On Updates, Wipes, and Migrations

[MishkaL1138]

There is no doubt that the new little UE4 minigame using PlaneShift's assets is a big step towards the completion of the game in a whole brand new engine, shiny and powerful. It's been something that the playerbase has been waiting for, and for quite a long time: to drift away from an engine that was slowly becoming obsolete, and step up into the leagues of powerful indie (and free) MMOs. Even if I can't try it out myself because there is no macOS version of the client, I know that it's going to be a huge game-changer (in more levels than one), and I expect it with the giddiness of a kid on Christmas' Eve.

Now, for the bitter part of updates, and especially updates as big as this one... Let's not raise our voices. Calm down, read on, and think before you scatter around mindless hate and confusion. Understand that it is not my intention to cause a ruckuss here, and I am simply concerned about it. Read throughout the post, and then give it a five-minute reflection before you reply.

I am going to talk about wipes. There have been wipes in the past, and there have been wipes in not so past. Just a while back we had a partial quest wipe that, while it didn't affect our character progression too badly, it upset some people for whatever reason. But that's not what's worrying me. You can take away our rivnaks, and we'll go back into the Winch to get a brand new one. We'll repeat the way quests, and we'll move on with our (virtual) lives.

But I'm droning on, and I haven't raised my concern: I'm worried, very worried that there will be no option to save the current advancement of our characters. Those maxed skills that took months to achieve, the ability to hunt maulberlords, being able to cook every single dish and variation under the Azure Sun... Will that be lost? Will we be able to keep it?

Think about it. I hope to hear from a developer, and that they uphold their promise of "no more wipes."

[Venalan]

http://207.244.96.64/PlaneShift/smf/index.php?topic=39725

This..

[Shatterkiss]

The partial quest wipe was just a dozen or so quests that had their rewards changed and they reset them so we could get the new rewards. Why would that upset anyone?

[Dilihin]

Weren't you able to keep the old rewards aswell? The wipes that has been done don't really have any drawbacks to players, so i can see no problem here.

[Rigwyn]

http://207.244.96.64/PlaneShift/smf/index.php?topic=39725

This..

Second that.

That post was made after the community was destroyed by a careless post titled "Wipe y/n" or something like that by the gm lead at the time. It wasn't a wipe that caused players to leave, but rather it was speculation about a wipe that discouraged so many people and then a nasty ripple effect that followed. ( more players left due to shrunken player base )

When version 0.5 was released (years later) , we saw that the dev team had carefully migrated players stats and fixed any problems that came up as a result. Given this, I think it's reasonable to assume that they will handle player accounts with the same care should a migration to UE4 ever happen.

If anything, you should be more worried about whether or not your computer ( and those of your friends ) will be able to handle UE4. I see that as being a larger potential problem than a stat wipe.

[MishkaL1138]

http://207.244.96.64/PlaneShift/smf/index.php?topic=39725

This..

That post is from 2011, when CrystalSpace was the only thing we were using, and UE4 wasn't even thought of. A whole new engine might mean a whole new kind of progression.

Now, if what Rigwyn says is true, I really hope they gather a lot of patience. Surely the 500k accounts won't all come back at the same time and be all "muh statzzz!!!" but what about the other people, the ones that have a ton of skills maxed?

Next point, too: it doesn't appear like UE4 is ALL that scary to handle. In any case, it's the game that needs to be optimised. Keep in mind some people have computers that are almost 10 years old, and their VRAM isn't that powerful - mine is only a quarter of a gig. I hope they keep this in mind when porting the game.

[Ravna]

As usual, the devs try to keep as many things as possible in working order. This means that obviously, we will try to keep user names, stats, items, etc. Most of this data we should have no problem with, but a few specifics can depend on how we implement them in UE.
Suppose for example we were to overhaul something while porting, this could lead to some data being reset/lost. Pretty much like some quests were partially reset in the past. Solid guarantees of any kind cannot be made until we actually ported those things, and we are not yet at that stage.

Regarding performance:
This demo is not optimized for anything, nor does it contain option menus. In the actual UE client you can expect checkboxes/etc to disable shadows, anti aliasing, certain light effects, etc. This should make it much more playable for players with low end older pcs. That being said, there will be some cut-off point, just like CS won't load under certain specs, UE will not either. I know it runs the game on 1gb vram, it will probably do so on less, but exactly where that line is will need to be determined. Basically, we will try to cater as wide as possible an audience by making things optional (like the shadows, and the light effects), but the quality of the textures and models used will at some points impose lower limits on the hardware capable of running it.
Over at http://207.244.96.64/PlaneShift/smf/index.php?topic=43264.msg481933#msg481933 you can see some options that could improve performance, at least the more important of them will likely make it to an ingame option menu.

[Emaline]

Check the update date on the post as well was updated in 2014.

[Rigwyn]

For the curious, this is the original wipe thread that I mentioned.
http://207.244.96.64/PlaneShift/smf/index.php?topic=36199.msg412040#msg412040