Game Development: UI Scaling

[loftar]

Badcam is good though. The game just needs a sky. Are we playing in the underworld?

There are at least three reasons outside of the lack of a skybox why badcam is bad and unsupportable:

• Viewing beyond the rendering distance is not handled in any even half-descent way. We aren't just playing in the underworld, we're playing on floating islands when using the badcam (and adding a skybox would make that even more obvious).
• The graphics are optimized for viewing from a distance. I wouldn't at all be surprised if badcam alone is half the reason why Jorb's 3D graphics are criticized; they're generally not supposed to be viewed that closely.
• The perspective hides more than the isometric camera does unless one is playing at some unreasonable zoom level (see reason 1).

Now, supporting longer rendering distances would be really, really nice and is a (long-term) goal, but as long as we're not there, badcam deserves its name.

[Jalpha]

Agreed somewhat. I think most players are willing to accept the minor loss in graphical quality for the added flexibility provided by badcam though. As I've said before at different times, a large proportion of the gameplay takes place in the minimap anyway (but I am an explorer and forager primarily).

Wurm Online also struggles to handle rendering distances in a seamless way. I feel like a sky might help however that is probably not something to focus on when so many players are complaining about performance issues. It seems as though there are a lot of players using wooden PCs without much understanding of how to maximise the performance of their limited hardware. I suspect badcam may be a contributor to these issues also. I am not saying badcam is essential, only that it is circumstantially very useful, and that it is not something I romanticise in the same way as the day/night cycle.

It is actually very generous of you to allow custom clients at all. Sensible also. Other isometric games such as Project Zomboid do not allow custom clients (though they do allow extensive modding).

[Dondy]

I've been using amber, but due to the crashes introduced with the UI scaling, I simply logged in using the vanilla client so I could inspect my animals and my troughs.

The difference is speed is sobering. Yes, obviously I need a better computer but it was frankly amazing. My little farm took a long time to load during which time I couldn't move. Had I logged in any place remotely hazardous I would have been ko'd or dead before I could even walk. The duration was not long seconds but minutes. I went away and did some other things and when I came back it was still not loaded enough for me to move or for the ground texture to have appeared.

[MagicManICT]

Viewing beyond the rendering distance is not handled in any even half-descent way. We aren't just playing in the underworld, we're playing on floating islands when using the badcam (and adding a skybox would make that even more obvious).

There's always the old "fog effect" to eliminate the harsh "edge of view." (Turok was probably the worst of these, but also best done, too.)

[loftar]

My little farm took a long time to load during which time I couldn't move.

That particular problem is probably just because you hadn't been using the new resources previously, so that they all had to be loaded. Now that they're cached, it's probably way faster to log in the next time around. I don't think there's any intrinsic reason why the custom clients should load faster than the default one. At least, if there is one, I'd like to know it.

That said, "minutes" sounds exceedingly long any way you slice it. I've never seen loading times anywhere near that bad, even when I've launched the client on computers where it hasn't been used previously. Not sure I have any explanation to that other than to preemptively blame your connectivity.

[Zentetsuken]

Badcam is good though. The game just needs a sky. Are we playing in the underworld?

There are at least three reasons outside of the lack of a skybox why badcam is bad and unsupportable:

• Viewing beyond the rendering distance is not handled in any even half-descent way. We aren't just playing in the underworld, we're playing on floating islands when using the badcam (and adding a skybox would make that even more obvious).
• The graphics are optimized for viewing from a distance. I wouldn't at all be surprised if badcam alone is half the reason why Jorb's 3D graphics are criticized; they're generally not supposed to be viewed that closely.
• The perspective hides more than the isometric camera does unless one is playing at some unreasonable zoom level (see reason 1).

Now, supporting longer rendering distances would be really, really nice and is a (long-term) goal, but as long as we're not there, badcam deserves its name.

Serious question -

Have you ever once considered that your personal viewpoint on what is a good or bad gaming experience might be horrendously out of touch?

If like 90% of the active users at any given point in the population are using badcam, I think it's safe to say that you are objectively wrong, don't you think?

This also goes for many of the custom client features that the vast majority of the player population take advantage of, but that you and jorb have been stubbornly and coldly against for years now.

Maybe ...just maybe it's time to withdraw from the bullheaded conservative stubborn principles that you two are holding on to when it comes to things like badcam, grids, or even hiding objects. Maybe it's time to consider that you might actually not know what is best for your own game, especially when you step back and consider that the average players who actually takes the time to post on the forums has 100s more hours in to this game than you guys have.

You don't lose anything by tossing some of these features in to the client (even if they are done in the shitty barely-implemented way like the badcam console input thingy) besides maybe some personal inner feeling of disappointment, and I cannot even begin to explain to you how much we do not care about this.

EDIT - also consider that of the roughly 200 players who are logged in daily in the past weeks, only about 50 of those decided it's worth logging back in after the initial custom client breakage, and to be fair, some people actually still had the game working on custom clients even after the break if they avoided interacting with certain items.

That means that at a very minimum, 75% of the population said ... I can't use badcam? I can't hide flavour objects? or whatever their personal custom client poison might be ... well fuck it, the game is literally NOT WORTH PLAYNIG then

[Ardennesss]

[Zentetsuken]

Maybe it comes across as harsh or dickish, but compared to the average Enjoyment post I think it's pretty tame.

Just trying to articulate what everybody has been trying to say about the custom client vs. default client debate for years now.

It needed to be said, we're all thinking it

[abt79]

eternal alpha, passion project, my unique and special vision, etc. What would you know, people who play the game? You don't even speak loftarcode


w.r.t. custom clients I don't see how adding a Top Secret Menu with a bunch of immersion breaking features like bound boxes, grid and movement vectors etc really hurts the larpers. Don't like it, don't use. Don't the devs care about freedom?

[jorb]

you're wrong

Should we implement bot and scripting support as well? Wouldn't not doing so imply that we hate freedumb?

Fundamentally: I don't think there's any legitimate reason to turn off graphics, draw bounding boxes, or movement vectors. I understand perfectly why you would, but it's wrong, and not how the game should be played. There's not much difference in principle from using an aimbot or a visibility hack in a shooter.

I think the general paradigm of providing a lean and aesthetic default client, with open source code, is fundamentally a pretty good compromise between what I want the game to be, and how you want to play it.