Interface: Space (Undo's recent work)

[petrus4]

well i liked their video on browser based first person shooter tech they are coming out with.  it was real nice.  but i've messed around with browser based 3d games and this is what i found:

I had no idea that Epic had released browser-based games.  None of their games that I've played, have been browser-based.  I don't like browser-based games myself at all.  They tend to be written in Java, or are bad in various other ways.  When I mentioned Java in my previous post, Epic used that as a scripting language.  The engine itself was written in C++ I think.

3.  i wanted something low brow, that's still 3d and may not be as pretty graphically, but which will allow large amounts of people to play the game in vicinity of each other.  this is particularly necessary with planetary engines, where we're asking the game engine to not only generate players and their ships, pets, houses, armor, weapons, structures, pvp, pve, rts, and dungeoneering, but also doing it together in the same spaces of the game environment, while also rendering planet textures, loading and rendering clods of planets surfaces and etc.

Are you sure you need to do a full planetary AND space system?  From memory, Star Wars Galaxies tried that, and it crashed and burned.  Way too many eggs in too many different baskets.  It just gets too complex.

I'd also seriously reconsider player housing, to be honest.  The only place I've seen that done successfully was Ultima Online, and even there, it really wasn't that great.  You had people building houses immediately in front of dungeon entrances, as well as massive lag.  Instancing your house neighbourhoods has been a suggestion which might work, but it probably wouldn't remedy the lag issues.

so i want an old planet engine that has been tweaked.  preferably direct x 9 but willing to go with direct x 8, if necessary or something equal in open gl or what have you.

You are right about wanting relatively low resolution.  Starting out low graphically, was what enabled both WoW and Minecraft to get as big as they are now.  Unfortunately, Minecraft in particular is bloated as hell at this point, and the forum psychopaths scream for WoW to increase its' polygon count on a regular basis, as well.

As one other warning; think very, very long, hard, and carefully about whether or not you want PvP.  World of Warcraft was originally a primarily PvE game, and that was another one of the main factors which allowed it to become so successful. 

The Arena was to World of Warcraft, as the iceberg was to the Titanic.  The reason why, is because it broke the brand.  PvE roleplayers and PvP/FPS gamers are two very, very different demographics of people.  PvE roleplayers have much longer attention spans, are more intelligent, less aggressive, have much greater social cohesion, and are willing to accept delayed gratification.  In short, they're just more desirable and civilised people in pretty much every respect.

The Arena, on the other hand, caused WoW to become flooded by the Halo/CounterStrike demographic.  These were very different people, as mentioned, and they began demanding that Blizzard change WoW to meet their preferences, which Blizzard did.  As a result, the game's original demographic started leaving during The Burning Crusade; the exodus only really ended with the release of Cataclysm, with the end result being a loss of at least 2 million players, and probably closer to 6 million in real numbers.

The irony is that the FPS demographic who took over are also still not happy, because WoW was not able to turn itself into a full FPS.  At this point it is an extremely awkward, ungraceful FPS/MMORPG hybrid, which nobody is happy with and is still leaking players like a seive.

World of Warcraft: An Autopsy.

I wrote the above linked article at the beginning of 2010.  I'd strongly encourage you to read it, if you are willing.  It outlines a number of mistakes which Blizzard ultimately made, which in my opinion, future MMORPGs need to avoid.

[undo11]

i've been thinking about this kind of thing for awhile.

there are no dungeons on homeworlds, where all the housing simulation would take place so entrances can't be clogged up.

the interiors of houses are instanced but there's a limited amount of items that can be stored or placed inside the home. this will help with lag. you won't be able to go in your house and drop 50 of the same item in the corner.

keeping the real estate lots separated from each other by so many in-game feet will lower lag as well.  like you couldn't build your home next to someone else's home because your starter plot is meant to contain your house, a guest house, a garage and a storage facility.  and there's an easement around it to keep people from  blocking each other.  the warehouse storage facility on your housing lot is where you put those 50 items of the same kind lol instead of the corner of your house.  and the decorations for the interior of your house are mostly related to textures.  such as wallpapers and furniture textures.  decorative items would be limited.  that was the big probem in SWG -- people crammed their houses full of things either to decorate with or to store.  the storage faciliity will handle storage. 

if you still don't have enough room, your personal inventory is gigantic.  see the graphic for it, attached. the bag with the 1 on it, in the upper right hand corner is a drop downable box (scrollable), and ends up being bigger than an entire wow guild bank.. you can add bags (up to eight) to that drop down.   so you initially have an inventory of 12x7 (84 slots) with the ability to add up to 8 more bags to the drop down, at 84 slots each. that's alot of inventory room and the warehouse storage facility on just one housing lot has 84 slots too.

got whole planet surfaces to play with .  we can have nice sized easements around these housing plots

[Cyanhide]

Small update, I have been really trying to keep as close to your description as possible, but its really hard.

