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razoreqx

Wurm Unlimited has the potential to be a gold mine.

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I'm going to make a suggestion because I feel some potential is being missed out on here.   I know there are small features being added to WU, but It could be so much more.

You created a section for MOD requests, but to be honest the MOD community hasn't really been supported.  Changes have been made to the core game that often break many of the mods.  So no one really has any incentive for creating these mods or even monitoring that thread. 

I'm pretty sure the dev's know which mods are being used the most just based on the shear volume of replies each one gets.   Ive already seen a serious decline in mods over the last few months, and sales have dropped off on the purchase of the client. 

 

If I was running a business focused on success I would take those mods and bake them into the future releases so they continue to get supported with each release.  I'm sure the authors would be more than happy to have their mods actually added to the core game and all you'd have to do is create the ability to turn them on an off in the configuration screen. 

 

2nd. Id take take a serious look at the MOD requests being suggested.   Possibility picking a few of them each month and running a poll.     "What would you like to see added in the future" and then post a road-map based on the responses of the polls. 

 

You see the success of some of these big WU servers and I see new servers popping up all the time in the server browser.   Its obvious based on the games being developed on Steam in the greenlight program have trended towards survival, run your own server.  I don't even need to name them off.   Eventually this trend is going to be dead.  Something new will take its place, as gaming often changes over time. 

 

So it might be worth CC WU dev's sitting down and talking this over.   Ive been gaming since the days of MUDs and Ive run several titles as a graphic designer & game mechanic engineer,  and even an admin throughout the years.  I think I know a little about the subject, and the success of involving the community can have.  

 

I didn't post this as an argument or a trolling thread.   Just some friendly suggestions from one fan / developer to another.  

 

Cheers.

 

Edited by razoreqx
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We do pay attention to the mod requests and popular mods, but one thing to remember is that the development team primarily work on Wurm Online, Wurm Unlimited receives some standalone attention but most features are designed and developed for the MMO, which then trickles down

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1 hour ago, Retrograde said:

We do pay attention to the mod requests and popular mods, but one thing to remember is that the development team primarily work on Wurm Online, Wurm Unlimited receives some standalone attention but most features are designed and developed for the MMO, which then trickles down

 

Without sounding negative (which I already failed with a reply) I've been watching the login numbers on WO and the reduced number of concurrent user counts on the various WO servers, Id say your putting your eggs in the wrong basket.    If anything WU is and will continue to work against WO.   The last WO patch had the users so furious about tunnel collapses you even lost a large amount of players, and had to back the change out.   WO has always suffered from knee jerk decisions, and division of the community by adding to many servers, and to frequently, or failures in promised additional features and just poor business decisions.    This is why my wife and I stopped playing WO over a year ago, and just cut our losses on our deed we'd worked for years.   We finally just felt that INDI was almost a ghost town compared to its glory days, and the only voices being heard were that of the gold farmers and others making a profit from the game though gold sales. 

 

Im sorry but this sounds like a Rolf canned answer.   

 

And how on earth can you say you look and consider each MOD?  Just two patches ago you completely changed the tiler poller, and I continue to see changes in values, functions and procedure calls,  and DB schema.    Anyone that has decompiled WU  knows this statement i'm making is the truth.  At times I feel you've almost deliberately focused on breaking MODS..      Of course I know this cant possibly be the case. 

 

Anyway without starting an argument I think you missed the original point of my post.   If you truly had the mod community in mind you'd have a had a fully functional API and additions of the MOD request with a roadmap.     At some point CC is going to need to pick a side, and I think WO might be the wrong choice.  The numbers don't lie.  Rolf lost us (my family personally that is) as WO customers, but he won our hearts back with WU.    

 

Minecraft has probably the largest active MOD community of any indi game (own your own server) out there and almost everyone on the planet knows what that game is.    I don't think the same can be said about WO or WU.   

 

 

This is my own opinion and I dont speak for anyone else...    Just my .2 

 

 

 

 

Edited by razoreqx

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As far as I can see, Code Club don't seem to have the resources to put development time in to Unlimited

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It was stated several times prior to the release of Wurm Unlimited that support for mods would take time, while they are possible, we would not be making guarantees that they work after updates, this is adapting a currently existing server system into one that allows modding and player involvement.

 

Wurm Online will continue to be the main development focus, we plan, develop and build towards the Wurm Online game and community and provide the same resources later to the Wurm Unlimited community via larger updates.

 

That said, we have been working on improving official mod support and implementation of an API that will allow the community to have more control, but this does take time. Identifying what the immediate needs are as well as making functions more visible.

