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woh... that moment when you just realise this is a very slow timeline...
Sunday, 29-Jan-12 10:40:28 UTC from web-
@purplephish20 @scribble Can I get yo guys opinions on sumthin?
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@ladestitute yeah, sure!
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@ladestitute Sure, what is it?
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@purplephish20 @scribble Okay, I'll try not to talk your ears off and give a short summary. Chao Land is the primary project (former MMO) of a game I'm working on with a team, for a small indie community that has been around for probably more than two and a half years.
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@purplephish20 @scribble Recently, we removed the MMO part and switched engines. Development from then on was 100% by scratch (it was forced, anyway) and it has been ongoing for 3 weeks. The choice to switch engines (and for the second time, actually) was slightly off on basis, so we didn't think it through a little. The idea of doing MMO client/server software (not by myself, silly) by hand came into mind, in the past hour. The idea is rushed since it's so early and sudden, and very daunting for a set of beginner coders but the near mass possibilities with handwriten client/server software is nearly endless along with a huge boost in performance. Something our current engine doesn't have sadly (well, it's export format is HTML5 which is a very young language and not so good with heavy mass-user data handling/performance) though. Other than that, we've switched engines twice and I dislike to throw away my work, even it is truly little in comparsion to writing MMO software by hand.
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@purplephish20 Did you actually read it or skim through it?
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@ladestitute i read the whole thing..... -_-
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@ladestitute That sounds pretty awesome!
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@purplephish20 If you understood, I just wanted an opinion if I should stick with the engine or try (no, not try. Do. I don't like the phrase try) coding mmo sever/client software.
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@ladestitute I'm sorry, I just haven't got a clue what that all means
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@purplephish20 Simpler: Our game originally scrapped a MMORPG element to and we switched engines due to that. I recently had the thought of reversing the decision and coding server/client software for the MMO features by hand with the team. Should I just stick with the current game plan or return to the original MMO idea and try writing the mmo software?
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@purplephish20 You seriously don't understand? I'm not trying to be mad here, I just don't know what's the problem. Is there a statement in my last post your not getting?
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@purplephish20 I'm just really desperate for an opinion or some help. This decision problem is really starting to more than mildly bug me. Bugged Me = Poor Producitity/Mood
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@ladestitute Stay with the current plan. Switching engines very rarely improves projects, and trying to shoehorn features into engines that they don't natively support just gives you skyrims horse physics.
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@ladestitute Well he may possibly just not understand coding server/client software bit but that's just guessing since it's kind of like jargon or at least meaningless unless you know what it has to do with. Aside from this, is it best to get an opinion for this from people who may not know what's actually going on in terms of your project?
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@ladestitute All I can gather is that its better to just work with, and bloody communicate as much as you can with the people involved
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@ladestitute I absolutely know ZERO about coding.... and that now depresses me...
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@ceruleanspark The MMO engine we where using previously has been dead for since January of last year so the head dev of our team was struggling anyway. Shoehorn? How can you if your writing the server/client software by hand?
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@egnaroesroh Your probably right. I've weighted the pros and cons of switching and the pros far outweigh the cons far as I know so far. Including that I've been in the game's community for a long time (how's 2 and a half years?) and that the forums of it have had some odd staying power...I've never been able to leave, even though I never planned to. Although the task will seem daunting initially, it'll look good on my resumes n the future, and we would be learning the language of choice as a team. I feel one of the pros is slipping my mind now though.
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@ceruleanspark There's always the Valve route of writing your own engine so you can easily add whatever features you want to it whenever they become necessary. Of course, this option makes your game take a lot longer to finish (related: whatever happened to HL2: Episode Three? They've just stopped talking about it entirely it seems.)
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@toksyuryel Valve...route? Tell me more.
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@toksyuryel I think Valve doesn't know what to do. They've taken too long with it, so whatever happens, when they release it, it's going to get critically panned because it could never possibly live up to the hype it's now surrounded by.
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@ceruleanspark Duke Nukem Forever. That is all.
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@ceruleanspark It couldn't be any better even if the box had "HALFLIFE EPISODE 3: NOW STARRING MORGAN FREEMAN"
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@egnaroesroh In fairness to gearbox, DNF was an objectively subpar title. The humour and mechanics did not age well.
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@ceruleanspark That's mostly the point I suppose. That game would have revolutionized things if it actually managed to beat halo or some other shooter to the punch. Instead it just looked like a simple shooter with a ridiculous story and main character. Can't win 'em all.
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@ceruleanspark It hasn't been THAT long yet- after all they took six years to finish HL2 and it still ended up being amazing. But I do agree that it's really getting up there now.
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@egnaroesroh I think that statement underestimates precisely how amazing Halo actually was at the the time (and to a very real extent, still is)
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@ceruleanspark I'm admittedly not a Halo fan nor was I a shooter person at the time that it came out. Though I can still understand how revolutionary that game is/was as far as the future of gaming is concerned.
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@ladestitute It's what I described- writing your own engine so that you can easily add features to it whenever they're needed. If you listen to the developer commentaries in the HL2 episodes and the Portal games (I haven't played the L4D games, but if they have commentary they probably talk about the same thing there too) you can see that they constantly had to add features to their Source Engine throughout the development of those games in order to make it do the things they wanted to do. The tradeoff though is all the extra time you have to spend working on the engine instead of the game. If you lack the luxury of such time, you should not try to do the same thing.
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@toksyuryel Let's see...except for other dev team members of our group (far as I know, their not robots!), I am unemployed and take online classes. I don't see my umemployment changing in the near future so yeah.
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@toksyuryel I'm going to assume that at least a section of that extra time is spent recoding an already built section to now work with that add on that they coded in?
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@egnaroesroh Sometimes it's that, and sometimes the change IS recoding an already built section to make it do something it couldn't quite do before.
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@toksyuryel Isn't that kinda what I said?
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@egnaroesroh @toksyuryel What's the language to learn for my first? I've been told it's C#, but Java holds your hand too much. I'm also thinking on the basis of what language is best for writing a MMO.
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@egnaroesroh Only partially- you're talking about recoding to work with something that was added, I'm talking about the recoding being the only thing without anything added elsewhere.
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@ladestitute I barely know hard coding and the only one I did start learning is python so I'm probably not the best person to ask. Sorry.
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@toksyuryel Okay, I see it now after I re-read it. The wording just threw me off for a bit.
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@ladestitute You should ask several people this question and carefully weigh their answers against what it is you personally want to do, because there is no one right answer that is true for everypony. For instance, I hate C# but not for any rational reason- I hate it simply because I hate .NET and C# depends on it. Python is my personal recommendation for first language, though nothing is wrong with Java either if you're any good at coding in it (most people aren't, giving it an undeserved reputation of being a bad language when it actually does some pretty revolutionary things like JIT compilation). If you'd like to do things in hard mode, you could try C (but not C++, for reasons explained here: http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/ possibly #nsfw, I can't remember if it contains strong language or not so I'm tagging it just in case).
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