Sipher

Here's the video for the full experience. Those two in the back are Crosswise and Zeke, watching in disbelief before going ham on the forum while I walk in near the end of the video.

Moving to Unity and porting to Unity is the exact same thing mmmkay. Because Unity's support for VB is shit at best; Meaning that VB will need to be scripted into Unity, you kids will end up having to reprogram the entire game in C#. You guys still haven't made a concrete decision on what engine to go with which is extremely important. In your reddit thread promoting the game, Seth claims that a new custom engine is being worked on, well that would mean that the move to Unity isn't going to take place. Make up your goddamn minds. If you guys plan to have the game in multiple engines, that's an even worse plan because you'd have to duplicate added content into each different engine. You guys have to start putting in some serious and well informed thought into the moves you make, before you make them. For your viewing pleasure, here is an exact representation of the choices you guys have been making regarding the technical aspects of game development thus far.

That bug is hilarious.

Honestly, I don't get the concept you're trying to convey. There are several RPG games out already where people will kill a difficult boss and brag about it whether they are roleplaying or not. Killing a difficult boss monster isn't even PvP, it's PvE, so your example doesn't help me understand the idea.

DM does precisely what it was meant to do and it does it very well. It gives complete newbies to programming a glimpse of what it's like to be a programmer. The language intentionally holds the coder's hand by doing a lot of things automatically like allocating memory to variables, taking care of pretty much all the netcode, and adding a few layers of security for a smoother experience. At some point most of those newbies who got a taste for programming and enjoyed it will move on to more complex languages that don't hold your hand as much. It doesn't matter if the game was coded in DM, Python, C, C++, Java, whatever, as long as all the planned features are possible, performance was acceptable, and it could be done in a reasonable amount of time. Most people who argue that DM sucks don't have any real meat behind that statement. On one side, you could go with a language like DM that holds your hand, does a lot of things for you, probably even some things you don't necessarily want which could affect performance. While on the other side you could choose a low level language like Assembly which would allow the game to have lightning fast performance and extreme attention to detail, but take literally a century to code. @ That's understandable, seeing as part of your description under beds was to make tiles look more realistic, you guys could show before/after images of that work as it would be more significant. Just a thought.

I don't understand why being able to walk into a bed is a highlight so I assume I'm missing something. I mean, no offense, but I could code and icon the entire thing myself starting from nothing in DM within an hour.

If you're placing improvement upon your own life before Ninonline, then that's great to hear. Development of the game should come second to improving your own quality of life.

Not necessarily. I'm not telling the devs they suck, just that there is room for improvement. If a particular strategy or path isn't working, then clearly something new has to be used to reach one's goal. Personally, I think that Seth fills too many roles in the development for the game and he's burned himself out a long time ago. The Ninonline staff got extremely lucky having him on staff or this project would have died out again not even a year after it's re-announcement. That being said, he also has his weaknesses which I won't list because this isn't an attempt to make him feel bad or shame him in any way. Hell, I have my own weaknesses, but I acknowledge them and improve myself so those weaknesses no longer exist. I mention Seth a lot more than I do any other member of the staff because at this point he essentially is the staff. There isn't a large enough font size, enough bold/italics/underline or any kind of visual effect that justifies just how extremely lucky Rory is to have found Seth to keep his game alive. This of course brings out the elephant in the room regarding Rory's weaknesses as well and whether or not he's willing to accept and improve upon them. I'm sure that he knows what his weaknesses are that can or have caused setbacks whether the public knows about it or not. The defining change will be to man up and do something about it. Seth and Rory are the only two owners of the game that I acknowledge as owners at all. I think at one point there were like five of them, I don't know if that's still the case. Management of the game basically falls on their shoulders. If they're willing to take a step back and ask themselves, ok, what are we doing right, wrong, and how can we fix it? Maybe they're not even qualified to come up with a solution to an existing problem. Maybe they have to ask around for advice and opinions, then go with what makes the most sense. This is the kind of thing that should be done more often as this is how problems are resolved. I've noticed a lot of "this is what we're doing, this is what we're going to do, this is what is going to happen" only to have none of it come true or get delayed indefinitely because either the solution was shit, or it just never fell through because "meh".

