"You have no idea about programming"

General Discussion
61

I wouldnt be surprised. The only motivation that they had to make more heroes was simply because ‘Hots didnt have as many as LoL or Dota2’. A very poor reasoning which they still tried to compete with.

As they stopped trying to compete, its quality over quantity again. And sure, Qhira was a mistake on that, but other than that, they were quite spot on with the choises for heroes they released.

And i think that even though this game is on life support in the current state, they are still trying to get it into a decent state that later on could potentialy compete with a LoL2 or dota3. Which explains the exp globe change to indicate the laning process better (which in the current state is a bad idea).

And thats probably also why this many heroes get reworked. Rather than having 150 heroes at release of which only 20 are usefull, having 80 heroes with 50 of them instantly usefull and having 20 as decent niche would be a much better start.

Sure, if a hots2 would be made, it might still take several years before it happens, but at least it would have a decent start because the current hero balance doesnt have to be changed a lot anymore. And as this game is less known, it can get a much fresher start to many players.

62

So, you didn’t have to model the character, or rig the animations, do uvs, and texture mapping. You didnt have to test lighting, etc. This is just basic art that you nicely bypassed, wholly.

I won’t even bother to tell you what you didn’t do on programming, since you started with a premade editor, that has a trigger system built in. But congrats on the experiment.

63

Oh, you mean to tell me the devs don’t have pre-made tools to make their heroes and they need to code everything the hard way?

64

No. Programmers recycle as much as they can. Yet, a few mentioned, you forgot art, modeling, design, graphics, sound design, voice acting. Developing a hero from scratch takes time. Don’t contradict yourself, by saying the dev team is small now and expect them to push out tons of heroes as if they have a full team.

All you did was manipulate some codes with preexisting assets, and complain hero releases are slow.

Create a brand new hero with all the parts I mentioned above, document your progress here and we will give you your props. No lying, of course.

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65

So, at last report, you failed? Or is there an update?

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66

Yes

67

My knowledge and skills in 3d modeling and animation are very limited. Asking me to make a model of a hero along with everything that comes along with it would be like me asking you to overhaul a 680 kW engine, that is as big as a car :smiley:. I’m specialized in coding and you can’t ask of me to make models and such.

For a more realistic test, I’d need an equivalent amount of adequate people working long me on everything else, that isn’t coding.

68

Obviously, yet, you assume the art section can be created within 5 hours, along side coding.

There is an order to things. Some things are ready to go before other parts are ready. Conception of ideas, will it work ? or will it not work? Lore and story if applicable. Art and design. Modeling and then coding. Testing, look and feel.

When it gets into the coder’s hands, perhaps it’s a job that can be done quickly because of the tools that are ready to go. Yet, from your anecdote, it took about 1 work day to program 1 unfinished skill.

The original post is again asking for more heroes, but putting the spotlight on how programming works. While I don’t mind new heroes, if the heroes are terrible or poorly chosen, I wouldn’t want them in HOTS to begin with. It’ll just add one more hero that needs to be balanced or reworked, thus taking dev time to other more important things that REQUIRE their attention then the spoiled players wanting their hero to be featured in the game.

The roster is amazing already, the game is in bad shape not because of the roster, but because of how the roster functions, and the rest of the games problems.

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69

Please quote where I say that modeling and animations take 5 hours. I’m fairly certain that I said I think it takes about a month and a half, but I think it was on another thread. But yeah, I have no idea how long it ACTUALLY takes. Could be a week, could be a month, could be 6 months. I really don’t know, and I’ll be happy if somebody who has done modeling and animation tells me how long it exactly takes to make a working model of a hero.

Most heroes already have lore and story, so the devs don’t really need to make up new one. Maybe research it a bit, but if you haven’t noticed, there are just few sentences about the hero’s lore in the spotlights, and none of it is in the game, so that’s quite irrelevant.

Oh, please tell me in what country do you live in! I’d love to have 1:40 hours long work days! (Actually 50 minutes, as you said 1 ability, when I finished 2 for 50 min each)

Everybody deserves a spot in the nexus! But with this release rate, even the most deserving heroes can’t get in.

