The new community group just started and lets see what they bring to NS2, but hopefully we can see to the time after that also.
After Subnautica is done, would you like to see UWE working with NS3 on Unreal Engine 4 ?
If you don't think only from the business and nostalgia aspect UWE put to spark, just from pure gaming and modding aspect, and how it would bring in new players.
They already started Subnautica with unity, so why couldn't they start NS3 also with a new engine. Spark could be used to some side projects perhaps.
Majority of gamers really like that engine and could bring NS to a whole new light.
Make NS3 more like the Original Natural Selection. Move away from E-sports and the player base will be much higher. Natural Selection 3 would be awesome if they followed the player base statistics as a model. NS1 Remade for a new engine! I would buy that in a heartbeat!
The new community group just started and lets see what they bring to NS2, but hopefully we can see to the time after that also.
After Subnautica is done, would you like to see UWE working with NS3 on Unreal Engine 4 ?
If you don't think only from the business and nostalgia aspect UWE put to spark, just from pure gaming and modding aspect, and how it would bring in new players.
They already started Subnautica with unity, so why couldn't they start NS3 also with a new engine. Spark could be used to some side projects perhaps.
Majority of gamers really like that engine and could bring NS to a whole new light.
Make NS3 more like the Original Natural Selection. Move away from E-sports and the player base will be much higher. Natural Selection 3 would be awesome if they followed the player base statistics as a model. NS1 Remade for a new engine! I would buy that in a heartbeat!
NS2 was never an e-sport. I despise the notion that a game can't appeal to a pub/casual audience and a competitive one at the same time. This idea that NS2 turned out the way it did because it was catering towards competitive players is a complete fallacy.
Look at any of the top FPS games and you will see that the core gameplay mechanics appeal both to casual and competitive players (eg - csgo ).
The new community group just started and lets see what they bring to NS2, but hopefully we can see to the time after that also.
After Subnautica is done, would you like to see UWE working with NS3 on Unreal Engine 4 ?
If you don't think only from the business and nostalgia aspect UWE put to spark, just from pure gaming and modding aspect, and how it would bring in new players.
They already started Subnautica with unity, so why couldn't they start NS3 also with a new engine. Spark could be used to some side projects perhaps.
Majority of gamers really like that engine and could bring NS to a whole new light.
Make NS3 more like the Original Natural Selection. Move away from E-sports and the player base will be much higher. Natural Selection 3 would be awesome if they followed the player base statistics as a model. NS1 Remade for a new engine! I would buy that in a heartbeat!
In extension to @bonage point. NS2 has always lacked a LOT of tools for the competitive scene. If you believe that UWE focused on the competitive side too much, then you must explain why in the world there are so many 3rd party modifications with competitive games in mind.
Why was CompMOD and NS2+ ever necessary?
Moreover, we still lack a lot of tools for the comp scene. The demorecording system is as good as broken. For the longest time we didn't have 1st person spec.
I think everyone can agree, that NS2 suffers from low player retention. And a focus on the casual player might be a good strategy for that. But to blame it on the comp scene like this, when it has struggled every bit as much, is crazy in the light of these things imo.
matsoMaster of PatchesJoin Date: 2002-11-05Member: 7000Members, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver, Squad Five Gold, Reinforced - Shadow, NS2 Community Developer
I find it useful to split player retention in two parts; The Bounce is how many new players "bounce off" after trying. The Leak is players that stops playing the game after a long time.
Some game have a low Bounce but a high Leak. You play it for a few weeks and then you get bored and stop.
NS2 have a brutal Bounce, but a fairly low Leak; those people who stays around long enough tends to stay for while.
NS2 have a brutal Bounce, but a fairly low Leak; those people who stays around long enough tends to stay for while.
Yes but let's not give NS2 too much credit for the low leak, as you put it. I think it's reasonable to say, that the reason why NS2 has low leak, is not necessarily because it has done anything right in particular - but rather because it has a "monopoly", in a niche genre, with no real competitors.
