sunsvortex

See even before I could get my post out, you turned this into a Java is better than x or it can do anything x can. let me again make this clear NOONE GIVES A DAMN WHAT JAVA CAN OR CANNOT DO Stop making this into a language argument. If you , as a so called developer, dont understand what benefits a system like Unity or Unreal brings, you really need to do some homework. Its not about a language....at alll. Its about damn near everything BUT the language.

Its not that Java is a problem per se - its that it is a dead end platform for moving Wurm forward. If your going to look at moving Wurm forward then its really needs to move away from Java and move to Unity or Unreal. You have the Unity Asset Store - instant content that modders can use and drop in at thier liesure, assuming an integrated modding infrastructure. Top that off with player developed content as well as CC developed content and its a wonderful everyone wins scenario. Wurm needs a real, honest to god, engine. One that supports decent graphics, that can be scaled, that can be accessed by players and developers alike. Using a different platform opens the game up in ways that simply are not financially possible or realistic using java. And again its not Java per se - If Unity or Unreal had been developed in Java it wouldnt matter Id still be saying move to it. The list of pros would take a full page to list. Trying to turn this into a language argument or debate is not what needs to happen. It needs to be a discussion of : Financial Viability Workflow Content Support Please dont try and turn this into some kind of Java is better than x. thats not what anyone means What they mean is that Java is a low level language and content takes too long to be pushed out, support for Open GL is not good or we would have better graphics capability, Modders are stuck using hacker techniques (injection) to avoid stepping on things, and the age of WURM is readily noticeable in the code. So again to make this very clear - this is not about Java or what it can or cannot do - its about moving to something thats simply better to develop a game on.

6 months to transition the code to Unity if that long. Its not like creating a new game, you all ready know what you want, you allready know what needs to be developed,you allready know how everything works, you have hundreds if not thousands of examples throughout the web on how to achieve anything that WURM allready does via Unity. The biggest issue is getting the client server model correct, and Unity makes this fairly easy. 6 months tops with 5 developers working on it, which is how many Rolf said he has currently working on WURM. If the devs go nuts and resist the move or unforseen issues arrise - then say 1 year to transition. No longer than 1 year to make this move under any set of circumstances. And I didnt even count the non paid devs, throw them in and easily 6 months given a concerted effort. Java skills = Java Script skills, C++ just buckle down and learn what you need to make it work. Worry about fully learning the language later and hire someone temp to help get past any sticky parts.

Move to Unreal or Unity -anything else is a waste of time and resources. Once moved to a different platform, build an integrated modding infrastructure Rebuild current low pop WO servers into WU servers and charge for CC hosted WU servers Setup a WURM asset shop where anyone can develop content for WURM - See Unity asset shop for an example. CC should also develop and sell content here Abandon WO alltogether and transition to a WU Architecture based on the new platform. Monetize as needed

Short Term Bloodloss - Elephants in the room. 1. Decrease Action timers - specifically on mining or reduce the number of mining actions to break a wall. 2. Increase skill gain The bottom line is that people will not migrate to WO from WU because its just too grindy. If you want to see a net positive effect on WO from WU purchases, the experience a player had on WU must be comparable. It is currently DRAMATICALLY different. So even if you do get people trying out WO, they simply will not stay. Its too grindy for the steam crowd. Until this is addressed, you will continue to suffer from player retention problems. There are other ways of course, but they involve a longer subjective approach and significant reinvestment, which you said you were not entertaining. Good Luck

Lol, everytime I check the forums its different....this is a comedy of errors. What do you people have against testing on a setup that isnt a public facing live server?

hmmm...well it seems fine on my other machine with a different AV AM so going to ignore it. Maybe malwarebytes and redhat have had a falling out or something, lol.

Was going to check it out, but all I get is this. What you got going on there?

