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Chatlog des Face Of Mankind Entwicklerchats vom 11. Juli 2005 ok now it seems everyone is here So we can begin with Stage 1: Introduction of the developers begins I think ;) Hello and welcome to this developer chat, my name is Marko Dieckmann, aka . I'm the Managing Director of Duplex Systems and Lead Programmer for Face of Mankind. HI, I'm Bram "Opiate" Venneman, programmer for Duplex Systems Hi Guys, most of you know me, I'm Christopher Dierks. I'm doing the music and sound FX for Face of Mankind Christian Winter, Project Manager Online Gaming at Ojom Hi there, my name's Jasper Bongertz, i'm the technical guy for Online Gaming at Ojom Hi my name is Chris Barkey Bartlett, level design dps ok that was the introduction part, so you know which developer is doing what on the game lets move over to stage 2: "Plans for the near future" Ok, this stage is to inform you about several new and exciting things we have in our store for you in the near future. I will start with the most anticipated engine upgrade: There were several reasons to think about upgrading the engine. Although we had tweaked and optimized the old engine (LithTech Talon) a lot, we had to admit that it wouldn't suit FoM so well for the future. Especially when it comes to world rendering, we had some serious performance limits, where we had to find some compromises. For example these little white dots that you can see at many spots in the world, that was not a real bug, it was a performance compromise. That means accepting a little inaccuracy for more performance, since we could save lots of polygons. We also had a lot of artistic limits, such as no shader support or just very simple shadows. So, what do you do if you're already in an Open Beta? You can't just switch an entire game engine at the end of a development cycle. :) After careful thinking we found the best solution in using Touchdown Entertainment's (formerly LithTech) newer Jupiter System. Almost all artwork could be reused and we have been offered nice support from Touchdown when it came to converting worlds and models to the newer format. So, I think you want to hear features, right? :) Ok, let me list the most important ones. So you want? Ok, well... First of all, the engine is now based on DirectX(r) 9. It has a reasonable shader pipeline, render styles and much more efficient world rendering, which was one of the main reasons to switch over. There is support for realistically projected shadows, glow shaders, bump maps, normal maps, smoother lighting, faster particle effects and water that can interact with the environment. The engine was used in famous titles such as No One Live Forever 2 and Tron 2. The sound system will change as well. It now supports 5.1 surround and hardware accelerated EAX2.0 effects if your soundcard supports it. That should really increase the immersion factor a lot. For more info: http://www.touchdownentertainment.com/jupiter.htm But please keep in mind that we will not be able to use the full potential of the engine at the initial upgrade. First we have to make sure that FoM runs stable with the same feature set. Later we can add all kinds of special effects. Also keep in mind, that the current world architecture could not be changed in that short amount of time we had. But for most users the game performance will increase a lot. We expect to release the engine upgrade within the next 2 weeks. I am currently fixing bugs that have occurred because of the conversion process to the new format and then optimization of the maps takes place Once these stages have been completed on all the levels we can start adding more detail, create a more open environment and make use of the features the new engine brings. What was the maximum framerate again? Oh it's confidential... ok then :) triple digits for sure Those of you who have read the Newsletter have also seen that there is much more in store than just this engine upgrade, although this is already changing the game a lot. Besides the engine upgrade, the new character models will change the look and feel of Face of Mankind dramatically. I'm very glad that Ojom gave us the opportunity to go for this change. Let me go straight to the point. All player character models and their attachments are currently being re-created from scratch, both models and textures. We found it necessary to increase the quality of the models and to give each faction a unique look so that they can be distinguished much better. One of the biggest changes will be that all armours will be visible on the model itself. So if you attach a leg pad, it will become visible on yourself. The same goes for clothes and everything. The hair style will also vary a lot. In addition to that the entire player character animation system will be revised as well. Motion capture data will be used for the new animations to make your characters smooth and realistic. The most important aspect here is that finally the female animations will be different from the male animations. How about drooling a bit? :) Morph, open the channel for 5 minutes please. ok phew wow. yeah Ok, that was some drooling :) * Chaos comes back to the room But you know what, that was not all. that was a lot of text :) Some of you will probably be a bit scared about what comes now. So please make sure you are sitting. At the same time we have reworked the factions and decided some changes were necessary. The GIS, American Enterprises and Asian Coalition will be dropped and Vortex Inc. will be added as a new faction. So at the end there will be 8 unique factions. But please don't worry now, it will be a few more weeks before this changed will be patched. It's not that we didn't like those factions, but we wanted to give each faction more significance on its own. As mentioned in the newsletter we will now announce a few important gameplay changes which we want to implement before release. These are professions, squads and beginner missions. 