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

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BoozeCube

BoozeCube

The Wokest
<Prior Amod>
53,556
317,069
Aeiouy_sl said:
They have said they will require additional funding. Yeah this is essentially to get the ball rolling. They seemingly plan to continue to pursue crowd sourced funding, perhaps on their own site , if the ks funds.
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Which is why this isn't a Kickstarter for Pantheon and shouldn't even be listed as such. It's a Kickstater for the development and staffing of Visionary Realms, Inc., in fact I wonder if that's against Kickstarter's rules and it was pointed out to them they would pull the project.

Hell might even be a way for them to save face while giving them a chance to start over.
 
Jimbolini

Jimbolini

Semi-pro Monopoly player
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Vandyn_sl said:
Licensing, infrastructure, office space, dev tools, etc
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Staplers

rrr_img_57622.jpg
 
Tauro

Tauro

Bronze Knight of the Realm
371
26
From the comments section of update 10:

Tony "Vhalen" Garcia about 3 hours ago
Tony "Vhalen" Garcia here.
@Troy Within the ruined riddled highlands called the Wastes rests a large headland named Heroes End. All of this land was once the sprawling metropolis of an ancient race called the Celestials. When the planar collisions erupted, this land was torn asunder by the arrival of the fragments of other worlds. Much was buried or lost to the rising sea, but Heroes End and it's temple, the Sunken Sanctum remained partially intact. Triundan (Human) historians have designated the area as the sacred grounds of the Celestials where they came to build a sanctum for their goddess, Nexus. The grounds around the temple and within hold the tombs of great warriors, placed to guard the temple for eternity. The temple is sunken into the ground and is rumored to have hundreds of chambers that reach deep into the ground. Unfortunately, all expeditions into the sanctum have failed to breach much more than a couple chambers. Traps, hidden doors and undead war wizards (the Spartan-like soldiers of the Celestials) keep the curious at bay.
This dungeon and its surrounding ground is not a low level or newbie experience. Only experienced adventurers should attempt to enter the Sunken Sanctum.
And if they are brave (or foolish) enough to do so, they should be well versed in the arcane language of the Celestials. There are most assuredly barriers sealed with powerful wards.

also:
Creator Visionary Realms, Inc. 10 minutes ago
Hey all, Vu here. No its not a night shot. Just a different skybox (since the other one didn't have clouds) with some different ambient light to test settings. And yes, the night should be much darker.
smile.png
 
B

Bertox_sl

shitlord
14
0
Aradune_sl said:
We have them lined up and they will join once we have funding. This includes plenty of programmers.
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My good man and former boss,

That's not really how it works these days, not when you're crowdfunding and have nothing to show. Sorry dude. Gotta change with the times.
 
Bruman

Bruman

Golden Squire
1,154
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I posted it in the comments, I'll post it here too. Needing to know this answer is what's keeping me at just $100 as opposed to $250:

I have a question that I feel really needs to be answered. We know this $800k does NOT get us a game. It's to start the game in the hope to seek more funding later from a publisher / studio. What happens if the $800k gets spent, and the VR team was unable to get that publisher or other investment? Do we get refunds? Does the team work on it pro-bono in their spare time while working other full time gigs?
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Basically, as others have said - what's the business plan here? What's the contingency to those plans?

I'm not happy, but willing to piss away $100 on the chance this gets made. Not so much on $250.
 
D

Dahkoht_sl

shitlord
1,658
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Genuine question for those of you who have worked around the industry on the gaming development side of things. On the "engineer" side of things I've always wondered if they have them around and what do they do? I get the difference between designers/coders/artist etc , but have always been curious on the actual networking/infrastructure side of things.

I'm an IT Systems Engineer starting from back about 98 as far as professionally , and the co-owner of the company I work for has been also for longer and he lurks a bit on these boards. Our "Systems Engineer" titles essentially mean we could be installing a power supply for a cheapo client, removing spyware from desktops , and other basic things like that , although we do have technicians we try and have do that sort of stuff first but it's an all hands on company where no one is above doing anything. On the other hand the same morning we get done removing spyware we might that afternoon be helping spec out , or install ,a server cluster with a fiber channel SAN back-end and failover switches VLAN'd yadda yadda. And everything in between. Literally figuring shit out on the fly ,be it low end or high end stuff is what we do and our clients expect us to be able to handle shit we've never heard of. Yes we can do scripts and get the gist of some programming ,but are in no way "coders" at all. In fact most of the systems engineers I know have little actual coding experience. On the flip side , we've had clients who were coders who couldn't setup their own Outlook profile to connect to Exchange and other things I consider silly simple etc.

