Search Results: 12538 messages were found

Sykin wrote:
Pretending that a second LESIG sign-up comes around, what will make you eligible to join in on the good stuff? Ergo, what are those in charge looking for when it comes to feedback, constructive criticism, suggestions?

That's really a question for Walrus, 'cause I don't know what criteria he used, and I'd let him answer this, but I'm impatient, so--eh, maybe you should PM him. I know he just loves it when I tell people to do that (*instinctively ducks flipper slap*), but I think there's probably enough general interest in your question to justify it.

Roukan wrote:
Do the GMS have a policy for replacing lost items?

Probably, but you'd have to ask them that. GMs and such are managed by SOE for the most part, rather than by the MXO team specifically, so whatever they do is likely part of general SOE customer service policy.

Tseng. wrote:
if i had to guess id say ookami's model took the longest/ had the most attention on it. is that right or does another claim the throne?

I don't know offhand, and many of our previous character artists are no longer on the team, so I can't get a definite answer for you. If I had to guess, though, I would say that chances are good one of the movie characters took the longest--the Merovingian, say, or Morpheus, or Persephone. Because the toughest part of working on a piece of art, in my own humble experience, can be when you have to capture a specific real-life likeness.

Misfit1 wrote:
Who knows more? You or Agent jeeves?

I...don't know. And if Jeeves knows, then I suppose that means he probably does.

CooliceT wrote:
when are they going to release new download stuff on DN1...

found here.

its been updating for ages. it would seem. :/

Future release question! Yusss!

It was fun to watch Walrus' eyes roll back in his head when I asked him about that yesterday, though. A lot of his time goes into pushing for this stuff. But it is not directly in our hands.

symbea wrote:
Have you ever considered any ideas seen in topics on the forums?

We don't so much consider them as just steal them randomly and pass them off as our own work.

SMILEY

DeBarlo wrote:
Are you guys able to log in as an LET charcter (Niobe, Merovingian, etc.) from home?

Jigsaw beat me to it, but: Nope. Admin access is very tightly restricted.

Symmetric wrote:

Would you consider making enhanced versions of clothing that currently have no enhanced versions? (i.e. the Black Jayne Half-Duster I wear has no Enhanced version, only Armored and Shielded. Some extra melee damage or Dodge Ranged would be nice. )

Message Edited by Symmetric on 12-17-2005 06:06 PM

That is *this* close to being a future release question, but I'll see if I can skirt the issue.

Adding generical enhanced clothing types pretty much has to be done by scripts generated by an object wrangler. As has been mentioned, our wrangler is currently very busy whipping up a ridiculous number of item revisions for the combat update. Whether or not that will include additional enhanced versions, I don't know.

Additionally, from my particular design side of things, I've you've tried making a new character recently and have gone through the first part of the Uriah newbie sequence and collected the available parts of the "Industrial" clothing set, you'll have an inkling of the type of thing we've been considering for increasing the number of unique enhanced items. I believe Frog has touched on this issue before as well.

Believe me, we're aware that the style selections available now for enhanced items do not always meet everyone's tastes. Now me, for our game I like black. And white. And shiny. Sooooometimes maybe a little brown or low saturation green; and perhaps a more saturated red if I'm feeling frisky.

Edit: Durn it! Got me with an edit. /shakefist

Message Edited by Rarebit on 12-17-2005 03:25 PM

Steege wrote:
Earlier:
Rarebit wrote:

TetraCleric wrote:
Why is Ghost Bald?

If I remember correctly, it's because we didn't get the rights to use the likeness of that movie actor in the game. This wasn't discovered until right near the end of Beta, so up until that point, he had hair, just like in the movie!
Message Edited by Rarebit on 12-14-2005 09:38 PM
However, I'm still curious as to why exactly Ghost is bald.

So they weren't allowed to use Anthony Wong's likeness, it doesn't quite explain why you guys decided to scalp him.

My question:

Why didn't you just Frankenstein together a vaguely similar looking character using the generic character models (like you did with Veil)?

I can only guess that whoever did it back in the day had a thing for bald Asian men.

Talauntiar wrote:
What's been the funnest thing you've designed in the game?

You are my new favorite question-asking-person.

Let's see... Actually this is getting kind of hard to pick.

I think it would still be the Death of the Destroyer event. Neither the character nor the general event concept were mine (the Wachowskis themselves came up with the Assassin's initial concept, or so I have heard through the grapevine, and Paul Chadwick decided that multiples of him would perish in mass bug-spray battles against players), nor were his nasty abilities or nifty loot rewards, but it devolved to Frog and I to design and implement the actual details of his week-long rise and fall.