1. Professions We found it important to increase the significance of each individual player. Ojom came up with the idea to add professions to the game and after some thought I jumped up on this idea. So what are professions? Professions are no levels. By selecting a profession players decide for a general direction their characters will go. Each profession will have at least one advantage over the others. You can choose from Combatant, Medic, Commander and Trader. All professions will be clearly marked as such by icons next to their name. Let me just give a very brief description of each profession. Combatant: A Combatant is the fighter. With higher ranks they can use weapons that a trader and medic cannot use, which means we will also add new weapon variations. Commander: A Commander is the strategist. Commanders can create squads within a faction. A squad is a group of people similar to a clan, but only within the faction. The Commander will be the squad leader and he can also declare a name for the squad. A squad will get a headquarter, which is about the size of a penthouse. The higher the rank of a commander, the more people can join the squad. Medic: A Medic likes to heal people. Medics will play a very important part in missions, since they are able to heal others. Only Medics can use MedPacks on other players to heal them. Imagine how important that can be in a large-scale fight. Trader: A Trader can mine and produce more efficiently. Traders will get production modules at a lower price than all the other professions. Production and mining can be finished more quickly. Many of you might see all this as a way to create classes or races. But that's not the case. Professions are only meant to create your significance as a part of your faction. You can still do everything you want, as before. We all know that mastering the fairly complex mission system in FoM can be tough for newbies at the beginning. With all those different aspects it can become quite confusing if you don't really know how to interpret them. That was the thought behind the "Basic Mission" feature. The idea is to pull new players into the game right away. Basic missions will be available all the time for the professions Combatant, Medic and Trader. Commanders are supposed to go the difficult way. Basic missions are available for all factions, they have neither a starting time nor an ending time. You can join or leave basic missions at any time, but only if your rank is the lowest. You will be able to gain some experience points by immediately entering the action and metting other players. Basic missions can be continous attack or defense missions defined by the faction leader per world. They can also be simple medic missions like covering a certain area and help to heal people there. For Traders basic missions are standard raw material mining missions, defined by the faction leader as well. So, basic missions are always there, but they won't remain the same forever. They can change with the current political situation. * gives the mic to Christopher to tell us a bit about sounds and music aah.. * Pern beatboxes Some news as far as SFX and Music go: 1. a whole lot of new environment and ambient sounds are being developed/ edited and incorporated, to further enhance the immersion. This means one-shot type sounds as well as new environment loops and event sounds. 2. some music is being changed/ added and further enhanced, This means the music for the tutorial, the login screen etc. * Christopher hands the mike back Time to unmute the channel again for a few minutes for discussion. * Christopher hands the mic back, too oh noes ok... Appologies to the reporters whos questions were spammed away i guess you all want to know when this all is going to release First, I would like to say thanks to everybody for coming, and giving us the opportunity to explain what we are doing right now, how FoM will change, what’s happening and so on. Good to see so many people here. Second… please apologize for my weird English sometimes, especially in situations like this one, when I don’t have enough time to think about grammar and wording. But I hope you will understand anyway what I am going to say. =) Regarding a release date... we got a pretty good idea when that will be, and it’s not too far away, but… no comment on it yet. =) it won't be too long you all will see the next development steps, duplex talked today about, and that way you can get a good picture when everything is implemented but i can already tell a bit about the things that interest you most About a free trial.. the bad news first, there won’t be a free trial. But the good news is, the client will be a free download. Other games are sold for around €50,- and then you get a free trial of 4 weeks… that doesn’t sound very free to me. The monthly subscription will be 9,99 euro. So, after all, it is a rather reasonable price for an online game. regarding the different payment options it's up to gagglezoomer to tell more Thanks, Kelly. Hi everybody again, i'm still a little deaf from the last 5 minute break :) There will be different types of billing systems available to meet most demands. Of course there will be the standard credit card billing, but additionally we will offer bank collection for certain countries and banking companies, which depends on our billing provider. As a new, special way of billing we will offer mobile phone payment. It will be possible to put the montly gaming fee on your mobile phone invoice, so that you won't need a credit card or banking account. Mobile phone billing will be offered for a number of countries. The list of countries isn't complete yet, and some things still need to be discussed, so more details will be published later. Mostly it will be europe and the US, but we're continually working on expanding that, of course * gagglezoomer hands the mike back to Hey, thanks Christian and Jasper. That was definetely something lots of player wanted to know I can imagine. :) Ok, now we will start Stage 3 of the this chat. We will answer some of your questions collected from a forum thread. But first give us a few minutes to prepare. * gagglezoomer takes cover ok Question: Multicom. It seems like a great idea. Being able to access forums from in game is a great addition. But what is the PRU gonna be used for? The Personal Replication Unit feature has been dropped. It was originally meant to be for producing clothes or food for yourself, but all this will become part of the economic system. Which means that clothes can be produced from textiles on a production terminal. The PRU model will be used as a variation for production terminals, so it wasn't done for nothing. - Question: When are the turrets going to be destructable, and what are the details on that (if they've been finalized yet)? Yes, turrets will become destructable although we cannot give an ETA yet for this feature. Along with destructability, turrets will also have to be produced and the GD forces will be able to place these at locations where the GD is in control. 