jdk

Oh yeah we definitely used the CoD databases in many cases over internal tools, so well done. I remember Ophelea too. Hope y'all are doing well!

The smallest world stays small. :)

I think a few (persistent) games touched on things like that, but I can't think of any that really went hard on it for long-term characters (instead you mostly see it in roguelikes/lites where if you got a bad roll, it didn't matter since you were making a new character soon anyway). At a very broad level, this is sort of what the taper system did but that was cracked after 6 months or whatever and it didn't really offer any meaningful differentiation beyond brute-forcing permutations.

> I'm curious, do you know how the games lore was developed and were there ancient texts that were inspirations for the events?

I was very not-involved with the lore/story (to the point, where I think I wrote a handful of notes and stuff before it being decided that I should just focus on gameplay, and someone else would cover the lore for me!), but there were 3-4 people primarily responsible for it and they were all very much fantasy literate, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if some of the inspiration were from those sources.

You're welcome!

I think I mentioned this in another comment and certainly a ton over the years - but a lot of the magic of AC was that it was made by a bunch of people who had never made a game before, much less an MMO, and there were very few ingrained lessons, so we were foolhardy enough to just do things the way it felt we should, player behavior or other consequences be damned. It was built on hopes and dreams and naivete and that made it beautiful and flawed.

But also yeah, once something ships to players, it's now "theirs" and not "ours". We stood in pretty stark contrast to EQ's "you're in our world now" philosophy, again, for better or worse.

You're welcome! Haha, mattekar farming will always hold a special place for me. And, of course, TD's herald defense is probably top 3 gaming memories for me. So much lifting done across the community for what's now basically oral history.

But also thank YOU for participating in some of my very formative experiences of my life as well. The players really made it a joy to work on.

In terms of discovery and wonder, I think Valheim did a good job of it in the general atmosphere and loop, but in terms of magic systems, not really. You have the Magika (or even Path of Exile) where spells have component parts and build into something larger, but there's not much mystery there.

A theme of a bunch of the comments is that the internet / audience makes this sort of thing impossible these days. One of my white whales for game design is figuring out if mystery, especially in multiplayer games, is still possible in a meaningful way.

Oh man... Now I'm trying to remember which of the CoD folks were from England. Thanks for all / any of the work you put into that site. It was really the nexus of AC for a number of years. I'm glad it's been lost to the ages because I definitely had a number of real spicy comments on it. I'm happy AC at least indirectly helped your career/marriage in some small way. :)

Nope, it was before my time. I joined the team in beta.

I had been gone from Turbine for 8 or 10 years by the time they decided to shut AC down, so I can only speculate. I assume it had something to do with WB not wanting to "give away" the IP but instead just lock it away in a vault.

The biggest problem was the degeneracy once it was "solved", instead of organizing around social circles. It led to people feeling like cogs in the machine and skewed play patterns and motivations.

I haven't really given it any serious thought but I'd likely start with trying to more strongly codify the good parts (incentivizing smaller circles inside of the larger structure, making systems for patrons/vassals to play together in more meaningful ways, etc) while highlighting the positive actions that players could do / benefit from. I don't want to say AC was TOO opaque but a lot of it definitely suffered from being over designed for a very hardcore market.

Yay! The first time an MMO lands for someone, it definitely makes an outsized impression. The combination of social outlet with a huge amount of free time is a recipe for something great.

It's funny you mention Valheim - one of my groups in had a core of people who I met back in the AC days and their friends. We got to some real old man gaming that probably annoyed their friends with all of the "back in our day..." stories while we were running around the landscape, running from trolls, etc.

Yeah, I was also involved in blowing up Arwic. It just felt right!

Definitely miss the "weird" MMOs of the early 00s...

For the last 15 years or so, coworkers ask when I'm going to make a new allegiance system but "less broken". So many good social behaviors came from its structure that it really deserves another attempt.

And yeah, Ash Gromnies were the bane of so so so many players.

Thanks! Always nice to hear people who "grew up" play it. AC having server-side physics and actually making use of them led to lots of ridiculous and emergent gameplay. I don't know how many hours I just spend idling in towns jumping from rooftop to rooftop or seeing how high I could climb up massive structures. Everytime I try to play again though, the old "you can't go home again" hits too hard and I just quietly close it back up and go back to the nostalgia.

I was on the design team, so was directly responsible for a lot of the shadow invasion stuff (if you ever saw the big bad Bael'Zharon running around in the live events, that was me!) and other patches for the first 2 years of its lifespan.

Weirdly, I work on WoW now with my career having come full circle after having not worked on MMOs since the mid 2000s. :)

Haha "Og mage" ... yeah. The combat of AC still holds up in its janky for being fun in the context of an MMO. I spent most of my playtime on Darktide and dear lord, it made me so sweaty.