We designed much of the event, such as the weather changes and corrupted spawns, to be automated, but there was still the matter of playing what were eventually twelve separate live Assassin characters. We decided that there would be a gentle ramp-up in the automated stuff and in the Assassin's live activity (killing players) as the week progressed. This all took a lot of work to prepare for, and unfortunately Frog got sick--OMG the Fly Virus!--somewhere around midweek, I think it was.

So I was the one who had to run around and organize the final big push. Archon and Andy K granted me widespread power over the team to make sure that the event went off, and for those beautiful few days, I was mighty!

Not that I took advantage of that, or anything. Well, okay, I did. I bumped up the severity of the Assassin's depredations. He was only supposed to whip out a stuns and a few lightning bolts and things on Friday, but I ended up staying pretty late and not sparing the damage AOEs and meatwads. Power! Raw, unlimited power!

The schedule that Frog and I had drawn up initially hadn't even called for anyone to play as the Assassin on Saturday. It was to be the lull before the final storm. But somehow I found myself in the office early in the afternoon, jacked in, and killing players right and left. They couldn't seem to get enough of it. I was amazed. It was a win-win situation as far as I was concerned. By late that evening I had ended up doing two long trawls across each of the three servers, first leading players across Slums/Barrens (these were the original names of Richland/Westview--I can't shake three years of habit there, so I'm going to stop trying SMILEY

from East to West on all three servers, then looping through each of them again from North to South, very roughly speaking. I think I pretty much slaughtered players en masse for about eight solid hours.

Then Sunday I had to manage all our team members who came in to play the various event roles (and Frog made it back, yay!). This was exhausting, and there were unexpectedly early Assassin deaths, and client crashes, and other things here and there, but somehow we got through it, and that was very satisfying. The only real downer was that the servers got way chuggier than experience had led us to anticipate. Found out Monday when the server engineers were in that the servers had been running with maximum logging enabled for standard server team crash debug purposes, and under the heightened client activity we had that day, the servers just reached that critical point where they couldn't quite keep up with both running the game and spewing out the extremely detailed logs at the same time. Live and learn.

So that Saturday was still my favorite day as an MXO designer.

The Fly Virus didn't catch up with me until middle of the next Tuesday. =p

Sykin wrote:
So you're part of the graphics design team (a highly interesting job, in my opinion), I assume. What other kinds of designers/developers can be seen Kung Fu'ing around the office on a normal day?

Don't assume, it makes an as-- Nevermind. SMILEY

I'm a general game designer (*double-checks his business card, sees it still just says "Game Designer" on there instead of "World Dictator," /shakefist*). HCFrog is in this group, too. We have the most fun, or so we tell ourselves. We do pretty much anything that Archon asks us to learn to do with the tools, which currently seems to include such things as:

- NPCs (conception, putting them together from existing components, play balance, etc)
- Screenshots for art, marketing, Paul Chadwick
- Missions
- Quests (ex: Pandora's Box, Uriah reflow)
- Gameplay (ex: snowball fights)
- unique inventory objects
- World design
- Events
- isn't that enough????!?!

But Archon is always inventing new things to make us do, too. He himself is, as you know, the lead designer, and he handles overlord stuff like dreaming up and pushing through big projects, ie the combat update, overall Richland/Westview level reflow scheme, skill tree revamps, and the Pandora's Box concept.

Then there's the mighty community team, aka Walrus.

And there's also, in no particular order:

- Matrix Storyline (the famous Mr. Paul Chadwick)
- Art
- Technical design (scripts, object and ability design and generation, and other hard stuff)
- QA
- Ops (keep dem Live servers running, keep our dev machines running)
- Dev Liaison (integrates changes, builds code and patches, does automated testing, props patches, maintains internal server clusters)
- Server engineering
- Client engineering
- Tools engineering
- Database administration
- Production

I think that about covers it for usual day-to-day development here.

Aquilae wrote:
How difficult would it be to add more hostile npcs in the mission system?

The reason I asked because it obviously seems (to me) is that each one was created specifically before hand. And as a result, they will eventually look the same.

I mean, when I do missions they all wear the usual hair styles with colors, wear the simular clothing, they usually have a white skin tone etc....

I think it would be cool to mix it around time to time, you know? They don't have to be fashion designers, just different. Mix it around some would be cool. Throw some tattoos or some wacky hair styles in there. Or better yet, an automatic generator to do it for you.

With character rsi customization limited as it is, it's always nice to see someing different for a change.

(The new and improved Demon Army is a breath of fresh air.)

(Oh man this sounds like a suggestion. Sorry for that.)

Holy cow, you like my Demon Army revamp? Wow, that is a relief. I think you're the first person I've heard say that. Thanks.

Adding new NPC types ranges from sorta difficult to ridiculously difficult. But if we're just talking about, say, adding more looks to the redpill opponents you fight on missions, that would actually be relatively doable--gradually, anyway. I will keep that in mind.

