Messages

441

Bug Reports / Re: New Forums (To Do List)

« on: November 03, 2005, 01:55:11 pm »

While it's an outright feature req for the forums software, I'd like to see the ability to save draft posts. I think we could have it save them for, say, 14 days (since the idea is that it's a short-term, "I don't have time to finish my thought but I'm not ready to post yet" deal), then automatically delete it. The button could be at the bottom, next to Post and Preview.

Also, I noticed that SMF allows for a calendar feature. That may be useful for scheduling events, or at least letting people know about them (e.g., IRC chat sessions, etc.). I definitely see that being a major thing later on, when we have a fanbase - "Come hang out with the people who made your favorite game! Also, get more info about the tournament next month!"

I also agree with the things you said, morgul.

442

General Discussion / Re: Introduction Thread: New users, please post here!

« on: November 01, 2005, 02:19:33 pm »

Good to see you on here (finally! ). Already, thank y'all so much for the assistance y'all have given us through Dawnet - very much appreciated.

You were talking to me earlier about working on the server and networking side of the game. You'll want to get in touch with whitelynx about that - he's the one working on it currently. We have a commercial licence from Rakkarsoft (http://www.rakkarsoft.com/) for their RakNet networking library. Take a look at that if you're interested in programming on it.

Anyways, glad to see you on here! Let the other GoRCs know they're more than welcome over here too.

443

Precursors / Re: What do Characters do when Players go offline?

« on: October 31, 2005, 04:26:14 pm »

At least we have some forums again. And the features on this one are looking promising.

444

Precursors / Re: What do Characters do when Players go offline?

« on: October 31, 2005, 03:27:21 pm »

Well, as far as simulators, for people in the military, they will have the simulators and classes already done and provided for by their military group. That would be a benefit to joining a larger group like that (whether Terran / League, or a player-started group) - you don't have to pay for things like simulators and classes, as the group provides them to its members (since the group wants its members to be trained as good as possible).

I don't think we should charge exhorbitant rates for simulators and classes, though. Individuals will have to purchase time in them, yes, but the reason to actually return to playing the game is the diminishing returns on simulators and classes, not on the rates charged for them. Yes, they may well go broke, but they may also have their schedule set up where they can either profit or at least break even every time step. High rates will only succeed in pissing people off.

The money issue is something else entirely that we should discuss in the money thread (I'm sure it's floating around here somewhere...) :-).

445

Precursors / Re: What do Characters do when Players go offline?

« on: October 31, 2005, 10:30:50 am »

Well, I think I posted somewhere else in the forums about having training simulators that allow you to learn how to use particular weapons and such without the threat of dying. However, the simulators' training abilities would be limited, as you always learn more in the real world than in a simulator. I also agree that we should add book learning to that - books > sims > real life.

Perhaps we could combine this with the day planner idea: You can schedule to attend a class (book larnin'), then spend time in the simulator. This way, you wouldn't have to be spending all your time online in those areas to advance your skill areas. Also, you don't particularly have to worry about safety - odds are you won't come back and find that someone bombed the school or something. However, the law of diminishing returns takes effect - you can spend more and more time in the class, but you won't be getting nearly as much out of it (until you're actually getting nothing at all by being there). This way, players have to return to gain the practical, real-life aspect of their training and redo their schedule for new classes and simulators.

446

Precursors / Can we have one centralized login system?

« on: October 31, 2005, 12:22:56 am »

While we're doing all this new fancy stuff on Dawnet's servers (kudos to Dawn, Cosmo, Neo, et al), one question I have is whether we can set up a centralized login system - one for the forums, Trac, and the like. Preferably, we'd also like to tie this into registrations for the game. This would serve 3 purposes:

• People who are on the forums before the game goes live are guaranteed their username in the game
• People who register after the game goes live are already set up to post on the forums and submit bug reports through Trac.
• People who are not registered for the game cannot post bug reports. We might, however, allow them to post to the forums, or at least have some forums that are public accessable and some that are members-only (which makes things more complicated...?).
  

Anyways, how difficult to y'all think that would be to do?

447

Precursors / What do Characters do when Players go offline?

« on: October 20, 2005, 12:20:56 pm »

Will a player be in route between systems for minutes, hours, weeks?

I vote minutes. We can still call it real-time, depending on what technology morgul cooks up for us ;-). But having to wait hours or (MUCH worse) weeks to travel will result in bored players. Players who are bored are players who quit (or become in-game social liabilities). We could have training or minigames or something like that if we really wanted, but that will get uber-insane-old after a very short while.

During that time, players may come under attack or something, so they should keep an eye out. But requiring them to keep an eye out for more than 5 minutes is just foolish.

The article Here Addresses several questions brought up in this thread.

Thanks, will read when I have time... Hopefully going to have more of it here in a few weeks.

448

Precursors / Tasks in motion, Routines, and Day Planners

« on: October 09, 2005, 01:24:47 am »

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. ;-)

449

Precursors / Offline Player-written AI scripts? Bad idea...

« on: October 07, 2005, 04:27:40 pm »

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.

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?

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).

450

Precursors / Interaction between the book and the game?

