PLANESHIFT!!!!!!!!!! Title is invalid!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!



  • Everybody's FAVORITE

    And we're off to a very good start:

    Let's see here:

    • Wrong monitor (you can't see it from the screenshot, but trust me: wrong monitor)
    • It needs permissions to update but doesn't just UAC prompt to get them
    • Unreadable button in that fake-o dialog. (It says Ok, if you can't read it. Which you can't. Because it's unreadable.)
    • The green arrows are, believe it or not, a scrollbar. The error message is about 5 lines long, but I'm sure this fake-o scrollbar is a much better option than just opening a slightly larger error message.
    • THAT ART!

    WHY CAN'T I EDIT THE WORD "everybody" UP THERE TO "everybody's"!? FUCK DISCOURSE IS FUCKING BROKEN AS SHIT GODDAKNED FUVCKMSD FSDIGHF suITghBWY3r7IO#WYTG58o -- oh if I do the update at the same time I complain about the update not working, it works. Go figure.



  • Look at all that open source-y ness just flowing down the screen! The wrong screen! I really wish this thing would open on the correct monitor...

    The login/select character screens don't have an Options button so I can't select the correct screen resolution. Also, alt-enter doesn't work (in that it doesn't put the game into windowed mode. It does work if you were thinking, "hey I wonder if alt-enter will freeze the animation and break the game?")



  • Online games that can be "easily" updated, guess who the beta testers are.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    The error message is about 5 lines long, but I'm sure this fake-o scrollbar is a much better option than just opening a slightly larger error message.

    A larger window? But then they'd have to draw new art for the outline, which as anyone can tell you is an integral component of an error popup.



  • The second time I try to run the game:

    I'm not even sure I'm going to be able to get to the point of attempting to take a video of this shit.

    EDIT: Oh I found the resolution setting, naturally it's in the launcher's preferences instead of the game's:

    And naturally it defaults to 1024x768, because that's such a HUGELY POPULAR screen resolution here in late 2014 and not, for example, a relic left over from the 1990s.

    Notice also the launcher (or perhaps the game itself? It's hard to tell what these are preferences are for) has skins. Because it's an open source program, of course it's skinnable!!!

    The extremely useful Controls setting screen:

    Look at all those amazing options!!!

    Setting the graphics to "highest" (which, BTW, is done in "General" and not in "Graphics", natch) results in this:

    The "highest" settings don't include shadows or weather? But it does include an option known to cause crashes on a huge number of video cards? Srsly?

    While I'm showing off all these settings, let's look at the Sound settings:

    You can turn sound off entirely (?) or select between OpenAL (which I'm pretty sure is software) or "Software". That's ok, I don't need volume sliders, or subtitles or anything like that.



  • What's the number on the bottom-right for?



  • Oh that's just FRAPS counting the FPS. The launcher runs in a OpenGL or DirectX surface, so FRAPS is hooked-on to it. That's slightly odd but not really a WTF.



  • That's what I thought at first, but then I thought why would a launcher have a frame rate?



  • @hungrier said:

    That's what I thought at first, but then I thought why would a launcher have a frame rate?

    A normal person when writing a simple app to change a few settings, maybe update a few files, then launch another app would not choose to do so in OpenGL and/or DirectX.

    But these are open source master coding experts, and also the combination of:

    1. All open source cross-platform windowing libraries probably suck-ass and make something like this unreasonably difficult, and

    2. Some moron thinks there's a huge code savings if they can reuse their awful custom widgets from the launcher in the game itself.



  • Ok, I'm not a FOSS hater, but this is pretty bad. Looks like an alpha.



  • To give you a preview of how well my YouTube recording went, I spent probably a minute talking over a static image about my dishwasher.

    The "good" news is that Vegas can encode video consisting of a single static image for like 3 solid minutes pretty fast.

    EDIT: ROFL, instead of force-quitting the game I alt-tabbed out of it to begin editing my video. It's still stuck on the loading screen, like 15 minutes later.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    I was tempted to download this game and see, but I think this topic is more entertaining than this game will be.



  • A little experimentation, and it appears to be incompatible with FRAPS somehow. I might have to use my HDMI capture card for this game, which is a pain in the ass.

    EDIT: nope, it just randomly either loads or doesn't load. I guess it just flips a coin. And about a third of the time the launcher crashes when you hit "Play". Wow.

    EDIT: ok I think I figured it out. It crashes if you try to join with a freshly-created character. It'll only load if you create a character, then let it lock-up and force-quit it, then reconnect using the character just just created.

    EDIT: ROFL the floppy-wings on the dragon character thing are HILARIOUS, jesus.



  • I warned you...

    P.S. I play for the community (or significant chunks of it at least), not the game.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    EDIT: nope, it just randomly either loads or doesn't load. I guess it just flips a coin. And about a third of the time the launcher crashes when you hit "Play". Wow.

