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Wi Flag (2002)

asheron.fandom.com

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Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#211

Post by wykillin »

jdk wrote: post #126
jdwithit wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loved Asheron's Call, played it a lot back in the day. My friends and I were in high school at the time so we had absolutely no idea what we were doing, but that didn't stop us from running around the world goofing off. My hobby was making characters with totally insane Run and Jump skills. Once you leveled up enough you could literally leap from one end of a town to the other like Superman, it was extremely funny.…

Thanks! Always nice to hear people who "grew up" play it. AC having server-side physics and actually making use of them led to lots of ridiculous and emergent gameplay. I don't know how many hours I just spend idling in towns jumping from rooftop to rooftop or seeing how high I could climb up massive structures. Everytime I try to play again though, the old "you can't go home again" hits too hard and I just quietly c…

I also wonder how many hours and points I wasted into jump to jump across the roof tops, haha. I absolutely loved the server based physics, even though I had the crappiest dial up connection at the time. I was 14 when I started playing that game. So many amazing memories, Atlan stones, spell system, cheesing death items, being afraid of losing everything because there's no bank, haha.

Lately, I've been getting more and more into esoteric topics and I keep thinking about this games lore... There is so much occult knowledge/history baked into the entire thing and I honestly still use the game as a reference point for some many things.

I'm curious, do you know how the games lore was developed and were there ancient texts that were inspirations for the events?

Thank you!

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#212

Post by jdk »

wykillin wrote: post #211
jdk wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! Always nice to hear people who "grew up" play it. AC having server-side physics and actually making use of them led to lots of ridiculous and emergent gameplay. I don't know how many hours I just spend idling in towns jumping from rooftop to rooftop or seeing how high I could climb up massive structures. Everytime I try to play again though, the old "you can't go home again" hits too hard and I just quietly c…

I also wonder how many hours and points I wasted into jump to jump across the roof tops, haha. I absolutely loved the server based physics, even though I had the crappiest dial up connection at the time. I was 14 when I started playing that game. So many amazing memories, Atlan stones, spell system, cheesing death items, being afraid of losing everything because there's no bank, haha. Lately, I've been getting more a…

> I'm curious, do you know how the games lore was developed and were there ancient texts that were inspirations for the events?

I was very not-involved with the lore/story (to the point, where I think I wrote a handful of notes and stuff before it being decided that I should just focus on gameplay, and someone else would cover the lore for me!), but there were 3-4 people primarily responsible for it and they were all very much fantasy literate, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if some of the inspiration were from those sources.

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#213

Post by jdk »

rjewell wrote: post #209
jdk wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of discovery and wonder, I think Valheim did a good job of it in the general atmosphere and loop, but in terms of magic systems, not really. You have the Magika (or even Path of Exile) where spells have component parts and build into something larger, but there's not much mystery there. A theme of a bunch of the comments is that the internet / audience makes this sort of thing impossible these days. One of m…

Literal showerthought while ruminating on this idea: are you aware of any multiplayer systems where individual characters have intentional Wi flags (good and bad) at a very granular level? for example, every spell or skill includes a fixed modifier generated for the player so that two identically built characters have different capabilities. Every aspect determining success or power has one. You are just slightly slo…

I think a few (persistent) games touched on things like that, but I can't think of any that really went hard on it for long-term characters (instead you mostly see it in roguelikes/lites where if you got a bad roll, it didn't matter since you were making a new character soon anyway). At a very broad level, this is sort of what the taper system did but that was cracked after 6 months or whatever and it didn't really offer any meaningful differentiation beyond brute-forcing permutations.

