I guess I just don't have a fair idea of how it would be implemented. Perhaps there is a quick way of doing it, but I see it prone to glitching if a quest is reset while we're in-game, somehow. heck, we apparently figured out a lot of glitches, like a way to see monster stats, by doing thing nobody would expect. What if a user starts a conversation with a NPC and resets the quest at the same time? Both fixes would likely cough up a little blood if s2 or swarf didn't consider it while coding.
Posted: Wed Dec 07, 2011 6:45 pm
Derp, derp, derp. Red Kutai, where's that card game you were making in some guild or something?
Derp, derp, derp. Red Kutai, where's that card game you were making in some guild or something?
Oh that thing! emotion_awesome
emotion_dowant Show us red.
Posted: Thu Dec 08, 2011 4:22 am
Oi. redface
Do keep in mind that this was a long, long time ago. whee
That said, though, in my recent period of generally disoriented thought, I've actually gone back and reconsidered a few concepts from that game, as recently as last week. The Guild is very, very dead, however, so I tend not to bother posting in there even when I am thinking about it... sweatdrop
I don't think you're simplifying the cause at least. Our quests were built onto the site's quest system. They are probably the only thing that used it in the last 3 years, and a lot of people have a lot of frozen quests stuck there from sponsors. Myself included.
Quote:
[NPC] Deva The House on the Hill Searching the Shadow Search for Kamila in the second cave section of Deadman's Shadow. zOMG! Quests: Step 3
Ruby Ruby's Rack Scion Achievements
[GAIA] FiredUpCheerleader Around Gaia Fired Up! 2 guys lots of girls
HeadShot Around Gaia Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 No details. You must watch the movie to complete this step. (Details) (Go to the NPC)
[MTV] Julie Around Gaia Promo MTVHills No details.
This lag seems in communicating quest progress between the game server and the site server seems far too common.
But, I feel that the "repair" solution could be monumental if it's the way you describe it. We're talking a check that would work for each and every step of each and every quest. Thus it is some work because, if you want to re-update the quest according to the flags, you need to make sure the flags aren't out of order first - for every possible step of any quest. If you want to update the flags according to your in-game quest that made a NPC beccome silent... Wouldn't that just leave things as they are? Abandoning, on the other hand sounds pretty straightforward. You're in Quest X. Remove all flags, remove all loot/animated killed counts off progress list and change the state of involved NPCs. It's always the same type of fix. Unless most of it is already in the game in a way that makes this task easy, then quest restarting would just be one step along the way towards quest repair at any point.
Well, it's worth noting, each quest knows which quest it is - if my Galoshes Go Squashes quest is somehow tripped-up, and I click the 'Repair Quest' button next to it, it's not going to check every quest in the game to fix my one. It would check the array of flags that is established for Galoshes Go Squashes (establishing a database of quest-flag possibilities would be the largest part of the project), compare it to the flags currently on my quest, and if there's an inconsistency between the two, it'll remove flags from my quest until there's no such inconsistency remaining. It is slightly more complicated with multiple-outcome quests, where it would need to check against multiple arrays to determine whether there were inconsistencies, but that's hardly an insurmountable obstacle.
I agree that 'Abandon Quest' would be much easier to implement, but again I feel that it's a rather unintuitive solution. It's still a worthwhile feature, for reasons unrelated to glitch-fixing, but it's not a natural solution to being unable to complete one's quests. Allowing the game to resolve these issues automatically also allows for it to make such checks routinely - for instance, checking each of a player's active quests each time a player connects to the server (something that 'Abandon Quest' wouldn't be able to facilitate). I'd still advise keeping a way of initiating the fix manually, or - at the very least - include a 'Quest Assistance' guide that advises you to switch servers (or visist the Forums!), among other potential hints.
Currently, fixing those glitches is a ridiculous amount of work - the devs have to manually check quest flags, and determine whether they're accurate or not. However, I suspect that such a process could be automated, and run routinely, to avoid such issues in general, and particularly when players don't understand what's going on...
It would depend on how quest flags are implemented.
If it were a system similar to Skyrim/Oblivion where they're just integer values which represent the stage in the quest, I would imagine it to be fairly simple to fix. Similarly, boolean values would also be possible.
I dare say that Gaia had made it needlessly complicated though. Especially since... I don't get at all how it breaks. Surely, once the transaction is logged with the database the flag will get updated properly. Similarly, if the transaction ISN'T logged then the quest simply doesn't update and the update can be triggered again.
Posted: Fri Dec 09, 2011 2:12 am
Valheita
Red Kutai
DrQuint
I don't think you're simplifying the cause at least. Our quests were built onto the site's quest system. They are probably the only thing that used it in the last 3 years, and a lot of people have a lot of frozen quests stuck there from sponsors. Myself included.
