Question of the Week: Animations
Ubiq has posed a new Question of the Week over on the Stratics QotW Forum asking us what extra animations you want to see in Origin; hit the thread here and add your thoughts!
Want Your Question In The Official FAQ?
Do you want to get your question in the Official UWO:O FAQ? Then head over to our UWO:O FAQ Board where the Origin Development Team will be selecting questions to be answered in the Official FAQ. What are you waiting for? Get over there and ask away!
Exclusive Screenshot from Stratics
In an ongoing series of exclusive screenshots, this week the Stratics presents us with the fifth exclusive fansite screenshot. To view it, click here and it's the one on the top.
Log From CoNB Chat/After Chat Posted
A log of the chat tonight hosted by CoNB may be found right here. Also, a log from after the chat may be found here. Be sure to take a look!
Guidebook-Moongates and Magical Travel
We've added a brand new section to our Guidebook entitled Moongates and Magical Travel. Do you know how the moongates will work in Origin? What about personal travel spells? Click here to find out!
Guidebook Updated-Moongates and Magical Travel Added, Skills and Skill Trees Updated
First up, the Skills and Skill Trees section of our Guidebook has been updated to include information from today's updates. Second, we have added an all new section entitled Moongates and Magical Travel where you can find out everything we know about magical travel in Origin. Will you have personal spells like Recall or Gate? How will the moongates behave? Click here to find out!
Gaffer had these answers to the questions in italics on the CoNB DevBoard:
4) Lack of variety. Variety is the spice of life. At least AC had this part right. They are able to add new dungeons constantly. Currently, their's over 100 dungeons I believe. Some for solo'ers, some for groups, some for newbies, some for powerlevelers, etc.
We have the same capability to add new dungeons after ship. Dunno how many we'll ship with (not dodging that question, I would just need to go ask our worldbuilders and find out what they have scheduled) but we can add arbitrary amounts after ship, and cheaply from a patch size standpoint. So no fears, if we ship with too few, we can add more. We'd rather not ship with too few of course.
I REALLY hope they add more dungeons to UO2. I hated that I could never really go throught the dungeons in UO. Either the dungeons were infested with PK's, or they were filled with monsters that one-hit you (Not good in any game).
Some dungeons are in NPK lands. Some dungeons are gonna be very tough. Some will be easier. There are also lots of non-dungeon areas in which to kill monsters as well...including areas in buildings, etc. which aren't "Dungeons" per se but aren't purely outdoors.
Mobius had this comment on the CoNB DevBoard concerning skills and the usefullness of certain ones:
While we've got enough spiffy features in each of the skill trees to make them worthwhile, not all will be equal in power and prestige. I do not think that this is necessarily a bad thing. Certain skill sets such as magic and combat, by their nature, are more powerful than a skill tree like cooking. Fortunately, we are able to use skill costs in order to balance this out. Since combat is a more powerful skill tree than cooking, it is much more costly to learn.
That isn't to say cooking is useless. We've provided enough in game benefits to chefs to make them valuable.
ImaFreak had some questions about our Skills and Skill Trees guide and Ubiq gave these answers to his questions (in italics) on the UWOO@egroups.com mailing list:
Hi, first off, great job on the whole thing, very detailed,
even I, a sucker
of knowledge, learned a few things(well, I hadn't known they
were confirmed
atleast :P).
I am wondering, will axes be completely smithed by
Blacksmiths? If so, will
the shafts be metal? If there was a way to balance it out, it
would be nice
so that axes took wooden shafts, thus making even trade skill
people unite
amongst each other :)
For some crafting skills this is the case, but for others, less
so. The key is to find a good balance between cooperation and
preventing total annoyance.
A second thought, there were a few things I was wondering about:
"What Is a Skill Box"-I have never seen a dev comment on the
fact that you
cant put multiple ankhs into 1 skill box, though I guess it is assumed
pretty well :)
You can't put more ankhs in a box than it costs. A skill box is
binary, meaning you either have it or you don't. In the example
tree, once you spend 2 ankhs to get Simple Metalworks, you have it
and any future ankhs should be spend on the boxes that it 'unlocks'.
Was the "How do stats Improve" mentioned as for sure yet?
This has been decided for sure.
I remember them saying they would keep the 3 main stats for
Origin, but did
they ever say they wont have sub-stats? Like coordination,
etc. Maybe these
will just be skills.
Yes, there will be 'substats' but most of them will be largely
invisible to the players.
I also havent heard on Titles :)
Well, I will stop now, probably going to confuse myself, hehe.
Just wondering if any of this was implied and not official, no biggie.
Thanks for the great info!(The skills tree's were awesome)
Titles are associated with a skill box. For example, front kick will
deliver with it the 'Kick Boxer' title. As you move further into the
tree, your title will be improved ('Journeyman Kick Boxer', 'Advanced
Kick Boxer', etc.)