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1 hour ago, Retrograde said:

It was stated several times prior to the release of Wurm Unlimited that support for mods would take time, while they are possible, we would not be making guarantees that they work after updates, this is adapting a currently existing server system into one that allows modding and player involvement.

 

Wurm Online will continue to be the main development focus, we plan, develop and build towards the Wurm Online game and community and provide the same resources later to the Wurm Unlimited community via larger updates.

 

That said, we have been working on improving official mod support and implementation of an API that will allow the community to have more control, but this does take time. Identifying what the immediate needs are as well as making functions more visible.

 

 

Well I can tell you that if you keep that promise you'll find the big cash cow is WU.   New servers and external advertising on game sites will keep sales of WU for years to come.  You get the mod community behind you and amazing things will happen.

MMORPG's are a dime a dozen now.   Most of these big MMO's end up free to play & pay to win after they've milked the sales of the original release.  Eventually they get buried by the next big title.   I see that trend all the time now.   The market is completely saturated with the same theme over and over.   Fetch quests and stat & equipment farming. 

 

Servers that tend to stay around have rich storyline behind them.   Its the community that makes a great server.  You lose the community you lose the game.  

WU gives average joe's like us the chance to create worlds and systems using our imaginations, and each server tends to curtail to a certain breed of gamer style.   At my age you have that perfect balance of systems and favorite parts of all the years of MMO's you've played and want that perfect game.  

I burned out on the WoW's, EverQuests, DOAC's, and AOC a long time ago.   The best days were where the games that had no graphics at all... It was MUD's.   Small to large communities with complex systems that engaged players in conflict, comradery, alliances, and there was no "END GAME".   Its the communities on these servers that make them so special and stick around.   Bringing the community together is what will make WU successful.   WO too if you listen to them.  

 

Thanks for the reply and I certainly wish you success because our servers success relies on your game sales, and if you keep breaking our servers we lose our player base.   Many of the admins I talk to have big plans of importing new graphic models animation, trade pact type systems, new types of crafting systems, and other player driven systems, politics, but in its current state its to risky to work on projects this big because...

1. We dont know how much control we'll have over the API

2   We dont know what you have planned for WU or what direction your heading. 

3.   And worst of all, we're scared of how much change each patch will change the structure of the game.

 

I'm a graphic designer, not a coder.  Ive personally paid over 1k in donations to modder's in this community, mostly funded by my own players donations.  I want to keep the Ago's, bdew, joedebo's (to name a few) of the community around, and I hope to see more and more find their way to Wurm.  But right now i see a list of projects that are no longer supported and the original authors are gone.   I know you cant totally prevent turnover, you can certainly encourage them with support that keeps them around longer.

 

Ive said enough on the topic and i'll just leave it at that.   Thanks again for the feedback.  

 

 

Edited by razoreqx
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5 hours ago, razoreqx said:

 Just two patches ago you completely changed the tiler poller

 

For the record: They didn't, there was a bug in the feature management system that activated a different method for polling crop tiles than the one that was active on servers before that. That bug was fixed with a hotfix and it went back to the original method.

 

Quote

Minecraft has probably the largest active MOD community of any indi game (own your own server) out there and almost everyone on the planet knows what that game is.

 

Also for the record - Minecraft is the most commercially successful PC game of all times. The activity of the modding community is the simple result of the 8-digit numbers of active players. I would say Mojang has did a lot more harm than good to promote modding in MC (the modding API that never materialized, the bukkit buyout fiasco, the fact that MC is still obfuscated, recent refactoring of the whole rendering system, i could keep going for ages here...)

 

In general i would say WU is not that bad about breaking mods, compared to say... Minecraft, where i had the joy of spending 100+ hours porting my mods between 1.7.10/1.8.9/1.9.0 during the last couple months.

 

There will always be some amount of churn between modders, people are doing it for fun (even if there some amount of donations involved) and they will from time to time burn out, lose interest, get busy with RL stuff or just disappear. What we (as a community) need is a steady influx of new people... some of them will be interested in modding and fill the gaps.

Edited by bdew
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Well as a former software engineer who has designed and written APIs I know just how difficult it can be to make a well designed one.So to be fair to Rolf and his team it really is a great deal of work to design and implement a good modding API, and then it needs to be maintained and modified from time to time as the game evolves. This means a lot of time and money. Mods also make maintaining the vanilla code difficult as you get people reporting problems that might be a result of some mod rather than the main code. Yes, I would love to see a good stable API for the modders, but we also have to be realistic about it too.

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Roman and bdew its nice to see both of you rally behind CC.  I'll continue to be the frustrated admin, bdew you keep cranking out great mods, and Romen stop by and visit sometime... we miss you.. 

