Crafting/Inventing

[Faraj]

(Off topic) First of all, Hello everybody.  I am so new at planeshift, the game is still download in progress.  I did some extensive reading on the forums, however, and I\'ll try to be as concise as possible concerning my ideeas.

(Main) As I understand there are weapong (maybe other items) smithing/crafting skills already implemented in-game.  But what I am talking about is true inventing. For instance: somebody could take gold, and a hammer, and through some simple interface could choose a shape. Than add some other ingredients, making the final object get some stats/qualities from all (in this case the golden fork, or the gold chicken with gemmed eyes) . Or: craft 20 sprokets, combine them together, tie a hammer and 2 knives to them, and you have a pendulum.

Some might consider this a usseles skill, but think about it. It would allow for interesting game developements, such as forgery, and, most importantly, will create a great sense of control over the gameworld and should lead to technological competition and imporvements, as well as benefitting overall economy.

(Off topic) I really am in love with mmorpgs, and from what   I have read so far, I have great expectations from this game. I really like the ease with wich the players can, and do, communicate with the devs. I look forward to playing planeshift.

[taboo8614]

yea i do like that idea of crafting things or being able to make them something like that sounds good

[Rolf Blacksmith]

I think this sounds good to many peiple (it sounds good to me, too), but the problem is, how do you control these items (there\'s nothing worse for a good game than an item or weapon made so powerful that it defeats other almost on its own) and how do you make this item accessible to the rest of the players (the others must obtain a copy of the model to be able to see, take or use it).

These are the problems that came to my mind, but there may well be more to be solved before such a feature can be used for good. Nevertheless, I think it would add a new quality to the game ...

[Faraj]

Originally posted by Rolf Blacksmith
 how do you control these items (there\'s nothing worse for a good game than an item or weapon made so powerful that it defeats other almost on its own)

You are absolutley right.  In my view, the better the quality aimed for an object, the higher the cost and skill req should be, and the chances of the crafting be succesfull should decrease (the devs could implement a craft success curve ). But inventing should not be limited to war items. I think it would be pretty cool to invent a water mill (I understand there are torrents of water, somebody was whishing for a spell to calm torrents), and use it to make semi-automated thinks like wooden doors or whatever (if the game engine allows it, that is).
A godly and apparently imbalanced item invented by a player, could easely made obsolete or at least surpassed by the item invented by another player.

 

how do you make this item accessible to the rest of the players (the others must obtain a copy of the model to be able to see, take or use it).

Why? Why do others need to obtain copies? If I were to invent a weapon for myself, I would custom fit it to my skills and abilities, and this means that for others it wouldnt be so beneficial. Not to mention they could invent custom fit items for themselves. I think that people should concentrate in copying the effects of some item, not the item itself.
This skill, Inventing, would allow people to take up jobs as custom items creators, and be paid for this service by other players.

[Rolf Blacksmith]

@ Faraj:

I think you got me wrong.
For others to see somethink in planeshift it has to be rendered by the Client. So all the clients that are within sighting range of an invented object ahve to obtain a copy of the object\'s data or there will just be a black spot in the landscape.
So you either need to have some autoload within the game which I regard as being quite dangerous (no game/application is absolutely safe, and autoload mechanisms seem to be quite easy to exploit (gathered from all the things I read about bugs and leaks in all sorts of software). I think this is a problem especially because players have the sourcecode of the clients and might try to compromise it with evil code and making it necessary to check all the clients thoroughly, which also can contain bugs anmd leaks, and so on ...
In short: I think objects and items created directly within the client are quite some security hazard.

Another way would be to make something and let the devs or GMs include this into the game, which I regard as rather complicated and not very intuitive.

I apologize for my horrible sentences above, but still hope you understand what I want to express.

[darkw00t]

This is a runescape like skill, it needs to be a whole different thing with smithing instead of bronze sowrd,iron sword, they shouldn\'t have like a \'bronze\' all the time, they should be like:
Falchion
Broad Sword
Pike
Dagger
Big 2h Axes and stuff
Making the crafting and smithing fun as well instead nail it on a anvil

[Faraj]

I see your point Rolf, and I think you are mostly right. Deriving from the subject, I was under the impression that the source code for the game is available as binaries. Maybe not for the client?
 Anyway, after some thinking about it, I realized that there is another, more complex problem with my ideea. Graphics. The game doesn\'t know what I am about to invent, nor does it know it\'s future shape/colour et cetera. The only way I can see as a working solution to this and to the problems you have brought up, would be to include automated scripts (yes you are right!) that would be able to generate completly new graphics and !code! extrapolated from the initial ingredients mixed with prediction/probability algorithms. What I mean by this is that if I succesfuly craft something very difficult, for this ex. a sword, out of high quality items, I will prefer the one with huge damage rather than the one with no damage but too heavy to move.  The code could be communicated in 2 ways, first to any clients in sight range, or better, if not lag-prone, from any client that has made \"eye contact\" to any other clients this initial client encounters. Yes blahblah malitious code blahblah. Could the clients recieving the new code check against the game server at the recieving moment for a signature?
Sounds to AI era? I guess it is, and now that I re-read everything, I guess it would be far to complicated to implement something with so many variables and unknown factors, even with moderate succes.
It was worth a brainstorm over it though.

[Rolf Blacksmith]

Another problem with script-generated items is that they aren\'t really inventive. As computers are dumb, you would have to code an item, elseway you\'d only get what the devs have prepared with scripts anyway. So you\'d either need lots of documentation and some animation/coding experience or a full SDK only for item crafting. You know how much works this means ...