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Discendo Vox posted:It's really easy for modders to lose perspective on complexity and difficulty, especially if the game has a lot of invisible stuff going on, stats-wise. Payday 2 is somewhat infamous for this, in that there's basically two playerbases: people who've read the infamous "Long Guide" (~82 thousand words), and people who haven't. I looked this up and find it incredible that people put this much into a 100% PVE game that is for the most part pretty easy.
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Jun 15, 2017 03:52
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Who the gently caress are the players (besides Discendo Vox and the author) who actually have read the entire "Long Guide"? I'd never even heard of it until right now. That's some Ulillillia levels of OCD and number wanking.
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Jun 15, 2017 03:55
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Memento posted:what directly the gently caress It's basically a very detailed mechanical breakdown of every aspect of the game, both in general and the specific levels. It's a handy reference but I don't think anyone has actually sat down and read the whole thing. It would be like going to a wiki and just reading every article from A to Z. Final Fantasy Tactics actually has a similar thing.
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Jun 15, 2017 03:57
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The Cheshire Cat posted:It's basically a very detailed mechanical breakdown of every aspect of the game, both in general and the specific levels. It's a handy reference but I don't think anyone has actually sat down and read the whole thing. It would be like going to a wiki and just reading every article from A to Z. Final Fantasy Tactics actually has a similar thing. I hope it has a google doc somewhere, because making people read it on Steam without a TOC is basically evil.
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Jun 15, 2017 04:09
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Yeah, it reminds me of those old-school GameFAQs guides people would write in the days before public wikis. Some of those were massive, but I don't think (hope) anyone actually expected people to read the whole thing.
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Jun 15, 2017 04:14
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King Vidiot posted:Who the gently caress are the players (besides Discendo Vox and the author) who actually have read the entire "Long Guide"? I read most of it like, two years ago when I still played payday. I should get back into it, though I fell out of playing shortly after they introduced weapon skins. Wonder what's changed in the interim.
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Jun 15, 2017 06:01
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Cat Army 
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Memento posted:what directly the gently caress dont even fink about it posted:I hope it has a google doc somewhere, because making people read it on Steam without a TOC is basically evil. Skippy McPants posted:Yeah, it reminds me of those old-school GameFAQs guides people would write in the days before public wikis. Some of those were massive, but I don't think (hope) anyone actually expected people to read the whole thing. King Vidiot posted:Who the gently caress are the players (besides Discendo Vox and the author) who actually have read the entire "Long Guide"? The Iron Rose posted:I read most of it like, two years ago when I still played payday. I didn't mean to start a derail, but Payday 2's quite thread relevant because many of the game's modders are the most toxic individuals I've heard of in any gaming community. They're not perverts, they're just unbelievably antagonistic. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 06:40 on Jun 15, 2017 |
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Jun 15, 2017 06:19
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Discendo Vox posted:not perverts, they're just unbelievably antagonistic. If you moved the "just" from the fourth to the second word there, we'd have a new thread title.
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Jun 15, 2017 06:47
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Discendo Vox posted:Payday 2 never had good internal documentation and has always been awash with bugs. It's also had continuing support and DLC for something like 5 years now. It's risen up like a Mayan temple update after update, as new gameplay mechanics and stat systems and progress meters are built on top of old ones-often with minimal explanation of how they work. I think the game's systems are at this point more obscure and complex than many MMOs. What the hell, what happened to just clicking on the cops trying to stop your robbery?
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Jun 15, 2017 06:53
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The Awful/Awesome Mods Thread: not just perverts, they're unbelievably antagonistic. Oh, and racist.Wamdoodle posted:What the hell, what happened to just clicking on the cops trying to stop your robbery? quote:Every enemy assigns a priority to every object (in particular, criminals) in his list of detected objects. The object with the lowest priority becomes the focus of his attention, his priority target. Depending on the object type of his priority target, he will show different reactions. The other detected objects are ignored (though he may change his priority target at any time). That's one of seven subsections of one of the ~3 chapters of the guide on enemy AI. If you'd like to know how much health a given enemy has, consult this easy-to-use spreadsheet- or, use a mod. The horrifying part is that the game balance at the top difficulty is so poor that reading the nightmare quoted above was key to how I beat all the missions on that difficulty. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 07:23 on Jun 15, 2017 |
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Jun 15, 2017 07:02
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This, along with Fallout: Equestria, is what happens when you don't have an editor.
