Back from/to? the dead.

[nutzie]

Hey there Adventurers.
So I finally decided to check out MS:C again after yet another lenghty break, just too see what's happening and if there are some new toys to play with. (I'll probably be online 24/7 if I know myself).

To my surprise my old character was still there!
All I can remember really is farming boars in thornlands and getting owned on every boss I could get to, and since boars doesn't give me that much of a reward xp- or item-wise at level 25 I sure hope I find a new suitable farming ground.

Been checking servers for the last... 2 days now and I hardly see anyone online, am I just in the wrong timezone?
(superior Swede here) or is MS:C heading towards a slow death? I sure hope to see some people online soon, and hopefully bug them with some noob questions and/or do some boss runs <3.

See you ladies online!
Yours truly
Nutzie

 

[Thothie]

Been a bit slow for awhile now... Largely due to my inability to escape RL obligations and tell people to "fuck off" (thus no patches since April), but also due to the engine just be so damn old. It isn't like the old days, where nearly everyone had Half-Life. The Steam browser breaking all the time, and Desura being unwilling to host us isn't helping. (Nor does my primary web host vanishing.)

Still, am working on patch as we speak... Hopefully I'll manage to keep at it for the next few days before I get back to the states and life resumes.

(Sneak preview, just for the hell of it


PS. ...What really worries me, is that fewer and fewer people have Half-life2 now, much less the whole Orange box you'll probably need for MSS. :\ Kinda of amazed at how many kids I'm running into who've never visited City 17.

 

[nutzie]

Ahh I see, altho the good ol half life engine is what gives MS:C it's charm.
I like all the small bugs and all the lovely polygons. To be honest I don't know if I would be playing if it wasn't ugly(read cosy) as it is.

As for the patch, good work!
and good work on everything else, a lot has changed since I played a couple of years ago, I hardly recognize some areas.

 

[FER]

I like all the small bugs and all the lovely polygons. To be honest I don't know if I would be playing if it wasn't ugly(read cosy) as it is.

...

 

[jon50559]

No, please!!! No bloom on there!!

 

[Monika's_BFFEx0256]

I like all the small bugs and all the lovely polygons. To be honest I don't know if I would be playing if it wasn't ugly(read cosy) as it is.

...

I agree with what he said completely, dunno why you replied with ellipses... :roll:

 

[Thothie]

No, please!!! No bloom on there!!

Heh, yeah, I noticed that old snow-blind effect rather quickly. I'll stick the usual dimmer-switch triggers.

Hrmm... This damn laptop doesn't seem to want to give me AA in MSC for some reason. I'll have to get a screenshot from the home machine at 5 FPS, somehow, I guess. (MSC over VNC is hilarious.)

I like all the small bugs and all the lovely polygons. To be honest I don't know if I would be playing if it wasn't ugly(read cosy) as it is.

...

I agree with what he said completely, dunno why you replied with ellipses... :roll:

The old engines do have a certain... Charm... I suppose. But as the new generations roll in, I suspect there's going to be less and less nostalgia factor for the younger players.

I think there's also the fact that the free-games industry has literally exploded over the past few years, as has the indi game industry. Even the older retail games - still generations ahead of MSC, graphically, are going for next to nothing. I've way more games gifted to me on my computer than I can possibly hope to play, and I suspect the same can be said of a lot of people. Getting hard to compete. Not sure what we could possibly do to get an edge in this market.

Not that we don't offer an oddly unique product, in a lot of ways.

 

[FER]

I cant understand why someone wants to keep glitches on its game, and all that liking the game cus its ugly is some nostalgia crap.

I would love MSC to be top-notch, polished and bug-free; not to mention half decent models. Dunno what you are smoking dude.

 

[Monika's_BFFEx0256]

Dunno what you are smoking dude.

Cannabis.

 

[Thothie]

I cant understand why someone wants to keep glitches on its game, and all that liking the game cus its ugly is some nostalgia crap.

I would love MSC to be top-notch, polished and bug-free; not to mention half decent models. Dunno what you are smoking dude.

I, dun think he was alluding to the glitches, so much as that tight feel you get out of ancient engines, that's hard to find in the fancier modern ones. There's not *too* many glitches in the old engines... Though all the gods know there's plenty in MSC.

 

[nutzie]

I cant understand why someone wants to keep glitches on its game, and all that liking the game cus its ugly is some nostalgia crap.

I would love MSC to be top-notch, polished and bug-free; not to mention half decent models. Dunno what you are smoking dude.

It's not the glitches themselves, but the whole unpolished feel that makes me love the game.
And sure, I might have my nostalgia glasses on, or I might have had nostalgia eye surgery, but damnit! It's MS:C and it's every bit as awesome now as 5 years back.

 

[CmdrQuartz]

Well there is such a thing as going too far back. I mean I love Command & Conquer but that's just going too far back technology wise, if you can even get it to run on a newer system. Thothie's right about getting new people into it too because they don't even have nostalgia to go on, they're used to all the bells and whistles of new technology. Doesn't seem like MSC is particularly well staffed either. Truly I'd like to see MSC become it's own game like Natural Selection 2 is, but as mentioned I don't think they have that kind of manpower.

 

[FER]

To become a game of its own it either has to move to an engine were it can works as a standalone were (no buying another game to get it to play) or pull some miracle with the HL1 engine to suprass all the annoying limitations or some crap like that.

