Originally posted by BadBoyOnFire I believe that the whole frosty thingy WAS explained in the series. I'm very sure that it had something to do with not properly compensating for stellar drift as in one episode (where they end up going through the sun i think, Red Sky) they come out all coverd in ice and shit because they didn't calibrate the gate properly or something but i'm sure it's explained.
That WAS the explanation about the ice. Once they had the Abydos cartouche and Carter worked her magic, they didn't have that problem again (until the one episode where they wormed through a sun).
I also think the reason why they didn't try to gate out of Anartica was because they couldn't manually dail the gate without a power source and Carter could not get the DHD to work (wasn't it all smashed up???). I could be wrong about that one.
The only big gate explanation hole I have ever seen was in the very first episode of SG-1. When Apophis and his Jaffa come though the Earth gate at the very beginning, and then leave through the same wormhole (without someone dialing back out). They left through the same wormhole as they arrived through.
If they try to do this non-instanced in a game, there could be a gate que of some time where you enter your destination coords and some kind of console and each group gets a turn at going through the gate. That would be hell if their were 10 or 20 teams ahead of you though.
There are a few problems I foresee with what you are proposing BBOF.
1 Lag - since they would be main hubs odds are you would have lots of people close enough to any given gate at any given time. The shuttle system can avoid this by doing what Planetside did and you enter the shuttle and then you are the only toon on the screen while you wait. The stargates are another matter though.
The fact that the gates would be tied up nonstop, they would also need to be rigged up so that they wouldn't accept any other gate codes but the 6 in the loop.
Gaould , Humans , Jaffa , replicators , etc all getting along and playing nice in neutral worlds? That sort of deafeats the purpose of 3 sides.
Lastly , a 15 minute wait isn't bad , but with 6 gates going like that while the average wait would be 15 minutes , the long waits would be 25 minutes , and thats not even including dial times which if you gave the gates a 60 second shutdown between dialing that wait could go up to 30 minutes. To me thats a bit exessive. 15 minutes is about the most I or anyone else I know cares to wait for transportation, beyond that i gets to the point of waste of time boring IE the boats in EQ.
Thats why I like the idea of the hubs gates being instanced, You still have the meeting places before the instanced area IE gate room in SGC. Yet you don't have the problems of waiting too long , worry of crashign otu all the time because the server can't handle that many people zoning at once, and you get to enter a main hub world without worry of your comp grinding to a .01 fps halt because you have the scene of 100 people waiting to use a gate or who are trying to leave the gate. It also lets you use the gate for what it is supposed to be used for in the first place ,, which is going from world A to world X.
Outside of the hub worlds you are gating in live to the same place everyone else is in. Yes it takes away from the "realism" a bit but that bit of it isn't nearly as bad as the gameplay hit you would take otherwise. And remember you are only talking about a few worlds for each side. Beyond those all the gate dynamics would be as they are on the show.
Originally posted by Blackmoor There are a few problems I foresee with what you are proposing BBOF.
1 Lag - since they would be main hubs odds are you would have lots of people close enough to any given gate at any given time. The shuttle system can avoid this by doing what Planetside did and you enter the shuttle and then you are the only toon on the screen while you wait. The stargates are another matter though.
The fact that the gates would be tied up nonstop, they would also need to be rigged up so that they wouldn't accept any other gate codes but the 6 in the loop.
Gaould , Humans , Jaffa , replicators , etc all getting along and playing nice in neutral worlds? That sort of deafeats the purpose of 3 sides.
Lastly , a 15 minute wait isn't bad , but with 6 gates going like that while the average wait would be 15 minutes , the long waits would be 25 minutes , and thats not even including dial times which if you gave the gates a 60 second shutdown between dialing that wait could go up to 30 minutes. To me thats a bit exessive. 15 minutes is about the most I or anyone else I know cares to wait for transportation, beyond that i gets to the point of waste of time boring IE the boats in EQ.
