Darwinbots Forum
General => Off Topic => Topic started by: PurpleYouko on September 02, 2005, 09:21:18 AM
-
A couple of weeks ago I was told about a cool online game.
I downloaded it and there began my downfall.
ROSE (Rush On Seven Episodes) online turned out to be so addictive that I spent every spare moment playing it.
Here (http://www.neoseeker.com/Games/Products/PC/rush_on_seven_episodes/) is a little background for those who aren't familiar with the game.
The day before yesterday, it all came to a crashing halt. When I logged on I got this rather disturbing message.
SERVER DEAD!
AAAAGGGHHHHHH!!!!! I thought. What has happened?
I tried again and again but got the same thing each time.
After checking a few ROSE dedicated chat rooms I found out some unsubstantiated rumors that the "free" version of ROSE is utterly dead and gone and is soon to be replaced by a P2P (Pay to Play) version. These rumors unfortunately look more likely to be true with each passing day.
OH The HORROR!!!!! :(
It might well be the coolest game I have ever seen but I am buggered if I am going to pay for it. I am way to stingy for that.
Now what am I to do?
I know. I am going to begin work on my own internet role playing game. :D
It might take a while but it will be way cool when it is done.
-
Welcome to my world. I refuse to pay for online games after what happened a while ago with a certain Online Collectible Card game and something like $400 in overdrawn bounced check fees...
Anyway, you need to find yourself some nice, free, replayable game. I play Civ 3 on the hardest difficulty (and still can't even find a challenge anymore...)
-
So make your own then.
Wanna join me?
-
Haha, you bet :D
It should only take, like what, 3 months right? :P
-
It should only take, like what, 3 months right?
Nah. Thought I would chuck one together over the weekend. How hard can it be?
-
Well if its not some ram starving 3D game , the game development itself takes about 3 days. The networking is the the killer part , so mutch bugs can happen with computers communicating at different speeds, different connections etc. then comes the pain of setting up a server. So that takes about 3 weeks. I dont know any networking so I am not sure how badly I am off, I know it shure takes more then 3 days.
I want to make a massive mutiplayer 3D space-to-planet/object online game, well I know that with my little convlage I have its going to take me atleast 5 years or so. (Num, this one ties in with that space exploration game you gave me ideas on)
As you guys are interested in making an RPG , (I hate everything to do with trading, so...)
If you guys run into any vb related nonsence , I might be able to help (I know Num will cover all the equations well without me , but just incase somthing crazy comes up let me know)
;)
... then again Networking is a PAIN....
-
As far as soe , they did this really evil antihack to my custom mouse controls , so I am not so happy to use sonys products anymore, and the cosmic rift comunity kiked me out of the boards for no spesific reason exsept that I was suggesting radical ideas (you know me), but this ideas in my mind anyway seemed like they can work well. Unlike the DB forum right here , no one there had enough skill to explain to me why my ideas were bad, one and only little theoratical mathematisian tryed to explain somthing, but he missed my point of the original post. As far as the rest of them they cursed me out until I could not stand it anymore, and soe did not reply or do anything about it. So I was like "Good luck with that soe, thanks for the free turnamint stuff" , "hope you dont make a law suite on me for using custom mause controls in the Turnamint" (somthing like you have to pay us back with interest for the free stuff, would be really evil and funny.)
:P
(did not have time to breack it down into paragraphs sry)
-
Well if its not some ram starving 3D game , the game development itself takes about 3 days. The networking is the the killer part , so mutch bugs can happen with computers communicating at different speeds, different connections etc. then comes the pain of setting up a server. So that takes about 3 weeks. I dont know any networking so I am not sure how badly I am off, I know it shure takes more then 3 days.
Thinks I was being serious!! <_<
It is going to take a whole lot more than a weekend. Most likely a whole lot more than 3 months too.
The networking component should not be too hard.The tricky bit is in synchronising the signals so that the graphics are seemless.
I am actually considering running the whole system from a SQL server and having the player's PCs handle all the graphic from queries sent to the server over the internet at a rate of a couple per second. It is going to take a pretty hefty server to cope with that kind of traffic. The individual PCs can calculate how to move sprites from where they are now to where they will be according to the X,Y coordinates from the server.
-
calculations done on user side btw = hacker heavin...
