APB 2022 Roadmap Discussion

[tuktukdriver 15]

At this point people would be happy with any update that improves player experience.

 

Sad to see it's so hard to make sense of the code behind APB.

Maybe AI or some of the original developers can make it work.

 

[MasterTheHero 20]

3 hours ago, tuktukdriver said:

At this point people would be happy with any update that improves player experience.

 

Sad to see it's so hard to make sense of the code behind APB.

Maybe AI or some of the original developers can make it work.

 

The technology has changed too much. The original devs wouldn't be able to make it work either.

[AlienTM 138]

the guest in this sort of podcast explains the current situation pretty well(from this minute till the end)

 

 

Edited February 5, 2022 by AlienTM

[_Nope 7]

You just shut down a decade old project with a single dot point, then went straight back to carrot dangling. Impressive.

[safdfsgkjhdgsjkhs 140]

they should atleast revert all the guns and cars back to normal... 

[TzickyT 212]

what murk said was indeed a nice view on things but i see to much people saying the opposit. i just wonder wich of the 2 it is

[Poperon 141]

Well, this is a big letdown for me.
I was waiting for the new engine like everybody else, but, to see that they will spend time revamping the actual version instead of keep the focus on the new one, i feel like we are about to enter inside a dark hole we're not going to leave for some good long time. They decided to apply some bandaid on the actual broken version, because the other new-but-yet-broken one is giving them headaches.

Well, news is that the actual one will yet give them headaches, but with some shiny "new" stuff added to it.

APB got ran over. Doctor starts a conversation:

Doctor says: "Hey, your legs are in critical condition. Your left leg is critically injured, it's 99% doomed and we'll have to chop it off. But hey! Right leg is injured, but if we give it some more care and attention, it will stabilize, so you'll likely have to ampute only your left leg. If we try to save your doomed left leg, you'll lose both with plus a 100% of death too."
APB says: "No Doctor, leave my right leg in standby, and save my left leg!"
Doctor says: "But... you'll los..."
APB says: "FIX MY DOOMED LEFT LEG!!"

*Patient ends up dying because tried to save a leg with no salvation*
That's LO trying to bandaid the actual doomed version.

[Todesklinge 143]

.ac45 Pistol and Clotting Agent 3 should be temporaly disabled until the balancing fiy is live.

[Arvie 2]

I just wanna point out here really quick, while Ive been gone for 6years~

Unreal Engine 3 is a huge mess. And other game studios agreed on that, its also why Unreal Engine 3 didnt sell as well as 1 and 2 did and Epic subsequently let ppl use it for free with a % fee of the earnings instead.

Other studios like Midway Games blamed the Unreal Engine for how shitty BlackSite: Area 51's development cycle was.

So I believe it, + Fumanchu(former RTW and Reloaded Studios Dev) back in the day said that there is absolutely 0 documentation on a lot of the assets in the game because the fresh dev students RTW hired were sloppy.

 

So I gotta give it to Matt here

[MonkaS 215]

6 hours ago, Todesklinge said:

.ac45 Pistol and Clotting Agent 3 should be temporaly disabled until the balancing fiy is live.

they aren't unbalanced 

[MrChan 337]

4 hours ago, MonkaS said:

they aren't unbalanced 

Yes, but Todesklinge though.

[Hexerin 1140]

8 hours ago, MonkaS said:

they aren't unbalanced 

CA pretty much completely invalidates the other green mods (flak can be better in cases where there's excessive explosives usage). So by definition, it is imbalanced. As others have said many, many times in the past... CA should be removed as a mod, and everyone should simply have CA3 as a baseline. They'd also need to do a balance pass on kevlar and flak though.

 

If I were to redesign kevlar and flak... I'd make them inverse to each other. Kevlar would make you take 40% less bullet damage, but on the flip side take 20% more explosive damage. Meanwhile, flak would confer to you 60% reduced explosive damage, but you instead take 20% more bullet damage. I've run the math on most of the common equipment most people use, and these percentages would be fairly reasonable. Frags still wouldn't kill you if you were wearing kevlar, and the HVR 762 wouldn't start 1-shotting you if you wore flak, just to give a couple of the more egregious examples. The big question mark on this though, are concs. They'd start being a 1-shot again, to people wearing kevlar. Personally, I believe concs shouldn't do so much health damage in the first place though...

[MonkaS 215]

15 hours ago, Hexerin said:

CA pretty much completely invalidates the other green mods (flak can be better in cases where there's excessive explosives usage). So by definition, it is imbalanced. As others have said many, many times in the past... CA should be removed as a mod, and everyone should simply have CA3 as a baseline. They'd also need to do a balance pass on kevlar and flak though.

 

If I were to redesign kevlar and flak... I'd make them inverse to each other. Kevlar would make you take 40% less bullet damage, but on the flip side take 20% more explosive damage. Meanwhile, flak would confer to you 60% reduced explosive damage, but you instead take 20% more bullet damage. I've run the math on most of the common equipment most people use, and these percentages would be fairly reasonable. Frags still wouldn't kill you if you were wearing kevlar, and the HVR 762 wouldn't start 1-shotting you if you wore flak, just to give a couple of the more egregious examples. The big question mark on this though, are concs. They'd start being a 1-shot again, to people wearing kevlar. Personally, I believe concs shouldn't do so much health damage in the first place though...

Instead of making CA default or nerfing it into the ground rebalance kev/flak. Flak is broken af when defending makes it impossible to push certain positions since they don't really need to fear nades anymore.