Hope you like

( I feel i'm nearing a final concept ) Please feel free to add things you really think needs to be changed or has to have.


Cyanhide

[undo11]

Small update, I have been really trying to keep as close to your description as possible, but its really hard.

Hope you like

( I feel i'm nearing a final concept ) Please feel free to add things you really think needs to be changed or has to have.


Cyanhide

that's looking more and more interesting!   

not sure you read this in the thread, but hats are just decorations in this game.  for head related stat increases, we use various types of goggles or sunglasses, eye gear, eye wear.   was just going for something different. a different kind of look.

[Cyanhide]

Aha, Okay so remove the facial thingi ?Since your original picture also has some sort of tiara. I was thinking converting it to a vail kinda thingi ( vail/face mask assasin ).

I'm trying to stay mostly on the surface of what your saying so adjustments can be made more easy. If I where to go to much in detail it would be really hard to find alternative ways.

Basicly what i'm doing is searching for a base character.

How is the skin tone ? To redish or ?

Question about the eyes, I thought I read a while back they would have a glow, as in glowing glowing ( meaning giving off ambient light ) Or more like storm white eyes ?


Cyanhide

[undo11]

petrus4

i'm going to go read your information but i wanted to first talk about what i had already noticed about pvp. 

this is a copy and paste from my game theory page:

My first hand experience while in a battleground in WoW, playing my mage, ties synergy to combat balance.

At the time, you could put points in 3 different talent trees, starting at level 10. Now you can only put points in 1 talent tree, till it's full, and then you can put points in others.

Anyway, mages in World of Warcraft have 3 trees to pick from: frost mage, fire mage or arcane mage. I chose arcane mage because i was developing a synergistic skill set for battlegrounds. At the time, most mages would only go frost because it had alot of pvp friendly defenses for the mage. However, that meant the enemy team had developed counter strategies for those defenses.

I learned that if they were accustomed to one type of mage pvp, choose a different one and make it work by thinking about how to do so effectively and synergistically. That character was so good, she was unstoppable. Blizzard (company that created wow) ended up downgrading several mage abilities in those areas, to keep it from happening again: it was THAT good and as a result, that unfair to the other players.

Which leads to the next part.

For all the synergy, there also has to be balance. The number one complaint in mmos, particularly in pvp or when choosing what classes will be able to attend raids is class imbalance. if some skill sets make some players too good at pvp or pve or rts, it ruins it for everyone who isn't playing that class. Probably the biggest cause of loss of players willing to support your game is not balancing the classes.

Of course, there's also the difference between somebody who is well geared and someone who is not. Or someone who is much more experienced and someone who is less so, but if you put 2 people of similar experience, with similar quality gear into a pvp scenario and one completely owns the other, there's gonna be problems. As a result, mmos have rather long beta trials of their games to be sure the game is balanced. even then, things can and do, go wrong.

For example, some melee classes require what is called "gap closers," so they can get close enough to a ranged melee or ranged spellcaster, to actually be able to defend or attack. If they don't have that, they will be dead way before they get close enough to engage the enemy and that's not pvp, that's just slaughter.

As a result, game designs often include not just gap closers but interrupts or what is called "crowd control". There is no easy solution for crowd control, because once you start adding it into the game, pretty soon every class has some form of it, and people end up not being able to use their other abilities. pvp goes from being about who has the best skill, to has the best crowd control, and since everyone has crowd control it's no longer pvp, but rather something that looks like it might be pvp...someday . lol

---

the end of that section.

now i want to discuss why each race has only ONE option for class and it is inherent to that race, and that is because, combat balance will be infinitely easier and more satisfying for the player's experience.  when we add new races (in future expansions, hopefully) we can add either new class types or simply allow the new race to have access to one of the other already existing classes, which should already been balanced by then.

i also don't want to make the mistake of making the healers carry the bulk of the game on their shoulders by having survival be so intrinsically contingent on healer mana that it can all be blamed on the healer if anyone dies or the group/raid wipes.

now i'm off to read your article.

