Just a few ideas for the engine

[Nigelenki]

As I understand it, part of the Planeshift project is to assure a reusable engine for other MMORPGs to stick their datafiles to.  I\'ve thought about some things I would do with such an engine if I had the skills, and came up with a few thoughts on what people could want out of MMORPGs.  First I\'ll quote the IRC conversation on this.  A recapitulation follows, so skip if you want.  I don\'t know if this idea has been covered yet, but I\'ll post just to make sure.

You know what would be really cool though?
Someone should post these topics
...
If the engine were flexible enough that you could masquerade an MMORPG as a real RPG
define \"real rpg\" in relation to an MMORPG
Planeshift\'s engine is made to be reusable
Real . . . sorry
Traditional RPG
Such as the type with a strong story for the backbone
Yes, that would be interesting
Think about having a Planeshift-type game that mimics Final Fantasy 7, in its entirity.
What\'s the first problem you run into?
Besides the menu based thing; I don\'t care about battle interface or anything.
Simple.
It\'s a massive world, that multiple people can play in, correct?
Once someone clears out an event, you can\'t go back to it.
thats what I think
Or, it could be something someone needs done more than once
What if each player\'s saved data allowed him to take a few players to his world as a party?  Not exactly his world, but his event scheme; once he entered an area that had specific events tuned around it that differed from the events that were set to trigger for others, he would vanish off other players\' screens
And the guy mightgo to the same person
Make a thread on Planeshift forums
Quote this conversation
i.e. if I follow you into the shinra mansion basement (back to FF7) and I\'m not in your party, BUT you\'ve seen sephiroph and I haven\'t, I see sephiroph, but you\'re in a different copy of the room, without me OR the event or anything else I do.
What happens?  Each player can play through the storyline at his own pace, independant of other players and the rest of the world, but still interact with them
thats a weird way of doing it
POst it, it\'s interesting
This is of course to my knowledge not a goal of the Planeshift project for THEIR game, but they DO to my knowledge want their engine to be reusable
um.  1) Where\'s the forums; 2) Where do I sign up; 3) Do I have to get flamed again?  :/
www.planeshift3d.com/wbboard/main.php
sign up there
thanks.
rofl
humm , for me the whole concept is uselless
--CUT---
i don t like the idee of having the same event played 2 times
thats you
not twice for one person
it s necessarry , cause it s too  difficult  to make it an other way , but that s all
unless he\'s in the party owned by a person who hasn\'t seen it yet.
like I said, massively multiplayer traditional rpg
i.e. Final Fantasy 10, but for multiple players.
wow
It\'s a story, but you interact with other players.
My threads read weird
where do I put this?
I have the best ideas when I\'m tired, but I\'m the worst at expressing them
general discussion?


I\'ll try to explain this clearly, but I\'m bad at this, so bear with me.

In traditional RPGs, you generally have a storyline-- something taken from a japanese novel a lot of the time-- wrapped inside a bunch of NPCs and a few PCs, some weapons and armor, experience points, a bunch of monsters, towns, shops, and menu based battles.  Action RPGs have action type battles but are essentially the same.

In a Massively Multiplayer Online RPG, you generally don\'t have this.  Even if you tried, in general it\'d be either cyclical and thus redundant; or you\'d have to play 24/7 to keep up with the story, and you\'d miss what other players clear out.

There is a way to do this quite well.  If the engine were capable of marking off specific areas -- whole rooms or segments of rooms -- and doing a sort of copy-on-write of the blank room whena player has a different set-up -- say, an event difference because there\'s an event there for him but not for the rest of the players around -- then he would vanish from the other players\' world and appear in his own copy of that segment to face the event.  In essence, they\'d see him just vanish if it\'s a segment of a larger room; or he\'d be gone if they followed, if it\'s another room.

The individual player thusly has to save his game occasionally, as in a normal RPG, for this idea to work.  He would also be able to take other players with him by becoming a party leader and having them join his party.  The ultimate flexibility would be achieved by allowing players which must face the exact same event to join parties as joint party leaders and both reap the same benefits AND clear the event in their game.

This would mean that games similar to Final Fantasy 7 or Dragon Warrior 7 could be transparently multiplayer.  It would also mean that those types of games would be open-ended and would grow as additional storyline and events are added on.

One other thing would be to extend the functionality of the engine to even allow such things as menu-based battles.  I don\'t mean by coding in a specific menu-based system, but by allowing the scripting/bytecode and maybe even plug-in elements to define their own battle control, thus allowing TBB (Turn Based Battle), ATB (Active Time Battle), and CTB (Calculated Time Battle) and more untold types of battle schemes.

This sort of world manipulation would have to be coded into the core of the engine, or as a plug-in extension to the engine if you could add the proper hooks.  Still, it would be useful for the engine\'s reusability factor.  I don\'t know if this would be a goal for 1.0, but I would say that if you\'re going to do it, at least set it as a goal for 2.0 or earlier.  I\'m aware of this project\'s game server, and so I\'m guessing that the 1.0 release will be ready for the project\'s game; while future releases would be feature enhancements.  Of course, tihs is just a guess, but it makes logical sense to me.


--Nigel (aka Bluefox)

[Xalthar]

Originally posted by Nigelenki
In traditional RPGs, you generally have a storyline-- something taken from a japanese novel a lot of the time--

ummm... what??? If you are referring to those ( I loathe to call them rpg) FF games, I\'d really like to know why you say most of the time...

As to an event occuring in lots of different zones, I think that would turn out to be rather confusing, but since I haven\'t really any idea of how you\'d make this work, I don\'t know what to think...