I have quit and come back many times - I basically have stockholm's syndrom now. There are no alternatives to NS2. The minute that there is; I think we will see a massive leak.
Does it really have a low leak? A year ago we had an average daily player count of almost a 1000 players while today it is circling 200. Those ~1000 players are the ones until the beginning of 2015. This last year we lost a lot of players.
I've also noticed that on big rooms and great distances have made players disapear....
Mm... relevancy distance is 40m, so the engine offloads entities beyond that range. There is a reason why there are usually large crates breaking long sight distances - mappers have to hide that.
That, bw, is a performance optimization to keep your client from having to update to many entities. The high client-side per-entitiy cost is one of the more glaring weaknesses in the Spark Engine.
Is there any other way to get it to render them say in certain testing situations that i want? i know there is a relevancy location mod but does that help with this?
Stop gloryfying UE4 and other engines. This is the damage the marketing teams on big companies do when they hype up their game engines.
Poorly informed people see an amazing demo of a game engine and they think all of that wouldn't be possible if it weren't for the new version of the engine. And that's exactly what the marketing team wants all you sheeple to think. You either dont know or forget that the demo or gane you just saw was the sweat of 100's of artists and programmers. A game can only look as good as the skill of the artists working on it. A game can only perform as well as the skill of engineers working on it. A game engine is only a tool in the hand of developers. The quality of a product doesn't depend on how good the tool is, but how good is the worker wielding it.
Also, you are missing a whole pther dimension: these people at UWE MADE The Spark engine. If I were to ask you whether you loved better your own children or someone else's, what would you answer? The kind of passion UWE has working with and on their baby engine is what gives birth to legendary games such as Half Life. Why didnt Valve keep using an unmodified version of the quake engine? It's because they cared about their game. And completely redoing id tech in order to make their own engine, GoldSrc, only strengthened that feeling.
Also, how can you guys consider yourselves modding supporters if you jump so eagerly at the first mention of using some big companies engine. Isnt that what modding is all about? Supporting the little guy, the small business, the indies?
Stop gloryfying UE4 and other engines. This is the damage the marketing teams on big companies do when they hype up their game engines.
Poorly informed people see an amazing demo of a game engine and they think all of that wouldn't be possible if it weren't for the new version of the engine. And that's exactly what the marketing team wants all you sheeple to think. You either dont know or forget that the demo or gane you just saw was the sweat of 100's of artists and programmers. A game can only look as good as the skill of the artists working on it. A game can only perform as well as the skill of engineers working on it. A game engine is only a tool in the hand of developers. The quality of a product doesn't depend on how good the tool is, but how good is the worker wielding it.
Also, you are missing a whole pther dimension: these people at UWE MADE The Spark engine. If I were to ask you whether you loved better your own children or someone else's, what would you answer? The kind of passion UWE has working with and on their baby engine is what gives birth to legendary games such as Half Life. Why didnt Valve keep using an unmodified version of the quake engine? It's because they cared about their game. And completely redoing id tech in order to make their own engine, GoldSrc, only strengthened that feeling.
Also, how can you guys consider yourselves modding supporters if you jump so eagerly at the first mention of using some big companies engine. Isnt that what modding is all about? Supporting the little guy, the small business, the indies?
Supporting the "little guy" doesn't have to mean having blind fervor for everything they produce.
UWE did a great job building their own engine from scratch, and they should be proud of it. But the landscape has completely changed since they released NS2 and Spark. Spark hasn't been maintained - some of it's tools are still broken (eg cinematic editor), it's performance is still questionable for a lot of people in NS2, and it has no brand recognition - which puts it at a disadvantage.
You talk about poorly informed people championing the marketing efforts of the larger companies, yet you don't outline any of the benefits of said engines can have. UE4 has a heap of tutorials and community support to help people learn and make their own content. UE4 is constantly maintained and updated - it has a dedicated team continually working on it. It has much better and more accessible licensing rules now too. It is also designed to run on a whole array of systems, and has PS4 and XboxOne certification, opening up new available markets.
