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Thread: PSO Remake

  1. #21

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    I am also looking forward to it. If I'd participate, I'd be in for the fun mostly and I don't care if the art I make will ever get any use, because I simply enjoy making art in the first place.

    Actually I've been running around with the idea of making a mock up Phantasy Star alike game with a bunch of fans, more like making an own installment in the series, rather then recreating an existing game. The problem of that imo is that it most probably will never be 'better' then the original. I would also lower the chance of SEGA making it a legal issue, if you don't copy any copyrighted material. In the worst case you'd have the change a bunch of names.


  2. #22

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    Quote Originally Posted by qoxolg View Post
    I am also looking forward to it. If I'd participate, I'd be in for the fun mostly...

    ... chance of SEGA making it a legal issue, if you don't copy any copyrighted material...
    Glad to hear it, while I study for finals and finish my final coursework for the semester I have been hypothesizing what could be done legally to prevent a project of this nature from being taken down. If you consider the serverside portion of the project it's easy to see that that source, depending on the implementation of instance servers, may be non-infringing. You can't exactly patent basic instance pooling systems and basic gameserver to instance and region architectures. If approached right the serverside should be non-infringing.

    The client is a different matter. Would a game such as Phantasy Star Online with say World of Warcraft art-like models or other anime models such as a cheerier cartoony artstyle somehow infringe on PSO? I think not, the model of PSO has been redone various times since PSO. Games such as Diablo, Vindictus and such draw many parallels. I don't think mechanics in general in PSO are unique and could be infringed on. Especially so if they were improved upon.

    This leads to the art issue. I believe the source distribution of a client, if done properly and with forethought of avoiding this issue, could be done. The main problem is art assets that will surely infringe on the Phantasy Star Online IP. Distribution of the client source, or the client, would be illegal for sure. Clever distribution of these assets would be needed to avoid tainting the distribution of the client and server with the infringing pieces.

    Which does suck for artists yes but as with anything, code or otherwise, it could never hurt to have in the portfolio. Distribution of these assets in general may be legal. Painting a picture or creating a 3D model is not illegal afaik even if it's reproduction, though I don't really know art.

    I think, in this convoluted way, the project if finished and in a form ready for distribution could be distributed legally and with a serverside hosted legally as well, which is the most important aspect because that is a central point of failure for the project as a whole.

    Since I'll have some time before I can begin working feverishly on the project I will mail out some letters to Sega corporate requesting a non-profit license of the original PSO IP for use in a tribute. Unlikely they'd do so as it has no benefit for them but I can try.

  3. #23

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    Well, there is this. It's on the Fair use of Copyrighted Materials.

    http://copyright.lib.utexas.edu/copypol2.html

    As with that, for artists, as long as we don't blatantly rip stuff from the game we should be fine. I'd say best method is hand creation. That's just me though.

    "Don't look for the people in your past. There is a reason they don't exist in your future." - Riesz
    Ship 2 - ID: Chrysheight

  4. #24

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    Quote Originally Posted by Saya Laurent View Post
    Well, there is this. It's on the Fair use of Copyrighted Materials.

    http://copyright.lib.utexas.edu/copypol2.html

    As with that, for artists, as long as we don't blatantly rip stuff from the game we should be fine. I'd say best method is hand creation. That's just me though.
    Yes, I would leave this issue to artists assuming we or any artist do collaborate. There is only one final exam that really matters so I may be able to get back to work sooner than I expected.

  5. #25

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    Warning: Long and rather complex post about Combat implementation. If this post was too complex to understand feel free to quote pieces and ask for clarification and I'll do so. Otherwise, what you can take away from this is that I believe I have a solution to handling a good majority of combat defined within PSO.

    Hi again guys, still waiting for the day I can begin coding again, this Thursday, and boy do I have a lot to do. I really hope I can finish up some features of GladNet so I can move straight away into working on the PSO project.

    I've had a tad bit of time to ponder how PSO combat could be emulated within Unity3D. My mind tends to wander when it comes to things I'm disinterested in, such as discrete math exams lol, so I found myself thinking about this for about an hour today and would like to share how I'd likely go about implementing PSO-like combat; assuming a one-to-one replica of combat is desired.

    First and foremost the question is "Do we need a fully fledged serverside Physx 3.x simulation for the game logic". When it comes to developing a massive serverside it's imperative that scalability is taken into consideration. A pure C# application, having only what computation is minimally required, would generally be most efficient to use. Something I tend to see newbies do when it comes to writing servers for Unity3D games is that their entire severside generally consists of a single application, a Unity3D instance. This is horrible and could never hope to sustain any reasonable load of players. However, it makes a lot of sense for a serverside to potentially interop/Interact with a Unity3D instance.

