Yeah, but it looked kinda inactive (14 hours since last message), so I didn't really think I'd get a quick answer

Hey folks

Anybody home?

I wanted to get some advice on whether I could word a question to fit within the rules, because the thing I'm wondering about is somewhat subjective

@doppelgreener hey.

o/

@Nzall See? Someone's always here :P

okay

thanks

← 2 messages moved from RPG Chat Game "Meta"

Oh that messed up

So here's what I'm looking to post a question about: supporting sequence breaking in games with official cheating and/or modding support

@Nzall subjective questions aren't necessarily off-topic

it's based on several games with modding support like Skyrim and to some extent Witcher 3, where some mods and/or cheats might cause sequence breaking

@Nzall also official cheating seems like an oxymoron

@Nzall You can ask your question here :)

@Pikalek like the konami code?

@Nzall #Minecraft?

@Nzall yes, the topic doesn't seem overtly off-topic - what specific thing did you want to ask about supporting sequence breaking?

@doppelgreener Hmmm, you may have a point there. I suppose that might fit the term. I should probably finish my morning coffee before making oxymoronic accusations :)

haha :D

I remember the original jurassic park game had a cheat code that had to be entered three times in a row, and the first two times the game would always pretend it failed. And my brother promised he was going to show me a really cool cheat, and the first two times pretended he'd messed up, like "whoops, darnit, ok one more try" "whoops, i messed up again, ok ONE more try i promise"

@Pikalek effectively, i'd like to ask to what extent it should be supported

but I think that's bad subjective

@doppelgreener Funny. What platform?

because it's pretty much a choice between how much effort you want to put into it and how much you want to support the modding itslef

What is Sequence Breaking?

@Nzall Yes, that seems too subjective in that form.

@dot_Sp0T metroid.wikia.com/wiki/Sequence_Breaking

:/

@dot_Sp0T doing something you're not supposed to be able to do, either because a mod or cheat changed how the game works or because you did something the devs didn't foresee as possible, leading to certain events not triggering or triggering at the wrong time and thus not working anymore

@Pikalek Playstation 1: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…

Stuff like fast traveling out of Whoreson Junior's house in Witcher 3 with a mod and missing the quest trigger for Triss' quest

ah, very interesting - didn;t know there was a term for that :)

@Nzall when you say support it - what do you mean? Traditionally, SB happens when players clever their way around a barrier of some manner. If you want to deliberately seed the game with opportunities, that's a valid design choice, but you should probably consider how it might impact the game overall.

@doppelgreener Samus? I know that character from somewhere...

@Pikalek with support, I mean giving the player a workaround to complete the important quests in case they managed to break one of them

When a game expects you to do A -> B -> C, sequence breaking is doing those in any other order.

Something similar to when you kill an important NPC in Morrowind and you need to go visit the Dwemer in the Corprus clinic as a workaround

@doppelgreener yeah, I view it as wider than just doing BAC instead of ABC.

It can also be AC, A -> you've won the game, etc.

Ocarina of Time has a way to skip to the end boss fight within 15 minutes.

Super Metroid has a Reverse Boss Order speedrun mode, where the order of every boss (except the final boss) is done in reverse because of some insane sequence breaking.

It also has the mockball glitch, which is so perfectly made for sequence breaking in one specific room that it has lead people to think the Super Metroid designers set that up deliberately.

For me the Sequence breaking is also "instead of ABCDEF, you did ABC123D456E, and now you can't do F"

I remember skipping the final battle in Halo5

What how do you do D twice

@FreezePhoenix I also consider that a sequence breaker, but I didn't do D twice in my example

Essentially, it's less the sequence breaking I'm curious about and more "what if a player does something I didn't expect and now they can't finish the game"

Sorry I can't read sometimes :P

maybe sequence breaking isn't the right word for that

I remember in Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, there was this bug in the release version where if you forgot to pick up a torch in an area, you'd die right after reaching the next checkpoint, and you couldn't go back for the torch. It caused a minor kerfuffle when a reviewer encountered this issue and in a purely impulsive move gave the game a 2, even though he was loving the game more and more before the bug

Dats a silly bug

And I'm thinking less about reaction and more about proaction

So here's my take: putting aside the notion of speed runs & deliberate SB'ers, there's also a chance that a player may inadvertently do the equivalent of a SB. If that puts the game into an unwinnable state, I think it's important to consider how much of a time investment the player may lose as a consequence.

Also, how obvious will it be the player that the situation occurred?

A lot depends on the nature of your game, the save / reload options (if any), the mean play time, etc.

@doppelgreener fuck, our company exclusively develops in Java. Does this mean that if we want to develop on newer versions of Java, we'll have to pay? And what about our customers? Our software is supposed to be hosted at the company, with several machines

That being said, I'm also not saying - never have an unwinnable state. Otherwise you eventually have a "press B to win game" situation.

But giving the player & to some extent yourself as developer/designer, an out in case some series of things results in something unexpected, I think that's okay.