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Jun 15, 2017 07:05
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Tasteful Dickpic posted:This, along with Fallout: Equestria, is what happens when you don't have
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Jun 15, 2017 07:13
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bahahahah vox you just couldn't resist john galting these bastards as you dropped the glory that is the long guide could you GOOD MAN
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Jun 15, 2017 07:20
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SaltyJesus posted:Haha modding Oblivion was definitely the game more than Oblivion itself for me and my buddy back in the day. Finding just the right ones and figuring out how to make them work together. One Skyrim modding thread was called 'Skyrim Modding: Just Spent 10 Hours Modding, Time to Play' and while I can't find it, I seem to remember one Oblivion modding thread having a subtitle something like "maybe we'll actually play the game this time." Edit: Yeah, I have archives, I just couldn't be arsed to find it without a working search function. vv m2pt5 fucked around with this message at 10:22 on Jun 15, 2017 |
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Jun 15, 2017 07:46
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It's fallen into archives - Let's Reinstall Oblivion v.3! Maybe we'll actually play it this time!
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Jun 15, 2017 08:00
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I spent like a week setting up mods for Skyrim before I played it on PC for the first time.
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Jun 15, 2017 08:23
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Well, yeah. You only briefly start up the game every now and again to see that there are no CTDs.
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Jun 15, 2017 08:46
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Tasteful Dickpic posted:This, along with Fallout: Equestria, is what happens when you don't have an editor. I skimmed that quote and it doesn't really seem that bad, the problem is more that the game systems it's describing are pretty archaic so the explanation needs to be pretty detailed. As one of the people who has dumped thousands of hours into an MMO, I eventually reached a point where I too was looking up all of the mechanical aspects of how weapons worked, damage calculated, etc. so I guess that I don't find this guide too strange.
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Jun 15, 2017 12:35
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Skippy McPants posted:Yeah, it reminds me of those old-school GameFAQs guides people would write in the days before public wikis. Some of those were massive, but I don't think (hope) anyone actually expected people to read the whole thing. Once, as a kid, I printed out a 100+ page guide for FFIX off of GameFAQs. Pissed my mum off something fierce.
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Jun 15, 2017 13:00
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Haha, I did exactly the same thing for FFX. I think I hosed up and printed single sided though, so it was closer to 300 pages. It was like a little encyclopedia of useless nerd information sitting on the couch.
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Jun 15, 2017 21:52
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Back when Duke Nukem 3D was the hot thing, I printed out the manual to making levels in the Build engine so I could make my own levels! I proceeded to make about three half-assed basic block maps, and put it aside forever. Took up quite a thick three-ring binder.
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Jun 15, 2017 22:07
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turn off the TV posted:I skimmed that quote and it doesn't really seem that bad, the problem is more that the game systems it's describing are pretty archaic so the explanation needs to be pretty detailed. the overlaid thing here is that payday 2 is five years old and even at the time it was designed was designed to run on pretty low-spec PCs. consequently, if you know a bit about computing optimization, you start to recognize a lot of these arcane things (such as enemy aggro determination, health granularity, and accuracy/hit determinations) as utilizing some pretty hard core optimization thought. why isn't cop health simply a number that you add and subtract, instead of a collection of odd 1/128th fractional rounding errors? because using bit-shifting arithmetic is orders of magnitude faster at scale than using a + operand in the development environment, and the other numbers involved in the game (most notably, player bullet counts) are low enough that in practice the inaccuracy you assume by doing the arithmetic this way doesn't matter a jot.
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Jun 15, 2017 22:12
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Coolguye, tell them about HoxHud.
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Jun 15, 2017 22:39
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GunnerJ posted:He also supposedly would have temper tantrums about cheating when people beat his supposedly unbeatable optional superboss, iirc. Well to be fair, Square Enix was like this in regards to their super boss in FF11 
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Jun 15, 2017 23:13
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Oh man, I remember printing out a guide to Ultima Underworld. My brother and I used to leaf through it for mantras whenever we reached a shrine. Good times.
