Not related to P&P gaming: Problems with MMO Gaming

[Judging__Eagle]

Anyway, I'm thinking that running a game that combines multiple elements of various games to 'run' the main game might be a new way of approaching the genre.

So, you start play at some sort of 1st or 3rd person persective view, running around, attacking things and work on either getting powerful on your own, joining forces with other players to create a warband and hiring NPCs to create a warband.

Then, you start picking up more NPCs and players and you start raiding outlying neutral villages and resource points and flag them 1) for your team and 2) for your own personal warband.

I'd say that every 'resource' that is flagged gives some arbitrary number of which 1/2 is distrubuted among the warband that controls it, and the other 1/2 is distributed among all other members of the faction.

So, while your faction gains stuff for holding more total resource points; your personal warband gains more for each resource point that they hold.

So, aggressive players will want to keep expanding their sphere of influence, while more passive players will watch and maintain safer points.


Combat itself should do away with; or be completely transparent with, elements such as monster HP/Mana/Whatever as well as who the monster 'hates' the most (an other annoying legacy of EQ). So that different levels of players can work together; so the lvl L heroes deal with giants leg with their swords, the lower lvl E heroes shoot the giants in the eyes.

The higher level heroes who are meleeing should get different benefits from using different weapons, instead of damage reduction for going board and weapon over more damage per second with THF or TWF. If you use a net, you better believe that the target is gonna move slower, so you can kite them if they're big dumb brutes. While a spear or polearm should fvck things up that charge you (dealing say, all of the base damage they were going to deal, plus all the base damage you were gonna deal; making spears great for 'defensive' fighters)

The lower level heroes who are attackign from range would use a variety of weapons, bows and crossbows being harder to use (hate to disagree with you Frank, but a firing crossbow at further than 30 or so feet and you need to take into account gravity) and you have to watch your ammo (b/c it's heavy), but you can shoot something in the eyes (or kidenys, or lungs/gills, or feet) and expect an appropriate reaction (can't see/misses more often; starts bleeding/lots of damage over time; can't breathe/moves and attacks a lot slower; takes damage while movine/moves slower)

While other weapons like magic wands simply do a bit less damage (but never run out of ammo) and you can't hit something in the eyes or kidneys for bonus power.

Of course, more adventurous players will want to pick up stuff like guns, but unless their warband or faction has some expert metallurgists (hmm, Dwarves, Gnomes and Goblinoids are better than average?), your gonnes have a chance of blowing up in your face. On the other hand, they'd be able to do special locational damage like a bow/crossbow would; and they'd do a lot more damage, but their ranges would be really short to have any sort of accuracy (which could change if your faction discovers how to do something that others don't).

I'd also probably do crafting different; there shouldn't be people running around killing monsters for 'crafting' recipes.

Recipes should be researched by players, and if they find something promising they can go to the "master recipe NPC" and put their findings research up for sale; gaining a commision for every sale.

So, players who want to reap the rewards of research should be able to go to the "master recipe NPC" and look up all the metalworking recipes (arraged in a progression Tree, the way that the Civ games organize discoveries) and if they see a recipe that they want (i.e. how to make cast iron gonne barrels and say how to add rifling to gonnes and how to make either match, wheel or flint lock firing mechanisms) they simply pay the Fee that the player who discovered the technique wants people to pay him.

Of course, if someone else also discovers the same recipe on their own, they can sell their findings; but people who buy a recipe can never sell the recipe that they found.

Of course, if people in a faction want the discoverer to lower her prices on say "How to make: [Engineering/Armour/Metallugry/Firearms Patter] Male-Pattern Steam-Powered Combat armour", they will have to actually talk to the player specifically and petion them either in game or on the game's forums to lower their prices.


Getting people to leak recipe info will probably not happen since everyone on every server is going to have to fight each other. So being secret squirrel with your factions cutting-edge adamantine-age tech will be encouraged at an in-game level, unless you want everyone running around with adamantine armoured warbands to compete with you.


Then again, I'm of the opinion that no faction should have more than 100-500 players (and 500-2500 players per server) so you'll be more intimate with the people you play with.

Of course, since each server is a different region, once you've made your character's initial race, and other characters will have to be of that initial race or your randomly chosen faction's other races (perhaps doing 4 factions with 5 races might be a good idea instead of 5 factions with 3 races each). So, if you're a High Elf and you've got Goblins, Ogres and uh... Gnomes and Reptilianoids in your faction, then you're either gonna keep leveling your High Elf main, or you'll have to choose to play one of those 'uglier' races.

Anyway, I'm rambling; back to more 'mini games' that players can play.

So far we've got

A pair of potentially new melee options:
Netting and using polearms; polearms should be really freaking long; like 16 feet, so a phalanx of players and their NPC warbands can stab a big thing like an ogre or giant and kill them that way.

Four Ranged options:
Bows/Xbows: Both use ammo, both can do locational damage; if FPS game can have headshots, and something like that Mercenary FPS game can have kideny shots, we can have those all in an MMO. However both take more time to learn and aren't amazing until you get some skill; Bows taking more skill, but having much more range, while Crossbows are better for lower skilled players, but have much shorter lethality ranges.

Magic Wands:
Faster shooting, no 'aiming' perhaps minigames like. For example a game where you have to type some random collection of words really fast gets you to deal more damage. You could pick from several games and each has different properties as to how they effect your 'shooting'. Matching games will do more shots in a row for every 'match' that you make. So players will get rewarded for getting 5 items in a row (instead of say the normal 3) and will get 5 bonus shots added on to the base 3 shots or something; while the 'typing game' would instead have you keep firing rounds as long as you are able to maintain a certain typing speed.

Firearms: All of the 'benefit's of Bows/Crossbows, with the extra benefit of having better tragectory (but much shorter range), but the gonne can blow up in your face, so don't use them if you don't want to have to sit out part of a fight while a cleric or druid or paladin has to reknit your arm back together b/c your gonne backfired.

Of course, all of these modes should have an normal and a power mode.

Why? B/c sometimes you want to play an MMO to relax and watch some pretty colours and chat.

At the same time, those people who want to do stuff in power-mode should notice an increase in power.


Some other minigames could include:

Healing: you have to 'erase' a wound with your magic healing 'eraser' on a pop-up window. If you erase the wound without going over your old erasing lines you don't burn extra mana, but you should be able to heal almost any wound with the same spell.

So, healing doesn't come in "Healing 1, Healing 2, etc. etc." anymore (well, it still could); but a player who actually kicks ass at the healing mini-game would be able to heal a high level tank from 10% of their total HP with one single casting of a 1st level healing spell and really good mouse control or a Wacom tablet and a good drawing hand.