All you did was repeat exactly what I had said in twice as many words. Regardless, the reality of the situation is that the management of the game isn't great, and this is due to inexperience. No matter what Seth, Rory, myself, or anyone wants to believe, this is a matter of fact. In any professional environment, having as little as 5 years experience isn't something to brag about. That time doing one thing doesn't automatically correlate into another completely different task either. A simple example would be having 20 years of programming experience and then being hired as a supervisor for a team of programmers, this does not correlate into 20 years of management experience. Even despite all that, the focus at this point seem to be money(even though that isn't the primary issue). Where is the steam greenlight and kickstarter that was talked about years ago? Why did that never fall through? Have you guys even considered placing advertisements on the forum for non-gold members in order to help generate income to work on the game? You guys do know that this is how a lot of free games manage to stay free, don't you?

It doesn't work that way. Money isn't a motivator for someone to do a good job. Money is compensation for someone who simply just does the job. There are plenty of people who slack off and get paid for it. I work with a guy who earns more than me and he literally falls asleep at his desk every single day, about 8 - 10 times a day, and begins to snore. Out of the 30ish people who are within my team, all of whom earn a paycheck, more than half of them do a shitty job.

Your number one priority should be to re-evaluate and refine your hiring process, it's failed for more than a year yet continues to be used. Money is clearly not the reason this game has it's setbacks. If your hiring process is shit, you're likely to end up hiring people who are shit. Maybe you'll get lucky and strike gold once in a while, but don't count on it. There's no more accurate response to the Ninonline hiring methodology than Vaas.

No it isn't, that's exactly the mentality that causes setbacks. An artist who designs a few assets and then stops doing work completely, has contributed to nothing. Those same assets may need to be replaced later. Now the time that you could be spending working on the game is spent looking for a new artist. Apply the exact same shitty methodology with the new artists, rinse and repeat.

Because the practice of giving everyone an opportunity is extremely inefficient as opposed to going with the people best for the job to begin with. If this was normal practice nothing would get done, there would be no progress, and we would all be hunting and gathering for our food right now. Case and point, how many deadlines has this game missed? How much bullshit have you had to put up with? How many complaints have you had to read through? How many times have I had to become a loudmouth and raise my concerns? Progress isn't about being nice and giving everyone an opportunity, and as harsh as it sounds, this is the way of the universe and it is unavoidable if you want something done right.

You're simply not finding the right people. There are tons of successful fan made games where nobody was paid for their work. It was simply a project of like minded individuals working on something they were all interested in. Hiring anyone who will say "yeah I want to help" is a recipe for disaster. This is the reason companies have interviews rather than just hire the first guy that says he wants to work for them. You first priority should be to tell anyone not currently involved that they're fired and not to bother attempting to re-apply for any position in the staff. Allowing anyone to be part of the team who isn't contributing properly is a complete waste of time, tell them to fuck off.

I don't mean to sound like a negative nancy or anything, and don't get me wrong, I think the level up/effect graphics look great. However, when you compare them to the level of detail to the playable characters themselves it seems somewhat off to me. It almost looks like two different styles were used. The effects are blurry, look like anti-aliasing is being used(smooth), and look very pretty. The playable characters and their equipment do not. That's really my only concern regarding this, everything else looks great. Also, that worm almost killed Rory.

@Wolf @Ryu I actually agree with Wolf on this one. I've pre-ordered games many times because the developer had already established a good reputation so I felt that there was a small chance that I would be disappointed. People are free to do what they want with their money of course, but people aren't always smart with their money. I haven't bothered to invest into Ninonline because I'm not yet satisfied with what I see, so far it hasn't delivered or promised anything I haven't already seen. There are a good number of games on steam that had been taken down last year because of false promises and devs that didn't deliver. Star Citizen got a ton of support because it's being led by Chris Roberts, the creator/director of Wing Commander. You younglings who aren't familiar with that, Wing Commander was the first of it's kind and back then everyone was blown away by it.

I don't remember if cheat engine is capable of manipulating network traffic, or just local variables. Regardless, I never said anything about speed hack. If your traffic is unencrypted, it's vulnerable.

Opening the game to a smaller group before making it open to all is the correct way to go considering the constant crashing in the two previous tests. If I get some time, I'll attempt to break the game, or cheat in some way and let you know. Last I remember, Ninonline used no encryption when handling packets, so I can possibly make myself invincible if that's still the case.

That golem looks like it did the fusion dance with Shukaku.

Will people ever stop resurrecting 9+ month old topics? I highly doubt it.

In the end I don't think this will really matter. As far as I know, there are either no client/server applications for HTML5, or they are almost never used. Generally everything is updated on the server side and players would just connect, and the changes would have already taken place. This is assuming the HTML5 version is real and on it's way of course.

If the forum display name affects character in-game name, I bet this will never get abused. /s

How many scorpions will we have to hunt to win the chuunin exam?

I noticed your name has been strategically placed in that picture of sexy Taki.