Thats why I like the idea of the hubs gates being instanced, You still have the meeting places before the instanced area IE gate room in SGC. Yet you don't have the problems of waiting too long , worry of crashign otu all the time because the server can't handle that many people zoning at once, and you get to enter a main hub world without worry of your comp grinding to a .01 fps halt because you have the scene of 100 people waiting to use a gate or who are trying to leave the gate. It also lets you use the gate for what it is supposed to be used for in the first place ,, which is going from world A to world X.
Outside of the hub worlds you are gating in live to the same place everyone else is in. Yes it takes away from the "realism" a bit but that bit of it isn't nearly as bad as the gameplay hit you would take otherwise. And remember you are only talking about a few worlds for each side. Beyond those all the gate dynamics would be as they are on the show.
If the gate is only open for 5 minutes per route than if you want to get from Gate 1 to Gate 6 directly you may have to wait perhaps 25 minutes, but if you're extremely clever in working out the routes you could easily halve that to 10 minutes at the most if you hop from Gate 1 to Gate 2 then Gate 2 straight to 6 say... its all a matter of timing.
And yes obviously the 6 gates would be locked to only be dialed by the other gates not the outside gates, so they would be a sort of internal neutral zone.
Personally i refuse to worry about lag or server load as i'm purely theoretical here and i don't want to think about hardware demands... but SWG was designed and released 3 years ago and that had litterally hundreds of players in Coronet consistently without the servers crashing... i don't think there would be a problem especially considering it will be going on 5 years after SWG release date that this game will be out, i think the servers can handle it eaisly.
I know what your saying about the 3 different main races "getting along" on the main planets but lets remember that this is probably going to be set in the future so the Jaffa will be allies of humans anyway and any third party race which wants harm on everyone like the replicators are going to have a tough time fitting in anywhere, instanced or not.
I think my idea could really work well and would be super immersive. I personally vote against lots of instancing unless its the last alternative.
Don't forget that the gates only work one way so you need an outgoing window and an incoming window which doubles the time, since it doesn't do much good if you can only gate out and not into a world. Hence the 5 - 25 minutes to get to the world you want to go to and that includes taking an extra gate or two to shorten up the time.
As to games being stable for zoning ,, WOW still has problems with ships zoning , so no the problem is not fixed in MMO's newer than SWG. In wow thats with maybe 15 people on a ship. As to hardware demands ,, don't wory about it then , I however do worry about it , and have dealt with enough lag in crowded areas to not want to deal with it if i do not have to. I have seen many many more games fail in this aspect than i have seen succeed. You are also not taking into account that while hardware gets better that software and video requirements increase right along with them. Hence the reason why with new games you almost never can run the game full out gfx wise or even close to it with decent results even with a top end machine.
Lastly where the heck do you keep getting lots of instancing? Even with 6 major hubs per side thats only 18 instances total ,, thats not a lot and they are such minor instances on top of it. Its not like you would be having incoming armies , even you said i would pretty much be a safe neutral zone in the 6 hub worlds when it comes to gate traffic.
I myself don't see your idea as immersive , dozens or hundreds of people sitting outside a stargate spamming LFG and trades while waiting or just plain spamming trades. To me its a useless time sink and annoying to boot since chances are it would be .01 fps city till you managed to get out of the mob surrounding the gate. Ever notice that almost every gate in the show is unguarded and out in the middle of no where? Thats because they ar made to go through and get on with what you are doing , not to hang around , because if you hang around then usually someone comes through it looking to shoot you or otherwise cause you bodily harm.
The other option is just that the gates are open all the time and you just gate to whatever coordinates you have preset, now that option i don't care for at all since i would like to see running battles and people trying to gate offworld before they get decimated.
Originally posted by Blackmoor Don't forget that the gates only work one way so you need an outgoing window and an incoming window which doubles the time, since it doesn't do much good if you can only gate out and not into a world. Hence the 5 - 25 minutes to get to the world you want to go to and that includes taking an extra gate or two to shorten up the time.