So I ask you, what are the disadvantages of a small company like UWE using an engine like UE4 for future games if the benefits outweigh the negatives? If it makes more sense business wise and allows them to produce the same great content, why shouldn't they consider it? At the end of the day, an engine is a set of tools to help make something. If one toolset is better than other and has obvious advantages, then it's a no brainer.
I don't need a company to produce everything themselves in order to support it - they will still be the 'little guy'.
I'll take the bait on that one : UE4 does not come with lag compensation or any of the basic modern networking requirements that are standard today.
Oh and it the UE3 engine handled fast moving entities very poorly, often resulting in hitching models. You can see it in Nosgoth, Dirtybomb, and even slower walking games like Chivalry.
Essentially, you'd be using UE just for the ease of modding and prettier graphics at the cost of having to rewrite the entire game from scratch - not to mention having to write your own networking backend.
The benefits most definitely do not outweigh the negatives / work required.
*edited to specify UE3 engine is what had hitching, not enough experience with UE4 to know if the symptom still exists
*edit 2 : forgot we were talking about a mythical NS3 here..
Those were UE3 not UE4
But I suspect UE4 doesn't have lag compensation or much networking included by default either.
Regardless you would be writing that code either way, so I wouldn't say using UE4 is necessarily harder.
That said, I have played UE3 games which DID have good input and what appeared to be smooth networking. They were certainly rare however.
I dont consider Spark one of the games with good input either, even after all the improvements. Switching between UE3/Unity/Source FPS games and Spark is still noticeable. I can play games on either of those 3 engines and when my sensitivity is set to be consistent, input feels very consistent (provided I can maintain stable FPS).
@bonage I agree with everything you said, but for me the problem is more about the mindset one takes as a developer (and I agree with UWEs one in terms of Spark) and also the masses not putting too much thought into what they want. Too bad this forum doesnt have a "respectfully disagree" button.
I think UE4 offers more than just "ease of modding" and "prettier graphics" (esp in code department), but that's just my opinion and something for UWE to determine down the line.
Regarding networking code and lag compensation - is there any evidence to suggest that this code would stay the same between spark 1.0/NS2 and any future iterations of Spark for NS3? Is the lag compensation in NS2 considered to be better than other games or is it simply sufficient? It's easy to cherry pick this as a con, but i don't think it's a deal-breaker. I would imagine that UE4 games like the new Unreal Tournament (Epic Games), Paragon (Epic Games) and Lawbreakers (Cliff Bleszinski, Boss Key Productions) have some form of lag compensation. Whether it becomes a part of the engine itself, or if it needs to be coded separately remains to be seen, but considering Epic are developing 2 of those titles, I imagine it's on their radar.
NS3 (should it ever happen) needs to be on an engine that offers UWE the best chance of success - both internally from a studio pov and externally from a customer satisfaction pov. Spark might be their baby which they know like the back of the hand, but there are other options out there which may be better in the long run.
Yeah - there will always be a degree of that where people just flock to the shiniest looking option. I think for many though, at least subconsciously, it's more to do with the fact that because its a widely used and popular platform, people associate that with stability and usability.
Spark is modeled after the Source engine. What most perceive as NS2 being slower is the lower server rates / higher interp.
The newest UT has *some* form of prediction but other than that not really sure after digging through forums and changelogs.
UE engine is definitely the easiest to work with and has tons of documentation and support, I agree; and I guess yea if you were going to write everything from scratch anyways it'd still be the best bet, even over Spark 2. I had forgot this thread was about NS3 in my prior comment
I don't know which games Dragon was speaking of that didn't show UE's typical networking woes.
I was just chiming in to speak of my own experience with the engine's history in regards to networking and fast moving entities compared to something like Source (or even possibly Source 2, if we're talking about NS3 here..)
If you ever wanted to try one, the best example I can think of is probably Archeblade (its F2P on steam). I never did frame by frame analysis, but when playing on good servers I very rarely noticed any issues. The game is pretty dead now so it might be hard to find a decent server to test on. Game was a lot of fun, shame it didn't do very well. Suffered from a lot of the same issues as NS2.