I always wondered do these sorts of dev houses have anyone that actually knows hardware/networking/infrastructure type stuff , or they outsource all that ? I just don't know many networking/engineer experts who know anything about coding , and vice versa also.

Just curious.
 
L

Lysis

N00b
102
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Is there a market for a $10-30M pay to play EQ/VG hybrid built the old way? Probably not.

Is there a market for a low budget title inspired by EQ/VG built by a small, extremely dedicated team? Definitely. Games can be made cheap; but not at the pace of 1999. I point to the 200k+ early subscribers of Vanguard who followed the vision. I point to the thousands who play EQ emus. We're out there. It's just about drastically reducing dev costs which other small teams are doing right now.
 
B

Bertox_sl

shitlord
14
0
Engineer and programmer are interchangeable terms in game development.

If you're big enough you get an IT professional, which would eventually expand into an IT department (assuming sufficient headcount growth).
 
DickTrickle

DickTrickle

Definitely NOT Furor Planedefiler
13,670
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Bruman_sl said:
I posted it in the comments, I'll post it here too. Needing to know this answer is what's keeping me at just $100 as opposed to $250:



Basically, as others have said - what's the business plan here? What's the contingency to those plans?

I'm not happy, but willing to piss away $100 on the chance this gets made. Not so much on $250.
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Probably no way you'd get a refund. If they spent it all, who could you get it from? Pretty sure you've have to attempt a lawsuit and since the KS only requires you to show a good faith effort to follow through, there might not be a lot of ground to stand on.

However, I do wonder if this KS is somewhat against the rules because it's an acknowledged fact that $800k alone would not get the game complete. That would require external funding. I don't know.
 
A

Aeiouy_sl

shitlord
217
0
Boozecube_sl said:
Which is why this isn't a Kickstarter for Pantheon and shouldn't even be listed as such. It's a Kickstater for the development and staffing of Visionary Realms, Inc., in fact I wonder if that's against Kickstarter's rules and it was pointed out to them they would pull the project.

Hell might even be a way for them to save face while giving them a chance to start over.
Click to expand...
Except I don't think ks requires that the ks fund the entire project.

If people get their rewards then everything is deemed kosher. Other ks games have used outside funding or continued funding via their own website post ks.
 
Bruman

Bruman

Golden Squire
1,154
0
Dahkoht_sl said:
Genuine question for those of you who have worked around the industry on the gaming development side of things. On the "engineer" side of things I've always wondered if they have them around and what do they do? I get the difference between designers/coders/artist etc , but have always been curious on the actual networking/infrastructure side of things.

I'm an IT Systems Engineer starting from back about 98 as far as professionally , and the co-owner of the company I work for has been also for longer and he lurks a bit on these boards. Our "Systems Engineer" titles essentially mean we could be installing a power supply for a cheapo client, removing spyware from desktops , and other basic things like that , although we do have technicians we try and have do that sort of stuff first but it's an all hands on company where no one is above doing anything. On the other hand the same morning we get done removing spyware we might that afternoon be helping spec out , or install ,a server cluster with a fiber channel SAN back-end and failover switches VLAN'd yadda yadda. And everything in between. Literally figuring shit out on the fly ,be it low end or high end stuff is what we do and our clients expect us to be able to handle shit we've never heard of. Yes we can do scripts and get the gist of some programming ,but are in no way "coders" at all. In fact most of the systems engineers I know have little actual coding experience. On the flip side , we've had clients who were coders who couldn't setup their own Outlook profile to connect to Exchange and other things I consider silly simple etc.

I always wondered do these sorts of dev houses have anyone that actually knows hardware/networking/infrastructure type stuff , or they outsource all that ? I just don't know many networking/engineer experts who know anything about coding , and vice versa also.

Just curious.
Click to expand...
Most developers worth a shit can handle the basics. A developer who can't set up Outlook needs a new career. Most good devs can handle the basics - set up your database server, set up your webserver, set up the security properly, etc. Depending on the language and environment you're developing in, a lot of what you do to even be able to develop locally is the same as setting it up for public access. One of the best traits of a good developer is, as you said - being able to figure it out, learn, adapt, and do it correctly. Many developers can manage your SAN, optimize the database, etc, very well also.

That said - the bigger your enterprise, the better off you are looking at specialized roles (to an extent - you don't want to go too far trying to make your software shop looking like an assembly line). But generally if you're going to needing your entire infrastructure to be virtualized, multiple redundancies, a TB database with backups handling 100 concurrent users, a data warehouse solution, etc - then you'll be looking more towards either outsourcing or hiring those specific roles, so your developers can spend more time writing software. Everyone though should still be working together as a team and in contact all the time, and knowing what the other is doing - skipping this often creates a lot of friction and issues in production, finger-pointing, and general animosity.
 