Ubiq had the following to say on the UWOO@egroups.com mailing list:
Caveats: by asking this, I am neither promising this feature, nor am
I picking on uo2rox, but I am intrigued. The question I have is simply:
how would you interface with this? Drag and drop is typically used for
'give' not 'throw', and most other things don't seem quick or intuitive
enough to be done in the heat of battle....
How would you do it? Let the Dev Team know on our Dev Board!
Hello. It's the freak, and I would like to let you know that I have
cooked up a little something special for Uo2.Org :) No, I didn't get a
l33t interview, no I didn't get an exclusive picture, nope, nothing
official actually. I just would like to point out that I have created a "Player Concepts" Section of the site(also found in the features section of Uo2.Org) at: http://www.uo2.org/playerconcepts/
This section is for players to submit ideas, whatever they want(these
ideas will be uploaded/composed by me, as I am maintaining this portion
of the site). I will guarantee to read each idea that is sent in to me.
I will be adding sections if I get enough ideas(which won't be hard).
Some sections don't have comments, submitting them to me are just as
good as ideas though :)(:
Audball had this to say on our DevBoard concerning 3D audio:
Ubiq is indeed correct in stating that ORIGIN does have full 3D sound. Basically, I took the Ascension sound system and improved it in 3 main ways:
1) It's now multi-threaded, so you shouldn't get any of those annoying pauses or repeats in audio that you sometimes would in Ascension. (Remember Hawkind saying "Arise, Avatar... atar... atar..."? ;-)
2) A better priority system is used, so you should get fewer sounds getting cut off for others in many cases.
3) We're using a different (better, IMO) format of music, giving us much better control over what plays when, and in a more interactive manner (eg. we could pump up the tempo or add a mood overlay when your health gets critically low in combat, etc.)
If you want to know specific technologies/APIs we're using for sound, here's the list: DirectSound, DirectSound3D, DirectMusic. (Basically, everthing DirectX gives us :-)
As for A3D, EAX, or other additional APIs we could use for audio effects, we haven't decided what, if any, we'll support on ship. I personally would prefer to stick to the DirectX route and use IA3DL2 (basically EAX 2.5 was integrated into DirectX 8 as Microsoft's standard for acoustics/reverberation). Adding it shouldn't be too difficult since we have the Ascension code to work with, but we haven't found the right place for it on the schedule yet. My guess is that'd it would be deemed a post-ship feature/improvement. (I'd personally agree with Ubiq and vote for things like housing to get done first.)
Stratics has nabbed an interview with Ahriman, Minister of Fiction; here's a bit from the interview and the rest may be found right here:
Citadel of Moonglow seems to have survived the Cataclysm at the end of the Jukan Prequel story. Does this mean that other Jukan Citadels and Shires also survived? If so, which ones?
Citadel Moonglow is renamed Logos by Blackthorn after he takes control of the floating city. It was the only citadel to have survived the Cataclysm. No Jukan Shires survived, but Kumar and Narah led their people into the wilderness where they built the city of Garron, the first truly independent city of the Juka.
Stratics comes around again in the screenshot rotation taking place; here's the blurb from Josh:
Stratics' 2nd Exclusive Screenshot in the Fansite Screenshot Series! In this
picture we have a Jukan and a Human interacting in the city of Logos. Both
Jukan and Kinetic Armor are prominantly displayed. Make sure to also check
out our Screenshot Gallery for other great pictures as well!
I apologize for the delay in news today. All yesterday I was moving into my new apartment getting ready to start med school on Wednesday. I'm currently searching around for my connection options but I was never told my school account will take up to a week to activate. After fighting with that all day today, I finally got that info a few minutes ago. I called a local ISP and got a nice temporary account and now...on to the news!
Austen Andrews had the following to say on the UWOO@egroups.com mailing list in reply to the comments in italics:
I would like to personally thank Ahriman and Austin Andrews on how they ended the fiction in a great way. Something I haven't seen many stories have that makes them great.
You're very much welcome. Personally I'll echo the thanks to Ahriman
for being a great editor and coming up with such wonderful plots to hang
my purple prose on. For those of you who don't know him, Ahriman is an
amazing guy, easily the most extraordinary person I know. He has an
unbelievable talent for characters and storylines. His instinct for
what's cool and what's not is dead on (and he's not afraid to tell you
when you cross that line!). EA is damn lucky to have someone with his
abilities on their payroll. I feel certain the dev team will back me up
on that.
He's also notorious for abusing the Hell out of his characters, as
anyone who's read the final Britannia chapter has seen. It ended like a
Shakespearean tragedy, didn't it? What gloriously dark fun for a writer
to flesh out.