    That reminds me of some of the ropier games from the '90s. You'd think that a game being commercial would mean it doesn't suck ass. Alas, paying just guarantees that you have less money than you previously did. :angry:


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    Maybe we should have a weekly "find a shit game for @blakeyrat" topic.



  • @tarunik said:

    P.S. I play for the community (or significant chunks of it at least), not the game.

    I dig that they're trying to do a serious RP game, but... uh... at the same time they're totally incompetent at it.

    "Just remember your character can't see the hovering names." Right, but why not just... NOT SHOW THOSE ON THE SCREEN THEN!? You guys control the code, right!? My RP-based MUD in 1998 had a "recognize" command to handle that exact scenario.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    My RP-based MUD in 1998 had a "recognize" command to handle that exact scenario.

    We tried that at one point -- it actually caused more problems than it solved.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @tarunik said:

    We tried that at one point -- it actually caused more problems than it solved.

    Could you elaborate?



  • @boomzilla said:

    Could you elaborate?

    It was a while ago, and my memory is fuzzy on this, so take this with a pinch of salt. However, there were two problems with this: 1) visually distinguishing characters when you don't have art out the wazoo is quite hard unless that label's there, and 2) when typing out action posts (i.e. '/me ...'), it's often better to mention the name of the character the action's directed towards than try to short-describe them, as sometimes people will miss posts if the name highlight's not there.



  • @tarunik said:

    1) visually distinguishing characters when you don't have art out the wazoo is quite hard unless that label's there

    Then they should do something like an identifier on them other than a name. "Dude 123" or some such (though it would need to change up or your ID number would be a workable identifier). This would also address the second issue you list (maybe there auto translating with a sign they had done so).



  • @locallunatic said:

    Then they should do something like an identifier on them other than a name. "Dude 123" or some such (though it would need to change up or your ID number would be a workable identifier). This would also address the second issue you list (maybe there auto translating with a sign they had done so).

    I can see your point -- MUDs use explicitly specified shortdescs for this, and it works well enough I hear. I personally wouldn't mind a shortdesc based /recognize (aka /introduce) implementation, myself...



  • @blakeyrat said:

    EDIT: Oh I found the resolution setting, naturally it's in the launcher's preferences instead of the game's

    I wonder if there are any other games that do that...



  • @tarunik said:

    We tried that at one point -- it actually caused more problems than it solved.

    Oh so the truth comes out. You're a developer of this shitpile. Now things are starting to make sense.



  • @tarunik said:

    However, there were two problems with this: 1) visually distinguishing characters when you don't have art out the wazoo is quite hard unless that label's there,

    On our text-based MUD, the label was a short text description of the character, something like "a short elf with steel grey eyes".

    @tarunik said:

    2) when typing out action posts (i.e. '/me ...'), it's often better to mention the name of the character the action's directed towards than try to short-describe them, as sometimes people will miss posts if the name highlight's not there.

    The character names are keywords, so on our MUD you could type:

    ; salutes ~steel

    Characters who don't have the character recognized see:

    Blakeyrat salutes a short elf with steel grey eyes.

    People who do see:

    Blakeyrat salutes Milton Bimbat.

    Of course, the recognize command requires the player to manually type in the name they want to recognize the character as. So it could also be:

    Blakeyrat salutes that idiot who fought me in the tavern over 3 silver.

    The game engine required players to type in a name for each character, but they were basically only there for administrative use. If a character called themselves Milton Bimbat, they were Milton Bimbat even if the database said "Fred Bassethound".

    We also had some more advanced concepts, like "disguise" items that allowed the steel grey eyed elf to disguise himself as, "a short elf who face is shadowed by a brilliantly red hood" or some-such. And that's a totally different "recognition" from the normal shortdesc.

    EDIT: if there were people with non-unique names, you could so ~1.steel, ~2.steel etc. to distinguish between them. But that was pretty annoying, and fortunately it didn't come up often.

    OOC channels were all named after the players accounts, not the characters. So you could tell which players were playing, but your character didn't have telepathic knowledge of which characters were around. (That said, people pick-up on the connection between player and character pretty quick, but we tried.) And, obviously, IC text was never allowed on OOC channels and vice-versa.



  • Yes yes, but I've never seen a MMO do it before. And at least Skyrim defaults to a reasonable resolution and (assuming it even vaguely recognizes your video card) a reasonable quality level.



  • This made me laugh and think "what a mean thing to say" (at the same time). Something tells me you are good at evoking two or more emotions at once from others.

    Programmers are so critical. I recommend smoking a fat spliff and drinking some malt liquor...

    I have provided pictures just in case you need help identifying these things.



  • Well, thanks for expanding on what I already mentioned upthread:

    @tarunik said:

    I can see your point -- MUDs use explicitly specified shortdescs for this, and it works well enough I hear. I personally wouldn't mind a shortdesc based /recognize (aka /introduce) implementation, myself...


