proxxie
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0.4.2 Should Be Out Tomorrow!
🕑 Added 2018-02-25 16:53:24 +0000 UTC Greetings!I wanted to announce that I should be done with Picture Pack 0.4 tomorrow, which means I can release 0.4.2 then, too! My poor computer has been rendering all week, but it's almost done. Just to be clear, 0.4.2 won't have any new content, it's just a bugfix/tidying update.
In addition to postworking images and fixing bugs, I've also been planning out 0.5. I expect I'll finish the planning this coming week, then I can move on to development and content creation.
There are two sorta complicated projects that I don't think I'll be able to avoid much longer - namely, developing a look for male humans/elves and developing a threat plugin.
I haven't finalized the H-scenes that are going to be in 0.5, but the cast of characters involved in them is going to expand pretty rapidly beyond Alex and Ana very soon. Having a consistent visual style in the H-scenes is very important to me. I have a little bit of work to do on the orcs, but I think they're mostly fine. I have a lot of work to do on male humans/elves - I've sorta planned out what I think will work using lessons learned from developing the female look, but it's going to involve a lot of trial and error. Then, of course, I'll need to develop looks for taurine and goblins, but that can wait a bit :)
The threat plugin is intended to make combat more WoW-like by allowing me to meaningfully use the standard tank/healer/dps model. For those of you who don't know what "threat" is in this context, I'll briefly explain: there are a lot of variations, but basically combat in MMOs is built around the so-called "holy trinity" of tanks, healers, and dps. DPS (short for damage per second) is supposed to do the bulk of the damage to monsters, healers are supposed to keep everyone alive, and tanks are made to keep the monster's attention and take most of the damage. Threat is the mechanic that allows this whole model to work.
How do the monsters know what to attack? Why don't they attack whatever's hurting them the most? Well, that's where threat comes in. Monsters attack whatever character has the most threat, and if you're playing correctly, that will be the tank. In practice, threat usually works out to:
threat = (total damage to that monster) x (some number)
That number at the end will usually be larger than one for a tank, and possibly smaller than one for a DPS. There are all sorts of nuances, but this is the basic idea. Note that it is still possible for the monster to attack a DPS if they're doing too much damage too fast! (This happens a lot in bad raid groups.) Usually you don't want this; sometimes you do!
I suspect this plugin will be a lot of work, particularly since I haven't written any plugins before.
I'm determined to get 0.5 out in the last half of March, so I may end up putting the threat plugin off until 0.6. I already plan to have a lot of stuff in 0.5 content-wise, and I don't think I can avoid developing the male look anymore - that sounds like enough work for a single release to me.
By the way, in a previous post I'd said I was using Scrivener to organize information about the project. I'm beginning to think this isn't enough, particularly as it continues to grow, and I'm considering a (private) wiki. Does anyone have any software recommendations? A bit about my preferences/requirements:
- I mostly work on a Mac
- I need complete offline access on my main computer
- I need it to be completely private (i.e., I don't want the public to be able to view it)
- The ability to sync to/view on mobile devices is nice, but not required
- I'd prefer that it not be very complicated to either set up or use regularly
If you have any suggestions please let me know! I was kinda looking at VoodooPad, but I don't think it's powerful enough for what I want. I'm starting to look at DokuWiki and TiddlyWiki, but I'm curious if there are any other good ones or if anyone has any relevant experience.
Thank you for your support!
Comments
OhioOkie
I like the idea. Could be a scene after a defeat by an nearly impossible battle where there is an offer to let them pass for exchange of favors.
I've always wanted to try MMOs, but then I remember how many hours I've sunk into league in the past, recall hearing that WoW is like 10x worse, and just shy away. So looks like the MC was right about prejudicing CoC players. :D
xRed Games
Love the game. Keep up the good work :) 👍
Proxxie
I mostly stay away from MMOs now. Every WoW xpac, I come back for a few weeks, ride the new rides, remember why I quit, and drop it again.
Doctor
Yeah, I intended for the party to be subject to lewd attacks. I love that in games and often grind the same battle over and over again just to get it... :/
"(This happens a lot in bad raid groups.)" Bah, gotta keep your tanks and healers on their toes while smashing those deeps meters. Man you're right about not starting mmos if you can help it though, I'm getting that itch again and all these F2P ones just aren't hitting it. Hoping Monster Hunter World will relieve it a bit when it finally comes to pc :x Anyhow, can't wait for that hi-rez release <3
Proxxie
Dude, you could run WoW on a potato. But if you made it this long without playing an MMO, I wouldn't start now. Kinda like crack.
Proxxie
Depends on what you mean. I may have a few fights where the PC/party are attacked in a lewd way, but the party won't be doing the lewding. It won't be common.
Doctor
Will there be lewd attacks? Just curious... >_>
I haven't played MMOs before (my computer is garbage) yet I understood all the terms! :D
Proxxie
Right. That was simply intended as an intro to the idea for folks who may not be familiar with it. There will, of course, be threat for healing, as well as for other special abilities, in addition to taunting, some monsters dropping threat, monsters that may target folks other than #1 on the table, etc. While I expect many folks who play this game will have played MMOs before, I wanted those who hadn't to understand what I was talking about.
Danielle
While I like your idea on the threat system but to be a little more realistic you would have to take in account a threat gain to healers. If a monster does a lot of damage only to have the healer recover it all that would draw a lot of attention to the healer as well. That way we would have to balance healing and attack to not draw too much threat to the healer and away from the tank.
OhioOkie
First I agree with Gamelover. I remember in EQ my ranger had to wait until the monster was done to 70 % health before wailing. But it was still possible take agro away even with casting agro reducing spells. It seems you are at the point where if you want to add more slots to the character for items that effects the characters, you should add all you want. I would suggest the slots me a mixed of the standard ones for combat that effects offense and defence and random things like luck, but also some that might effect the character non combat skills or attitude. One might be for liking gloves, another might be hair pens that increase attractiveness that would affect how the probability of getting a job or passing through a gate without fighting. Of course other attributes could be modified too. As for a private wiki or such. Beyond a way of keeping the material organized and as a backup, are you wanting to allow select people to view and help with it? If not why don't you set up a local LAN and have the wiki on a different computer that you can access from the computer where you are developing the game? I use to do this back with Win 3.1 to store all the data from multiple equipment in one organized file system. Then I could run analyze on the data from a different computer in a different building.
Me reading: >should be out tomorrow! > :D >0.4.2 > :( You haven't stopped being a tease!
tallytrix
I'm using Zim for several projects, which is a desktop wiki based on wiki-markup plaintext files, which I find nice, because they stay at least readable as long as you have a text editor at hand. It's quite cross-platform at this point, and instructions for Mac are on the page, even if it reads as if it is not quite the preferred target platform. All in all, I like that it is not brimming over with features and can be completely navigated via keyboard. Privacy is as well as you can make the storage solution for the text files private.
Gamelover
Your 0.4 update was amazing btw :)
