How to make demigod fun... and have it's community grow...

from Demigod Forums

<rant>
  • Clans in impulse (comming, yay)
  • An im client through impulse. More than that we need to allow other programs like trillian and pidgin to integrate with these. Create a client in which your impulse account is a chat account, a clan account, a form account (more details later), and a game account all in one. And you don't need (or a lightweight client) impulse to get these benefits. So you can chat with your friends even at work.
  • A VOIP client that impulse provides. This needs to allow team and cross-team chatting while in a game. Give the ability to be in a channel with friends as well as in one for gaming (like 2 voip clients open). Seamlessly integrate into impulse games so when you join a game you immediately join the voip channel for that game. Boom. Games don't need to implement all these features.
  • A clan form hosted by stardock. Clans just allow people to join and vuala you get access to their forms.
  • Integrate the forms into the games. Like when logging on even in demigod you get a quick overview of whats new in the clan, whos online, what are they doing, and unobtrusively get to go right into finding your game.
*note: to see what I mean by unobtrusive, check out Ubuntu 9.04's notification library. See what happens when you get an instant message or a song changes and a popup comes up. Whats awesome is taht you mouse over it and it fades letting you do what you wanted to do, like minimize or close a window. It is unobtrusive to the extreme! I love it.
  • Make sure if you make a chat client that there is a super-lightweight version of it that can be running all the time, impuse is in no way light weight.
  • Replace IE used with WebKit or just embed google chrome. It will start up much faster and use less resources... (granted that google chrome has shown to spike in memory usage). I never have IE launched so bringing up impulse is like telling my 2 year old to also carry around a 10 pound bag while strolling through the city (kids get tired easily).
  • And last but not least... actually one of the more important ones... DON'T MAKE YOUR PLAYERS RAGE-QUIT THE GAME COMPLETELY. In other words, fix the damn annoying bugs. Demigod is one of the lower quality games I've played. And honestly I and many others currently feel that if DG was not so damn good we would quit it, and all probably won't buy any SD or GPG games again because SD is becoming the new EA when it comes to bugs in games. Or at least that is the feeling I have. Fix the bug where alt-tabbing causes crashes. For god's sake make the game not crash on exit, that is just pitiful. If you introduce a feature like "random demigod" make sure it does not crash everyone in the game before releasing; I rather not have the feature.
</rant>

demigod
9,057 views 11 replies
Reply #1 from Demigod Forums Top

This is just silly. Half the stuff you listed is coming, and alot of it isnt that big of a deal. They use IE because everyone has it, no one's gonna want to hafta download a new web browser if they dont have too.

And about the bugs, SD is nothing like EA in this regard, First of all, the bugs are pretty much on GPG's end anyways. Also stardock has been working extremely hard to fix everything and keeping us informed on what they've been doing. No other company (especially EA) Does this.

Reply #2 from Demigod Forums Top

SD is becoming the new EA when it comes to bugs in games.

Blasphemy!

Anyway, some of what you've listed has already been confirmed, however I do agree with your comment about IE. There's a reason I don't use IE, and I'd prefer not having to use with Impulse. Hopefully this gets changed when they roll out the improved Friends system.

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Reply #3 from Demigod Forums Top

If you think Demigod is "lower" quality, then you simply do not play games.  At all.  Full stop.  Do not pass go.  Do not collect $200.  And passing judgement on Stardock is just silly; while it is true they recently have had a finger in Demigod's pie, you simply cannot blame them for any real or perceived faults with Demigod.  You can blame their service, their impulse client, what have you - but blaming them for somebody else's piece of work is simply stupid.

 

As for your wish list, it sounds good in theory.  Here is some news, however: most games' communities are not geeks that care about having a light weight, stand alone messenger.  There is little reason for it, from a business perspective.  If anything, businesses should be pooling together to have a standard client, instead of fragmenting everything into a bunch of clients.  Pick a protocol!

 

Finally, IE isn't slow.  This isn't 1995.  Now, IE definitely has faults (standards breakers, argh!).  It looks like Impulse's implementation is what is slow, not IE itself.  Switching to a different renderer isn't going to solve anything if they implement it poorly.  And yeah, this is one thing that drives me nuts - Impulse's web browsing is just so slow.  Again, place blame where it belongs and don't turn your rants into a different topic entirely.