 

[zeus9860]

Pretty funny, when i heard NS2 being a standalone game pretty much, seems like all the hype about that game just vanished once it got out of it's cage.

Everyone was like "Omg, must preorder this thing, it's so awesome!". Then again i see no one speaking of that nor playing it now that' it's released.

Ms:c is worth a try doing this on another engine with a new team, but it needs alot of improvement... and i don't think it's a good idea at the moment, given the progress that this community made with the mod itself by sharing their projects and the likes.
Leaving it be would be an awfull idea, most people want to see the conclusion of this mod and changing directions right now would completly mess this up for most of us.

Only option i see is MSS attempting to do this, since it's in a forever TBA state. :roll:


PS: As i always said, ms:c is one of those things that will likely keep on going... even if it lacks the man power to do things fast enough. I always thought myself, this mod will hardly see an end, the way things are going! Soon it'll be 2020 and it's still on the works and MSS is still in the forever TBA state...


EDIT: I wonder why MSS team doesnt group up with MS:C itself and focus in just 1 mod (MS:C). I think MSS is pretty much a futile project right now, we hardly see any news or progress made with it. It makes people loose hope on this mod. And devs put effort in something like that instead of finishing something that is already in our hands, i don't get it.

Hell, it would even make more sense that way, finish ms:c as one group then move on to mss...

 

[jon50559]

Anything already made for MS:S would likely need to be redone anyway, as source's capabilities + player's hardware and expectations have increased dramatically. And I think source was/still is a poor choice for a game of this type.

 

[Thothie]

Pretty funny, when i heard NS2 being a standalone game pretty much, seems like all the hype about that game just vanished once it got out of it's cage.

Everyone was like "Omg, must preorder this thing, it's so awesome!". Then again i see no one speaking of that nor playing it now that' it's released.

NS2 is still in beta, although far enough along to have matches. I must admit, I pre-ordered it, and have hardly touched it. The alphas and the early betas were just painful, and I've been waiting on them to refine and finalize their product.


It used to be that a mod off a popular game, rather than a stand alone, was advantageous, as it used to be whenever any new popular game came out, the first thing everyone did was look for mods for it. This was pretty much free advertising, for Master Sword. Anyone looking for a HL mod would eventually find it.

But again, with the shear number of games that are out there now, and the fact that most major game releases are console ports that discourage modding (damn you console tards!), I don't think this is the case any longer... But even if stand-alone was a real option for MSC, it'd be difficult to find it, and therefor, hard to create a client base.

No clue how to get around that and adapt to the realities of the new gaming world though - at least not without spending a lot of money and/or opening ourselves up to litigation.

On the plus side, despite the chirping crickets, we're in the top four non-retail HL1 mods, after NS, Svencoop, and TS (or were, less than a year ago, seems the site that tracks that is down now). Granted, that's only because the scene is all but non-existent, but I suppose we should be proud to be one of the last hangers-on.

 

[FER]

if stand-alone was a real option for MSC, it'd be difficult to find it, and therefor, hard to create a client base.

Thats the point od MODDB, to post mods and standalone games.

 

[Thothie]

Hard to find stand alone games on ModDB unless you're looking for a specific one. Mods are fine - it's the best advertisement for mods by far... But, suffice to say, we already have a page there. Granted, they are trying to replace ModDB with Desura, and Desura has basically told us to f*ck off, so...

Anything already made for MS:S would likely need to be redone anyway, as source's capabilities + player's hardware and expectations have increased dramatically. And I think source was/still is a poor choice for a game of this type.

Ya know... Maybe we should just give up on this whole engine thing and do it in Java... Works for Minecraft and Runescape.

 

[The Man In Black]

Wouldn't necessarily say anything "works" for Minecraft. Currently doing development there. While I never work with the source code, I've seen it, and I dare say that it's as bad if not worse than MS:C...

 

[Monika's_BFFEx0256]

The Specialists mod is dead. The community has pretty much abandoned it, with two RP servers barely populated and the DM servers all vacant.. The website's been down for it for quite a while now, as well as all the filehosting sites they used to have. I play it quite a bit to troll about, as there's nothing left to really do there... I hope MS:C never suffers the same fate.

 

[Thothie]

Wouldn't necessarily say anything "works" for Minecraft. Currently doing development there. While I never work with the source code, I've seen it, and I dare say that it's as bad if not worse than MS:C...

That's a shame, I always heard Notch was the autistic coder from hell... And assumed the Runescape guys were the amateur coding horde of chaos.

Still, wondering if there's a Java graphics package good enough to make that a possibility... Maybe one that'll load SMD based models.

Not everyone has Half-Life2, but everyone has Java... Hell, everyone knows Java...

 

[The Man In Black]

That's another problem. Java is far less secure and easy to mod the client. Minecraft is full of hackers and Mojang isn't doing anything about it right now. There's a cheat client that just got an upgrade to bypass what was the "best" anti-cheat plugin. Fun with running a server :\

 

[Thothie]

I heard of the drama between Notch (Minecraft Coder) and Scetch (h4x coder). Apparently, just recently, Scetch actually got his work around for the hack fix out a few days before Notch even released the next version, and a full week before Bukkit got their plugin back end ready... It's sad I know so much about the coder drama behind a game I don't actually play.

Seems it'd be easily remedied by verifying core files though. In Minecraft it's less of an option, because you want people to be able to add all sorts of plugins, but in another game, I don't think that'd be a limitation. It is true, however, Java is easy to decompile and take apart.