Bay 12 Games Forum

I for one am really hoping for MPS health to be server-side. When that's done, I'm starting the map over on my server and keeping 'er on ultra hard mode, and if possible increasing the number of monsters, too. Only your little torch-lit villages will bring some safety from the hordes, and then only until... ssssssSSSSSSSS...

I'd strongly suggest having lots of monsters. After all, we are dwarves, here. So long as elephants, carp, and bronze collosi aren't added, we have nothing to fear!

...however, I might wuss out and request that either Creepers be disabled, or (even better) their explosion be changed to damage players but leave blocks intact. Sort of how Llamacraft defangs TNT, so we don't end up with chunks being blasted out of megaprojects. Or maybe not - who knows, maybe when we've got something to fight, we'll spend more time on defensive structures than megaprojects...

wait...

So I can do everything like craft/dig/explore even though I didn't buy the game?
Is buying the game just for getting online play?

Well, yes and no. You've downloaded the game client from the free weekend. You'll still be able to use it to play, AFAIK - after all, you have all the relevant files. You won't be able to update or play online without authenticating or whatever, but theoretically you might be able to play single-player.

...of course, I haven't actually tested this, but there's a quote to back it up:

Quote from: Spade on September 22, 2010, 03:41:07 pm

Is it weird I can still play the game on the world I made during the free weekend?
I can still craft and everything, but I haven't actually bought the game.

Not if you're playing offline. You can play offline pretty much indefinitely if you don't delete your files, you'll just be stuck with the features of whenever you downloaded.

so I'm assuming it works. 

If Notch suddenly disappears to a remote french island. I wouldn't blame him.

And immediately begins punching down trees and building a stone house with his bare hands? 



But yeah, this is ridiculous. It'd be more ridiculous if he could actually access any of his Paypal funds, of course, and we're still operating under the assumption that they'll ever let him access his money, but still. Twenty thousand purchases. That's damn impressive.

Quote from: Eugenitor on September 21, 2010, 09:36:36 pm

The entire point of an MMO is to manage leveling speed of players, to cause them to waste more time than necessary *by design*, to stretch out what would be 30 hours of gameplay into months.

Those are the MMOs I avoid. If there's a sign of grind and no fun, I leave. It's one of the reasons I try to find mmos that focus on PvP and advancing through pvp. It's one of the reasons I enjoyed warhammer. The pve was very typical, but the pvp could be extremely fun and rewarding.

Frankly (and I know drumming up a specific MMO is a fast way to derail this, so I'll keep it short) this is one of the reasons I loved Guild Wars. Low level cap, no (non-cosmetic) benefits to 'grinding' endgame content, no real motivation to play besides having fun (which is the reason I bloody well play games, online or not!). Then you remember: "right, no monthly fee". So they've got no incentive to keep you grinding for months on end - they have to provide new content for players if they want more money, so that's what they do.


It's kind of silly, really, the insistence on grinding in your average MMO. Why in my right mind would I pay you $15 a month for the privilege of repeatedly performing a repetitive task? If somebody released an MMO as a single-player game, it would rightly be deemed a complete piece of crap - repetitive quests, constant grinding, half-assed storyline. Take a crap RPG, slap in some shoddy netcode, charge money every month, and you've got a blockbuster. 

When I play rogue survivor... I can't help it, I always wish it would feel a lot more .... like it would simulate the zombie/survival population. I figure it would be hard to get down and a lot of games would just break down because either the survivors die off to soon or the zombies get all killed or whatnot.

I figure roguedjack thought about all this and probably even tried to just have initial zombies and survivors and let it run like a cellular automaton and THEN decided that spawntimes were actually a good idea to keep the game intense and fun.

But still... I wish there was a gamemode which was more like that... some initial survivors, some initial zombies and off you go, see where it leads you. I think, in theory, it should be possible to kill every zombie in that sealed city.

I havent even seen the blackops guys yet, so maybe it wouldnt even fit in the "story" or the chronology of things, but hey.

In theory? Maybe. The problem here is simple: you're one person. Even with Leadership, you're 4 people. The average city worldwide has (according to 2 minutes on Google) a population of 6,545. Therefore, I'd estimate that 99% of the kills in the game would be completely independent of you. And, of course, those 'independent actions' would take a heck of a lot of processing power to compute, and they'd generally work out to something close to the average. In other words: you can spend 10 seconds per kill calculating each battle, which works out to an average survival rate of 70%, or you can just multiply the population by 0.7 and be done in less than a microsecond. If both lead to the same outcome... wouldn't it be better to skip the simulation? Likewise, rather than maintaining a count of surviving individuals versus zombies, and the skills/equipment of each survivor, and a map big enough to reasonably hold them... why not just abstract that away?


If my argument isn't clear, to simplify: if the game did simulate populations, you wouldn't notice during gameplay. You might read the post-game summary of each city, but your actions would have roughly no effect on the city at large. Wasting CPU cycles on something that means nothing to the player seems like a waste.

If you're looking for a serious friendly fire server, then no - they all died quickly because you couldn't even leave spawn before getting killed by teammates.

Part of this is the old excuse: "But I can!" Friendly fire is so rare in TF2, that when it's activated, people start teamkilling obsessively, just for the heck of it. 


But mainly, it's because TF2 was never designed for FF, and it shows. Explosives are abundant and have large blast radii; automatic weapons (*cough* minigun) are highly inaccurate even at mid-range and will likely hit anything near the target; sentry guns will happily fire through teammates if there's a valid target behind them; flamethrowers have difficult-to-judge hitboxes (though I've heard they don't ignite friendlies when using the built-in FF command, so they're still useful for spotting Spies.). Making a good FF mod would require more than setting one cvar; it'd require a substantial rebalance of the entire game.

Goddammit, why does the forum have to be down now?  I'm in dire need of technical help here.  Fucking display drivers.

The forums are working fine for me. Admittedly I haven't tried posting (they certainly don't need my help to make stupid posts!), but I've yet to see a web forum where posting went down while the forums were still available for viewing.
http://www.minecraftforum.net/index.php is the forum index, and you'll probably want the SMP tech support forum at http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewforum.php?f=1013.
 

Well, the game works now. Sneaking's awesome.

My skin's reset though, and when I play SMP it logs me on as foobar. Weird stuff.

Probably because names and skins are stored on the Minecraft server... which is currently offline. You should get everything back once Notch performs emergency CPR on the server, probably some time early next week.


By the way, if you're like me and always went through Minecraft.net for the blog, it's located at http://notch.tumblr.com/, and the forums are at http://www.minecraftforum.net/index.php. Ya know, until the site comes back up and the links are available again. 

EDIT: Of course, he immediately puts a blog link up on the temporary page. The forum link might still be useful, though!

*sigh* Why do none of these idiots seem to understand what exactly an alpha is?! Features go in now, focus switches to bug-fixes in beta.

Don't forget - while half the population is screaming "OMG fix bugz no new featurez!", the other half is screaming "OMG this iz alpha give us biomez nao!". It's really kind of funny, actually. (So long as you aren't a forum mod, at least. )


Oh, and a third half (yes, the MC community is so annoying, there's a third half) is just bitching about minecraft.net being down. So, it's "Fix bugz!", "Give us new, buggy featurez!", and "We don't care, just let us play at all!"