The only thing in my mind ever to lend on user side is the grahix (if I figure out a good use for the cpu I will add it as well, for now I dont see any) Thats how soe got me , they were changing my controls on server side. I had no "special downloads" or anything...
or you can send the controls and the coords, that way if someone wants to check if you are hacking they can if your controls list does not match your coords list.
if you think networking alone was killer , try network security... In reality I still have no clue how even a basic 2D moution calculation is supposed to look like. Maybe we can make trafic so heavily incripted no one will have a clue how to properly edit it.
Then there are copyright security issues , .......................zzzzzZzzzzzZzzzzzZzzzz
Then there is the other side of the coin , making everything Pairtopair , save up on server speed big time. In a 3D game with tons of missles and god knows what else flying arround that will be a perfict solution.
-
It should only take, like what, 3 months right?
Nah. Thought I would chuck one together over the weekend. How hard can it be?
I think you're underestimating the time involved. Better devote Monday too :P
-
Well if its not some ram starving 3D game , the game development itself takes about 3 days. The networking is the the killer part , so mutch bugs can happen with computers communicating at different speeds, different connections etc. then comes the pain of setting up a server. So that takes about 3 weeks. I dont know any networking so I am not sure how badly I am off, I know it shure takes more then 3 days.
Thinks I was being serious!! <_<
It is going to take a whole lot more than a weekend. Most likely a whole lot more than 3 months too.
The networking component should not be too hard.The tricky bit is in synchronising the signals so that the graphics are seemless.
I am actually considering running the whole system from a SQL server and having the player's PCs handle all the graphic from queries sent to the server over the internet at a rate of a couple per second. It is going to take a pretty hefty server to cope with that kind of traffic. The individual PCs can calculate how to move sprites from where they are now to where they will be according to the X,Y coordinates from the server.
I had the idea of a mMO once. Let me explain:
Instead of a Massive Multiplayer Online game, you do a minimally Multiplayer Online game. You make a program with a server and client. Most people have a spare computer to devote to being a server.
So Joe Shmoe buys the mMO, and sets up a persistant world. He then tells his friends, and they start playing on their own server with something like 10 players.
Which has the benefits of:
1. No servers to buy and maintain for the developers.
2. No worries about hacking (what sort of friends do you have that would hack their own personal server? Anyway, just don't let your hacker friend play)
3. Less anonymous playing. You can be the star of the world, since there aren't hardly any of you playing. The one thing about MMOs that frustrate me is how hard it is to gain any sort of clout.
I like saving the world and having everyone recognize me. This way you can have that and still have the persistant world thing going on.
4. One player can be the DM instead of playing a character. If you make some really good DM tools, this ends up bridging the gap between D&D players and RPG players.
5. No overcrowding. There just aren't enough people to overcrowd. Yet, since you know everyone that's playing, you can easily coordinate some grand adventure.
6. You can get rid of the spawning monster generation model. You can have monsters that die and don't dissapear. You can have monsters that are actually born. You can have players actually chop down trees and the trees don't grow back. If someone torches a forest, the whole forest stays down, or slowly recovers.
Basically, whenever you do something, it permanently would effect the world. It would be quite possible to kill every last ooglblat in the world, making them go extinct. Or kill every single person in the world. Or maybe even start a family with an NPC and make your own town.
The developers don't have to worry about gameplay balance (is this action overpowered/underpowered) since all the players are friends, and can make up their own "house rules", and tweek the stats to their own style.
Bandwidth requirements are likely within the realm of most standard cable modems since you only have a handful of players. I see a game like this being much closer to tabletop RPGing experience and less of the level treadmill that most MMOs necessarily are.
I've had this idea since way back when I got Ultima Online. Only problem is any sort of online game takes in the range of 1000s of manhours.
-
Or you could call it minimally massive multiplayer online game.
mMMO. Or you could make up a decent acronym.
-
I first imagined this as a squatter sim. You start the persistant world and it's all forests and wild animals. You and some friends find plots of land, clear them, farm them, form a town, try to start mining for ore, etc.
No real goals, just a blank canvas you can go and play with.
-
Descent3 is like that, problem is it lacks the "masive" part, takes the fun out of it badly. It make more sense to Invide some frands over and sit down for some Bond or some Dark for N64. Don't have to worry about phone bills that way.
-
Not really, unless I misunderstand the game. The game presumably ends when you finish a mission. I'm talking about a persistant world that never resets, never goes away that a small group of peopel log on to.