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Jun 15, 2017 23:27
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Discendo Vox posted:Coolguye, tell them about HoxHud. Whoa gently caress, lets not open that can of worms. Let's talk about a success story of GoonMod instead. A mod that started as "remove the corpse limiter from Payday 2", ultimately attracted enough dev attention that they hired Wilko (the goon who made it), and incorporated most important features of the mod into the base game. What features? Well, anyone who played Payday 2 will remember that after each completed heist you got to pick one of three cards. That card was your loot - a mask, a mask pattern, a mask material, a mask pattern color, a gun mod, some cash or some XP. This was the only way to get ANY of these items. Payday 2 is half copshoot, and half mask/gun dressup, so having a very limited access to parts for said dressup was loving RETARDED OH MY GOD. Best part was, that for the first 2 DLC that added masks and weapon mods, they didn't give them directly to you, nor did they lock them behind some achievements (they did that later, with varying results - I still don't have all the mask achievements, despite having 700 hours in the game), they added them to the drop pool. The game already had like 40 of everything, so when you add 4 of each, that doesn't really improve your odds. Oh and did I mention the system is COMPLETELY random, with some items having their odds of appearing lower then 1%? And that the game can give you items you already have, unless you have 3 of them in your inventory? And that you have buy the items that got added from the payday with in-game cash (which is a problem fixed at one point by tripling the rewards for each heist, but 1,5 year ago it was still an issue)? The system was retarded. In comes Wilko - one of the DLCs added something called Gage Courier Packages - every level had 10 of them (on Overkill difficulty, which most people play), sorted into 5 groups - once you got enough of one group, you got some weapon mods for free. This was good, but you had to buy the DLC to use it, otherwise the only thing you got was some weak XP for completing a set. Well, Wilko thought "hey wait a minut, what if you got some kind of token for completing a package set, and then exchange a number of those tokens for a weapon/mask mod of your choice"? And that's what GoonMod did since then. This was a gamechanger. I poo poo you not when I tell you that the idea of gaining some control over the way we play dressup brought back a lot of people, and the extra hunt to clear out a level from the packages added a new risk-reward level of depth to the game that was incredibly satysfying. Later the mod kept expanding and expanding, with Wilko participating in another Big mod, the BLT pack (basically SKSE for Payday 2), which enabled entirely new mods to pop up (like new levels, difficulty and bot overhauls, and much much more), and all of that was enough to get him noticed and picked up by Overkill to work for them in Sweden. Also, Payday 2 has some really wierd mods. They added the character of Jacket from Hotline Miami, and he communicates via a tape recorder. Only all of his lines are recorded in the same voice. There's an amazing mod pack that changes all of his lines to be things you could have actually record, from movies, cartoons and whatnot, making him really sound like he hastily put it together. There's also one that makes all of his voicelines turn into Microsoft Sam voicelines, packed full of memes. Or Ducks:   (you can get it here)
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Jun 15, 2017 23:27
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Angry Diplomat posted:Oh man, I remember printing out a guide to Ultima Underworld. My brother and I used to leaf through it for mantras whenever we reached a shrine. Good times. Thanks to this thread, I now feel less nerdy about printing out a guide to the goddamn water temple when I was a kid.
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Jun 15, 2017 23:29
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You kids with your printers, when I was a yung'un I was the only kid on the block with the internet, so I was writing down passwords and cheat codes by hand and smuggling them around 
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Jun 15, 2017 23:41
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Kikas posted:Whoa gently caress, lets not open that can of worms. The first thing we as a species would do when finding alien races is figure out how to copulate with them. Open the
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Jun 16, 2017 00:16
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Cythereal posted:Thanks to this thread, I now feel less nerdy about printing out a guide to the goddamn water temple when I was a kid. I hex edited my Exile 2 save file, making paragraphs of scientific observations in a text file, while exchanging notes with strangers over Gamefaqs trying to fully understand the arcane 4th dimensional coordinates system the map used. Really, printing out a guide to the water temple is just common sense.
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Jun 16, 2017 00:22
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Kikas posted:Whoa gently caress, lets not open that can of worms. GoonMod is great in many ways, but the best part about it was that it spawned out of a bug. Normally, after murdering a couple dozen cops, their bodies would start to despawn. The bug was caused by a connection desync iirc and it stopped the despawning of the corpses and other poo poo like smoke bombs the police would toss. Aside from the incessant smoke and other oddities, getting the bug was loving great cause it let you see just how much damage you had done. Sadly it was only client side so none of your buddies could see it. Lunethex posted:The first thing we as a species would do when finding alien races is figure out how to copulate with them. Open the Don't remember too well, but I think HoxHud was basically another version of GateGate.
