exec
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Posts posted by exec
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We've decided for 2D, we've decided for Unity, we want to create a Mabi-like game. What changed from before, when we had Aura and Aurora? Very little. We have a few new ideas, sure, but we also have 40k+ lines of code, ready to be (ab)used. Could Aura be used as the base for the new server?
When you have to work with other people's (sometimes questionable) design choices, you constantly think "how awesome would it be to do [this] my way". But you can't. You start to think about how you would do things if you were in control, a different packet here, a different way of communicating something there, that would make it all so much better. And it would be better, starting more or less from scratch, even with reusing some elements from Aura. But it would take longer.
We already went through these features though, we don't have to redo everything. We could simply remove everything that's "Mabi" from Aura (encryptions, databases, NPCs) and start to adjust Aura to our needs. It's hard for me to justify starting from scratch, when we have so much already done. And customizing it to improve the design is still very much possible. But a few of their decisions would probably stay with us forever.
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As for a weight system... I'm torn on this. I generally like the idea, and I feel that it's actually much more realistic than random stack limits. My only problem is that this implies items carry a realistic weight, and the added realism isn't always desirable from a gameplay perspective. For example, let's say you're in a dungeon and pick up a weapon and a heavy armor... Now you're fully weighted down and you haven't made it through the dungeon yet, so you want to go back and sell some things, but that's really a pain when you're in the middle of a dungeon. (Or impossible, depending on the game.) I like the strategic element of not being able to load up on stuff when going into battle, but I don't like the restriction to picking up loot along the way.
The level of realism in a weight system is something we control though, a hand full of armors doesn't have to weight you down. And monsters don't have to drop heavy things constantly. For example, even if you didn't have any points in Str in Ragnarok you were still able to carry, what, 1-2 dozen armors?
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2. Detection by enemies being hindered/stopped (think Baol/infiltration and the Anti-Fomor Robe)
In what ways, things like a Hiding skill?
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Before starting to select framework/engine we need to know what we can do with our current skills.
The best tool will be always a tool that you know how to use it, so we need to know everyone skills for making decisions based in our capacity.
Maybe we need a recruitment thread and everybody should post their skills and experience there. Then "staff" must categorize what skills and experience will be useful for server development, network communication, client application, web control, web site, etc.
Best teams are self-organized teams, so, we need to start to know what everyone want to do and start making some "kind of organization".
The best tool is the best tool, not the one you know how to use, a spoon will be rather useless if you need a hammer, no matter how familiar you are with the spoon. And there aren't that many high class hammers out there, fit for the kind of thing we want to do, so you can just as well choose the one that you just like best in my opinion.
You make some good points about building a team, we just haven't thought much about that because there's already a core team in place, and we generally know who is able to do what. This would be important to new community members, but I didn't consider the possibility of new people joining just yet, since we basically just went from Aura to this "new" idea and are still in the planning phase.
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Ideas of what scope, basic gameplay mechanics? Anything specific?
Anything.
Check out the threads about combat, movement, etc. for discussions about the respective topic, or create a new topic if you want to talk about something else. Basically we'll take Mabi as the base, since that's what we're all familiar with, and we'd like to create a Mabi-like game.
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but if @exec make a poll, I'm sure wasd will win with great gap :\
Oh, it's not about which one we choose, we will definitely offer mouse movement, the question is whether to implement WASD at all, and if so, how to fix it, compared to Mabi.
along with horrible auto targeting and auto skill use
Good point, they're pretty misleading. We might not want to offer that at all. That should be part of the combat discussion though.
Or we change to something more like b&s or tera and moving to WASD?
Personally I'd prefer to keep a Mabi-like combat system, for me it's a big part of Mabi. It's not like hotkey combat, that you have to replace because it's antiquated, the Mabi combat is unique, with a system behind it.
If you can't combine WASD and the Mabi combat, you're right, then we should continue the combat discussion and see where that leads us.
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i meant the name i mean granted i do like aura as a server emulator but i like it more as a name
I meant the name too, I only explained why it wouldn't be correct to use it for a new program^^
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I've had nothing but bad experiences with games on unity though D:
Don't blame the engine for being so accessible and easy to use that newbies can create terrible games with it. If UE4 was so easy to use there would be an equal amount of terrible games created with it. Maybe even worse, since those terrible newbie programmers wouldn't be protected by .NET's garbage collector.
I like Unity's ease of use, but I like UE4's graphical capability... It came down to majority and priority, but I guess we have to work with what's chosen
UE4's out-the-box graphics are impressive, yes, but they are misleading. Unless you are able to create state of the art models and textures, you aren't even able to use UE4 to its full potential. It will look just as poor as any other engine. And if you are able to create AAA assets you can make them look just as good in Unity 5.
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Unless you meant upstairs/downstairs, but those are portals, and WASD doesn't work for any portals in the first place.
Though that could certainly be possible, optionally.
The main concern, aside from maybe some glitches, seems to be the combat. WASD doesn't seem to work too well with Mabi's combat system. In other games to mash hotkeys and that's it, but in Mabi you're loading a skill to use it at the right moment.
For example, loading Smash, going to the enemy with WASD, and then clicking the enemy to use it is awkward, but making the character auto attack the moment you activate Smash doesn't fit the style of the combat and would cause problems. What happens when you click the enemy is that you actually go into the melee combat handling, so what would work is running to the enemy and attacking it, maybe with an attack hotkey, as that would use the loaded skill, but that's probably a little cryptic, and it doesn't solve the problem for skills that don't use that.
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all you need to do is remove loading times but increase cooldowns imo.