What I was talking about before for 'warbands'. Each players should be able to generate, for free a "retinue" of NPCs that can allow the player to either level on their own with up to X amount of NPCs or if they join other players, each player can bring one of their Retinue to help the party out.

So, the warrior on his own can bring in a ranger, cleric and wizard NPC to provide healing and damage, while he tanks; if he parties with a Rogue and a Wizard he might just bring in his cleric while they do the same (or maybe they only bring in 2 clerics instead) so that they have as much healing at the group of Player's disposal as possible.

While the 'warband' should be made up of 'grunts' (that is, lower level than the PC, and more of a strategy game type of unit) generated with things that relate to a characters class or race. The warbands should cost something, either in training, equipment or something and can then be used to manage a single or group of Players resources.

So, the PCs go out an slay fire giants and kill some golems that no one has yet been able to take down; while the grunts of that group of PCs guards that group's villages and guard tower. Manufacturing metal weapons, leather armours and building a better forge or more houses in the villages to house a population that can now grow since it's not getting eaten by monsters every now and again.

So, the Druid gets faries, tree-people and giant bears and wolves and cats; the Paladin/Knight gets people of the same race as their are, but they all ride horses and can fight from horseback; and those people run your warbands villages.

I guess that I'm envisioning a more tactical game than anything else.

[RandomCasualty]

The main problem with creating a truly dynamic world is that you don't want it to be too mutable. In other words, you probably don't want your game to be as fast paced as Planetside where cities are changing hands every 15 minutes. Otherwise, conquests tend to lose all meaning and if you want there to be some tactics and strategy, you want to have some semi-permanent powerbases to let people set up economies and defenses.

The game can't become a matter of "Azeroth is under attack again" every 30 minutes. Though possibly you've got to defend against a set of smaller battles, attacking strategic targets like iron mines, scouting outposts, and villages.

You probably are going to need some NPC static defenders, not EQ uberguards, but just like 10 guards or so to stop minor incursions, so a group of 5 attackers can't take a city just because no PCs happen to be there. You also likely need to make good PC incentives for defending. In fact, holding off a siege should be worth more benefits than attacking a city. That ensures that you always have defenders and doesn't get into the planetside "ahhh screw that city, lets just continue our attack" strategy. There should probably be some kind of outer wall that needs to be breached before defenders can get inside the city, to let people set up defenses. Because while attacks are easy to setup, defenses aren't and there should be some way to set up some basic strategic battleplan. Almost like a real-time strategy commander function where you can give orders to individual PCs "Go on this tower and the man the ballista", and with flashing arrows so PCs actually know wtf you're talking about.

Also, Sieges need to take awhile, to let people log on if reinforcements are needed. I'm thinking of an IM or email alert that could be sent when one of your major strongholds are under attack by superior numbers, so people at their computers might want to log on to help the defense. Granted, this sort of design does expect that the players have little in the way of outside lives, but this is a MMORPG, so it's not like that sort of thing is uncommon.

[Judging__Eagle]

Well, the plan is that PCs use their own NPC arbands to do defensive stuff while they themselves are logged off.

Most PCs will leave their warband to guard their faction's quarter of the city or the overall city defenses.

I'm actually envisioning each race to have almost the exact same looking city area no matter what server it's on; so if you're on one server and you enter the Hobgoblin quarter of the city, it looks like you've entered feudal Japan.

Of course the NPCs that sell you stuff will all have their own randomly generated name, but the buildings style and such will be the same from server to server. So in a Goblin/High Elf/Orc/Dwarf/Ogre city you would have: a mud and wood wall section with wattle and daub homes and buildings; A section of fantastical walls with tapering towers; A rough boulders, rubble and wooden log palisade with crude log and stone/dirt structures; an expertly assembeled grantie walls section which guards a path that goes into a mountainside city full of dewllings and shops that are carved right into the stone itself; with an old castle that's been partially rebuilt with ramshackle buildings inside along with some hide tents.


I guess that each faction would really be 5 smaller 'cities' that join around a central feature that binds them together as a faction.

Now 'that' is something to look into.

I'm thinking a magical pool of water that prospective heroes leap into so that they gain power (aka, the 'portal' to the auto-level quest NPC; hop in if you think you're ready for the test they'll give you and then do it. If you fail you have to wait an hour. If you succeed you can try the next one. Of course, you may fail, however people with really high skill will be able to max their power very fast; while those that can't just won't and will have to grind.

When people enter the pool of testing area they go and talk to their class apporpriate NPC (all of which will be giant statues of the highest ranked PC of that class on either: all servers, your server or your faction; so being really high and kicking ass with one class will be noticable by everyone on the server). The NPC then offers them the next quest(s) (yeah, you should be able to do quests higher level than you are to gain that many more levels per attempt, of course, doing a lvl 60 quest at lvl 30 will probably get you one or two-shotted) that they can take and then proceeds to outline the quest goal; what you'll lose marks for, what you will gain marks for etc. etc.


Yes, I'm pretty much saying that stupid people have to grind in such a system and the tests will be hard for new players.

Better playes will earn more XP if they are able to beat the goal faster and by doing more things that are supposedly above their expected skill as a player.

Example:
Clerics who use more than just healing spells to heal, using bandages or other stuff to conserve their mana like being able to heal really well with low lvl healign spells and great skill at playing the healing minigame.

Warrior's test will be stuff like make sure that you are actually tanking not the NPCs that are given to you for the test; keep aggro as high as possible. The longer you can keep it maxed, the better, with longer times giving more XP on an exponential basis. Being able to control yor character to move out of the way of an attack (or time your pressing of the shield command to raise your shield) stuff like that.

Also, I'd like if how you leveled your character determines your character's title.

So, someone who's rogue has leveled to 60 doing just the tests (which will probably be the equivalent of assasinanation jobs (aka infiltrate past an area) that culminate straight PvP matches (with the guy at the end of the base or whatever) where being able to jump around, over and past enemies while timing your attacks would be key) has a name like Penultimate Rogue Darksmoke Puncher.

While someone who grinded or did a mix of grinding and level quests has a name like Rogue, 37th Grade Lordchaostorm.

The gradient marking how many quests the above character has completed if they've done nothing else to distinguish themself.

Of course, I'd like to have a feature where anyone can flag someone with a stupid name that's easy to do; the more flags someone gets the faster a GM will look into their name, but that's just me.

[Crissa]

I really miss Myth. Ahh, for a real tactical game to play... Maybe I should break it out and see if I can get it to run on my iMac.

However, what people get out of an MMO - what they use, want, actually want and what they get are all different things.

1. For instance, what I want for an MMO:
   
2. A world (game) I can interact with for hours at a time.
3. Saves my progress. This can be my oiutfits, whatever.
4. Allows me to interact with random people.
5. Allows me to dumb, repetitive tasks like pick berries or flowers for some eventual reward.

