Other than giving more money what are some things we could do for VR to "assist" in the development.
I'm watching NerdSlayer on YouTube in his Death of a Game series and watching the EverQuest Franchise when he got to what EQ2 did in the form of it's Marketplace. In the Marketplace they had the Player Studio where members of the community designed and fleshed out items that were added to the Marketplace that other players in EQ2 could acutally use.
After watching the video of the tree being made in the July Newsletter, I was thinking, why? That is a lot of wasted time that a talented dev shouldn't be doing. Give me (and I'm a computer idiot) the tools and I could create a tree.
Could VR do something like the Player Studio that EQ2 had? Are there assests in Pantheon that users could create? We could color in the lines of trees, or rocks, or roads. The way EQ2 implemented items from the Player Studio makes me think there could be a way for bored community members to freely assist in the minor assests of the game.
I see what you're getting at but I would hesitate in regards to game content. Simply put, I don't want to play Pantheon, the dev team and community united front to create a vast landscape. I'd rather play the dev teams version of the game for several reason. The coding would be common and as optimized as possible. The quality across the game would be similar. The content across the game would be streamlined and make much more sense. The Lore is defined by their team and they can guide it as is, this is part of why the trees are the way they are. Pateinetly waiting and supporting the team when they bring us requests seems to be the best we can do. An example of this will be when we hit Alpha. The players can give their best feedback to all the systems and bugs they encounter, as the Pre-Alpha team is doing.
Player involvement is actually part of the pledge perks. Regardless, I don't want to play a player designed game, in any way shape or form.
These developers take pride in what they do. When they release this game it's going to be what their vision is for us. Not what some joe shmo cooked up on very limited software. I don't want to know the cost of some of these programs. But in the end this is their game, their vision and they should be able to see it through. All the hard work they put in I would think would be insulting to them.
I'm not saying let some 3 year old with a crayon contribute to whats in game (granted they might make better stuff than me) but have you ever seen the player created content that is released from the Player Studio in EQ2 Marketplace? It's amazing work and often times more creative than what the dev release and more often than not the standards are on par with anything from the game studio itself.
ipDRe said:I don't want to play a player designed game, in any way shape or form.
Me either. But adding knots to that tree (in the video) took 5 hours. Why not give hundreds of eager community members a chance to submit what they've done with a tree.
Give guidlines.
1) Brown
2) Tree
3) Leafs etc.
And take submissions. You potentially could fill the world with trees that look exactly like what you want, community feels involved, you save hundreds of man hours better spent on stuff people will notice rather than a tree no one cares about. (except the person or made it)
Kittik said:ipDRe said:I don't want to play a player designed game, in any way shape or form.
Me either. But adding knots to that tree (in the video) took 5 hours. Why not give hundreds of eager community members a chance to submit what they've done with a tree.
Give guidlines.
1) Brown
2) Tree
3) Leafs etc.
And take submissions. You potentially could fill the world with trees that look exactly like what you want, community feels involved, you save hundreds of man hours better spent on stuff people will notice rather than a tree no one cares about. (except the person or made it)
That goes in to my other points regarding quality, content and coding similarities across an entire game. My perspection of all of these is different then yours and VR's. My interpretation of guidelines will also be different. I personally love the environment detail as I play the game. There is a good chance I'll notice quite a few minor details that the game has put in to trees, or snow, desert, swap, etc. lands. So, I wouldn't refer to many of these objects in a manner that no one cares about.
Like I started off with, I see what you're getting at but I don't feel in game content is the place for the community to help. That shouldn't stop anybody from generating their own tree's, environment, characters, armors, housing, etc. and sending it to the dev team or uploading an image of it on the website though.
Kittik said:Other than giving more money what are some things we could do for VR to "assist" in the development.
I'm watching NerdSlayer on YouTube in his Death of a Game series and watching the EverQuest Franchise when he got to what EQ2 did in the form of it's Marketplace. In the Marketplace they had the Player Studio where members of the community designed and fleshed out items that were added to the Marketplace that other players in EQ2 could acutally use.After watching the video of the tree being made in the July Newsletter, I was thinking, why? That is a lot of wasted time that a talented dev shouldn't be doing. Give me (and I'm a computer idiot) the tools and I could create a tree.