Regarding Java - it depends. If you stay with SE, then yes, someone will be expected to pay Oracle something. If you do not want / need commercial support or enterprise management tools, you can likely transition to the OpenJDK.

OpenJDK is GPL 2 w/ ClassPath Exception, so as long as you're not changing the language code itself, licensing shouldn't be a problem.

@Pikalek Our current product doesn't work on OpenJDK

And we only just officially switched our development version to Java 8

Hasn't most of the Ora JDK code been transitioned into OpenJDK code already anyways? I thought only the SUN bits were still missing due to license issues

and we develop on Windows, where the OpenJDK version is even older

We use some of the sun bits

We use sun.syndication.feed.rss

Well then, I don't envy the person who will need to figure that out for your company. The likely options are pay unto Caesar etc or change the code base to get around the problems.

Shouldn't staying with Java8/9 be just as effective license-wise? The last company I worked for has been using Java6 up into 2017ish - I don't think the likes of IBM and co will update their application servers to java 9/10 anytime soon

@dot_Sp0T Starting in 2019, even Java 8 will require a sub to get the latest version

and Java 9 and 10 are short-term releases that aren't supposed to be used in production

Oracle is just looking out for my best interests. I appreciate they don't want my skill set to go stale & thusly are encouraging me to add other languages to my C.V.

@Nzall End users of your applications are unaffected. They use the JRE, which will remain free. Your company will be paying an overhead licensing fee to Oracle for each developer and each server because of use of the JDK.

@doppelgreener Our product uses a server/client/webapp layout using Karaf/karaf/tomcat, and apparently you need a JDK to run Karaf

@Nzall If Karaf is server-side it might just be part of your server overhead. If your users have to have Karaf, and in turn have to have the JDK... you need to switch to OpenJDK or something.

You should probably bring this up with your business department so they can assess the cost impacts on their business.

@doppelgreener it's... complicated. Our product is a build automation tool meant for businesses to automatically build, test and deploy their own software solutions

There's some confusion going on right now, a colleague investigating thinks that base features are still free, but enterprisey features will cost a fee.

so we have a webapp running in tomcat for the front end, and on the same machine there's a server Karaf application that handles handing out tasks to the karaf agents installed on the various machines you're deploying and testing on

So people are still trying to figure out what these licensing fees mean exactly, which parts cost how much money, etc.

the only part the users interact with is the web interface through a browser. This updates the database, and from there the server checks if anything should be done on an agent machine

Each article we find on the subject explains things a bit differently.

so our end users don't need to have a jdk installed on their own machine, but every machine you want to test your software on or deploy your software to has to have a karaf, and probably a JDK as well

@Nzall like Jenkins?

@dot_Sp0T yeah, something like that

Why reinvent the wheel?

We were around before Jenkins, I think

Well, if they use java to develop their own applications they will need the licenses anyway obviously...

@Nzall So what is your prod called, if it's on the open market? Don't have to answer. Just only ever knew about Jenkins and Travis for Java stuff

@dot_Sp0T Ikan ALM. we're mainly active in Western Europe, in Belgium, France and Germany

ikanalm.com is our website

very interesting, never heard about it. We built our own solution based upon Jenkins at the Swiss bank I worked in my last job. And that things was running a good 5 or 6 years at least when I joined the team in 2016

@dot_Sp0T Jenkins was created in 2011. Ikan ALM exists at least since 2004, because that's the date we imported our codebase from CVS into Subversion

Hello!

Hello?

@Nzall So we just went through exploring more about the java licensing deal, and our conclusion is it's really unclear what remains free and why. We can find a few different theoretical ideas, for example, our current suspicion is that new JDKs release once or twice a year, and you get the new JDK for free but get zero patches for it unless you're paying.

So if JDK11 comes out, you can upgrade to that. Then you get zero updates or patches to it, ever. Then JDK12 will come out. You can upgrade your project to JDK12, which will include some improvements. If true, means you either upgrade your product regularly to new JDK versions, or you stay in the one version and if you want updates you have to pay $$$.

We're still not 100% sure that's correct and Oracle's site is not exactly clear about it.

@TheMattbat999 Hi! o/

How are you, @doppelgreener ?

doing alright. having a good friday. :)

Good.

you?

Fine. Not much going on, added a new level to a Zombie Survival side project I have been working on.

ooh

What's that like? :D

It is, simple 3d graphics. The new level id an Airship above the sea. Zombies come in waves, with more HP and more of them each wave.

There are 5 guns with 4 variants each (normal, red, blue, green) red has higher fire rate, blue does double damage, and green has more ammo per clip.

@doppelgreener

I am trying to think of which one of those is best and I can't figure it out, which is a good sign

i'm leaning toward blue

I usually get the Green one, but Blue is really good for the Uzi and Plasma Cannon (pistol-like, futuristic gun that shoots balls of plasma). Red is good for the Rifle.

@Tyyppi_77 I have had that happen to me too. There is still a watch somewhere in my closet that goes off rarely during the night and day...

i bet it's hidden in a vent or behind a closet

yeah :)

I hope he can make it soon o/