Possibilities RotMG has on Unity

#1

The most awaited update 8 years since it’s release, is the Unity Port, the game we all know and love (or hate, goddamnit RNG), is getting ported from buggy, limiting Flash to a more popular and almost limitless Unity.

I’ve seen people discuss on what Unity will mean as whole on RotMG, but most people only think on the performance upgrade, and not on the magnitude Unity could mean for RotMG.

  • Gameplay

This is by far, the thing that will change on an enormous scale with the access to Unity.

Just, just imagine all the new, game changing updates that would be only possible on Unity.

  • Shots that will follow your mouse in a homing fashion.
  • Shots weakening or totally erasing enemies’ shots (shields could work as shields now).
  • Enemies with multiple hitboxes (hitting Shaitan’s Hands damaging Shaitan itself).
  • Floors/levels system (using ladders, portals within the dungeon, etc).
  • NPCs attacking and/or receiving damage from enemies.
  • An enciclopedia showing information on enemies, items, dungeons and misc. stuff on the Realm, on a menu (like Friends list).
  • Assorted client-side problems fixed (enemies reappearing when healed at the same time they’re killed)
  • Ninja’s Stars won’t longer have their infamous hard-coding.
  • PvP (eh…)

And that’s just a few things that could change within the game.

  • Interest

I personally believe that Realm of the Mad God has a lot of potential as a multiplaying game, most MMOs right now are either FPS, RPG, fighting games, but RotMG as a genre is unique, a Bullet Hell MMO, in fact it’s the first game with that genre, and Deca shouldn’t miss the opportunity to make RotMG popular due to it’s difference with the others games in the market (in Steam, for example).

RotMG being ported to Unity would bring a lot of interest, why? Players wouldn’t be interested in a game that is coded in Flash, because security flaws, performance, etc.

Deca should REALLY update The Tutorial, any MMO game has to have a good tutorial, and for a game as complicated (atleast from a new player perspective) as RotMG, the Tutorial should really get updated.

  • Hackers

Now this topic is quite an interesting one, we are all used to hackers roaming around with their autonexus and shit, and this is because Flash and RotMG’s spaghetti code (mostly Flash, through) is so easy to modify.

Unity should have better security on that matter, making it hard for extreme hacks (anti debuffs, for example) and third-party clients to be made, there will surely be some shitty autonexus or autoaim garbage, but at that point it won’t be a bother.

So don’t think Unity will be ‘RotMG but no lag’ kind of thing only, think of all the endless ideas we could have as players for dungeons, equipment, with unique mechanics that would be otherwise hard or even impossible to code in the current Flash RotMG.

Unity? lmao
#2

Most, if not all, of the possibilities you suggested are also possible on flash.

About hacking and exploit: I’m no expert on unity anti-hacking tool but I expect things like fullscreens and anti client sided debuff to stay unless Deca invest more on security

#3

With regards to gameplay, none of that is tied to Unity. If they wanted they could introduce any of those now, in Flash. Some are consequences of the design which won’t change with Unity. PvP for example: the game is just not suited to it.

They could change things with Unity but I think it’s more likely they will leverage the Unity 3D engine to do new things graphically. Dynamic lighting, more dynamic textures, transparent items and effects, more filters. These are things they could do in Flash but only when Hardware Acceleration is on. I don’t think the gameplay will change radically.

As for interest and hacking, these will likely be very different with Unity, though it’s hard to predict how without a better idea of their distribution and security strategies.

#4

You can indeed implement those in flash, but it requires workarounds as of the way the game is coded, especially for things like those :

However, as much as they’re “possible”, implementing them in Unity will be far less of a pain for multiple reasons. Here are the two most obvious to me :

  • Flexibility : Unity grants better performance, thus giving more liberty in the way things are coded. It should make the game overall more fluid, allowing more things you couldn’t have introduced in flash (especially concerning menus and other features that sometimes take a while to load or do not work correctly).

  • Legacy code : this game has been running for a while now, and it’s suffering of this thing we call legacy code, like most games that are this old. To make it short, the game runs on code that is years old, and it limits what you can implement in the game.

For example, adding foes with multiple hitboxes linked to the same health bar would probably require to recode entirely this part of the code, which would already be quite the pain. The problem is : most of the game depends on how those mecanics are coded, meaning you’d have to change all of those in order to simply have it work, from the way monsters move, the way sprites are rendered, debuffs, interactions with players and even more. Recoding half the game just for a single addition isn’t a good option.

(The whole part above this text was made assuming the code is made as I think it is, but even if this was not true the person that corrected me on that would definitly have a better example of this than me.)

Switching to Unity means both getting a better running environment and reworking old code, so it pretty much is a flawless win to me.

TLDR : possible on flash yes, but it would be 10 times harder than just porting the game and doing things there.

#5

I don’t think any of that is relevant to ROTMG. Right now they are working on porting the game to Unity. Their focus is on getting it working exactly like the Flash game, down to the pixel level on graphics, with every subtlety of the UI and gameplay captured.