G

gogojira_sl

shitlord
2,202
3
At work so can't keep up everything that is happening, but initially I put $45 to reserve my alpha spot while having every intention to bump that up to a few hundred bucks. That same feeling isn't there at the moment.
 
T

Troy_Costisick_sl

shitlord
437
0
Tauro_sl said:
From the comments section of update 10:

Tony "Vhalen" Garcia about 3 hours ago
Tony "Vhalen" Garcia here.
@Troy Within the ruined riddled highlands called the Wastes rests a large headland named Heroes End. All of this land was once the sprawling metropolis of an ancient race called the Celestials. When the planar collisions erupted, this land was torn asunder by the arrival of the fragments of other worlds. Much was buried or lost to the rising sea, but Heroes End and it's temple, the Sunken Sanctum remained partially intact. Triundan (Human) historians have designated the area as the sacred grounds of the Celestials where they came to build a sanctum for their goddess, Nexus. The grounds around the temple and within hold the tombs of great warriors, placed to guard the temple for eternity. The temple is sunken into the ground and is rumored to have hundreds of chambers that reach deep into the ground. Unfortunately, all expeditions into the sanctum have failed to breach much more than a couple chambers. Traps, hidden doors and undead war wizards (the Spartan-like soldiers of the Celestials) keep the curious at bay.
This dungeon and its surrounding ground is not a low level or newbie experience. Only experienced adventurers should attempt to enter the Sunken Sanctum.
And if they are brave (or foolish) enough to do so, they should be well versed in the arcane language of the Celestials. There are most assuredly barriers sealed with powerful wards.

also:
Creator Visionary Realms, Inc. 10 minutes ago
Hey all, Vu here. No its not a night shot. Just a different skybox (since the other one didn't have clouds) with some different ambient light to test settings. And yes, the night should be much darker.
smile.png
Click to expand...
Thanks for posting that. Seems like a positive development to me.
 
Jimbolini

Jimbolini

Semi-pro Monopoly player
2,607
991
gogojira_sl said:
At work so can't keep up everything that is happening, but initially I put $45 to reserve my alpha spot while having every intention to bump that up to a few hundred bucks. That same feeling isn't there at the moment.
Click to expand...
Bah...not you Gogojira. Hang in there
 
D

Dahkoht_sl

shitlord
1,658
0
Bertox_sl said:
Engineer and programmer are interchangeable terms in game development.

If you're big enough you get an IT professional, which would eventually expand into an IT department (assuming sufficient headcount growth).
Click to expand...

Gotcha , that clears that up , all the programmers we've been around were coding experts like I said but knowledge ended there and vice versa from what we referred to as engineers ourselves.

If don't mind one last highjack question (promise last one ) , on the programmers side , are there any that are experts in the networking part of the code , as in the low end part that hands off the data tying in with the TCP/IP stack , a networking programmer specialist I guess , or is there not much to that and coders just keep it following certain standards that are universal to hand it off ?
 
taebin

taebin

Same trailer, different park
973
450
Dahkoht_sl said:
Genuine question for those of you who have worked around the industry on the gaming development side of things. On the "engineer" side of things I've always wondered if they have them around and what do they do? I get the difference between designers/coders/artist etc , but have always been curious on the actual networking/infrastructure side of things.
Click to expand...
I'm a system administrator in a technical software department for a large company. My group writes client applications and web applications for the product we sell, mainly written in C# I believe. All our builds live in a Team Foundation Server repository, get checked out by the engineers who write in Visual Studio, then checked back in. As the build gets checked back in, it gets pushed by a TFS controller to TFS build agents, who then use web deployment to get it to our development/production servers hosting IIS.

Check out branch of build from TFS --> Write code --> Check in --> Build --> Deployed to server. Our different build agents have different components installed on them (Sandcastle, WiX, Unity, different .NET frameworks, etc) and they are tagged as such. So in your code if you specify these tags, they get passed to certain build agents when deployed that have those tags.

Brief description, but it's a bit more involved.
 
Vandyn

Vandyn

Blackwing Lair Raider
3,656
1,382
Tauro_sl said:
Creator Visionary Realms, Inc. 10 minutes ago
Hey all, Vu here. No its not a night shot. Just a different skybox (since the other one didn't have clouds) with some different ambient light to test settings. And yes, the night should be much darker.
smile.png
Click to expand...
I figured it wasn't, although I'm not sure why the caption above it says it's a night shot then:

Vu's been working hard on the Sunken Sanctum this week, and he just sent over some current screenshots of the area just outside of the dungeon's entrance. You'll see anight timeand a day time capture of the area below.
 
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