    The reasons for this are:

    1. You're provided full Physx 3.x control; you don't have to implement some shoddy library to mock it and end up doing so poorly.
    2. Developing the serverside will draw parallels to clientside development if both done within Unity3D.
    3. Various key features already exist within Unity3D that would need to be emulated in a pure C# server anyway.


    The reasons not for this:

    1. A full Physx simulation beyond what is required for your game logic could be expensive.
    2. Unity3D most definately will compute things internally, of which you've no control over, that will carry a computation cost.
    3. The overhead of a Unity3D instance is much higher in but CPU usage and Ram usage than a barebones simulation in pure C# would be.


    Now, this is not to say I'm arguing for a SINGLE Unity3D instance as the serverside, that would again be a HORRIBLE idea.

    I'm just debating whether the key sections of the serverside, namely what would be known as a zone/region/instance server, should be handle within a Unity3D instance acting as a subserver to one of the various Gameservers.

    Going forward, to reduce development time, bugs, sync issues between any mocking physics simulations and the Physx 3.x wrapper in UT5 and project complexity I'm going to assume that some pieces of the serverside can and will be handled within Unity3D. Very likely just a headless server instance.

    So, at the moment melee combat and non-projectile spells seems like they'd be simple to implement. I'll outline the way in which I think combat with these mechanics could be achieved.

    Firstly, swords, sabers and other melee weapons, regardless of whether they cleave or not, function in what I believe to be a similar fashion. Their contact with the NPC is determined based on distance and facing.

    Suppose we have a player and a Booma, this will be done in 2D lol sorry.
    Spoiler!


    At the moment, no facing is indicated. However, let us suppose he is wielding a saber. A rather short-range melee based weapon and that he is facing in the general direction of the Booma.

    Spoiler!


    It is agreeable that the player is facing in the general direction of the Booma. This information would be part of position update requests sent from the client, to the gameserver which then forwards them to the proper zone/region/instance server.

    Now, the question is if he attacks how should we determine, authoritatively, if his hit lands on the Booma?

    I propose a solution below that handles most melee and non-projectile based spells combat, it will get very technical:

    Given a point Player.Pos, Player.Pos changes approximately 10 times a second. This is a result of a position change request from the client, timestamped, sent unreliably UDP sequenced. That means Player.Pos is reasonably up to date at all times assuming optimal connection.

    Given a point Booma.Pos, Booma.Pos changes approximately n times a second where n would be determined by the NPC/AI handler/controller. These instructions produced may be sent and then deterministically calculated, in best case scenario, to the client. Otherwise a naive position broadcast would have to occur which would provide poor preformance. Anyway, so the Booma and the Player both have a position.

    From that point an equipped object or casted spell has a defined range. To determine if the player can really hit the Booma, as it has requested, firstly determining if the global cooldown for the action has finished is important. This is akin to the unique delay weapons experience. Let's suppose a Saber has a distance of 5 units. We can RayCast from the player to the Booma. If Physx indicates that the raycast collided with the collider of the Booma then it's true that the player is within distance. This is essentially a highlevel abstracted comparision of whether a given displacement between two objects with position is sufficiently small enough.

    This begs the question of facing though. If the player is facing the Booma like this:

    Spoiler!


    Then the proximity check will pass however you don't want the player to be able to attack a Booma behind him. At least not with a saber.

    So, the proposition to handle this is to define a maximum angle allowed between the player's facing direction and the raycast.

    (Facing is black; Raycast is red)
    Spoiler!


    Angle a being the angle between the facing and the raycast, or direction the Booma is relative to the player. If the angle calculated is within the threshold defined for the melee weapon then we can finally say the Booma has been hit.

    Hurray, a semi-functional implementation of a non-projectile instant attack oriented combat system. But wait, this simulation and computation makes a rash assumption and that assumption is that we're actually not experiencing any latency between the request to attack, the position of the Booma perceived on the client and the new position the Booma may have upon the arrival of the request.

    Yikes, this adds a lot of complexity to the problem which can only be addressed, I think, by essentially rewinding Physics every request to attack and, through the use of timestamps and approximations based on latency, verifying that the client's request from the past was valid and thus should be applied. Certain aspects of PSO such as the temporary shutter of an NPC when it is hit astromnomically increases complexity of that issue, it's tough to explain but it would very likely be some of the most complex issues a project such as this could face code wise.

    I have potential solutions for this, and so much more information about combat mechanics and their actual development implementation, but this post is already long enough.
    Last edited by Glader; Dec 1, 2014 at 09:14 PM.

