FusionFall
 

Let's have a FusionFall retrospective thread! I'm just making the thread right now so I can link to it, but I'll post some of the sordid details about what happened later on.

Okay, so first off, my own background with the game.

Early on in the game's lifecycle there was a problem with the account servers. My own personal account got caught up in it; if I tried to log in, the game would crash. So I ended up playing on my wife's account because she lost interest in the game fairly quickly.

So this meant my in-game name was Mrs. Moonbunny (MrsMoonbunny on the forums). I went ahead and followed through with the character design my wife wanted to pursue, collecting the equipment necessary to do a Sailor Moon cosplay.

I ended up never getting past about level 17, because I got distracted from the main gameplay by exploration. I heard about the possibility of a way to break out of bounds, and I started searching. I ended up being one of the leading explorers of the game, and when the moderators started cracking down on "glitching" they talked to me about it. The conclusion was that the staff at the time didn't so much care about our little group exploring the game world because we were behaving ourselves, but they didn't want discussion of game exploits on the forums and they didn't want us to share our information around because they didn't want to deal with the support requests if kids got themselves stuck out of bounds or, worse, got their account stuck in a crash loop because they saved somewhere unstable.

So I started the FusionFall Explorers website with a forum hidden from public view. With the help of Viva Alecto (Mandie LeScum) and others, we screened applicants to make sure that we weren't spreading information to people who didn't already know it. Viva and I also helped out as citizen moderators on the official game forums, helping answer questions about the game, cautioning new users about the rules, and when possible even providing technical support for other players.

For our efforts in helping the community, we were invited into a newly-formed Player Advisory Council, where the forum staff would solicit feedback about the game and various community issues. They served as the liaisons between us as representatives of the player base and the South Korea-based development team Grigon that was honestly pretty out of touch. (It was in part thanks to our efforts and feedback that we got features like the Croc Pot and even going so far as to rebalance the XP system to avoid the stupidly tedious stereotypical Korean MMORPG grind that most FusionFall players didn't want to deal with.)


Espy, since you used to play, what was your in-game name and/or your forum name?

sounds like a sort of neat game, sort of reminds me of Glitch.

I'm not familiar with a game named "Glitch."

The general gameplay was a pretty standard MMORPG with instance dungeons containing bosses and quests given by characters in the world. The thing that set it apart was that it was a Cartoon Network crossover game -- representatives from LOTS of different CN shows were there. Dexter from Dexter's Laboratory was the central NPC in the story, the Kids Next Door were coordinating the resistance effort against the alien overlord invading the planet, and heroes like the Powerpuff Girls and Samurai Jack were contributing their strength in the war effort.

That was a decade ago, and I don’t remember. Also, this was back when I lived w my parents, so I couldn’t play much, especially since FF sometimes hung on closing, and I was constantly scared my parents would catch me playing.

I do remember exploring a lot and trying to break out of the playable area; I do that in every game I play.

Out-of-bounds exploration in FusionFall benefited from having friends. I noticed that your character doesn't change animation states when using the buddy warp function, so I tested it with a friend -- you had one game tick between spawning into the world and starting to actually fall where you could jump as if you were standing on the ground, so you'd warp to someone who was at the peak of a boosted jump and then go even higher.

Originally you could go arbitrarily high with just two or three people, you could keep leapfrogging each other. Eventually they tried to patch it out by adding a cooldown to the warp function, but that just meant you needed more people collaborating to get that high.

Huh. That’s really interesting.

I’ll admit, one of the reasons I explore and constantly try to find the highest points in maps is, I love taking screencaps of scenery :|

Oh, then you might like what Drazil found. (I'm still in contact with him; he's the most significant contributor to my Ludum Dare stuff.) He laid claim to an entire out-of-bounds mountain (the game staff actually ended up unofficially referring to it as "Drazil Mountain") by being the first to reach it, climb it, and document it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chgQW2ZFMgg

Ah, yes, floating flora, the omnipresent marker of being out of bounds.

Glitch was basically an old MMORPG thing where you'd collect things to make other things and give them to the gods or screw over the economy. It's a bit hard to explain, but there is a Wikipedia page.

There's at least two revivals, one of them is currently in alpha and is called Children of Ur, completely free to play, provided you've got a browser, but it hasn't been updated for some time AFAIK. The team from Children of Ur are working with another team from another revival of the game to try and make a better build of the game.

so how did it all go down?

I remember the game a little. I didn't play much, kinda wish I could've back then. :(

Oh! I forgot to finish the story, didn't I. Thanks for the ping.