The biggest issue that turned people off to the game, IMO, is the very high learning curve, with almost zero effort into teaching a new player how the game works. Combine that with no place for any meaningful practice and you have new players getting destroyed in multiplayer and then quitting forever.
The second biggest issue was hackers. That made me quit for a good long while, and when I came back to check it out again, it was dead.
The biggest issue that turned people off to the game, IMO, is the very high learning curve, with almost zero effort into teaching a new player how the game works. Combine that with no place for any meaningful practice and you have new players getting destroyed in multiplayer and then quitting forever.
best part being, nothing in that matter is in the works.
best part being, nothing in that matter is in the works.
This is total blasphemy. I will report you to the almighty badge tribunal!
Don't listen to him, let's pray for a new skin.
oooohhhhhmmmmm! oooohhhhhmmmmm! oooohhhhhmmmmm!
I have faith that source 2 will be the best engine for non-open world games, then I vote Unity for open-world I guess.
Whatever private engine rockstar has for GTAV was pretty solid - online was a bit wonky but it's quite amazing the world size and what can be done on it. All while running at over 150 fps
The biggest issue that turned people off to the game, IMO, is the very high learning curve, with almost zero effort into teaching a new player how the game works. Combine that with no place for any meaningful practice and you have new players getting destroyed in multiplayer and then quitting forever.
best part being, nothing in that matter is in the works.
That is wrong, actually.
There are multiple projects in the works right now that are actually far along, and will be assisting with teaching a new player how the game works, as well as a meaningful way to practice without being stomped.
@xDragon
You are correct in that archeblade had better than normal UE netcode by at least smoothing out / interpolating the animations, (something most devs don't seem to care about??) but their high tickrate definitely helped with that... however it still didn't have any lag compensation
Tribes tried for a bit with hitscan weapons iirc but it felt so awful it got reverted supposedly?
@DC_Darkling Yea but this is where Source and Spark differ: in source the tickrate is far more impacting and is much higher than in spark, (often 100 vs 30) meaning more frequent updates for a more responsive game. Interp is just there to catch any failed snapshots in between, and can be adjusted clientside.
I have faith that source 2 will be the best engine for non-open world games, then I vote Unity for open-world I guess.
Whatever private engine rockstar has for GTAV was pretty solid - online was a bit wonky but it's quite amazing the world size and what can be done on it. All while running at over 150 fps
Unity for open-world? Are you mad!! I wouldn't use Unity for an open-world game. I am trying to, but it really is not designed for it, as UWE are finding out with Subnautica. Unity is a great engine for 2d, psuedo 2D and 3d games, but on a smaller scale.
With what I know now about Unity, I would have probably tried to build it on a different engine, if there was one more suited, but I can't find one that doesn't cost the earth..
The biggest issue that turned people off to the game, IMO, is the very high learning curve, with almost zero effort into teaching a new player how the game works. Combine that with no place for any meaningful practice and you have new players getting destroyed in multiplayer and then quitting forever.
best part being, nothing in that matter is in the works.
That is wrong, actually.
There are multiple projects in the works right now that are actually far along, and will be assisting with teaching a new player how the game works, as well as a meaningful way to practice without being stomped.
@xDragon
You are correct in that archeblade had better than normal UE netcode by at least smoothing out / interpolating the animations, (something most devs don't seem to care about??) but their high tickrate definitely helped with that... however it still didn't have any lag compensation
Tribes tried for a bit with hitscan weapons iirc but it felt so awful it got reverted supposedly?
@DC_Darkling Yea but this is where Source and Spark differ: in source the tickrate is far more impacting and is much higher than in spark, (often 100 vs 30) meaning more frequent updates for a more responsive game. Interp is just there to catch any failed snapshots in between, and can be adjusted clientside.
