Pan'Theon: Rise' of th'e Fal'Len - #1 Thread in MMO

Zaide said:

The issue is how do you pay for a coffin when your corpse is out there? I guess you buy them in advance and bank them?

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We can call it a coffin, but the idea is to have some sort of tradeskill-created item that allows you to complete a "corpse summoning ritual" within a certain radius (i.e. within the same dungeon) of your corpse that summons your body back to you.

You could get pretty creative with the item/ritual. Certainly a higher level corpse would require a "coffin" made with more difficult to find/expensive components.

How you pay for it is up to you-- that's the point. Maybe you make it, maybe you buy a few and stockpile them.

The idea is to put corpse recovery in the hands of the players, rather than simply have an NPC in a central hub area that does it for you.

AC had the best death penalties IMO. If you planned well, you could mitigate most of the item losses because you dropped on value only not utility. So if you had something dumb like a diamond chalice worth 80K coins drop, it was worth insane amounts of money on top of the vendor cost because it was light so didn't affect burden as much and it would be way above the value of most armor and weapons.

I didn't mind EQ either, the only issue was at certain points it hampered normal gameplay in some zones where it otherwise shouldn't have. I liked the danger element in dungeons and stuff but there should have been more availability in the outside world (trade gold/plat for npc corpse drag or res or something). There's got to be a balance between driving players towards exploration and danger. That's one area I felt EQ2 actually improved on, there were lots of areas and quests that brought you places were you could die but part of the puzzle was figuring out how to thread the needle in dangerous areas at lower levels and survive the experience. That sort of content only works if there's a way to mitigate risk.

Zaide said:

Anyone here (Besides Tyen) have experience with Unity? Do we expect issues with Unity being used for a game of this scale?

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Unity is great for small, indie developers that don't require MMO-levels of complexity.

To answer your question, I don't know, and I don't think anyone knows because an MMORPG to this caliber hasn't been built on Unity before. From the fellow developers I have spoke to in industry, doing almost anything like an AAA MMO in Unity requires complete source access - and that's where they charge you a shit ton. My guess is Brad was offered an advertising deal of sorts - ie; "Look at this MMO we made in Unity" in return for full support from Unity's developers. For those making a smaller indie game, you don't require that level of detail. But for those making server technology that is intended to interact with Unity, it is preferable to have full source access. I had to deal with a lot of pitfalls making the EQEmu Unity client - most pitfalls which would be solved with source access. And if I had to do it over again, I would just do it in C++/Blueprints with Unreal 4 as it would be a lesser time investment to get things working.

You are able to make a small indie MMO on Unity - quite easily, in fact, but in terms of performance and technology I would say Unreal 4 has better community support, better developer support in case things go wrong with implementation, and in general better performance.
And if you want full source access to UE4, you literally have to only open a Github account and download the source code. That right there is the determining case for going with Unreal 4.

Zaide said:

Anyone here (Besides Tyen) have experience with Unity? Do we expect issues with Unity being used for a game of this scale?

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It is a bit draw call heavy at the moment. Will get much much worse as they don't have fixed player models that are all one piece. Once you start getting wearable pieces of gear the draw call count goes up alot. Light sources and shadows add a bunch too.

There's new stuff coming in Unity that will help alot, probably in the next few months. GitHub - Unity-Technologies/ScriptableRenderLoop: Scriptable Render Loop

Yeah we've had some members bring up concerns about Unity, I guess we'll wait and see.

In other news, we're sitting at roughly 15 members with pre-alpha pledges. Testing should be fun.

Unity is fine. You have to build onto it, but you have to build onto any engine. Who used an unmodified Unreal to make an mmo? Nobody. Both are better today than doing it all yourself.

As to the death penalty, there has to be danger. It's essential and one of the biggest reasons new MMOs have sucked so horribly. For so long now, there is no danger of dying, so you go anywhere and do anything. If you die, you're right back in minutes. That leads to there being absolutely no mystery, and players uncovering and achieving everything in a fraction of the time they should. That was probably the biggest difference between EQ and mmos today.

Remarkable how they make it sound like progress has been made.

Newsletter is fine unless you were expecting stream dates, then it's a huge disappointment.

lurkingdirk said:

Remarkable how they make it sound like progress has been made.

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One thing Brad has always been exceptional at is using a lot of words to say almost nothing.

That's exactly what I said in my beta pre-Vanguard post. Just droned on and on for pages and pages and pages.

I remember that night surprisingly well. I was drunk. I put up the lyrics to Little Conversations by Concrete Blonde and plus I think a quote from Worf from Star Trek. "He who talks much, says little." Or some shit like that.

goishen said:

That's exactly what I said in my beta pre-Vanguard post. Just droned on and on for pages and pages and pages.

I remember that night surprisingly well. I was drunk. I put up the lyrics to Little Conversations by Concrete Blonde and plus I think a quote from Worf from Star Trek. "He who talks much, says little." Or some shit like that.

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1918 pages into this and we finally get a Concrete Blonde reference.

Great goddamn band.

RobXIII said:

Is...that a toupee? I'm really bad at picking out even the obvious ones, don't judge. My hair would look like that if I let it grow out for a month or so.

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I had the same question. He's at least colouring it. But that shit looks fake to me.

I actually google image searched to see what his hair looked like in the last few publicity shots because I thought it looked like a bad rug too. I think it's real though. Unless he just recently switched from a good rug to a terrible one? Idgaf, tbh.

Not a good look for old McQuaid, no doubt. You never want your hair looking like a toupee.

Guess he's too busy making Pantheon to give a fuck