1st April 2019: THIS TOPIC HAS BEEN CLOSED BY MODERATOR ON REQUEST OF TOPICSTARTER
EMERALD GAMING ROLEPLAY https://emeraldgaming.net
WHO WE ARE
We are a small team with 21 years of combined roleplaying experience amongst us all put together and we all have the same goal - creating a roleplaying environment that is enjoyable, accessible and most importantly - fair for everyone.
Each of us have all held a administrative or leadership role within popular roleplaying servers in the past which has given us an in-depth understanding of all aspects within roleplay - civilian, legal, illegal and government. No matter what server, one thing has always been persistent; no community was able to continuously fulfill the three goals stated above. This eventually led us to come together and form a community of our own.
WHAT WE PLAN TO DO
Creating the ideal roleplaying environment which will appeal to everyone and all sides will take time and feedback - this is why we have gone public quite early in development; to build from the ground up based on community feedback in order to ensure we create the ideal server filled with features, rules and guidelines dictated by the community. At the end of the day it is you who'll be primarily playing and on the end of everything, not us. By removing the bureaucracy that most other communities revolve around, we're creating something that is built by the players themselves to ensure we stick to the right path and work from ideas and suggestions that the players have approved of.
We aim to be a medium-to-heavy roleplaying server, enforcing the highest levels of immersion, roleplaying rules and at the same time, maintaining a high level of enjoyability. We feel that roleplaying nowadays has lost its touch with what it used to be years ago, a sort of grounds where you could come online, play with friends, build up what you desire or play any role within roleplay and enjoy doing it - whereas now it seems to be is competition, cops versus robbers and all about winning.
Read more about Emerald Gaming here: https://forums.emeraldgaming.net/topic/35-what-is-emerald-gaming/
DEVELOPMENT CONCEPT
There have been numerous communities that crumbled because of lack of attention given to a certain part of development or a feature, and that's why working without a deadline and at our own pace gave us the opportunity to work on features more thoroughly and in-depth. We've seen this in the past from other communities that have failed as a result of increasing desire and pressure to launch an unfinished server.
We have devoted a great deal of our time to not only development but also to research what players expect from a server and how to improve from the mistakes of other communities, overall creating a more enjoyable experience. A substantial part of the process we need to go through is not only reducing the internal bureaucracy of the staff, or ensuring that everyone has equal opportunities, but also the experience of not being restricted by the server's script capabilities.
WHAT WE HAVE TO OFFER All concepts, ideas and showcases are currently in their early alpha stages and do not represent actual gameplay, they are subject to change at any given moment throughout development until the final public release.
3D User Interfaces
This is the primary feature that we believe will make us unique and re-invent the way roleplay is conducted on MTA. By creating graphical interfaces within the 3D world, players can interact with things such as vehicles or objects seamlessly like any open world game where pointing the center of your screen at the element triggers the ability to interact with it. Expanding on this idea, having 2D GUIs on screen all the time or for each interaction can leave the user feeling quite clustered - so we've minimized it all down to simple prompts and selections to get what you need done.
An example of this concept can be seen below, where a player interacts with an ATM to withdraw money - the ATM interface is drawn as soon as the player approaches it, and you can begin interacting with it like any other GUI. Please bear in mind that the example below is a very rough draft to show the concept and does not represent the final project.
Advanced Inventory & Item System
Our item and inventory system is one that provides the highest level of immersion and accessibility. With custom models for objects to reflect the actual item itself, a sleek and simple inventory with an easier level of interaction to use - you'll get used to it as if you've been using it for years in no time.
The inventory is split up into 4 portions.
The main inventory holds all of your basic items such as your wallet, keys, clothing, accessories and storage items.
The weapon inventory holds.. weapons. When a weapon is placed into this inventory, it'll appear on the player and be added to their hotbar for usage. Ammo is fed to the weapon directly from the main inventory.
The hotbar is a concept we wanted to try out and see what the community thinks - you can place items into your hotbar by dragging and dropping them to any of the six available slots. From there you can pin your hotbar so it remains on screen wherever you like when you close your inventory. When roleplaying, you can then scroll through each item within your hotbar with number keys 1-6 or your mouse scroll wheel. This can be used to select weapons to equip in-hand, or hold out items such as your car keys to unlock your car, handcuffs to use before handcuffing a player and so on - the possibilities are endless!
The storage inventory is only visible when you click on a storage item such as a backpack, dufflebag, basket, armor and so on. The size and slots that can be stored within the storage item depends on the item itself and its predefined slots. Dropping a storage item on the ground with contents inside will retain its contents, so you can finally fill a briefcase up with tons of money and pass it over the table to a mob gangster just like in the movies.
Unique GUI System
We use a custom GUI system which draws amazingly designed and easy to use interfaces instead of the stock MTA GUIs. Player Report Panel accessible via F1. Administrative Item Spawn Panel. Character creation. Character creation skill points allocation. (This will be explained in-depth at a later date.) Video displaying the full character creation.
Focus on all sides of Roleplay
We aim to provide enough script support for all sides of roleplay. Be it legal, illegal, government or just plain civilian. Leaving one side more superior and focused with features scriptwise can result in a loss of incentive of to play other roles, so making one role just as enjoyable as the next is key.