Could VR do something like the Player Studio that EQ2 had? Are there assests in Pantheon that users could create? We could color in the lines of trees, or rocks, or roads. The way EQ2 implemented items from the Player Studio makes me think there could be a way for bored community members to freely assist in the minor assests of the game.
I get the sentiment. And Player Studio is one thing as it was a thought out feature baked into the Station Store with some people that did oversight and it was by and large just reskins of things already in the game. But getting people not associated with the project officially comes with a potential for a metric ton of problems. Now I'm no lawyer or expert, so I'm going to just point out a few things from some observations on why volunteer work from the community to help make parts of the game would probably be a very bad idea.
First, VR is a company and that makes things very different from say a fan project. All sorts of laws and pitfalls creep into this. Sometimes even having your workers under hire or contract for certain things can lead to a wide assortment of problems. So here's just a few of those:
Copyrighted Material: There's two big problems that can arise here. First, if you're outsourcing fans to make something there's no guarantee that they will actually be the ones making it. They could easily rip an asset from one game, make a few changes and submit it to the Pantheon team. Say this happened to several objects. VR can't catch all this stuff. How would they know someone didn't make asset A that was actually altered asset B from game X?
Let's say a year passes into the launch and, as the Internet often does, somebody notices and starts putting that list together. How? It's the Internet, these folks found a flag Shia Labeouf once hid in a mid-western wheat field with only a camera pointed upward at the flag and sky by becoming amature astrolgers and tracking plane flyovers. I put nothing past their obsessive ability to find the most minor of details. Point is, VR suddenly finds out a large number of submitted fan created assets belong to someone else. That's a big problem for two reasons: First, they'll likely have to work to creat new assets quickly as the old ones will probably need to be removed right away. Second, they'd probably owe legal royalties to whomever they belonged to. That's something that can sink a project on its own.
Then there's the potential that someone creates the assets to be used and decides later that they need to be paid for the work they submitted even though there was no agreement for compensation. On that front, there have been lawsuits filed on similar things, some even from contracted workers that signed actual contracts that stated any work done in creating content for said game belonged to the people contracting them to make said game. Not having that contract to fall back on could be another potential problem. Add to that, there's a potential legal argument of who owns the assets. So if someone wants to lease them out elsewhere, can they? If they own it can they assert that control over VR for profit or take legal action against them if not? All questions that require an answer as to who owns the property.
The last thing I'd bring up is that there are some funky labor type law stuff I started browsing through while following some other stuff out of curiosity. And in some cases, as odd as it might sound there may be legal arguments that you could be an employee of X if you meet certain things that might qualify as an employee/employer relationship even if you were never actually hired. Again I'm no lawyer so I'm not even going to make a meager attempt at trying to explain the brain needles I got trying to read any of that, but that was the gist. It also seems to vary state to state.
Business vs Fan projects are two entirely different beasts. So even if VR wanted help from some of its fans to craft their game, in all likelyhood they would have to avoid doing it because there are some major pitfalls that could come back and bite them right in the arse. And sadly these days you have to evaluate on the potential worse case scenario.
ipDRe said:Kittik said:ipDRe said:I don't want to play a player designed game, in any way shape or form.
Me either. But adding knots to that tree (in the video) took 5 hours. Why not give hundreds of eager community members a chance to submit what they've done with a tree.
Give guidlines.
1) Brown
2) Tree
3) Leafs etc.
And take submissions. You potentially could fill the world with trees that look exactly like what you want, community feels involved, you save hundreds of man hours better spent on stuff people will notice rather than a tree no one cares about. (except the person or made it)
That goes in to my other points regarding quality, content and coding similarities across an entire game. My perspection of all of these is different then yours and VR's. My interpretation of guidelines will also be different. I personally love the environment detail as I play the game. There is a good chance I'll notice quite a few minor details that the game has put in to trees, or snow, desert, swap, etc. lands. So, I wouldn't refer to many of these objects in a manner that no one cares about.
