Mark's review of the preview weekend.

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Zeratulx
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Mark's review of the preview weekend.

Postby Zeratulx » Mon Aug 25, 2008 3:04 pm

Date Posted: 4:29pm Subject: RE: Preview Weekend Update - Date Edited: 4:48pm (6 edits total) Edited By: MarkJacobsEA
Folks,

Okay, it was a wild and crazy weekend in WAR and while some of you might be tempted to go all Samurai on us for a couple of the bugs, overall things went very, very well. As long-time readers of my notes now, I won’t do a Nick Winters and we are anything but pathological liars so we’ll always own up when we make a mistake and we made a couple here. So, let’s talk amongst ourselves and have a little chat about the top nine list of the biggest issues and where we stand in regards to them.

(1) Client Crashes – I’ve talked about this as one of the reasons why we didn’t release the NDA until recently. Here’s the current status.
- Just a little too many currently. While we are better off than we were in beta, we must do better still before release.
- A number of players will lower spec machines had more CTDs than higher spec machines.
- Number of fixes already in pipeline. They are working their way through our testing servers and will be pushed to the players once they have been vetted internally.
- Engineering time for CTD issue has remained heavily committed; our top engineers are working on the various issues.

(2) Monster Pathing and AI – Well, what can I say other than not even all of King Tut’s wealth could have made us feel better for messing up on this one. Well, maybe all his wealth. happy
- “Yes, that monster seems to be behaving a little oddly”. Monster responsiveness was very sketchy, odd pauses and tethering issues.
- “Oh, was I supposed to go in that direction?” Pathing sometimes wonky - mobs get stuck or go in wrong direction.
- Utter confusion at times as both monsters and pets will engage and disengage seemingly at random
- Internal server optimizations last week broke the pathing/AI. And I mean really, really broke it. This truly was a “Opps, we broke this code” moment for us and we don’t have many of them.
- Going to ensure that this problem is fixed this week. As I said in my first Preview Weekend, this is a major concern for us. Fortunately we have no underwater combat in this game or some of the NPCs may have been appropriately dubbed land sharks.

(3) Pet Responsiveness – With similar issues to Monster Pathing and AI, this was not our finest hour.
- Need to transfer "combat responsiveness" fixes to pets - have pet move immediately on button press.
- “Oh no, Mr. Bill!” Pets suffer from same pathing and lack of response as general monsters. Pets hopping around like they were headed to Del Staters.


(4) Global Cooldown Timers –This seems to be a hot topic for players to talk about. However, things aren’t always as they seem.
- Reality and perception are two different things, Warhammer has a GCD of 1.4s, WoW has 1.5s
- “Ability not ready” messaging needs to be improve, a sound effect if Global Cooldown in effect, maybe more cowbell?
- Need to improve on the feeling of sluggishness of the GCD and UI. Bug with display where our timer shows 2s when it is really 1.4. We need to improve on anything that makes the UI feel more sluggish than it is.
- The next best thing to a queue is? We will add in better "slop timer" to allow players 0.3s extra to pre-queue a second ability followup.

(5) Better animations
- So much more coming in the next two versions of the client. We are currently incorporating serious amounts of new animations into the game. Hopefully nobody will sneak a coneheads model into the game.
- Look at what my XXXX does now? Over the next month we will address many class-attack specific issues across all 20 careers.
- “U think you can dance?” Nope, but we have added new racial animations for movement, fidgets and redid some emotes.

(6) Texture Blurring
- Textures are currently cached in a manner that results in blurriness on entering a region.
- We will look at adding a client scalar.

(7) Client Performance – This is one of those issues
- Need better scalers on effects, sounds, graphics, etc to help lower end machines (already lots of additions to coders)
- This thing loves memory like Dan Aykroyd loves bass. We have already improved the memory consumption of the client and taken 100M out of current test best.

(8) Targeting, Camera, etc
- Currently our targeting system differs from many MMOs in terms of our features and how we go about things. We will identify and make a more standard initial setup but allow flexibility.
- Will add additional keybinding selections to allow flexibility

(9) Renown rank gear
- Unfortunately, a new bug (well an old bug we fixed and then managed to break again) which allowed Rank 10 RR 6 players can go to Tier 2 to get better gear and then come back to Tier 1 and own scenarios. We are currently working on a fix.

I hope you enjoyed the Preview Weekend and we thank you for your interest and we hope, patronage of our game.

Guess what folks, that’s the news and I am outta here!

Mark

P.S. You wanted SNL references, you got SNL references, lots and lots. happy See if you can spot them all. Hopefully, I get lots of bonus points...
DAOC - WoW - AoC - WAR - Aion - Rift - GW - SW:TOR - GW2

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Zera Giantsbane - 80 Thief
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Rishug
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Postby Rishug » Tue Aug 26, 2008 11:12 am

I enjoyed the preview. After falling through the floor and dying in the first minute of my first char I was a little worried, but had no issues after that. Even on my decent but fairly old machine I ran everything fine on the highest setting, which was unexpected.

Zeratulx
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Postby Zeratulx » Tue Aug 26, 2008 11:38 am

The game is not using all of it's graphics settings, it's using it's low settings even though you have that option for high quality so keep that mind.
DAOC - WoW - AoC - WAR - Aion - Rift - GW - SW:TOR - GW2



Zera Targaryen - 80 Mesmer

Zera Giantsbane - 80 Thief

Zera Plaguewind - 80 Necro

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Postby Amit » Tue Aug 26, 2008 2:52 pm

I have to say in the whole weekend I had zero client crashes, no problems at all with lag or framerates even in zones with 60+ other people.

My major annoyance is the "ability not ready" thing they talk about. what pisses me off the most is that the message is HUGE and covers so much screen space and for me its the screen space that usually shows incoming people.

Other than that the game was r0x0r. more polished still in beta than conan is 3 months post release.

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Hall
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Postby Hall » Tue Aug 26, 2008 4:24 pm

I want my sliders game runs from great to shitty depending on the number of people on screen.

I want my motherfucking sliders, to tide me over till I buy a dual core.
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Rishug
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Postby Rishug » Wed Aug 27, 2008 2:48 pm

I figured something was up with the graphics. Still, it's nice to know I'll be able to play even if I run things on low.


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