Destruction

[Silvercraft]

I\'m under the impression that planeshift will be an ever changing world, with new citys built, and the like.
SO.......

What about destruction of objects/buildings?  When I set a bomb off next to a small bush or sigh, i expect it to be destroyed.  So far i haven\'t seen any games that have anything like that.

And what about ships?  if they do have seas and ships, and someone casts fireball, will the ship not burn and sink?

I know this sounds a little out there, and dangerous, but think about it.  Am I the only one who thinks anything should be destructable?

[Altharion]

i have thought about this idea before and i like it with rules and an orderly system. It would make being \"evil\" more easy.

but this idea should come after the first job has been established by the least.

[Icefalcon]

So what happens when these evil guys actually do destroy everything?

[Altharion]

for starters they shouldnt be able to destroy everything, there are also guilds, town guard etc to protect the common folk and capture the evil people.

[kamakura]

thats an interesting idea.

but such a thing should not be able to do inside cities or important places.
if someone with bad manners decide to destroy ppl houses or important places in the city? would be a chaos!

[Adeli]

The devs say there isn\'t enough water mass to warrant ships. Acraig said so in another thread, so no burning ships... I think burning Pterosaurs would be a little too much.

[Lardhoc Aewheros]

No way! If an evil guild decided to put an entire city on fire there would be no way to stop them unless a huge amount of blue mages can put out the flames in time. The entire game would be a raging battle to protect the cities from madmen who just sets another building on fire as soon as he returns from the death realm. It doesn\'t make sense! Who wants evil guys berserking at anything nearby?

Also, it would be much more \"time-eating\" for the devs to model buildings as they have to model a ruin for every building.

[Moogie]

Ya, plus you have to keep in mind that not everyone has a monster PC and top-of-the-rage Internet connection required to handle stuff like this.

I consider this much like the other idea about players being able to alter landmass; too many ways to abuse it.

[Seytra]

That\'s right. I\'d have loved to be able to fry / freeze / chop off everything (well, at least plants and crates), though. *sigh*

[Silvercraft]

Ok, i have to agree, it would probably get crazy, so i thought about it a little more.  here\'s what I came up with

1.  I agree with kamakura, there should be no destruct zones, like temples, and certain areas of cities. (who cares if they destroy slums/abandoned buildings.  Forest areas, random huts, shrubs should be destructable.

2.  I don\'t know how hard it is to program, but what if there were NPC firefighters/police in major cities.  Players should also be able to help.  If someone caught hydlaa plaza on fire, i\'m sure players would come help the firefighter npcs put out the blaze.

3.  The MAIN idea i was thinking of is that newbie players would not be able to destruct anything.  Perhaps after a set nubmer of hours online, or a level, or even after a player audit they would be able to destroy.

4.  A destructed object would have a plaqe in it\'s place until a new building is built(read 5).  The plaqe would read the name of who destroyed (or assisted in the destruction of) the building.  If pking is normally off, pking for that player might also be turned on for a while so that players have an insentive not to destroy things that people care about.

5.  CONSTRUCTION.  Players could also build buildings themselves.  I would also say only experienced players could do this.  Either a player could select from severl designs to choose from, or code a building themselves.  In any case, the building position/orientation would be submitted for approval, then integrated into the world if it got approved.

6.  To deal with rubble, some mobs (like packrats) would have the abbility to pick up rubble and either just make it dissappear or move it to some random dump location.  The rubble is the only real place that would take a lot of bandwidth/cpu usage (i think).  If it\'s a problem, the rubble could could just deminish every so often.

What do you guys think of the new ideas?

Silvercraft

[Kiva]

Well actually making places destroyable means you pretty much have to update your map every single time you enter that place, and you would have to update it every time someone punches a hole in a wall, which would mean excessive bandwith usage when there are thousands of people breaking walls because they can.

If you really wish to have something torn down, talk to some GMs and if they decide that you might have a good reason for destroying something, then the game plotline could be pushed a bit in the right direction. But... Uncontrolled destroying of anything in the game is a very, very bad idea. If you wish to just break walls for fun, don\'t play MMORPGs. Play Red Faction.

[Seytra]

But maybe we at could put out / ignite / take away candles, torches and streetlights (well, leave the streetlights in place :] ).

[Silvercraft]

Good point Gronomist.  I\'m looking for something bigger then just running around beating things up, i didn\'t make myself clear.  You\'re right, i\'m too optimistic in thinking that people won\'t do random stupid stuff to everything, maybe I should rather pose a situation which i think it would be cool to see.

Example: A guild/group wishes to build a community for themselves.  The group would be able to go out into the forest and destroy a bunch of trees to form a clearing, apply for houses to be built there, and a wall surrounding it, and maybe small shops as well.

Another:  In order to elude mobs, a player might want to knock over a tree or something and climb up on it, or chop down a tree so that it spans a crevis/waterway.

I know programing all this would be very consuming, but hey, this is a wish list, right?

I wish there was a way that we could have destruction for the constructive purposes, not random useless destruction.  We can dream, right?

I actually really like seytra\'s candle idea.  It annoys me in games when i put a lit torch in my bag and NOTHING happens.

[Zeraph]

Originally posted by Moogie
Ya, plus you have to keep in mind that not everyone has a monster PC and top-of-the-rage Internet connection required to handle stuff like this.

Originally posted by Gronomist
Well actually making places destroyable means you pretty much have to update your map every single time you enter that place, and you would have to update it every time someone punches a hole in a wall, which would mean excessive bandwidth usage when there are thousands of people breaking walls because they can.

What are you talking about it taking up a major amount of bandwidth? the devs were talking about there being custom tattoos & stuff....

As I have herd, CB takes up about 0.1kb/sec. so this shouldn\'t take up a whole lot more, it would be something like server says dent in object #125 @ X,Y,Z & the rest of it is client-side (& it wouldn\'t even be that much info to be sent if it\'s compressed). this wouldn\'t mainly make loading time increase if anything. & since Planeshift will take @ the very least more then a couple of years to get to the point were the devs will be thinking about putting in these sort of things  (I\'m guessing) so by that time we will all have \"fast\" computers (by now a days standards) to do all this stuff.

I just talked with acraig, he said that the he would worry about this is the load time it would take for the client to load all the damage, not exactly the download time... \" I think the big bottle neck would be loading though\"

He said:

well, there are serveral issues for this
1) How to store the data on the server side
2) How/when to send this data to the client
3) How the client treats this
Punch holes in walls?
#2 could be large if we have to send texture names/locations for many locations

This is why holes will be able to be \"repair\"... maybe only a maximum of 100 \"holes in walls\" limit @ any given time could control bandwidth/loading/render time. (keep in mind that \"fast\" computers are getting more affordable every year with them coming out with faster & faster ones, the \"older\" ones become inexpensive.)

Will it get to a point were the devs will not be able to keep up with all the new computer power to come?

actually one of the first thing acraig said to me  \"lets save that for the next version \" so it could be a possibility in the future, just expect these sort of things any time \"soon\" (like CB) in other words, it\'s probably going to be a while...

[Holy Avenger]

I think destruction would be a good idea it would bring out the good and evil in every1. but i agree that every building should not be destroyed too. Destruction would bring more realism in the game. It should be hard to do though so every1 isn\'t just knocking down building to see who can  do it faster