Dungeons & Dragons Online Forum News (Mar. 17, 05)

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Here are today's Dungeons & Dragons Online forum highlights, collected from Dungeons & Dragons Online forums. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

Xundau, Community Relations

I have a few questions - AC2 engine

We're using the latest and greatest version of the Turbine Engine for DDO. Some of the engine has been upgraded from AC2, while some of it has been completely rewritten. The graphics and art in this game look good. Really good. The last batch of screenshots don't really do justice to how far we've come over the last few months; fortunately, it looks like the dryspell is nearly over.

As far as zones go, Kale is correct in that you will definitely be zoning when you leave for an adventure, since all adventures are instanced. Stormreach is also divided into separate zones/wards, each with its own distinct flavor or feel. Although there's no wide-open outdoor landmass, there are outdoor areas outside of the city -- these are instanced adventure zones, however, not public areas.

WASD and mouselook is definitely an option. In fact, until recently, it was the only option, but we've added some more traditional MMORPG control schemes based on internal feedback.

death from massive damage

Nope, no death by massive damage rule in DDO (for those of you unfamiliar with this rule, it states that anyone taking 50 or more damage from a single attack must make a DC 15 Fortitude save or die instantly).

Being one-shotted is bad enough. Being one-shotted when you didn't even lose all of your hit points is even worse.

Need reasurance

Thanks Ravi and Sordes for clearing up the PvP and server population issues. I'll take a look at that unofficial FAQ and see if it needs to be edited or unstickied, since it's pretty old at this point.

There are definitely outdoor areas outside of Stormreach for you to explore, and some of them are quite expansive. They're all instanced areas though, and this might be where some of the confusion comes in -- our generic term for an instanced zone is "dungeon," but an instanced zone can in fact be a wilderness area, a city area, a graveyard, the interior or a building, on board a ship, or just about anything or anywhere else. Of course, many of our instanced areas are in fact good old-fashioned dungeons, but a lot of them represent other environments as well.

Zergfest vs. Groups

Six is the number we're going with right now. This isn't set in stone though.

Nik Davidson, Administrator

Wow, just... wow...

Whoa. That guy wins.

I'm impressed by the amount of work he'd have to put in per session to get the maps set up like that. Honestly, if I had a setup like that I'd need to tailor my campaign to it a lot just to get the most use out of it. Continual attention to LOS and movement in dungeons can slow things down a lot, but the cool factor probably more than makes up for it.

Need reasurance

We're hoping there's a lot of people like you out there.

Jason Booth, DDO Dev Team

Colllision control betweeen pcs and mobs ?

Actually, thats not it at all. What I ment by desyncronization is when the server and client have different views of what is really happening and one of them has to correct thier view of the world. This usually results in one of two events; either you are forced to a new location (adjusting your world to the server's view), or the server adjusts it's view, which is not allowed because the client cannot be trusted. Desyncronization happens because the client is allowed to move and act with some level of autonomy from the server; without this, you'd press the move key and start moving .25 seconds later. The game would feel extremely unresponsive.
Thus the server's view of a player is slightly behind the client's view in time; your view of another player is even farther behind the server (because the messages are routed to the server, and then to you). Thus, if you turn on player to player collisions, you get errors in syncronization of time in when they collide; each view of the world see's the collision at slightly different times, and slightly different places. When those differences are rectified, someone, or both parties, are forced to a new location. This is highly annoying to experience, expecially if you're, say, hanging from a ledge above a pit of fire.

Monsters don't have this problem because they only exist on one time line; the server's view.

Now, the realities of player collision are so minor in the scope of the game that if I turned it on, you'd likely only notice the blips it would introduce. Some people seem to believe that p2p collision has some huge implications on the gameplay, but it really doesn't. In fact, I turned it off about 2 months ago and I don't think anyone even realized the change happened; they just saw less synconization issues in certain cases. So while any of us can think up theoretical cases where the game play could be improved by having that type of collision, the realities of the actual experience are very far from those theoretical grounds.