What's your sandbox?

[KroqGar]

Originally Posted by Unomat

I'd even like to go one step further, with AI taking over the character completely when the player logs out or becomes unresponsive (in an attempt to save the character from Perma Death) but ONLY to the extent the character continues to show the same behaviour as the player has up to that point.

That will never happen. I know for a fact I wouldn't want to log on in the morning and find myself halfway across the world from where I logged out. Not only would it be a pain in the ass, but it's virtually impossible to code something like that for every single player. Until there's organic AI that can learn and adapt, which we're quite a bit away from developing for robots let alone video game NPCs, then it won't happen.

[Traceur]

Originally Posted by Unomat

Pity the poll isn't public Traceur ^^

My vote goes to Immersionist, as I'd prefer emergent behaviour developing into player-based lore (just like Dragonlance and Greyhawk lore came into existence) as opposed to the static lore we get through lore-cops / rats. I'd even like to go one step further, with AI taking over the character completely when the player logs out or becomes unresponsive (in an attempt to save the character from Perma Death) but ONLY to the extent the character continues to show the same behaviour as the player has up to that point.

i actually already categorized your view as a combination of "immersionist" and "sims"

as you probably know i really like the idea, but i also have a lot of doubts about the extent to which we can technically do so and the extent to which we can "be at peace" with the actions of the AI when we're not there even if they do replicate our own behavior...

either way it's worth a try, it could solve so many problems that it's amazing nobody tried it.

[Unomat]

KroqGar, if Traceur and me can combine our ideas into something remotely viable, I estimate it'll take about 5 years

[KroqGar]

Originally Posted by Unomat

KroqGar, if Traceur and me can combine our ideas into something remotely viable, I estimate it'll take about 5 years

Not trying to offend Traceur, but I honestly hope that very few of his ideas ever manifest themselves in MMO format. Besides that, Organic AI is a little farther off than 5 years, as far as I can remember from the articles I've read.

Do you seriously want AI to take over your character when you're not online? I think that's a really big mistake. It's basically like sanctioned bots that do things automatically. Not only that, but it'd be easy to exploit. Just have your character run around mining (For example), then logout and let your character run around doing the same thing while you go to work. Login every so often to sell the raw materials you're gathering, and you have a Gold Farmers wet dream come true.

I say leave the characters in the players hands at all times, even when they're offline. I'd think most people would agree with me on that, as well.

[Traceur]

Originally Posted by KroqGar

Not trying to offend Traceur, but I honestly hope that very few of his ideas ever manifest themselves in MMO format.

that's not nice. i mean i understand you not wanting to play such an MMO, but not wanting it to become an MMO? do MMOs not to your personal taste offend you somehow? or it is the breaking of the classical true tried-and-failed-yet-repeated-anyway conventions which offends you? i don't agree with or see the point of playing in what most MMO developers have to offer, i still wish them luck.

[KroqGar]

Originally Posted by Traceur

that's not nice. i mean i understand you not wanting to play such an MMO, but not wanting it to become an MMO? do MMOs not to your personal taste offend you somehow? or it is the breaking of the classical true tried-and-failed-yet-repeated-anyway conventions which offends you? i don't agree with or see the point of playing in what most MMO developers have to offer, i still wish them luck.

Look Traceur, I understand you have a lot of 'fresh and new' ideas that will 'break the mould of the gaming industry', but it's not necessarily a good thing. I don't really see how the current methods of game creation, which are making massive amounts of cash and are very enjoyable to play, are failed conventions. Just because you don't like what they have to offer doesn't mean that the games have failed at what they're trying to do, make money.

While you can argue the same thing for my point, that just because I don't like the ideas doesn't mean that they are bad, it's not the same for my point of view. Your ideas, while 'original', would end up creating a very unbalanced and game that was realistic to the point of irritation. I'm obviously not able to stop you from making a game, but looking at the current types of games and how popular they are, games like the ones you're putting forward tend to fall on their faces. Be my guest and figure it out on your own, though.

