1 Reply by DEV BoyC

(103 replies, posted in General discussion)

Stranger Danger wrote:

I wish you had played Diablo 3 since launch, that tells you everything you need to know about what happens when you offer in game items for sale.

I have. And all that story told me was that crowdsourcing random item generation in a game whose whole point is to keep rolling the RNG for better items is a very bad idea. Perpetuum is not a game like that. The RMAH in D3 was shut down because of the Auction House, not the Real Money component.

I'm not saying this in defense of RMT, just to clear up a common misconception regarding the AH shutdown in D3 because this argument kept popping up repeatedly.

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2 Reply by DEV BoyC

(103 replies, posted in General discussion)

As usual you guys have raised many valid points. We'll be reevaluating the Steam Economy idea based on your concerns.

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3 Reply by DEV BoyC

(4 replies, posted in Q & A)

We switched to a newer compiler - we wanted to do this before the Steam launch as we suspected that some issues that are not immediately evident (such as the client suddenly requiring admin privileges to run) might pop up. We're looking into it, please let us know if anything similar comes up that we might have missed.

Go to forum: Q & A

4 Reply by DEV BoyC

(25 replies, posted in Testing server)

At the current rates 2400 credits let you refund exactly 100 days worth of EP. We think that's a reasonable ratio that will enable players to make corrections to their builds without revamping everything. Making the price scale with the EP also helps new players experiment more and to keep veterans from overusing this feature.

Go to forum: Testing server

5 Reply by DEV BoyC

(25 replies, posted in Testing server)

Ville: some very valid points were raised and we'd rather be cautious.

Inda: the values are not yet set in stone, especially for the extension downgrades, but we're happy with them at the moment. We're always open to the opinion of our players though.

Go to forum: Testing server

6 Reply by DEV BoyC

(266 replies, posted in News and information)

Burial wrote:

From what I gather, only one can be active at a time, it's not possible to go overboard and get a million EP overnight

Indeed, EP Boosts are non stacking. They are meant to provide the same level playingfield for roughly the same cost as before, but they are not mandatory like the subscription has been.

Go to forum: News and information

7 Reply by DEV BoyC

(266 replies, posted in News and information)

The ICE system is being removed for now as a precaution and something to replace it will likely be introduced again later. That's one of the possibilities we're looking at. It's a known gap and it will be addressed.

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8 Reply by DEV BoyC

(266 replies, posted in News and information)

Celebro wrote:

So ICE becomes Perp Credits?
Can I buy P.C with NIC?

Not at once, but we're not dropping the possibility. We need to inspect what problems it could cause and find the best way to deal with them first.

Go to forum: News and information

9 Reply by DEV BoyC

(266 replies, posted in News and information)

Alexander wrote:

3) Some people won't be able to drop £30 in one go for Perpetuum when it releases. They may be playing from using ICE or single month to month transactions. Anyone with less than 3 months subscription time remaining is going to need to purchase the game (3 months sub) and you should at least make this a little easier for existing players. If they have been subbed for 2 years without a break and now you're going to ask them for 3 months money up front, some people won't be able to pay it. Most will not have an issue but try and be as caring as you can. Don't get yourself a bad name for "locking people out". £30 ain't a lot of money and I certainly will be looking forward to making that purchase on Steam.

This is exactly why we're giving more than 2 weeks of a heads up so that players still missing one or two months can make their accounts eligible and not need to pay the full client price. As for the Steam related purchases, we'll be discussing them at a later time, but there won't be a separate Steam only shard for Perpetuum so if a player doesn't want to purchase the game on Steam they won't have to.

Alexander wrote:

2) Any improvement to the engine? Not in terms of appearance but performance. Perpetuum is still very much a GPU killer and while the client might be rendering a lot more things than some games perhaps adding more LOD or occlusion might not burn out a few GPU's on go live day.

Sadly the main issue with the engine is that it's not GPU but CPU limited, which is something that's only worsened by introducing extra CPU side systems. I'm trying to work on it as much as possible but without a major architectural overhaul we've pretty much reached the limits of its capabilities. We have plans to fix this but they are long term and won't be implemented for the Steam launch.

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10 Reply by DEV BoyC

(2 replies, posted in Bugs)

Those are the edges of the shadow maps and sometimes they can glitch a bit, yeah. That was a sacrifice I had to make to get shadows working at all on our target hardware. It's been a while since I worked on those but with the increased processing power of the newer GPUs it might be worth a revisit. Thanks for the report.

Go to forum: Bugs

11 Reply by DEV BoyC

(9 replies, posted in Bugs)

No Mas: that sounds more like a network related issue.
The black screen is due to some recent changes to our backbuffer handling. I'm working on the issue along with some other related problems.

Go to forum: Bugs

12 Reply by DEV BoyC

(6 replies, posted in Q & A)

Actually the lack of LOD doesn't really factor into it, having LOD would make things even worse as it's a CPU side problem.

Two main things factor into this:

The first is that every object in the game world (a robot is made up of 20+ objects at minimum) has to be processed on the CPU side before it can be drawn. As this is the bottleneck and not the GPU drawing, adding LOD (a CPU side calculation) would only slow things further. A major rewrite of the artwork pipeline will be required to fix this issue - it's on the todo list.