But the thing is, I don't like mini-games. For them to be in the world I want them to be part of the world - I like immersion. I don't like poor language, stupid names, and people who can't take the time to talk/type properly. If the spells are a card game, I want everyone to be able to see how it works. The cards need to on the ground in the world. If it's a swing game, I want to see them doing their thing.

And lastly, it needs to be attentive to latency and client security. The user's client could be full of sh*t and lying about their skill - that's why those silly online flash skill games don't work. If there's any way to cheat, some segment of the population will do it.

So unless you're a doctorate in secure language and handshake protocol, we're probably not going to solve the problem of complex skill games that can be lied to by the client.

However, the proble of tactics is partially one of latency and of interface; but mostly it's the difficulty in creating responsive AI. In WoW, each class has a different way of dealing with things - but the variety of mob tactics is much slimmer, because of lack of any AI.

-Crissa

[RandomCasualty]

1171867464[/unixtime]]
However, the proble of tactics is partially one of latency and of interface; but mostly it's the difficulty in creating responsive AI. In WoW, each class has a different way of dealing with things - but the variety of mob tactics is much slimmer, because of lack of any AI.

You'll never see great AI in a MMORPG. There are just too many monsters to manage at once, and thus the tactics need to be dumbed down to something that can be processed quickly.

It's one of the reasons I say to really limit the impact of NPCs in general. You've got tons of thinking strategic players on at all times. That's what a MMORPG is. You might as well use them. I'm not sure why MMORPGs are locked into the old human versus AI stereotype. AI is boring... lets face it. You can give them basic tasks, but they have to be a minor part of the game. Let the interesting opponents (the other PCs) be the major component of the game.

[Judging__Eagle]

Hmm, yeah, AI wil never be written well, but for a good reason.

Most AI scripts are very very simply written.

What if we give players AI script-writing tools as part of the game inteface?

Some players can already do this sort of stuff and can write fairly complex 'Bots' that can play the game while the player goes off to do other stuff, like live their life.

So, if some players can do stuff like that, then that means that a complex AI script can be created and run. Also, 'bot' NPCs that only transmit data would be less server intensive than a player would be.

So a player could run his retinue-script(s) from his computer while playing on the same computer and he would still create less server load than if there were 2 players logged on.

Really, the main reason people think AIs are dumb is that most monster AIs are actually using pretty much the exact same script; so it will have to be pretty basic.

I've also got a hankering for allowing all players to be able to design content on the fly for all other players to interact with.

Having players able to design a game's conent would really be good imo; it would constantly keep material in-game fresh and having a broad range of randomly spawning monsters that players designed will allow the game designers to work on stuff besides making and coding new monsters.

Heck, we'll even put in an incentive system; every PC that your created monster ever kills on any server earns you xp as long as the PC is at least the same level or higher than the monster.

Something along the lines of the "Spore" game would work for 'creating' a new monster.

An aside here: Seriously, check out video.google.com and do a search for Spore, the 'race' creation section is extremely flexible; I'd even dare to say that it is almost infinitely flexible.

So players can design monsters and based on a few pieces of info the creator supplies the 'drops' and 'value' of killing this thing could be procedurealy generated.

Which I think is what needs to be done for the next step.

We should focus not on creating very complex models of characters/monsters/ buildings etc.. We should isntead focus on having procedural tools and built in scripts that can take any creature that a player designs and then throw it onto all the servers in areas that are flagged as appropriate.

A game suddenly becomes a bit more challenging when monsters can be given complex command scripts that a player wrote up.

Also, I think that flying should be something that players should be able to do and flying monsters something that players should be able to kill.

I don't think I've seen a mmo where flying actually meant something except that a monster was hovering 1 to 4 feet in the air.

Of course ranged weapons will have to have a range greater than.... 30 feet.

[RandomCasualty]

1171924654[/unixtime]]Hmm, yeah, AI wil never be written well, but for a good reason.

Most AI scripts are very very simply written.

For neverwinter nights this doesn't have to be so, because only a few scripts are processed at a time. However, for a MMORPG, you're processing several hundred scripts simultaneously. You just can't do anything except simple scripts in that case, unless you want to make server load a nightmare.

If you've got 500 guys on your server, all fighting 1 monster, then you're looking at potentially 500 scripts running at the same time, this doesn't even count PC cohorts and summons.

[Jack_The_Quick]

First thing I have to say is that I actually work in the gaming industry… well actually I don’t I DID, but my job collapsed a few months ago due to managerial incompetence. I know that whenever anyone on a forum I’m reading establishes their credentials it pisses me off, I’m sorry.

I do actually do this for money, except not right now as I am unemployed and bitter. I have spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about this. I am not just talking out of my ass.

The first thing I have to say is that, unfortunately, every single thing you see in a video-game costs money.

Everything.

Grass costs money. Rocks cost money. Trees cost money.

Everything.

EVERY. SINGLE. THING. COSTS. MONEY.

Everything is made, laboriously, by hand, and you have to pay those hands.

If you want those hands to know their arse from their elbow you have to pay them well.

In a modern video game it takes the average, skilled, character modeler roughly a month to design, model, texture, and rig a character. That means it goes from being a written description to being the thing you see on screen. That’s just what it LOOKS like, after that you have to pay more people to animate it.

That’s for NPC’s.

For PC’s the amount of time increases dramatically. Too Human, a game being produced by Silicon Knights, one of the companies I did contract work for, has been designing their main character for TEN YEARS. He has had over forty people working on him. That’s forty people making roughly forty to fifty thousand dollars a year.

One character alone is worth almost half a million dollars.

I know I’m belaboring the point but it’s the one thing that it’s almost impossible to wrap your head around when you get into this industry. You can make good games on a budget, but you had better have the best idea in the world otherwise you are totally cooked. Katamari Demancy proves that, it’s a great game, cost nothing to make, and brought in buckets of cash.

That being said, you can’t bootstrap an MMO. No matter how good your idea, unless you’re making little chibi 2D characters like that weird Korean MMO, you require a ridiculously vast budget.

Issue 1 – Adding Content

A number of people mentioned that each server should be a part of a continuing world. That’s a wicked idea, but it’s completely impossible from a financial standpoint. Consider this:

You have $1000000.

With your money you can produce an MMO that is 100 square kilometers of world space that is full of content. You cannot create more. This is the LARGEST world you can make with your budget.

If you split your world into four different regions then each player will be playing in a world that is only 25 square kilometers and has only ¼ of the content.

This also limits the number of servers you can have, which limits your player-base, which limits your income.

Alternatively you can do what everyone else does and have one world that is 100 kilometers square and create as many iterations as you need in response to player demand. You can scale infinitely up based on your player-base and each player has a larger more immersive world to play in.