I'm going to crawl off in a corner somewhere.   Bdew i couldn't agree with you more.  We need more influx of new people.  As for minecraft you bring up a good point.  The lack of an API and the constant versioning with mods got to be a pain in the ass!  But also look at Kerbal space program.   Another example of a mod community making all kinds of things possible with a game that would have had little to offer without the community projects behind it. 

 

But I still stick to my guns on the fact that WU is an overflow for WO.  I truly believe WU is the diamond in the rough for CC.   I think WO and WU should be treated as two separate development projects as WO is Rolf's dream game and WU is our dream game waiting to be created.  With a finished API it will open doors for what we can do with our WU servers.   Im sitting on hundreds of models and animations that ive done over the past several years just waiting to bring to life and all I keep hearing is WO content gets added then flows down to WU.   There wont ever be an API for WO so where does that leave the timeline for a fully functioning API for WU? 

  I dont really care about new content for WO.  I doubt most of it even fits into the systems I want to add to our server. 

Edited by razoreqx

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Please don't take me wrong Razor - I too would love to see a well-designed modding interface. I was merely saying it is a lot of work and as we all know they have limited resources. It doesn't mean we should try to push for it, just that it will take time, effort and money for them to do it.

 

And while it's true we don't have a clear set of APIs we can design to, it also in a way gives a lot of freedom. Modders aren't strictly limited to only using what the devs have seen fit to make available. The whole code is available to us (granted decompiled and not necessarily easy to understand) and that give an amount of power that few games offer.

 

(Sorry I haven't really been playing much. I hurt my back and haven't been spending much time at my desktop. Mostly getting my Wurm fix through reading the forums on my laptop.)

Edited by Romen
fix typo

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3 minutes ago, Romen said:

Please don't take me wrong Razor - I too would love to see a well-designed modding interface. I was merely saying it is a lot of work and as we all know they have limited resources. It doesn't mean we should try to push for it, just that it will take time, effort and money for them to do it.

 

And while it's true we don't have a clear set of APIs we can design to, it also in a way gives a lot of freedom. Modders aren't strictly limited to only using what the devs have seen fit to make available. The whole code is available to us (granted decompiled and not necessarily easy to understand) and that give an amount of power that few games offer.

 

(Sorry I haven't really been playing much. I hurt my back and haven't been spending much time at my desktop. Mostly getting my Wurm fix through reading the forums on my laptop.)

 

 

ack.  Sorry to hear about the injury.   I hope you scored some good pain meds!   Back injuries are the absolute worst!

 

Im not trying to rush them honestly.  Im saying they should divide and conquer.  Most of the focus of WU was not waiting on WO content it was getting the ability to add our own content.  Take me for instance.   I have working models to scale of four new ship types.   Mount points for guns that work similar to the inventory on a horse.  You place the cannons, trim sails for speed, grappling hooks in slots like you would a horse or a character with gear.   Ive spent hours working on this but I don't have the coding experience to add them in.  Id be more than happy to contribute these models to the vanilla code base.   I have hundreds of new monster models with animations.  Almost 2Gb of graphics...

 

As far as the mods.    Running mods which inject themselves into memory make take up much more resources than if the Dev team bakes them into the main code and we can retire the Mod.   It becomes a toggle feature of the vanilla server.  That way we don't have to chase the madness of versioning that happen with Minecraft and other mod supported games.  

The majority of the servers are all using the same mods from the handful of skilled coders so why not include them in the vanilla build?   Then there is less of an issue of DB item number over laps, clashing of action timers.. etc.    It truly becomes a community effort in conjunction with the dev team.   It would be the first time anyone has actually done this to my knowledge.  

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22 minutes ago, razoreqx said:

As far as the mods.    Running mods which inject themselves into memory make take up much more resources than if the Dev team bakes them into the main code and we can retire the Mod.   It becomes a toggle feature of the vanilla server.  That way we don't have to chase the madness of versioning that happen with Minecraft and other mod supported games.  

The majority of the servers are all using the same mods from the handful of skilled coders so why not include them in the vanilla build?   Then there is less of an issue of DB item number over laps, clashing of action timers.. etc.    It truly becomes a community effort in conjunction with the dev team.   It would be the first time anyone has actually done this to my knowledge.  

It's possible to do, as the feature management system allows server owners to toggle all sorts of ingame aspects but again, we want to wait for the modding API to come in before we start looking at this

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10 minutes ago, Retrograde said:

It's possible to do, as the feature management system allows server owners to toggle all sorts of ingame aspects but again, we want to wait for the modding API to come in before we start looking at this

 

That would be fantastic! 