70

What an asinine post lol

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71

I would say the modeling and animation actually takes the most amount of time. If you had to make those from scratch it would take you at least 3 weeks of hard work to make them up to standard.

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72

Quoting the whole paragraph of unfinished parts would be silly. I extrapolated 5 hours.

“Working version” being the operative words here. Not finished. Players want a finished product not a working product. This isn’t Fallout 76. How much longer will it take to test and make sure the skills are in polished finished condition?

Keywords being v

Sad to say, but no. This is an opinion and not all characters belong in the Nexus.

Again, don’t contradict yourself.

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73

Yet getting a working version is the main body of work. Improving it after that is the easy part. In worst case scenario you will have a working version of an unoptimized code, which the users (players) wouldn’t really notice, unless they are playing on a potato.
And anyways, I’m not saying that we should be getting a new hero every day. I’m saying that increasing the hero release rate from 4h/y to at least 8h/y shouldn’t be an impossible task, and if they are indeed happy with the current release rate and that’s the reason they aren’t increasing it, if they in fact can, they shouldn’t be, and they should increase it. So with 8 heroes per year, even if they are working on just 1 hero at a time, they will still have 1,5 months to develop them. But they aren’t working on 1 hero at a time. They are working on several. If they are working on 2 heroes at a time, that would give each hero 3 months of work time. If it’s 3 heroes at a time, then it would be 4,5 months of work time on each. Or 4 heroes at a time would be 6 months for each. KTZ took them about 6 months, so working on 4 heroes at a time seems like a reasonable thing for them to be able to deliver 8 heroes per year. Does this really sound impossible to you???

Umm, what?

And that is also an opinion. Don’t contradict yourself.

74

Alright, since I am actually studying game design in college and actually create characters, and animations/VFX etc, let me put an end to this topic.

A standard character model can take about 1 week of a professional modelers hard work, this is just the model. Sometimes you then have to redo said model, or retopologize it (Recreate the geometry) Which can take another day.

Now you have to rig it, this is quite a lengthy process especially for non humanoid models. Now you have to most likely retopologize it again, because once its rigged the mesh is messing up in places that it shouldn’t be.

Now you go ahead and continue to tweak the rigging/Topology of the model until its right.

Now you have to animate, step by step to get smooth coherent animations which can also take about a week for all animations. And this is providing everything is going according to plan and you dont have to light your entire project on fire and basically start over from scratch because of some issue with the model.

Now you go ahead and slice the geometry into sections called UV’s, from this you can start designing textures/colors. Alongside 2D art, You then need to draw this 2D art to add detail and color to the model, this doesnt always translate exactly so you need to adjust the UV’s or redraw the art if things are messed up.

Now you need to polish, and code in all this into the game, create the abilities, VFX, and talents (which can modify the abilities look/feel) Into the game.

And hope and pray to god that NONE of the things you do with VFX go crazy because of some random silly mistake in your modeling or animation.

You also need to then polish like crazy to make sure everything feels smooth, intuitive, and nice.

I would guess about half the hero creation process would be scrapping all the things I just said about once or twice to recreate the hero from the ground up because it just didn’t have the right feel, the right sizing on portions of the body, the abilities didn’t match the model, etc.

(Keep in mind you also have to have animations for the abilities, recreating these because the abilities didn’t feel right with the animation/model is also an issue)

As for why you cant just (Change the model) The geometry is incredibly important, and adjusting parts of the body can take a ridiculous amount of time the farther along you are in the process.

Sometimes its literally faster to say, recreate the whole model from the ground up then try to adjust it once its past a certain point in the workflow. And when I say faster. I mean “Faster”

Now all the people who dont know much about game design can chill.

They should totally be spending more time on creating hero’s rather than skins and events though, The game certainly does need more heroes released rather than skins.

Kinda annoyed deathwing isnt already out, but I will say I believe its partially because they are trying to fit him in just right since hes such an odd character, hes like cho’gall in the sense that hes just a balancing nightmare because he completely breaks the standard rules of the game.