-
IC
interesting idea, I wont mind playing it , as long as its not all about trading. I seen some games all people do is go to item menus and buy or sell or exchange stuff, I can sit all day move folders arround on my C drive too. :P
still:
5-7 people , no common chat system , no 20 people doing a group attack on 2 people piloting an ZeroSystem sourt of like thing. No systematic killing of every player in the whole matrix , nah, not exsactly my style for a mmo. Waiting until StarTrack Online comes out.
P.S.
You know the StarWars3 opening fight seine, now thats what I am talking about.
P.P.S
The complexity of it all so intance that I beat by the time I am done the avrage computer will be fast enough to handle it. Doom3 kind of messed up on that part.
For now I got first Bot to evolve , and get everything possible out of my collage Reasoning class. If we can get a unifyed model will have android datah in no time, running on 1.x or 2.x hrtz prossesor. , Reminds me Sunday it is , time to go finish off smbot for a ping pong game as an away project.
-
I still prefer the massive idea really but running in minimal with a few friends on a local server would be a great way to playtest it.
As for the total open endedness and the persistent world, That is exactly what I plan. Monsters spawning all over the place with no rhyme or reason is just not realistic. better that they have a lair (which can be pretty well defended) that spews them out into the surrounding world. At some point some of these monsters can set up a new lair somewhere else and start making new baby ones again.
I really want the players to be able to have an impact on the world. I also want dynamically changing quests, some of which may be based on other players. Imagine a player becomes a criminal like a Pirate or something. Later, other players could be given a quest to go and capture "Plaer A" the pirate. Ie. players can get a price on their heads.
I want players to be able to have registered property (plots of land) which can be traded, built on etc. Landlords and rent become possible. Someone might become a King and demand taxes. Who knows.
This is going to be cool B) (rubs hands together in glee)
I have some interesting new ideas to stop hacking too.
First/ the server will be literally a giant database (SQL or similar) with no inherent software at all.
Second/ The real work is done by a piece of software housed locally on the server PC that has access to the database but no direct connection to the internet (so not easily hackable) Through this program we access a second "mirror" database which contains a copy of the first. This can be used to restore the primary database if it gets hacked, possibly automatically.
Third/ Client PCs will send their queries to the database with a dynamically changing password and the server will log change requests and passwords. If the SQL server is changed at any time (via hacking) without having the correct password logged then this will trigger the database to automatically upload the backup data from the mirror database.
Can anyone see any problems here? I think I have a more or less hack proof (actually automatically self repairable) server in mind. of course this is my first foray into anti-hack so I could be missing something obvious.
-
I never studied much into making something hacker proof. Basically, if there's any difference between what the player's computer knows, and what they know, that's one level of hacking possible. This level is almost impossible to detect.
Then there's the player's computer sending erroneous information to the server. This is easily avoided by enforcing the database to be self-consistant. I'd put packet interception here too. Anything where the player is modifying the communication between client and server without using the client.
Then there's the level where hackers aren't even using the client anymore, and are directly logging into the database and altering values. This is also the most destructive, and the area I've done the least amount of thinking, let alone research.
I have never liked the massive part of the MMO. I'll admit it's probably the selling point for most other people, but I absolutely detest being an anonymous no one in a game. If I wanted to be an anonymous no one, I'd play my real life. :D
Here's my list of things I'd want in a perfect MMO:
1. No spawning of anything. All items, monsters, etc. are in a closed system. Monsters must be born from another monster. Items must be crafted by someone or something. Ore must run out eventually and permanently. Merchants that run out of lychestra blue cannot sell lycestra blue untill they get some more from either an NPC or PC. "Ruined" crafting materials must turn into something else. Burned down forests must not regrow if there aren't any seeds to regrow from. Speaking of which, even trees must grow from seeds, and eventually die themselves.
It is a simple enough request, harder in the implementation, especially in trying to balance the game in a massive world so one player can't ruin the experience for everyone else. Which is why I'd propose not balancing the game, and letting people be griefers if they want. Let them destroy the world if they want.
2. Everyman a place to live, and solitude. Every PC needs a "home" they can go to. Other people need to be able to follow them to their home, and random strangers need to be able to stumble upon this PCs home.
Anyway, that rule applies to the plot of land. As part of #1, houses must be built from lumber and steel. That's not an easy amount of work, and takes time and/or money.
3. Everyman a Hero or villain, ie: no enforced anonymity. Every PC in the world has a part to play. Not even a side kick part, but an active part. I don't mean letting PCs fight in wars, I mean the PCs are declaring wars. Web games are better at this than other types.
