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Indicators and Distance

PostPosted: Wed Aug 13, 2014 4:35 pm
by cyberchild
Hello another Idea came to mind now.

Indicators: same like the indicator to where your household is....an indicator where to find your corpse..

another thing is a counting down/up Meterage or Mileage indicators to <examples>:
** the distance between your home and Boston
** the distance between your home and your current location
** the distance between you and your party member or Kin
** your fresh corpse
etc.

by doing this , the need for a world map diminishes.

Re: Indicators and Distance

PostPosted: Wed Aug 13, 2014 4:46 pm
by Feone
cyberchild wrote:by doing this , the need for a world map diminishes.


Why is this neccesary?

Re: Indicators and Distance

PostPosted: Wed Aug 13, 2014 5:28 pm
by cyberchild
It is necessary for easing the player, to give a good clue on how far he must go to reach a certain destination.
It takes x minutes for items to despawn when he dies, for example, If you had the distance indication you'd know if it worth it to return and claim what you lost, or to give up and move on.
It helps you when you have a buddy and you want to meet in a certain place , on how long will it take for you to reach there/them. Some players' free time playing games is not unlimited and a time/distance indicator will help a lot planning their overall gameplay.

***I Myself am a Gaming Student at my university, and "Sympathy to the player" is an important aspect of game designing. making the game too hard isn't helping for audience building.

A game is made out of 3 curves: Learning, Interest and Difficulty curves, the first two..the Devs made it extremely well. the difficulty curve (in my opinion) requires a little tweaking.

Re: Indicators and Distance

PostPosted: Wed Aug 13, 2014 5:55 pm
by Kandarim
cyberchild wrote:another thing is a counting down/up Meterage or Mileage indicators to <examples>:
** the distance between your home and Boston
** the distance between your home and your current location
** the distance between you and your party member or Kin
** your fresh corpse


1) the client has no clue about the distance between your home and boston
2) the client has no clue about the distance between you and your home
3) implemented in my client, ctrl+Q, doubtfully a 'sploit
4) how can your corpse be fresh? you do know this is permadeath, right ? You're unlikely to get to your corpse fast enough to save anything. Best case, you just get killed again.

cyberchild wrote:"Sympathy to the player"


Image
This is not a game where you should expect sympathy of any kind from anyone. Not the other players, and least of all the devs :)

not entirely true, they do listen if you lost serious stuff to bugs

Re: Indicators and Distance

PostPosted: Wed Aug 13, 2014 5:59 pm
by cyberchild
Kandarim wrote:
1) the client has no clue about the distance between your home and boston
2) the client has no clue about the distance between you and your home



No clue! true! why not helping to have a clue?

Re: Indicators and Distance

PostPosted: Wed Aug 13, 2014 6:16 pm
by Feone
cyberchild wrote:
Kandarim wrote:
1) the client has no clue about the distance between your home and boston
2) the client has no clue about the distance between you and your home



No clue! true! why not helping to have a clue?


There's a good reason to give clients as little info as possible.
Everything that's sent increases strain on the server and, more importantly, could lead to exploits. If you really did do gamedesign you should know that it's good practise to give potentially hostile code as little to work with as possible.

Re: Indicators and Distance

PostPosted: Wed Aug 13, 2014 7:03 pm
by Kandarim
have a look at the principle of a "thin client". As Feone said, that should have been part of your education.

although in this case it might just be because loftar hates java programming.

Re: Indicators and Distance

PostPosted: Wed Aug 13, 2014 7:20 pm
by ImpalerWrG
Game designers often don't know anything about programming.

Re: Indicators and Distance

PostPosted: Wed Aug 13, 2014 7:32 pm
by Mereni
I, for one, would love a distance indicator in parties and even better in kin. Trick one guy into joining your party or even just kinning you and when he goes home, you can know not only the direction of his homestead, but also is exact distance. So much easier than only knowing the direction, and that only if they agree to a party.

Re: Indicators and Distance

PostPosted: Wed Aug 13, 2014 7:34 pm
by Kandarim
ImpalerWrG wrote:Game designers often don't know anything about programming.

that's like saying that you don't expect your barber to know anything about scissors/blades and that he can just use random sharp stuff lying around.