[undo11]

Aha, Okay so remove the facial thingi ?Since your original picture also has some sort of tiara. I was thinking converting it to a vail kinda thingi ( vail/face mask assasin ).

I'm trying to stay mostly on the surface of what your saying so adjustments can be made more easy. If I where to go to much in detail it would be really hard to find alternative ways.

Basicly what i'm doing is searching for a base character.

How is the skin tone ? To redish or ?

Question about the eyes, I thought I read a while back they would have a glow, as in glowing glowing ( meaning giving off ambient light ) Or more like storm white eyes ?


Cyanhide

go for the glasses, no veil.  trying to give it a sort of spacey look, with a tonge in cheek set of cultural references.  the mercurians eyewear looks like retro art deco, like the tail fins on a 50-60's automobile.   the venusians look like steam punk. the martians look like soemthing picasso would've come up with, simple geometric shape oddly placed,  the jupiterians look like elvis, the saturnians look like something james bond would wear or those guys in the matrix movies (agents?), and the neptunians look like something out of old captain nemo art, a submarine hatch.

the skin color is great. might even be nice if it were even deeper red.  but i like it the way it is so maybe just keep going with it the way it is.  it seems to compliment the white feathers nicely

[petrus4]

i found a fantastic one, that almost meets every one of my criteria (it
needs some tweaking though), but the problem was the guy created it back in
2003 and during the creation of it, employed a GPL algorithim, meaning that
it is freely distributed, with its source code, but you can't sell anything
you make with it, and you can't make money from the use of it either.  for
example, even if the game is free, if you maintain a shop to support it from
which you generate income or a monthly subscription in order to play it, you
are violating the GPL license.

I lost my first reply to this, due to Firefox reloading the page from a
typo; so I'm writing it in Vim first now, hence the weird formatting.
*Orcish growling*

The GPL does not make any stipulation, about whether or not you can make
money from software that is licensed with it.  I will quote from Stallman
himself, here.

Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should
not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should
charge as little as possible just enough to cover the cost. This is a
misunderstanding.

Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as
much as they wish or can. If this seems surprising to you, please read on.

The word "free" has two legitimate general meanings; it can refer either to
freedom or to price. When we speak of "free software", we're talking about
freedom, not price. (Think of "free speech", not "free beer".) Specifically,
it means that a user is free to run the program, change the program, and
redistribute the program with or without changes.
-- Selling Free
Software.

The GPL 3 is murkier, but the only thing that the GPL 2 requires you to do,
is provide source if you provide binaries, and also to provide the source
code of any derivative works you make.  In other words:-

a}  If you change something, and release the changed program, you must
provide the program in both source and binary form.

b}  If you want to charge money to sell unmodified copies of something that
someone else has licensed under the GPL, go for it, but you must provide
said program in both source and binary form.

The other thing to understand about the GPL, is that the Free Software
Foundation is essentially a cult, and the GPL can be considered its'
manifesto.  Virtually nobody uses the GPL (3 at least; 2 is a decent
license, if still restrictive) because they have invested conscious,
rational thought into doing so; they use it because they have been either
brainwashed or otherwise pressured to, by either Richard Stallman, or other
people in the Linux/Free Software community. 

Generally speaking, anyone who wants to make their software open source, and
has actually thought about it, will normally use either the BSD or MIT/X
licenses, which truthfully are not that far removed from public domain,
given what they allow in practical terms; although the BSD license does
still include a copyright statement, and requires attribution. 

Richard Stallman is UNIX and open source software's answer to Paul of
Tarsus, with everything that that analogy implies.  The unencumbered trading
of source code existed before him, in a number of different venues, (IBM's
early SHARE program among its' customer base being one example) but while
claiming exclusive credit for the concept, he has also attempted to bury it
in a semantic quagmire, which has led to exactly the type of confusion that
you demonstrate here.

This is another topic I'm fairly passionate about, as you can possibly tell,
but I will shut up about it at this point.

i spoke with him at length about it, and he told me that it was cutting edge
for its time and he was annoyed no one had managed to make a usable game out
of the technology. one way that would be possible was writing it in another
language. it is currently C++, so writing it in java or C# would work and
bypass the GPL issue.

