Help wanted: Cryptic...

[dwturducken]

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/192483/Get_a_job_Cryptic_Studios_seeks_multiple_programmers.php

[johnrobey]

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/192483/Get_a_job_Cryptic_Studios_seeks_multiple_programmers.php

They told me there was nothing out there, nothing to fear. But that night I caught a glimpse of something. I've looked for it ever since. I went around the world, searched in all the shadows. And there is something out there in the darkness, something terrifying, something that will not stop until it gets revenge... Me.

Love your signature line.  Most excellent!  ROFL

[Joshex]

only part of it I don't meet is I am not extremely sufficient with C. I'm maybe moderate at best. something tells me without a certificate they wont give me a chance to prove myself lol.

[Ceremonius]

Developing the engine that drives our games, including AI, graphics, physics, animation, and audio.

Wich actually means -> If you know ogre3d and our modified version of it, that's for you! http://www.ogre3d.org/ (if I am not wrong)

Putting the "massive" in MMO by working on databases, networking, transactions, chat, and other systems that scale to handle tens of thousands of users.

New ones will create one of our late features: "the lag"! Our old 'n' lazy ones will share their expierence :D.

Creating the development tools to handle the ever-changing demands of producing online games.

By now - use what's around :P

Wouldn't work for cryptic anymore, after they pretty much messed everything, after CoH, up :(

[GuyPerfect]

Wouldn't work for cryptic anymore, after they pretty much messed everything, after CoH, up :(

Based on what I've seen in the City of Heroes data and program code, the only reason it turned out as well as it did was because they were using it for practice making terrible design decisions.

[General Idiot]

CoH turned out as well as it did because when they made it, Cryptic had a number of smart and talented people working for them that served to rein in some of the worst of the others. Most of those people stayed with CoH when Cryptic sold it and became Paragon.

[Joshex]

Based on what I've seen in the City of Heroes data and program code, the only reason it turned out as well as it did was because they were using it for practice making terrible design decisions.

lol seems like you're saying the cryptic staff are so incompetent that thier idea of 'wrong' is soooooo right.

[Aggelakis]

lol seems like you're saying the cryptic staff are so incompetent that thier idea of 'wrong' is soooooo right.

Not incompetent. Newbie. City was all of the devs' first MMO. They had no idea what they were doing. There was no 'wrong' because there was no 'right' - MMOs were a very young genre back in the early-early 2000s when City was cooking in the pot.

[GuyPerfect]

There was no 'wrong' because there was no 'right'

Cryptic and Paragon both were strong subscribers to the school of "hard-code assumptions into the program". They'd take as many shortcuts as they needed to implement the spec under the assumption that the spec would never ever ever ever ever change. This is 'wrong' because it's stupid in any situation. You don't hire programmers that do that, and should it happen, you don't keep them on the payroll.

These are just a few of the facepalm moments we've encountered:

• We all remember coloring our powers. Colored powers weren't in the original specification, so the game engine was designed in such a way that powers could never be recolored. They had to make some hefty modifications to make it work, and it wasn't until Issue 24 before we could get rid of the yellow pom-poms on Hasten.
• You know the brown bar for Brute Fury, Dominator Domination and formerly Blaster Defiance? The game decides whether to draw that--each and every frame--by checking if the current character's class name is equal to "Class_Brute", "Class_Dominator" or, formerly, "Class_Blaster". Why save a flag somewhere when you can do a string comparison every frame instead?
• The terms of service agreement was a big long legal-sounding document. Turns out the entire thing was drawn to the screen every frame, but everything except the visible portion was cropped out. This severely impacted the framerate for many users.
• On a similar note, all of your character names in the character selection screen were drawn every frame, and only the visible column wasn't masked out.
• Ever had difficulties clicking something on the far right edge of the screen when you first log in with a character? You also know how the pop-up help exclamation marks appeared on the right-hand side of the screen? Those were drawn in an invisible window, which from time to time wound up in front of your power tray or whatever else was over there. Disabling pop-help in the menu did not remove the invisible window.
• Pretty much every GUI element is copied from other GUI elements. The "show only free costume parts" check box? It doesn't use the same code as the "remember account name" check box; it's copied over.
• Super group bases are sent to the client as a big ol' string-formatted zlib stream. Every. Single. Time. you make a change to a base, the entire string is sent back down to all users in the base to be redrawn.

[Joshex]

• You know the brown bar for Brute Fury, Dominator Domination and formerly Blaster Defiance? The game decides whether to draw that--each and every frame--by checking if the current character's class name is equal to "Class_Brute", "Class_Dominator" or, formerly, "Class_Blaster". Why save a flag somewhere when you can do a string comparison every frame instead?
• The terms of service agreement was a big long legal-sounding document. Turns out the entire thing was drawn to the screen every frame, but everything except the visible portion was cropped out. This severely impacted the framerate for many users.
• On a similar note, all of your character names in the character selection screen were drawn every frame, and only the visible column wasn't masked out.
• Ever had difficulties clicking something on the far right edge of the screen when you first log in with a character? You also know how the pop-up help exclamation marks appeared on the right-hand side of the screen? Those were drawn in an invisible window, which from time to time wound up in front of your power tray or whatever else was over there. Disabling pop-help in the menu did not remove the invisible window.
• Pretty much every GUI element is copied from other GUI elements. The "show only free costume parts" check box? It doesn't use the same code as the "remember account name" check box; it's copied over.
• Super group bases are sent to the client as a big ol' string-formatted zlib stream. Every. Single. Time. you make a change to a base, the entire string is sent back down to all users in the base to be redrawn.

no wonder things were so laggy, seeing as you know so much; what invisible window was to the right of the chatbox and inbetween the power tray?

that region never works with point and click powers.

as for the stuff being read each frame, thats kinda, how to say 'computer abusive', I'm programming my own game atm and I ran in to severe computer overload problems with scripts just like that; always(Level tap true) and [anything]= unecessarily consumes a crap load of processor power and memory.

I've found it's much more efficient to set-up a 'check point' at various places like scene changing/loading panels and at any time the bar is actually called for it's functionality. attack=true = callbar

more simply stated, anytime the whole scene is reloaded or any time the player interacts with said bar. all other times = nothing[/list]