It might not be as cool, the idea of creating teleportation spells between servers is wicked, but it’s infinitely more practical.

Issue 2 – Dynamic Worlds

When I started my Game Design course I had a bunch of questions. Foremost in my list was “Why don’t games actually CHANGE when I do something? When I hit a wall with a rocket-launcher why does it just get scuffed?”

The answer to that is that games are not reality. The world that you see when you play a video-game is an illusion. It’s a series of lies and tricks that the programmers and artists are playing on you to make you –think- you’re firing a rocket-launcher.

You’re not.

If you have an opportunity, ask one of your computer-savvy friends to pull apart a first person shooter map for you. It’s a strange experience the first time you do it. Things that look so convincing in game are suddenly revealed as significantly LESS convincing then set dressing. Most things in video games exist only from one angle. They have no backs, no sides, and no bottoms. Almost everything is just a front.

Those buildings over there? They’re just one wall, drawn on a single polygon to save processing time.

Ten to one, the character you are playing as has no souls on his feet. They’re just not there, deleted to bring the polygon budget down.

The problem with implementing dynamic systems, like economies, or national borders, is that the AMOUNT of tricks that the designers have to play on you exponentially increases.

The concept of Changing Civilizations is very cool but it’s a massive investment of time and energy. The infinitely re-spawning guards are, from a programming perspective, simple. They are Actor-Nodes that follow Path-Nodes that take a small amount of time to set up as you just drop them like breadcrumbs and the NPC’s follow them. They have a ‘faction’ alignment that changes their responses to other Actors within the world based off of simple AI principals. Basically you’re a “Friend” or an “Enemy.”

If you’re an Enemy you get attacked if the Actor Node perceives you. That’s it.

To create a “Caravan” you’d have to build the models (a huge investment) but then you’d have to figure out how to have this group of characters move together without totally screwing everything up. Pathing is always a problem. How many times have you tried to get an NPC to do something and they get stuck in a wall or stand up and sit down forever rather than following you? That’s because their pathing has screwed up. Getting a group of characters to move through a complex environment is hard.

Now you can do it once, if you pay enough money for it, but then you run into the same problem. It’s always the SAME caravan, with the SAME guards, who get attacked at the SAME time.

The “Towns” in World of Warcraft, and other MMO’s, are just places with a bunch of clickable posts that happen to look like characters. Those NPC’s don’t move, or respond differently to you, because doing so would be harder from both an artistic and technical perspective.

Effort = Money

If you did have a sort of Civilizations game running in the background it would mean you’d have to yank the money from somewhere else. Maybe you would only have half as many enemies because you couldn’t pay the artists. Or maybe there’d only be three playable species rather than six. Or maybe the UI will be clunky and impossible to customize.

Any features you add subtract features from somewhere else.

Dynamic economy? Fine, but you no longer have a magic system.
Mini-games for Crafting? Very cool, but your character loses all of his emote animations.

Nothing comes free, and MMO’s have such ridiculously vast overhead costs that people will stick with what will make them money.

Issue 3 – Multiple Empires

As I mentioned, you have to pay for everything.

If you go out into the woods and find a wicked looking witches hut with a creepy looking witch who asks you to find her kitty you are looking at the work of half a dozen people or more.

In this example you have:

Story Design: These guys create a coherent world. They make sure that the Witch talks like a witch should. They also came up with the idea for the quest and write a written description of the house and the witch. They also write her dialogue. If you want her to have different responses to different types of characters their job exponentially increases in complexity. It takes them longer, you need more of them to do the same work.

Concept Artists: These guys are painters. They take the written description and transform it into 2D artwork. In this example they have to paint the trees, the grass, the hut, the witch, the stuff inside the hut, the chair the witch is sitting in, the rug on her floor, and they probably have to design the cat.

Asset Modelers: These are the grunts. They take the concept artists designs and build the models for things that don’t move. They’re the ones who build the hut, the chair, the rug, the grass, and the trees.

Character Modeler: This guy builds characters based on the concept artists drawings. This is a hard job, as they have to look correct but they also have to move. In most modern games you actually have TWO character modelers, one of them builds the low resolution character that you see in game, the other builds the extremely high-detail version used for lighting information. As you have two characters (the witch and the cat) you’re actually employing four people here.

Texture Artists: These guys take the 3D models made by the Asset and Character modelers and paint them to look like they should.

Riggers: This person takes the low-res version of the character model and creates a movable skeleton for it. He then attaches the model to the skeleton so that it can move. He then, laboriously, scripts the bones so that they move based on controls.

Animators: The animators take the skeleton created by the Rigger and animate the character so that it moves. In most cases these days this process is done using Motion Capture (In which case you have the Actor, the Site-Technicians, the Camera Men, and the Motion Capture Cleanup Artists as well as the Animators who take the cleaned data and translate it into a usable form for the game).

Voice Actors: Everything has voice acting nowadays, and if you want a character to talk you have to pay a real person to talk for them.

And then, of course, on top of all these guys you have the Art Director standing around making sure that nobody screws up. Human Resources to make sure everyone knows what they’re doing and when they have to have it finished. Accounting to see that everyone gets paid…. Etc. etc.

This is why there are monthly fees.

Every time there’s a new monster, a new weapon, a new HAIRSTYLE, it has to go through this pipeline.

Now you can deal with this by either having a small amount of content (Boo! Hiss!) or you can reuse content. Every time you kill the same wolf someone is re-using content. Every time you see the same creature just colored GREEN and made twice as large that’s someone re-using content. It’s done all the time, but excessive use get’s ridiculous.

Oblivion is an excellent example of re-use gone to illogical and crappy extremes. Every character in that game uses the same model, the only thing that is swapped are the heads, and most of the heads are the same as well. They have only four different tile-sets (types of environments) and everything uses one of those four.

The game is big, and interesting enough in its own way, but the entire game feels homogenous. You go from one big castle to the next, and they all look the same and are full of people who all look exactly the same.

So that’s your choice. If you want to have five different factions they’re either going to have to all look identical, or they’re not going to have much content. You can’t have both because nobody can afford it.

WoW is incredible because it manages to re-use everything, but it does so in extremely artistic ways to make everything look different, all the time. The Blizzard crew are fvcking ninjas, and their budgets are nearly limitless, and even THEN you only have a choice of five faces for your orc, while fighting the same boar you were fighting last level re-coloured and renamed “A raging Boar!”

Oh yeah, and you fight that Raging Board fifty times to collect twenty of his tusks.

Issue 4 –Mini-Games and Skill

I love mini-games. One of my favorite series of games is Mario Party.