That is refactoring, and it probably would not hold up in court, if you were
challenged on it.  If the code does exactly the same thing, functionality
wise, and has exactly the same name, then if the FSF's lawyers tried to
claim that it should still be under the same license, they would probably
win.

Unless the license is GPL 3, then I would just use it.  GPL 2
is not a problem.  You can still charge money for use of the engine; all you
have to do is provide the source code for it.  The GPL also does not place
any restriction on artwork at all, for the record; so you don't need to
provide masters for that, or give anyone permission to create derivs from
it, if you don't want to.  You can copyright that completely.  That is what
Red Hat did, with their Linux distro; the code is GPL, but their logo/art is
completely their own.

i'm not sure on java for a mmo

Java is slow, but the advantage of it is, that it is generally easier to
port things to different platforms.  When Notch wrote Minecraft for example,
he didn't need to rewrite the entire game to make it work with both Linux
and Windows; he wrote a support library for Linux with a few
platform-specific bits and pieces, and that was basically it.  The bulk of
the code ran as-is.

Before you ask, however, no, I do not know Java.  I certainly don't know
enough of it to refactor a major program.  Truthfully, I wouldn't write an
editor in it even if I did; you want a higher level scripting language like
Python (which is also slow, but could also work multi-platform, if you did
your GUI stuff for GTK) for that.

A program ideally has four different layers, or exists as one of three
different types.

a}  Stuff which controls bare hardware.  This is written purely for the
computer/hardware's benefit, and is not written with the intention of being
understood by humans at all, for the most part.  This is where you have your
binary, and stack based languages like Assembly or FORTH.

b}  The Application Programming Interface (API) layer.  This is an interface
level between machine language, and stuff which humans can partially
understand.  Basically an API is a set of aliases, which associate single
commands in machine-only languages, with function names that humans can
understand.

c}  The scripting layer.  This is where a more basic level programmer can
take the function names from the previous layer, and start applying logic to
them, with an appropriately basic scripting language; Lua is a good example
of this.  This is where you can write loops, branches, elseifs etc; basic
decision making code, although if you're intelligent, you never tell a
computer to perform more than rote tasks, for the most part.

d}  The human interface layer.  Generally speaking, anything I write for
myself, will not normally have this layer at all; but this is the GUI layer
for complete non-programmers.  This is the layer people interact with when
they normally use, say, Firefox.

The reason why I'm pointing that out, is to also emphasise that different languages
are meant to be used with different layers in that group.  So it's not a good idea to
use a layer a} language like Assembly, as one example, for layer c} tasks. 

That is not to say that you can't do it; it's just that it will likely be a lot
more difficult, and you won't enjoy the experience.  It's directly analogous to using a
one wood golf club, for a shot where you'd normally only need a putter.  Breaking
things up makes your life easier.

C# has not been around long enough to be as tweakable as C++ but i could be
wrong.

C# is pure Microsoft, AFAIK.  Hence, probably Windows only; although I don't
know, because I've never used it or really looked at it at all.  C++ is also
a mess, for the most part; although people generally use it for graphical
stuff, because object orientation makes it easier to create new
windows/classes, rather than having to write out an entirely new template
every time, if you're only doing something incrementally different.

When I go this far off topic, I normally get accused of seeking attention;
people who do so, generally don't seem to be able to grasp the idea, that
maybe I just like talking about things from a reasonably free-association
basis.  So accept or reject the above as you will.

[undo11]

petrus4,

no worries, i thought it was interesting and informative.

the planet engine is Open Source (GPL 2)

here's the information on it and the download link. if you try it, please let me know what you think.  the following are the bits to control it:

1-9 controls speed, with 1 being slowest and 9 fastest with 0 being lightspeed and not very useful to look at a solar system. i mean you end up like wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy yyyyyyy wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy yyy past what you were just looking at.

Shift + z allows you to slow down the passage of time.  default time is 100 times faster than normal time. 

Z allows you to increase the passage of time

P changes FPS by changing quality.  low quality is normalized at 60 FPS.

I  removes/shows the data on the screen so you can see the whole scene without/with the data

M shows/hides the ship (which i think is a naboo cruiser from star wars)

R realigns the camera so the ship  is directly in front of you in case you end up losing the camera

C allows you to freely move the camera around/away from the ship.  R helps go back to the ship's position.

