Posts made by KairosVal

@jetah said in hint for logout:

@kairosval said in hint for logout:

I like the 15 minute timeout in unsafe locations on disconnect.

I don't like the 15 minute timeout in unsafe locations on logout. My problem is that it feels too punishing on players that aren't exploiting and have limited time for their gameplay loops.

I think that a good compromise might be to allow players to create a safe logout zone in the open world by creating a campfire and clearing out any aggressive mobs and enemy players in a large radius.

I think that getting players to manually set up camp is a more immersive and balanced method than the super-gamey channeled-logistics-spell route when it comes to enforcing players to not log out in the middle of combat.

I think that if players can create a safe logout zone with planning and consumable resources, then the 15 minute penalty on logging out in unsafe spaces becomes reasonable.

instead of using alt+f4 or removing network access they could just hit escape then logout/exit and are instantly removed from the game world. to me that's just as bad.

Do you seriously claim to think that:

A) Allowing players to log out safely while out of combat by spending time and resources to set up a safe camp first...

... would be just as bad as...

B) Players disconnecting mid combat to avoid death without penalty?

If so, I don't believe you.

@zidroc said in Let's be honest...:

Alright, thanks for the tips guys. Also, I was a little concerned that the KS has stalled out a bit. Wonder what we can do.

I wouldn't stress about that just yet. Wait for an update on the game to drop and see how much that generates more interest.

If we get a spike, things should be fine.

If it flops, then maybe worry.

Purchasable cosmetic items.

I have a minor problem with how most cosmetic items break art design by obscuring visual information about the gear other players have equipped.

So from a pure gameplay perspective, that's the feature I see as being the most droppable.

But from a finance perspective I concede the necessity, servers and employees don't pay for themselves.

I like the 15 minute timeout in unsafe locations on disconnect.

I don't like the 15 minute timeout in unsafe locations on logout. My problem is that it feels too punishing on players that aren't exploiting and have limited time for their gameplay loops.

I think that a good compromise might be to allow players to create a safe logout zone in the open world by creating a campfire and clearing out any aggressive mobs and enemy players in a large radius.

I think that getting players to manually set up camp is a more immersive and balanced method than the super-gamey channeled-logistics-spell route when it comes to enforcing players to not log out in the middle of combat.

I think that if players can create a safe logout zone with planning and consumable resources, then the 15 minute penalty on logging out in unsafe spaces becomes reasonable.

EDIT: Additionally, this could open up a balancing mechanic: If a character is logged off at a campfire, the campfire should show that fact in the game world. Not necessarily showing who or how many, but just that someone is logged out at that location.

This would give nearby players who scout the campfire a head's up that someone might pop into existence at that location at any time, so they've got the ability to identify the risk and alter their gameplay accordingly.

Also, keep in mind that the Foundation isn't supposed to be a competitive thing. It will be really difficult for an account that has just joined to catch up to an account that's been here for ages.

The point of the foundation is to have a bit of fun, reward the long-running early supporters with some goodies, and to incentivize engagement and word-of-mouth marketing.

If you stress out about it competitively it'll probably be a net loss for you in terms of fun vs effort.

• Will spell effects interact with the travel system? For example, would I be able to get a burst of warmth for my character by self-casting an AOE fire effect?

• Assuming we have the resources to do so, can we create a campfire to respec skills anywhere on the open world map? Or will this only be available at predetermined locations?

• When travelling between worlds, how will the arrival location be determined? Particularly interested in this for demon characters.

@jetah said in Extension of: Alpha 1 Please Line Up!:

@kairosval
Tartaros and Demons might not be testable in Alpha.

Yeah, I know. But there's some demo footage of demon combat in the kick starter, so I'm hopeful.

I keep all the music I like in one giant playlist, set the volume just low enough that it doesn't obscure in-game sounds, then just shuffle play on a loop.

I should warn you all before listening to that playlist that my taste in music is all over the place. The part of your brain that identifies music based on genre will get whiplash listening to that. Think twice before inflicting that on yourself.

And so it begins.

Ah well. It was a good run while it lasted guys.

It was inevitable that it wouldn't last: Humans gonna human.

My condolences to @Prometheus.

I'm not too stressed about it.

From what I've seen, the plan is to drip-feed information over the course of the kickstarter campaign. Each information release should in principle result in a spike of interest in the campaign.

I do hope it goes through - I want my Immortal EB rewards. But the game will be going through anyway, so it's not the end of the world.

Looking forward to finding out more about the game over the next month.

I think I've seen that movie.

...

It was good.

I wanted to be a demon anyway, but it made me happier to be a demon than when I started out.

Not sure yet what's going to be possible in Alpha One.

My first having-fun goal is to head to Tartaros and run around as a Hellfire demon getting into fights with people, and probably dying a lot. I plan to PvP in fractured, but I do not expect to be successful at PvP.

My first actually-testing goal is to see how much my New Zealand latency impacts on gameplay so I can give some meaningful feedback to Dynamite. I hope that a single shard for everyone will be viable in terms of latency because I want a maximally populated server. But if latency tanks PvP then that won't be viable and regional servers may be necessary. Time and testing will tell.

Weird. Had a quick search, but couldn't find an answer to this.

Short version is that I'm not sure, but I would expect the answer to be no as I think that falls a little to close into the realm of banks and auction houses relative to the design goal of making players actually have to interact with each other.

On the other hand, eve-style courier contracts seem like they might not be a great fit either.

Would be interested to hear from the devs on this one.

Here's some timezone information for people. Only listing for Saturday because that should be easy enough for people to map it against Monday to Friday dates instead of Saturday dates.

