WotC WotC blacklist. Discussion

[Mannahnin]

I really think that cubic fireballs were designed to streamline TT play, and the VTT was designed to mimic that. Heck, my group still uses cubic fireballs whenever we use a grid for our 5e games. We don't like using spell templates (they tend to get misplaced), and it makes visualizing areas quick and easy.

Frankly, their heavy integration of reactions for 4e would have been a PITA for a fully automated VTT. Do players really want a pop-up (and to have to wait on that player) every time a reaction might possibly be triggered? I don't agree that 4e was designed to be optimal for VTTs, though they certainly did have the VTT on their radar.

I think it was meant to serve both. Having a pop-up trigger when a character's ability is eligible to be activated is certainly less annoying than continually having to back-track because the triggers are missed or forgotten about. At least IMO. YMMV. Beyond that, again, are all the little situational modifiers, especially from feats, but also from auras and such.

My groups enjoyed 4E quite a bit, and played several campaigns up to epic levels. One of our recurring pain points, though, was certain classes and abilities, especially at high level, having a ton of triggers and off-turn abilities which were challenging to keep track of.

 

[LordEntrails]

With a modern computer (or even smartphone) you would never notice the difference.

Define modern. Because when they were developing the VTT for 4E computers were not as capable as today.
(There are also other simplifications you can make basing on a grid, such as when entering a grid rather than a continuous range calculations for every aura. Which could still be noticeable depending upon other factors in the architecture.)

 

[Fanaelialae]

Define modern. Because when they were developing the VTT for 4E computers were not as capable as today.
(There are also other simplifications you can make basing on a grid, such as when entering a grid rather than a continuous range calculations for every aura. Which could still be noticeable depending upon other factors in the architecture.)

As in anything made since around the year 2000.

If you're talking about a computer from the 70s, sure, you could use such abstractions to make an appreciable difference.

 

[Dausuul]

I wonder if doing so would have required less processing power, and thus potentially made the hardware requirements lower than an MMO?

Not really. Rendering the combatants and the environment in 3D is what strains the hardware; whether the combatants' positions are locked to a grid is irrelevant.

It might have made development simpler, however. Pathing and collision detection are way easier to implement on a grid. It would also allow for a more streamlined UI.

 

[Cordwainer Fish]

For bleep's sake, the entire point of computers is to do lots of arithmetic really fast.

 

[LordEntrails]

As in anything made since around the year 2000.

If you're talking about a computer from the 70s, sure, you could use such abstractions to make an appreciable difference.

I'm glad to know that performance is no longer an issue with computer games </sarcasm> Steam Support :: Troubleshooting Game Performance Issues - Hardware.

For bleep's sake, the entire point of computers is to do lots of arithmetic really fast.

Yep. And human nature is to throw more and more at a computer to allow them to do the grunt work and then complain when they get overloaded by poor architecture. Scalability is a thing.

Designing and Developing for Performance

 

[Cordwainer Fish]

Determining whether a point is inside a circle is two subtractions, three multiplications, an addition, and a compare. ENIAC would not be overtaxed by that.

 

[Fanaelialae]

I'm glad to know that performance is no longer an issue with computer games </sarcasm> Steam Support :: Troubleshooting Game Performance Issues - Hardware.

Yep. And human nature is to throw more and more at a computer to allow them to do the grunt work and then complain when they get overloaded by poor architecture. Scalability is a thing.

Designing and Developing for Performance

Your sarcasm is completely uncalled for.

Yes, many modern games have high performance requirements. On the other hand, I believe that OG Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment, and similar games are now available on the Google Play Store. Meaning you can run them on a smart phone (which have relatively modest computing power compared to PCs).

There's absolutely no reason that a VTT would need high performance requirements unless you were doing something fairly non-standard, like VR. Heck, plenty of VTTs, like Roll20, can run in a browser. I can't recall anything from the 4e VTT demo that would have suggested it had high performance requirements.

 

[LordEntrails]

Yes, Roll20 runs in a browser. And many users complain about performance problems. Foundry and FGU also have users that complain about performance problems. I suspect every existing VTT has a point at which performance becomes a problem. Are you saying otherwise?

Because it really sounds like you are saying that software performance is not an issue with modern hardware. Yet somehow I have meetings almost every week with my developers where performance and how to increase it is at least tangentially discussed. Modern hardware DOES NOT negate the need for good architecture decisions. Nor does good hardware and good architecture mean that performance will never be a problem for any user. There will always be users who try to exceed practical limits and experience performance related issues. Always.

Sure, maybe using actual distances rather than grid simplification might not be a detrimental architecture decision, but it will impact performance at SOME level, and hence consideration of such simplification might be a good architectural decision.

 

[LordEntrails]

Let's supply some more relevant facts.
4E was released in 2008 (mostly), so computer specs for that are what's relevant.
A gaming computer from that time was often 512MB of RAM, and was probably running a 32-bit operating system. Or atleast any VTT would at least need to work on such a platform. Meaning anything over ~3.2GB of RAM was useless (except in specialty built operating systems etc).

A typical, not high end, modern phone like the Galaxy 22 has 8GB of RAM. Go compare processors, screen resolution, FLOPS, etc. You will find a modern mobile phone is much more powerful than a gaming computer of the 4E era in everything except raw storage.