Options that shouldn't be

Development discussions for TMW's official client, alternative clients and client adaptations.


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Ledmitz
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Re: Options that shouldn't be

Post by Ledmitz »

Clort wrote: 17 Apr 2021, 15:24

I'm against Ledmit's suggestion to remove client-side settings/options for reasons Hello gave.

I don't want all options gone or anything crazy. I just would like to see some of the functions I consider to be cheats disabled, unless there is a justified reason to have them. The "Heal most injured player" is one. The sprite layers being able to be removed just seems counter-productive in certain situations. Someone makes the art, someone puts together a map, someone uses that to hide something for a quest. Players that remove layers see the item, NPC or whatever better and thus giving an advantage to those that remove the work of our devs. Other players may realize there are other ways to find things, like cycling the NPC target toggle for instance. So the better player gets the reward first.

But there are even more silly things in those options, like "Enable battle tab" and "Show battle events". Is there any reason to have a battle tab if we never see any output? This should be one option not 2. There are more like it. Logging debugging is worse because there are 2 different tabs to enable things in for it to work correctly.

But this may all be pointless if a new client gets released. Hopefully any new client will not have all this confusion and techie advantage.
/me crosses fingers

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Ledmitz
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Re: Options that shouldn't be

Post by Ledmitz »

feff wrote: 08 May 2021, 09:39

so you have to manually look through your list of party members one by one, trying to find who's at the lowest health

No. I don't think that social list should exist. I think you should have to pay attention to the action and have a rough idea of how much abuse a player can take and based on that decide who needs healing and when. There are particles that show damage inflicted and particles for criticals, particles for normal and magic hits, emotes we can use to say we need a heal. I have no information gauges as a mage. I'm not in a military vehicle, I'm a magic user. Make a spell that shows player health and I'm all for it. Have client always reporting it to all is bad for the game, as there is no rationale or explanation.

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Livio
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Re: Options that shouldn't be

Post by Livio »

We are facing a lot of issues here. The client interface is something designed around a lifestyle of more than a decade ago. Young users that comes from "material design" touchy thingies will probably not like it.
Many modern games have simple polished interfaces usually filtering out advanced options if any.
That's is not the right moment to do that on M+ due the heavy use of the "GUIChan" library and other client issues.

For the "Healing of the most injured player" I'd move that on another thread and make a poll because that issue by itself has a lot of things to talk about like people not knowing that option, detection failure, tactical (dis)advantages and so on. Personally I find it useful but works badly on Legacy sometimes.

Ledmitz wrote: 13 May 2021, 00:18

No. I don't think that social list should exist.

Well, I have that opened all the time for party, nav, Guild and the like. Maybe you don't want HP damage to appear on it. Am I right?

Ledmitz wrote: 13 May 2021, 00:18

I think you should have to pay attention to the action and have a rough idea of how much abuse a player can take and based on that decide who needs healing and when. There are particles that show damage inflicted and particles for criticals, particles for normal and magic hits, emotes we can use to say we need a heal. I have no information gauges as a mage. I'm not in a military vehicle, I'm a magic user. Make a spell that shows player health and I'm all for it. Have client always reporting it to all is bad for the game, as there is no rationale or explanation.

Something like: "More playing with people and less with numbers"?
However, what you call "cheating" in some cases may not bother other players. I guess that's another thing that deserves a poll.
Using functions aimed for developers in order to reveal entities on map or getting valuable information easily is something quite debatable as cheat as anyone can do that. In my opinion I'm sure that such functions can spoil the fun.

Led, the "show battle events" puts battle events on debug tab if you disable battle tab probably to help developers with logging. If you enable the battle tab and disable the battle events that tab remains empty exactly as you stated before. But I'm not sure that M+ can hide or disable checkboxes if you enable or disable other options: I have no such knowledge of GUIChan but I believe that both options should remain.
I believe that's not feasible to have one client for players and another one for developers,

Off-topic things below:

Spoiler:
Ledmitz wrote: 13 May 2021, 00:18

[...] emotes we can use to say we need a heal.

Ah, yeah... Sometimes I forget to tell that to newbies. I remember many years ago that Nced told me that as one of the first things to do. "And don't attack the white slimes if you can't kill them in a single blow."
N00b memories...

Ledmitz wrote: 13 May 2021, 00:18

I'm not in a military vehicle [...]

But I'm sure you want to be inside a military vehicle! And I want it too: let's grab a tank, go to Asphodel Moore and run over the graveyard tombs shooting whatever moves. Moar sound effects, particles, undeads pulverized, metal music and fun. Smell of death, upturned swamp dirt and badly burned diesel fuel.
And if that can't be implemented in game I don't care. Let's do another drawing contest:
Draw the military vehicle(s) of your dreams spreading death in TMW
I will not participate because I'm too good at it.

