Ryzom - A beginner's 7-day trial experience

[aardnebb]

trying to get out of the Samsara pub nights with your purse intact

LOL!

<.<

>.>

No idea what you are talkin about...

*Zahan polishes his halo.*

[tannack]

a lot of games make users accept an eula before they log in, this isn't unique to ryzom...

Agreed. The one game I know of that shows the EULA only once is WoW. Once you understand the details of how their EULA display works, it can be bypassed in such a way that any court in the U.S. would rule against Blizzard if push ever came down to shove. It's just not worth it to do it any other way than the "click every time" method.

the loading issue is probably related to the jumping issue... it's because of the NeL engine.

I've said this in the past, and it bears repeating here. Writing a resource manager for a game this big is a bear of a problem. Unfortunately, much of this relates to the engine design, so unless we get a full redesign of NeL, from the ground up, faster load times are not likely to happen.

Keeping that in mind, Ryzom may be working on an upgrade for the engine. Sooner or later, it becomes worthwhile to just torch everything, and start again from scratch. Sure, you'll pour a year or two into it, but it gives you than chance to look at the previous one, say "well, we did that wrong" and fix it.

If you work your resources carefully, AMD proposed a very sweet idea (mostly targetted for their 64 bit systems) that allows almost instant load times. You burn your resources directly into DLL's so a resource load becomes nothing more than a call to LoadLibrary, and boom, there is all your stuff loaded into the address space of your process.

If you havn't noticed, this game uses well over 512 megs of ram running, with all caching and stuff I've heard it uses between 1 an 1.5 gigs of memory during normal operation....

Funny you should mention this. This is why AMD suggested the DLL method as applicable to a 64 bit system, simply because in your typical 32 bit process, with an address space of 2 gigs, you can't fit everything in at the same time. But yeah, that is the root cause of why resource managers are such a bear.

My biggest peave is the missions. You get told what to do once and only once, it isn't saved anyplace so if you forget what was said all you have to go on is "find item x" with no clue where to go.

Agreed. This needs a total workover. So many games have done this so better. Two that come to mind are WoW, and the now defunct Earth and Beyond. For a good mission system, E&B was top of the pack. OTOH, there's quite a few that have dropped the ball very badly (CoH anyone).

But yes, Good missions, that immerse the player into the Lore, so that you don't just watch it from the outside, but actually experience it as you do the missions, are one thing that could set this game hhead and shoulders above the rest. (apologies for the run on there. )

-- Edit -- Borken quote tags and typos --

[katriell]

But yes, Good missions, that immerse the player into the Lore, so that you don't just watch it from the outside, but actually experience it as you do the missions

Until you realize it's fake - you're still watching it from the outside because it's just a static quest or instance that many have done before you and many will do after you.

I find live events far more immersive and effective. If WoW has such great story-driven quests, why do most WoW players not roleplay? Because it does not take any imagination, creativity, or social skills to read NPC dialogs and perform preset tasks. You have to force people into a situation where roleplaying is how the story is given, evolved, and participated in. And that's what Ryzom does well.

"I helped defend Pyr against a kitin invasion" or "I saw the completion of the construction of the Karavan/Kami temple that I helped to build" vs. "I did the orc boss dungeon" or "I delivered medicine to the healer of a sick village and saved all the villagers, just like my mate did last week."

[seriel]

Why don't people in WoW RP..? You're joking, right? WoW has tons of RP servers, with many, many people who do RP. Probably more people than the total population of Ryzom combined.

But you never see it. Why? Because most of the well over 100k subscribers don't like to, so they don''t. The WoW audiance is a mix of RPGers, FPSs, and RTSs. This means that to even begin with 2/3rd of the population has no interest in roleplaying. And then of those RPGers, a bunch simply like to get gear and enjoy the story, not actually roleplay themselves.

Missions and quests don't correlate to RPing at all, look at a game like DDO. It's based on a PnP game with a very, very nice quest system. And almost no one RPs. The majority of roleplay is still done offline or over text-based mediums like MUDs and forums.

[elijstar]

Sorry Axeal, I was still editing my post


You said you were in marketing, so I would suspect you've a pretty good idea of human nature and exploitation. And the ramifications of trying to achieve broad appeal. I'm in no way trying to be offensive or insulting, by the way. Like my comment earlier about "VHS standard", what has the broadest appeal and the greatest success is not necessarily a good thing. Subjective argument, sorry.

I didn't take any offense at all btw at what you said.

First I am not understanding what exploitation has to do with this at all. And what are the ramifications of trying to achieve broad appeal? I can assure you that the developers want to sell their game to as many people as possible so they can keep living their dream of making a living creating a game that lots of people like. That's creating something from nothing, and as a dev, you want people to like what you create. Are you implying that that's automatically a bad thing to have broad appeal? You'll have to explain that to me. Guild Wars is a great example of a game that just happens to have broad appeal as a side effect of having been designed, programmed, and executed with the utmost excellence and skill. It doesn't appeal to me personally as much as some, but I can't deny that the game is incredible. And that's only one small example.

But back to the point, this is a forest through the trees topic. Making the game easy to play to me means that there aren't arbitrary ways to force the user to do what you think they ought to be doing in-game.