[Traceur]

that doesn't make any sense. so if we already have bread and you like bread then you hope nobody will come and try to invent an alternative source of carb's in the form of pasta? what's the logic behind that? you'd be offended by product diversity? by other people who go to italian resturants instead of the bakery? your thinking is really really silly.

another funny absurdity is that in order for games like the ones i'm putting forward to tend to fall on their faces, such games would have to actually exist, and given that your speaking of how their too different from the current games, that would mean games like the ones i'm suggusting don't exist... so how would they tend to fall on their faces?

i realize FFA PVP, full loot, destructible housing, food requirements, eventual PD, etc... aren't for everyone. in fact they are oriented around community-based gameplay, based around a simple marketing model in which in-game communities profit by their size and will thus constantly try to pull in more members by minimum risk (avoiding political conflicts when possible), meaning bringing in people outside of the game to play with them, and a customer service model by which social community ties are the proven most affective ways to keep customers. it's not only viable commercially - it is practically a marketing scheme in itself.

[KroqGar]

Originally Posted by Traceur

that doesn't make any sense. so if we already have bread and you like bread then you hope nobody will come and try to invent an alternative source of carb's in the form of pasta? what's the logic behind that? you'd be offended by product diversity? by other people who go to italian resturants instead of the bakery? your thinking is really really silly.

That analogy actually has nothing to do with what I was saying. Look, if you want to create some sort of life simulation MMO, then be my guest. I'm just annoyed at seeing all these games get hyped up and seeing them fall. I never said I'd be offended by you creating a game, because to say that would be really intolerant. However, I just don't think that the current gameplay mechanics and conventions are broken.

What I really don't get is why you think that you're some gaming messiah who has polygonal stigmata everytime you have a new idea. As I said before, just because you have an idea doesn't mean that it's a good one.

[Traceur]

Originally Posted by KroqGar

What I really don't get is why you think that you're some gaming messiah who has polygonal stigmata everytime you have a new idea. As I said before, just because you have an idea doesn't mean that it's a good one.

i don't think so. i mean a messiah in general is still on the table of career possibilities but as far as "gaming messiah" goes often i criticize my own or go back on my ideas when others give good reasoning against them. i never claimed infallibility regarding any idea.

usually when i think of something i explain why it's good. sometimes other people who dislike them reason against it while using reason or propose better alternatives and then i do change my mind - but more often the people who argue against it don't - they use self-contradicting arguments, circular logic or assumptions without any basis. often just a few see the same potential i see, which often leads to brainstorm and further refine those ideas and combine those ideas with their own and develop the design of how the systems would complement each other etc'....

and i enjoy that. i like brainstorming. the difference between them and you krogar is that they are using the active parts of their minds when they look at the ideas - they see potenial through their intuition and reasoning and creative imagination - your using the non-active part, the memory, based on what you've expirienced in the past that worked and what you've expirienced that didn't work. it's not bad, it's just different mentalities. but i'm sorry to say - it's not your type of mentality capable of designing a new game. it might take an old game and splash new graphics on it, combine different existing features not seeing in the same game previewsly, a slightly different setting, but not a real new game. right now we have plenty of designers using your way of thinking, it's why the MMO genera hasn't advanced much in gameplay since the mud times. but who built these original games and settings which you want a refined copy of? guess what, it couldn't have being people using your mentality of copying stuff from past MMO expiriences because they didn't have such expiriences to build upon. they had to be people capable of using the active side of their mind - their creativity, their imagination, their intuition and reason. it's like fredrich said: you have the lion, the child and the cammel. the lion eats the old to give room, the child creates something new, then the cammel makes it into a tradition and carries it on it's back. your a cammel, and that's ok. but don't look down on the children - without my kind nobody would have created anything for you to make a tradition off. any field in the world needs all 3 - and gaming is no exception.