[Todesklinge 143]

3 hours ago, MonkaS said:

Instead of making CA default or nerfing it into the ground rebalance kev/flak. Flak is broken af when defending makes it impossible to push certain positions since they don't really need to fear nades anymore.

Why buff all other if just CA is unbalanced?

[MonkaS 215]

3 hours ago, Todesklinge said:

Why buff all other if just CA is unbalanced?

Just because something is the most used doesn't mean its 'unbalanced' or 'broken' if anything like you said it should be default both kev and flak are a lot more situational   

[Revoluzzer 274]

"...we can continue to try and get APB where I want it."

I think you're still taking the wrong approach, continuing work on Frankenstein's Monster. Better get a fresh body and start from scratch.

 

 

"I feel like there are more unknowns around the corner that could block our efforts again."

Narrator: There would be.

 

  

On 1/31/2022 at 7:36 AM, SkittyM said:

Your timeline is somewhat wrong, 1.20 started in either 2017 or 2016.  Engine work iirc started in early 2014 or late 2013.  As of i guess this week, nothing is gonna happen with 3.5/2.x as its been put on hold basically indefinitely.

"Q1 2014" was a meme on an already postponed engine upgrade launch, iirc. So the whole ordeal started in Q3 or Q4 of 2013 most likely.

Then again, it doesn't really matter.

[Hexerin 1140]

23 hours ago, MonkaS said:

Just because something is the most used doesn't mean its 'unbalanced' or 'broken'

This isn't just "most used", it's "used by 99.9% of the playerbase", which is a distinction that matters.

[MonkaS 215]

56 minutes ago, Hexerin said:

This isn't just "most used", it's "used by 99.9% of the playerbase", which is a distinction that matters.

not from what I've seen a lot of ppl using flak now

[Dead_Game 73]

https://techraptor.net/gaming/news/descendent-studios-scores-big-win-in-descent-lawsuit

 

"weird year"

@MattScott

Edited February 14, 2022 by Dead_Game

[Yapopal 168]

On 2/3/2022 at 5:18 PM, Azukii said:

Hi everyone,

I've had to remove a significant amount of posts as they had nothing to do with the topic at hand. Please remain on-topic or unfortunately we will have to close this topic.

Thank you for your understanding.

 

- Azukii

Do not close the topic, this is not an option. Just delete messages with whining, useless criticism, and discussion of criticism of other players. Leave messages with reasonable suggestions. The result will please you and interested people who can read topic headings.

[MrChan 337]

You're quoting a message that's 11 days old mate. Think we might be in the clear.

[SkittyM 287]

On 2/13/2022 at 5:43 AM, Revoluzzer said:

 

"Q1 2014" was a meme on an already postponed engine upgrade launch, iirc. So the whole ordeal started in Q3 or Q4 of 2013 most likely.

Then again, it doesn't really matter.

In fairness, i never ever took "q1 2014" as an actual release date for anything.  I saw it as a "we'll have something done internally by Q1 2014", which in fairness, they did have whatever they were internally doing done by then.

 

Old blog posts i think imply that development started likely in early-mid 2013 however.  I do feel that if LO had continued development on that UE4 version of APB, we'd probably at least have a playable Financial/Waterfront by now.  Just my wishful thinking however since they'd have to start from scratch mostly.

[Lord Cashpoint 269]

10 hours ago, SkittyM said:

In fairness, i never ever took "q1 2014" as an actual release date for anything.  I saw it as a "we'll have something done internally by Q1 2014", which in fairness, they did have whatever they were internally doing done by then.

 

Old blog posts i think imply that development started likely in early-mid 2013 however.  I do feel that if LO had continued development on that UE4 version of APB, we'd probably at least have a playable Financial/Waterfront by now.  Just my wishful thinking however since they'd have to start from scratch mostly.

 

If I remember correctly "Q1 2014" was the proposed release date for a much smaller project, which was never met because before that point they pivoted to the "full" engine upgrade project. I could be very wrong on that point however as it has been a long time.

 

I have to agree with Revo though, it's hard to imagine how LO will draw life out of a game that began development in the mid/late 2000s.

[Benguin 141]

On 2/15/2022 at 9:20 AM, Lord Cashpoint said:

 

If I remember correctly "Q1 2014" was the proposed release date for a much smaller project, which was never met because before that point they pivoted to the "full" engine upgrade project. I could be very wrong on that point however as it has been a long time.

 

I have to agree with Revo though, it's hard to imagine how LO will draw life out of a game that began development in the mid/late 2000s.

Quote

The upgrade timeline, and opening the door to next gen options
Aphadon (our lead developer on this task) will pen a more detailed technical post about the upgrade in the next month or so when we are getting closer to something that's actually testable. Also, as we get closer to launch we should be able to predict the performance (and optimization) characteristics of the upgraded engine.

The current roadmap puts a full 'upgraded APB engine' sometime at the end of Q1, 2014, but as with all roadmaps, that could potentially change. The team is clearly working insanely hard on this particular task, and we think it will finally allow us to also unleash a lot of potential that has remained locked away in the custom code the game has been saddled with. As an added bonus, by upgrading the engine, we also open some interesting possibilities, including a path to launch on other platforms in the future.

in the same blog post our favorite community manager got introduced

[Lord Cashpoint 269]

17 minutes ago, Benguin said:

in the same blog post our favorite community manager got introduced

 

I stand corrected, Q1 2014 is a full meme. Is that not the blog post after half the developers left the team?