I also love skill-based games, especially the ones like Ninja Gaiden. Your character does get better, but it’s really YOU getting better at playing as him. At the beginning of the game you get trashed by low-grade ninja, by the end you’re bouncing off the walls, decapitating demons with exploding shiruken while killing cyborgs with your MIND…. And the crazy thing is that you can do most of those things right from the start… if you’re skilled enough.

It would be totally amazing to play an MMO that worked like that.

The problem is Lag.

If you’ve played an MMO you may have noticed what’s called the half-second tick. Basically, every action takes a minimum of ½ of a second. That means if you’re computer slows down for a second, you’re still OK, you can still act the next tick.

That’s also why combat is mostly automated. In WoW, if you’re computer lags hard, for several seconds, you’re certainly not in a GOOD situation… but your character kept stubbornly slugging away at your chosen target. You don’t just STOP like you do in an FPS if your controller get’s unplugged. You might need to pop a potion but you’re not suddenly eight ticks behind your enemy.

Another, sad, thing, is that if you implement any kind of mini-game people will write macros to do it automatically.

The reason why Grind exists is because it keeps people playing.

“If I just kill eighteen more of these Demon Wombats I can get the necessary SILVER COINS to purchase my Mystic Boots of Basketweaving, which will let me make the Baskets of Dawn, a highly useful object as that will increase my Holding Things capacity and…”

Why do you think MMO’s display those little damage numbers? It’s because it’s an easy way for people to track how good they are at something. That’s why the math is always near the surface, because it let’s people micro-manage their characters and that, sadly, is what keeps people playing.

It’s not interesting story, it’s not great art (though having BAD art can definitely drive people away), it’s not Crafting or Guild’s it’s getting that extra +3 to Strength so they can wield the Greatsword of Punching People in the Face.

I have a friend who, the last time I checked (six months ago) had a World of Warcraft character with 1800 hours clocked. That’s SEVENTY FIVE DAYS OF PLAY.

That’s not “He’s been playing this game for seventy five days.” That’s “He has been ACTIVELY playing his character for SEVENTY FIVE DAYS STRIAGHT.”

That is TWO MONTHS of play.

And he is not the most extreme player I know.

He doesn’t play for RP, he doesn’t play for Story, he plays because he loves kicking ass. Specifically, he loves kicking OTHER people’s ass. And he does, at great length and with endless enjoyment.

He’s been playing WoW for two years. At $16 a month that’s $384 spent on that one game, plus the fifty or so that he spent to buy the game in the first place. That’s a heck of a lot of money for one game.

But he’s played it for TEN WEEKS of time. That’s only 0.21$ an hour. Less than a quarter.

He’s having fun, for pennies, and Blizzard is making a killing… because he HAS spent over $400 on a game.

Issue 5 –Spore and Creature Building

Will Wright is a genius.

I’ll get that right out in the open. He is a genius. He’s also a genius with credentials up the wazoo and he (HE!) had to fight for YEARS to get them to make Spore.

Spore is an anomaly.

A wicked-fvcking cool anomaly, but it’s still a blip in the data. So was Katamari Demancy. Wicked cool, made for pennies, but you can’t really use it for comparison or examples.

I would LOVE to be wrong about this. I would LOVE to see dozens of games take up the innovative spirit of Wright and the Spore team and usher in a new era of digital entertainment… but I’m not wrong.

Instead we’ll get Halo 3, and it will be cool, and pretty, and based on financially sound pre-existing mechanics. It might have some nifty new quirk, maybe we can fire weapons with our dong WHILE duel wielding machine-guns or something… but it will be the same game we’ve played before, repackaged in a nice shiny new box.

People don’t buy newspapers for news. They buy them for Olds. They buy them to have their preconceptions about the world reinforced.

It’s the same with games, especially MMO’s. Anything innovative happens by accident, it slips through the cracks, or it’s made by geniuses after browbeating bean-counters for years. It’s bright and glowing and totally unexpected.

You can’t plan for it. It just happens.

Will we see a monster-building system like Spore’s in an MMO?

Maybe, but it’ll take years. Fable came out three years ago and they haven’t integrated the “Dynamic Character” system into any MMO. Nobody’s even copied it for a single-player game because, while it was damn impressive, it nearly bankrupt Big Blue Box making it. They traded having an actually good game, with an open and interesting world and an engrossing storyline, for the ability to get bigger when you raised your Strength stat.

Two years before Fable came out these features were listed as game features:

- Planting trees and being able to watch them grow over the course of the game
- Admiring townsfolk who mimic the character’s dress and style.
- Competing heroes who can actually beat the player to a quest.
- The ability to carve the character’s name into a tree
- A heroes guild in every town.
- The ability to vandalize all manner of public and private property
- The ability to have children.
- NPC’s with other NPC relatives
- A vibrant, living world where NPC’s didn’t have strictly scripted actions to be performed every day (Radiant AI)
- Freedom of exploration throughout the world of Fable, often labeled as ‘If you can see a place in the distance, you can go there.” This was likened to the world exploration found in Morrowind.

None of these features made it into the game. They ran out of cash.

Now this happens with every project. You create a big list of features and you have to cut back to what can actually be done on time and under budget, but to anyone who has played Fable they know that the loss of some of these features hurt, bad; especially the last one.

It’s not technically untrue, if you can see somewhere you can go there, they solved the problem of actually having to build a large world by simply never letting you see anything.

I think threads like this crop up frequently because people see the amazing potential of Massive Multiplayer games both as entertainment as and modes of communication. The possibilities are mindboggling, but the practicality is that, barring a happy coincidence, they will progress forwards slowly, if at all.

(Now that’s not to say that there aren’t wicked Massive Environments out there. Second Life, for example, is a very interesting Massive Environment, but it’s not a Game. It’s not built like one, and the architecture needed to build a game is entirely different than the one that Lindon Labs has in place.)

I apologize for my long-windedness. If anyone is still reading at this point I salute you.

[Catharz]

Having looked at Spore, that's one amazing game concept. Actually, it's about 8 amazing game concepts, and unfortunately that's the problem. If Mr. Wright had decided to release each part of the game sequentially as a module, we'd probably already have Spore 1 & 2, and he'd be making money off it.
oh well

[RandomCasualty]

Jack makes a lot of good points. The divided server concept for multiple "worlds" just wouldn't work also because of server load. The problem with say 4 continents, each on a different server, is that all the PCs could go all onto one server and crash it.

The big server problem isn't one of lack of memory to hold the gameworld, it's lack of processing power and bandwidth to manage all the players. You could very well have utterly huge maps, that's not even a problem with the massive storage devices available today. The problem would be managing all the NPCs on those maps.

In fact, it's actually a lot less server load to create larger worlds, because server load increases as PCs get closer to each other, because you have to send PC data back and forth. This ignores monster combats of course, but I think that monster combats are kind of lame anyway.

