freeze myth version

[waywardone]

I propose that we (the players) no longer update Myth. Magma can do w/e they want. Clearly and justifiably they mod to please themselves. They just aren't capable of doing the few things we'd like changed anyway.

Unless they can give us a standalone release that doesn't screw with gameplay, I'm tired of accepting their shitty changes just to get a slightly lower ping, the unnecessary option for 300 fps, gimmicks, or used-only-in-coop bullshit.

[amino1]

Can you list all the ways Magma have screwed up gameplay? I don't know but everything seems to work pretty well right now, and I'm inclined to think that's more or less Magma's doing. I for one appreciate not needing a CD to play and being able to play in a modern OS, not to mention options for detailed textures and other improvements that actually have no bearing on gameplay. What are some examples of what "we" want that Magma won't implement?

[Aki]

wwo was just irked when 1.6 made caps lock unmappable (spell check wants me to write unflappable :0)

[iron]

No-one forces anyone to update. If an old version is better, by all means play it.

[pogue]

I agree we stay at 1.7.2. The only thing I would like to change is when you move up arcs in a long line, a couple of them always want to switch position, JUST STAY THE SAME!!!! I recall Adren mentioning this in, Sam The Full On Retard's thread.

[waywardone]

I hate these tiny reply boxes.

@ amino1: it's not always the changes themselves; it's usually something else unforeseen. Pathfinding has certainly been altered several times. It might be subjective whether it's "better" or not; the point is it's different and still not "fixed". Adrenaline's a good source for these types of issues, such as heron healing, which afaik is still buggy as *cruiser*.

No-cd is great but nothing others couldn't do (hell, it's a routine first step for modding; cd cracks and DRM-removal is modding 101), never mind that a tiny game like Myth and freeware virtual drives make no-cd a "meh" issue anyway.

Modern OS compat is a good thing I already listed in StB's thread. Detail textures? All it really does is show off the dated sprites and models. I'm pretty sure the rest can be safely ignored.

Aki: Great example. The bullshit arguments I had to participate in just to keep playing the same *cruisering* gameplay as before was ridiculous, especially for something so trivially coded as keymaps.

iron: Exactly right, thus this poll to get a consensus among this particular audience.

pogue: More right. Gameplay issues that are relevant should be addressed, but if they want to package that with yet another tweaked pathfinding algorithm, it's not worth it.

p.s. Pyro had a link to all the old builds. Can anyone repost it?

[milkman]

I disagree. Every time I disappear for a year or two I'm always happy to find the cool new stuff magma has added. The ability to search for plugs rather than having to scroll around endlessly, autohost, persistent ready, chat carrying over from game, transparent interface, the list goes on and all or almost all of it is just stuff that makes day to day play more convenient without effecting gameplay. I mean, if it wasnt for magma updates we simply wouldn't be playing this game with modern OS, and without future updates we certainly won't be playing it with future OS. Yea, some of the stuff is coop and mapmaker oriented, but these are legitimate miff subcultures and in a community so small some solidarity would be nice. And you guys are just gonna cry and whine because of some obscure, debatable pathfinding quirk that they do their best to fix at no pay? I say THANKS MAGMA and also everyone else who puts in WORK for us to have fun... like also grim and the dudes running mnet.

[pyro]

Aug 11, 2012 10:59:00 GMT 2 waywardone said:

Pathfinding has certainly been altered several times. ...the point is it's different and still not "fixed".

Usually pathfinding has been messed with due to the MWC crowd requesting/complaining about it. Some blame Magma, then it is proven its been like that since Bungie or since a previous fix requested and tested by them. Then some instead of asking that it be reverted or not be touched anymore, want yet another fix for it. Pathfinding is tricky, you can fix one part but then it will mess something else up and it is not always obvious what is broken. Last time (MWC 2011) someone talked about a pathfinding fix some had wanted, no one was interested in testing it or just changed their minds. Then they stated its better the way it was in the end, so it was dropped.

Detail textures? All it really does is show off the dated sprites and models.

If the sprites and models are replaced by better detailed ones, then that wouldn't be an issue. There are players outside of Myth that don't even try the game due to its outdated graphics. I once encountered a player that preferred Myth 3 over Myth 2 just because of the graphics! He was a lost cause, but others don't have to be. Besides, you can simply disable them in prefs or toggle them off even in game if you don't like the look.