Still annoyed though…

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75

This is what I meant about not contradicting yourself.

Yes, when you mentioned the team is small. I did mention this before, but you glossed over it. The same guys creating heroes are the same guys nerfing, reworking, tweaking, ruining the game. You think they got loads of the time to spare creating 8 heroes a year, after you said the team was small?

Your math says that by adding heroes adds time to dev time to all heroes added. So if I’m working on 2 heroes I have 3 months. This still equates to the same amount of time for each hero, unless you’re irresponsible and devote 2.5 months on one hero and half a month to the other. 2 heroes divided by 3 months still equates to 1.5 months…

Problem here is you don’t really know how long it really takes to fully conceive a hero from start to release status.

You go off of what you do at home. I’m not saying you’re not skilled in what you do. I’m saying you have giant gaps in your claims that need filling to fully understand.

So since you attempted to give us estimates on how long something takes to create. I will add 1 week in addition to your estimates to each part you mentioned. Things will and do go wrong. So with a generous guesstimate 3-4 months for one hero.

76

What tools they use could only be extrapolates from the Making of series on set increments they show along the way and from talking point ls revealed in stuff like the AMAs

Alex “broke” some of the presumptions on HotS being limited by the Starcraft 2 engine and another AMA said custom maps wouldnt likely be a thing because the tools they do use don’t translate well to the ui that works for utilizing pre-made assets found in warcraft 3

So based on those two elements (ability to get around certain hurdles) and the supposed snags in translating their process to a player editor (to suit your experiment). would suggest some of the process is more involves that your “experiment” will let on.

However, the biggest time consumption is going to come from

  1. the approval process
  2. making multiple iterations of design and test process to fine a balance of fantasy-fufilment and fun/unique kit
  3. the moving parts of aligning spell effects with animations with programing functions.

The capacity to suggest one possibility realized on pre-set assets would suggest a lack of care or interest in quality and unique elements in favor of hitting a status quo.

While other games do have larger hero pool, they have also had longer active dev time and have similarly slowed their hero releases. The ability to put out several heroes is based on having several in the works to juggle parts as the process does not utilize all dev time and assets equally.

77

Let me tell you why you are wrong and what you don’t seem to understand:
The team is split in groups. One group is working on one hero, another group is working on another hero. If you are working on only 1 hero, that means that only 1 group is working on heroes, and if they want to release a hero every 1,5 months, that’s the amount of time they will have. But if you have 2 groups working on hero development, that means that each group will have 3 months, although the gap between hero releases will be 1,5 months.

Either you, either I misunderstood him. I understood that the whole process described takes 3 weeks. So if we are being generous, the said process shouldn’t take more than 1-1,5 months. And since heroes are released with 2 skins, let’s say 2 months, since the alternative skin uses the same animations.

78

Are you going to continue to ignore the fact that the team is large enough to only release 4 heroes a year. Are you going to ignore the plethora of problems this game currently needs fixing? Are you going to ignore that dev time is split between making heroes and fixing said problems? Players are dropping like crazy, and yet your main concern is pushing out more heroes?

I understood very well. Especially when he mentioned in a different post in this thread that it take 3 weeks to model and animate one character with hard work, this is assuming EVERYTHING went according to plan. What he failed to mention was the time it takes for art to be created, art to be added, model rigged properly, testing, if something goes wrong, ect… He also didn’t mention the rest of the processes to completion with time. I based my guesstimate with what he said.

You took the times literally in the post (ignoring the times he didn’t state) and added them to 1.5 months. This is how you don’t fully understand the entire process.

79

Oh, sorry, I didn’t know you worked for blizzard and knew exactly how big their team is and what they are capable of. As well as the state of the game, along with the state of its player base.
But personally I don’t see that many problems with the game apart from the slow hero release rate.

“Making a model up to standard” sounds like a ready and working model to me.

80

This is why people keep telling you, “You have no idea about programming”. I feel the problem is a little deeper than just simple programming, but hey that’s just me.

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