  6. #26

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    Despite originally entering college as a CS major, I have no skills to contribute to this whatsoever. However, I do offer my support and wish you the best. Despite me having no knowledge of the vast majority of what you're saying, this is really interesting to me. I'll be sure to check in every so often. Good luck.
    Quote Originally Posted by loukaras View Post
    PSO-World is a game?

  7. #27

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    Interesting ideas you have. And thus you already having issues to face when coding. Wish I knew anything about coding aside from my uber basic C++ skills from my single college course, because I'd love to help out with this otherwise.

    I do have a few questions myself, namely from a disucssion I was having with a few other people on the PSO 15th anniversary thread.

    How faithful is this remake supposed to be? I love it PSO just as much as the other players on here who got to enjoy this game in it's heyday, but if I wanted to go back and play it to experience the same mechanics, I can easily do that on the Ultima server. I'm not just talking aesthetic design, but gameplay as well. For example, will any improvements/changes be made to the combat system or will it remain mostly unchanged? My main issue with the original (as I said before) was the slow pacing of the combat and the poor camera control. I'm basically wondering if the way characters move and view the environment will remain the same, or be updated according to more modern-day standards.

    Also, I may as well ask about classes. Do you plan on keeping the 12 classes, or adding more to them? (EX: HUmarl, RAnewearl). There's no reason for these classes not to exist, but I wonder if it would if there would be any issues implementing such classes as far as game balance goes.

    Lastly: we've all seen seen various updates and changes to the Phantasy Star gameplay formula over the years. Are there any elements you are considering to put in/alter to this remake?

    When it comes down to it, I don't know if a straight up-remake would cut it. I kind of hope this project ends up being more than that, but don't let me be the only voice. Plenty of other people, many more I'm sure more qualified than me, have their own ideas and opinions on how this project should develop. I wish you the best of luck in this endeavor. I won't keep my hopes up, but I'll keep an eye on this project anyhow.
    Ship 02 - Ur, Player ID: Niare Sky
    75/55 BR/BOdewearl Niare Sky, 54/40 GU/RAmar Davin Carver
    YouTube Channel here - check it out!
    PSO2 Story Playlists: Episode 1 | Episode 2

  8. #28

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    Quote Originally Posted by SStrikerR View Post
    Despite originally entering college as a CS major, I have no skills to contribute to this whatsoever. However, I do offer my support and wish you the best. Despite me having no knowledge of the vast majority of what you're saying, this is really interesting to me. I'll be sure to check in every so often. Good luck.
    Well, if you find game development an interesting topic you can always study it independently. Nothing I've mentioned I've learned at my University. If I knew only what they taught me I'd still be writing console applications that take in keystrokes and save things to a file, very boring and pointless stuff.

    And it is complicated, what I described above is a broken down version of PSO melee combat with the curtain pulled back. While not the most complicated topic it is also not the easiest. Especially so with the part at the end about rewinding physics, which will be difficult. That is essentially R&D from Quake in the past which some credit going to John Carmack. I've tried to apply those principles before but up until now I don't think I've been competent enough to do so. Hopefully that will change now =)


    Quote Originally Posted by Stealthcmc1974 View Post
    Interesting ideas you have. And thus you already having issues to face when coding. Wish I knew anything about coding aside from my uber basic C++ skills from my single college course, because I'd love to help out with this otherwise.
    I too wish anyone who is passionate could contribute. Sadly a project such as this is an ode to complexity. An undertaking a team of developers in '98/99 took on and probably by the skin of their teeth pulled it off. Thankfully tools now adays help developers be more productive and such. It's more reasonable to pull off now. I can only give the same advice as above; you can study things independently from school. In fact, school will never teach you enough to do interesting things like this.

    Quote Originally Posted by Stealthcmc1974 View Post
    How faithful is this remake supposed to be?
    I intend for the remake to be faithful to the original to the extent that is sane. Producing exploitable gameplay is obviously not in the scope of what I consider being faithful. My thoughts on this can be read somewhere in the many lines I've posted since the thread's start.

    Quote Originally Posted by Stealthcmc1974 View Post
    I love it PSO just as much as the other players on here who got to enjoy this game in it's heyday, but if I wanted to go back and play it to experience the same mechanics, I can easily do that on the Ultima server.
    Private servers such as Ultima and others are essentially projects that have had the luxury of being worked on since 2002. When the original DC emulation and PC emulation began, far before PSOBB. Much work has gone in reverse engineering the serverside just to provide you with the experience. It's a high bar to set but what Ultima lacks is flexibility. They have no client source access and are thus only able to make extremely limited changes to the functionality of PSO as a whole since so much depends on the client itself.