There's not a single thing regarding player retention in the trello beside some Dropbox stuff (lol). You've gone on forever about open development, am I missing something???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
There's not a single thing regarding player retention in the trello beside some Dropbox stuff (lol). You've gone on forever about open development, am I missing something?
Yes.
No need to be obnoxious with your formatting, either.
There's the warmup mode and player progression stuff on the trello, but other than that we have stated before in these forums that a robust tutorial is on the way.
It's not on the trello because it's being done on people's free time (volunteers and paid staff alike) and therefore isn't an official project.. it might get added on there eventually, idk. (i'll ask if it can be)
Completing this tutorial's very basic first tiers will be required if rookies want to play something other than Rookie Only servers with bots. The rest (more advanced stuff) will be optional.. but may come with some sort of public announcement to other players that they haven't completed all of them yet. (maybe a badge or rank or something )
There will also be a mandatory intro video for rookies that concisely explains the big picture in a quick amount of time.
This means that future rookies you see in a server will have learned the most basics at least, and maybe even some advanced stuff.
*All of this is subject to change, obviously, since it's very much a WIP still.
There's not a single thing regarding player retention in the trello beside some Dropbox stuff (lol). You've gone on forever about open development, am I missing something?
There's the warmup mode and player progression stuff on the trello, but other than that we have stated before in these forums that a robust tutorial is on the way.
Completing this tutorial's very basic first tiers will be required if rookies want to play something other than Rookie Only servers with bots. The rest (more advanced stuff) will be optional.. but may come with some sort of public announcement to other players that they haven't completed all of them yet. (maybe a badge or rank or something )
Comments
Make NS3 more like the Original Natural Selection. Move away from E-sports and the player base will be much higher. Natural Selection 3 would be awesome if they followed the player base statistics as a model. NS1 Remade for a new engine! I would buy that in a heartbeat!
NS2 was never an e-sport. I despise the notion that a game can't appeal to a pub/casual audience and a competitive one at the same time. This idea that NS2 turned out the way it did because it was catering towards competitive players is a complete fallacy.
Look at any of the top FPS games and you will see that the core gameplay mechanics appeal both to casual and competitive players (eg - csgo ).
In extension to @bonage point. NS2 has always lacked a LOT of tools for the competitive scene. If you believe that UWE focused on the competitive side too much, then you must explain why in the world there are so many 3rd party modifications with competitive games in mind.
Why was CompMOD and NS2+ ever necessary?
Moreover, we still lack a lot of tools for the comp scene. The demorecording system is as good as broken. For the longest time we didn't have 1st person spec.
I think everyone can agree, that NS2 suffers from low player retention. And a focus on the casual player might be a good strategy for that. But to blame it on the comp scene like this, when it has struggled every bit as much, is crazy in the light of these things imo.
Some game have a low Bounce but a high Leak. You play it for a few weeks and then you get bored and stop.
NS2 have a brutal Bounce, but a fairly low Leak; those people who stays around long enough tends to stay for while.
Or at least I think so.
Maybe because I started playing back in NS1 days.
Yes but let's not give NS2 too much credit for the low leak, as you put it. I think it's reasonable to say, that the reason why NS2 has low leak, is not necessarily because it has done anything right in particular - but rather because it has a "monopoly", in a niche genre, with no real competitors.
I have quit and come back many times - I basically have stockholm's syndrom now. There are no alternatives to NS2. The minute that there is; I think we will see a massive leak.
Is there any other way to get it to render them say in certain testing situations that i want? i know there is a relevancy location mod but does that help with this?
Stop gloryfying UE4 and other engines. This is the damage the marketing teams on big companies do when they hype up their game engines.
Poorly informed people see an amazing demo of a game engine and they think all of that wouldn't be possible if it weren't for the new version of the engine. And that's exactly what the marketing team wants all you sheeple to think. You either dont know or forget that the demo or gane you just saw was the sweat of 100's of artists and programmers. A game can only look as good as the skill of the artists working on it. A game can only perform as well as the skill of engineers working on it. A game engine is only a tool in the hand of developers. The quality of a product doesn't depend on how good the tool is, but how good is the worker wielding it.
