Development Cycle Archive

That's a good step for factional combat, Thunderheart. I feel you still need to raise the double decay on armor, and you should still take another long, hard look at why there's any decay when you die while insured. I've posted several times on a trivial to implement usage based decay that would have no more impact on server performance than death decay does. I'll repeat it below, just in case it's been missed the last five times.

The current death based decay system is a hack, an ugly ugly hack that is not fun for us and not flexible for you. Please, reconsider.

And remember, it's not a factional death if you're out destroying Rebel bases, but you're killed by the slinking voritor hunter whose nest spawned 4m from your target...

--- BEGIN USE BASED DECAY ---

1. Each object has a condition value and an accumulator value.
2. Each object also has a decay start value, which is a timestamp.
3. When the player begins to use the object, the decay start value is set to the current time.
4. When the player examines the object, or stops using the object, or the object's status is in some other way checked, the difference between the current time and the decay start time is computed, the accumulator value is added, and the result is divided by the decay rate.
5. The dividend is the percent decay. Subtract it from the condition. Condition becomes a 0-100 value. Decay rate is the experimentable attribute.
6. The remainder multiplied by the decay rate is the new accumulator value.
7. The object's decay start is set to the current time.

Programmatically, this means one function to update decay that does steps four through seven, and a bit of effort to decide what is meant by "using" an object.

For clothing, the time the object is equipped is the start time, and when it is unequipped is the end time. As a shortcut, you can say that logging on is equipping, logging off is unequipping, and shuttling or dying is an unequip/equip. I'd be mildly surprised if this wasn't already the case.

Armor already decays through combat. Don't double dip.

Furniture currently does not decay at all. The 'equip' time is the time the first player enters the building, or logs on in there. The 'unequip' time is the when the last player leaves the building. Furniture may also have a much slower general decay as well, based on the time it was created.

Note the power of the system: a new item type merely needs its use start and end times defined in some meaningful way to join the ranks of item typess that decay.

--- END USE BASED DECAY ---

Oh, and you're probably already discovering it's hard to have a game that's both PvP and PvE. You may need to make up your minds; to help you, I'd just like to point out that Horizons: Empires of Istaria has a working civil war raging, with meaningful goals being accomplished. How, you ask? Simple. One side is NPC only.

Awesome day for PvP in SWG

/pat Devs on back!

Thank you for ignoring PvE players and focusing on the PvPers. It's wonderful that they're getting this, but meanwhile we're getting the shaft. Just remove it already, raise insurance prices, and make cloning a one time deal instead of "until you clone somewhere else."

This is not a flame but an honest question that I've had for a long time.

Why do fixes like these take so long?

It seems to me that things that break or things that were not implemented in a popular manner take you guys months to fix. Why is that?

Thanks.

And a mighty cheer arose from both sides of the army....

It's as if thousands of voices called out in joy.....

I hate to say this, and it's gonna take me a long time to type this....

Go....od Jo...b S......O.................E.

There, I did it!

This is the reason why some of us are very critical. We KNOW you can do it. Great job guys. Hopefully this is the changing point. The start of something great that we can all be proud to be a part of.

I think I'll go get owned with my hologrinder by some defense stackers/combat medic-rifleman to celebrate!

lol

Wonderful, all of SWG rejoice !!!