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    Oh I found the resolution setting, naturally it's in the launcher's preferences instead of the game's:

    I've seen that in other games. Wizard101 does it (although, bizarrely, the launcher only had a limited set of resolutions you could choose, and if you wanted others, like widescreen, you had to do it in the game. Yeah, there's another WTF, two different places you can choose resolution.)




  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    I've only watched 5 minutes so far but I'm pretty sure you sailed on by a second text size slider.



  • If I did it wasn't on purpose.

    EDIT: if you mean on the same panel as the one for the purple chat text, it's a "text spacing" slider. Has nothing to do with text size.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    If I did it wasn't on purpose.

    EDIT: if you mean on the same panel as the one for the purple chat text, it's a "text spacing" slider. Has nothing to do with text size.

    I'm not positive, you went by it pretty fast and I didn't want to go back and check.

    Also, when Abelia starts talking WHY IS HER TEXT BLURRY?

    At one point when you started talking about the black square it made me think of Michael Savage for a few seconds.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    It was the shortcut bar. There's text size and text spacing sliders. Also the Active Magic bar. Then I stopped looking and went back forward to where I had been.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    Why didn't you just try clicking "Bye", by the way?



  • @FrostCat said:

    At one point when you started talking about the black square it made me think of Michael Savage for a few seconds.

    It's a reference to the mysterious purple square in this game. Which Shmorky calls something like "this is the best invention in gaming ever!"

    Part 2 will be up in about a half hour, plus whatever processing time it takes YouTube which is anywhere from 10 minutes to 10 hours based on ... solar elves? Unless this windstorm takes out my power lines.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    You didn't even notice she told you not to get frustrated.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    in this game

    ...was that some kind of Strongbad game? I kinda skipped forward until I saw the square, but didn't hear the best invention thing.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    11:50 or so--I believe that's a wing boner.



  • @FrostCat said:

    ...was that some kind of Strongbad game? I kinda skipped forward until I saw the square, but didn't hear the best invention thing.

    No it's just the normal type of shitty game Lowtax plays. The game creator apparently had problem with the scrolling, and so the game scrolls based on the position of the purple square instead of your actual character-- and the square gets caught-up on stuff. EDIT: I just re-listened to it and Shmorky's comment about the square is in the last 20 seconds.

    BTW if it's still blurry, the 1080p copy is finally processed on YouTube, so if you refresh it might be better. YouTube processes from the shitty resolutions up, instead of the other way 'round.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    BTW if it's still blurry

    No--ONLY her text was blurry, in the chat box. Your text, like when you said ass and it got converted into Korean Klingon, wasn't blurry.

    UI complaints: those scrollbar arrows make me want to pick them up and stab the developers. Also, the world looks like Minecraft. For all the silliness it has, WoW at least doesn't have infinitely flat plane plains with perfectly smooth cubical buildings.

    And the way the hips are put together on your character are just bizarre. Go watch yourself walk. The body is built sort of like a Barbie doll.



  • Oh I dunno then. That particular shade of purple seems to hate both MP4 compressors and human eyeballs, so it never looks sharp (even on the actual live game) and it looks even worse than MP4-compressed. Just one of those colors.

    The white text, even being like font size 7, is readable on the 1080p version even after YouTube massacres the compression. But that purple text is barely readable at size 14 or whatever it is.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    The blue text of your and her names is blurry too. I don't think that's a compression artifact, but I obviously haven't seen the actual screen, just your video.



  • @FrostCat said:

    Korean Klingon

    "Addlepated" is a perfectly cromulent, albeit somewhat archaic, English word.

    1. Being mixed up; confused
    2. Eccentric

    "Kormi" appears to be a Persian proper name.

    Why the game converted "ass" to "confused Persian guy" I couldn't begin to guess.



  • @HardwareGeek said:

    Why the game converted "ass" to "confused Persian guy" I couldn't begin to guess.

    Especially after I specifically unchecked "censor swear words."



  • Maybe it's using discologic.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @HardwareGeek said:

    "Addlepated" is a perfectly cromulent

    I know that. I didn't know what Kormi was, and "Korean Klingon" just came to me and I thought it was mildly funny.



  • Here's the URL for part 2:

    http://youtu.be/TPBOUJU7x1U

    It's still processing, but there's like a 80% chance this windstorm will knock out my power, so posting it now.

    EDIT: it's up now and I'm somehow still online.



  • I'm surprised you put up with that game long enough to make a second episode.



  • It was an hour and 10 minutes, all in one sitting. I'm still technically unemployed for a couple days.

    I also made a 20 minute video about the character creator and then failing to load into the game and the Seahawks and my dishwasher, but I deleted it because it wasn't very funny IMO.

    Somehow PlaneShift has enough videos that it's a "recommended tag" in YouTube. Huh.


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