PlaneShift
Gameplay => General Discussion => Topic started by: zanzibar on March 12, 2006, 11:57:20 am
-
Hundreds of maps and zones - perhaps thousands - are planned.
I like running into other people, having discussions, travelling with others, engaging in group activities. I even enjoy the conflicts that happen between people as long as they\'re colourful and in character.
When the planeshift world is 100 times as big, or 200 times, or 500 times - what will the PS community be like? How many population centres like Hydlaa will there be? What proportion of the PS world will be like the laanx dungeon - a place where you wouldn\'t expect to run into other people?
I guess my concern is that once the PS world is huge and once it starts to meet its potential, will it still feel like a multiplayer game.... will we run into other players more often or less often, how will the community dynamic be affected? What advantages are there to things being smaller and closer together? Does the PS world as it exist now represent a single unit, and will the PS world later on consist of many such units acting independantly? Or will it be expanding out from Hydlaa, with everyone starting in Hydlaa or Oja and then travelling out from there?
-
An interesting question and additionally how many players will it take to fill it?
And seeing as PS is firstly RP orientated will it end up with the rpers congregating in certain areas while the players that just want to rathunt and level take over the rest of the world?
-
First off I must say that I don\'t believe the expansion will ever stop. As you know, there isn\'t a planned \"stop\" date where the developers will step away from their giant sand castle with a content grin only to walk away forever, never to add another grain. Planeshift will always be expanding. Bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. Untill we all forget about it. :P
That being said I can\'t see a problem with the idea. To bring an answer to your proposed question which I believe went something like this, \"If the world is just too big, won\'t the community get stretched out too far?\" But to that, all I have to say is: Look outside your window. Right now.
We live in a huge world. Even when we overlook the infinate reaches of space, the area located on Earth is just staggering. There is no possible way of traveling to every inch of it. Yet, even though we have not met every single solitary person, nor have we even met a great percentage of them, we still have rich and interesting lives.
Planeshift will indeed be massive one day. So massive, it may even begin to rival our own world in stature. When that happens, I don\'t think our community will have taken a change for the worse. It will have taken a major change, one so radically different from the one we exist in now, that we will hardly recognize it. But, I think this change is a great one.
So for better or perhaps in some others\' views for worse, planeshift will get bigger. So just hang on and enjoy the ride. :)
-
I\'m sure that new cities and other places will be added as more and more people come along, but it wouldn\'t be smart to make a huge world if there aren\'t enough people. Along side that, the Death Realm will be a REALM, so that will help people get a general idea of where you are with 2 letters. LR or DR.
-
I\'d say anything between 9 and 12 should see it fine.
Though you must remember to take into account things like the population density of dogs, and the french (ou est le ...)
Basically, I am asking are cats and badgers naturally enemies like Mr T and Chuck Norris are?
Should I leave the creatures to fight next time and not interfere?
-
Well the land of the azure sun can only be so big, its limited to size due to the settings and the 8 levels. But the world outside of it will be infinite. :) But usally online games expand more land when more people play.
-
As the world gets bigger, we\'ll need to add more ways to get around. Wagons, flying stuffs, teleporting, etc. And, we should expand as we get more people, such that as things get crowded a new map is available. If the world gets too big, too fast, yes that\'s be a problem. However, I don\'t think it\'ll be an issue we\'ll have to worry about too much.
-
Along side that, How big space wise will this game be when it is 100 or more maps big?
There are things you have to consider in things like this.
What will you need to play it, what will become of such a game? ]
Will it be too big for itself and die, or thrive on its enormouseness?
-
Im guessing, from all i have read and heard, we will have player controlled kingdoms. And thats when we have alot of players :3.
-
Originally posted by miadon
Well the land of the azure sun can only be so big, its limited to size due to the settings and the 8 levels. But the world outside of it will be infinite. :) But usally online games expand more land when more people play.
Well, there are the levels of the cavern, but the stone labyrinths stretch outside the cavern for a very long ways. And there are possibly other caverns to be found as well.
-
Well indeed with the octarch discusion I was thinking of how large the world would actually get (I guess the same as Zanzibar).
If the community would be the same size this might mean that we get that some areasaren\'t visited much.
Right now only enki\'s spawn in Akkaio for example and thankfully this is a popular race but otherwise this would be a pretty dead area for a city.
Something the devs will have to take into account I guess when expanding.
But having the spawnpoints more spread so not just one race spawns outside Hydlaa might help it being founf more normal to have a party somewhere else then Hydlaa.
-
I\'m all for PS being MASSIVE. I\'m talking you wander for an hour and a half and never see the same landmark twice. Like Microsoft or Siberia huge.
I just have one caveat on that. A compass!!! Don\'t need a map or anything, but without a sun (kinda hard to have inside a stalactite), it is impossible to figure out which way you are going if you are off wandering in unknown territory. Not only that, a compass is also pretty good when NPC\'s give you directions to go somewhere.