Like I started off with, I see what you're getting at but I don't feel in game content is the place for the community to help. That shouldn't stop anybody from generating their own tree's, environment, characters, armors, housing, etc. and sending it to the dev team or uploading an image of it on the website though.
But... we paid for artists to come aboard. This was a small smatterring of what they can do; and to have created a tree with knots and leaves, and supporting design docs in 5 hours is pretty good I think. What I mean is: A complete, priorietary design asset software showing changes in design or colors that is useable and placeable with supporting documentation including addendums for the changes in design or colors all within 5 hours- barely a days work. What are they doing tomorrow? what did they do last week?! I've already seen rocks and grass, caves and crystals, and the lighting. All those bits are assets with their own supporting documentation. Sure, some say the level of detail may be passed over to the eye, but the detail has to be there. Where would Mobeius be without a dot? or a pixel in this case.
I don't know if the Steve Jobs Apple argument applies here, seal up the box and there will be no problems. Once you start letting other people put in their own video cards, sound cards, motherboards, creating their own art and assets and trees, then you open to viruses and ruin the whole thing. Ok, Oblivion did it but to me, some mods became a hinderance so many mods and it became- not the game. Are there any mods for Dark souls? some people are threatened by the "co-op" concept but are slowly embracing it (Praise the sun!) but us codgers in old school MMO's think that's how its always been, mate.
@Kittik
The amount of time that would be wasted by VR staff trying to create a Player Studio for players to use and then having to work through all of the submissions is a waste. They are better off creating for themselves to their standards and getting it done right the first time. What people dont see about Player Studio is all of the rejected pieces of work and all of the back and forth between someone that may have a piece of work that is close to perfect but needs some changes to really fit the mold. It just takes to much time to implement at this point in Pantheon development and would hinder more than help
Just my 2cp
Thanks
Pyde
Oh... and as the Lorax said. I speak for the trees!
I think you‘ve got the right idea when it comes to doing what we can to help VR make Pantheon the best game it can be. But it won’t be from a technical standpoint, leave that to the developers. In my humble opinion, its all about community building for us. We are the community, and we have control over what that looks like. As we all know #communitymatters, and Pantheon will only be as strong as the community that plays it. So if you are looking to help VR out, be creative with community building, or just engage with those that already exist.
And you can give them money :)
Kittik said:Why not give hundreds of eager community members a chance to submit what they've done with a tree.
Because collaborative design projects rarely turn out well. Every artist is going to have a different vision or intepretation of what a "leaf" should be, let alone a complete tree existing as part of an entire zone ecosystem. I would rather wait another two years for their artists flesh out their design, than play a disjointed incoherent mess in six months.
Kittik said:Other than giving more money what are some things we could do for VR to "assist" in the development.
I'm watching NerdSlayer on YouTube in his Death of a Game series and watching the EverQuest Franchise when he got to what EQ2 did in the form of it's Marketplace. In the Marketplace they had the Player Studio where members of the community designed and fleshed out items that were added to the Marketplace that other players in EQ2 could acutally use.After watching the video of the tree being made in the July Newsletter, I was thinking, why? That is a lot of wasted time that a talented dev shouldn't be doing. Give me (and I'm a computer idiot) the tools and I could create a tree.
Could VR do something like the Player Studio that EQ2 had? Are there assests in Pantheon that users could create? We could color in the lines of trees, or rocks, or roads. The way EQ2 implemented items from the Player Studio makes me think there could be a way for bored community members to freely assist in the minor assests of the game.
A talented Dev is probably not doing this Tree.
A talented Artist is doing said Tree (they're still Devs tho, but for the purpose of clarity let's call the coders Dev's and the creators of assets Artists).
Artists makes the 3D models, the Meshes to wrap around the 3D models and the Animations to go with the 3D models.
Devs provide the code to show the 3D models, their Mesh and when which Animation should be playing.
Pretty sure that VR (as they should) have both Coders and Artists. Anything else would be foolish (relying on 3rd Parties is not ideal.. In fact it is likely to create legal issues).