It's amazing to me how many people are still friends with their patrons/vassals from 25 years ago.

Thanks! Glad it holds a special place for you :)

In retrospect, I give a lot of credit to the fact that we were young and dumb and didn't know any better. I've been revisiting a lot of the stories from back then and so many of them end up with us saying, "I dunno, let's see what happens!" and not being dissuaded by "best practices" or even common sense.

Also lots of credit goes to the early internet era when people were a LOT more forgiving of, well, everything.

Really didn't expect to see AC at the top of HN. Asheron's Call was the first game I worked on and I remember all the times we'd joke with Wi about it and watch monsters beeline for him. It seemed like one of those "Haha sure, player perception" problems and not something that was actually real. IIRC someone did a very cursory look at the code at one point but it never bubbled up as important enough to assign someone to to actually investigate.

Wi came to one of the player gatherings with little printed out cards and would hand them to people and say, "You've been Wi flagged!"

The fondest of memories.

I get this semi-randomly when I'm using my bluetooth headphones/mic with Meet/Discord and then quit/close it and it becomes available to the OS or something. Music.app just pops up and as far as I can tell, there's no way to turn it off.

Mutt in shells and MailMate (https://freron.com/) if I'm using a GUI. It's the fastest email client that I've found, has super fast search, and is incredibly configurable and it's ONLY focused on email, nothing else. Its UX is perfect for me and is incredibly functional, but it's definitely not a "pretty" client.

The photographer mentioned in the article has a few videos up that illustrate this much better than the text https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ff7nltdBCHs (for the "squinch" one).

The cofounder of OKC and author of these posts for a long time wrote a book in the vein of the blog: https://www.amazon.com/Dataclysm-Identity-What-Online-Offlin...

Epic has a grueling work ethic/culture. They all LOVE what they do, work insane hours, and are compensated very well.

Cheers! It's funnier still to hear that anyone watches those. :)

Thanks! We had actually soft-launched before the cut-off, so we slipped in before that requirement got put in place. That said, we did just get it working with IL2CPP last week which was a few days of work for one engineer. More hiccups encountered but nothing show-stopping (though mostly in dealing with Unity's peculiarities than anything else).

We just released our second game in Haxe on iOS a few weeks ago and we're releasing the Android version in another 6 weeks. It's a Unity client with haxe-generated C# code and then javascript and node on the server. There have definitely been a bunch of hiccups and hitches along the way, but it's been pretty good overall.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/world-zombination/id68062469...

It was Apple's Editor's Choice in the app store (across all apps, not just in games) in its release week plus a fair amount of pre-release hype. Though mostly it's about being Editor's Choice.

Pretty much. A 4x return is great and all, but MV was likely the best reviewed and most Apple-hyped paid iOS game of the year. To only make 4x return off of it is pretty unfortunate for the platform.

I used to make MMOs and we'd often question why we were doing it when we'd read stories about people's relationships falling apart, kids flunking out of school, or other really negative things that happened when people played too much and didn't keep a handle on their life.

Then one day we got a letter. It was from a man who suffered a host of physical ailments, including quadriplegia, and could barely leave his bed, nevermind his house. In his letter, he wanted to thank us for making our game. He made friends, lead a successful guild, and could feel powerful and accomplishment in a way he couldn't in real life.

The stories would repeat themselves over the years, too... I know at least one very successful HN denizen met his now-wife in our game. Families would stay in touch and play together, groups of people who didn't know each other would raise money to help guildmates who needed surgery or had fallen on hard times and had trouble making ends meet, and so on.

It's for those people that I make games. (Or at least that's what I tell myself when I'm having moments of doubt and questioning why I spend so much time pushing bits.)

C# chose to leave this up to the JIT/VM to implement, rather than compiler. Both Microsoft and Mono's .NET runtime will choose to inline functions based on some heuristics. (see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/473782/inline-functions-i...).

However, the (old, forked) version of Mono used by Unity does not appear to inline functions - at least not when using the ahead-of-time compilation required to run on iOS.

Haxe is a garbage-collected language, and in general, it uses the GC of the target platform (the C++ target includes a runtime with a conservative collector). So you'll run into the typical issues with writing game code in a GC language - being careful about allocations and deep reference hierarchies, pooling/reusing objects, etc. Haxe doesn't really change anything here.

Haxe does expose some platform-specific features that help though, such as C# structs and pointers/unsafe code, as well as platform-specific API's for interacting with the garbage collector (e.g. http://api.haxe.org/cpp/vm/Gc.html). You can take advantage of these while still writing cross-platform code with the usual tricks of conditional compilation.