[Unomat]

KroqGar, 'Organic AI' has been implemented from the day Backpropagation ANN (using Supervised Learning) have been trained, the only prerequisite being the knowledge domain is limited (as it is in games). And yes, logarithmic skill improvement with decay as well as PD are part and parcel of the package in order to avoid senseless botting. Then again, if someone can build a proper mining bot with little risk to be killed, the closed economy will eventually tip the balance to the point the bot WILL get killed.

The upside of 'Organic AI' would be the way it mitigates the rebuttals to PD based on technical issues, i.e. lagspikes / power outages / hardware failure aso. It'll force players to train the defenses of their characters as well instead of only behaving offensively.

Imho the reason most 'simulation' MMOs fail is because they don't simulate enough and they still incorporate too many artificial rules in order to 'balance the fun for everyone'. If devs want to cross-breed, they cannot pick a number of characteristics from both genres and try out whether that'll become a hit (evolution takes a long time and VCs in general aren't that patient ^^), they'll have to implement both feature sets and check what's actually being used then carefully cut away the fluff.

After all, people ARE playing Poker online, they ARE dating online, they ARE playing stock exchange games online, so why not go for the whole nine yards?

I think MMORPGs have about exhausted the limited possible combinations of Single RPG heroism / FPS / CCG type harvesting of items. To me resurrection and non-persistent characters (when going offline) is the lazy dev's answer to people being unable to save their game and continue whenever they want; it's screwing the people who'd like a truely epic game as non-accountability leads to extreme forms of exploitation and when push comes to shove, you should be accountable to your fellow human player, not some arbitrary company rule that's drawn up to maximize profit for that company alone.

There's enough people playing EVE and that's definitely a sign there's a market waiting for the right mix of fantasy RPG and simulation. After all, how many bird men tried to fly with feathers glued to their arms between Leonardo da Vinci's helicopter design and the first flight of the Wright brothers?

[Rhygar]

I've posted this idea somewhere else on the forum I think.

If a developer thinks that their server can handle 10,000 players (using this number as this is supposedly what DF will be able to handle) then they can create a static population of 10,000. This is in addition to the NPCs in the world, or at least that's how I understood it.

To start off all the 10,000 are "greys", i.e. unused player characters. When a new player creates a new character and logs in he or she assumes control of this "grey". This grey looks like your character forever until your account is cancelled, or of course, if you have aging/PD, the character meets it "natural" end.

My assumptions to go along with this was;
1) at the very least your character ages and dies (does not have to be other kinds of death, such as combat etc)
2) your character has to eat and drink to survive, or, if no non-aging PD, maintain it full strength
3) all items are finite and you therefore need to replace your weapons and tools

Before you log off you can specify some activities that your character can do while you are offline. These activities do not accrue substantial increases in skill and resources. It would be mostly to feed and cloth your character with a modest skill gain in those activities specified. When you log off the AI does not take over control, except to execute those activities. Other online players will see you character walking around the area "acting" the role you have assigned. I suppose it's not necessary for the character to do anything but walk around and fill in space.

I don't think you need very sophisticated AI for this and as the benefits while you are off line are minimal it would not be useful for farmers.

[Rhygar]

O, yes, and to add to that, your character can obviously not be killed. Maybe if something significant happens in your area such as a battle then your character relocates to the closest location to continue its activities until you log back in.

[Unomat]

Welcome back Rhygar, and yes, that's a viable alternative as well

[Rhygar]

Originally Posted by Unomat

Welcome back Rhygar, and yes, that's a viable alternative as well

Thanks. Glad to see you guys still fighting the good fight...

[Hypnos]

I vot for immersion, but I want to be free but with some rules like in real wolrd.
Acts = consequences

[KroqGar]

Originally Posted by Traceur

the difference between them and you krogar is that they are using the active parts of their minds when they look at the ideas - they see potenial through their intuition and reasoning and creative imagination - your using the non-active part, the memory, based on what you've expirienced in the past that worked and what you've expirienced that didn't work. it's not bad, it's just different mentalities. but i'm sorry to say - it's not your type of mentality capable of designing a new game. it might take an old game and splash new graphics on it, combine different existing features not seeing in the same game previewsly, a slightly different setting, but not a real new game.

