The absolute state of MB2

MaceMadunusus

Level Designer
Donator
Movie Battles II Team
Posts
1,888
Likes
2,570
1) the nice one being you simply need more able coders and what not

Its mostly this. Basically 4 of the 5 current programmers have IRL things that are heavily impacting the time they can spend coding right now. So we might only get an hour of their time a week for one of them, or a couple hours every couple months for the others because of it.

I've personally been dipping a lot into code recently to try and change things that I can without their help. Mostly simple things.
 

Fang

Donator
Posts
440
Likes
688
aye I get it, volunteering only goes so far when the government man comes knocking for his monthly dues

something will be better than nothing, albeit needing to be at least something significant, even if its only one thing.

too be honest i would've caved in already had I volunteered x years ago, my brain gets fried from some of the debates from both development and general player base
 

Karus

Donator
Posts
367
Likes
517
This patch was entirely designed by beta testers directly. We just asked them what a minimum amount of changes would be to make dueling slightly better. Devs did nothing but propose the question, and actually implement the suggested changes.



This is a goal we have had for a long time. Easier said than done though, especially regarding the next patch which will essentially change the entire game, not just a few files.



We accept basically everyone that applies to the beta team. However, you are one of the few that were declined for pretty much the reason stated at the end of your sentence there. We currently have over 30 testers. The ones I personally think are up their own ass aren't around anymore and I wouldn't say any of the current testers fit that description.



You're not wrong about gameplay being the most important thing. However, you are wrong about what the UI, Tutorials, etc are. They are far more than the name suggests and its really hard to fully quantify them on the roadmap. One thing that has been worked on in the back end of things has been the entire reworking of the class and spawn system backends. Due to the needs of the tutorial, with the need to dynamically be able to spawn and changes classes as people run through the level, we ran into massive issues with the old spawn system that was just a massive headache to fix. The whole spawning system, and class backend was just completely bonkers stupid. As a result, we pushed the entire reworking of those systems that have been slowly worked on for years to the forefront. That, within the first few days, had resulted in us fixing everything in the tutorial related to the spawn systems, except for some bugs with weird cases like droidekas.

However, what most don't know, is how much this fixes a lot of things in MB2 itself. We don't know the full extent, as we still need to do a lot of cleanup, testing, etc but it has the potential to be pretty game changing. It drastically changes how abilities are applied to classes, which is hard to explain how much of a benefit that is. It basically makes it easier for us to move abilities around from class to class, and modify those abilities allowing us to modify and balance faster. It also makes it so that its WAY easier to make new classes for mb2. We have something like 10 new classes in testing (To be clear here... a lot of them probably wont see the light of day, but several of them likely will). That were all added/created in a massively shorter time than any time we have tried to do that in the past and that number is an illustration of how much better this system is.

All off that doesn't even include what it does for bugs. It reworks even how classes are selected by the UI and communicated between clients and servers, which should result in less join bugs, and maybe even less kyle bugs. I personally haven't seen a single one since it has been fully working but that is not a guarantee so don't quote me on that. It should also make it so theres less weird morphing when things swap between classes, or fix some weird bugs or allow more options to be done in FAs. That little bit should also fix some exploits as well. Reworking the UI also means that from a back end standpoint for us, even just adding or modifying abilities in those menus is a lot easier as well. It also means, you no longer need to overwrite the official UI when running penekepack or anything. You can make it an option to switch between the two in the options menu.

Even just simple things like customization and performance have had quite a bit of improvement. As a result of redoing the class and spawn backends, each class now has a "default" optimized model. Which means we can potentially implement a cvar, that lets people use a "performance" mode that should boost framerates on lower spec machines, and not require people to download those performance replacement packs that replace everything with basejka models. It also means, model replacements are no longer a thing. You can add your own custom models, and those custom models will appear as the default model for that class for everyone else. Some performance optimizations have been done to several functions as well, so just general performance should be better too.

So while gameplay is definitely one of the most important things, what are are working on is still heavily related to improving gameplay, or making it easier for us to adjust gameplay in the future. The patch should include gameplay changes with it, but we might play it a bit safe, so we can iron out any issues with the conversion. We need to be careful about doing gameplay changes with this, as we can run into a situation where we weren't sure if a bad change/issue is due to something happening in the back end, or a balance change that we did on top of it. There are a lot of gameplay changes that are already being built on top of this new system though.

Either way, my point is, that tutorials, ui, etc are far beyond fillers and mean a lot for the future. UI itself was even technically releaseable months ago before the merge of the new class and UI system that resulted in me dumping hundreds of hours into updating and improving it a crap ton further since. Were getting closer and closer every day. I already wrote out a good chunk of the changelog for release and put it in the beta area and it took me at least 3 hours to write it the other day while not including several things that need more info, and not including the list of gameplay changes just yet.
Hearing about the general performance improvements & class/spawn backend changes makes me really optimistic
Quality of life bitches
Oh and the new UI looks great too, I'm just hoping you guys can finish the essential stuff in time for the movie release
But please don't let this patch release with the current saber system, omg
I'm pretty sure the majority of people who try out MBII are trying it for the saber combat
I mean, Battlefront 2 is so ridiculously better looking, I'm sure people who are looking for the gunplay aspect would go straight to that game over this
Not trying to say that Open is redundent or anything, but I'm pretty certain that people who download MBII after seeing the new movie, are downloading it because they want to play out some dank saber duels
Would be a massive shame if they were introduced to sabering whilst the system is so lackluster/flawed


1571024450833.png
 
Last edited:
Top