    Quote Originally Posted by Stealthcmc1974 View Post
    I'm not just talking aesthetic design, but gameplay as well. For example, will any improvements/changes be made to the combat system or will it remain mostly unchanged? My main issue with the original (as I said before) was the slow pacing of the combat and the poor camera control. I'm basically wondering if the way characters move and view the environment will remain the same, or be updated according to more modern-day standards.
    I'm personally exploring fresh new ideas, in the PSO spirit, that would be reasonably implementable. I could share them but there is no promise they'd ever be implemented so blabbering about ideas like that doesn't bring the bread home I think. I believe a more indepth support role could be explored for combat. PSO came out in an age before the holy trinity, in MMORPG gaming, was established. Once the project is mature enough it may be possible to produce content that requires a set group of roles to complete, maybe akin to a dungeon or raid, but that is a very complicated goal. I can not promise something like that is achievable and would depend very much on the size of the team once the project starts to take off.

    Player and camera control for PSOBB was as poor as it was due to the fact that a majority of the codebase from the original DC, PC and GC versions was recycled. I see no reason other than nostalgia or possibly unique experience to provide the same control set and camera. Of course, things are always based on fun and feel so only time will tell what actually feels like PSO. It's very possible PSO wouldn't feel like PSO without these. I do intent to provide a more functional controller and camera. That's not too difficult.

    Combat itself deserves some attention. Tech spam, monster's incredibly slow and seemingly stupid actions can be addressed. This would have to be addressed much later from now. Surely some trial and error will happen and, due to the nature of development in Unity, it will be reasonable to provide tests with people in the community to see how they like the feel of any changes.

    Quote Originally Posted by Stealthcmc1974 View Post
    Also, I may as well ask about classes. Do you plan on keeping the 12 classes, or adding more to them? (EX: HUmarl, RAnewearl). There's no reason for these classes not to exist, but I wonder if it would if there would be any issues implementing such classes as far as game balance goes.
    My personal opinion is that roles should not be race-class combo locked. I never liked that but this may be a non-popular opinion. Addressing balance is not something that can be spoken about without the existence of the actual game itself, aside from PSOBB. Surely no developer wants to encourage or see every player playing a FOmar or something because it's the best. Who knows though.

    As I said before a think a support role could be expanded upon. Giving value to playing with others more. Considerably reducing the ability for classes to solo would entice more party play and with more diverse roles there would be a much larger gap between players who play well as opposed to hose who do not. But again, the ideas I've bounced off people may or may not be implemented. I have thought about many things but now isn't the time to share those.

    Quote Originally Posted by Stealthcmc1974 View Post
    Lastly: we've all seen seen various updates and changes to the Phantasy Star gameplay formula over the years. Are there any elements you are considering to put in/alter to this remake?
    You'll find in this thread I talk about reworking everything I believe to have been a result of technical limitations. I won't go into it, because you can find it, but at the least that will be considered. There are many things I'd consider but it is all dependent on development team size. If somehow 20 competent Unity3D developers with fair knowledge on networking and multiplayer games popped out of the wood work and offered to collaberate I could promise a much different feature set for sure. For example, in that scenario it'd be reasonable to see larger scale non-PSO features happening. Such as large-scale instance based raids that, unlike PSO2, don't seem like a face smash against the loot pinata. Or a fully fledged and balanced PvP system akin to World of Warcraft. But these are unrealistic if you consider that, at least at the moment, it is just me. I can do these things yes, well maybe... but it would add months or years of development time to produce in a polished state. So, until a team size is established I cannot speak to what sort of modernized elements you see in MOG/MMO/DVE's would be possible for this project.

    Quote Originally Posted by Stealthcmc1974 View Post
    When it comes down to it, I don't know if a straight up-remake would cut it. I kind of hope this project ends up being more than that, but don't let me be the only voice. Plenty of other people, many more I'm sure more qualified than me, have their own ideas and opinions on how this project should develop. I wish you the best of luck in this endeavor. I won't keep my hopes up, but I'll keep an eye on this project anyhow.
    This is definitely not just a remake in the sense of a one-to-one remake. I'd consider the goal a remastering and improvement (hopefully). Hope to see you around the thread =)

    Edit: I should note one area that will 100% be explored is the idea of a competitive single life server. Most often refereed to as a hardcore on some games. I think this could breathe some fresh air into the game play for sure. A competitive ladder may attract players. It's not overally complex to implement either which is neat. If I, or the team, actually finish the remaking of the original game it would be trivial to provide this feature.
    Last edited by Glader; Dec 1, 2014 at 10:40 PM.