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Re: Options that shouldn't be

Post by feff »

Livio wrote: 12 May 2021, 22:12
feff wrote: 11 May 2021, 04:53

It certainly dampens people's enthusiasm when they say that you can do something just because it's free software, without any knowledge of your skill or ability.

Before contributing to rEvolt quests they warned me that TMW will never be like RPG Maker. So read the manual and ask on IRC if you aren't able to go on with development. I kinda dislike that but I see no other way to move on.

RPG Maker isn't even open source! That automatically makes it worse than any C++ project!

Yeah I have weird criteria I know.

All I'm saying is it's not enough to tell someone they're "free" to edit the source. Not everyone can do that, and manaplus is a bit less "doable" than most programs. Better to say something like "I don't really want that to be done," or "It would be neat if someone fixed that," instead of phrasing it like they're not good enough to fix it.

jesusalva wrote: 12 May 2021, 23:41

Also, when you hear something along the lines "DIY" (Do it yourself), it is not (only?) because we think you might fall in any of the above no-no categories, it is the maximum rule for developers and we tell each other "DIY" quite often as well.

I never really saw the point of saying that. I might say "You can do it yourself by ..." and then give the actual advice. But I'm not asking people to do it for me here, so why would anyone feel a need to tell me to do it myself?

Heck I'm not even arguing that anything should be done. I think this change shouldn't be done! It's already fixed!

Ledmitz wrote: 12 May 2021, 23:52

"The point I was trying to make is that it takes a better player to cycle targets and heal based on observation and interaction, rather than having a cheat key that automatically finds the most injured player.

It's not cheating when you make things easier. It's cheating when you make things easier only for yourself, people you're playing with don't know you're doing it, and you use that advantage against them.

I prefer the term "griefing" to be honest. It's less hostile to cleverness and ingenuity and more to the point than "cheating."

I do think it would be neat if there were better ways to observe and interact. Like if you could have everyone's HP/max HP pop up when cycling through targets. People might deliberately avoid 'F' in that situation, since there was another way they could effectively play.

If you have a key like this, you make it less of a game. The challenge is in the operation. This isn't a total strategy game, but is in part. Hand-eye coordination should still matter to some degree.

I mean you're free not to press the 'F' key. What you're saying is that I should not be allowed to play that way. Development of the game affects everyone who plays, so it's a lot bigger deal when you take away our options. My coordination isn't great, so should that punish other people by barring me from healing them, at no benefit to anyone?

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jesusalva
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Re: Options that shouldn't be

Post by jesusalva »

"The point I was trying to make is that it takes a better player to cycle targets and heal based on observation and interaction, rather than having a cheat key that automatically finds the most injured player.

It's not cheating when you make things easier. It's cheating when you make things easier only for yourself, people you're playing with don't know you're doing it, and you use that advantage against them.

I prefer the term "griefing" to be honest. It's less hostile to cleverness and ingenuity and more to the point than "cheating."

I do think it would be neat if there were better ways to observe and interact. Like if you could have everyone's HP/max HP pop up when cycling through targets. People might deliberately avoid 'F' in that situation, since there was another way they could effectively play.

Add a pre-hook at

Code: Select all

clif->party_hp(sd);

instructing to halt execution.

And then the game server will no longer inform the users of HP change.

But keep in mind game server only provides this info for party members; IIRC the one for non-party-members is calculated by ManaPlus so it can only account the time the being was visible, and once out of visible radius - 14 tiles in TMW and 18 tiles in ML - this data is reset.

So yeah, it is a dirty hack which won't work well and probably should be either removed as it is misleading or restricted to party members only.

It was not supposed to exist; Has the standing of a widespread code hack if you prefer - and it is highly unlikely game servers will ever send you this info for all beings as if anything, it would be quite bandwidth intensive.

Spoiler:

What the game server expects the party HUD to look like:

MMORPG Party HUD
MMORPG Party HUD
Captura de tela em 2021-05-14 17-29-13.png (65.11 KiB) Viewed 3356 times

What ManaPlus could do with Gui-Chan:

M+ Party HUD and GUI
M+ Party HUD and GUI
Captura de tela em 2021-05-14 17-29-50.png (143.08 KiB) Viewed 3356 times

And yes, this impacts gameplay; Given M+ does not have a party HUD, it makes parties way more permanent than they are supposed to be :lol:
To the point they start competing with Guilds.

Jesusalva (aka. Jesusaves)
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Ledmitz
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Re: Options that shouldn't be

Post by Ledmitz »

Ledmitz wrote: 13 May 2021, 00:18

No. I don't think that social list tab should exist.

You're correct Livio. It's just the extra info and if it was just a list of playert names then it would be useless anyway. I think it's cool that party can see more and it even makes a bit of sense. If you party up, it was planned and a meeting is assumed to have taken place.... or something like that. Also, the party seeing more info does help to initiate co-op factor, yes.
:D

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