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Thread Statistics | Show CCP posts - 43 post(s) |
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CCP Bayesian
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Posted - 2012.01.17 10:37:00 -
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Time for some new information on our plans.
Incarna is not dead, it is however on a slight hiatus with much less development effort being put towards it. This is partly due to the refocus on to spaceship gameplay and the War expansion. Mainly it's because we want to take the time to do the gameplay in Incarna right and learn from the mistakes we made in creating the initial release.
The effort is being led by a new, small team inventively named Team Avatar. We're tasked with maintenance and improvement of existing systems, developing new features for the Captains Quarters, NeX Store and Character Creator and prototyping multiplayer gameplay for Incarna. Our top priority after dealing with defects that are live on TQ is to come up with a solid vision and find the gameplay for future work on a multiplayer Incarna release.
We are interested in your ideas and will trawl this epic thread to see what you guys have been discussing. Any more suggestions would be good to put in the Features & Ideas Discussion forum just so that they are more visible to us.
We'll be coming out with more concrete information on what this all entails soonish but fire away with questions.
EVE Software Engineer
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CCP Bayesian
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Posted - 2012.01.17 11:12:00 -
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Salpun wrote:Thanks for the update.
What is the current state of the multi avatar CQ? 3 characters plus hopefully. What do you want to get to before release to Sisi:?:].
A Sisi release of any new multiplayer gameplay content is sadly a long way off, our team is currently only five people. Ideally though we want compelling avatar gameplay that has you interacting with other people in a way that is complementary to EVE's existing spaceship gameplay. To that end and as I said above we're mostly going to be concentrating on getting a solid vision and using the time to prototype gameplay features. This not only lets us have a pretty good idea that we're making something good but when the time comes we'll have a much better understanding of the technical and time requirements involved. We'll of course keep the community filled in on what we're doing via Devblogs and the forums. We're at the early stages right now so there is sadly not much meat to add to the bones.
Salpun wrote:What improvements are we getting in Crusible 1.1?
For the Incarna features it's more bug-fixes. The team has literally only been together for a week or so at this point so we're mostly planning right now. Prior to that it was just me fixing things in an even smaller team!
Salpun wrote:When are the rest of the clothes going to be available in the nex store and will the price be droping any time soon?
This is definitely high on our list of things to look at, no firm dates as yet but we don't want to leave all these clothing items sitting around. We'll be taking a look at the pricing structure at the same time.
EVE Software Engineer
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CCP Bayesian
104
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Posted - 2012.01.17 11:37:00 -
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Rek Seven wrote:CCP Bayesian wrote:Time for some new information on our plans.
The effort is being led by a new, small team inventively named Team Avatar. We're tasked with maintenance and improvement of existing systems, developing new features for the Captains Quarters, NeX Store and Character Creator and prototyping multiplayer gameplay for Incarna. Our top priority after dealing with defects that are live on TQ is to come up with a solid vision and find the gameplay for future work on a multiplayer Incarna release.
We are interested in your ideas and will trawl this epic thread to see what you guys have been discussing. Any more suggestions would be good to put in the Features & Ideas Discussion forum just so that they are more visible to us.
I would be grateful if you could clarify... I assume that you're main tasks for now will revolve around improvements to the performance and aesthetics of CQ/avatars but when you say that you will be prototyping multiplayer gameplay for incarna, are you talking about multiplayer features that with be brought to the existing CQ experience or are you referring to the creation of a new area specifically designed for multiplayer interaction? This may help when we are making suggestions
Basically, "our top priority after dealing with defects that are live on TQ is to come up with a solid vision and find the gameplay for future work on a multiplayer Incarna release". From my perspective anything we do has to be compelling and if we can find a compelling gameplay experience in expanding the CQ with multiplayer aspects then that is something we'd definitely look at. We are definitely going to be looking at letting you out of the CQ though as they'd get crowded pretty quickly. ;)
EVE Software Engineer
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CCP Bayesian
104
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Posted - 2012.01.17 13:11:00 -
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Razin wrote:CCP Bayesian wrote:
We'll be coming out with more concrete information on what this all entails soonish but fire away with questions.
Glad to hear an EVE feature isn't getting abandoned. A couple of questions about what's currently on TQ: 1. Do you plan to update the 'clothing simulation'? Because currently clothing looks like it's glued to the body of the avatar. This is especially bad for any top layer clothing that is supposed to hang loose when unbuttoned/unzipped, like jackets, etc. 2. The character creator adds extra shadows across the face when it does the off-line rendering for the portrait. When are you going to fix that?
1. No plans currently, some parts of the clothing are physically simulated but most moves in a similar way to other games with the character animation. It's a balance between performance and visual fidelity.
2. This should be fixed when Crucible 1.1 goes out.
EVE Software Engineer
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CCP Bayesian
104
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Posted - 2012.01.17 16:44:00 -
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DeMichael Crimson wrote:As for posting threads for WiS ideas in 'Features & Ideas Discussion' forum, there's already been quite a few different ones posted. It probably be a good idea if CCP made a sticky thread asking for players to post ideas for WiS gameplay content. Then the various ideas would all be located in one area for easy reference. However, while I was browsing the 'Features & Ideas Discussion' sub forum channel, I noticed there was a definite lack of interaction by CCP.