Reply #4 from Demigod Forums Top

I had a whole giant rebuttle to the comments. But really I want to hear from Frogboy what SD will do about all this.

Reply #5 from Demigod Forums Top

Clan support, IM client-like functionality (Ready-to-Play), and VOIP are all things we've already said we're planning and working on for future revisions of Impulse and/or Impulse Reactor.

On the other hand, unless [insert favorite HTML renderer here] provides a complete drop-in replacement for MSHTML and System.Net (among other libraries), the chances of Impulse being completely rewritten to accomodate it are exceedingly slim to none. MSHTML is a fundamental part of Windows (used in explorer, help, etc), and though it may have flaws, it's easy to integrate and is present on all Windows machines already. But Impulse's using IE's engine or not doesn't really have any bearing at all on Demigod anyway.

Reply #6 from Demigod Forums Top

I think they are all good suggestions, but ones that have been made before and verified by Stardock. Possibly my only concern is VOIP - the game needs VOIP, but I just have a suspicion they will implement this just in impulse. You need to have the ability in a game to be able to chat to all your other team mates whether you know them in impulse or not. You also need the ability to mute any player in a game easily. Sort these two out and team games will move to a different level imho.

Before anyone makes the obvious comment - I play most DG games with vent and have my own vent hosted solution.

Tals

Reply #7 from Demigod Forums Top

Adding VOIP, which is a great idea, to Impulse will of course mean it's available to Demigod. What's the point in having a Digitial Distribution service with VOIP that doesn't work with the games it provides? Anyway, VOIP will increase the amount of upload required by Demigod which is already too much for some people - I'm sure it's already being looked at, I was just wondering is does anyone know by how much it would increase it by?

Reply #8 from Demigod Forums Top

As far as VoIP goes, from Frogboy's comment on it, he said they were going for high quality voice chat, which might leave some people with sub-par connections not able to use it. On the bright side, we might actually be able to hear what people say when they use it!

Reply #9 from Demigod Forums Top

Quoting Resist_The_Dawn, reply 1
This is just silly. Half the stuff you listed is coming, and alot of it isnt that big of a deal. They use IE because everyone has it, no one's gonna want to hafta download a new web browser if they dont have too.

And about the bugs, SD is nothing like EA in this regard, First of all, the bugs are pretty much on GPG's end anyways. Also stardock has been working extremely hard to fix everything and keeping us informed on what they've been doing. No other company (especially EA) Does this.

ok fanboy

1.1 was hyped to fix the dam game yet it created more problems

random does not work hmm how the hell does that pass test phases

name 1 major thing they fixed in 1.1. that would be 0

all that got fixed could have been implemented longtime ago. it seems they only have 1 person working on this game.

its already been stated that after 1.2 the rest of the patches will come out depends on sales of the game.

 

news flash alot of decent games are gona be out starting in september and all the way to december.

so i guess this game is done

Reply #10 from Demigod Forums Top

Quoting jinxster, reply 9
1.1 was hyped to fix the dam game yet it created more problems

Please provide a link to the Journal or comment where an employee of Stardock mentioned that patch 1.1 was the patch that was going to fix every issue in the game.


Quoting jinxster, reply 9
name 1 major thing they fixed in 1.1. that would be 0

Actually, that would the correction of the flow of the game with HoL tweak and the Priests and Angels tweak which allows for the Creeps to be used without fear of feeding the opposition and removed the ability for a player to get a hold of the HoL minutes into the game.

Quoting jinxster, reply 9
its already been stated that after 1.2 the rest of the patches will come out depends on sales of the game.

Please provide a link to the Journal or comment where an employee of Stardock mentioned that no further support or patches of any kind will be provided after patch 1.2 unless the game sells well. As far as I'm aware, the only comment made was that additional content after the 2 Demigods would depend on the sales of the game.



Quoting jinxster, reply 9
news flash alot of decent games are gona be out starting in september and all the way to december.
so i guess this game is done

I was unaware the idea of a Games release was to be the last game ever released for Mankind. As far as I'm aware, and I could be wrong, every game ever made faced the prospect of other releases after it's launch. If you just jump from game to game at launch and never return to games you enjoyed, then I'm greatful that September is nearly here.

Reply #11 from Demigod Forums Top

@ZehDon

 

I just want them to fix the bugs.

 

ALL community features are to make the community grow better. It can't happen if the game is so buggy that people will just quit.