Xaufin

Pros: Would let me work on my level right now or whenever the game crashes, without logging in Cons: A user could subscribe for 1 month, download the World Editor, never subscribe again, and just use the editor features for free Those users could share the Editor application with others who had never even subscribed once It's a small game, so these losses may not amount to much for the developers, but you could argue that their world editor is pretty and fun enough that it's a game on its own. All that's missing is the ability to load and view and experience the rooms without logging in. I would say it's worth it, but someone could purchase a month, build rooms for 2 months, then purchase another month to preview and play them. The devs just need to decide at what value they're willing to allow a download of the offline editor. My solution would be: Allow a world editor download by anybody who has purchased at least 6 months of gameplay.

It's not impossible, but the amount of development, funding, and monitoring required will probably never be seen by this game.

Hey everyone. I made a list of all the recently demanded features I could see and sorted them into levels of difficulty based on how hard I think they'd be to implement (I'm a coder). The categories are: EASY (1-3 days) DIFFICULT (4-10 days) VERY DIFFICULT (11-30 days) ENORMOUSLY DIFFICULT (30+ days) All estimates are based on programming implementation time, not including the time to create art assets. This list is for FEATURES, not for BUGFIXES or additional CONTENT. This poll has options for all the "Difficult" features. The more easy options will be listed in the sister topic: Poll: Top Features To Add (EASY list). If there is a feature you can think of that is not on either list, please leave a comment!

Hey everyone. I made a list of all the recently demanded features I could see and sorted them into levels of difficulty based on how hard I think they'd be to implement (I'm a coder). The categories are: EASY (1-3 days) DIFFICULT (4-10 days) VERY DIFFICULT (11-30 days) ENORMOUSLY DIFFICULT (30+ days) All estimates are based on programming implementation time, not including the time to create art assets. This list is for FEATURES, not for BUGFIXES or additional CONTENT. This poll has options for all the "Easy" features. The more difficult options will be listed in the sister topic: Poll: Top Features To Add (DIFFICULT list). If there is a feature you can think of that is not on either list, please leave a comment!

No, of all the proposed features I've seen on the forums so far, the Pose Editor is the most complex and challenging, could easily take 2 months to implement. Plus, user poses with no approval process? Customization is very overrated and often detrimental to quality (hi, MySpace). Aside from the server fixes, my top picks would be: kick/ban options persistent server til room is empty Guaranteed time for room boosts (1000 for 15 mins)

I suspect that's just as likely to knock people out of their conections, and you'd need enough unique addresses to rotate between. I think one of the most common approaches is to give each user login a unique ID that's validated with their subscription/login, signifying they are allowed to connect. And then process other attempted connections without adding them to the server until validated, ignoring those without a valid login key. So at worst the DDoS would crash or lag the login queue itself instead of the actual game servers. Nobody would get disconnected but it could still stop players from logging in? I've never implemented multiplayer but validating logins before connecting them to servers seems like the safe way.

More body types is really a wish list feature. It's high complexity and low priority. I hope the game finds the success

This is an open letter to the dev team. I believe @Gizmo is the head programmer. First, I work professionally in Unity Engine and I think 3DX is impressive. Good job on the game and it has lots of cool features. I am a programmer, and I imagine there are a dozen others playing the game as well. A lot of us are tech literate and will understand if we're told the specifics of your server problem. We can probably help parse it into layman's terms if PR isn't your strength (brief jokes from the Art Lead aren't quite enough). Even if the problem is simply poor planning and unanticipated volume, people will understand as long as there is an end in sight. But we need details and better communication. This is my list of questions: How big is your team? How many full-time programmers, artists, and designers are working on the game? Are your servers and architecture your own or are you using a third-party solution such as Photon? Is the problem based on capacity of the servers (quantity) or is it a quality issue with the programming? What is the specific problem? What is the specific new solution? Can the new solution be implemented immediately? if not, tell us why not. (for example, increased third-party server capacity won't take effect til your next billing cycle) Many of us sympathize with your work and recognize that the team is small, but this is a class A bug at the least. Without connectivity, you do not have a product. We need clear answers and estimates while this is being resolved. If your networking was middleware and something you were simply paying for, volume wouldn't be an issue because you could just buy more server space. So I'm assuming you're using something more proprietary and less field tested. If this is the case, do you have a full-time server engineer? If not, I'd recommend you hire one or switch to a middleware solution. We appreciate answers and transparency. Good luck. Xaufin

Please ban Talon Queen from the forums. I'm scrolling through unprompted literal garbage that has nothing to do with this topic. I don't know what forum protocol is, and maybe the person is drunk, but this is just trolling.

