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Librarian 42

Librarian 42

Posts: 1,411 Mithril Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile
Hi Mods,

Did you take any pointers down from the New Content or Non Thread, specifically locking a couple of worlds that could have no updates on them, pretty much like you did for the F2P worlds? thinks Jagex should honour the results of the original Old School Poll

26-Jun-2013 12:35:48

Mod Ash

Mod Ash

Jagex Moderator Forum Profile Posts by user
Original message details are unavailable.
...specifically locking a couple of worlds that could have no updates on them, pretty much like you did for the F2P worlds?

If we apply updates to some worlds and not to others, you wouldn't be able to hop between them anymore because your saved games wouldn't be compatible. We would strongly prefer not to split the OldSchool community into halves every time people want a version of the game that's got X but not Y.

26-Jun-2013 12:47:25

Librarian 42

Librarian 42

Posts: 1,411 Mithril Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile
Original message details are unavailable.
Original message details are unavailable.
...specifically locking a couple of worlds that could have no updates on them, pretty much like you did for the F2P worlds?

If we apply updates to some worlds and not to others, you wouldn't be able to hop between them anymore because your saved games wouldn't be compatible. We would strongly prefer not to split the OldSchool community into halves every time people want a version of the game that's got X but not Y.

Thanks for the reply Ash.

I think it was mentioned that we would be quite happy not hopping and being locked into the worlds.

I understand that you don't want to keep splitting it (although halves seems a but strong). I would have thought that keeping as many members as possible though would have been more important.

Once again thanks for the reply, it save me waiting in vain :) and I can move onto other things.

Edit - Missed a whole sentence out. thinks Jagex should honour the results of the original Old School Poll

26-Jun-2013 13:07:09 - Last edited on 26-Jun-2013 13:10:12 by Librarian 42

Mod Ash

Mod Ash

Jagex Moderator Forum Profile Posts by user
Original message details are unavailable.
Is making new content for oldschool a "big job". You guys got a really small team, and I know eoc updates normally take awhile to develop and they have large teams

It's a big job, yes. For Nightmare Zone, I was installing a spectator option yesterday to let people watch each others' Endurance and Rumble dreams, and it took about 4 hours, even though it looks very simple on screen. I don't think that's because I'm a particularly slow programmer either.

We do have some time-savers, though. With no graphics tools and no artists, we don't have to schedule work from the GFX team and wait for them to design and implement it. We're not scheduling anything from Audio either, since we don't have any audio compilers for OldSchool.

On the other hand, we run into really random obstacles. For example, there's an outstanding issue at the moment whereby any text we put on a menu with a strikethrough will be shifted nearly an inch to the left. I think the game engine's getting confused by the invisible characters. It'll take a while to investigate and work around. That sort of thing adds time.

26-Jun-2013 13:07:48

Mod Ash

Mod Ash

Jagex Moderator Forum Profile Posts by user
Original message details are unavailable.
What kind of updates requires other departments (like game engine), and what kind of updates requires only the work of you and Nexus?

This can be unpredictable. Anything that's built into the game engine is beyond the reach of me and Nexus (and, indeed, Reach).
- Run energy rates.
- Combat level calculation.
- Routefinding.
- Client loading errors.
- Behaviour of members-only items on F2P-style worlds.
- The login screen where you enter your password.
- The mouseover text of "pausebutton" interface components.
- Your client's cache.
- Friends/chat-channel behaviour.
- ... and much besides.

Ideally, lots of these things would be taken out of the game engine, so that content developers like me could edit them. Indeed, in 2013, quite a few of those things have become content-side rather than engine-side.

Mostly, things were taken out of the engine for specific game updates, such as the run energy update. It wasn't always due to some overarching technical design plan! Thus it's really very unpredictable.

Non-game things will definitely be beyond the scope of the content team. Things that involve webpages or web modules (e.g. the account creation form, the world-picker webpage, the poll system's skill total check) are controlled by other teams.

26-Jun-2013 14:10:17

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