Multiplayer Linking + Game off-putting to newcomers.

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Multiplayer Linking + Game off-putting to newcomers.

Postby Fay » Thu May 03, 2012 10:01 am

I was advised to come here with my ideas. I love the Myst series, My favourite series of all time. My problem is, I try to get people to play with me on Uru (I've tried with so many people now) but they all end up hating it for the same reasons which I listed in a thread on mystonline forums:

- The most important one: Linking is tedious and time consuming (Hand collecting).
In order to get people to your age you have to gather in D'ni/Bevin then share the Relto book one at a time, Then inside the Relto you have to share the Age book one at a time and sometimes within the age you have to share linking books again, Then when someone 'Dies' they have to link back to the nexus and go through the process of the nexus machine to get back to your age, This process especially if playing with 3+ people is a real time waster. Same with the hand collecting, Everyone has to press the hands for them to count.

- Running/Walking/Jumping animations
So the second most complained about so far is the sluggish and glitchy running/jumping, The controls are stiff and the animations glitch out frequently.

- Bugs/Glitches/Crashes
Now this one isn't as bad as the first two, at least these don't happen too frequently and they are manageable though still quite irritating annoying people.

Solutions:

- Make it so that once you invite someone to your Relto, ALL your books automatically link to your books and all books in all your ages ONLY link to your books/ages. So that the only way for another person to leave is to use their own Relto book at the bottom. Even when they 'Die' they get send back to your Relto instead of their own. I'm surprised they didn't do it that way in the first place.

- The piece of the hand someone collects should count for everyone currently in that age rather than having to collect each individually that way it feels more like a team effort and no time is wasted with trying to remember who has pressed what already and everyone having to wait in line to press a tapestry. Also for people who are visiting your age and help out, they should get the same story progress (unless they are ahead) as the person whose age it is.

- It would be great if the running and jumping animations could be smoothed out making them more up-to-date and less stuttery/sluggish.

- Obviously it would be good if most bugs could be fixed, For example in Eder Kemo if you try to share the book at the end with more than one person it stops being usable by yourself and unsharable, meaning you have to log out and go back each time to send someone through. But if you'd fix the sharing books issue from the first suggestion it would no longer be an issue anyway.

Conclusion:

I know Myst is meant to be difficult but that doesn't mean the game mechanics should be tedious and hard to control. I honestly believe that if these issues are fixed that more people would get into the game and enjoy it, support it, perhaps donate for servers to be kept up. I really feel right now that Uru is a single player game badly adjusted for multi player, it's off-putting for a lot of new people. Right now the issues make it not worth the effort for a lot of people. This makes me really sad, being passionate about Myst I want to see more people enjoy it together.

So are they fixing these issues? Making it more Multiplayer friendly?
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Re: Multiplayer Linking + Game off-putting to newcomers.

Postby Christopher » Thu May 03, 2012 10:52 am

Fay wrote:- The most important one: Linking is tedious and time consuming (Hand collecting).
In order to get people to your age you have to gather in D'ni/Bevin then share the Relto book one at a time, Then inside the Relto you have to share the Age book one at a time and sometimes within the age you have to share linking books again, Then when someone 'Dies' they have to link back to the nexus and go through the process of the nexus machine to get back to your age, This process especially if playing with 3+ people is a real time waster. Same with the hand collecting, Everyone has to press the hands for them to count.


As far as I know it's possible to send invitations to your ages over your KI. Once you've done this, they can link over the nexus into your ages.

Fay wrote:- Running/Walking/Jumping animations
So the second most complained about so far is the sluggish and glitchy running/jumping, The controls are stiff and the animations glitch out frequently.


I think this was already fixed with unlocking the framerate, but this fix is only available on Fan run MOULa shards like Gehn or TOC.

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Re: Multiplayer Linking + Game off-putting to newcomers.

Postby janaba » Thu May 03, 2012 10:56 am

Welcome aboard, Fay ... You've come to the right place now, where you can get
some more in-depth resonance and feedback to your suggestions and thoughts ... :P

As Deledrius told you already on the MOUL forums
Deledrius wrote:Your list of issues generally involves things we've already fixed, want to fix, or are
in the process of fixing. Some of them are simpler than others, of course.

This is all I can confirm and leave you with for now ... Our programmer and coder
magicians can elaborate more on your good and valid points and issues you've
mentioned above, what has already been fixed, what is in the works and what
cannot be done as of still pending licence restrictions maybe soon to be repealed
by Cyan ... :)

What you could do meanwhile would be to look through the latest Gehn Live updates
like for example here and here and the latest one here, to see for yourself what has
already been fixed and improved ... Enjoy your stay here, Fay, and maybe you'd like
to join us one day on the Gehn Shard to test stuff yourself, find the instructions here ...
See you anytime in the cavern ... :P
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Re: Multiplayer Linking + Game off-putting to newcomers.

Postby Deledrius » Thu May 03, 2012 4:47 pm

Welcome to the forum, Fay!

Thanks for reposting your observations here. It's very useful to get the impressions you receive from new players unfamiliar with the game; it can be all too easy for those of us accustomed to it to overlook things, so such insights can be valuable.

Unfortunately fixing some of the things you mention, like the way linking works, are big projects that take a lot of work (and will probably be controversial in the community) and legal permissions from Cyan we do not yet have. It's definitely an issue on which much discussion has taken place over the years, with a large variety of suggestions. Nearly everyone agrees it needs fixing though!

The physics problems are ones we've tried to fix in our fork of the code, and have done a lot of work in that area. There are still some bugs, but I hope you'll find it much improved in general from the behaviour on Cyan's aging shard. As for the stuttering animation: this is something which has bothered me since MOUL's beta. It wasn't present in Uru:ABM's version of the engine, but alas I don't understand the animation code well enough to track it down. I've kept hoping some of the other fixes the team has made will fix it by proxy, but there's been no luck yet.

In general, we've fixed a lot of bugs and crashes too, so hopefully the client is more stable here. It's always a work in progress, moving toward the nebulous goal of "better" each day. :)
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Re: Multiplayer Linking + Game off-putting to newcomers.

Postby Tsar Hoikas » Thu May 03, 2012 5:59 pm

I think a lot of the stuttering in the animations and sticky controls were fixed when we unlocked the framerate... There are still possibly some issues with the former, perhaps--I know absolutely nothing about how the animation subsystem works. Too much 3d math for my brain to comprehend!
Last edited by Tsar Hoikas on Thu May 03, 2012 6:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Multiplayer Linking + Game off-putting to newcomers.

Postby Deledrius » Thu May 03, 2012 6:12 pm

They still stutter. It's most obvious with the hands, which makes it looks like the avatar has early symptoms of a disease in the nervous system.

When reaching out to a book, or when reaching for a rung on a ladder, the animation hitches back and then ahead again. This was not present pre-MOUL.

Likewise, I just don't understand it well enough to even know where to start, or if it's even a bug in the code directly. For all I know there's a bug in the animation exporter and so the curves in the files are wrecked themselves. I can't test any of these hypotheses. :(
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Re: Multiplayer Linking + Game off-putting to newcomers.

Postby Christian Walther » Sun May 06, 2012 2:21 pm

I never noticed any stuttering animations… that either means that I’m good at overlooking them (not unlikely after years of playing :)), or that the issue doesn’t affect everyone.
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