Personally I feel the future of good MMO gaming is probably going to be something like planetside. It's going to look like a FPS/RTS crossbreed. Imagine Starcraft where each one of your units was actually controlled by a real person.

[Josh_Kablack]

(Now that’s not to say that there aren’t wicked Massive Environments out there. Second Life, for example, is a very interesting Massive Environment, but it’s not a Game. It’s not built like one, and the architecture needed to build a game is entirely different than the one that Lindon Labs has in place.)

In your opinion, what 're the key differences between a "game" and a "massive environment" ?

[Cielingcat]

I think he meant that a "massive environment" is meant to simulate life, while a game involves some conflict between players or between players and environment, or, more often, both. Massive environments would be social, while games are competitions.

[Judging__Eagle]

Hmm; what id we had small server worlds?

With like.... 600 people max on any server at at time?

Of course they could move from one region to an other; if they can leave their own region at all without getting killed by an other regions locals of course.

As for Spore; yeah, that's what I would really like to see.

If an MMO could rely on Player generated content to keep the game fresh, that would be huge.

Let's scrap everything else I said.

Let's imagine WoW where every area you level up in has all sorts of different monsters that players created (and heck, you'll design them too since any players that your designed monsters create generate you bonus XP for being the first to 'discover' the monster).

In fact; that's how you test if the monster is viable or not; once the player has designed the monster and placed it in the type of region they want it to show up; they have to go an kill the first one.

If they kill it; the monster poofs since ti runs deeper into the wilds not to be seen again until some other person designs a similar monster and kills it; while of course the original creator could go and tangle with their own creation until they get it killed.

[RandomCasualty]

The problem with player generated content is that it usually ends up being too cookie cutter. Because the game designers don't want PCs making up uber monsters, the combat system is going to be designed in such a simple way as to make most monsters so similar.

It'll be much like the spell creation system in Oblivion, whereby you can create all kinds of spells, only most of them end up being the same, and there really isn't anything truly innovative you can do that works well. You're still best off just making a really big fireball.

WIth player generated monsters you're worried about players creating easily killable monsters, either via faulty AI scripts or easily exploitable stats.

[Draco_Argentum]

1172764518[/unixtime]]In your opinion, what 're the key differences between a "game" and a "massive environment" ?

I'd say its the rules that govern interaction coupled with the expectations of the types of interaction available.

Its like the difference between a PnP RPG and writing a novel in a group.

[Digestor]

Good post Jack, very interesting read on the insights of the mmo dev/production world.

[Judging__Eagle]

You know what I think we need to get away from?

Graphics.

We need to get away from grapics and get into better game play.

Spore doesn't really have the most hotshit graphics out there; but it does have really, really robust procedural programs that can generate movement animation for a creature; attack, happiness, sadness and mating animations for that same creature.

Now, as much as I hate to say this, but we need to get rid of artists and bring out the really really good programmers who can write up extremely powerful and tight code that will animate any number of created body parts on a creature.


That's why spore is the game that it is; Will Wright got out of the states and went to denmark, finland, germany and other places where people did coding in the old-style. Thus achieving really, really tight code that can make itself do anything.


You could have creautres designed using something like the Spore creature creation engine.

In which you have to consume reasources to make the creature more powerful; thus, making powerful creatures would increase the inherant power that they have and thus setting the scale at which any one creautre would be encountered or fought or run away from.

So, making tiny, inoffensive hopping herbivores costs little, which is then translated into how much you get for killing one of them.

While a giant 6 legged scythe-clawed creature that can attack from both front and back and can gallop like a thoorubred costs invariabely more, since it has more options and stuff added to it. Killing one of those would generate you more points.

Of course, all of this procedurally generated content is really bad news if you're trying to learn digital animation for making games. Which I am, so this is all shooting myself in the foot.

[RandomCasualty]

We need to get away from graphics and get into better game play.

Spore doesn't really have the most hotshit graphics out there; but it does have really, really robust procedural programs that can generate movement animation for a creature; attack, happiness, sadness and mating animations for that same creature.

Procedurally drawn animations don't necessarily make for better game play. Animations are just another part of better graphics, only instead of having pre-created animations you've got a system which can accept new graphics more readily. But when it all comes down to it, your game engine doesn't change, your game world doesn't change and fighting an orc may well be the same as fighting a dragon.

And I'm not even going to really comment on spore yet, because it's not out yet. It could be really awesome or it could really really suck. It's an ambitious concept, but it may be a bit *too* ambitious, as it tries to be several games in one.

Procedurally done NPC monsters could be interesting and then they could be boring too. Remember that any computerized system is just that, a system. And once you figure out all its little secrets and pitfalls, it gets pretty old. As I said earlier, you can use the spell design system in Oblivion as an example of one such player based creation system.

When you have things designed on a point system, you end up with very cookie cutter stuff, and I'm guessing spore will end up the same way. Sure, it'll seem interesting at first, but eventually you'll exhaust the majority of possibilities and your next race will just be your last one with an extra leg or a third eye. Maybe the animations even look pretty cool, but mechanically it'll be the same.

Having new and exciting graphics and all manner of wierd ass monsters might be kinda fun at first, but it'd lose it's novelty, because there really isn't any extra gameplay, it's all a system to get pretty graphics into the game. And as you said, the graphics emphasis does not make for a good game. So you can dress up real awesome creatures, but if everything plays out to be nothing more than a hit point attrition battle, then the gameplay won't have improved at all. It'll just all be window dressing.

If you want to create a real game of an MMO, it has to be player versus player, not player versus simple AI.

[Jack_The_Quick]

What’s the difference between a Massive Multiplayer Game and something like Second Life?

From my perspective it’s fairly simple. An MMO is a GAME.

Second Life, and other worlds like it, is a world, or a zoo, where everyone is a god.

In a game you have certain preconceptions. I will be able to play it. I will be able to ‘win’ or at least advance myself through the systems of the game. I will compete with either the system or with other players to achieve clearly spelled out goals.

Massive Worlds aren’t games. There are no systems, there is no way to ‘win’ or ‘advance,’ they’re just virtual environments. Now that’s wicked-cool, but you approach building them in completely different ways.

The architecture on Second-Life is based around the idea that latency isn’t a big deal and that everyone can build things. If someone says something to you and you don’t respond in two seconds, the universe will not explode. Heck, you can spend two minutes loading an environment and it’s not a big deal. The architecture is server-oriented. The Second-Life browser is around twenty-five megabytes; all it has to have in it is the display and network code as well as the two avatar meshes. Everything else you stream from the Second-Life servers. This gives them flexibility in letting people upload their own content, as they can stream the content that is nearby your Avatar to your screen… without requiring you to download the twenty billion gigs of data housed on the Second Life servers.

