Talla

A monument for all devs to remember, despite the tremendous talent of the team, there is no such thing as "Too big to fail".

Former employee analyzing how Realtime Worlds went bankrupt. https://web.archive.org/web/20200814025847/https://lukehalliwell.wordpress.com/category/realtime-worlds/

Nothing prevents another company to make a spiritual successor under a different IP (Besides the sheer amount of manpower required to make a game of this scale).

The maps, models for cars & guns, animations & textures could be exported to a new engine. There would be some heavy lifting to be done regarding all the custom code: Character creation, Symbols, Clothing a.k.a. skinning, LODs, physics... maybe even network... Starting from scratch would be best, but there is so much to do... If a "10-devs or less" team could update this game engine in 4 years by themselves, I'd be impressed.

It is just another side effect of a stagnant active population. Veterans & hardcore players optimize everything to win, and end up scaring new players / solos / casuals away. Nothing new here. Enforcing solo matchmaking would indeed make matchmaking teams fairer (More possible combinations of solo player rankings), but you would probably futher kill the game population, lower the matchmaking sample size and make things worse. You simply can't matchmake fairly an instance with 10/10 pop and ensure players find a match within 5 minutes. I'd agree with this. Create instances where grouping is impossible, and calling backup is the only way to construct a team. I think this was planned in the matchmaking rework with instance phasing. Grouping would only be possible in Social. The team gets attached an historical or sum of individual ratings. You then phase that group to the district with the appropriate team battle ratings. That would ensure full premades, duos or solos quickly find matches on a comparable scale.

Anyone has a recording of old APB Twitch stream, when Tiggs used the server-side spectate feature? It was a sight to behold. My jaw dropped as low as its FPS. It is simply not good enough to judge between a closet or a legit player (at that time). Monitoring GMs cost alot in the long run, even if you outsource this work to some 3rd world offshore company. You want to rely on automated anomaly detection tools. This game has too many security design oversights to prevent cheating.

Glad to see someone gets it. The engine update was needed for console deployment mostly. Having a unified codebase also allows devs to send updates more confidently and faster. In the backstage, it's still Unreal 3.5. Cheat makers already have no difficulty to hook onto it, and we'll be back to the good ol' signature-based detection that is actually worse than FairFight.

Also true

This game was very ambitious at the time. It's so ambitious that no one in the gamedev industry even tried to reproduce it, yet. I'm eager to see someone try with modern development tools.

Imagine if the devs went live with that idea :

50m is not terrible. Tap-fired at the proper rate, that thing was a monster.

RHD LS1 "Corsair" for the fun factor. Mobility + Pin-point precision + Cover/defensive gameplay. tied with .45 ACP with chambered round mod from the xmas gun game

Old videos of network going bonkers when we switched from Overkill to Softlayer servers, post NA merge. Another bug from bad networking https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLjMFugNIco A bug that used to occur when exiting cars gave you maximum falling velocity and ensuing Gomba stomp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGGwUSSvLPE

Colby CSG + .45 AP Once upon a time, SHAW 556

So the description saying: "Doubles base health regeneration for 5 seconds" is actually not applied on medspray? It's only removing the delay? Receiving 2 obir burst is a easy way to test. If I recall, the sound effect triggers when regen delay is reached? Or when full HP is reached?

@xiphos @MonkaS I was part of those xmas 2016 false Punkbuster bans. FairFight did not advertise my ban. It was a silo PunkBuster error. I remember digging and seeing how the PB package for APB was never properly configured in the game files. I really doubt PunkBuster would do any kind of ESP tracking. It monitors the memory for interfering processes, not player inputs according to context.

We Are All in This for the Long Game, After All.

Please share if you've seen any innovations in recent anti-cheats. Resident programs which use signature-based detection are worthless, yet it's been the main strategy for most anti-cheats since forever. First program to load into memory wins. If you can load first, then you can hide or spoof data to the monitoring program.

This video is hitting bullseye on balance points. But now I'm wondering: Is it preferable to have a perfectly balanced game? Or a game with good player retention? It is a well known practice: Players are more likely to invest themselves (both in time & money) if they think they already are invested. a.k.a. the sunk cost fallacy. Progression & unlocking are giving a pragmatic goal to new players and makes them more likely to stick. Let's say you are the developer. If you were to remove all "negligible PvP advantages" tied to player progression, would it actually do more benefit than harm? From the video's point of view, the "investment time to reach an even playing field" also happens to be a barrier to entry.

It all seem so easy when spectating from a passenger seat.

Sounds about right. Thanks Kewlin for saving my post data before the old forum server went AWOL. Medspray only skips the regen delay part. Which means regen rate is 62.5 HP/sec It would take 8 seconds of uninterrupted regen to get back half HP (500). Without any CA, it would take 2 seconds... It would be super simple to balance medspray: Either remove it (consumables are a bad concept in a PvP game anyway) or adjust the regen rate on use to 50 HP/sec , regardless of any green mods worn.

It's not going anywhere, but at least it's not going nowhere.

What if I told you the engine rework would help in dealing with cheaters? BTW the main reason why matchmaking isn't fair is the low population pool. Can't really fix it without more players.

Being able to trigger health regen at any time is overpowered.

To be fair, APB was tagged as EOL ever since the downfall of the Edinburgh studio. It was clear they would sell the IP in the future. Tiggs, a community manager, ended up co-producer when they moved overseas. When you let a CM become producer, it shows how unmanned and drifting the G1 ship was.