So they are not going to, a the same time, completely overhaul the game mechanics for some hypothetical (as that’s all they are now) gameplay enhancements. Especially not ones which they could have done in Flash already. If they did not make sense in Flash they make no more sense in Unity.

Once it‘s written there may be opportunities to add game features. But mostly on the graphics/rendering side, with always-on hardware acceleration, as that will be the main difference with Unity. These have the advantage too of being possible without upsetting game balance.

Remember it’s a client server game, and the code that runs on the client is pretty dumb and limited. A lot of what you describe would have to run on the server anyway, and so is entirely independent of the client.

Remember also there is one reason they are doing this: as Flash is going away in 2020. Not because Unity offers massive opportunities for new, more complex gameplay. It really does not – all that you describe could be added to the game now.

#6

The flash code isn’t actually as bad as you think. I’ve read through a fair chunk of the source code. While it’s not fully optimized, I’ll easily give it a A- in terms of things like readability, modularity, etc.

Sure some of design decisions aren’t optimal, but I can promise you that you wouldn’t have to “recode half of the game for a single addition”. Things like “Floors/levels system” don’t even require any modification if you think about it. And other things like “NPCs attacking and/or receiving damage from enemies” are more like server-side changes.

Specific points:

This is 100% not on flash. Things taking a while to load are generally due to the lack of caching. I can’t recall any meaningful feature that doesn’t work.

Unless Deca have the foresight to implement those classes in a highly flexible, general fashion, I don’t see how it’ll be any different on unity. And let’s be honest. A small company isn’t going to write code that is unnecessarily general for some future game mechanics which may or may not be added.

tl;dr: unity is mostly an upgrade in terms of graphics and performance. New game mechanics won’t be much easier to implement because the flash code isn’t actually that bad.

#7

We’re talking about the engine the game is gonna use. It may change drasticly the way it is developped, thus having a great impact on the players and the way they play. I don’t see how this is not relevant to the game.

That’s the information I was lacking. If legacy code isn’t a problem they have then it’s probably only a problem of better performances and graphics.

#8

How did you get accsess?

#9

Anyone can download ROTMG’s SWF and use a Flash disassembler to look at the source code.

#10

This along with overall FPS improvement and any half-decent sort of light physics to enhance the game graphics will make me much more interested in it. I hope they implement those in unity. What I’m almost sure about (and hope) is that DECA will release the Unity port with a few good graphical changes.

#11

I don’t know where you are getting this from, that it will have a ‘great impact’ on players. Their overriding goal with Unity is to make it possible for players to continue playing with as little disruption as possible. In other words it needs to have a minimal impact on players.

One aspect of it is the transition. I think it will take a while, so for days if not weeks you can play both Flash and Unity, and make the transition at your own speed. This will be easier on players, easier on servers, and let them deal with any issues that arise while players can still use the Flash version. For all that to work the game has to be essentially identical. Minimal impact.

I would not be surprised to see improvements after the port, but I think they will be in two main areas. Graphics, with always on hardware acceleration, as I described earlier. And new content, both as people have more bandwidth now and as a standalone app can be bigger than an embedded .swf. Not just a few sprites and tiles, but much larger graphics and effects, as well as sounds such as new music tracks and voice samples.

#12

There is potential yes, but we also need to look at what they can do with that potential. I’m hoping for some new gameplay that’s not a new dungeon, boss, or event.
Personally, I’m kind of okay with the lag. What I’m looking more forward to is something new.

#13

If flash can’t do this, then it NEEDS to go. I’ve played so many games for NES and SNES and older game systems that games where you were inside a dungeon, but can use steps to go up or down floors. The first one that comes to mind is the amazing Dragon Warrior series.

#14

Examples probably exist even earlier than NES/SNES, but I can’t think of any. ROTMG anyway already has a mechanic for going up and down levels: portals. They take you down into dungeons and in a few cases move you between levels such as Oryx’s Castle, Lair of Draconis. Also areas do have levels when there is water, or other liquid, that you can sink into.

You could add code so you could move between levels but stay in the same area, but what is the point? It can’t affect gameplay by giving you e.g. more range as it would be totally unbalancing, given how much of the difference between classes is range. If it had no gameplay impact it’s just a gratuitous visual effect that slows you down.

#16

OMG I didn’t even think of LOD! When you go from LOD to Ivory, that portal is technically a different floor, probably a lower level of the dungeon.

#17

There could be a boss that you could only harm by being on a higher level, and you could fall down during the fight, too.

Example: Monster Hunter’s Yama Tsukami Fight

Also it could be used on different ways, for example there could be a boss rush-esque dungeon that is a Tower, or for a large, end-game dungeon Castle.

#18

Im pretty sure cultist hideout is under lh too.

#19

But that’s a 3D game! ROTMG is very much not a 3D game. A few bits of landscape are drawn as 3D but it’s a visual effect only; you interact with them as 2D obstacles.

#20

Trueeee. See, I didn’t think about those perfect examples. Neither did the guy who started this thread :sweat_smile:

#21

The switch to Unity will reduce the number of hackers but not because of its security but because many people hack just for the full screen and anti-lag. A switch to Unity would make hacked clients less attracting for many players.