Quote from: Rigwyn on December 15, 2016, 06:22:59 pm

Though I thought the dummies were implemented because of players who wanted an alternate path to training their characters since slaughtering every living thing under the Dome would be OOC in some cases.

Thats along the lines of why I thought they were add too.

Yes and no.

I'm always up to provide more options to the player, however if we are speaking about OOCness and "IC reality", nobody will really get too much better just sparring against a dummy. In the end the only way to master a weapon is to train against someone able to put up a real fight, not just standing in place like a dummy.
Still speaking about IC there are other options available not to kill things: gladiators and mercenary will try to retreat when they're wounded enough (fleeing). Another option is to try to avoid the final blow and get out the arena pit, they won't chase outside the pit and you can spare their life.

From a OOC pov training these ways may be not practical, but then again just using dummies will only give half of the benefit from training: since they don't fight back, charaters won't get any armor training. So it's an "asymmetric" training in any case.

The training dummies were designed in the first place to allow players to test their spells, new weapons and attacks in a safe (from damage) environment. They weren't designed to allow AFK training or "speed up" practice.
Let's try to use them properly without abusing this game feature, I would hate having to change it, removing lot of their HP or making them invulnerable. This would damage players that use them in a reasonable way and I don't like it.

Yes, but I bet there's far more people who can help you add support to UE4 than can help you with Crystalspace. If I understand, Crystalspace isn't being actively developed anymore while UE is very popular and lots of people use it.

This is exactly why we really need to switch engine.

some games do even better ... they kick you from the server after you've been inactive for some minutes 

When I started as a prospect and then Dev I very much though with the POV that 'In Character-ness' was more important than 'playability'. Over the years working with players and Devs on implementing things this view has basically totally swapped, but there are limits to what I'd do if to break immersion too much.

This idea would greatly increase the ability for a player to find a mine on a map themselves so I would be happy to trial something. I have been working on developing some droppable effects, after the next update I will drop a rock pick and effect at some mines some of you guys can then tell me if you think it works as a mine marker well.

We could do the same things we do for harvesting: the server has the ability to spawn a few items in the mining zone. For mining areas this capability is disabled for reasons Venalan has explained very well. However I can't see why not make them more visible; we could spawn 1 or 2 ores just to point out the mining place, this without even relying on special effects (or a slight special effect could be added to the ore items itself).

A quick answer: more or less these guidelines are still right, the more the hardware progress anyway the more the polycount can be relaxed. Speaking about the file format I think blender is advisable and the current and future engine both support it.

Edit:And is this page, http://www.planeshift.it/Join%20Us, up to date? Honestly it looks like it could use a reworking so it doesn't give the impression of the game being farther along than it is.

partly yes and partly no. Generally speaking we never refuse by default anyone logging in #planeshift-prospects. We try to give a task (and the support to get it done) and see how they handle it.

Generally speaking Talad is alright to update info in hte website, we just need to provide him the text to change or load.

Alright, now how about the procedure for people helping out with making the crafting books? I mean helping to determine the steps for the unimplemented skills.

This is better worked out hanging on IRC #planeshift-prospects, but it's something not terribly hard.
The pipeline requires to compile a datasheet like this: http://www.planeshift.it/download/example_crafting_sheet.xls (but there is an updated one), including:

• the items and item characteristic for all the ones needed for the craft (including intemidiate and final items and tools)
• transformations
• combinations

Talking about the repeatable quest format, what I meant is we have a few of them that can indeed provide a good base to work on. In my experience that's much easier and less intimidating than starting from scratch. However I dunno if settings is happy to share one of them outside the team ... but I'm pretty sure if someone is interested working on them we can share what is needed for the task.