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Jun 16, 2017 01:48
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Geomancing posted:Back when Duke Nukem 3D was the hot thing, I printed out the manual to making levels in the Build engine so I could make my own levels! I proceeded to make about three half-assed basic block maps, and put it aside forever. Took up quite a thick three-ring binder. Did the same thing, then years later Mapedit came with eDuke32 and you could run it in a window and alt-tab in Windows 7 and up so I now had a full website to reference. But then I made an example map where I dicked around with sector effectors and then never touched Mapedit again, totally forgot how to do anything now. Recently I also bought the original Level Design Handbook which sits on my floor barely looked at while I continue to not make levels for Duke Nukem 3D. e: But in other videogame printer abuse news, I did print out a knife-only GameFAQs walkthrough of Resident Evil 3. And I got most of the way through the game!
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Jun 16, 2017 03:07
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Danaru posted:You kids with your printers, when I was a yung'un I was the only kid on the block with the internet, so I was writing down passwords and cheat codes by hand and smuggling them around You were a good kid.  "I can't beat Doctor Wily's castle!" "How does an 8 E tanks password sound?" "Thank you, Solid Snake."
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Jun 16, 2017 03:13
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So here's an interesting new development: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=933055903quote:If you would like your own custom themed mod created, $30-$50, contact ADLER to discuss. Mods on commission for anywhere from the price of a big DLC to nearly the price of whole game. 
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Jun 16, 2017 14:52
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Cythereal posted:Thanks to this thread, I now feel less nerdy about printing out a guide to the goddamn water temple when I was a kid. I think everyone old enough for Web 1.0 did this at least once. I probably still have a copy of DSimpson's titanic BG2 walkthrough in a box somewhere. Back in the days before second screens and seamless alt-tabing, it was useful to have a hard copy to reference while playing the game. Skippy McPants fucked around with this message at 15:18 on Jun 16, 2017 |
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Jun 16, 2017 15:12
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GunnerJ posted:So here's an interesting new development: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=933055903 As someone who works on by-commission basis, the weirdest thing about that to me is the price point; exactly what kind of 'custom mod' work are you getting for what would be, generously, maybe a day's pay? Even just a swap-job on names, portraits, and traits in a 4x game seems like it would be pushing it on that payment structure. How many people are even going to be interested? Even as a hobbyist thing, that's an odd approach. Granted, I don't work with people buying 4x games. For all I know there's a hardcore base of Train Simulator-style grognards willing to poo poo out $30 for twenty minutes worth of Ctrl+h work multiple times a day and this person is going to be printing money until the interest dries up.
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Jun 16, 2017 15:30
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A friend had this program that would take a text file, and shrink and tile individual pages so you could fit four or more to a sheet. Thing was amazing for printing FAQs without going through an enormous amount of paper.
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Jun 16, 2017 15:48
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Shady Amish Terror posted:As someone who works on by-commission basis, the weirdest thing about that to me is the price point; exactly what kind of 'custom mod' work are you getting for what would be, generously, maybe a day's pay? Even just a swap-job on names, portraits, and traits in a 4x game seems like it would be pushing it on that payment structure. How many people are even going to be interested? Even as a hobbyist thing, that's an odd approach. Looking at it from that perspective I don't see how this makes sense for anyone. Even if I would consider paying for a custom mod, I would not pay anywhere near at least half the price of a full game, and as you point out, the mod maker is not getting much for the work needed to make anything worth the price. What the hell?
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Jun 16, 2017 16:19
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GunnerJ posted:So here's an interesting new development: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=933055903 This is against the TOS for Bethesda mods and I'm pretty sure Paradox has the same stance.
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Jun 16, 2017 16:20
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GunnerJ posted:Looking at it from that perspective I don't see how this makes sense for anyone. Even if I would consider paying for a custom mod, I would not pay anywhere near at least half the price of a full game, and as you point out, the mod maker is not getting much for the work needed to make anything worth the price. What the hell? Commission work is weird like that; most people drastically undercharge for creative commission work, which is a separate issue, but alternatively, you have to be offering something the customer really, really wants and can't find elsewhere for it to be anywhere near worth the amount that they need to pay you to make it worth YOUR time. It's hard to imagine that niche lies in a custom $30 4x mod of any kind. I mean, that's part of why crowdfunding and other alternative payment structures are such a big thing; it's much easier to get a lot of people with similar interests to pitch in a couple of bucks than to try to find one person to front the whole cost. This seems to be especially true in venues like modding, where it also helps to sidestep legal concerns; you can still accept artistic patronage while releasing your work for free. I really don't think this person has thought their offer out, unless they're just doing some quick pump and dump scams, in which case, loving lol; the return on the effort STILL sounds spectacularly low.
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Jun 16, 2017 16:34
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