General > Off Topic
ROSE is dead!
PurpleYouko:
Yup you got it. Totally open ended.
Dig a whole and it stays there as part of the permanent persistent world.
Kill the last remaining Orc and go down in history as the person who finished them off once and for all. There will never be another Orc in the world... ever.
Chop down a tree and you get resources to build your house. The tree is gone forever and for everybody.
Plant a new tree seed and it wil grow over time to become a new tree. (I would make this a much speeded up process so that it will be decent sized in less than a year)
You could make it your personal mission to go around shaking trees to get seeds then planting them all over the place. :D
Players should be able to become bounty hunters, notorius outlaws, pirates or whatever they like.
The main thing I don't like about games like "Guild Wars" is that there is a central story line which is exactly the same for every player. They move from chapter to chapter and each have to perform identical quests to progress.
I want quests to be dynamic (possibly DM assigned) so that a quest to bring in a notorious robber barron dead or alive is fulfilled when he is brought in. Nobody else can then do it because there was only ever ONE robber baron or Pirate or whatever.
Maybe this Robber Baron could even be a PC so that his reputation grows within the game world.
The way I see the SQL server working is that it will contain pretty much every bit of data about the world and everyone in it. All your PC will have to do is to read and write to the server then turn that data into graphical output.
Every piece of information going to the server can be accompanied by a dynamically changing authentication code so it will be pretty easy to tell if someone hacks the server directly. No accompanying code. Then a monitoring program running on the server PC can just reset any hacked information within seconds of it being changed.
Keeping track of the world should not be too hard. Although the primary graphic files can be part of the player's initial download, a layer of trees, houses and other stuff can be stored on a database in the server and will be downloaded whenever a player goes into a new area.
A simple manager program can also be run on the server computer so that new trees will spontaineously grow near to other adult trees. Same with monster lairs. An Orc lair will make new baby Orcs at a rate proportional to the number of adult female Orcs in the lair (Only takes one male). Kill 'em all and that lair is history.
Numsgil:
I agree with pretty much everything. I think online games where you have GM/DMs actively DMing would be so cool. You only need like 1 DM for every 10 players or so to get some really intricate playability.
More than that even, you should be able to set it up so that players can interact with the world and each other that you entirely get rid of the idea of developer run worlds.
On the most basic level, allow players to interact and establish contracts, etc. Allow them whatever powers they want.
For instance, start the world off with no towns or any signs of civilization. Then give the people the tools to build up civilization. People could band together and create a jail, where subdued outlaws could be brought to. Markets could be formed. Give the players the means to assign NPCs to a certain task. One NPC could simply pilot a barge up and down a large river, embarking at certain times. Another could simply guard the barge against outlaws.
All the sorts of tasks that are mindless and boring.
Then the players could be like robber barons and pull all the strings. Trade the NPC contracts. Etc.
There are two paradigms to hacker prevention:
1. Stop people from hacking
2. Don't
Now, the 1st has been fairly well explored, and it requires a server with quite a bit of bandwidth.
Less explored is the second idea. Assume that no one will hack the server. What kind of things can you do now? Well, you can start with distributed computing. Use the players' computers to do most of the processing.
There are some other possibilities. I think you could get more detailed games going. Have 1000 players on at a time? Great, you have 1000 computers to process for you. The more players on a server the less lag you experience.
Obviously the problem then is when people do hack. Since it'd be so easy. I see a few routes here:
1. Try and steer computational packets towards computers where the results don't effect that player.
That is, if player A and B are in a duel, computer C is doing the calculations for it. This of course depends a great deal on how good the server can tell the consequences of an action.
2. Don't worry about it. This will mean hackers will get the upper hand. The way to solve this is to allow players to be banned by other players, and players to go off and form their own public/private server, etc.
Also, since packets are divied up randomly, you could do it so that the player has no way to know what is being calculated. For instance, what does 7-5 mean to the player? If the computational packets are abstract enough, hacking could be quite difficult.
I'd prefer option 2 because it's never been explored. Peer to peer MMO. Its compexity could increase logarithmically as you get more people. In general, P2P is a fascinating paradigm. They're already using it to calculate prime numbers.
The server would do little more than allow computers to connect to each other. If done right, the packets would be sent where they need to go... Ah, the computational chaos! Mwhahaha...
*goes to research distributed computing*...
Botsareus:
The idea is , if a player hacks another player , the other player will complain and report to the server, the server will trow the affender off. If a player hacked a server then the game abservers (people reseaving reports) wont see it.
:blink: ... I realise it does not make any sense now...
The idea is to abserve the data exchange from third person, but then the third person's can be hacked as well so it does not make sense.
P.S.
I leave you guys to your own discussion because I realise I got a lot to learn before I can be anywere close to your level.
Endy:
What about a method "in game" to save the world? Some sort of ultimate item that returns the world to a past setting. This way if anyone ever does destroy everything there's at least a chance to save it(I can just imagine the quest for this :) ). Hiking across the wastelands in search of the ultimate item, battling the armies of darkness along the way B) Although such an item would be just as useful to keep control also... :)
It might be an idea for the enviroment to affect players in a more injurous way, if a player is in a rocky area for example there could be an increased chance of injury. This way the monster habitats would make more sense and give monsters some measure of protection.
Numsgil:
I found a cool thread on this sort of thing here.
Basically, the idea that P2P networks are suseptable to malicous attacks has been noticed, and solutions exist to solve them. Notably, all these solutions fail if more than 1/3 of the users are malicous.
The most basic way is redundancy checks. Have the same packet computed several times by different computers. If one computer is different from the concensus, then you blacklist it, and it doesn't get or recieve packets from other computers. In effect, they're shut out of the network.
Theoretically, it would be possible for a netsplit to occur, where half the network blacklists the other half. Which would be like a parallel universe forming, which sounds neat, but not when half the players go with it.
I'm going to see if I can make a seriosuly simple game and try out some of this distributed programming things on it.
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