ConundrumofFurballs wrote:

Radiac wrote:
As far as suppressing powers while holding an object, I mean, CoX had power suppression while doing various things, right? It might be necessary to allow the game to turn people's powers off for various reasons, so I'd at least look inotr that as a design feature for some areas, or when holding a large object in two hands, etc. Maybe even have power suppression while using long distance travel powers, I don't know.
Power suppression and power replacement are two very different things. I don't believe we are going to clear your trays and replace the contents with a rock or whatever. I could be wrong, but I don't believe so.
As far as power suppression, I'm sure that will happen for various reasons at an assortment of places.

We aren't going to have physical object carrying currently. It is something we've discussed, but there are issues with the mechanics we would have to address. The coding part is trivial in general. Getting the interactions to work with our player model would take some time but eventually possible.

The mechanics circumventing a non-stat-based game however are non-trivial.

Power supresssion is possible, and mostly will be as stated,..when appropriate (for locations and a few othet story-related requirements).

Power replacements...we could do it, but there really isn't much reason to.

We don't have item pick-ups like other games, though there could be temp power "drops".

But they won't over-write your current powers.

Radiac wrote:

It would be nice if the temp power(s) that a carried object might give me pop up in a tray of their own, possibly above my regular tray. Then you could default setting that to be hidden when not in use, if you want. So like if you pick up a special gun object, the various shooting powers of the gun might be different attacks with their own temp power buttons, which would mean that when you pick up the gun, a "temp powers gained from carried object" tray pops up just above your regular tray and then your some subset of your powers (maybe just the click-to-use ones) also get's greyed out maybe. The idea being that your powers probably require hand gestures to use and as such the object carried precludes you from doing those animations, so out of fairness, all clicky powers would be suppressed (even the ones that are eye beams, etc and don't use hands, just to prevent everyone from making all of their attacks "hands free" because it's better than the other kind, for min/maxing purposes).

We do have a specific temp-power tray to make it easy to find and use a temp power when missions require the use of a specific temp power. This way you don't have to search an inventory list and drag an incon to a power tray.

In general, these story-based temps shouldn't require the replacement or supporession of regualr powers. The exception would be if there is very specific reasoning for the temp power to do so. Again, this is probably an exception, not a rule.

Crafted temp powers are another beast altogether. But the same general rules apply. They won't overwrite current powers (they may even work as buffs to current powers!).

The difference her is the way GW2 designed their combat mechanics around skills and the way we designed ours around powers. Apples and oranges.

Both have classes with different abilities. Both have you activate said abilities to produce an effect.
But the skill-based system using the object held as part the condition to providing the tree of skills is very different from ours where the objects (like weapons) have no bearing on mechanics and are for visual flare.

There may be other ways to solve that problem, though, without a hard-coded tray.

BTW, Star Trek Online has a tray like that (except it's for gear powers, not temp powers, such as spacesuit functions and starship special commands) and it's a bit of a pain to get set up since most of the time it's not there.

Coming into this a little late.

ConundrumofFurballs wrote:

We will have some NPCs that stand around as contacts. That is relatively unavoidable (at least for now? maybe tech can come up with something down the road that could change this, but it's not a priority, so it's not even being thought about really). But, that's not all they do. When it's appropriate, they will show up in missions. They're not stick figures, they're not cardboard cutouts. They're heroes/villains for a reason, and it's not to stand around all day with their thumbs up their &^@%$.

Give contacts a reason to be where they are. Awhile ago I suggested that there be micro-instances where what you do is speak to the contact in the instance. So if your contact is a police officer you might have to visit his office (a micro-instance) where he's sitting at his desk. Later you might visit him in another micro-instance where he's doing surveillance in the back on a van on 4th street. Or perhaps you are meeting with a retired mob boss and his hangout is a local cafe where he spends all of his time. But at night you'd visit him in his office above the cafe or in another location entirely. In this case you'd enter the instance when you passed through the door. Using micro-instances also has the benefit of preventing players from bunching up around a contact. Something that is a bit unnatural in most settings especially if the contact is trying to keep a low profile. Going back to the officer example. Moving the micro-instance can also help tell more of a story. IE the leads the officer is sending you to chase down aren't panning out and it's putting the officers career on the line so instead of meeting with him in his office you'd meet with him at the bar down the street.

At the very least avoid having contacts standing around this city unperturbed by the armed robbery happening 25ft down the sidewalk.

Concerning story and lore, maybe be you could find inspiration with that :)

[url=http://fortune.com/2017/05/17/library-of-congress-free-record-release/]http://fortune.com/2017/05/17/library-of-congress-free-record-release/[/url]

Grimfox wrote:

Give contacts a reason to be where they are. Awhile ago I suggested that there be micro-instances where what you do is speak to the contact in the instance. So if your contact is a police officer you might have to visit his office (a micro-instance) where he's sitting at his desk. Later you might visit him in another micro-instance where he's doing surveillance in the back on a van on 4th street. Or perhaps you are meeting with a retired mob boss and his hangout is a local cafe where he spends all of his time. But at night you'd visit him in his office above the cafe or in another location entirely. In this case you'd enter the instance when you passed through the door. Using micro-instances also has the benefit of preventing players from bunching up around a contact. Something that is a bit unnatural in most settings especially if the contact is trying to keep a low profile. Going back to the officer example. Moving the micro-instance can also help tell more of a story. IE the leads the officer is sending you to chase down aren't panning out and it's putting the officers career on the line so instead of meeting with him in his office you'd meet with him at the bar down the street.
At the very least avoid having contacts standing around this city unperturbed by the armed robbery happening 25ft down the sidewalk.