If I'm a griefer and want to destroy the known world, I should be theoretically able to. It shouldn't even be terribly impossible.
A subset of this is that the game developers have no absolute control over the course of the game. Nor should they try. Two sides are battling? Good. One side is almost totally destroyed? Fine. Don't interfere. The world has run out of trees? It's some sort of Easter Island Apocalypse? Too bad, so sad, that's what you get. Plant a truffla tree.
That's not to say the DMs can't interfere, just that they shouldn't try to guide the course of the game if the players want to go another way. Don't artificially try to balance things. Some things are more powerful than others. It's just how things are.
In essence: No T-Rex's in the field. (If that reference passed over you, then you must not be as nerdy as I :P)
Another subset of this is that a player can play a no one if they want. Let them take over an NPCs job. It's sometimes relaxing to play a farmer and farm some food.
From these three rules I'd like to see a game be made. They're simple enough, but how to accomplish them? There are alot of problems.
What if the players absolutely destroy the world? Reset the server and let them do it again? Give them the tools to rebuild?
What happens if you get too popular? Are we really going to have room in our world for 50 heroes? Too many special people and no one's special.
I think you see the point.
-
Sounds good.
Whats the point of hacking a SQL server , were all it does is assign people to there games, I dont see people getting any major cheats out of this other then to potentialy distroy the server. Thats unless you are doing all the ingame communications not Pair-to-Pair but Pair-to-Server-to-Pair.
-
That's Peer. As in friend. Not pair as in fruit (:lol: :P)
-
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.
-
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*...
-
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.
-
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.
-
I found a cool thread on this sort of thing here (http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=338425).
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.
-
http://solipsis.netofpeers.net/wiki/HomePage (http://solipsis.netofpeers.net/wiki/HomePage)
I believe it's an open source, free, peermog.
-
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.
Such an item would need to be *extrememely* difficult to find and keep. In the real world, it is always easier to destroy something than make it. I think the same should be true of virutal worlds.
If someone(s) destroys the eco system of the planet, they should be forced to *live* with the consequences of their decision for several months *real time*.
-
Yeah, I was thinking it would be at the "end of the world" so to speak and possibly only come to exist when the enviroment is seriously affected, it'd be located in some extremly difficult area to find and reach. It could also be defended by monsters of some sort.
Once removed it could require a physical guard at all times or it would revert to it's original location. This would necessitate any evil leader to have trusted men stationed nearby at all times, since you can never be too sure of someone slipping into your ranks or a guard getting bored :) it would be hard to maintain the stranglehold over everyone.
-
What Num is saying make perfectly sense.
This also opens up for the possiblity that players unite against eco-destroyers etc. Making eco-police patrols etc. ;) This would be extremely funny, Eco vs anti-eco, something like LoTR, good vs. pure evil.
-
But a nice little Item that restores the world as it was, is NOT my cup of tea... It seems pretty silly, maybe some kind of extremely rare spells (say 10) should be used, where only one spell could be used by an extremely (yet again) POWERFUL wizard. Thuse the world need to emptied for the 10 most powerfull wizards and the 10 spells needs to be researched, found whatever. But still this seems rather silly.
The idea behind the "limited world", is nice and should open up for much more possiblities than the "unlimited worlds" give.
No one what a month or more (in realtime, maybe incl. money spent) wasted just like that, because some people suddenly whats to destroy the world (and such people always exists, and I really dont know why), people will band together (I will bet on it, if there is enough players) and try to save atleast a small fraction in the world, either becuase they dont what to reset the world, or they just what the fun in combatting others and have a reason for it or maybe they just think in pure money (game money), and knows if they control the last bit of fine forest, they are going to get unbeliveable rich..... (and will control the entire world, hahahha)
-
My head hurts, but thouse are some seriosly cool links Num, Thanks. B)
-
I think some libertarian ideas would be the way to go in such a world. Divvy up the land into plots, where every meter of the land is owned by someone, or everyone (ie: the government). Then allow players the ability to police their land, or build on it, or do whatever they want with it. The 'government' could be little more than the most powerful faction making, and enforcing, laws.
I'm thinking a world like this would work best with something like 50 players. More than that and you suffer the problem of anonymity. Less than that and you lack the necessary people for any sort of organized society.
edit:
Also, the world is never really 100% 'destroyed'. If you destroy the ecosystem, and all plant and animal life dies, you end up playing a kind of post-apocalypse Mad Max game.
:burnup: