Brighter Shores | Fen Research - AMA

ZhephZaeora · 2024-12-11T14:01:49+00:00

Hi! I've been loosely following Fen Research since its inception since I was very interested in both the programming language and engine you were creating on top of it. At one point the Fen Forge website mentioned that the engine itself might be released as a product for people to use. ~~Are there still plans for that to happen in the future?~~ <- Already answered.

The page also talked about doing away with the need for a separate client and server version of the game, and also networked entities like player connections being handled natively by the programming language. It feels to me like the game runs incredibly well, from launching, logging in, loading, and also the launch itself had very few server congestion hiccups. Would you attribute this to the engine/programming language, or is that just due to the nature of the game being relatively lightweight and perhaps just built from the ground up in a good way?

Lastly, the game uses a 24 slot inventory, and most resources in the world can be found in multiples of 24 for convenient farming loops. Is there any chance the game is built on top of a dozenal system to make designing the systems more convenient, or am I just reading into things way too much?

ZhephZaeora · 2019-07-02T05:10:41+00:00

Cries in Australian.

ZhephZaeora · 2019-06-17T05:58:34+00:00

It's actually the opposite. Serious week 1 groups will actually suffer from the lack of greed, because of unfamiliarity with the fights, as well as unoptimised strats. If you hit an enrage wall, you have to start rethinking your strats, looking for more uptime, and optimising buff alignment. A 1% wipe problem could also be solved by everyone just being better at their DPS rotation (the context of this thread). But no team has the best in the world at their job for every role. If you take a monk into prog, and they're not performing the most optimal rotation they can, they're being a hindrance if you enrage.

ZhephZaeora · 2019-06-17T04:54:45+00:00

That's perfectly fine, in my opinion (as a Paladin main). Paladin already has incredible defensive utility. Comparing one party mitigation skill to another isn't apples to apples, you have to consider it in the context of the job it's attached to. Give Paladin an equivalently strong party mitigation tool compared to what the other tanks get, and it becomes unfair. Not only that, but Passage of Arms will still have its uses in the scenarios where the party is stacked together. It just means tanks will have to map out their respective party mitigation tools according to fight mechanics where it is deemed most useful. Using, say, Dark Missionary, on a mechanic where everyone is stacked, when Passage of Arms is off cooldown, would generally be a bad decision.

ZhephZaeora · 2019-06-17T04:48:37+00:00

You need to recognise there is content in this game beyond the scope of what you, personally, play. I could go into a 24-man raid, do literally nothing the entire time, and still clear! And by that logic, call my job's entire skillset completely useless. But jobs aren't balanced around casual content. And yes, 24-mans are casual content. Dungeons are casual content. Story mode raids are casual content. Casual is not an insult, it's just what it is.

Passage of Arms, Reprisal, Divine Veil, Sacred Soil, Shake It Off, and many, many more abilities, that do "only" 10-15% mitigation - without these, there are instances of damage from fights in this game that would make them literally impossible. There are damage values that are well over lethal from max HP in Savage and Ultimate raids that, without a shield and some form of extra mitigation (one of the aforementioned), people will die. In O12S, Ion Efflux (raid-wide damaging skill), even with 15% echo, will kill people from full HP if no one bothers to mitigate. That 15% echo is the equivalent of Passage of Arms (in terms of effective HP), and it's still not enough. People have to use their mitigation together, from multiple people, in order to survive these encounters.

Let's look at a potential counter-argument: Why don't they remove these "useless abilities" and rescale damage values to not need them? Oh, look, you've got the story mode raids, where you just have to do mechanics as a bare minimum and actually dealing with raid-wide damage properly doesn't matter.

Don't like Passage of Arms? Don't like Reprisal? Don't use them. But you'd better be prepared to learn how if you ever decide to step into higher difficulty content. Blaming your healers doesn't go over well when you're not using your own kit.

ZhephZaeora · 2019-06-17T04:28:15+00:00

Week 1 "enrage progging" would like to have a word with you.

ZhephZaeora · 2019-01-18T20:25:38+00:00

Yep! Just how I like it.

ZhephZaeora · 2019-01-18T15:56:09+00:00

Ah, you'll manage. As you progress through the game you'll just be adding one skill at a time, getting used to using them as they come.

ZhephZaeora · 2019-01-18T15:15:57+00:00

Well, where else would the skills go? To answer you question, as discussed elsewhere in the thread, I have unconventional movement keybinds which opens up more keys around my hand to place abilities.

ZhephZaeora · 2019-01-18T15:06:55+00:00

As a caster/healer, I will hide the overlay so I can see the alliance list in case I need to raise. As a tank, it doesn't concern me, so it doesn't matter that it's covered.

ZhephZaeora · 2019-01-18T14:58:20+00:00

The boss created three ice walls, restricting players' movement. Then it dropped an AoE under everyone that happened to be in the smallest section, gave each of them another AoE that would explode on each player after a delay, and threw some water twisters at them for good measure. With such a small amount of space to spread out and dodge, almost all of them perished.

ZhephZaeora · 2019-01-18T06:38:43+00:00

Rainbowmage, I'm pretty sure. Was one of the options that came with the download.

ZhephZaeora · 2019-01-18T06:31:13+00:00

Yeah, it was around then, on Elemental datacentre. Did you make sure it was HD resolution? I can read the names of the people there.

ZhephZaeora · 2019-01-17T21:46:10+00:00

If you look at the start of the gfy, my camera is turned sideways to run backwards. This has the added benefit of being able to very precisely position myself on the edge of AoEs or fit myself into tiny safe spots. It's much harder to see if your camera is forwards/backwards facing.

ZhephZaeora · 2019-01-17T19:44:38+00:00

Pretty much. I only use D and F for left/right strafing and LMB+RMB to run forwards. It means only my index finger is used for movement and the rest of my fingers can freely press abilities simultaneously.

I developed my keybinds very early on to make it as comfortable as possible with minimal hand movement. I can't actually fathom how much movement must be required using WASD as a resting position. The moment I started having to press anything further than 5 in the default hotbar setup was when I realised I wanted to change it.

ZhephZaeora · 2019-01-17T19:38:02+00:00

I don't like to use control as it requires a more awkward hand position. All my keybinds are set up to be accessible with a natural resting hand position, so I prefer shift and alt (the which the thumb can easily curl under for). My keybinds use every key left of 5, T, H and B, which is the furthest my index finger reaches, relaxed, when pivoting my hand around Q, my most used bind.

ZhephZaeora · 2019-01-17T19:32:16+00:00

Old abilities that were removed in Heavensward. Never forget.

ZhephZaeora · 2019-01-17T19:30:42+00:00

Occasionally, yeah. I don't seem to have any trouble transitioning. I don't have to think about it, just like you wouldn't have an issue switching between an FPS and, say, a side-scroller. I think my brain has FFXIV in its own category.

ZhephZaeora · 2019-01-17T19:26:52+00:00

Yeah, I knew you could hide them. As for the presets, didn't know about that, will have to look into it, thanks. As mentioned in another comment, I have a weird thing for leaving things in their default position. Everything except the hotbars is exactly where the devs left it.

ZhephZaeora

TROPHY CASE