-
Heck, who knows? It might get soo big that it spans multiple servers. You know, like \"Entering second level. loading...\" then you continue on your way. Should help lag, right?
*edit*
Well, you don\'t have a sun, but you have that big, glowing crystal in the middle of the cave.
-
Guess it\'s good to have alot\'a maps. Just thin of this. When the world had just gone through the plague and the peoples of Europe were decimated to 2/3\'s the humans living there would pack into masses, hiding from the plague[Pretty stupid, but that\'s the way the cookie crumbles] and large areas would be left out. In a matter of generations people would forget of big land areas which where they once resided[Krans, caves. Dwarves do not remember either.]
If all the Races are gathered in Hydlaa from, say, The Black Army[Read the Dragon Council\'s history] vast areas would be left, and as we hav elived in this city for more then a century, wouldn\'t you think what happened to those poor people in Europe would happen to us?
Now we only need NPC\'s like hermits, lone hunters, fishy merchants in a dark shire. That\'s what we need, they world is full of magical events, you just need to EXPLORE:)
-
Originally posted by Baldur
Guess it\'s good to have alot\'a maps. Just thin of this. When the world had just gone through the plague and the peoples of Europe were decimated to 2/3\'s the humans living there would pack into masses, hiding from the plague[Pretty stupid, but that\'s the way the cookie crumbles] and large areas would be left out. In a matter of generations people would forget of big land areas which where they once resided[Krans, caves. Dwarves do not remember either.]
If all the Races are gathered in Hydlaa from, say, The Black Army[Read the Dragon Council\'s history] vast areas would be left, and as we hav elived in this city for more then a century, wouldn\'t you think what happened to those poor people in Europe would happen to us?
Now we only need NPC\'s like hermits, lone hunters, fishy merchants in a dark shire. That\'s what we need, they world is full of magical events, you just need to EXPLORE:)
The history that the DC wrote for themselves is not \"cannon\", for lack of a better word. I know what you\'re saying though... but there is archetecture planned for each of the different races, so I would imagine that they\'d each have their own city as well.
-
Originally posted by Mentak
Im guessing, from all i have read and heard, we will have player controlled kingdoms. And thats when we have alot of players :3.
maybe you need to catch up on recent events a little
-
Well look at the size of WoW. It\'s huge and you always see people running around... I see Planeshift expanding proportionally with the active in-game population.
-
Well I hope so although the question ofcourse would be if we will have enough serverspace and bandwith so it will still beplayable at that time ;)
-
Heck if the dev's can make a game good enough to hold my attention for that long I'd sell my internal organs :'( to get more servers :lol:
-
I'm sure that we'll have about two or three servers before we really need to concern ourselves with things like teleportation between kingdoms.
Look at it this way, guys. At least we've already passed the amount of players on Dark Age of Camelot's main PvP server. ;)
-
I thought they weren't going to split up servers and junk...oh well. :-\
-
The way it was explained to me, when that time comes, multiple servers will be used to load balance, but you will conect to the same world, and interact with everyone and everything no matter wich physical server is actually handling your character. Multiple physical servers to load balance, one logical server to play on. Its like the oposite of spliting up a physical hard drive into multiple logical drives or for easier thinking, not like WoW's Setup.
-
The way it was explained to me, when that time comes, multiple servers will be used to load balance, but you will conect to the same world, and interact with everyone and everything no matter wich physical server is actually handling your character. Multiple physical servers to load balance, one logical server to play on. Its like the oposite of spliting up a physical hard drive into multiple logical drives or for easier thinking, not like WoW's Setup.
So its like one big striped RAID? :P
-
Took awhile but I found the old discussion we were having about it.
Should be good to start here and read through the few posts made on the subject.
http://hydlaa.com/smf/index.php?topic=22559.msg247839#msg247839
-
So its like one big striped RAID? :P
Its more like a proper Enterprise solution
1 Server for the database.
additional servers to handle the Business Logic..
you could easily expand the number of Online players using this model..
they may even choose to host different regions on different servers.. this would be the cheaper option in terms of complexity.
Segregating the regions by server could also mean you could control the amount of people IN one region.. so that you dont get a mass migration of people in one area...
If you had several 1000 people in Hydlaa square for example most peoples GPUs would over heat and explode...
-
Well I figure, that they are going to have to make whatever level we are on at the moment, of the stalctite and then at some very distant point in the future create the large stairs that run round the outside of the thing into the lower/ Higher levels of it. That and the pully systems, flying etc.
And before they even start work on another level they would have to create the internal maps involved in the world. Things like caves, and dungeons and all the rest of it.
Basically it will be a while before we even get to multiple levels as they need to consider the above and create that.
-
At the current rate of expansion, PS will be 1.25 X bigger in about a hundred years.
