Approach to Idiosyncrasies? (Jumping)
Posted: Thu Aug 02, 2018 6:42 pm
Hello, everyone! Been lurking since early this year, incredibly excited and impressed at the work going on around these parts!
My pair of questions are sort of overarching in nature, but I'm going to ask them through the lens of the jumping mechanic. I'm sorry if this has been asked before, I promise I combed the General forum beforehand (even if only briefly).
1. I can remember some ways the game acted that were peculiar, from back in the authentic Windows 95/98 days. For example, if I chose Athleticism at character creation, and Jumping was one of my primary skills, then when I got out of Privateer's Hold and got to a town, I could usually jump all the way onto buildings with the hanging slanted roofs. The key word here is usually. Travelling towns via rooftop became extremely fulfilling - the traversal mode of choice.
There were a rather large series of computers I had access to, while growing up. Although creating a rooftop parkour king usually worked, it didn't always work. The weird thing was, it seemed to most often change from computer to computer; it worked on most computers, but was inconsistent on a computer or two, and outright didn't work at all on one. Imagine my surprise when I brought a fresh Custom Class save file to a friend's house, and could hit the rooftop freeway with ease, only to come home and have the same character unable to jump high enough! DosBox installations are also often inconsistent in this regard.
My question here is, how is the 'correct' version of jump height determined? My best guess in my early adulthood, without any real programming knowledge, was that movement was in some regard tied to CPU clock speed or other hardware dependencies. Climbing seemed similar in this regard, where a character that was the same in all other ways would practically jettison the hell up a wall on one computer, and slowly crawl up the same wall on another.
TL;DR: Will I be able to Batman my way around town in Daggerfall Unity?
2. With all the pre-fashionable 90's parkour fun had in Daggerfall, we'd also discovered some accidental veritable launchpads. Sometimes if you hit the top of a hill just right, or jumped over a fence at the right angle, or especially if you jumpspammed off the top lip of the aforementioned slanted roofs, you could jump a fair bit further than you should have. The most easily-reproducible instance of this is off the protective lips at the tops of city walls. If you hit those suckers just right, you could literally (and I do mean that word) launch halfway across Daggerfall city, or more, in a single jump.
Is that sort of accidental functionality the type of thing that gets lost in translation when porting to a new engine? Would it be something that gets considered a 'bug' even though it was in vanilla Daggerfall, and gets patched out? Or do we get to experience the occasional push-from-the-gods, the happy accidental Prototype Scroll of Icarian Flight?
Thanks for everything you do!
My pair of questions are sort of overarching in nature, but I'm going to ask them through the lens of the jumping mechanic. I'm sorry if this has been asked before, I promise I combed the General forum beforehand (even if only briefly).
1. I can remember some ways the game acted that were peculiar, from back in the authentic Windows 95/98 days. For example, if I chose Athleticism at character creation, and Jumping was one of my primary skills, then when I got out of Privateer's Hold and got to a town, I could usually jump all the way onto buildings with the hanging slanted roofs. The key word here is usually. Travelling towns via rooftop became extremely fulfilling - the traversal mode of choice.
There were a rather large series of computers I had access to, while growing up. Although creating a rooftop parkour king usually worked, it didn't always work. The weird thing was, it seemed to most often change from computer to computer; it worked on most computers, but was inconsistent on a computer or two, and outright didn't work at all on one. Imagine my surprise when I brought a fresh Custom Class save file to a friend's house, and could hit the rooftop freeway with ease, only to come home and have the same character unable to jump high enough! DosBox installations are also often inconsistent in this regard.
My question here is, how is the 'correct' version of jump height determined? My best guess in my early adulthood, without any real programming knowledge, was that movement was in some regard tied to CPU clock speed or other hardware dependencies. Climbing seemed similar in this regard, where a character that was the same in all other ways would practically jettison the hell up a wall on one computer, and slowly crawl up the same wall on another.
TL;DR: Will I be able to Batman my way around town in Daggerfall Unity?
2. With all the pre-fashionable 90's parkour fun had in Daggerfall, we'd also discovered some accidental veritable launchpads. Sometimes if you hit the top of a hill just right, or jumped over a fence at the right angle, or especially if you jumpspammed off the top lip of the aforementioned slanted roofs, you could jump a fair bit further than you should have. The most easily-reproducible instance of this is off the protective lips at the tops of city walls. If you hit those suckers just right, you could literally (and I do mean that word) launch halfway across Daggerfall city, or more, in a single jump.
Is that sort of accidental functionality the type of thing that gets lost in translation when porting to a new engine? Would it be something that gets considered a 'bug' even though it was in vanilla Daggerfall, and gets patched out? Or do we get to experience the occasional push-from-the-gods, the happy accidental Prototype Scroll of Icarian Flight?
Thanks for everything you do!