Compare that too WoW, which is around eight gigabytes. Everything is player-side. You don’t download anything from the game servers except for statistical information about Actor-nodes. You have Ironforge on your machine. All the meshes, and textures, and character models are already on your computer. The server just tells you where they are.

They are, literally, built completely opposite too each other. One houses everything on the server, the other houses everything on your machine.

That’s why Lindon Labs has so much difficulty changing up updating SL. Their architecture isn’t really designed to WORK with “Patches.”

Onto graphics.

You can’t just ditch graphics. It would be cool if you could, but you can’t. Graphics sell your product. They are what make people look at a trailer and go “Hey! That looks really cool!” A game with crappy graphics and with amazing gameplay will find an audience, and that audience will likely be very committed too that game, but it won’t get a BIG audience.

Morrowind, for example, a game with vastly inferior graphics then most modern games… but it still sells because it’s good (and the modding community makes it better). It just doesn’t sell a LOT.

To my mind, there are two types of graphics. Good graphics and Shiny graphics.

You can lose Shiny graphics, but try to drop Good graphics at your own risk.

Shiny graphics are what people normally mean when they talk about “good” graphics. They’re sleek, they have all the modern tricks, they look as good as a “next-gen” game is supposed too look. The problem is that in order to get that Shiny look you’ve got too spend a crapload of money on them because they’re ‘cutting edge’ and your art-team has a) never done anything like them before and b) has no good tools with which to make them. This means they take a long time, and time costs you cash. You also have to buy the best hardware as you can’t hope to build things on computers that can’t run the finished product.

So you end up spending a metric ton of cash on something that will be immediately eclipsed by the next thing that comes out.

Good graphics are different. Good graphics are graphics that are well DESIGNED. They are good from the perspective of “Are they memorable?” and “Are they cool looking?”

Take WoW, the perennial example in this thread. WoW has Good graphics. It doesn’t have Shiny graphics. Its engine is four years old. They don’t have dynamic lighting, they don’t have normal maps, and they don’t even have specularity maps. Their characters are between 1200 and 1500 polygons while ‘modern’ games have characters pushing 20 000 polygons without sweating.

Despite that, the average ‘orc warrior’ in Warcraft has more attitude, more interesting details, and in general just LOOKS better, and more memorable, then most characters from graphical powerhouse games like Gears of War.

It definitely looks better then the Everquest 2 characters, a game that technically has a superior graphics engine, but whose graphics would never be described as superior.

Shadow of the Colossus is another amazing example. That game came out for the Playstation Two. That system has a hard-coded lock on texture sizes. You cannot put any texture into any game on that system that is larger then 256x256 pixels. Anyone who has done any graphic work on a computer knows that’s ridiculously tiny. That size of texture is used on characters SHOES in modern titles, and yet that games graphics look sweet enough to cause tooth decay.

The new Zelda, Twilight Princess, is another example of Good but not Shiny. It came out on the Wii, but the GameCube version looks just as good. They look fantastic, but everything is done with hand-painted textures, and they lack all the fun Shiny things that other games have. Instead they have fantastic looking graphics and a good storyline… and they cost less then games with ‘better’ graphics.

Shine flakes, wears off, gets rusty… Good design lasts.

The ultimate example is Super Mario Brothers, for the SNES. That game is ancient, it’s sprites, it’s got no Shine left… but it still looks Good. Honestly, it still looks remarkable. That’s because it’s well designed. You could go back and play Super Mario Brothers and get so engrossed in it you no longer noticed the graphics…

But take a Shiny game from a few years ago and try that and you will find yourself constantly wincing from the horrible graphics.

Graphics are easy to rag on in a thread where the merits of gameplay are primary, but the only reason that good games get played is because their design is good enough to get people to play them in the first place. Good graphics doesn’t mean Shiny, it means designs that people will be able to come back to, years from now, and say, “That’s cool. He’s composed of fourteen pixels, and he has nine frames of animation, but he’s still cool, and I still wouldn’t mind being him… for a while.”

[Judging__Eagle]

Hmm, I guess I meant to get away from Shiny Graphics and instead use Good Graphics with Good Gameplay.

Not, do away with graphics entirely.

RC:

What if the creautres you design are used as your own personal warbands armies?

Hmm, like a sci-fi game, where everyone lives in an uber-tech galaxy, where: 'borg mercenaries pilot battle mechs that they design and build and upgrade, gene-splicing scientists create all sorts of human augmentation procedures or even new races to do different things, throw in other players (engineers, scientists) who can create new scuctures or equipment; psychic characters that command tiny men, or a gene-splicers gene-forged troops.


Maybe the best way to create a new game 'ecology' is to simply release tons of potential options to the players that actually matter and see how they make connections and establish hierarhcies.

Of course, that's easier said than done.

The thing is, player-competetive games are really popular for good reasons; most AIs aren't worth fighting against.

On the other hand RC, I know that some very old games, like Total Annihilation could have custom written AIs, making them challengeing for most human players.

If you allow people to open up and tinker with the AI scripts, you will almost always get really intelligent AIs.

[RandomCasualty]

1173042752[/unixtime]]
If you allow people to open up and tinker with the AI scripts, you will almost always get really intelligent AIs.

I don't doubt that, but remember, this isn't neverwinter nights we're talking about where you run AI scripts for just a small fraaction of the possible monsters at one time. This is a MMO game. You're running tons and tons of AI scripts. Balancing server load is a big deal and it's just not feasible to have lots of complex AI scripts all the time, not without lagging the servers to all hell.

As far as creature designs go... basically the same issue you run into with custom creatures is that you need to create a monster design system, which is probably going to lead to very cookie cutter creatures.

Whether you're striving for an RPG or a strategy game or what not, cookie cutter just doesn't make for a great game. I mean I suppose you could have basic creature roles, and people can choose some various things with them and design how they look, but I think it would basically be a lot of unnecessary code to produce what is effectively window dressing. Such a feature would do well as far as selling the game, but wouldn't really make it more immersing or more entertaining.

[Judging__Eagle]

Well, there are methods to reduce server load:

1. Drop graphics intenstiy; aka, use good graphics, not shiny ones.

2. Reduce the number of monsters. By 90%.

I think that you're expecting there to be just as many monsters around; if we instead have a lot less monsters; that are a lot more challenging (and thus, give that much more rewards); you'd have a game that looks like there are less swarms of monsters and more sparsely seperated powerful or intelligent mosnters.

Also, you referenced NWN; how comlex could those scripts be beside, lateral motion, target aquisition and attack routines?

Even World of Warcraft and Old style Everquest could run player bots more complex than that.

In WoW, you not only have to think of lateral motion (like flanking, circling or surrounding a foe) but also horizontal motion.