 

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Yes I agree the ideal would be to incorporate some of these features into the base code. Effectively the devs have some free developers at their disposal (and from what I hear some of the devs work for free already). Clearly not every mod is a candidate for inclusion - there are some which I think many agree make the game too easy, or don't fit the character of the game. But there are many that would be great to see included. Many of these are things players have asked for for years.

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+1 on the chosen mods. 

 

   And free?    No one works for free..No wonder everyone's in a bad mood.  Tell the scrooge Rolf to open up his check book!!

 

 

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2 hours ago, razoreqx said:

And free?    No one works for free..No wonder everyone's in a bad mood.

 

I've pretty agreed with everything you've said. I wholeheartedly agree that games that support an active mod community have a far greater longevity in the market.  Additionally more people will buy games that they know they can tailor to their own needs and wants. Wurm itself is proof that people like to build. It's the perfect analogy for moddable worlds and the modding community. "Here is my world. Here is what I've created. Here's how it's different from the others around it".  WU was every potential to FAR EXCEED the income potential of WO.  Rather than home creators, it can attract WORLD creators.  That's what brought me to this game; not Wurm, but the ability to create a rich world that others can enjoy ... regardless of the underlying game system.  WU has the potential to be much more and much greater than its parent will ever be.

 

With that long-winded preface in place, I disagree with you on the "no one works for free" part.  I'm pretty confident that our primary motivation is that we do it for "the love of the game".  It is for me. I've turned down peoples requests to donate to my server because ... well firstly the server costs me nothing to run and secondly I believe the relationship between player and GM/server owner fundamentally changes once money gets involved.  My circumstance is a bit different than most though and I realise most people use hosting services which aren't cheap, so I make ABSOLUTELY no value judgement on those server owners who do accept payment.  For many, it's essential to keep their worlds operating.

 

But you gave me a GREAT idea though.  One thing i will suggest is that players wanting to donate to my server direct their donations to mod developers instead.  The quality of mods helps me directly in creating my world, allowing me to implement my ideas. That makes my server more interesting and fun for players and more fun for me to build and create the world ..... "for the love of the game".

Edited by Lichbane

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40 minutes ago, Lichbane said:

 

I've pretty agreed with everything you've said. I wholeheartedly agree that games that support an active mod community have a far greater longevity in the market.  Additionally more people will buy games that they know they can tailor to their own needs and wants. Wurm itself is proof that people like to build. It's the perfect analogy for moddable worlds and the modding community. "Here is my world. Here is what I've created. Here's how it's different from the others around it".  WU was every potential to FAR EXCEED the income potential of WO.  Rather than home creators, it can attract WORLD creators.  That's what brought me to this game; not Wurm, but the ability to create a rich world that others can enjoy ... regardless of the underlying game system.  WU has the potential to be much more and much greater than its parent will ever be.

 

With that long-winded preface in place, I disagree with you on the "no one works for free" part.  I'm pretty confident that our primary motivation is that we do it for "the love of the game".  It is for me. I've turned down peoples requests to donate to my server because ... well firstly the server costs me nothing to run and secondly I believe the relationship between player and GM/server owner fundamentally changes once money gets involved.  My circumstance is a bit different than most though and I realise most people use hosting services which aren't cheap, so I make ABSOLUTELY no value judgement on those server owners who do accept payment.  For many, it's essential to keep their worlds operating.

 

But you gave me a GREAT idea though.  One thing i will suggest is that players wanting to donate to my server direct their donations to mod developers instead.  The quality of mods helps me directly in creating my world, allowing me to implement my ideas. That makes my server more interesting and fun for players and more fun for me to build and create the world ..... "for the love of the game".

 

 

Yea i keep a tally for them just so they know where the money goes.  Like you the server cost me nothing but the electric bill.  Work pays for the MPLS connection so nothing lost there. 

I, like you, was approached to donate money.   I didnt want it.  I explicitly said donations would not reward anyone in game so there was no point.   Its a fair playing field for everyone.

  I had already invested several hundred in donations to modders for coding projects so I came up with the idea of a donation bucket.  All the money gets tracked.  The players vote on what mods they want (except the big projects im working on with developers) to make their life easier.    If its picked we test and install the mod and I use the funds out of the bucket to pay the author.   Its worked out very well.   Everyone gets to feel like the bought a piece of the world we create but no one feels like they are being pressured or begged for donations, and I don't feel guilty for taking money I know most people don't have, which is why they like these build your own server communities.   Its free. 

 

The no one works for free was kind of a joke and poke at Rolf.   Hes always used interns and outside volunteers throughout the ten years hes worked on WO which has been a big part of how the game continues to thrive after all these years.   I dont always see eye to eye with his business decisions or the way he choose to run his game, but I was a dedicated customer for over four years. 

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