Quote:
[NPC] Deva The House on the Hill Searching the Shadow Search for Kamila in the second cave section of Deadman's Shadow. zOMG! Quests: Step 3
Ruby Ruby's Rack Scion Achievements
[GAIA] FiredUpCheerleader Around Gaia Fired Up! 2 guys lots of girls
HeadShot Around Gaia Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 No details. You must watch the movie to complete this step. (Details) (Go to the NPC)
[MTV] Julie Around Gaia Promo MTVHills No details.
This lag seems in communicating quest progress between the game server and the site server seems far too common.
But, I feel that the "repair" solution could be monumental if it's the way you describe it. We're talking a check that would work for each and every step of each and every quest. Thus it is some work because, if you want to re-update the quest according to the flags, you need to make sure the flags aren't out of order first - for every possible step of any quest. If you want to update the flags according to your in-game quest that made a NPC beccome silent... Wouldn't that just leave things as they are? Abandoning, on the other hand sounds pretty straightforward. You're in Quest X. Remove all flags, remove all loot/animated killed counts off progress list and change the state of involved NPCs. It's always the same type of fix. Unless most of it is already in the game in a way that makes this task easy, then quest restarting would just be one step along the way towards quest repair at any point.
Well, it's worth noting, each quest knows which quest it is - if my Galoshes Go Squashes quest is somehow tripped-up, and I click the 'Repair Quest' button next to it, it's not going to check every quest in the game to fix my one. It would check the array of flags that is established for Galoshes Go Squashes (establishing a database of quest-flag possibilities would be the largest part of the project), compare it to the flags currently on my quest, and if there's an inconsistency between the two, it'll remove flags from my quest until there's no such inconsistency remaining. It is slightly more complicated with multiple-outcome quests, where it would need to check against multiple arrays to determine whether there were inconsistencies, but that's hardly an insurmountable obstacle.
I agree that 'Abandon Quest' would be much easier to implement, but again I feel that it's a rather unintuitive solution. It's still a worthwhile feature, for reasons unrelated to glitch-fixing, but it's not a natural solution to being unable to complete one's quests. Allowing the game to resolve these issues automatically also allows for it to make such checks routinely - for instance, checking each of a player's active quests each time a player connects to the server (something that 'Abandon Quest' wouldn't be able to facilitate). I'd still advise keeping a way of initiating the fix manually, or - at the very least - include a 'Quest Assistance' guide that advises you to switch servers (or visist the Forums!), among other potential hints.
Currently, fixing those glitches is a ridiculous amount of work - the devs have to manually check quest flags, and determine whether they're accurate or not. However, I suspect that such a process could be automated, and run routinely, to avoid such issues in general, and particularly when players don't understand what's going on...
It would depend on how quest flags are implemented.
If it were a system similar to Skyrim/Oblivion where they're just integer values which represent the stage in the quest, I would imagine it to be fairly simple to fix. Similarly, boolean values would also be possible.
I dare say that Gaia had made it needlessly complicated though. Especially since... I don't get at all how it breaks. Surely, once the transaction is logged with the database the flag will get updated properly. Similarly, if the transaction ISN'T logged then the quest simply doesn't update and the update can be triggered again.
Indeed, that was my concern. The quest flags can be just a boolean with pointers for all the functionality they need to have. A freaking BIT, just true or false. There's barely a window that justifies a communication lag causing such a thing. I, again, just feel like pointing out how old, unoptimized and purely catastrophic the main site's quest system must be, because I don't see the original zOMG! team letting something like this pass for so long specially during their period of "Fix 200 bugs each update".
And it's also what it worries me for the future of such a quest fixing feature. The need to communicate this to an external server means it's that server that's doing the storage of how far we're in our quests. That's perfectly fine, every MMO does it and that's how you can log in to different servers and maintain your progress (Well, not every MMO does it. Several have you create a new character on the new server). My problem is with that is that, even if it's the game that handles the flag check, which shouldn't be too complex to begin with as quests happen to be a linear chain of events, then it's still required of the other server to accept the game's signal to reset all flags of a quest to negative. If the server isn't made ready to accept this, then that means someone has to go add it there. And that's going to do alterations on something the code architecture of might not be known by either of our coders. But I doubt that's the case anyways, since the devs can manually fix the flags, then I 'hope' that means they know what they're doing with it.
It would depend on how quest flags are implemented.
If it were a system similar to Skyrim/Oblivion where they're just integer values which represent the stage in the quest, I would imagine it to be fairly simple to fix. Similarly, boolean values would also be possible.
I dare say that Gaia had made it needlessly complicated though. Especially since... I don't get at all how it breaks. Surely, once the transaction is logged with the database the flag will get updated properly. Similarly, if the transaction ISN'T logged then the quest simply doesn't update and the update can be triggered again.