If gold had value and could be transferred between accounts, that would likely change, because accounts generate gold daily from logins. If the system can be gamed, it will be. Players will find the optimal way to play, rendering others (Xgold bundles) obsolete. The game would then be rewarding people who make extra accounts, which the admins probably don't want. In game design, we avoid creating optimal paths in most cases, because it doesn't create interesting decisions if one is optimal. That's at least doubly true if you're directly screwing with your revenue stream. A full design meeting could yield more reasons not to do the thing. Maybe devs will share their thoughts with us on why it's a bad idea. Or maybe they won't, since some of us can't really be swayed by explanations.

Since I'm quite new here and haven't played any similar games (other than Second Life a long time ago), what are the perceived advantages of this game over others? What are its strengths?

New characters don't generate gold as far as I know, whereas new accounts would. And it would be twice as expensive to directly purchase XGold. When I said design considerations, I meant avoiding the problems it could cause (there are several). As you said, it was disabled. I don't know when, or why, but there are three possibilities: The developers had a good reason because they are professionals. Your ability to understand it doesn't matter. The developers didn't have a good reason, but are still the developers. Your subscription doesn't entitle you to anything other than using the services they provide as they provide them. You're every bit as smart as you are confident, and the developers will recognize this and bow to your experience.

Unless adding that feature would help fund more important general development in the long-term. If there are 5000 accounts, and we estimate 5% have a pregnancy fetish, and half of those are willing to pay to do it between 1-4 times per month, and a pregnancy costs $10 to initiate (funded by both participants), they could have an extra $1,250/m indefinitely (even more as the playerbase grows). Obviously we have no idea if any of those numbers are accurate, but if you want subscription costs to stay the same as features are added, then either the playerbase grows without fulfilling special niches, or devs cater to them and take their money to benefit us all.

I don't know how big the 3DX dev team is or if it includes a full-time designer, but there are design considerations with allowing gold transfer between players. They may already know this, and it might be why it doesn't exist despite being fairly easy to implement. Or it might contradict their mission statement or design pillars in some way. At the 20,000 tier, XGold is about $0.37 for 300. Which means $0.37 worth of free gold for daily logins. On the 6 month plan, it costs $0.17 per day to have an account. If gold were transferrable and those numbers weren't changed, people would buy new accounts instead of new characters just for the sake of logging in daily and gold farming. It takes players a few seconds to make a casual suggestion like "oh, then remove daily gold" or "make memberships more expensive", but measuring the consequences for a player economy is a lot trickier. Not even including the possibility of scams, blackmail, whatever. And on top of it, the final question is whether players can either sell their gold back to 3DX for real currency, or spend it on.... currently almost nothing. A robust economic system that made rooms expensive to build but also allowed them to charge and make money would be lovely, but it would also be a full-featured MMO, which requires tons of design and code that just isn't in the cards right now.

Regardless of how much "joy" the devs would get from implementing this, I don't think it's common enough to be worth making for free.

While writing this post, I've gone ahead and done some analytics. About every 30 seconds, I refreshed the list to see if the top listing had changed. I did this for about 45 mins for a sort of okay set of data. Right now, 3DXChat has a feature in the game that can allow a player to pay about $0.50 for 5 seconds of advertising, i.e. nothing. Whether intentional theft, or just irresponsible, that isn't right. At best, this feature is unbalanced or useless. At worst, it's predatory. When a player spends real money, it should have a real impact. Gambling can be okay if designed and implemented well, but this isn't that. What won't help: Increasing the gold cost on its own won't fix anything. If anything, it would be worse, with players losing even more for nothing. A global ad chat. People will just ignore it. Ads have to be placed where people will see them. Cooldowns/timers for the existing system. That doesn't solve ads being overwritten. Arguments that "user counts aren't as important as quality". An ad feature exists to put more eyes on your room and more bodies in it, regardless of quality. What could help: Establishing a fixed return on the player's investment. My prediction for the above data was that 300 gold gets you an average of 5 minutes (it's about 4.8), which I don't think is bad. But it's wildly unreliable for no particular reason. My recommendation would be 1000 gold for a guaranteed 15 minute listing. A club that runs twice per week could do this once per set for free, and they would have to buy XGold to do it more often. Allow more than one boosted room. It's the only way to guarantee a fixed/predictable/fair amount of ad time for those who pay. Declaring a room type upon opening, and letting us filter user rooms by type, so that it's not as important to be near the top. If my ad, or simply my room, is competing with fewer rooms in a list, it has a better chance of being noticed or chosen. Room types: Dance/Club, Game, RP, Cold, Casual. With the above changes, you'd have 4 or 5 shorter lists, with potentially several promoted rooms at the top. Fewer disappointed hosts, fewer disappointed guests.