One of the keys allows you to adjust View Distance by adding/removing fog

http://vterrain.org/Packages/IUE/

i read your article and i'll just say, that the LFG tool has helped me out immensely but i think they implemented it too late, when player pop was already waning, resulting in having to form groups from multiple servers. had they done it back when the game had peak membership and only from the server you were currently on, woulda been all good.

as far as sex change/race change,etc, negatively impacting the game, and all that, i dunno, i never really thought about that.  i mean it might help a player escape a stalker or might help a stalker keep stalking their victim. so it's 6 of one, half dozen of the other.   i suppose having the personal responsibility thing for behavior is easily avoided by just not playing the character who has been behaving badly and playing a different or new character.  not sure there's a way to avoid that problem when you have 8 potential character slots available on each server and there are 40 servers lol

[undo11]

race eyewear concepts so far
see attached, click to enlarge

(correction jupiterian sunglasses sorta look like a cross between a butterfly and elvis sunglasses lol )

[undo11]

jupiterian sunglasses from the front
lol
i think there will be a toggle so you don't have to show the sunglasses/eyewear, while still retaining the stat boosts

also think it would be fun if you had an option to turn on an animation for sunglasses/eyewear, such as a right click function.  like the jupiterian glasses, would flap like a butterfly.  the neptunian ones would open and close like a submarine hatch. the mercurian ones might have light dash from one side to the other side (would kinda make them look like the original battlestar galactica cylons tho, which i don't want to do, so maybe glow at each end like tail lights on a car).  the venusian ones could fog up and refog. they aren't fogged up anyway. they are magnified (useful for jewelers).  the martian ones would glow at the bottom corner, like headlights for driving in fog on a car (useful in martian sandstorms). not sure yet what the saturnian ones would do.  perhaps have a little neon decorative bit on them that pulsed. 

[Ellirium113]

2.  we need something that people with direct x 9 can play, because this economy has bottlenecked alot of computer upgrades  (including my own).  sure replacing the computer maybe cheap but there's also the graphics card.   i can guarantee you unreal is currently running direct x 10 and higher and probably requires a 200+ dollar graphics card upgrade to build/play games with it.  it's pretty though, real pretty.

The editor for the origional UNREAL TOURNAMENT I believe is long before Direct-X 9...this was origionally designed to run on OPEN-GL, GLIDE, & Direct X. This was right around the time 3d-FX cards were dominant. Your current laptop should be able to to run MULTIPLE instances of this. If you are working off a laptop with Intel based graphics this will be the issue as it does not perform well. Even still running this in direct-x should take next to no load on todays PC's as the poly counts are low and the video cards are generations newer. I can't speak for the programming side as I am mostly familiar with software and hardware and not a lot of programming.

[undo11]

and these were the hero machine conceptualizations, when we first started this project.   we don't want to copy these verbatim, for the obvious reason that they belong to hero machine and are not entirely how the final characters should look

looking at this i realize that the tallest race for the outer worlds faction are the healers (neptunians) and the shortest race for the outer worlds faction are the tanks/warriors (jupiterians).  since they will be matched against martians in pvp, and martians are average height, jupiterians should have a racial talent/skill called "big guy" or something, that they can activate every 3 minutes, where they grow in strength and size.  so it doesn't look like they are always chopping the martians in the knee caps.

there's also the problem that the martians in these examples are not in their metal armor.  martians wear metal armor.  jupiterians have natural armor.

[undo11]

The editor for the origional UNREAL TOURNAMENT I believe is long before Direct-X 9...this was origionally designed to run on OPEN-GL, GLIDE, & Direct X. This was right around the time 3d-FX cards were dominant. Your current laptop should be able to to run MULTIPLE instances of this. If you are working off a laptop with Intel based graphics this will be the issue as it does not perform well. Even still running this in direct-x should take next to no load on todays PC's as the poly counts are low and the video cards are generations newer. I can't speak for the programming side as I am mostly familiar with software and hardware and not a lot of programming.

errrm, the unreal dev kit is direct x10 tho.  can we even use/buy the original unreal tournament editor and wouldn't there be some problems trying to get it to render planets?

[undo11]

since we have new people reading/responding to the game concept, might as well give an over view of two more functions. 

"Give Me the Options" concept, for new players.
the first one is for using skills/talents/imagines
and the second one is for learning how to compare armor pieces and choosing upgraded versions from inventory.