Don't pretend to know my mindset based on a single argument. Honestly, I've had enough of arguing against your points with logic because it almost always results in you telling me that we have different approaches and that we're looking out for different things. Do you remember the racial thread when we were discussing the races? As far as I remember, I had valid points against your races, yet you still decided to ignore it and just tell me we weren't approaching it the same way.

I'm not denying the fact that you have some good ideas, I mean come up with thousands and a few are bound to have potential, all I'm saying is that the majority of your ideas wouldn't entirely work, or would lead to an undesirable aspect of an MMO. Stuff like micro-raptors, having AI control your character, etc. You tend to come up with ideas that, although some may look good on paper, in practice they would just be annoyances. This is, of course opinion, but I know of several others who feel the same way about your ideas.

As for Unomat, did you not get what I meant by Organic AI? I think that was just a misunderstanding on my part. I'm not quite sure of the actual term, so I just threw the name Organic AI on it. What I meant by that is AI that actually learns as you go along, so it adapts and changes to suit the situation at hand. As far as I know, this doesn't exist in a functioning format yet, so it would be impossible to have in an MMO in the way you're suggesting. Truthfully, I'd love to have it in an MMO on the NPC's and stuff, gives an actual challenge to the gameplay and makes you a little more wary. However, I really feel it is a mistake to try and put it on logged out characters. If you made a game, I'm pretty sure the playerbase would want you to patch it out as soon as possible. If you're going the realism approach like your points suggest, then it kind of counteracts that. The character would need to sleep, so what better time to do that then when the player isn't using them?


Rhygar:

I also feel character age and eating/drinking are kind of mistakes as well. I mean, we all want realism in a game but making it like a Sims MMO isn't really in demand, I don't think. If you want a game where character aging and stuff is involved, check out Fable 2. I'd think that this kind of falls into one of those ideas that looks good on paper, but put into practice it wouldn't work. The food has potential, but character aging would really be a pain in most peoples asses. They don't want to have a warrior character become old and useless just because they've been playing the game for a few months. It would drive away longstanding players.

[Traceur]

agh, i can't believe i let you derailed this thread into a general-wide attack upon all my ideas, more so considering this thread is an analysis thread and doesn't include any of my ideas ok point me to a post you think you made a valid argument and I'll explain to you (most probably again) why their not. and no, it's not that i immediately assume that their invalid, i don't actually remember your arguments (like i said, i use "the active functions" of the mind, that also means I'm not very good at using the non-active functions such as memory retrieval), but i know myself and i usually go to "differences in mentalities' explanations as a last resolve only when i get that i can't use reason with the person, and if i would have seeing at list one valid argument from you i probably wouldn't have categorized you this way.... so bring it on, prove me wrong.

[Traceur]

on the more interesting topic of "existing logout characters", one middle ground which i brought up in a discussion of your idea in IRC Unomat was 'log out as [insert regular NPC job]".
the simple idea is that you can log out at a town-crier/scouting post to alert of enemies, at a guard post by the walls or the gates or as a city-wide guard for patrols, at an acountent office or a merchant post etc'... in this state your death wouldn't count towards PD or as anything other then "normal NPC resurrection", and to solve the full loot problem, your character will automatically go to replace it's wares with whatever uniforms the city/guild has placed in the armory for that position.

it is very different from your idea and being optional it doesn't fullfill all the purposes you have in mind for it, i realize that... in fact i am mostly suggusting it because i want to minimize the usage of NPC hirelings. but given that this doesn't require much advance AI other then the regular NPC AI scripts, we already know that it's possible. think of it as a low-tech backup plan.

[Lachrymose]

Originally Posted by Rhygar

I've posted this idea somewhere else on the forum I think.

If a developer thinks that their server can handle 10,000 players (using this number as this is supposedly what DF will be able to handle) then they can create a static population of 10,000. This is in addition to the NPCs in the world, or at least that's how I understood it.

To start off all the 10,000 are "greys", i.e. unused player characters. When a new player creates a new character and logs in he or she assumes control of this "grey". This grey looks like your character forever until your account is cancelled, or of course, if you have aging/PD, the character meets it "natural" end.

My assumptions to go along with this was;
1) at the very least your character ages and dies (does not have to be other kinds of death, such as combat etc)
2) your character has to eat and drink to survive, or, if no non-aging PD, maintain it full strength
3) all items are finite and you therefore need to replace your weapons and tools

Before you log off you can specify some activities that your character can do while you are offline. These activities do not accrue substantial increases in skill and resources. It would be mostly to feed and cloth your character with a modest skill gain in those activities specified. When you log off the AI does not take over control, except to execute those activities. Other online players will see you character walking around the area "acting" the role you have assigned. I suppose it's not necessary for the character to do anything but walk around and fill in space.

I don't think you need very sophisticated AI for this and as the benefits while you are off line are minimal it would not be useful for farmers.

i can't really say i like the idea very much, since i don't understand why you're character should be leveling while you aren't on. but, even so, it would be a much easier idea to just have a system where you can log out in an inn, tent, near a campfire, etc. and when you log back in, you could possibly have some "rest xp" that would let you gain 2 tenths of a skill point when normally you would get only 1 for the next x number of skill-ups after your following log-in.

as you mentioned, the benefits from logging out should be modest, so there would need to be a cap on how much you could store up (you can't just log off for 2 months and get all your skills up in half the time), and you shouldn't get that much from remaining logged off anyways, maybe like 10 per day or something (10 tenths = 1 whole point), so the next time you logged in, you'd end up getting a bonus 1 skill point if you leveled up any skill(s) by at least 1 point.

i don't see why you would need you're character to actually perform the tasks while you're away. if anything, it could simply pretend to be doing them, by just running the same calculations it would as if you were actually doing whichever skill you wanted to level. if you're avatar cannot be killed while you're away, i don't really see the point of him being there.

as far as aging goes, i don't understand the point of this whatsoever. is there any reason you could provide for how aging would enchance gameplay? sure, it's more realistic, but can't see much benefit coming from it.

as far as eating/drinking goes. you shouldn't die from not having food or water, although i think it would be a good idea to make players keep food and water on them at all times, and if they chose not to, they would recieve a small debuff, maybe like "dehydration" or "hunger pangs." would be a good way to stimulate the economy a little bit, gives cooks a little more purpose, and it does something with food and water other than the typical boost in hp/mana regen.

[Rathius]

Unomat - That would be insanity for AI to take over. Althought it'd be kinda weird for you to come back and not know what you did, lol. People are like, "Dude you totally whooped up on 'so-n-so' that was awsome!" "...... I did what?" lol

[KroqGar]

Originally Posted by Traceur

agh, i can't believe i let you derailed this thread into a general-wide attack upon all my ideas, more so considering this thread is an analysis thread and doesn't include any of my ideas.

The rest of this post made me angry to the point where if I discussed it, I would just end up getting reported. Therefore, I'm going to focus on this point which will probably result in a very short post. What you need to realize is that you derailed this thread yourself. All I said was that I hope none of your ideas get produced, specifically stating that I meant no offence to you (Which brings it down to difference of opinion and not a personal attack). I then went on to discuss something somewhat relevant to the thread.

In response to your challenge, although no matter what I post you're going to tell me it's invalid, I will go search through my subscriptions to find something. However, it may be difficult because I've never found it necessary to found a reasonable argument against your more preposterous ideas.

EDIT: Should satisfy your feelings, although it didn't then so why should it now? Honestly Traceur, I don't care about how you feel about me. The thing that bothers me about you is how self-righteous and intelligent you come across as being. This tone carries over into your posts and ideas and makes you look (Once again, not just to myself but to several other people who I know read these boards) like a very pompous person.