Also, you are missing a whole pther dimension: these people at UWE MADE The Spark engine. If I were to ask you whether you loved better your own children or someone else's, what would you answer? The kind of passion UWE has working with and on their baby engine is what gives birth to legendary games such as Half Life. Why didnt Valve keep using an unmodified version of the quake engine? It's because they cared about their game. And completely redoing id tech in order to make their own engine, GoldSrc, only strengthened that feeling.
Also, how can you guys consider yourselves modding supporters if you jump so eagerly at the first mention of using some big companies engine. Isnt that what modding is all about? Supporting the little guy, the small business, the indies?
Supporting the "little guy" doesn't have to mean having blind fervor for everything they produce.
UWE did a great job building their own engine from scratch, and they should be proud of it. But the landscape has completely changed since they released NS2 and Spark. Spark hasn't been maintained - some of it's tools are still broken (eg cinematic editor), it's performance is still questionable for a lot of people in NS2, and it has no brand recognition - which puts it at a disadvantage.
You talk about poorly informed people championing the marketing efforts of the larger companies, yet you don't outline any of the benefits of said engines can have. UE4 has a heap of tutorials and community support to help people learn and make their own content. UE4 is constantly maintained and updated - it has a dedicated team continually working on it. It has much better and more accessible licensing rules now too. It is also designed to run on a whole array of systems, and has PS4 and XboxOne certification, opening up new available markets.
So I ask you, what are the disadvantages of a small company like UWE using an engine like UE4 for future games if the benefits outweigh the negatives? If it makes more sense business wise and allows them to produce the same great content, why shouldn't they consider it? At the end of the day, an engine is a set of tools to help make something. If one toolset is better than other and has obvious advantages, then it's a no brainer.
I don't need a company to produce everything themselves in order to support it - they will still be the 'little guy'.
I'll take the bait on that one : UE4 does not come with lag compensation or any of the basic modern networking requirements that are standard today.
Oh and it the UE3 engine handled fast moving entities very poorly, often resulting in hitching models. You can see it in Nosgoth, Dirtybomb, and even slower walking games like Chivalry.
Essentially, you'd be using UE just for the ease of modding and prettier graphics at the cost of having to rewrite the entire game from scratch - not to mention having to write your own networking backend.
The benefits most definitely do not outweigh the negatives / work required.
*edited to specify UE3 engine is what had hitching, not enough experience with UE4 to know if the symptom still exists
*edit 2 : forgot we were talking about a mythical NS3 here..
But I suspect UE4 doesn't have lag compensation or much networking included by default either.
Regardless you would be writing that code either way, so I wouldn't say using UE4 is necessarily harder.
That said, I have played UE3 games which DID have good input and what appeared to be smooth networking. They were certainly rare however.
I dont consider Spark one of the games with good input either, even after all the improvements. Switching between UE3/Unity/Source FPS games and Spark is still noticeable. I can play games on either of those 3 engines and when my sensitivity is set to be consistent, input feels very consistent (provided I can maintain stable FPS).
I think UE4 offers more than just "ease of modding" and "prettier graphics" (esp in code department), but that's just my opinion and something for UWE to determine down the line.
Regarding networking code and lag compensation - is there any evidence to suggest that this code would stay the same between spark 1.0/NS2 and any future iterations of Spark for NS3? Is the lag compensation in NS2 considered to be better than other games or is it simply sufficient? It's easy to cherry pick this as a con, but i don't think it's a deal-breaker. I would imagine that UE4 games like the new Unreal Tournament (Epic Games), Paragon (Epic Games) and Lawbreakers (Cliff Bleszinski, Boss Key Productions) have some form of lag compensation. Whether it becomes a part of the engine itself, or if it needs to be coded separately remains to be seen, but considering Epic are developing 2 of those titles, I imagine it's on their radar.
