Having smaller bonuses on gear though is fine because you're not supposed to feel a huge difference for putting on each piece of gear unless it's a super powerful weapon or armor piece. Dmans has two (three?) rings, boots, shoulders, pants, chest, gloves, hat, two hand slots and a ranged slot. The majority of those are incremental upgrades, some steeper than others, with the occasional super glowy hot shot item that has a cool unique game effect. That's definitely a valid approach, and one that a lot of players like. However, just having these slots doesn't mean that you have to always have something in them. If (some) items are rare in general, finally finding a ring when you're level 8 would feel much better than having to change them five times until then. It would also allow to make each one significantly different from the others. It does require a lot of extra work to come up with different effects and balancing them. It's not impossible though, and The Depths of Tolagal does this very well (and even Dungeon Crawl with rings/amulets to a smaller extent). You can finish the game with the starting equipment, I think, but the different weapons and equipment have their own synergies that you might want to make a use of. Actually, I think that Dungeonmans does loot quite well, too, by reducing the busywork and the need to check every item against the character's stat sheet. Also, some types of items seem to be quite rare, and finding one feels good in the early levels. I'm not a big fan of discrete equipment levels, though, as improving your armour or whatever becomes practically a no-brainer and helps making early dungeons feel a bit of a slog because the enemy doesn't pose much of a threat, and in every game you end up with having mostly the same equipment and skills if you play the same archetype. The Academy helps with this, but sometimes I almost wish I could just start the character from level 5 or something. Burning Rain fucked around with this message at 19:46 on May 4, 2015 |
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May 4, 2015 19:43
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By the way, even the trash loot in Path of Exile has an explicit use in concert with the currency items. A "Normal" item that is dropped in a high-level area will have a high item-level and is usefully crafted with an Orb of Alchemy (relatively common currency item) to immediately get a random "Rare" item of the same item-level. The higher end players then splurge on Chaos Orbs (the defacto currency denomination) to re-roll the "Rare" items until they get what the specific one they want.
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May 4, 2015 19:54
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Neat little iOS roguelike called MicRogue. .99 cents USD, pretty charming so far. Climb ten levels and get the treasure. You die in one go, so do most enemies, you can move one or two spaces in cardinal directions, you've got a shield that can take three hits, some enemies make you swap positions with them, some move in diagonals. Kind of cute art style, nice (limited) writing. Doesn't kill music you have playing for its own (pretty decent) music. I like it a lot so far, even if idk if it's gonna replace Hoplite for me.
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May 4, 2015 20:31
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madjackmcmad posted:I agree with this for leveling, but I feel like there's room (+stat) gear in games. +% feels lame when it is your One Big Choice, like spending a talent point while leveling up. You can't feel it unless it's something like +50% to stat. Having smaller bonuses on gear though is fine because you're not supposed to feel a huge difference for putting on each piece of gear unless it's a super powerful weapon or armor piece. Dmans has two (three?) rings, boots, shoulders, pants, chest, gloves, hat, two hand slots and a ranged slot. The majority of those are incremental upgrades, some steeper than others, with the occasional super glowy hot shot item that has a cool unique game effect. I don't have any problems with Loot Games (or whatever) specifically, if I'm sitting down to play Diablo, I know what I'm getting into. But I do have a problem with % modifiers on small numbers, they're lovely. At low levels, a piece of gear that's +3-6 +3-6% gives a useful flat bonus, and at higher levels, where the flat bonus no longer means much to your power level, the +3-6% remains useful. A +25% piece is likely to be felt at any level, but that's usually too much oomph to put on one piece when you have a lot of gear slots - combining +flat and +% lets you make bonuses that are relevant to the character at any point in the game. For Dungeonmans specifically, there are only a couple of fixed %s that I remember being pretty bad. e.g., the +5% block/parry/dodge mods all seem to be completely static all game, so they generally suck badly early game. +5% parry in particular seems incredibly weak, since I usually don't see parry % go above like ~10% for a long time without massively stacking Skill. Also +block% feels somewhat weak because block% seems to be capped at 50% and you seem to get pretty close to that just with natural shield progression, much less ability use. Dodge seems the most useful of the three, given how it scales, though I don't know the specifics of shield block % vs enemy level, so maybe it's more useful against higher level enemies even if you're close to cap. There's also the matter of hidden information - supposedly some enemies have defeat block/parry (dodge?)% chance, but since that isn't clearly exposed, it's not something I ever notice or try to play around. edit: Moved to another thread, doesn't belong here. tldr: +5% Strength when you have 5 Strength is a bad mod that should feel bad. victrix fucked around with this message at 22:23 on May 4, 2015 |
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May 4, 2015 22:20
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victrix posted:tldr: +5% Strength when you have 5 Strength is a bad mod that should feel bad. You can't roll a Dungeonmans with 5 Stremf. But I get what you're saying. Trouble is, %s are the best choice for bread and butter stat increases. Players with bigger Academies can roll out of the gate with big enough stats so that % values make a difference. Flat bonuses make you good at something whether you have any ability in it or not. % bonuses reward focus. I think the latter makes for better play. So yeah, +5% of 5 is  but +30% of 50 is meaningful. Flat bonuses, when big enough, result in meta game stuff like "Don't put any effort into learning to Parry, just rush to the third floor of Dogwater Fastness and get the Parryprancer Mitts with a flat 50 point bonus, mandatory for any build." The +% bonuses in dmans aren't going up as the gear quality goes up, that's a bug.