Law Enforcement
Because LEO roleplay is quite major and requires quite a lot of equipment on the script end to assist in being able to carry out essential tasks such as using an MDC, a prison system and tactical equipment, we'll be sure to incorporate everything a law enforcement officer needs to get the job done. Starting from just a pen and ticket book, all the way to a remote controlled bomb disposal bot.
Illegal Roleplay
The other major role of every roleplaying community. Illegal roleplayers are the heart and soul of creating exciting roleplay opportunities for other players such as gangs, large factions, shootouts and the general illegal atmosphere.
With the Faction Team already functioning and prepared, we spent a considerable amount of time thinking of ways to provide life and new innovative features to illegal roleplay. We're making it easier than ever to grow drugs with a fully detailed drug system, requiring as minimal staff interaction as possible and allowing players to roleplay independently. We'll be putting measures in place to make sure that the economy is balanced to allow healthy illegal roleplay.
Legal Roleplay
When attempting to achieve a perfect balance between all sides of roleplay, legal RP plays a major role. Be it a bar, club or a trucking service - it's going to be a pleasant experience for company leaders, employees and entrepreneurs. Everything you need is going to be accessible in-game, such as creating a faction by going through the typically mundane process of acquiring a business license from the government.
The Faction Team is more than open to hearing your suggestions and will have an announcement up in the coming weeks for more information, we can't wait to hear what you think!
Customization
Everyone loves customization and personalization. It helps you feel more comfortable and make something yours, and to do that we've added a ton of customization opportunities throughout. If you've seen the video above of the inventory system, then you already know you can move each inventory anywhere you want and save it's location. Pin and unpin your hotbar so its constantly on-screen or only appear whenever you hit a scroll number key.
Adjust your HUD style to whatever theme you like through the settings menu, as of now we have two styles already available for all players, 'White on Black' and 'Black on White' with more coming soon. We even plan to open up design submissions to the community, so anyone can make their own HUD design using our provided templates and if it receives enough approval, we'll add it in-game! White on Black HUD Style. Black on White HUD Style.
A ton of extra settings exist and can be found in the F10 menu in-game to toggle on graphical enhancements, shaders, or adjust how certain scripts react to your actions and make them do what you prefer.
Preventing Abuse
As with every server, we plan to have a large staff team at some point, and tracking the actions of each and every member can be quite time consuming, and some unintended actions can slip past unnoticed. We've tailored different ideas as to how we can resolve this, and at the end of the day we can have as many policies, regulations and rules in place but this doesn't stop the pesky habits of administrators who think they can slip past them all to get a quick weapon, item or vehicle fix. Everything and anything they do is logged, along with live notifications being sent to managers on duty with their actions for every command that can be abused in one way or another.
If a staff member abuses the commands they have access to or breaks any rule and there is no manager online to see it, there are measures we put in place, allowing us to ensure that everyone is maintaining a very high standard.
Performance
Hey, with everything going on and all these great features being brought forward, where do we stand in terms of performance?
All our code is written and rewritten multiple times until we're happy that it's at its most optimal and the highest standard possible. Promising such great and advanced features is one thing, being able to use them seamlessly is another so we've taken it as our goal to ensure that low end computers still have a chance to experience what we have to offer. We continuously check and monitor the usage of each resource occasionally to avoid the common mistakes other servers make, such as memory leak or high CPU usage.
Prior to a public launch, we plan to run tests on virtual machines and try out different specifications to see how resources react and assess the playability until we're satisfied. A public graph will also be provided displaying the minimum and recommended specifications. Please bare in mind that MTA functions on only one CPU core, so even if you have a beefy super computer with an i9 processor and a ram size of 512GB, you'll still experience FPS drops for rendering and object loading in minor occasions.
DEVELOPED BY YOU
Development is a process that requires a lot of decisions to be made. An ideal community can only be built up when ideas and decisions are put into discussions - the best way to do is to hear everyone out, the whole community. We want to make roleplaying enjoyable for everyone, in all areas, fields and roles of roleplay.
The reason we are publicizing the community rather early in development is for the sake of determining important decisions and features which will be utilized by the players for months to come. Each month we will be posting what progress has been made, constantly be creating surveys and initiating discussions regarding what features we need to pursue in order to satisfy every kind of player. We urge you to contribute to discussions and to make your opinion heard, everything is equally considered. The community will pave the road ahead.
If you possess programming skills that you believe are of use to us, we always appreciate and urge developers willing to dedicate themselves to this project to apply for the Development Team here. Keep in mind that we have a very high standard that we maintain throughout development in order to reach the perfect balance of performance and enjoyability.
We urge all newcomers with roleplaying experience to start a discussion, introduce themselves within the community or give us feedback regarding our ideas! When you've gotten comfortable, send us your suggestions and what you want to see in the server.
Let's make something great together.
Thanks for reading!
CREDITS
All content displayed is developed directly by the Emerald Gaming Development Team with the exception of any listed resources and/or code obtained from external sources.
@thisdp for his original dxLibrary.
@Grozz for assistance with 3D interface functions.
@ryden for original superman resource.
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