Thanks ArashiNoShad0w!
I like to try to give specific information about areas I have knowledge of, as is the case here, but sometimes "We'll look into" it is as specific as we can be, unfortunately. This can be because we can't say too much on a specific topic (secrets!) or don't have the research or information necessary to speak to a subject at that moment (we actually need to look into it). When "looking into it" doesn't result in swift change, it is probably because of design decisions, competing priorities, resource limitations, or technical issues, all of which are just a reality of development.
I think the team tries to interact with the community as much as we can, which hopefully you see as a positive!
Interesting idea and good write-up!
I was the one who implemented the change to armor stacking! (If I remember correctly, Brett, our lead designer, was the driver for this though) We didn't actually remove the cap, it is still 75 across the board. The lack of stacking just prevents you from hitting it in almost all cases.
Garrosh is a bit special case because I believe his trait still uses "base armor" (this is what Johanna had once upon a time), which *does* still stack with other sources of armor. Leaving his trait this way was probably intentional, or most armor buffs would just be useless on him, so he is currently one of the few heroes for whom the cap can apply.
Cool concept and execution!
Awesome!
Good response. This is a weird case of an interaction that exists somewhere between a bug and a design call. I remember being perturbed during Stukov's development that he removes his own Weighted Pustule with Massive Shove, but that was the call we made at the time.
I've made a note to look into this interaction, and i'll see what we can do. Thanks for the report!
This is awesome! Well done!
Everyone be safe and have a Happy New Year! If you want to. I'm not gonna tell you what to do. But you should consider it. <3
Yep. Kyle deserves all the props for this one. If he hadn't stepped up to the plate of his own volition, then the mount wouldn't work as you see it today.
I'm still in the middle of watching it. You guys are great. I love what you do.
Here's another view with all three. Happy Holidays
Agreed! Congrats and thank you for being a continuous beacon for our community!
We do have something like this, we run it every build as a first-pass smoke test which tests all heroes in their base skins, and their base abilities.
There's also a more thorough version which executes all abilities on all heroes/skins for performance, budget, and stability testing, but it takes several hours to run.
Releasing a public version of this is an interesting idea. I'll give it some thought over the break.
The kernel panics were being investigated by Apple, and affected specifically Mac Pro's with AMD graphics devices on Catalina. Last I heard there was a fix for at least some of those cases in Catalina 10.15.1, so if you haven't updated yet then grab that, make sure everything is saved, and try again.
As always, please post on our mac support forums for issues like this, our customer service department rocks; they have the latest information from both us and Apple and they'll make sure issues like this are surfaced to all relevant parties.
Quite a milestone. Congratulations guys, and thank you!
Hello Reddit family!
Some members of the team just finished making gingerbread houses - we need your help judging who won :)
Thank you for a wonderful year! Happy Holidays - and we'll see you in the Nexus!
I guess that is true. Darn compression.
Great question!
A few reasons.
it would add extra animation and hook ups. Time is a factor when we create skin packs. We do as much as we can in a specific window. Sometimes this means cool ideas just don't make it in. In the time that we did have we were able to put their bases in the character select and store screens so that's pretty cool.
It's also a single color tint for 3 different heroes and even though it would be really cool playing with the bases in game it means we would have to use the effort we would have put into something that might have more impact and use in game into something that would be very low impact. That's 3 sets of animations. We thought we could use an Animator's time better.
Another issue is that from a design perspective it had a potential to change the animation set so much that people wouldn't recognize any of the 3 skins as who they were suppose to be. This can be an issue, especially with 3 skins that could end up looking too similar if they were in the same game. Having them keep their default animation sets in game keeps their overall silhouette and recognizably higher than if they had a more homologous army man animation.
Thanks for the question!
You can always take what you've done and resize it using constrain proportions and Nearest Neighbor (Preserve Hard edges) to increase the size of the image while retaining any pixel art hard edges. That way you're not repeating the same sprites over and over. The pixels of the image just gets bigger. Still retains the same retro look too.
Hello Mac friends! I'm glad to hear that performance seems better with the latest patch. It's an ongoing process for sure and we made a number of fixes to the 2.49 branch of Heroes.
The upgrade to Metal introduced some new graphics programming patterns that were, shall we say, not fully compatible with our engine's graphics layer, which was designed for the D3D9/OpenGL2 era and hasn't seen a huge number of upgrades over the years (if it works, right?).
Reasoning about what you might see in game before it happens is actually a fairly difficult and unreliable task with the engine. We do do this during map load as much as we can, but it ends up only covering about 80% of everything that would be needed. Conversely, just loading everything is not a great solution as it will take longer and longer as more content is added to the game and we'd start busting through memory budgets. We need to strike a balance.
A major refactor to do things the modern way is something I'd love to do, especially as we anticipate support for D3D12 at some point. I can't promise this happening soon, but I think we'd get a ton of value out of doing it!
For those who are having stuttering and general performance issues, what's happening is that each time you see a skin or effect for the first time, there is a chance for it to stall as the graphics driver optimizes the shaders for your system and our engine has to wait for it to finish before it can proceed. Often there are a dozen or more shaders that need to be loaded for a single frame, and optimizing a single shader can take in the ballpark of 100-200ms. The good news is that, at least for the drivers we've tested (various versions of AMD, Intel, and Nvidia), once a shader is optimized then it gets saved to a cache file on your machine and won't need to be optimized again unless it changes.
A solution we're exploring in the interim would be something like what games like Elite Dangerous do, in that the first time you run the game after a shader change, you spend 5 minutes or so just optimizing shaders on startup. That's not a great experience, but at least it's one and done. However, if it turns out that we just have too many shaders and it'd take an hour, it's not a tenable solution. TBD!
One thing you can do to minimize the stalls during a match is actually to go to the collection tab and just scroll through all the Heroes, Skins, and Mounts, so that they draw on the store screen. After that, your graphics driver will have optimized and cached a majority of the shaders and you should see a dramatic improvement in-game. Beyond that, just play more games and you should see a better the experience over time as your system is exposed to more effects and other things that don't show up in the Collections tab.
Last note, for those who are seeing the issue with missing scenery, Minions flying off to infinity, your Heroes doing the same, this is a known issue specifically affecting MacBooks running the game with the integrated Intel graphics devices. I don't have an ETA on this fix because as it's quite a complex issue; what I can say is that it is the highest priority Mac bug on my task list and we're working with Apple to better understand why it's happening and how we can work around it. Follow the thread at https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/heroes/t/known-mac-technical-support-issues/30125/6?u=caterpepi to keep up with progress on it.
I know the experience right now is not the best and for that I apologize! Know that you have an advocate: I playtest exclusively on a Mac, and I am feeling your pain every day.
Once he gets the Level 20, he should just get a single reset on Go for the Throat for each kill that he gets. He shouldn't get 2 casts of the Heroic.
