Changing Origins (Null the Gull)

[General Idiot]

On 8/6/2024 at 5:43 PM, Duuk said:

So, to summarize:

 

Things can be changed because the game evolves and changes.  And there is no reason Null shouldn't be able to help you tweak your origin and retcon yourself so you don't have to reroll.

In theory, yes.

 

In practice, a character's origin is buried so deep in the game's code that attempting to change it at all would be an enormous amount of work because early in development (as in, before the game's original release) origin was meant to affect far more than it ended up affecting. But as a relic of that early development, there are checks all over the place that a character's origin matches what it should be. Finding and removing those in such a way that doing so wouldn't in turn break all sorts of other stuff is technically possible, but so much more work than it sounds like.

 

Something very similar was why we were locked into the first power of our secondary for so long, again there were checks in all sorts of places in the game's code to ensure you had that power. Originally the idea would've been they were sanity checks to prevent a glitch or bad connection at just the wrong moment letting you create an illegal character, but when changing the rules of what makes a character legal they become obstacles that need to be overcome instead.

 

Would I love the devs to prove me wrong and let us change origin somehow? Maybe. I don't think I'd ever do it myself, origin is just that. It's where your character came from, how they came to be a superhero or villain in the first place. It'd be like DC suddenly saying 'oh Superman was never an alien, he was doing magic the whole time somehow' and expecting the fans not to riot. That's enough of a reason not to allow it, in my opinion. Nevermind all the technical stuff too.

[srmalloy]

On 8/5/2024 at 1:18 PM, Duuk said:

Please allow Null to change origins.  Sometimes I roll a character, start playing it, like the character, but decide that my original idea doesn't work in my brain.  Then I need to delete and reroll because Tech should be Mutant and that seems... inefficient.

And if it is done before your character reaches a level at which you've replaced all of their enhancements with IOs, you suddenly have a character slotted with enhancements they can't use. Pass.

[Excraft]

On 8/5/2024 at 4:18 PM, Duuk said:

Please allow Null to change origins.  Sometimes I roll a character, start playing it, like the character, but decide that my original idea doesn't work in my brain.  Then I need to delete and reroll because Tech should be Mutant and that seems... inefficient.

 

You re-rolling is still far more efficient, less time consuming and easier than anyone here trying to code this as an option to Null.   Others who have pointed out that this is baked into the character are correct and the live Devs mentioned that quite a few times as I recall. 

 

30 minutes ago, srmalloy said:

And if it is done before your character reaches a level at which you've replaced all of their enhancements with IOs, you suddenly have a character slotted with enhancements they can't use.

 

Exactly what I was thinking. 

 

[TheMoneyMaker]

15 hours ago, General Idiot said:

In theory, yes.

 

In practice, a character's origin is buried so deep in the game's code that attempting to change it at all would be an enormous amount of work because early in development (as in, before the game's original release) origin was meant to affect far more than it ended up affecting. But as a relic of that early development, there are checks all over the place that a character's origin matches what it should be. Finding and removing those in such a way that doing so wouldn't in turn break all sorts of other stuff is technically possible, but so much more work than it sounds like.

 

Something very similar was why we were locked into the first power of our secondary for so long, again there were checks in all sorts of places in the game's code to ensure you had that power. Originally the idea would've been they were sanity checks to prevent a glitch or bad connection at just the wrong moment letting you create an illegal character, but when changing the rules of what makes a character legal they become obstacles that need to be overcome instead.

 

Would I love the devs to prove me wrong and let us change origin somehow? Maybe. I don't think I'd ever do it myself, origin is just that. It's where your character came from, how they came to be a superhero or villain in the first place. It'd be like DC suddenly saying 'oh Superman was never an alien, he was doing magic the whole time somehow' and expecting the fans not to riot. That's enough of a reason not to allow it, in my opinion. Nevermind all the technical stuff too.

In all the time the game was active before the shutdown... in all the time work was being done on the secret servers... in all the time since the game came back and its code was released into the wild...  why has no one ever bothered to untangle the spaghetti and introduce a revised code without some of the hard coded restrictions?

 

oh wait, I know.  Because it would be too much work.  No one was getting paid enough to start over in the old days.  Secret server development was focused more on just getting the game to work again.  And currently everything is free and pretty much working here and the other independent servers, and no one is or can really get paid to do anything of the sort.  It's the kind of thing that would have to be done as a labor of love... by someone with both the talent and the money not to have to worry about showing up at a real job so they can eat and keep the lights on at home.

 

Maybe one day AI can sort it all out.

[Luminara]

6 hours ago, TheMoneyMaker said:

Maybe one day AI can sort it all out.