;)
-
At the current rate of expansion, PS will be 1.25 X bigger in about a hundred years.
;)
Yeah but thats only becuase the number of layers on the server is exactly teaming. Planeshift will expand when the player base starts to fill up the current maps. At the moment we have a smallish player base, not that many people online at one time etc, so Planeshift doesnt need to be expanded world wise.
-
Planeshift will expand when the player base starts to fill up the current maps. At the moment we have a smallish player base, not that many people online at one time etc, so Planeshift doesnt need to be expanded world wise.
Not necessarily :3 Making new maps and areas takes a crapload of time, so if we begin only when the playerbase is already huge, the situation won't be ideal. However, as people tend to average 160-180 in-game at most, it won't be a problem any time soon. Still, areas will be created regardless of how many people there are. These don't influence one another.
-
I don't think planesift will get TO big.. Because remember the makers said there will NEVER be maps... And if planeshift EVER gets as big as you say we WILL need maps.
-
Who said that there will never be maps, at all? We meant that we won't have automatic maps, but did you forget the Cartography skill? :}
-
to answer zanzibar's question.
if it takes 3 months of 24/7 game time to run across it is too big.
but it terms of number of players. i don't think there really is a too big. as in rl, there a groups of people you interact with daily, reguraly, occastionaly, never. as ps grows it will be the same thing. you do not have to interact with everybody.
-
It's never too big. People will congregate where the action is, no matter how big the map is. But having the freedom to wander is very cool.
-
It's never too big. People will congregate where the action is, no matter how big the map is. But having the freedom to wander is very cool.
That's very true. The remedy? Lots of places where the action is, or things to do all over (such as wilderness areas for spawning, crafting areas in each city, farms, etc.) Give incentives for people to be in that small village instead of in Hydlaa. Clumping has a time and place, but having a spread-out population is a good thing.
-
I played SWG from beta through the initial release (it disappointed most beta testers that they released it so early) for a while, and talk about enormous, that MMORPG is gigantic--10+ planets that were several hundred square kilometers apiece. You can walk around for days if you feel like it. The population did spread out in that case, for a number of reasons, but it was pretty fascinating to wander through, and there were still centers of population to be found on each planet. Another gigantic MMORG is WWIIOnline, which is like, a 2/3 scale mockup of western Europe, and some have tried to walk the entire distance, but nobody has succeeded in one 'life' that I know of. Truly enormous, but the playerbase keeps up the intensity by fighting where...the fighting is. Enormous MMORPG playing fields are totally doable, and no hindrance to roleplaying, powerleveling, or anything else you want to do. Ideally, I think they should expand Planeshift in perpetuity, whenever they get the resources to do so. Eventually, It seems like money will probably become the issue limiting size, however, as all those servers have to add up, no matter how big the devs hearts are.
-
That's precisely how I would like to envision PS in the future :} It'll be comprised not just of Yliakum, but whole other worlds to "planeshift" to. That sense of "Wow! Where does it end?" is absolutely delicious.
-
That'd be nice. It'd give more of a feel to the history. Like we'd be able to see where the Diaboli came from, and we could run around on Earth where humans came from. And go to wherever the other races were born in. =P
-
I think that you tend to find people at differing levels of experience and knowledge in different parts of the world. This is think, at least to a degree, can lead to vast distance between those that know something enough to help someone, and those that are in essence the blind the leading the blind.
-
Well the feel with PS right now is pretty good with the number of people. You tend to see other people quite a lot and that should be the case, but atm 150 people is about the most peoplle I have seen online at the same time. Other games this is 10 time that and then a bigger world would definately be nececary.
The idea of mutible world I don't know we have a whole plane to explore first and ofcourse then there are other planes. Think thats enough expansion if the wilderness is a sign of things to come.
-
i want to see a huge world, where expeditions will lierarelly takes days ( or at least hours ), and there will always be somewhere new to explore. similar to game like anarchy online, project entropia, and guildwars etc, but without the teleports ;)
has anyone considered the technical aspects ? e.g. the terrain engine and file sizes
-
to answer zanzibar's question.
if it takes 3 months of 24/7 game time to run across it is too big.
but it terms of number of players. i don't think there really is a too big. as in rl, there a groups of people you interact with daily, reguraly, occastionaly, never. as ps grows it will be the same thing. you do not have to interact with everybody.
ptetosaurs *cough* teleportation *cough*
-
Well technical side might be an issue aswell I guess seeing I believe the devs have chosen for a mapstyle that makes it so you can adapt more but it also takes up more room that way. (no expert on it thought) But I think thats for the devs to look at when the time comes ;)
Better to look here at what would be ideal and try to work to that. Ideally I think the world should be bigger then it is now but unless there are also a lot more people not that much bigger so you keep meeting people while just walking around. Ofcourse as planeshift becomes more mature I am hoping the number of people will increase even more so that new maps will also be populate with players.