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#214

Post by sveiss »

jdk wrote: post #204
sveiss wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My marriage and a good chunk of my career trajectory can both be traced directly back to having "grown up" playing AC and writing/coding for Crossroads of Dereth. It's a little scary to think how different my life would be if I hadn't picked up that box--possibly the only copy the EB Games in my small English town would get--and gone "huh, looks cool". I think growing up during those years of transition, right before…

Oh man... Now I'm trying to remember which of the CoD folks were from England. Thanks for all / any of the work you put into that site. It was really the nexus of AC for a number of years. I'm glad it's been lost to the ages because I definitely had a number of real spicy comments on it. I'm happy AC at least indirectly helped your career/marriage in some small way. :)

I was Dotcher on CoD and ingame, but I don’t think we ever spoke. I didn’t post on the forums much at all, and as a teenager on the wrong side of the world the fan gatherings and the like were a tad inaccessible.

I did a bunch of writing, news posting, collecting information for the monthly patch summaries, and then they figured out I could code and I ended up building tools and maintaining various bits of the site. I think I ended up owning the item database code for a while? I remember hearing that one got used at Turbine, because it was superior to what you had internally!

I’m now married to Kelly Heckman (Ophelea), who was site manager on CoD for a while, and my first real job was at a social gaming startup, getting in the door with the help of her network. That set my career on the path it is now, so you can draw a direct line from picking up that game box to where I am now. So yeah, thank you and the rest of the team :).

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#215

Post by jdk »

sveiss wrote: post #214
jdk wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man... Now I'm trying to remember which of the CoD folks were from England. Thanks for all / any of the work you put into that site. It was really the nexus of AC for a number of years. I'm glad it's been lost to the ages because I definitely had a number of real spicy comments on it. I'm happy AC at least indirectly helped your career/marriage in some small way. :)

I was Dotcher on CoD and ingame, but I don’t think we ever spoke. I didn’t post on the forums much at all, and as a teenager on the wrong side of the world the fan gatherings and the like were a tad inaccessible. I did a bunch of writing, news posting, collecting information for the monthly patch summaries, and then they figured out I could code and I ended up building tools and maintaining various bits of the site.…

Oh yeah we definitely used the CoD databases in many cases over internal tools, so well done. I remember Ophelea too. Hope y'all are doing well!

The smallest world stays small. :)

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#216

Post by anyfoo »

Stratoscope wrote: post #201
anyfoo wrote: post #44

Around 15 years ago, when casual little games on Facebook were still a thing (actually when Facebook itself was still a thing), I used to play Yahtzee on the site while watching TV shows or whatever. It was one of the most popular games on there. For me it was something to fidget with (there was no money involved or anything, just a personal high score), so I played it a lot. I felt more and more that dice values of…

> the distribution was not uniform: 2-5 were fine, but it seemed that it was twice as hard to get a 1 or a 6 compared to any other value. As soon as I saw that, I knew exactly what the problem was. I'm glad I was reading on a small mobile screen, so I didn't feel like I was cheating by getting a hint from the rest of your comment. Yes, voice of painful experience here! > The crucial point being to use floor() or ceil…

Yep, you're right, including ceil() was misleading of me, if not downright wrong. I technically did not specify which side the interval is open on. But practically and realistically, in pretty much any scenario it will be a half-open interval that excludes the upper bound, and you have to go out of your way to get it the other way around (at which point you probably well know yourself to use ceil() instead of floor()).

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#217

Post by TheRealPomax »

SamBam wrote: post #11
TheRealPomax wrote: post #2

tl;dr: players get attacked based on monster targeting RNG that's supposed to take an interval [0,num_players], assign players to subintervals that are shorter or longer based on a bunch of factors, and then roll a random number somewhere in that full interval. Whoever's subinterval the number ends in, they get targetted. Instead, the code assigned subintervals and then rolled a number between 0 and 1, instead of 0 a…

> A unit test could have caught this I've always wondered the best way to write tests for "This event should happen x% of the time." Obviously we could re-run the test 100 times and see if it happened close to x%, but not only is that inefficient, how close is "close"? You'll get a bell curve (or similar), and most of the time you'll be close to x but sometimes you'll be legitimately far away from x and your test wil…

100? Let's make that 100,000 instead, and then you check the resulting distribution. It's a unit test, not an integration test: this will run very quickly. Even on 1999 hardware.
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