Needlessly complicated is par-for-the-course here, I think - and it sounds like exactly what must be the case.
All that I can think is that a quest's tasks and flags are handled separately - the tasks in question are supposed to activate the flags, but the systems aren't mutually dependent. Thus if the game lags while a task is activating the next flag on your quest, causing the next flag to be activated twice in succession (that is, the next two flags), you no longer have access to the task you need in order to continue to activate flags. The task that you have is now irrelevant to the point in the quest that you're at, leaving you no way to proceed. Alternatively, if the flags are booleans that are being flipped (rather than set explicitly, for some reason), duplicate requests caused by lag would set and then clear the flag, again leaving the player with a task/flag mismatch.
Of course, that requires that the tasks not be dependent upon the state of your flags (otherwise a mismatch would be impossible), but that tasks still check the flagstate before activating new flags (otherwise the game would continue activating flags and granting tasks, but at an offset to the storyline). Actually, since NPCs are the most common source of these problems, I would suspect that it's the NPCs that are checking your flagstate to determine whether they should talk to you, so when your task ("Talk to NPC x." ) doesn't match your flagstate, the system breaks down...
EDIT: Why would tasks and flags be set up independently, though? I would presume that it was done to allow for multiple-path quests, but you'd suspect at least a little dependency with things that are so intimately related, no? whee
Posted: Sat Dec 10, 2011 2:48 am
Red Kutai
Valheita
It would depend on how quest flags are implemented.
If it were a system similar to Skyrim/Oblivion where they're just integer values which represent the stage in the quest, I would imagine it to be fairly simple to fix. Similarly, boolean values would also be possible.
I dare say that Gaia had made it needlessly complicated though. Especially since... I don't get at all how it breaks. Surely, once the transaction is logged with the database the flag will get updated properly. Similarly, if the transaction ISN'T logged then the quest simply doesn't update and the update can be triggered again.
Needlessly complicated is par-for-the-course here, I think - and it sounds like exactly what must be the case.
All that I can think is that a quest's tasks and flags are handled separately - the tasks in question are supposed to activate the flags, but the systems aren't mutually dependent. Thus if the game lags while a task is activating the next flag on your quest, causing the next flag to be activated twice in succession (that is, the next two flags), you no longer have access to the task you need in order to continue to activate flags. The task that you have is now irrelevant to the point in the quest that you're at, leaving you no way to proceed. Alternatively, if the flags are booleans that are being flipped (rather than set explicitly, for some reason), duplicate requests caused by lag would set and then clear the flag, again leaving the player with a task/flag mismatch.
Of course, that requires that the tasks not be dependent upon the state of your flags (otherwise a mismatch would be impossible), but that tasks still check the flagstate before activating new flags (otherwise the game would continue activating flags and granting tasks, but at an offset to the storyline). Actually, since NPCs are the most common source of these problems, I would suspect that it's the NPCs that are checking your flagstate to determine whether they should talk to you, so when your task ("Talk to NPC x." ) doesn't match your flagstate, the system breaks down...
That would be about the only way I can think of for them to mess it up. Two flags controlling the path of the quest. Makes you wonder why.
I had an epiphany. Quite a mean one at that. Let me tell you how it rolled...
For as much inhospitable /v/ manages to be I find it quite cozy of a place to be, once in a while. As a start, it's the only place in the entire internet where you can get discussion on games that is both fully informed, no matter how obscure or old the game is, and, many times indiscernible from, unbiased. No other place in the internet will see people hating on mario or zelda without seeing it hit the freaking headlines.
And, despite the apparent huge and chaotic feel of the place, there ARE quite a few organized anons out there, as well as an incredible amount of "regulars". It so happens that once in a while, /v/, or most of the other main board besides /b/, gets their panties wet over the prospect of something bigger. Most times it fails, as shown by the two canceled trips to Valve (even though Gabe Newel had promised to give /v/irgins a tour), or any mention of Pressure/Airlock games ever becoming a reality. Several times it... it is just "there", as shown by Broquest which hasn't moved forward in a while. And others... it succeeds - The /v/'s recommended wiki is first stop for recommended games on the entire internet, just not voted so by idiots who still haven't heard of it.
So then it happens. One day I trudge the imageboards and I see someone asking for F2P MMO's to play. I make the mandatory "zOMG! (zomg.com) It's
Fun
despite what you'll think." post. A day later I see a F2P MMO general, with a list of games they tried... Herp durp, zOMG! post again. A day later, they have a F2P MMO General picture, a picture with a list of game with screenshots and a steam group that dedicates to try new games together. And they strive for having both a "completed" list and a "quality list" with the picture, so as long as the MMO isn't complete a**.