« on: October 02, 2005, 05:45:22 pm »

So what special benefits will being "Legendary" confer? And how does one officially attain to the Legendary status?

I like the idea of having it be merit-based - that's going to be the best way to do it. But do we do it something like "majority vote of current Legendary members", or what?

451

Precursors / Player Advancement

« on: October 01, 2005, 11:43:43 pm »

If we're worried about the offline system being abused, we could also do something like what WoW does: When you're offline, you save up "rest points" or something similar. Then, as you gain experience through progression in the game, you get extra experience based on the amount of rest points you have. So, rest points are essentially extra EXP. I'm not sure that's exactly how that works, so y'all'll (that's "you all will" :-P) have to talk to someone who knows more about it than I do.  

/me elbows Panda ;-)

Now, I know we are shying away from experience, but doing something along this line for however the system works would allow us to have Players' characters progress while they are offline, but still require them to be online in order to take advantage of such advancement.

OR: We could do what has been described here, and do it kinda like the Matrix (first one) does it: You can buy programs that you can use offline to either train in a new skill or enhance a current one. Militaries may have those programs automatically set up for their soldiers, so they don't have to buy them. (The military will provide most of this kind of stuff for their soldiers - equipment, training, etc.; freelancers will have to get their own.)

And yes, Matrix Revolutions was on tonight, so I was watching that while studying. That's what gave me the idea just then.

Anyways, there ya go.
~Brian

452

Precursors / Interaction between the book and the game?

« on: September 20, 2005, 01:42:30 pm »

So what would one do to become a Legendary character? Play a long time, or progress in the game? But since the game is insanely non-linear (even for an MMORPG), how do we measure "progress"?

453

Precursors / Interaction between the book and the game?

« on: September 19, 2005, 06:12:41 pm »

Could it be possible, though, to have characters that are of that same Legend status that the admins play, but are not part of the book? Presuming I get to be an admin, I have a character kinda already picked out. If there's someone in the book that's similar, then I'll play as that character; however, if not, then I would like to be able to play as that Legendary character.

What do you think? Would that be messing with the game universe too much?

454

Precursors / Interaction between the book and the game?

« on: September 19, 2005, 06:00:30 pm »

morgul, since you're writing a book that takes place in the same universe as the game, how much of a presence will those characters from the book have in the game? Will they be hero NPC characters, or characters controlled by admins, or what?

Just something I'm curious about.

455

Precursors / AI in the game

« on: September 15, 2005, 03:53:35 pm »

Panda, I sent you an email with the Trac and svn information. Please check it out and either email me or post (preferably) that you've gotten both of them set up.

Also, start posting your ideas on AI on the forums. Morgul and Whitelynx are both open to suggestions :-).

Thanks,
~Brian

456

Precursors / AI in the game

« on: September 14, 2005, 03:54:08 pm »

Hey Panda!

Glad to have you aboard. I'm (hopefully - homework willing) going to add you to the svn and trac systems tonight so you can check out the code and the current task list for the project. We'll have to get together sometime, likely this weekend, and work on the code a little. Bear in mind I'm still getting my head around most of it, so I dunno how much help I'll be. However, when you're not busy at work, we can all get on IRC and discuss it (morgul and whitelynx included, hopefully).

Morgul, we should add a ticket to Trac for the AI stuff so Panda can start working on that (to some degree, anyways - I know we're still moving stuff around, but maybe Panda can help with that). I'd add it myself, but I am not certain what all's involved.

Thanks,
~Brian

457

Suggestions / Space Ship Velocity

« on: August 31, 2005, 10:49:58 pm »

However, there is a maximum speed you can go, before your ship is torn apart atom by atom, and you make a nice pretty cloud of plasma.

** Pilot clicks one more notch on throttle knob **

Ship goes FOOF! :-D

Hey - there's an idea - Who can make the prettiest plasma cloud when they explode?

458

Precursors / Space Flight Controls, and Realism

« on: August 30, 2005, 02:57:26 pm »

Personally, I'd prefer a toggle, though a momentary might work.

~Brian

459

Precursors / Space Flight Controls, and Realism

« on: August 29, 2005, 05:39:03 pm »

I like your idea regarding the AI-controllers.

Personally, I really dislike introducing artifical penalties for using certain equipment (e.g., your ship is slower if you use the AI-assisted controls). Any penalties and consequences should arise directly from using those controls - e.g., you can't pull off some more complex flying maneuvers if you are using the AI controls. Maybe you want to keep rolling when you release the key, rather than having the AI automatically stabalize you. Further, stabalizing would likely use up more fuel (make it a VERY slight amount, should be barely noticable to even the most anal of players), so that would be a natural consequence. But to say that "using the AI system makes your ship slower" seems far too artificial, especially in the context of the future.

460

General Discussion / Introduction Thread: New users, please post here!

« on: August 29, 2005, 04:17:30 pm »

Physics + CS... ouch. Just judging by the Physics department here, at least... :-(  (good teachers, hard tests...)

Anyways, blessings on your studies! Glad to hear your ideas, too.

And to everyone, like fehknt said, this place is for sounding off ideas - don't worry about appearing foolish (of course exercise some common sense - post something beyond "the game sucks. the end.").

~Brian