Increase them to what extend? Iirc Defense and Counterattack currently already have a cooldown of 7 seconds. And does increasing them really make the combat more challenging again? You'll still be able to use them during an enemy's combo, with the difference that when you make the cooldown too long the skills basically become useless for anything else, which kinda destroys the whole idea behind the combat system, doesn't it?
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i still like aura
Me too. We could've probably kept using Aura, just without the Mabi data, but if we code our own game we can finally break free from devCAT's conventions =| And if we do that, the new server becomes different, it's not Aura anymore.
If you think about it, the Aura Project was slowly leading us to this point. Just two weeks ago I created Aurora, the beginning of a custom client for Aura, which would've been a turning point in this project. Aura is gone, but the Aura Project continues its work, of developing a server and now a client for a Mabi-like game.
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Forcing people to take a break between fights would make the combat even slower though. And isn't that already the point of the stamina system? Take away the pots and you'd have that.
I still like being able to counter quickly
Sure, while I'm in danger I like that I can get out of it as well^^ That's the point here, isn't it? Breaking the enemy's combo to get a hit in yourself. But giving every defensive skill 0 load time makes it too easy. How about adding a new skill, with a comparatively high cooldown, that lets you break the combo and attack yourself, just for emergencies? Or only give 0 load time to Defense, so you can try to block an attack and strike back. But with Defense you still take damage and you don't knock back, which makes it more fair.
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Makes sense to me, "Aura Project" works. I strongly (and incorrectly) associated it with Aura itself. I'm sure I'm not the only one. Why not change "Project" to something that feels more group like for example "Collective" or "Team Aura" because to me that makes the name feel more agnostic of the software written itself.
Not such a bad idea, we should think about that.
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I moved the forum to aura-project.org for now, and I'll create the future repos on the aura-project organization on GitHub as well. The "Aura Project" will simply work on something else now.
We can change that any time if we come up with a good name.
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The main critique point of the new combat system seems to be that it's too easy. You can spam Smash, you can load counter/defense during an enemy's combo, WM doesn't cost HP anymore, and probably more things that I don't know about. But it makes the combat feel a little more dynamic, it's a little more fast paced.
Personally, between the two, I prefer the old one. It was slower, but the reason for that was its strategic component. It simply wasn't a button masher, you were supposed to think about what you're doing. The question to me is, can you combine them somehow? Or are they contradictory? Can it be challenging and strategic, while also being more fast paced?
I'd like to keep the base concept of rock-paper-scissors, because to me that combat system is a huge part of Mabinogi.
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So you'd have 3 names - the server, client, and game engine?
The engine doesn't necessarily need a name right now.
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Shouldn't the client and server be the same name?
It's two different programs, like Aura and Aurora, or to some degree Pleione and Sahara.
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Is anyone opposed to keep using "Aura Project" for the organization and this site? I've realized that "Aura Project" != "Aura". Aura Project is the name of our organization, and our "flagship" product was Aura, but just because we can't work on Aura anymore doesn't mean we have rename the "company". Only the client and server need a new name.
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Regarding the "cluttered inventory" critique.
While Mabinogi's inventory is kinda realistic (realistic: limited space, depending on item size, unrealistic: being able to put a dozen sacs into it and being able to carry dozens of heavy armors), the inventory system can indeed be kinda annoying.
One solution for the inventory Tetris and cluttered view could be a simplified inventory as you find it in many other games, with 1 slot per item. You can still sort them any way you want, or automatically, but every item is basically 1x1. Additional bags are not put into the main inventory, but into a limited amount of bag slots. And items basically stack infinitely, so you can easily hotkey one kind of HP pot for example.
To prevent carrying around too much stuff we add a weight system. This not only adds some realism, but also strategy, because you can't just stack up on hundreds over hundreds of pots, distributed over a dozen bags. Carrying too much would activate certain debuffs, like moving slower.
Gold is related to this topic as well I guess. The concept of money in form of items is interesting, but ultimately I think it's really more annoying than anything else in Mabi. There are people who carry around dozens of bags full of gold, just in case they might need it. Paying via bank is already possible in Mabi, and there are checks, why exactly are we still running around with bags full of gold?
Instead gold could simply be "virtual", basically a constant "pay via bank".
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Hm, but we'd still need to lock on to the target I think. So should it use the enemy in front of you?
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pretty much, i wouldnt' see wasd working in mabi otherwise.. and the "taget enemy near cursor" never gives me the enemy i actually want.
Can't you select the enemy by clicking on it? Or tabbing?
The Project
in General
Posted · Edited by exec
Some of you might be wondering what's happening behind the scenes at the moment, and the unfortunate answer is: not much. While I have been busy with work, I've also had some trouble motivating myself in the remaining time. I wasn't sure why, until earlier today, when I realized, I don't care that much for creating a game of my own. It's not that I don't like the idea of having a game, but planning and developing it...
I'm a coder. I'm not very creative, I'm not a designer, and I have trouble writing concepts. I'm nothing but a problem solver. I don't enjoy developing the parts of the game that make it a game (including the client). I can't do this alone, but that's what I did with Aura for the most part, and I'm afraid that's what's gonna happen here as well. I don't mind that so much while developing something I do enjoy (server emulators), but if it's something else, it's a different story.
You could say this whole idea is a desperate attempt to keep the spirit of Aura alive, for me, and for you. I'm still ready to do this, but if we want to do it, we have get some order in here, and we need more people on the core team who are able to take care of planning and the client, and also have the time for it.
The original (admittedly half-assed) plan was to let the concept come together on its own, from your input, but that's not gonna work.
Consider this a discussion on what we should do, what you might be able to contribute, and in which direction the new project should go.