The big ones. - Use second-person in 1 on 1 roleplay. But in group or local where the reader may not be your target, use third person. (/me tickles your ear. 2nd /me tickles Xaufin's ear. 3rd) - It's happening right now, as I read it. Use present tense. (/me tickles Xaufin's ear. YES /me tickled Xaufin's ear. NO) - In any situation, "my" won't work with emote narration, because the sentence will start with the narrator's name. Xaufin bends over and exposes my ears to you. This implies that I am not Xaufin, but some disembodied recipient of Xaufin's unusual methods. Note: A game I played had a complex tagging system built in that converted pronouns like $his and $her to the reader's perspective automatically. Additional people could be added to the sentence by using $his2, which would match the second person tagged. It did help to clarify group interactions a lot, sometimes preventing confusing modifiers. A bit of mental gymnastics, but the effect was: /me pats $John on $his head, while pointing a finger at $Sally and $his2 dog while $his2 dog sniffs $John. John sees: Xaufin pats you on your head, while pointing a finger at Sally and her dog while her dog sniffs you. Sally sees: Xaufin pats John on his head, while pointing a finger at you and your dog while your dog sniffs John. Others see: Xaufin pats John on his head, while pointing a finger at Sally and her dog while her dog sniffs John.

For anyone using shoutcast, don't forget the "http://" when you put "streamingv2.shoutcast.com/mystream" into 3DX. It only took my sleepy brain about an hour to remember how URLs work. fml I went the Mixxx + Shoutcast route, and it was largely easy, except for one confusing bit I had to google about. The login is 'admin' and the password format is "password:#streamID" '

Also experienced this in the past couple of days. Had to end task.

Something I've been thinking about is adding a symbol column for a few room categories. So you could filter by category and only see lists of those rooms. It would reduce the need for promotion if only 50% of open rooms were the type you're promoting. RP Room (police, hospital, school...) Game Room (hunting, board games...) Club/Dance Room Cold Room

I get the motive behind suggestion #1, but there are two problems. First, that effectively makes a single-player experience, where people can AFK and have stuff done to them. I think that's what Betty is for. And the part about "using your spouse freely" is honestly kinda creepy and wrong. I'm tempted to veto this change just on the basis that it's more responsible to maintain the recipient's consent even when non-consent is given, even in a video game. Making this change definitely only works with the ability to turn down certain poses.

Receiving gold has very little benefit to someone's gameplay. So until there is something for the recipient to spend it on, there's no point in making it transferrable. For example, I'd love to pay the employees of my club. But for what? Nothing costs anything. Currency has no value. Prostitutes with 1000 gifts in their profiles are hoarding the gifts for status. And that wouldn't change with gold, except that your personal XGold isn't displayed in your profile.

I always assumed 300 gold got you like 10 mins of promotion on a rotation with other promoted rooms. It looks like you just get overwritten within seconds. How about 300 gold for 10 minutes, and there's no limit to the number of "promoted" rooms at the top of the list. Right now it's... a bidding war? Seems kind of scammy honestly.

I think a kick button should be sufficient, ideally with a 10 min timer before the person can join again. Ban may be an unnecessary feature, result in lots of noobs getting banned from a room cause they happened to cold request the owner. Repeat offenders could just be reported. To go a step further, letting the owner grant a sort of "arrest" permission to security would be nice. So instead of kicking them, it just puts them in a jail square (like the starting square but different). They stay in the square until they leave the server or they're released. I think this mechanic would benefit everything, from clubs, to the 69th Precinct, to game rooms.

Finally got the courage to make this stupid door. Could be worse.