As to games being stable for zoning ,, WOW still has problems with ships zoning , so no the problem is not fixed in MMO's newer than SWG. In wow thats with maybe 15 people on a ship. As to hardware demands ,, don't wory about it then , I however do worry about it , and have dealt with enough lag in crowded areas to not want to deal with it if i do not have to. I have seen many many more games fail in this aspect than i have seen succeed. You are also not taking into account that while hardware gets better that software and video requirements increase right along with them. Hence the reason why with new games you almost never can run the game full out gfx wise or even close to it with decent results even with a top end machine.
Lastly where the heck do you keep getting lots of instancing? Even with 6 major hubs per side thats only 18 instances total ,, thats not a lot and they are such minor instances on top of it. Its not like you would be having incoming armies , even you said i would pretty much be a safe neutral zone in the 6 hub worlds when it comes to gate traffic.
I myself don't see your idea as immersive , dozens or hundreds of people sitting outside a stargate spamming LFG and trades while waiting or just plain spamming trades. To me its a useless time sink and annoying to boot since chances are it would be .01 fps city till you managed to get out of the mob surrounding the gate. Ever notice that almost every gate in the show is unguarded and out in the middle of no where? Thats because they ar made to go through and get on with what you are doing , not to hang around , because if you hang around then usually someone comes through it looking to shoot you or otherwise cause you bodily harm.
The other option is just that the gates are open all the time and you just gate to whatever coordinates you have preset, now that option i don't care for at all since i would like to see running battles and people trying to gate offworld before they get decimated.
I still think that my idea would work dispite having to have outgoing and incoming wormholes, i mean its not that longer wait... 25 minutes at the very very longest, most of the time it would be a 10-15 minute wait at the most which gives you time to socalise and things which is the main part of any MMORPG i'm sure most people would agree.
I can't speak for WoW but SWG servers i can only remember crashing once and that was when litterally about 800 Jedis crammed into a cantina and took on like 500 Jedis and 500 regular civilians outside of the cantina (anybody on Bloodfin may remember this). I never experienced a huge ammount of lag at any point on SWG even in the main cities... the load times may have been extreme but once i loaded into places like Coronet the lag wasnt that bad at all, and my computer was 2 years out of date and only met the minimum specs of the time.
I hate the argument about "oh we should make this game capable of being played on even the lower end machines" because its a huge copout answer. UPGRADE YOUR COMPUTER. I sat on the lower end of the computer market for years but i never dreamed of complaining and effectively holding back the entire market just because i wanted to be able to play the game on lesser settings.
And btw i've managed to play practically every game on maxed out settings since i've got a super computer but thats only recently and like i said above i've been on the other end of the scale for most of my life but i never complained.
Your point on instancing is well made and i'm beginning to come around... but i still think it would ruin it. I keep making the comparason in my mind to SWG and how crowded and cool Coronet was it really made the game for a lot of people and i can't imagen it being instanced... it would spoil the whole game. But i never said it would be "safe" i merely said neutral... i'm sure there would still be fights, especially if room was given for the aggressive races to invade the core worlds.
Dosens of people would be surrounding the gate and yes spamming probably would be envolved... but this would only be expanded to where the instance begins and ends anyway, so whats the difference? This mechanic worked fine in SWG in my opinion for years, tons of people standing around spamming trades and shop locations (nobody really spamming for groups...) and it was very very immersive, i don't see how it wouldn't be... like a huge market place.
The last idea about the gates always being open is horrible i agree, i can't stand the idea of it and i wouldn't even play if that was the case, it would ruin Stargate entirely for me and others too, i mean the gates are the best part.