Thanks for taking the time to scour the sub-forum to find all those threads!
Hopefully you should see an uptake in participation as we really get rolling on this and throw some ideas and questions out. I'm reluctant to start commenting on specific ideas and their relative merits because there are literally almost as many as there are users posting on here. It can be too easy to get sucked into the rabbit hole. I think it's likely we will use that sub-forum to gain focused feedback though.
EVE Software Engineer
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CCP Bayesian
104
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Posted - 2012.01.17 16:59:00 -
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Bloodpetal wrote:Thanks for taking the time to respond.
No problem, thanks for sharing your ideas!
EVE Software Engineer
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CCP Bayesian
104
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Posted - 2012.01.17 17:41:00 -
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Sakura Imoru wrote:How are the chances to get a proper "Pod-Room" so we can emerge from our capsule more in private instead of the whole station watching us on the balcony in the buff?
Sorry that wasn't intentional. That sort of cosmetic change is pretty low priority at the moment as it would require a large amount of our artists time. We're more focused on working out what the compelling vision and gameplay for Incarna in general should be so our art support is minimal.
EVE Software Engineer
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CCP Bayesian
104
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Posted - 2012.01.18 11:20:00 -
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Che Biko wrote:I get the idea that you (CCP) for some reason are back to the drawing board, as if a lot of the ideas you've had for this are no good anymore. This is something that baffles a lot of players, as you seemed to have plenty of good ideas, even back in 2008.
I wasn't actually here in 2008 but we haven't abandoned any ideas. The idea at the moment is to find and validate the ideas that we think will work best.
Che Biko wrote:I wonder what you people think was wrong with Incarna as you had intended to release it this winter, and why. Was it technical issues? Did you think the players wouldn't like the Incarna features because of the uproar last summer? What will be done differently than you had originally planned?
A little from column A and a little from column B. What we are doing differently is setting up a strong direction and goal for Incarna through prototyping. A lot of our issues in the development effort of the last year stem from not realising as a company what we actually needed in terms of technology, time and resources but still needing to hit firm dates. Working through a proper pre-production cycle allows us to make those known unknowns more clear as well as proving our gameplay features.
Che Biko wrote:There was a graphical representation of the workload of "Incarna": ~1/4 character creator, ~1/2 CQ, ~1/4 the rest (multiplayer stuff). Is this still a valid representation?
I've not seen it so I couldn't really comment on the rationale used at the time but to me the meat of the remaining work is the multiplayer stuff.
Che Biko wrote:What would be the shortest time before a multiplayer avatar enviroment will come to TQ, and what the longest?
This is a bit of a 'how long is a piece of string' question but the answer is really dependent on the priority Incarna is given by CCP Unifex.
EVE Software Engineer
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CCP Bayesian
104
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Posted - 2012.01.18 11:44:00 -
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Sakura Imoru wrote:You said that Team Avatar is made up by 5 guys and gals right now (*fights the urge to call you "Team Power Rangers"*) . Who are the other 4? (And when will you be joined by a 6th Ranger?  )
We have in no particular order:
Designers:
CCP Flying Scotsman
CCP t0rfifrans
Software Engineers:
CCP Karkur
CCP Bayesian
QA:
CCP RedDawn
EVE Software Engineer
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CCP Bayesian
104
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Posted - 2012.01.19 09:06:00 -
[10] - Quote
Flamespar wrote:Will there be anything WiS related to get excited over at Fanfest?
We definitely want to do a roundtable session and of course will all be there to chat with anyway.
EVE Software Engineer
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CCP Bayesian
104
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Posted - 2012.01.19 09:14:00 -
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Indahmawar Fazmarai wrote:Well, that could be a first goal. The point is, they don't have that technology yet. As Mashie put it, the CQ currently is a client-side feature and the only functionality it haves is the in-world UI (holograms).
it's kinda puzzling to try to figure what they did expect to do with Incarna, actually, provided it is a single player client side environment and they don't even have the foundations to make it multiplayer.
There is a lot more there on the technology side than is visible in the current Incarna feature set. There's also a lot more work to do though. To ease some of the more worried minds I can say that we have had multiple avatars walking around in the same environment together.
EVE Software Engineer
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CCP Bayesian
104
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Posted - 2012.01.19 18:32:00 -
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Vincent Athena wrote:That makes me wonder if it would be possible to get some test version into the game rather soon. For example a simple meeting area inside the "Site One" structure of the Arek'Jaalan project. Initially it would be just a meeting area. As that structure was done by the role players, it would be quite sufficient for us, and well received.
To be brutally honest this is the gulf between having done it and having a lot more work to do in order to make it something we'd feel comfortable releasing. That's not to say we won't try putting multiplayer environments out on Singularity to see how well they work but we can't make any promises as to when that would be or if we even will before the technology is improved. The size of the team working on this feature is pretty prohibitive in that regard.
EVE Software Engineer
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