The bullshit arguments I had to participate in just to keep playing the same *cruisering* gameplay as before was ridiculous, especially for something so trivially coded as keymaps.

The user interface code for Myth2 is a mess, or at least it was a bigger mess in the past. Any new options would be hardcoded, some better than others. The capslock thing had already existed since Bungie but in a different key, and it did not always work right. Should any such thing be hardcoded? Ideally not, of course. But it was forgotten/overlooked and no one complained about it during the betas and public betas.

It wasn't until after 1.6.0 was final that someone outside of Magma took notice of your refusal to update. In fact, I bet if you had brought it up then to Magma, the devs would have made a fixed build for you that would still use 1.6.0 gameplay. Then you would not have had to wait 3 years before updating again. It probably would have taken even longer if you hadn't reported it in 2009 after trying the 1.7.0 public beta.

p.s. Pyro had a link to all the old builds. Can anyone repost it?

Here is the Myth2 EXEs pack, it only includes the Windows Myth files from 1.3.0 to 1.7.2, no Mac or Linux. As long as you can load them, you can even get on Mnet with any of them. The ReadMe tells you what you need to know to prevent you from messing up your files. If others are interested in looking up old changes to Myth2 versions they can do so here.

[waywardone]

TINY REPLY BOX, I HATE YOU!

@ milkman: Every boon you listed was already called a boon because to this crowd -- you can exclude yourself -- those changes are inconsequential. The difference between a shit player and a good one is that a pathfinding issue is never a throwaway "quirk". I guess you've outed yourself on that one. Maybe use less inflammatory terms next time.

@ pyro

pathfinding, and unit targeting (melee) as well: One of the last rituals to die of the old guard ('97-'01) was nerdly testing every permutation of combat after patches. You get sensitive to things like at what distance a chasing unit decides to copy its target's turns, or the standard deviation curve of vet accuracy. Good players still get a feel for these things. I'm certain that if the top 5% of players say something's fucked, it's fucked. The fact that it's gone through X iterations since 1.3 is irrelevant. What is relevant is that forced re-learning of once instinctive play is not conducive to good competition.

I absolutely agree with the sprites/models issue, but until they catch up to the textures, it really is a jarring disparity. I mean, I guess I'm happy they're finding ways to bash some modernity into an old engine, but that's really all it is, like a tech demo. For us, it is still inconsequential.

As far as new players go, honestly, someone worried about what this game looks like is not someone we're going to give a shit about. There could be a huge influx of ipad hipsters bloating MWC signups by 500, but if they're not here because the game looks old, then they're pretty much interchangeable with the crappy players we already have. {The biggest hurdle to new players is all the assholes and attention whores!}

I didn't play from ~ april 01 till mwc 05. I think it was 1.5.1 at the time. That there were still updates went almost unnoticed by me. I never saw a Magma person online and, other than mwc, I'm not a forum monkey (hi, seeker!) so I was unaware I was supposed to be seeking these people out. Other than it becoming almost a joke where I enjoyed playing the crotchety old guy refusing to modernize, staying on 1.5.1 was never an issue for the more than 2 years I used it.

I'm also positive that 1.6 caused freezes and crashes for my hardware. Just like now, I look at the changelog and ask myself "what am I getting in exchange for a potentially unfixable flaw?". Between the crashing and capslock, there was no reason for me to use 1.6. My thinking is, if I'm going to change something that people already reliably use, the obligation is on me to make sure I'm not *cruisering* something up. Then again, I also think that if 99 people don't have a problem, then a bitch ain't one.

Groovy on those exes. I wanna do some really hardcore nerdly testing.

[milkman]

Ouch!

But seriously, was the pathfinding so different back in the day? I remember plenty of tro moonwalking and shit but maybe I'm trippin.

I guess one of the reasons that I feel like you shouldn't be so harsh towards magma and other people who are more on the creative rather than competetive side of things is that I've seen many of the creative talents who've made cool stuff for this game more or less chased out by belligerent players who think PG is the absolute pinnacle of map making. Not going into details just cause I don't want to stir up ego-trips from a decade past but all I'm trynna say is that there has always been this weird tension and mutual dislike between these segments of the myth community; I think that our community grown small enough that we need to try to overcome them.