NS3 (should it ever happen) needs to be on an engine that offers UWE the best chance of success - both internally from a studio pov and externally from a customer satisfaction pov. Spark might be their baby which they know like the back of the hand, but there are other options out there which may be better in the long run.
@CptClutch
Yeah - there will always be a degree of that where people just flock to the shiniest looking option. I think for many though, at least subconsciously, it's more to do with the fact that because its a widely used and popular platform, people associate that with stability and usability.
Spark is modeled after the Source engine. What most perceive as NS2 being slower is the lower server rates / higher interp.
The newest UT has *some* form of prediction but other than that not really sure after digging through forums and changelogs.
UE engine is definitely the easiest to work with and has tons of documentation and support, I agree; and I guess yea if you were going to write everything from scratch anyways it'd still be the best bet, even over Spark 2. I had forgot this thread was about NS3 in my prior comment
I don't know which games Dragon was speaking of that didn't show UE's typical networking woes.
I was just chiming in to speak of my own experience with the engine's history in regards to networking and fast moving entities compared to something like Source (or even possibly Source 2, if we're talking about NS3 here..)
The biggest issue that turned people off to the game, IMO, is the very high learning curve, with almost zero effort into teaching a new player how the game works. Combine that with no place for any meaningful practice and you have new players getting destroyed in multiplayer and then quitting forever.
The second biggest issue was hackers. That made me quit for a good long while, and when I came back to check it out again, it was dead.
best part being, nothing in that matter is in the works.
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Source_Multiplayer_Networking
Whatever private engine rockstar has for GTAV was pretty solid - online was a bit wonky but it's quite amazing the world size and what can be done on it. All while running at over 150 fps
That is wrong, actually.
There are multiple projects in the works right now that are actually far along, and will be assisting with teaching a new player how the game works, as well as a meaningful way to practice without being stomped.
@xDragon
You are correct in that archeblade had better than normal UE netcode by at least smoothing out / interpolating the animations, (something most devs don't seem to care about??) but their high tickrate definitely helped with that... however it still didn't have any lag compensation
Tribes tried for a bit with hitscan weapons iirc but it felt so awful it got reverted supposedly?
@DC_Darkling Yea but this is where Source and Spark differ: in source the tickrate is far more impacting and is much higher than in spark, (often 100 vs 30) meaning more frequent updates for a more responsive game. Interp is just there to catch any failed snapshots in between, and can be adjusted clientside.
Unity for open-world? Are you mad!! I wouldn't use Unity for an open-world game. I am trying to, but it really is not designed for it, as UWE are finding out with Subnautica. Unity is a great engine for 2d, psuedo 2D and 3d games, but on a smaller scale.
With what I know now about Unity, I would have probably tried to build it on a different engine, if there was one more suited, but I can't find one that doesn't cost the earth..
There's not a single thing regarding player retention in the trello beside some Dropbox stuff (lol). You've gone on forever about open development, am I missing something???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
Yes.
No need to be obnoxious with your formatting, either.
There's the warmup mode and player progression stuff on the trello, but other than that we have stated before in these forums that a robust tutorial is on the way.
It's not on the trello because it's being done on people's free time (volunteers and paid staff alike) and therefore isn't an official project.. it might get added on there eventually, idk. (i'll ask if it can be)
Completing this tutorial's very basic first tiers will be required if rookies want to play something other than Rookie Only servers with bots. The rest (more advanced stuff) will be optional.. but may come with some sort of public announcement to other players that they haven't completed all of them yet. (maybe a badge or rank or something )
There will also be a mandatory intro video for rookies that concisely explains the big picture in a quick amount of time.
This means that future rookies you see in a server will have learned the most basics at least, and maybe even some advanced stuff.
*All of this is subject to change, obviously, since it's very much a WIP still.
How is that going to help...
nothing has changed, all these years, I can't...
You have a better idea?
The game still needs a ton of better systems in place to help rookies once they'd passed the tutorial.
But let's wait for none of it to end up on trello and not be implemented. Just discuss it on the forums for 3 months.