I am not talking about the entire city or areas being instanced. As an example on earth just the SGC gate room would be instanced , the rest fo the complex would be shared with everyone else making it a bustling hub , but when it comes time to head out your group enters the gate room instance and goes on their way. You end up with maybe 1000sq feet of instance per hub world, not entire cities which are instanced. As to your claim of people spreading out ,, ok whatever , It happened in EQ -NOT, WOW - NOT , AO - NOT, AC - NOT, heck the only one I can think of without a ton of crowding issues in towns is DAOC and thats because things were so spread out the tradeskillers usually went to the outposts where they could get the supplies they needed and thus spread out because of that.
As to the computer thing ,, your argument is moot for the simple fact that the game makers have to make the game playable for people with less than top end systems. My point was not about it being playable on lesser setting but actually being playable for the majority of players due to hardware reasons IE loading in to a crowded area. As for your claim of playing almost every new game on max settings , either you are using a 14 inch monitor or else you are flat out lying, cause if they can't do it at the [H] I can't see anyone else running a similar setup somehow magically doing that much better. Unless you did actually splurge on a true supercomputer ,, in which case all the more to you , most people don't have that kind of money to spend.
Originally posted by Blackmoor I am not talking about the entire city or areas being instanced. As an example on earth just the SGC gate room would be instanced , the rest fo the complex would be shared with everyone else making it a bustling hub , but when it comes time to head out your group enters the gate room instance and goes on their way. You end up with maybe 1000sq feet of instance per hub world, not entire cities which are instanced. As to your claim of people spreading out ,, ok whatever , It happened in EQ -NOT, WOW - NOT , AO - NOT, AC - NOT, heck the only one I can think of without a ton of crowding issues in towns is DAOC and thats because things were so spread out the tradeskillers usually went to the outposts where they could get the supplies they needed and thus spread out because of that.
As to the computer thing ,, your argument is moot for the simple fact that the game makers have to make the game playable for people with less than top end systems. My point was not about it being playable on lesser setting but actually being playable for the majority of players due to hardware reasons IE loading in to a crowded area. As for your claim of playing almost every new game on max settings , either you are using a 14 inch monitor or else you are flat out lying, cause if they can't do it at the [H] I can't see anyone else running a similar setup somehow magically doing that much better. Unless you did actually splurge on a true supercomputer ,, in which case all the more to you , most people don't have that kind of money to spend.
I never thought you ment entire cities or whatever instanced... but still its called STARGATE Worlds.... if they're instance it kinda voids the entire genre, don't you think?
I'm not sure what you ment by me saying spreading out... but i'm telling you right now that if theres 6 core worlds with say 2500 people online at a time per server then theres not gonna be more than 1500 people spread between 6 core worlds which makes only 250 per planet... so at most there might be 150 people per Stargate area at the very most and they'd be spread out over the entire area where the Stargate is...
The lagg was never that bad in SWG and there was like 250-300 people consistently... if it can work for that game it can work for this one, end of story.
My argument about computers i agree is moot because the selfish ones who want to not spend money on upgrading there computer getting it out of the stoneage will always end up being the focus of the money greedy computer gaming companies... theres very few companies who'll make an engine/game which won't run on out-of-date computers... but i believe MOST current day computers would run SWG therefore would run this game with a hundred people or more in one area.
And yes, i can run almost every game on max graphics easily. Not all admittedly because some games are made to not be able to be run on full... like Operation Flashpoint and F.E.A.R which require stupidly high processing power like those quadruple 7800 beasts which are out now, but i wont get into that.
Comments
That WAS the explanation about the ice. Once they had the Abydos cartouche and Carter worked her magic, they didn't have that problem again (until the one episode where they wormed through a sun).
I also think the reason why they didn't try to gate out of Anartica was because they couldn't manually dail the gate without a power source and Carter could not get the DHD to work (wasn't it all smashed up???). I could be wrong about that one.