• Saturday, 6pm CEST
• Saturday, 10pm CEST

Also, I'm in New Zealand, so my availability at these times is going to be limited. Ah well. Such is life.

The entire point of virtualization is that you separate out the actual process from the hardware with a virtualization layer in between.

What you're paying for is uptime, not hardware.

Somewhere in the world, SpatialOS will have a data center that they either own or rent. In that data center will be a number of servers that are set up as the base metal.

On top of that base metal there will be a virtualization layer.

That virtualization layer will be able to bring worker processes up and down, and assign them to run on different servers, all on the fly.

So the worker processes running fractured in the virtualization layer could be load balanced to use 20% of the resources across 10 different servers all at once. Someone else's SpatialOS software could be load-balanced across that same set of servers.

Then if there's a big release and the number of users spike up and more users are needed, the virtualization layer can automatically load-balancing that out to use 30% of the resources across 15 different servers all at once.

If one of those servers falls over for some reason, then the worker processes running on that server will be impacted. But the others will chug along just fine, and the processes that crash can just be restarted on one of the other servers - hopefully fast enough that the overall impact to the userbase is minimal.

Then if one of those servers needs to be taken down for maintenance, then the virtualization framework is notified of the change, graciously migrates any worker processes over to another server, and then once that server isn't running anything it can be shut down. Maintenance can be performed - more RAM, upgrade CPU, change out the RAID drives, whatever. Then the server is brought back online, reintegrates back into the virtualization layer, and worker processes can start to be assigned back to that server.

The entire point of this kind of virtualization is that the client is paying for uptime and performance, not hardware. The data center and virtualization provider deal with the hardware side of things so that the client doesn't have to.

To be clear, I'm not familiar with exactly how SpatialOS does things. This is just the general outline of how cloud virtualization generally works at the datacenter level in contexts I'm familiar with. I'm making some reasonabl assumptions about how SpatialOS probably works as a natural evolution on top of that.

The thing about SpatialOS that's really interesting is that they're virtualizating at the level of the worker process. Originally virtualization took place at the level of an entire virtual server. Then Docker came along, and virtualization started happening at the level of a "container" that can be stored in an isolated segment on a given server, dropping the total footprint required for virtualization of functionality.

The industry has been moving towards the virtualization of worker processes for a while now. The implementation I'm familiar on the business computing side of things are called micro services, which work in the manner I described above. I am assuming that SpatialOS worker processes are doing something similar, because that would make sense.

The thing about SpatialOS that's more interesting than micro services is that they've set up a shared set of data (the game world) that multiple worker processes can all share and operate on. There's a distinction between worker processes that run as the back-end for a player connection and worker processes that run the background world, and there's some synchronization stuff going on there about making sure that two different worker processes don't screw things up by trying to make different changes to the same world object at the same time.

Which is basically how multi-threading works as a general programming concept. So from the outside, it looks like what SpatialOS is doing is virtualizing at the worker process in a way that is analogous to traditional multi-threading... Which means that they've completely abstracted out most of what a computer does so that you can treat the back-end as just a bunch of threads running out in the cloud, with automatic load-balancing and scaling up and down as needed to meet the load, and robust to individual server failure at the hardware level.

So my assumption could be wrong: Perhaps SpatialOS does do dedicated servers on a per-customer basis, that wouldn't be maximally efficient but it also wouldn't be crazy either.

But even here, you'd probably want to have multiple servers for the redundancy of it... Because that's kind of the entire point of why you want virtualization in the first place. And in principle, Dynamite shouldn't have to know or care about what's going on at the hardware level, although in practice it's probably a good idea if at least one person at Dynamite does know what's going on.

Anyway, impromptu and probably-badly-structured-and-confusing lecture over. Sorry for the huge wall of text.

Ah, cool. Siege window is a good enough answer for now, I'll wait for the blog update for details.

Thanks.

@target said in Payment Model info and post release strategy:

I don't know enough about Eve to decide whether it's pay to win or not, so I googled it and find conflicting info, with most of the people defending it making up the same uneven scenarios that you just did. It's not very convincing.

Eve has this weird auto-balance mechanic. A lot of PvP is based around killboard entries online showing the total value of the ships you've destroyed vs. the ships you have lost. So flying around in something really expensive is like having a massive bullseye on your back.

So it's sort of pay-to-win, but at the same time you're increasing the amount of risk, so there's still a meaningful risk/reward tradeoff... But it also perversely winds up creating high-value content for other players to destroy. So it has this weird way of balancing out.

That's why the accounts you will have read will be conflicting - because it is kind of a conflicted situation. It just sort of works out in the end, because that's just Eve.

The reason it works (if it can be said to work at all) is because of the weird dynamics in now the online killboards - which are not a part of the core game - motivate in-game PvP behavior. It sort of happened by accident and not as part of the core game design. So I wouldn't bank on the same thing applying anywhere outside of Eve unless it was very carefully put together.

I plan to be there. Will see how things play out at the time.

I've had a hunt around in the Everything we know about Fractured thread and the general search function, and I'm amazed I can't find anything on this. Someone must have asked this question already. Is my search-fu just that weak, or has this somehow not come up yet?

Has there been any discussion around how player-owned buildings can be attacked or defended while the owners are offline?

I'm interested in this from both angles, both as a future property owner and as a future plunderer.

Because if there's an eclipse going on and I jump into Syndesia in an area where the owners of the local landscape are all offline, I still want to be able to cause a bit of mayhem while they're away.

But at the same time, if I have a little desert lodge in Tartaros, it would be nice to at least have a chance to do something to defend it or recover from an attack that will inevitably happen while I'm offline, because demons gonna demon, obviously.

What's the story?