Dev Team/Community - thank you (and my thoughts) - MechWarrior: Living Legends Forum

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Dev Team/Community - thank you (and my thoughts)

Tech49

As a new player to MW:LL, and longtime (almost 3 years) MWO player, I wanted to take this opportunity to thank the Dev Team and Community at large for resurrecting MW:LL. I've been watching the resurrection of this game over the past 2 years, having tried it at 0.8.something (no JS support was a deal-killer for me), waiting for things to start to come together, which it appears they have.

The Wiki, tutorial videos, etc. are excellent; huge thanks to the Devs/community members that put the work into these resources to assist new players. Obviously growing the playerbase is critical to continued success. I've been mulling around the Wiki, forums, Reddit, etc. to familiarize myself with the mechanics of the game, and the differences between MW:LL and MWO; the "Primer for MWO Players" was a great piece to read, and spelled things out pretty well. Game installation went pretty easily (once I turned off my AV!), and setting up my JS using the XBox 360 controller emulator was relatively straight forward when following the guide. Again, thanks for the resources on the Wiki and such that make this doable without much fuss.

This game is definitely different from MWO in many ways; I think PGI could learn a few things by looking at this game and it's style. Honestly, if they took the work they are doing with MW5 in Unreal and developed a multiplayer version similar to this game, I think it would be a great success. The fact that this game is based on such an old game engine is both good and bad; bad due to limitations in the engine, but good in that the systems specs required to run it are pretty darn low compared to MWO.

I look forward to getting to know this game and the community. I would like to suggest that the Dev Team consider posting a roadmap for the future of game development; I think it would be interesting to know where the game is headed. An open list of development projects that need volunteers to help could also be beneficial (I'm not a programmer or artist, so I can't say for sure). Also, I thought I read something about funding from the players via content purchases for this game last night, but I can't seem to find it now (it was really late and I did alot of reading and got the game installed, JS working, etc!). Thanks.

Star_Wraith

Tech49
Heyo, we're glad you appreciate our work!

As for joystick support, it's been a major problem for us, because the engine we are relying on doesn't have support for DirectInput. Only XInput (used by Xbox 360 pads) is properly supported, which explains why you need a X360 emulator. We used to have our own implementation of DirectInput in the past, but it was very buggy and prone to crashes (even for people who didn't use joysticks), so we decided to disable it. I don't think we're gonna put any additional work on DirectInput because it has proven to be too much unreliable.

As for the engine, yes, CryEngine 2 is giving severe limitations to what we can do, and actually, despite being old, its requirement (especially concerning CPU power) are still a bit high, mostly because of how inefficient the engine is.
All of this is indeed slowing us down, but it's not stopping us, tho

About the roadmap, I can say something about the patch we're working on right now (0.9.5): we have a new asset, we have some enhancements to the core gameplay (especially QOL updates) as well as some balancing work on the Battle Armors.
We don't have a date yet, but we're gonna need your help to test all of these changes in a PTE, so stay tuned for updates!

As for the future patches and roadmaps, it's not really easy for us to stick to the roadmaps, because our resources are extremely limited, therefore we have to adapt the development plans according to the available resources.
I'm pretty sure our lead gameplay designer Invictus can tell you more about our plans, though.

As for funding, that's really against the nature of this project. It's a no-profit project, therefore no purchaseable premium content is available at all in MWLL. all of the content in the game is 100% free and can be enjoyed by anyone without having to pay or donate money to us.
That also implies donations are not accepted.

Thanks for your apprecation post, looking forward to see you in the game soon!

Tech49

Thanks for the reply, understood all points.

Regarding JS support - Please see my post on Reddit regarding my issues, and I'd ask that if it can be addressed in the next patch easily, that would be great. I understand that you cannot cater to every individulal's needs/desires and that resources are limited, so if it will take too much effort to address, I understand.

Regarding the "roadmap"; maybe a "goals" statement or mission statement would suffice? Maybe it already exists and I missed it, but basically, what are the dev team goals with this game? Keep it a small, dedicated community and add incremental updates under the current engine? Grow the playerbase and have organized comp play? Partner with something like NBT for community warfare-type/role-play stuff? Etc, etc.

Star_Wraith

From the Reddit thread https://www.reddit.com/r/MWLL/comments/94gef0/new_mwll_player/

Tech49 Regarding JS support -New to MW:LL, currently playing MWO since late 2015.
A few questions:
1.is there any way to add throttle decay? I play with a joystick (I've already followed the guide and gotten it working) and use the Y axis for throttle, but if I let the stick center the throttle stays where it was (no decay).

Hm, weird, we fixed the throttle decay very recently. Have you tried with keyboard controls? It should work. If you still have problems, you should ask CWG Andrew on the discord, he knows about joystick support much more.

Tech49 2.suggestions on servers, getting matches, etc? I only saw 10-12 servers, mostly empty, and most seem like dedicated team servers.

Yeah we all know about that, you will find most of the players in the EU evenings in the weekend. There is an online server list maintained by Spooky at https://stats.spikx.net . We also have a bot on our discord you can set up to notify you when servers starts populating.
Uh, and no, no, the CJW and the 12VR tags indicate the unit who's hosting those servers, but if they are not password protected, usually it means anyone can join and play. Anyone can host a server, and anyone can protect it with a password.

Tech49 Regarding the "roadmap"; maybe a "goals" statement or mission statement would suffice? Maybe it already exists and I missed it, but basically, what are the dev team goals with this game? Keep it a small, dedicated community and add incremental updates under the current engine? Grow the playerbase and have organized comp play? Partner with something like NBT for community warfare-type/role-play stuff? Etc, etc.

We plan to stay on this engine. We want to keep adding assets, features and keep improving the core gameplay. Moving to a better one (my choice would be Unreal Engine 4) would mean rewriting the whole game from scratch. There are various reasons of why we can't to do this, so, I'm sorry for whoever is dreaming about a MWLL remake on Unreal Engine 4, but this is just not going to happen. I won't lie, I'd love to see it myself.

Of course we would like to see the community grow, but there are limits we just cannot overcome. And it's not really only about technical limitations.
Unfortunately, for example, there is no way we can achieve persistent progression, cause we don't use an account based system as modern games. There is no progress on MWLL, every battle is like the first battle (except for player skill ). Every in-game progress is lost after a battle finishes.
Sure, we could organize leagues, community warfares and competitive events. In those cases, though, all the relevant elements of the progression would have have to be tracked manually.
And, most important, we would not be able to offer any kind of material rewards. We can't offer rewards such as premium credits or unique game content. We cannot even give you an in-game badge.

It is just impossible for us to create and maintain an infrastructure that would give proper support for these kind of features, so yeah, this is definitely not in the plans.

What we currently do is to run small, open and casual community events, although I think that fairly simple competitive events are quite possible to make (an example would be the Forever Legends tournament I've hosted few years ago with the ELH guys - and I am planning to make something similar soon ), but you need to make sure to find enough players first - at least in these days.

DeimosEvotec

Tech49 did you try the actionmaps.xml I modified for you? Is it still not working?