I was wondering a few things, first, does this mean you will not produce any more things with Lord British in them?
I'm just a contractor, so I'll leave it to Ahriman or someone else from
EA to elaborate, if they so choose. Though I thought he was pretty
clear in his letter.
I also wonder, are your new books, the ones published by PocketBooks, going to be about Ultima Origin?
Yes. I can't say anything more, except to point out that Ahriman
mentioned the books in his letter from May 19th. And that we're wildly
working to produce a trilogy that will far outpace the standards we've
set in the prequel fiction.
* You will have the option to change the colors of the text you read to something that is easily visible for you.
* You will have the option to shrink your viewable 3D window small enough that your chat window will be on the background of the 'big window', and thus be constant.
To kick off our new Guidebook section, we start with the subject of skills and skill trees. What exactly are these arboreal arrays of actions and attributes? Click here to head to our extensive coverage of what skill trees are, how you advance in them, what they do and how they do it. Think you know everything there is about skill trees already? Well, did you know that upon release, Origin will limit your level to 50? Did you know stats advance through skill trees? Did you know that over half of the entire skill system is related to the harvesting and manipulation of materials? Once you've read about that, be sure to take a look at two example skill trees from Origin and then take a look at our comprehensive skill list of what we know will be in the game, arranged by skill tree where possible.
Stay tuned for more subjects as we cover all aspects of Origin and summarize what you need to know to prepare for the next generation of online gaming. As always, links are in the left column for easy access. Thanks!
Ubiq had the following to say on our DevBoard concerning 3D sound in Origin:
I believe we already have 3D sound. If not, we should by ship. We have the guy who did Ascension's sound system, and UA won several awards for the quality of the sound in that game. He's done some amazing stuff that is going to make the world just seem to come alive as you walk around in it.
Ubiq had the following to say on the UWOO@egroups.com mailing list concerning the realism vs. immersion debate:
For the record, I'm not criticizing you or your ideas, just
explaining how we look at these problems. I prefer to think
of it as a challenge - you are quick to point out the problems -
so I challenge you to offer a better answer. You don't need
to be a game designer to know what's fun in a game, but you
do need the ability to see the problem from the point of view
of the thief, the inn owner, and the inn patron. =)
That being said, let's talk about realism. Often, when making
things 'realistic', you need to do things in a way that would
seem counter-intuitive. For example, you point out that it
is unrealistic that you can't pick up a book in a store. I
would argue, contrarily, that a world where every store, library
and inn in the world had their furniture stolen daily is far
less realistic. A world where no one decorates their shop or
inn because it's not worth risking losing the decorations and
going through the hassle is also not realistic. If you look
at it that way, adding the ability to lock down items certainly
adds realism. =)
A better goal is immersion, in my opinion. For example, when
Trespasser came out, it attempted to have a 'realistic' interface
with a hand that you could use in different ways to manipulate
different things. This hand was difficult to understand,
hard to control, not to mention pretty ugly to look at.
Now compare this to Unreal. In Unreal, you run over items to
pick them up. Very unrealistic, technically, right? However,
what this simple interface does is it removes this part of the
gameplay from your thought, so you can instead focus on the
parts of the game that ARE realistic (physics, projectiles,
level design - the strengths of a good first person shooter).
Immersiveness is all about playing off of your strengths to
make the best possible gameplay, while doing your best to
take the things that are your weaknesses out of the way.
The fact that you never THOUGHT about how you pick up items
let that brainpower be better spent on things that are more
immersive and more fun. =)
Ubiq had the following to say on the UWOO@egroups.com mailing list concerning being blocked by small animals:
Being blocked by small critters shouldn't happen that frequently.A monster's collision size is typically smaller than his art, meaning you should have no problem jumping over or walking aroundsuch items.
Concerning a discussion on the UWOO@egroups.com mailing list that there isn't enough hype for Origin, Ubiq said the following:
Because you can't sustain it. For example, a year ago,
everybody was talking about how much Team Fortress II was
going to rock the planet. Now, most of the people I know
of have gotten tired of waiting for it, and have moved
their attention to other things.
It takes a lot of time and effort on the developers time
to sustain hype. Far better we spend that time working on
that game, and build more excitement closer to ship.
This week's topic of the week is "Necromancy". Head over there and add your thoughts from spell ideas to reagents to general ideas on the skill.
Thread of the Day
Our thread of the day is World Economy: Cost for Items posted by KnightBK on our DevBoard. How would you deal with item cost and what other money sinks should be in Origin? Click here and add your thoughts!
Have a question for the Dev Team? Want to have it answered in the Official FAQ? Then head over to our UWO:Origin FAQ Board where the Origin Dev Team will be selecting questions to be answered in the Official FAQ!