Not trynna "inflame" you wwo but if you hate the pathfinding now why not make a plug that reverts to 1.3 pathfinding and see how many people want to play it?

[Aki]

milkman ~trynna

[punkuser]

Almost nothing relevant to gameplay has changed in many years, so I'm not sure why you're complaining. Most of the objectionable stuff that apparently happened in 1.4 was reverted for 1.5 and onwards I believe.

Pathfinding has not changed for quite a while. I think I mentioned this in the other thread but I made a pile of builds during last year's MWC that had all the relevant permutations and versions as well as a bunch of hybrids that you guys thought might be good and after a pile of people testing them all and posting films, etc. it was determined that the current way is actually the best. Please feel free to go back and play with those versions and give your input, but there was overwhelming consensus on the issue at the time. Nothing is ever perfect, but how it works now was deemed to be the "least bad".

Again I'd encourage you guys to just try the old versions whenever you figure anything has changed and bring up your concerns. In the vast majority of cases, nothing really has actually changed.

Most of the work done on Myth doesn't touch gameplay. It's stuff luck optimizing, making things work on modern OSes, fixed bugs/crashes, adding peripheral features (stuff like autosave films, alternate keyboard layout support, improving statistics, etc) and so on.

Detail textures (which don't even affect gameplay) are completely optional of course. I prefer to have them since the Myth sprites actually are already significantly higher pixel density than the terrain at regular zoom levels so the detail textures level that out a bit. Depends a lot on the specific set though... I tend to like somewhat subtler dtex than some people.

Anyways I personally care more about the competitive side of Myth than the coop side so if you have concerns or things you'd like to see addressed, by all means feel free to PM me and I'll look into them. But I will add that all the current devs share the same concern for making gameplay changes as you folks do, which is why very little has been changed in many years.

[godzfire]

So basically, what I'm seeing here and from other posts like it are is the following:

A) Select few people bitch loudly about a perceived change in the game caused obviously and specifically by Magma

B) Devs offer to look at issue and give some plugins for players to test to see (if) it occured and ways to fix it

C) Players are too lazy to actually put in some work themselves and test issue they are bitching about and continue to complain about it

It never fails. There are ALWAYS multiple early builds of new versions available for testing and also usually at least 2 Public Betas for people to download and see if it affects them. It's not like these releases are rushed either; normal updates can easily take 6 months to a year or more before the final version is put out the door, more than enough time for someone to speak up about a problem; that is, if they care enough to check. If not, how can you expect Magma to fix an issue if it's never brought up?

If you think the Myth community right now is small, imagine the even smaller group of bug/build testers. It's an absolute impossibility to have enough people to test out every single combination of hardware/os/graphics card there is.

You like 1.3 right? You're still free to play it if you want, assuming it will work on M.Net. FYI forget about it if you're on an Intel Mac, it won't run, or anything post Windows XP; you MIGHT be able to get it to run in some kind of compatibility mode, but I'd wager the performance wouldn't be too hot.

The fact is, if you're not willing to test ways to 'fix' these perceived 'issues' you state and lend solid credence to it actually being a problem, then that's all these issues are, 'perceived'.

NOTE: I'm not part of Magma, so please don't try and associate my comments as trying to defend them, (although I'm sure the people who disagree with my comments wish I was, would make it easier for them to insult with)

[giantkillergeneral]

no one wishes you were a part of magma godzfire. we all thank god each and everyday that magma at least knows better than to accept the continuous offers to help from someone as weak and spineless as yourself, even while you constantly ride their nuts. no doubt they would otherwise be the laughing stock of the community and no one would take anything that they did seriously.

why are you on the mwc forums anyway? don't you have some games to suicide in, drop out of, and deny or something?

[drunken]

Dont get me started on patches. Ever since magma fucked around with the coop games. Levels have been damaged to unplayable. That coop level that you free deciever from soulblighters prison. Soulbligher litterly patrolls your escape route.

Oh and they killed the instant win on the Ermine level as well, not to mention the old favourite of mine the Babyshaker 2 berserk method of Triggering all enemies on "the great library" and survive. You cant even do this now, you must trigger the waves separately and its not the same feel.

Did Magma even bother to play the standard coop meshes on legendary because I think at least 3 of them are bugged and unwinnable.