Monsters scripted to duplicate the WoW PvP rogues leaping-backstab routine to both avoid being targeted and potentially land an above average damage attack. That's something that NWN isn't able to deal with since it lacks, you know jumping.

Also, since players create monsters; this should be used as a tool to foster "indirect PvP". Monsters that you create that are really well scripted earn you bonuses (xp or credits to burn on either xp or items).

That way, people who may suck at doing actual PvP, but are good coders or can establish solid tactic hierarchies can still benefit in an indirect manner from PvP.


Plus, if you have 1 monster for what is normally 10 in most MMOs; and you have battles last proprotionately more; people would still burn the same amount of time actually playing.

I'd also add that 'tracking' a monster down could also take time. Your first rabbit slaying will take a while, b/c you're stalking anc chasing it.

Killing it is a matter of pulling out a bow and hitting it once or setting a trap; or running it into the clutches of your friend, who helps you catch a bunch.

Also, randomly generated content should be actually randomly generated. Creatures and monsters should wander all over the freaking place; and stuff like bison/gazelles/antelopes/whatever that are herding animals should move from place to place and PCs can hunt either them or hunt the preadators that hunt these herding creatures.

[RandomCasualty]

1173133940[/unixtime]]Well, there are methods to reduce server load:

1. Drop graphics intenstiy; aka, use good graphics, not shiny ones.

Graphics don't change server load in general, as they are something client side. The graphics for any old orc are stored on your machine, when the WoW servers tell you there's an orc there, it just sends you the code for "an orc" and your machine draws the graphics from its own hard drive and paints an orc up there. Theoretically you could be using a cheezy 2D imp sprite from Doom 2 or you could be using a super complex 3D render image and the server side operation to put one at location X,Y,Z & facing F is the same.

2. Reduce the number of monsters. By 90%.

Kind of frustrating given that there's already a shortage of monsters and PCs already feel like crap since it takes an average EQ party like 6 guys to fight a single meaningful monster at high level.

So this would entail requiring 10 times the group size to take out each monster.

Remember that inactive monsters don't take up much server load, only ones in battle do. So if you cut the number of battling monsters by 90%, that means that you're going to have to cut the number of PCs by an equal amount or increase the PC group size by that much. And really when your monster is outnumbered 10 to 1, how much good can a complex AI script do? For AI scripts you need tactics.

I think that you're expecting there to be just as many monsters around; if we instead have a lot less monsters; that are a lot more challenging (and thus, give that much more rewards); you'd have a game that looks like there are less swarms of monsters and more sparsely seperated powerful or intelligent mosnters.

That's already what EQ does. Already you're limited to fighting a single opponent at a time with your entire group. That's cause you suck that bad. And having one monster severely limits tactics anyway.

Also, you referenced NWN; how comlex could those scripts be beside, lateral motion, target aquisition and attack routines?

I'm not sure, but I'm just saying there's a capacity for making better scripts in a single player game. NWN was just a random example I selected because it had some basic scripting tools. My point was simply that in a single player game you can afford more processor load to run AI.

Even World of Warcraft and Old style Everquest could run player bots more complex than that.

Player bots are in fact different because they don't create server load, at least no more than a normal PC does, because the player's computer is calculating the action for that character.

Monsters scripted to duplicate the WoW PvP rogues leaping-backstab routine to both avoid being targeted and potentially land an above average damage attack. That's something that NWN isn't able to deal with since it lacks, you know jumping.

But you're talking about reducing monsters by 90%, that means that your monster is taking on 10 PCs at once!

Also, randomly generated content should be actually randomly generated. Creatures and monsters should wander all over the freaking place; and stuff like bison/gazelles/antelopes/whatever that are herding animals should move from place to place and PCs can hunt either them or hunt the preadators that hunt these herding creatures.

Ultima online did things similar to that. Having animals and the rough attempt at an ecology, where wolves would attack lesser prey animals and stuff. It was pretty pointless in the end and didn't work out all that well, since agian, server load couldn't take it. Wandering monsters are bad, because you don't want stuff taking processor time that isn't even in a PCs sphere of influence. So it's good to put a monster to sleep effectively until a PC gets close to it to make it relevant. Then you can wake it up and add its AI as another process.

Remember that in MMOs, server load is a top priority to manage. Every calculation you do increases server load and every care has to be made to keep server load down. Otherwise you just can't support that many players without lagging to all hell.

[Judging__Eagle]

Well, in say, WoW, if you made each fight last 10 times as long; you could get away with 10 times less monsters.

Most of the time, if say you have two or more players in an 'area'; each one of them could probably kill any of the monsters in the dungeoun and will probably kill their monsters fast enough that the two players will eventually be competing to finish 'this' kill off and move on to the next one.

If we prevent players from being able to kill monsters fast while reducing the number of monsters, then it means that players could spend more time fighting better run monsters.

Instead of killing a monster and moving on to the next one; until you kill fifty of them.


If, instead you had to kill less monsters; but each was worth a lot more, and simply took more time per fight, then you'd have 'different' server load.

So, the server load you have spent on monsters is instead of being used in lots of usually inactive monsters; is then put into less active monsters.



That; or we put the NPCs that players can script be their armies and we turn the game into a wargame, where players can play heroes, or command armies.


Of coruse, the real problem is that I want a lot of options in this game.

[RandomCasualty]

1173212925[/unixtime]]Well, in say, WoW, if you made each fight last 10 times as long; you could get away with 10 times less monsters.

No, you don't understand. Having dormant monsters doesn't use up much server load. You can have 500,000 monsters in different regions and the only time the server ever really cares about them is if they happen to be within range of a PC and attacking him, or visible enough to require that their location be sent to a client machine.

Generally monster AI shuts down when PCs aren't nearby and the monster simply waits until a PC gets within range, upon which it activates. A sleeping monster is a peice of AI code that isn't actually active and running until the server starts running it, so you can keep an almost infinite amount of potential monsters that require zero calculations.

If, instead you had to kill less monsters; but each was worth a lot more, and simply took more time per fight, then you'd have 'different' server load.

So, the server load you have spent on monsters is instead of being used in lots of usually inactive monsters; is then put into less active monsters.

But there is only negligible server load for inactive monsters, so it wouldn't make a difference.

That; or we put the NPCs that players can script be their armies and we turn the game into a wargame, where players can play heroes, or command armies.

Well keep in mind real time strategy games have very simple AI commands among individual units, as again, processor load becomes an issue. Commands have to be simple enough to resolve easily. So for instance, you've got stuff like attack-move, attack-target, force move to location X, cast spell Y at Location X and so on, hold position and so on.

As far as turning the game into a wargame, why not just use the Planetside model and have the PCs be soldiers in a big army?

Seriously, you've got a bunch of PCs, why not save yourself the server load and just have the PCs make up the wargame?