[Wedge]

You all clearly play way too many console RPGs, and this has nothing to do with Planeshift\'s \"engine\".  Most console RPG\'s are not in fact \"real\" RPGs, because they have no true Role Playing aspects to speak of.  I play and love plenty of them, but they are not real Role Playing games.  RWG is what they should be called.

Ultimately what you are talking about would amount to using the technique called \"instancing\"... aside from that blathering about stealing the FF/DW combat system (go play FF XI).  Blizzard\'s Warcraft MMO game is going to use this for it\'s dungeon exploring.  I\'ve said before it may be interesting to use this for lengthy quests so you can use more detailed and intereseting scripted events and plot elements into them.  However as a precept for an entire on-line game, it all but defeats the purpose of it being on-line.  You have all these people playing the game so they create the story, that\'s the ultimate goal of an MMORPG.

[Vengeance]

Dungeon instancing is something getting stuck into MMORPGs recently because they are trying to cut down on downtime of players, in an attempt to allow the casual gamer to get more done quicker.  I think dungeon instancing crosses the line and is not realistic enough, though.  We want our game to be very immersive, in the sense that we want our players thinking about their characters *living* in this world, not as a game to pick up for 30 mins at a time with constant action, necessarily, like a console game.  Part of this immersion feeling comes from the world being as self-consistent as humanly possible, and instancing doesn\'t fit that goal.

- Venge

[Nigelenki]

Vengence:  I\'m not talking about your game, I\'m talking about re-use of the engine itself.  Other people may want to use the engine to make THEIR games, and if I understand the project correctly, part of the goal is to make an open-source MMORPG engine for reuse by others.  And don\'t bother trying to argue that \"If others want that feature, they can code it themselves,\" because you could have just stopped at Crystalspace if you were going for that.  Besides, who wants 40 proprietary hacks on an engine floating around?  Plugins, maybe; proprietary recodings, no.

Wedge:  Stop whining about my gaming habits.  It was a post about possible features in an engine, not a post about who\'s RPG had the biggest dick.

Xalthar:  I thought I explained it quite clearly.  What would I need to clarify?  It was an idea anyway, but ideas need clear communication to be evaluated properly at all.

[Vengeance]

I am not against other games using the PS engine and adding dungeon instancing.  Hopefully it will happen.

[roguewolftamer]

what i want to see in an MMORPG or in any RPGs is alot of enviromental interation, such as having a spell to make the weather change to something more suitable and to get rid of it (for another player) u would have to dispell it before u can change the weather again

or such as red faction\'s engine where u can blow gigantic holes in the walls and it\'d stay there

and there was another engine i think its called the ghoul engine, but basicly if u shot someone in the leg it\'d fly off or something

i\'d like to see something like this in the game

basicly u\'d lose your legs and had to crawl back to a healer, he\'d cast a spell and in a certain time ur legs grow back (such as a minute, more or less) including any non essential body part

now to top this post off, what i want to see in the game mainly is the ability to combine spells, through other ppl or by 1 handed spells, 1 handed spells would basicly be the weaker spells, most others would take 2 hands and require more then 1 person to combine spells

examples are like 1 person using his 2 hands to combine 2 spells to make a spell thats stronger and is different from both spells :: or such as 3+ ppl add either 1 or 2 1H spells or 1 2H spell to make a strong enough spell to take down a monster much higher lvl then each of them (reducing the exp alittle of course)

[Bigfoot]

If the engine were flexible enough that you could masquerade an MMORPG as a real RPG

guess youve never realy played a \"real\" RPG in the traditional sense. Ie one not involveing an electronic personal computer.

Real RPG\'s are currently an impossablity no matter how much a developer will harp on about its realness... give it time though and significant advance ments in computer and network technologies, and im sure one will eventualy be made.

No computer \"rpg\" allows you to roleplay... especialy mmorpgs (dont let the online multiplayer chat aspect fool you). All Computer RPG\'s confine a player to a box through the game systems, rigid class systems and branching dialogue systems etc. MMORPGs confine a player by placeing them within a \"job\", within an arena \"the game world\"... this could be removed by removeing all systems and only leaveing chat, however all the fun goes out the window.

Where as in a PnP true roleplaying game the environment and actions are made up within the players mind and kept in track by the DM  (but not limited in anyway, even by the game system which can be forgotten or put aside and tweaked adhok when needed for a bit of free form adlibing)  this lack of boxing doesnt detract from the fun within this instance but instead inhances it, and makes for some rather memorable moments...

Unfortunately in a computer RPG this just cant happen. Remove the limiting environment/systems/boxing and you get the opposite of the PnP rpg... no fun.

[ksfireball]

Hmmm, after playing lots of RPG\'s on old systems, ive decited RPG stands for Roll Playing Game instead of Role Playing Game, thats what I always though they stood for, every game where you take the role of a character is a Role Playing Game, while most of the clasic RPG\'s just had the rolling of random numbers define them as RPG\'s.

Man for my first post I sure didn\'t make alot of sence, heh aw well.

[roguewolftamer]

i got it, though it\'s best to make a better point such as

after playin enough of the old RPG\'s they should be called Roll playing games instead cause all its made up of is random rolls that determine everything, from damage, to what u get on a level (unless preset), and even when u hit the monster

thats a good point right there, a real RPG would be cool, if they could make the technology.  if anyone\'s seen jason X, if we had that kinda technogoly we prob could make a \"REAL RPG\"

*curses the current technology and wishes he could be frozen for time to come*