Death++ wrote:
Boxers or briefs... or other...?

In the Matrix it's all about black briefs, of course. You can thank our old Warner Brothers producer for that. Before they insisted we put *something* there, everyone was barbie-doll naked when they took off their clothes.

Personally, I think this change ended up costing us the chance to be the most popular MMP ever. But what can you do.

Death++ wrote:

you live in seatle if im not misteaken (mmmm steak... sorry) so do you ever tune into 102.5 and listen to the bob rivers show?

Nope. I don't browse the dial very much. The only station I really listen to is 89.5, in fact it's funny that this question came up because I flipped the radio on just before I came back and refreshed this page (not that I mean to use my position here to encourage people to find their streaming music web site and enjoy their ad-free, nonprofit dance music broadcast).

Hey wait, was this about the Matrix? All right then.

EDIT: Oh man, this reminds me how I heard them give a shout-out to Monolith Productions as I fought my way to work one day. That put a stupid grin on my face all morning.

Message Edited by Rarebit on 12-17-2005 05:25 PM

Death++ wrote:
is me f5ing over so often the reason for all this lag and crashing we've been having?

Yeah. Keep up the good work. /thumbsup

Symmetric wrote:
Will you ever remove the collectors from The Hunt for Morpheus event?

Goodness, no. Every time we remove anything you people act like we just axed your grandmother.

Wait, that sounded suspiciously like a future release question...

alex364 wrote:

how can we get iconics to show up at player driven events?

If by "iconics" you mean Matrix storyline characters, then just send us a couple million dollars earmarked for a dedicated Live Events Team, and you're golden.

Short of that, you can't ever count on it. The event's gotta fit into the storyline, of course; I guess that goes without saying. Or rather, it can't directly contradict the storyline.

Edit: Oh, and you gotta promise to post a bajillion screenshots for everybody. Or at least a couple.

Message Edited by Rarebit on 12-17-2005 05:55 PM

Talauntiar wrote:
How many people come into the office every day to work on the Matrix Online?

That is top-secret info, amigo. Nice try getting me fired, though. =P

TxTurbo wrote:
How long have you been dying to post on these forums? =)

Well, it wasn't that I was dying to, exactly. I'm just sort of finding it to be useful now.

ThePigeonKing wrote:
What were you looking forward to when the idea of joining the MxO team came to mind?

I was looking forward to finding out what MMPs were all about, because I really didn't know, and because it'd be a change from the games I'd been working on.

I was also looking forward to at least a year or so of non-crunch mode, because I knew MXO would be a long project, and I had just come off two straight crunch modes, having been pulled over to help ship Sanity, and then going back to AVP2 just in time to start crunch on that one. Of course, I knew an MMP would be the worst crunch I had ever seen in the end, but a year of non-crunch sounded absolutely miraculous.

Musutangu wrote:
When will /ignore properly block area chat?

I dunno. But /futurereleasequestion seems to work all right for me. That one might be admin-only though.

Talauntiar wrote:
'what, if anything, is being done about the AWR situation?'

No clue. That's all corporate stuff, not game dev stuff. The suits deal with that.

Talauntiar wrote:
Have you tried out the new CU yet, and if so, whats your favorite part?

Not really, because it's being handled by an inner circle on a separate branch so that the rest of us can go about our own work without ending up being hopelessly distracted by incredibly awesome combat the likes of which we could never have imagined.

I can drag the combat buttons from the actions panel up into wherever I want in the hotbar, though. That's kind of neat, and they behave a lot better now.

Beachhead wrote:

Are the body type pills separated by floor?

Yes. I think the middle one overlaps a little, though.

mercurius420 wrote:

Are there any pranksters among the office? (I.E. anything from whoopie cushions to putting super glue on the homerow keys of someones computers) and if so can we get a list of the highlight moments?

Nah, I think we've fired all those people by now.

Trying to think here...hmm... Okay, best I can come up with on short notice is this. One of our designers has on their desk about four of those "musical snowmen" things that grind out a hackneyed, off-tempo holiday jingle when you press some part of their padded anatomy. Certain people who work in distant parts of the office somehow happen to keep stumbling as they walk by, accidentally blundering into the activation buttons for all four of the musical horrors at once. Maybe there's a hitch in the carpet right around there or something...

Message Edited by Rarebit on 12-18-2005 04:41 AM

For those interested in taking up the Kid's on his offer, please see the post about E Pluribus Neo faction tags on Broadcast Depth.

Short version: Zion factions can contact their server's E Pluribus Neo liaison (named in the Kid's post above) to get a special "EPN" tag added to their faction name.

Siros7 wrote:
lol

Ok once more:

Waffles or biscuits? :O

Used to be waffles, but now I'm a biscuits man.