A great example is making the interface transparent or invisible (not literally, I mean just simple and easy to use). This is one of Ryzom's greatest strengths. You don't have to work very long to learn to use the interface and that means players are free to consume the real product, which is the game. the lore, the other players, the characters etc.

Arbitrarily deciding NOT to include an interface or some code that helps the players do something in your game, because you think offhand that it's just been done before is a way to make it harder for the users to consume your product, not easier.

It may very well be that Ryzom doesn't need a smarter quest interface because the game isn't about quests. But that's not the tone of what has been said at all. The tone as far as I can read has been a qualitative differentiation, like it's bad or wrong to need those kind of things and somehow Ryzom has it right and Asheron's Call, as an example of a game in which questing is key, had it wrong. That's the wrong approach to development. They aren't the same game at all, and we definitely agree that one size does not fit all. But if that's true then why on earth is a quest interface bad intrinsically? The remark I was originally responding to was not reasonable for this reason. That wasn't really addressed to you

The problem I have is the idea rejecting good sensible ideas just because they've been done in other games one may or may not like for whatever reason. As an interactive developer, I rampantly steal every good idea I come across, because they're good ideas.

Clearly though, we're NOT talking about the content of the game. I'm talking about the mechanical part. Anything you can do to make your game easy to use is good. The point is the game not the programming behind it. And I can say definitively that any idea no matter how widely it's already been spread, can be done better and improved on. World of Warcraft itself is a great example of that. Those guys at Blizzard stole every single good idea that had every been used in an MMO and came up with some new ones, and improved on it all. That makes their game easy to use, not easy to 'Win,' cheap, or inferior.

See what I mean?

Sorry I am so long winded tonight. I have no idea why hahah. This stuff just crowds my mind because I have been trying to design software that people have to consume for almost 20 years and I think the only reason I keep at it is these discussions keep coming up and new improved ideas keep coming from it. That's good!

Axeal

[elijstar]

Until you realize it's fake - you're still watching it from the outside because it's just a static quest or instance that many have done before you and many will do after you.

I use this thing called Imagination when I'm playing WoW, or any game. WoW in particular does everyting possible to get you to believe you're really a hero fighting for the alliance or horde, as the case may be. In fact what you're saying is doubly untrue for those of us who bring our imagination into it, because I know full well that I can go kill Ragnaros over and over and I feel, or imagine, that I'm a total badass and it feels great and is a blast.

I find live events far more immersive and effective. If WoW has such great story-driven quests, why do most WoW players not roleplay? Because it does not take any imagination, creativity, or social skills to read NPC dialogs and perform preset tasks. You have to force people into a situation where roleplaying is how the story is given, evolved, and participated in. And that's what Ryzom does well.

That is not the spirit of roleplaying at all. I have been RPing since I was a kid in the 70s and 'forcing' people who don't want to is a sure-fire way to make sure they quit the game. Better to get them to play another game.

And hundreds of thousands of WoW players roleplay. I'd say it would be fair to guess that the percentage of RPers in WoW corresponds roughly to the percentage of people playing any game who like to RP. That's why they have RP servers for them, and other servers for people who enjoy playing in other ways. They even have RP-PVP servers now where (which is where my lvl 60 toon is), where you get real PVP *and* RP at the same time. I think it's heaven.

I'll say it again, you picked the wrong servers in WoW. In fact, I'm starting to believe that you've never really spent any time in that game for as much as you mention it because the game you're describing is not the game I have been playing at all. You sound like you're mad at WoW or something cause it cheated on you haha.

Regards,
Axeal

[archaeos]

Hmmm define 'roleplay '...
I think the moment when u create a char u allready have a role.
Anyhow u will get a certain place in the community ,judged by certain actions u take .U will make friends or enemies , u will like people or might not like em ,Even if the actions are taken the same or different as in your IRL(but aren't they part of a role?)...My char reflects in a way my personality IRL...AM i therefore not a roleplayer??
There are different ways to RP,I chose a natural way ...That's how I obtained an IG love and Sis and daughter ...does that make me an RP'er only from that moment on ?Don't think so ...
Mmmm I just was wondering about the roleplaying thing ...don't mind me ;D
*mutters against herself again*

[katriell]

Why don't people in WoW RP..? You're joking, right? WoW has tons of RP servers, with many, many people who do RP. Probably more people than the total population of Ryzom combined.

But you never see it. Why? Because most of the well over 100k subscribers don't like to, so they don''t. The WoW audiance is a mix of RPGers, FPSs, and RTSs. This means that to even begin with 2/3rd of the population has no interest in roleplaying. And then of those RPGers, a bunch simply like to get gear and enjoy the story, not actually roleplay themselves.

Then my statement was sufficiently qualified ("most").

Hmmm define 'roleplay '...
I think the moment when u create a char u allready have a role.

My definition of RP is very strict. I believe roleplaying = speaking and acting fully as your character, not yourself, and that character != you / you != character.

I'm going to go ahead and back out of this discussion. Then find some way to block myself from forums during PMS.

[archaeos]

So if u get seriously p*ssed of by someone in game, will u scold his char or the person himself ?and if u do ...does that make u a part time roleplayer ?
Heh just pulling your leg Katriel