3. We have TV's, let us use them! How about the ability to import video into the FoM game files to pipe into the TV. * Opiate erases that question Question: Combat system. The current combat system is flawed. A person can stand still with no helmet, and will have to get shot 6-8 times just to die. The impact of weapons should be stronger, so you don't have to fight for 5 minutes just to kill one ganker. Please remember that this game is no shooter! People spend a lot of time into their characters and cloning isn't cheap for everyone. But the combat will be tweaked and balanced one final time after all the new features are in. In a few big events we will give everything a few last practical test before release. - Question: Food. It's kinda pointless right now, so lets give it some use. Like after 12 hours of not eating, your stamina starts to drain faster and faster. So it becomes an intrical part of the FoM lifestyle. In order to do this, however, you would need to make food easily accessible (cost factor) so anyone can eat. That was actually planned a long time ago. It is still on our to-do list. :) But it will only affect stamina, not health or your movement speed. Question: DMC ticket trading, what's going to happen to stop it. How will the prison system be further enforced? There is a delicate balance between securing DMC and maintaining the * Opiate uses the MiB flasher to make sure noone saw that bad paste * Opiate pastes that again There is a delicate balance between securing DMC and maintaining the ability to escape. We've always made it clear that we do not want to make DMC a prison from which no escape is possible, but escaping should require outside help. There are no major changes planned at this moment, but we will continue to refine the current system until we are happy with it. - Question: When the game goes retail, there will obviously be some sort of credit wipe, but how will rank and XP be transfered, or not? - Wipes, wipes, wipes... Ok there will be only one major wipe which will probably scare a lot of you. Namely when the new character models will be patched. A lot of things will be changed both on client and server. But at this time we're not 100% sure what exactly will be wiped. Will it be only the look of your character or your entire character? We can't tell yet, but we will try to avoid anything that is not absolutely necessary. -Question: I only have one, will we have more clearly defined policies for forum posts for example different posting policies for each of the sub-forums, what names on chars arent alowed, how to reach the current gms and how to behave if we get contacted by one, what can we get banned for, the current exploits in the game. Reason why is that comes retail we will need these policies clearly defined. - We will have some more defined policy until release. We are aware of the fact that the complex environment of FoM needs a little bit more guidelines than other mmorpg's. With all the politics and player run conflicts the possibility that the situation gets a bit unfriendly can happen easily. So, you are right when you demand a clear stance from our side, what is ok and what not… and how we react when somebody is breaking rules. - Question: Crimes. Will drugs, hacking, smuggling, illegal weapon modifications ever be an aspect of criminal activity in Face of Mankind? There should be a lot more emphasis than there currently is on the criminal underworld, seeing as how Face of Mankind is being aimed for a urban sci-fi, cyberpunk theme. - The answer is yes. It was always planned that other illegal actions besides murder will also have impact on your penalty points. It is still on our to-do list, which is not very short as you probably can imagine. * Opiate reminds everyone that drugs are bad :) - Question: Are democratic elections still planned? The system of government we have seen thus far, primarily the Colonial Senate, has included faction representatives elected internally by the leadership of each faction, as opposed to true, large scale democracy. I personally would like to see a Dominion Senate, in which any player could stand for office as long as they meet a few criteria ( eg. no extensive criminal record), in add this, or something similar, be a possibility?" Long question obviously :) The whole Senate feature idea has always been one of my favourite. In fact I can tell you that a special government world (an area in NYC) will be added later. But with all the current activities I really can't tell if this is realizable before release. It was planned to have a main Senate hall in there, an embassy for all factions and a few court room to handle trials. So far it's only on paper, time will tell. - Question: What is going to be done about apartment exits? When an enemy faction takes over a colony, the person is stuck in his apartment all the time. When he leaves, he appears only at the first node, leaving gankers great potential to camp nodes. The vortex node system will see a revision soon. This will include a more flexible way of arriving in a new level, as well as a system to distribute the "load" in a level, this should prevent overcrowded spawn spots. The exact details of this change are not known yet at this moment. - Question: What are the current development priorities for DPS? - Our main priorities are the engine upgrade, the implementation of the new player characters and animations, profession system, basic missions and of course bugfixing. k now a few moments for you and then we go for the last stage Spammers will be punished. ok we have now arrived on our final stage where you can ask questions to us directly Ok... Spammers please... Spammers will be punished. I agree with Timekeeper now about the proceeding You will send your questions to Tick, Rayden or myself we will then pick several and bring them to the devs please send questions ONLY to us all other question will not be answered and no DCC chats please i.e stop