The second is that the highest visibility setting draws EVERYTHING that can be drawn. Don't use that. It's there for screenshots.

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13 Reply by DEV BoyC

(24 replies, posted in Q & A)

Just to be clear on the "Target is currently early 2013" part: this is for our pending changes and not the Steam release. We're not allowed to discuss that one so don't even ask wink

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14 Reply by DEV BoyC

(13 replies, posted in Q & A)

I'm running windows 8 on my home system and Perpetuum works just fine - I don't see any reason why it shouldn't.

Also I'm tempted to question why so many people are bashing win8... It's the exact same thing with the start menu replaced by a full screen version.

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15 Reply by DEV BoyC

(117 replies, posted in News and information)

Fixed.

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16 Reply by DEV BoyC

(117 replies, posted in News and information)

Lemon: good call, added some stuff there.

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17 Reply by DEV BoyC

(117 replies, posted in News and information)

Well they did remove the % bar... But we finally have official info on our position in the toplist smile

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18 Reply by DEV BoyC

(156 replies, posted in General discussion)

Annihilator wrote:

the usual method to try out a game for a big percentage of player is to simply click through the character creation process

A quick note on this: we're currently in the process of creating a new screen for the character creator because of this - it'll feature the most common types of characters currently in the system. Basically you'll be able to one click create a full fighter or full indy character. The original process will become the "advanced character creator".

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19 Reply by DEV BoyC

(156 replies, posted in General discussion)

Guys, we heard you.
EP selling in any form has been canned. The idea is bound to raise its head from time to time, but we got the picture.
However we'd still like to give a larger incentive for players to go from a trial account to the first subscription - what are your thoughts on giving a bunch of EP to players subscribing from a trial account? Of course however much this EP is, it'd be retroactively granted to all accounts that have ever subscribed.

As for ICE, it's in the works.

Go to forum: General discussion

20 Reply by DEV BoyC

(156 replies, posted in General discussion)

Yes we know they can catch up - however the distinct feeling of new players is that they can't, and this is an issue we'd like to address.

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21 Topic by DEV BoyC

(156 replies, posted in General discussion)

Hey guys.

With the recent influx of players from Steam Greenlight, we've been faced with a familiar question again: how to give newer players the option to somewhat catch up to older players without 1. making this option mandatory 2. making the game pay to win.

Here are the two ideas we came up with, but before acting on these we'd like to hear your opinions on them.

1. ICE (Integration Cycle Extender)

This idea is one that has been requested many times by many people, we just never got around to implementing it. The ICE would be an ingame, tradable item sold in the Perpetuum webshop that - when consumed - grants one month of gameplay. Basically this is a way for people to legally and securely trade game time with other players for NIC without inflating the value of NIC. This should help new players acquire some starting funds if they feel the need.

2. The EP catch-up game

The other issue new players tend to have besides the lack of funds is the feeling that they can never catch up to older players.  In the past we argued that older players can only be more diverse in their skills, but anyone can easily catch up in a certain area. While this is still true to a certain extent, we realize this may not work forever as the game continuously expands and becomes more complex. This is a tricky question, and most ideas we discussed were shut down by the "this makes the game pay to win" or "this is just like increasing the monthly subscription fee as it introduces a semi-mandatory item to buy each month" arguments.

What we want is a system that enables three things: 1. It keeps the level playingfield intact, 2. It enables new players to somewhat catch up to veterans 3. It still gives veterans an edge
What we came up with is an optional EP booster package players could buy that would grant X amounts of EP (this could possibly tie into the ICE system as well by having an option on what to get when an ICE is consumed) - however the catch is that a player could only get extra EP in such a way until he caught up to Y% of the current maximum EP a player could have (so this would be a rolling limit). For example if the maximum amount of EP any player can currently have is ~1.000.000, these packages couldn't be used if a player is over... say 250.000 EP (25% of the max).

This way new players could catch up to a point, old players would still always be ahead without having to do anything, and a new player would eventually reach the point he's allowed to catch up to without using this option.

We'd like to hear your opinion on these ideas!

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22 Reply by DEV BoyC

(17 replies, posted in Testing server)

Celebro that's a very nice catch - it's the exact issue we're facing.
The new engine is completely based on vertex texture fetching, so we'll need to look at this issue more closely once everything else is done for the expansion.
I do have an x1950 now so I'll be able to check out a possible solution.

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23 Reply by DEV BoyC

(23 replies, posted in Testing server)

Update: We'll be getting an x1950 on monday and will be checking up on the issue then.

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24 Reply by DEV BoyC

(12 replies, posted in Testing server)

Lupus please give us a coordinate where this happens - Zone, Coordinate, Robot used

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25 Reply by DEV BoyC

(17 replies, posted in Testing server)

Eng Daniel: the 9600 didn't support pixelshader 3.0 yet so it's not on our target list.

Celebro: this is not actually an ATI fault, we just need to figure out what feature we're using that these cards didn't have yet. Need to do some proper debugging for this tho so we need hands on time with the hw.

Go to forum: Testing server