The only big gate explanation hole I have ever seen was in the very first episode of SG-1. When Apophis and his Jaffa come though the Earth gate at the very beginning, and then leave through the same wormhole (without someone dialing back out). They left through the same wormhole as they arrived through.
If they try to do this non-instanced in a game, there could be a gate que of some time where you enter your destination coords and some kind of console and each group gets a turn at going through the gate. That would be hell if their were 10 or 20 teams ahead of you though.
Joe
1 Lag - since they would be main hubs odds are you would have lots of people close enough to any given gate at any given time. The shuttle system can avoid this by doing what Planetside did and you enter the shuttle and then you are the only toon on the screen while you wait. The stargates are another matter though.
The fact that the gates would be tied up nonstop, they would also need to be rigged up so that they wouldn't accept any other gate codes but the 6 in the loop.
Gaould , Humans , Jaffa , replicators , etc all getting along and playing nice in neutral worlds? That sort of deafeats the purpose of 3 sides.
Lastly , a 15 minute wait isn't bad , but with 6 gates going like that while the average wait would be 15 minutes , the long waits would be 25 minutes , and thats not even including dial times which if you gave the gates a 60 second shutdown between dialing that wait could go up to 30 minutes. To me thats a bit exessive. 15 minutes is about the most I or anyone else I know cares to wait for transportation, beyond that i gets to the point of waste of time boring IE the boats in EQ.
Thats why I like the idea of the hubs gates being instanced, You still have the meeting places before the instanced area IE gate room in SGC. Yet you don't have the problems of waiting too long , worry of crashign otu all the time because the server can't handle that many people zoning at once, and you get to enter a main hub world without worry of your comp grinding to a .01 fps halt because you have the scene of 100 people waiting to use a gate or who are trying to leave the gate. It also lets you use the gate for what it is supposed to be used for in the first place ,, which is going from world A to world X.
Outside of the hub worlds you are gating in live to the same place everyone else is in. Yes it takes away from the "realism" a bit but that bit of it isn't nearly as bad as the gameplay hit you would take otherwise. And remember you are only talking about a few worlds for each side. Beyond those all the gate dynamics would be as they are on the show.
And yes obviously the 6 gates would be locked to only be dialed by the other gates not the outside gates, so they would be a sort of internal neutral zone.
Personally i refuse to worry about lag or server load as i'm purely theoretical here and i don't want to think about hardware demands... but SWG was designed and released 3 years ago and that had litterally hundreds of players in Coronet consistently without the servers crashing... i don't think there would be a problem especially considering it will be going on 5 years after SWG release date that this game will be out, i think the servers can handle it eaisly.
I know what your saying about the 3 different main races "getting along" on the main planets but lets remember that this is probably going to be set in the future so the Jaffa will be allies of humans anyway and any third party race which wants harm on everyone like the replicators are going to have a tough time fitting in anywhere, instanced or not.
I think my idea could really work well and would be super immersive. I personally vote against lots of instancing unless its the last alternative.
As to games being stable for zoning ,, WOW still has problems with ships zoning , so no the problem is not fixed in MMO's newer than SWG. In wow thats with maybe 15 people on a ship. As to hardware demands ,, don't wory about it then , I however do worry about it , and have dealt with enough lag in crowded areas to not want to deal with it if i do not have to. I have seen many many more games fail in this aspect than i have seen succeed. You are also not taking into account that while hardware gets better that software and video requirements increase right along with them. Hence the reason why with new games you almost never can run the game full out gfx wise or even close to it with decent results even with a top end machine.
Lastly where the heck do you keep getting lots of instancing? Even with 6 major hubs per side thats only 18 instances total ,, thats not a lot and they are such minor instances on top of it. Its not like you would be having incoming armies , even you said i would pretty much be a safe neutral zone in the 6 hub worlds when it comes to gate traffic.