The instance idea does have merit, but I am not the one that has to implement it, so I'm staying out of whether or not it's doable.

As far as contacts staying in one place, we do have some of those. I do not know what their behavior will be regarding the activity around them, that's a gameplay department question. I do know that we have a few contacts that we in Composition intend to move about, depending on where you are in their story. I do not know how feasible this actually is at this time, but I do know that that is our intent on at least a few.

ConundrumofFurballs wrote:

Grimfox wrote:
Give contacts a reason to be where they are. Awhile ago I suggested that there be micro-instances where what you do is speak to the contact in the instance. So if your contact is a police officer you might have to visit his office (a micro-instance) where he's sitting at his desk. Later you might visit him in another micro-instance where he's doing surveillance in the back on a van on 4th street. Or perhaps you are meeting with a retired mob boss and his hangout is a local cafe where he spends all of his time. But at night you'd visit him in his office above the cafe or in another location entirely. In this case you'd enter the instance when you passed through the door. Using micro-instances also has the benefit of preventing players from bunching up around a contact. Something that is a bit unnatural in most settings especially if the contact is trying to keep a low profile. Going back to the officer example. Moving the micro-instance can also help tell more of a story. IE the leads the officer is sending you to chase down aren't panning out and it's putting the officers career on the line so instead of meeting with him in his office you'd meet with him at the bar down the street.
At the very least avoid having contacts standing around this city unperturbed by the armed robbery happening 25ft down the sidewalk.
The instance idea does have merit, but I am not the one that has to implement it, so I'm staying out of whether or not it's doable.
As far as contacts staying in one place, we do have some of those. I do not know what their behavior will be regarding the activity around them, that's a gameplay department question. I do know that we have a few contacts that we in Composition intend to move about, depending on where you are in their story. I do not know how feasible this actually is at this time, but I do know that that is our intent on at least a few.

What you're describing sound much more like phasing. The technical difference between instancing and phasing is that phasing only alters the visual data presented while instances actually builds a separate "world" (or piece thereof). So the smaller and more seamless it needs to be the more advantage there is to using phasing over instancing.

Pretty sure Grimfox meant phasing but couldn't just find the right term.

I think the main idea was to have some of the contacts [i]indoors.[/i] And while sometimes that should be instanced, so not everyone sees your contact, phasing could work as well, and lots of contacts could just be standing there in public instances or indoor spaces.

(And no, I have no idea if indoors and outdoors will be the same "zone" without a loading screen to transit between them.)

GW2 uses phasing for some stuff. For example, if you and I are in the vicinity of a treasure chest, and I have already opened it, it looks open when I see it, but closed when you see it. They do a daily "reset" at 8pm Eastern every night whereby all of the treasure chests reset to "closed" to everyone, among many other things.

That, by the way, is something I recommend looking into, the daily reset. For example, if you want to, you can defeat the dragon Tequatl every two hours, if you can muster enough people. But the GOOD treasure he drops only happens once per day. They don't track separate 24-hour timers for everyone, they just reset that with the daily "The Great Reset" action. So you COULD do the Tequatl raid now, then again after 8pm EST and do it TWICE in the same 24-hour period, but then after that you'll have to wait until 8pm tomorrow night to do it a third time for the good rewards again. You're still limited to one per day in the long term, but you can plan your week for short-term scheduling a little more flexibly. If you're like me and you play Magic on Friday nights, you can just do the Friday stuff on Saturday afternoon instead then do the Saturday stuff after 8pm on Saturday too.

Grimfox wrote:

Nope, definitely referring to instancing. I haven't played a lot of games that use phasing. Like I said these would be small "world spaces" separated from the main world. Much like the contact meetings in SWTOR.

Pretty sure that is actually an application of phasing rather than instancing since to my knowledge the difference is that instancing essentially requires loading between them due to being separate "landmasses" of the actual world while phasing doesn't due to being different variations/versions of a subsection of a "landmass". SWTOR seems to have added a few boundary rules that I haven't seen in other games that utilizes phasing but I don't think that makes them qualify as instances.

Besides, even if they could make "loading-less" mini-instances it won't really matter which technology is actually used in the end as long as it looks good, especially if we wouldn't be able to tell those technologies apart.

Cinnder wrote:

Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

ESO uses phasing as well. It's kind of odd when you're teamed with your friend, approach a town, and they disappear. You can see a little v marking where they are, but they're just not there, and they can't see you. Meanwhile, the city you're in is overrun by pirates, and the city they're in is peaceful and sunny. All because I haven't completed the quests in this city (basically to liberate it) and my friend has...

That's an interesting implementation of phasing. In our old City, everyone on a team would see the team leader's phase.

In World of Warcrack, it works as Cinnder describes for ESO. Additionally, sometimes you don't see the mobs that are there in the phase you'll be in until you've actually entered the area, sometimes later if your connection or graphics are slow. Which can be annoying if you can't see the first mobs until you've already entered the threat radius of the next batch...

I think I prefer to have the whole party follow the leader, as Lin described, and show the contents of the projected phase as far in advance as it would if it wasn't phased.