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May 4, 2015 22:45
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madjackmcmad posted:Flat bonuses make you good at something whether you have any ability in it or not. If we're talking random loot games though, I don't look at % bonuses rewarding focused play, because you're only going to care about the %s that apply to your specific stats anyway, the others are dud mods regardless of if they're +10 int or +10% int when you're a str build (and there's a big difference psychologically between 'that's no good for me' and 'that should be good for me  ' - finding an int item on a str build is whatever, that happens, finding a +% str item early game is frustrating if other flat damage mods exist that would be superior in the early game, and they very, very often do in these games!).And again in random loot games, rushing for a flat bonus item isn't something you can do - sometimes you luck into one, sometimes you don't, and it's a 'woo, useful stat bonus!' when you find it, instead of a 'aww man, low level % affix, boourns' find. The dumb thing about those is in the end-game, all the affixes are now at a point where the % mods are hugely significant, so the early game gets hit with the double whammy of low %s and low base stats to modify, while the endgame is big numbers and big %s. Philosophically, I suppose it comes down to whether you want the player to be finding potentially useful items all game (spec/personal preference/playstyle all influencing what actually is), or having certain affixes/items that are simply much weaker at certain stages of the game pretty much always. I've seen a fair number of devs argue that it's important to have garbage so good stuff stands out, or a similar argument that even if your game is plains and mountains instead of peaks and valleys, players are still going to look at the plains as 'garbage' in comparison to the mountains. I don't really agree with that, but this is getting a bit too abstract  Short version: More games need +flat+% affixes  And rushing for specific items in games that are more static than random is pretty cool play I see lots of talk in rpgs of that nature, it doesn't hurt new players, and vets are going to break the game mechanically no matter what anyway, so having strong items out there for specific builds is cool I think.
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May 4, 2015 23:02
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Bogart posted:Neat little iOS roguelike called MicRogue. .99 cents USD, pretty charming so far. Climb ten levels and get the treasure. You die in one go, so do most enemies, you can move one or two spaces in cardinal directions, you've got a shield that can take three hits, some enemies make you swap positions with them, some move in diagonals. Kind of cute art style, nice (limited) writing. Doesn't kill music you have playing for its own (pretty decent) music. I like it a lot so far, even if idk if it's gonna replace Hoplite for me. Are there any ads in it? B/c if not, sold.
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May 4, 2015 23:07
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madjackmcmad posted:You can't roll a Dungeonmans with 5 Stremf. I think he agrees with you that +% is the best choice to make gear scale well, he's just saying that pairing percentage boosts with small flat boosts makes them meaningful bonuses regardless of whether you're high-level or not. +5% of 5 is , and so is +3 when you have 50, but "+3 and +15%" is decent when it takes you from 5 to 9 and also when it takes you from 50 to 61.
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May 4, 2015 23:08
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doctorfrog posted:Are there any ads in it? B/c if not, sold. Nope! Ad-free. Apparently made by just one person. I've made it to the top of the tower to get the treasure but now I have to get down.
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May 4, 2015 23:28
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Borderlands 2 is a good example of a game where most of the skills feel really soulless and pointless early on. There are an awful lot of skills that are +3-5% to damage when using a specific kind of attack (e.g. rifles or fire damage or whatever), and there's only a small handful (six per character) that actually give you extra "significant things" to do. They clearly balanced the skill system for high-level play on the theory that low-level characters can basically splat every enemy with one or two shots anyway, but that ends up meaning that low-level play feels pretty samey regardless of what class you are. Once you invest the maximum of 5 skillpoints in a given one of the "soulless" skills, it does make a noticeable difference in your character's abilities, but then it ends up feeling like you have to level up 5 times to get one "real" skill's worth of progression. This is compounded by the fact that you're required to invest 5 skillpoints at a given tier of skills in order to access the next tier.
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May 5, 2015 00:14
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Bogart posted:Nope! Ad-free. Apparently made by just one person. I've made it to the top of the tower to get the treasure but now I have to get down. Bought. And... there's a graphical bug where it only does portrait style, and only in landscape mode, so it's like playing through a keyhole. Hope it gets fixed soon, looks like a great little five minute game.
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May 5, 2015 00:46
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Borderlands 2 is a good example of a game where most of the skills feel really soulless and pointless early on Borderlands 2 is actually the example that leaps to mind when I think about how awful a tree of +1% skill ticks is for leveling in terms of player experience.
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May 5, 2015 02:27
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Unormal posted:Borderlands 2 is actually the example that leaps to mind when I think about how awful a tree of +1% skill ticks is for leveling in terms of player experience. God, I hated that. Only 1/3 of all skills felt like they made any difference what so ever. Other skills were pretty much "Do you want to get to use fun stuff? Sink 5 points into this and maybe we'll give you access to something interesting."
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May 5, 2015 02:35
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