I myself don't see your idea as immersive , dozens or hundreds of people sitting outside a stargate spamming LFG and trades while waiting or just plain spamming trades. To me its a useless time sink and annoying to boot since chances are it would be .01 fps city till you managed to get out of the mob surrounding the gate. Ever notice that almost every gate in the show is unguarded and out in the middle of no where? Thats because they ar made to go through and get on with what you are doing , not to hang around , because if you hang around then usually someone comes through it looking to shoot you or otherwise cause you bodily harm.
The other option is just that the gates are open all the time and you just gate to whatever coordinates you have preset, now that option i don't care for at all since i would like to see running battles and people trying to gate offworld before they get decimated.
I can't speak for WoW but SWG servers i can only remember crashing once and that was when litterally about 800 Jedis crammed into a cantina and took on like 500 Jedis and 500 regular civilians outside of the cantina (anybody on Bloodfin may remember this). I never experienced a huge ammount of lag at any point on SWG even in the main cities... the load times may have been extreme but once i loaded into places like Coronet the lag wasnt that bad at all, and my computer was 2 years out of date and only met the minimum specs of the time.
I hate the argument about "oh we should make this game capable of being played on even the lower end machines" because its a huge copout answer. UPGRADE YOUR COMPUTER. I sat on the lower end of the computer market for years but i never dreamed of complaining and effectively holding back the entire market just because i wanted to be able to play the game on lesser settings.
And btw i've managed to play practically every game on maxed out settings since i've got a super computer but thats only recently and like i said above i've been on the other end of the scale for most of my life but i never complained.
Your point on instancing is well made and i'm beginning to come around... but i still think it would ruin it. I keep making the comparason in my mind to SWG and how crowded and cool Coronet was it really made the game for a lot of people and i can't imagen it being instanced... it would spoil the whole game. But i never said it would be "safe" i merely said neutral... i'm sure there would still be fights, especially if room was given for the aggressive races to invade the core worlds.
Dosens of people would be surrounding the gate and yes spamming probably would be envolved... but this would only be expanded to where the instance begins and ends anyway, so whats the difference? This mechanic worked fine in SWG in my opinion for years, tons of people standing around spamming trades and shop locations (nobody really spamming for groups...) and it was very very immersive, i don't see how it wouldn't be... like a huge market place.
The last idea about the gates always being open is horrible i agree, i can't stand the idea of it and i wouldn't even play if that was the case, it would ruin Stargate entirely for me and others too, i mean the gates are the best part.
As to the computer thing ,, your argument is moot for the simple fact that the game makers have to make the game playable for people with less than top end systems. My point was not about it being playable on lesser setting but actually being playable for the majority of players due to hardware reasons IE loading in to a crowded area. As for your claim of playing almost every new game on max settings , either you are using a 14 inch monitor or else you are flat out lying, cause if they can't do it at the [H] I can't see anyone else running a similar setup somehow magically doing that much better. Unless you did actually splurge on a true supercomputer ,, in which case all the more to you , most people don't have that kind of money to spend.
I'm not sure what you ment by me saying spreading out... but i'm telling you right now that if theres 6 core worlds with say 2500 people online at a time per server then theres not gonna be more than 1500 people spread between 6 core worlds which makes only 250 per planet... so at most there might be 150 people per Stargate area at the very most and they'd be spread out over the entire area where the Stargate is...
The lagg was never that bad in SWG and there was like 250-300 people consistently... if it can work for that game it can work for this one, end of story.
My argument about computers i agree is moot because the selfish ones who want to not spend money on upgrading there computer getting it out of the stoneage will always end up being the focus of the money greedy computer gaming companies... theres very few companies who'll make an engine/game which won't run on out-of-date computers... but i believe MOST current day computers would run SWG therefore would run this game with a hundred people or more in one area.
And yes, i can run almost every game on max graphics easily. Not all admittedly because some games are made to not be able to be run on full... like Operation Flashpoint and F.E.A.R which require stupidly high processing power like those quadruple 7800 beasts which are out now, but i wont get into that.