...

I'm never going to hear the last of this, am I?

I sure hope this has something to do with the Matrix Online. Uh... Eh... Oh, of course. That's all right then.

Kayda wrote:
What are your thoughts on the possibility of people in LESIG being able to prove themselves worthy of becoming a LET member? This could potentially save you guys budget costs, and thusly get us a LET sooner

I'm sure plenty of people in LESIG or on the boards in general would do just great in resume submissions and interviews for such a position--if said position existed. But right now there is no such thing as an MXO LET, and the dev team does not get to decide when there might be one.

Kayda wrote:

Granted, but what are your thoughts on such a possibilit? Your personal opinion on such a system

I'm not holding my breath; figuratively speaking, I suppose I'm hyperventilating.

Tseng. wrote:
whats the hardest part of making critical missions.

Keeping them fresh and exciting. We try to have at least one thing per mission, whether it's a chance of finding a hidden new clue item, or a meeting with a unique story NPC, or a type of fight that the player probably hasn't had many of, or a new wrinkle to the storyline, or something like that, that even players who've played since the beginning will find new and enjoyable. That can be a real challenge, and I don't think we're successful every single time, but that's what we shoot for.

Holy%2BLemon wrote:

Holy%2BLemon wrote:
Rarebit
Would it ever be possible for a revision of the coding system so that players get to chose the colour of their buffed clothing, for example, they find a piece of clothing, decompile it, then when they go to compile the code, they get to chose the colour of the coat/pants/gloves/shoes etc.
I'm only saying this because it would make many more people much happier, also it would stop so many people looking so similar.
Aswell as this I thought, instead of bosses dropping actual items of clothing, they drop the buffs you could encode into any piece of clothing for that slot, for example, instead of getting a direwolf, you get the code of the direwolf that can be implanted into any piece of codeable outerwear. This would also make many more people keep up to date with the coder trees.
Or is there something like this in consideration, because i hate always wearing the same thing for everyone else for MA (ive acutualy stopped caring about my rolls and started to wear purple and black outfit thingys, very funky lookin may i add lol)
Thanks.
KingHazaa
Message Edited by Holy%2BLemon on 01-22-200605:21 AM

A lot of ideas have been thrown out on this subject, and personally I kind of like the idea of having buffs associated with equipped chips or codes or something that are separate from your actual clothing. This would be a rather massive change to the game, though, so don't expect to see it soon, if ever.

I may as well mention here (maybe I've mentioned it before, too--ah well) that the original spec for the game did not include buffed items at all. But then some dev one day said something about "phat l00t" and it was all downhill from there. SMILEY

Message Edited by Rarebit on 01-22-200612:56 AM

PhanthomZtryker wrote:
Wil lwe ever get to see the effectuator?

One way or the other. Zion's seen him already, you know. And wait...have the Mervs seen him, too? Now I can't remember.

bonopi wrote:
whats one question that you are suprised hasn't been asked so far?

Nothing specific is occurring to me at the moment; although, in general I've been surprised that the vast majority of questions are about stuff that hasn't happened yet, rather than about stuff that's in the game currently, or the development reasons behind it, etc.

[machete - Interesting bug. I'll see if I can find out anything about it.]

zeroone5069 wrote:
Is a building interior structure reflaw being planned?

I'm not entirely sure what you have in mind, but no, I don't think so.

Kayda wrote:
He means a reflow of the interior design of structures, I think.

Rarebit, what do you think of the possibility of adding the use of Pixel Shaders to aid in the special effects of the games, such as the streaming code?

It would remove the load of animated textures, while improving the quality of it. In the event someone doesn't have the right video card to support the pixel shading, the animated textures could be used in lieu of them.

Thoughts?

I believe we make use of basic pixel shaders here and there. Updating the FX to make use of the latest shader stuff available on newer graphics cards would require updating our renderer somewhat, I should think, and we might have to look at changing our required system specs. It's something I'm sure we'd like to do eventually, but it isn't a priority at this time.

Whoops, there I go hitting the wrong button again! D-oh. =p

What I meant to say was:

cloudwol wrote:
What ya think of shadows latest CR2.0 combat UI?
[linky]
*cough* buffs should be at side *cough*

"Movable stuff is nice... Although personally I'd prefer it to have the thinner, more translucent style of the chat window--less obtrusive that way."

Message Edited by Rarebit on 01-22-200603:54 AM

cloudwol wrote:
You just love doing that to me dont ya? lol.

I blame your long links! I can't be responsible for my actions when you hit me with those monsters. :p

Hm thought I'd caught all those. I'll have to see where that one's hiding. Thanks for mentioning it.

I knew that at the time, but it wasn't really worth it to change them.