I mentioned that the development studio, Grigon, could sometimes be painfully out of touch. There was a span of MONTHS where development seemed to just be completely halted -- we knew there were promised features on the horizon, but we never got any updates, not even bugfix patches. From my semi-insider perspective I learned that Grigon (in South Korea) had been really slow to answer messages from the management (in the US). There were a couple of times where they flew a manager to Korea just to get communication moving.

At first, we thought it was a language and time zone barrier combined with known challenges on the technology side of things. This is actually information that you won't find on FusionFall's Wikipedia page, but FusionFall had originally been written using the Gamebryo engine. It switched over to Unity3D mainly to support being run in a web browser -- the management at Turner Entertainment wanted to avoid requiring young players to install and update a game client. (It turns out that installing and updating the Unity3D web player plugin might have been even more of a hassle for players than a game client would have been.) This was a fairly rushed migration, and a moderately challenging one: Gamebryo uses C++ while Unity uses C#, so basically all of the code had to be rewritten, and Unity was very new and wasn't fully mature yet, so they had to work around a lot of stuff. (FusionFall was directly or indirectly responsible for a LOT of development in the Unity engine.)

But no, it wasn't any of those things. Those were just excuses. As a matter of fact, Grigon had been on the brink of bankruptcy. I don't know the specific details, but I can imagine they were taking Cartoon Network's money and trying to use it to stay afloat but not having the funds to pay their engineers to work on the game. Turner management found out about this with barely enough time to demand that the assets and source code get handed over so they could develop the game in-house. Grigon closed its doors in early 2010, merely a year after the game's public launch.

It's not clear whether or not it was coincidence that the game went free-to-play in late 2009, but it was widely considered to be a bad sign. Cartoon Network did finally get things up and running on their side, but it was too little, too late. A lot of players had gotten bored of the lack of content updates, and the new content that was added afterward was not what players had expected and the release pace was inconsistent (sometimes too fast, sometimes too slow), and it didn't really tie in with the rest of the game.

The game kept limping along until the servers were shut down in 2013, but with no real monetization strategy and no marketing whatsoever it really didn't have a future. I think they were planning on merchandise, but that never happened.

would be nice if it was brought back tbh, but kids these days won't know the characters from the shows because they don't air anymore.

There's FusionFall Retro, which works... reasonably well, if you have Windows. Unfortunately it doesn't work on Mac at all despite Mac being one of FusionFall's original supported targets, and it takes a ridiculous amount of hackery to get it to work on Linux and I wasn't able to get it running again after an update.

dual-booting is probably your friend in that case, but that's a pain in the ass to set up if you don't like fucking about with bootloaders.

I mean. I would. Except I picked a different solution: run Windows on a dedicated gaming PC.

I did download FF Retro. But it froze during character customization. :(

idk if that server's offline or crashed or if your computer is strong enough to run it. hell if i know.

This computer has been able to run a lot of things and it's still kinda new, I'll see if I can find the problem ;u;

It seems unlikely that it's a computer performance issue, given that the game is from 2009. It can just about run on a potato. It's actually more likely that your computer is too NEW than too OLD.

FusionFall was never the most stable game, and FF Retro is limping along on an ancient (and notably buggy) version of the Unity engine that's shoehorned into a web plugin that doesn't work with any modern browser. The issue you describe was a common thing to hear about even when the game had first-party support.

I tried to get the FF Retro team to let me help, since I'm... y'know, probably a better engineer than anyone they have on staff. But despite my history with the game, they're super jealous of their stuff and they don't want to let anyone see it.

that vaguely reminds me of sonic gather battle in the way that the guy was trying to protect his sprites by injecting actual malware, but hopefully they won't stoop down to that level.

someone's gonna datamine shit anyways.

is it possible to run it in a VM?

Yeah, it should work just fine in a Win2000 / WinXP VM, assuming your VM software emulates / passes through the necessary 3D stuff.

Hey Coda

I just got a bit nostalgic and looked up the old ff explorers forum and found this thread, so I wanted to say hey!

I was ctvugyhf on the forums and butler amoeba in game. I focused mostly on trading but I was on the forum and did a bit of exploration with you guys. I don't think we really hung out much, but I remember your name and I do remember drazil. He and I grouped a good bit at the time.

I was pretty young at the time (12 I think?), but I remember having a lot of fun with you guys! Hope y'all are all doing well

Oh hey, I remember you. Welcome to Trisphee!

EDIT: Drazil says hi too!

EDIT: No, sorry, he says "HI!".

Sudden realization that I could have just randomly *met Coda in FF* months before I ever joined Tris.

FusionFall is how I met Viva Alecto (Mandie), which is how I ended up here.

Like I mentioned in the second post: In-game and on the forums I was Mrs. Moonbunny -- my own account got glitched out, and my wife wasn't super interested in continuing to play, so I ended up playing on her account until the game shut down.