pming me Keep your questions short and concise ok I hope this is clear * Opiate activates his "if PM-ed, delete char" script and then we start 1.will fom still be able to play with "old" hardware or will there a limit like only shader 1.4 will work and will the engine include a new netcode too to improve the lag ? - 1. FoM should be well playable on all medium systems. At the moment only shaders 1.2 are used. But to get the best performance you should have DirectX9 HW TnL compatible graphic card. - 2. what will happen to AE/AC and the people inside it, its a bit sad if they lose out from this. How are you going to go about removing AE/AC - 2. Don't worry too much right now, there will be a partial or full wipe anyway when the new player characters are implemented. This will be a good chance to choose which of the available factions will suit you best. - 3. What will be the role of the new Vortex Inc faction? And will they get to do anything special with the vortexes, like block certain factions etc. There you go. Vortex Inc. has played a major role in the background story of Face of Mankind. So it was only a natural step to include them as a player faction. Yes, with the new faction system each faction will play a unique role in the Global Dominion, so does Vortex Inc. :) 4. Will the appartments eventually have doors that work. Will god-mode be removed in the appartments (perhaps for everyone but the owner)? Doors..I doubt that, there are some technical difficulties related to having actual doors in an apartment. Having godmode inside an apartment is a bug, this should be fixed in one of the upcoming server patches 5 what about the storyline system in the future? will it drop or improved ? Answer: There will be more storyline tools and more development as the development progresses beyond the major engine upgrade. Storyline is an important part of FOM and will be a priority. - Why are you just deleting 3 random factions? That is unfair, and very unprofessional of you. To make one big faction? Bad excuse, you're making alot of people very angry with this and it should not be done. - Unfortunately you miss the point. We don't just remove 3 factions to combine them into a bigger one. We wanted to have less corporations and drop the GIS, but wanted to have at least 8 factions. - When you implement the whole profession idea, what will prevent the leaders to promote everyone to a higher rank, so the combatants for example, can use the best weapons ? This would improve their fighting power ... - That's right. That's why a significant revision to the whole promotion system is being planned. - do i keep my money after the 3 days downtime.. i worked for that long.. dont wanna lose it Absolutely, nothing about your character will be any different than what it is now after this engine upgrade. Only when the new character models and faction changes are applies will there be a partial wipe. - what features, exactly, will the multicom have? The Multicom will offer a few standard administration functionality which is at the moment available through the portal. You will be able to change your nametag, resign from your faction, change apartment key codes. You will also be able to get an overview about your storage capacities in ALL colonies. :) please excuse the waiting time, but you have a lot of questions on your heart :) What will happen to the AE + AC Headquarters? Will the maps be redesigned altogether to exclude them or will they remain? - The maps will stay for now. Those corporations still live in the FoM universe, players just can't join them any longer. But please keep in mind that the patch is due in a few weeks, not very soon. So you will have enough time to decide for another faction. Could we expect teasers of the new engine, new player models, or any other things that are in developement by DPS as they are being worked on? undo - Question: Is a revision for the campaign/colony takeover system planned and if so, how will colony takeovers be changed? - Since there are many questions regarding this feature, I don't want to let you down and just ignore it. But as I can't tell you anything specific, i have to stay with "No comment" at this time. - You were talking about making the levels more open , does this mean that the levels will be adjusted , or are there going to be more maps? well this comes from how the new engine renders the world. The old engine used special walls to block what the player can see and could only handle relatively low poly count, the new engine renders everything within a specified radius of the player this includes a lot of overdraw in our current maps, so we might as well use this over draw and let players see it. It would be safe to assume their will be new maps which use the new engine to better effect, as duplex said their will be a parliament map for starters - Could we expect teasers of the new engine, new player models, or any other things that are in developement by DPS as they are being worked on? - Yes, you can definetely expect a teaser when the time is right for it. But first we plan to release a few screenshots of the new faction styles. This might be interesting as well. - During the partial wipe, will we be able to recreate our charachters we lost as in names, and what will duplex do about angry customers who get tagged by imposters who stole their names to get power in the faction? - If we do a full character wipe, we will also clean up the player name database, that's for sure. We will also cleanup old names of permadead players if we only do a partial wipe. don't worry, we're sorting questions right now :) are there gonna be any sort of Accessible Storage Containers in your Flat? - Not planned right now, but it's a good and useful idea. ok thank you all for comming Ok, the 2 hours are over. I would like to thank everyone for participating and our guests for answering all the questions so patiently. you shall stop when you have most fun ^^ Note: a log will be posted so you can read it all over again if you wish. unfortunatly we cant answer anymore questions * Opiate waves * Christopher waves ok now we will open the chat up again in a minute * Chaos bye bye Good evening! please be aware that spamming is forbidden Thank you very much Duplex and Ojom for giving this wonderful oppurtunity to the community You're welcome!