I get that it was a "hey lets get the forums upgraded", but couldnt they have at least pushed it to a test web server first. Then everyone would have known that it wasnt going to work. Would have saved everyone a lot of grief. The tiniest bit of forethought is worth tons of hindsight. And if x,y and z all said it would work, automatically assume they are lying and test it anyways. What a mess.

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Any way to embed media....song of the day thread is destroyed....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MHn5bb85Lw

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Yeah, i know what you mean. I dont doubt some will return, but not many. Once the time is invested in WU, and as all the mods come to maturity and people become used to improved AT/SG they may migrate back in (for whatever reason) and the shock of having everything slow to a snails pace, possibly limited content (depending on the server they came from) will , imo, drive many away and they will just abandon Wurm for greener pastures. What i cant seem to figure out is the first part you mentioned. Its a one time purchase. If your going to really capitalize on these new found gains in players one would think that there would be some ...i dont know...business plan or road map, something....some way to get a continuous income stream going. I can come up with all kinds of crazy ideas that would work, but the more that time passes the more it looks like they were really honestly expecting people that play WU to come over to WO. I really find that idea ridiculous in the extreme (given the crowd WU was released in )and when they first talked about it I took it as they were just fighting PR fires after the announcement. But if that is / was the real honest to god plan...then omfg....that would be a true mess, and i still find it hard to believe thats what they really thought, so Im going to go with, they have some future plan that allows them to get some kind of income stream from all the newfound gains. If that turns out not to be true...and they are really seriously expecting people to come over from WU...then ...its going to be a really big mess. The only way I see people migrating over from WU and "staying on WO" is if they improve AT/SG, otherwise its just not going to happen.

The main point I would make here is that yes its great for CC...of this there is no question, but for the individual aspect of WO...its not so great. Its like having a wife and then picking up a new concubine and expecting them to live together all happy. If CC is the guy that has both the wife and the concubine he is all happy as can be, but the wife and concubine are always going to be at odds assuming they dont kill each other.

Im going to say that your base assumption is only partially correct in that while they may be competing on some levels, I see it more like one is leeching the other. Which only slightly changes the viewpoint but significantly so. I dont think that one can use a competing viewpoint as if you go at the problem from that angle you undermine the "develop for one and therefore both" approach that has been talked about by Rolf. If one is going to start giving one uniqueness that the other doesnt have, then by default you start splitting up the dev team, which on some levels seems to have allready happened. And of course there are allready some natural differences that give uniqueness to each of them, however, the more one goes down this road the more you split the dev time between them, the longer it takes to actually develop any one feature and the more it becomes unsustainable. I already did a post looking down the road if you keep splitting dev time so im not going to rehash it here but the short version is that it doesnt end well for WO. IMO - there is only one , sure fire way, to increase numbers on WO short term and most importantly...RETAIN those numbers once it gets them, and thats to increase action timers and skill gain. Those two items are nearly universally employed on all WU servers. Its clear people like it so maybe its time to do that. Now this will clearly piss off a lot of WO players and will change WO to WU on a CC hosted server. So maybe its not a good way to go. If you split the difference and create a new server on the WO side that has the increased skill gain and action timers its still leeching. So the problem isnt being addressed or solved. Incentives in my mind dont work or work only for a short while. Take the argument for stability. So lets say that all the WU servers start to crash and burn. They are managed badly, they have crap people running them ect ect ect ect. If the only option for those players is to go to WO, they are just going to abandon Wurm alltogether. If CC has split the difference then some will migrate to the AT/SG server, but the amount that do will be totally dependent on how close it is to the server they are coming from in terms of AT/SG. I have yet to come across a scenario in which the current state of WO can survive with more than a shadow of its former playerbase. The leeching, slow death seems inevitable for it at this point. There are simply more people that like the decreased AT and increased SG not to mention all the new features that the community is pumping out daily. Every day the mods get better and larger in scope. That CC will not or cannot follow this level of development is a major problem for them. Right now if you look at the mod section 2 items stand out, the mod loader and the associated mods that run under it and the more animals mod. These items have been developed nearly over night and continue to be expanded upon by people of all skill ranges in JAVA and graphics. They are only going to get better and this will continually draw more people in as players become frustrated with WO. To me , this says something about how CC views its own product. I think the best way forward is to just let the current state of WO continue as is, and let it die or survive based on its own merits. Continue to develop as normal and if it comes to be that the current WO is just a small playerbase, so be it, if it dies, so be it. Whatever happens happens, it has to stand on its own. Continually trying to con people / trick people / incentivise people / herd people to a particular play style does not work. We have a beautiful example of how badly it does not work already in place - Wurm PVP. How long have people tried to get the pve players and new players to come over, how many forum campaigns have we went through trying this method. How many years and how many people have tried it and yet.....it did not work. There is no reason to believe that this approach will work for WO. If you take the sales of WU and then take the number of private servers that are AT/SG improved then its clear, people have spoken, the current state of WO is just not popular and hopefully we can learn from the example of pvp and not go down a road of trying to push cabbage on people that want candy, so to speak. In short - there really is no way, given the current paradigm of "develop for one and therefore both" in which WO is anything other than a small playerbase - given all the evidence thus far by WU sales, private server setups and mods.