I would normally not think much of all of this, but HOLY DAMN I KNOW THE GUY DOING THIS, small internet. I instantly hook up with the group on steam chat and catch them playing Eden Eternal. >Aeria Games - No thanks. Not going to join them, right now I think. But then I catch an interesting point in the conversation. I had posted zOMG! again (along with PSO:BB and Ragnarok Online that those idiots managed to miss somehow). And someone asks who was the f*****t that posted a gaiaonline game. "Who the ******** called me a f*****t?" ... ... ... What? I don't see a problem in admitting to be a "gaiafag" in a group with so low standards. Half of them probably closet furries who fapped to Faithful Te- anyways... For the sake of completeness, I put myself in a position where I had to be brutally honest about zOMG! I'll be frank, these people WERE willing to play it because it had no required installation and because I mentioned o_8 (They have an hard-on for his art you wouldn't believe.)
And there I was, making the biggest leap of word of mouth I ever could for this game. And this was my review of zOMG!:
zOMG! >Made by Gaiaonline >Terrible/Unexisting Tutorial >Main Quest Glitches as early as first Area >Only content update in 3 years is P2P and has obnoxious speed bumps to progress >Badly unbalanced PvE >No PvP >Made by Gaiaonline
That was my epiphany. Time to be unbiased about zOMG! as possible and I describe it as a game that I wouldn't just not recommend, I'd also likely tell people to get the ******** away from it instead.
Oh well. I'm now waiting for them to roll around to start playing Ever Quest 2.
Quint version is a long winded rant about the company's structure, artists having too much power with too few communication skills, the CEO being pretty much a cool guy doing great choices on is work which has "Let Gaia rot" and "Give it more stuff to rot with" along in the agenda (don't blame him). It's a good deal community based, both in-game, outside of the game and non game related affairs, albeit that situation drastically changed recently on the most former, still, the worst part, defense force, didn't. Also, zOMG! developer rant, which mixes with the company structure rant, explaining why the game is so slow to make the most minorest of additions despite easily made comparisons to other games. Overall, the fact this game is gaiaonline means that the current issues it has won't be handled soon, nor is there much of a future prospect.
Internet at large (The knowing part of it) sums up in: Cyberers, wannabe anime style that doesn't appeal to "Weeabos" enough in its medium, Artist launch-pad to use and forget and both the Meme Abuse and the terrifying force of the Cash Shop, which had predated the larger ill fame those have now pretty much everywhere else but have been done by gaia first. Also, if mapplestory gets huge flak for its cash shop driven nature, then transcribe that to a nagging game-unrelated cashop. So pretty much, Gaia isn't going to be listed as a place for a bunch of nerds to go to if they want a game for the next 2 weeks to 2 months, it'll be marked as a place for young teenager girls who never used the internet before and probably describe forum going as "Playing Gaiaonline".
Hmmm... Issues really come up with ease when one settles down and tries to review them.
Quint version is a long winded rant about the company's structure, artists having too much power with too few communication skills, the CEO being pretty much a cool guy doing great choices on is work which has "Let Gaia rot" and "Give it more stuff to rot with" along in the agenda (don't blame him). It's a good deal community based, both in-game, outside of the game and non game related affairs, albeit that situation drastically changed recently on the most former, still, the worst part, defense force, didn't. Also, zOMG! developer rant, which mixes with the company structure rant, explaining why the game is so slow to make the most minorest of additions despite easily made comparisons to other games. Overall, the fact this game is gaiaonline means that the current issues it has won't be handled soon, nor is there much of a future prospect.
Internet at large (The knowing part of it) sums up in: Cyberers, wannabe anime style that doesn't appeal to "Weeabos" enough in its medium, Artist launch-pad to use and forget and both the Meme Abuse and the terrifying force of the Cash Shop, which had predated the larger ill fame those have now pretty much everywhere else but have been done by gaia first. Also, if mapplestory gets huge flak for its cash shop driven nature, then transcribe that to a nagging game-unrelated cashop. So pretty much, Gaia isn't going to be listed as a place for a bunch of nerds to go to if they want a game for the next 2 weeks to 2 months, it'll be marked as a place for young teenager girls who never used the internet before and probably describe forum going as "Playing Gaiaonline".
Hmmm... Issues really come up with ease when one settles down and tries to review them.
Int at large: Quint falls under insider view and I already have that. I'll spare ye the rant xD
Posted: Thu Dec 15, 2011 6:39 am
I am growing progressively less comfortable posting anywhere outside of this Guild. Do you all make it too easy to keep up discussion, or does everyone else simply make it too hard? redface
Eh, get where you're coming from. Perhaps. I just don't see anything to say right now. We're on a development stalemate in terms of both zOMG! and Gaia as a whole. Again... And the threads going on outside don't really peak my interest.
Doesn't help that I have so many other cool stuff to do elsewhere.
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