  9. #29

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    This was defintely more of an answer than I was looking for, especially these bits:

    Quote Originally Posted by Glader View Post
    I'm personally exploring fresh new ideas, in the PSO spirit, that would be reasonably implementable. I could share them but there is no promise they'd ever be implemented so blabbering about ideas like that doesn't bring the bread home I think. I believe a more indepth support role could be explored for combat. PSO came out in an age before the holy trinity, in MMORPG gaming, was established. Once the project is mature enough it may be possible to produce content that requires a set group of roles to complete, maybe akin to a dungeon or raid, but that is a very complicated goal. I can not promise something like that is achievable and would depend very much on the size of the team once the project starts to take off.

    Player and camera control for PSOBB was as poor as it was due to the fact that a majority of the codebase from the original DC, PC and GC versions was recycled. I see no reason other than nostalgia or possibly unique experience to provide the same control set and camera. Of course, things are always based on fun and feel so only time will tell what actually feels like PSO. It's very possible PSO wouldn't feel like PSO without these. I do intent to provide a more functional controller and camera. That's not too difficult.

    Combat itself deserves some attention. Tech spam, monster's incredibly slow and seemingly stupid actions can be addressed. This would have to be addressed much later from now. Surely some trial and error will happen and, due to the nature of development in Unity, it will be reasonable to provide tests with people in the community to see how they like the feel of any changes.

    My personally opinion is that roles should not be race-class combo locked. I never liked that but this may be a non-popular opinion. Addressing balance is not something that can be spoken about without the existence of the actual game itself, aside from PSOBB. Surely no developer wants to encourage or see every player playing a FOmar or something because it's the best. Who knows though.

    As I said before a think a support role could be expanded upon. Giving value to player with others more. Considerably reducing the ability for classes to solo would entice more party play and with more diverse roles there would be a much larger gap between players who play well as opposed to hose who do not. But again, the ideas I've bounced off people may or may not be implemented. I have thought about many things but now isn't the time to share those.
    I did read through the whole thread, but I admit I kinda speed read it, so I may have missed some details where you were talking about the technical stuff, hence my seeming ignorant. Sorry about that.

    But I wholly approve of your ideas. Unlocking the class-race thing, more modern controls, and more support on actual class roles would be lovely, not to mention raids and such. Obviously you are right in that this will be a massive undertaking.

    I'm honestly considering doing some independent work to learn coding and such, for more than one reason, but this project would be good as any. (Don't quote me on that though, there's still the learning part to do obviously).

    My reason for my strong interest in this project is not getting a remake to a beloved game of my childhood, but imaging what PSO would be like nowadays. I've been writing a fan story that takes characters through the many universe of Phantasy Star, but it starts at Phantasy Star Online. I've been having an interesting time trying to rationally explain in a scientific way, as well as address some other issues I had with PSO (Pioneer's 1 and 2 were city ships complete with skyscrapers and flying cars, but 30000 people each is a very low population for such a city, especially considering there were certainly more than 30000 people that played PSO as Hunters, which would only comprise a percentage of the total Pioneer 2 population realistically).

    Again, good luck to your future endeavors, and should I develop and practice any sort of meaningful skills aside from concepts to this project once my classes end and I have free time, I would love to contribute to this.
    Ship 02 - Ur, Player ID: Niare Sky
    75/55 BR/BOdewearl Niare Sky, 54/40 GU/RAmar Davin Carver
    YouTube Channel here - check it out!
    PSO2 Story Playlists: Episode 1 | Episode 2

  10. #30

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    ^,^ thanks, it would be a massive undertaking. I generally fear discussion about features such as that because to other developers who view this they too will seem unrealistic goals. I try to be very careful, too many times I've seen projects claim absurdly complicated features will "totally be in the game." It looks poor from the outside looking in as a developer imo.

    I do wish you luck too studying independently, it's hardwork and takes awhile to get to the point where you can do awesome things but as long as you don't give up you will get to that point.

    PSO, without the technical limitation of the dreamcast, would be very different now. I think Pioneer 2 itself could be more vast and could entirely replace the block and lobby system itself. Thankfully in t he year 2014 this is a realistic goal while in 2000 I can imagine the bandwidth cost AND the computation cost of computing interest for those players in the city both exceeded the hardware and was likely an impossible concept.

    I must go finish a lab now though so I won't be able to respond too much. I might work abit on this project tonight if I get time. It would only be work on the underlying networking library that I'm going to use, one I've written, that I'd be working on though. It needed a couple more features before I can start on PSO sadly.

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