[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaV-I5C90zk

Good Idea on the economy Good Luck with your new server.

[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqyvVeCCsGM [media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gA9eDIWQTs

Ill see your Bob Seger and raise a Metallica Version [media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOibtqWo6z4

[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWLr2WVhIp8

40th anniversary of the Edmund Fitzgerald. [media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vST6hVRj2A

WO isnt dead...its "Undead". its been killed a number of times, yet it still walks. Cant kill whats already dead....that takes silver bullets, a knife to the head, or a good ole fashioned exorcism. Its too early to be proclaiming death, however, its future is not the brightest bulb in the bunch. I think WU underperformed even though it looks like pretty decent sales given right at 3 weeks now. Still have xmas coming up so perhaps a few extra sales there, not many, but a few. If WO is to feel some love from WU then some interesting decisions are going to need to be made. The decline in wo numbers (i predict) will continue unless they make some changes or pull something out of thier collective asses to stop the bleeding. The idea that people would play WU and then want to come to WO and stick around is a pipe dream without some changes. Even if private servers start floundering all over the place, if the alternative for players still interested in playing Wurm is WO with current grind settings, they will abandon wurm altogether. Untill WO addresses player retention, WU is a slow, self inflicted wound that will eventually end in pain for players currently in WO. The contrast from playing WU and then going into WO is shocking to say the least. It will be interesting to see if they make the changes necessary to stop the bleeding or let it bleed out and finally be laid to rest.

Just a quick update Nearly all sounds replaced or reworked. ground tile, floor, animal textures 50% completed - still WIP Witch mechanics still WIP but coming along nicely Zealot is ready for testing, just need witch done to test. Hybrid pvp/pve looks good from testing so far. New clothing (period specific) WIP Looking at opening a public server sometime in late Jan to early Feb. ATM - THE biggest issue is client modification. We think we may have a decent approach given the current status of things. Given that we are modifying so many files, we are discussing doing a bat file you can run inside your client folder and it will simply download and overwrite your client with all our files. This is still very much just being looked at for feasibility but some permutation of this concept should prove successful. It would allow an easy way for users to get the mods to their client and make it easy for us to manage updates. It doesnt stop CC updates from overwriting, just gives everyone an easy way to keep the client current for our server. it should also be possible to just make another copy of your client folder and drop the bat in there so you can have our client files separate from any other mods you may be running. We hope that something like this will be a good way to distribute files for now unless something better comes along before we open up. So untill Jan/Feb - We'll continue to build this thing "Piece by Piece" [media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IahlaRZUyQ

I have been hearing hushed rumors of a Unity version....but its just that .... rumors. Hopefully they are looking at something like that.