G33X Nexus Entertainment > Precursors

What do Characters do when Players go offline?

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Morgul:

--- Quote from: "topher" ---As long as there is risk vs reward it should be acceptable.  Most games I've played, the community at large hates Bots, scripters, etc...then again, maybe because they feel they are at an unfair disadvantage.  If we had the tools for everyone to do the botting maybe its more mainstream and ok.
--- End quote ---


Well, the risk would be simple. Death is either permanant, or costly. Unless you log in, you can't be sure your character hasn't been killed by pirates, or something of the like. Any *really* lucrative buisness would be risky... scripting it might be possible, but I doubt you'd trust an AI to dogfight six or seven players who are trying to steal your ship. It WOULD loose. (So would most players). So, sure, you can do a simple, safe run, making you $200 a trip, but with maintenece on your ship, and other monthly taxes/fees, plus the cost of living.... You might only be making $25 a trip.  You're not going to get rich that way. Especially if the trip takes a week in game.

Atleast, that's how I see it.

--Chris

fehknt:
i'm going to assume that people like this idea, because that's the way it seems.  I like it too.  Something that needs to be scheduled as well is something that college students may not have much familiarity  with.  "sleep."  If you try to play a character, and she/he' sleeping... some sort of penalty for not enough sleep?  a sleep deficit build up until a point where the character just conks out whatever they were doing?

If we're going to simulate what a character does all the time, then i feel that sleep should also be simulated.

Morgul:
Wow. I had completely overlooked that. Then again, seeing how dead you looked this morning, I can see how sleep would be on your mind. :-p.

So, how do we handle the case when a player wants to play the game for 10 hours straight?  Should we simply hame real life and the game 1:1? If we do that, then I could see some fin times where a player and a character haven't had enough sleep... almost compounding the affects.

I dunno, I need to give this 'sleep simulation' more thought. I want it in, though.

contingencyplan:

--- Quote from: "topher" ---As long as there is risk vs reward it should be acceptable. Most games I've played, the community at large hates Bots, scripters, etc...then again, maybe because they feel they are at an unfair disadvantage. If we had the tools for everyone to do the botting maybe its more mainstream and ok.
--- End quote ---



--- Quote from: "whitelynx" ---If there's a lot of people who just script their AI's well and leave them doing complex actions, what difference does it make?
--- End quote ---


Honestly, I think having Players able to script offline behaviour is going to be a bad idea. The main reason is that we will be hosting the scripts, not the Players' machines. This means that at any time, we could have thousands of such scripts running at any given time. Especially in the early stages of a beta or even a production release, I doubt we will have those kinds of resources. Later on, I doubt we'll want to invest in the resources required to have such capabilities.

Further, to allow Players to script their offline characters opens the door for every programmer wannabe to upload their code. They'll think "I've done stuff like this in <insert programming language>, and it worked fine, so I can post that code and have them run it." I'd bet you 90% of the code written by those people will not be optimized a bit. This leads to a bog-down in the servers running the scripts, making the offline, scripted AI behaviour flaky at best (depending on how many bots are running at one time, and how well they are coded).

What happens with bugs in people's code - crashes or memory leaks or whatnot? We'd have to design a stripped-down language for this purpose - one that doesn't allow for things like that. I'm interested in language design, but I'm not looking to have to write a language from scratch when we have other stuff we want to be / should be working on.

Players could also write bad scripts on purpose - e.g., the script only runs a for loop thousands of times, or deletes memory twice or something - with the malicious goal of bogging down the servers. I don't know why, but some people get off from doing that. To avoid this, we'd have to put a lot of infrastructure in place to handle such things, including code reviews, performance analysis, and the like.

For these reasons, at least in general, I don't like the idea of allowing Players to script their offline behaviour.

I'll post my views on what we SHOULD let the Player do in a future post (probably in a few minutes).

contingencyplan:
So we're back at the question: What should we allow the Player to do while they are offline? Basically, what has been talked about here - let them build their character's stats and such while they are away. When they come back to their character (esp. after taking a real-life vacation, as topher suggested), the character should be in better shape.

Additionally, I think we should allow them to set a task in motion before they leave - via waypoints or something simple like that. If the Player is afraid that their character will die while they are away, then we could set up "cities of refuge" - places that players can go to where they are free from the threat of death. (While a separate issue all its own, I think we could allow those cities to be used for reasons beyond simply preserving the character's life while the Player is at work.) I think this will provide a much simpler method of preserving characters' lives during downtime. We can talk about implementing the cities of refuge idea later; perhaps one implementation would require that all visitors check weapons and the like at the gates of the city before entering.

As far as routine, I think we could also do something like that. Perhaps the Player has a skill or something they could market while in the city of refuge. Regular players would interact with the Player's character as if they were an NPC (I know we have the goal of the AIs being indistinguishable from the Players, but esp. with the chatbots, there will be a difference), and could buy goods from them or something. We could also have NPC characters randomly happen by to purchase goods or services from the Player's character. The point is that the character is doing the same routine every single day, whatever that routine entails.

We should have several general-case setups / routines for Players to choose from - e.g., "Skill Building," "Sell Goods," "Perform Services," etc. These might require scripts to run, but they 1) are much simpler than the ones Players would likely try to write, and 2) are written by us, so we know when bugs occur and can take steps to fix them.

If we wanted to get really fancy, we could have a day planner for the character. This would prove especially valuable while the Player is offline. The Player sets times and activies that they want their character to undertake - from 9pm - 10pm, the character is at the gym, working on building Strength and Endurance, for example. Further, the day planner is a single day-based object; we don't allow for changing activies mid-week, or automatically scheduling changes two months down the road.  

This is where the sleep idea could come into play - as the character is more and more sleep-deprived, the less benefit they will obtain from their activies. If we are going to do a sleep-based thing, though, then we will need to have a 1:1 correspondence between game time and real-life time (though this then opens the problem with multiple time zones... :-/)

One other thing - we should have an online system that the Players can log into and check on the status of their character. If we go with the day planner idea, then the Player should be able to update and modify the day planner online.

Anyways, that's my thought on the subject for right now. I need sleep myself, so I'll catch y'all later. ;-)

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