Problem when you think of it like “my stuff”.

If I was to talk about my experience, I have little problems, I dont play official servers, my game is heavily modded and I can fix pretty much anything that bothers me if it doesnt.

But my experience is not the game. As much as “YOUR” experience isnt either.

What happens is: You might feel you have problems now that you did not had before, the same way a lot of people had problems before and still having the same problem today.

The whole thing is: Taking statistics and frequency of reports in mind, the situation hasnt changed much since before AoS, because the number of complaints is pretty much the same, which lead one to think a few possible ways as in why that is the case:

  • A lot of people who complained then stopped playing so they did not complained anymore.
  • A lot of people complaining now wasnt playing at that time.
  • There is, indeed, people who have complained then, and still complaining now.
  • There are people with the bad faith of just posting things they hear about without even experiencing those things.

No matter how much other things can be drawn from it, one thing is for certain:
The exact same code that made a problem then, makes the problem now. It doesnt matter how much you “roll back” the problem wont go away, because it was present then.

One might not have been experiencing the problem then, but experiencing the problem now for a number of reasons, and very few of them lead to a simple conclusion that problem is worse.

Another thing I have said a lot: A fundamental problem in the game manifests as much as systems building on that problem show up. If you have a thrall that does “4 things” and then is updated to do “8 things” but the system has a flaw in its core, for the player, there will be twice as many “complaints”, but that does not mean that there are twice as many problems.

For example, given my work on solving this problem, I am aware that your sinking into foundations, dying when loging in on top of a building or placeable structure, your thralls not aware that they cant “float” in terrain holes, and the thrall’s inhability to find out that it cannot pass through the space between a rock and a wall if a “line” can pass through it, all originate from the single one flaw in the code. It comes a same way of data trace that is done wrong. It is buried under the hierarchy of code that comes up from “Master” code that many of the actors use to find out what is a surface and how it should be interacted.

How do I know that ? When I was developing the boat it was a long structured development that included trying to gather data over surfaces to make the boat move over and around terrain, buildings, and avoid “floating around” and for that I needed to detect several types of surfaces.
I soon found out that would never work if I used the functions in the Funcom code, because they do not give the data necessary to read the surfaces. In time, I made my own, and soon I found out that if I tweaked it to allow thralls and my own character to use same basis to avoid the same problems, they would stop having that happening.

However I faced another problem. In order to fix it in the core game stuff, I need to edit two blueprints on devkit that are from the core game, Building base and Master Placeables. Every single time the game has an update, it requires a mod that changed it to delete the file from the previous version, and then add the fix in the new version (that is never fixed) and update the mod.

So instead of making the boat a placeable, and use the whole Funcom stuff, I recreated the boat as an independent actor from the actor Unreal Engine native class building its full components from the ground up, detection of borders, detection of overlapping, etc, and create a blueprint with functions to read the landscape and buildings independent from what the more particular game does.

During that I found out an useful trick to use the “sinking through objects” feature, and it was when I developed the camera actor that works more or less like the boat, but instead of floating on the water, if flies on the air and lend its camera scene component to the player to do the views.

However, the fact remains that there wont be any fixing of this problem if every time an update comes up, they build more thing on top of the things that have the problem. Like in the video, I can even predict where the “hole” will be because it is “procedurally generated”.

One interesting thing is that you see all around people talking about “procedurally generated” content, as if there was ANY AAA game at this century that was made by hand completely. Almost every game that has been famous for some reason is procedurally generated, levels, characters, even freaking dialogue.

It is the same as CGI. There is a guy who is specialist in the stuff, even made a series: No CGI is invisible CGI. (https://youtu.be/7ttG90raCNo)

Well, non procedural generation is procedural generation you cant tell.

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