GM Ability: Follow

[zabeal]

Originally posted by SaintNuclear
I don\'t think it\'ll be a good command. It could be achieved in two ways, both of them are bad:
1. Using AI that will \'figure\' it\'s way to follow the player. This will be bad because: A) Alot of programming. B) Alot of testing. C) The only way it\'ll actually work is either if the player being followed is braindead, or if he\'s just walking straight.

Errmm.. and what of all those monsters? Do you think they just stand in one place? If ou are worried about the devs wasting time on following, you haven\'t been reading the CVS updates....

A good way to solve it will be if the GMs will be able to fly. Flying = no obstacles. No obstacles = extremely simple AI, wich isn\'t really needed at all.

Hence teleporting.

I don\'t see a problem with having a GM follow- they\'ve got most of the programing in already, all they would need is some sort of \'ghost\' that the GM\'s could create on demand to stay invisible and follow people.

[rifft]

I don\'t think the follow command would be a bad idea, in reply to the having two options why make a third that renders the previous two obsolete. I think that\'s an overstatement. There will be time where a GM will need to be somewhere and visible and chat with the parties involved. This is pretty standard from my understanding, so the teleport command would always be useful. Invis, well that explaines itself, and is essentially made so you could follow people without them knowing.

As for the follow command, there are many games that implement it for players not just GMs, for example when people group into a party, and one person is leading, then the rest of the party set to auto-follow that player and in that way don\'t get lost (I think FF XI has this).  For a GM, all you would have to do is add a teleport statement and invis statement before engaging auto-follow.

As for the difficulty in coding... Well, I\'m not really an experienced game programmer, but IMHO it would not be that difficult (comperatively speaking), especially if you make it a GM only command that simply *intercepts* the players position coords and places the camera there.  So essentially the GMs client is asking for that players coords to observe him and essentially follow him.

[SaintNuclear]

Originally posted by zabeal
Errmm.. and what of all those monsters? Do you think they just stand in one place?

You compare a player walking around town, in streets, where there are obstacles and stuff, to a monster that walks about in some cave or an open space? An AI to go through town AND follow someone without constantly bumping into things is far from being like an AI to just walk around in a place with hardly any obstacles.

Originally posted by zabeal

A good way to solve it will be if the GMs will be able to fly. Flying = no obstacles. No obstacles = extremely simple AI, wich isn\'t really needed at all.

Hence teleporting.

No, not really.
Teleporting can\'t be instead of following. Even if you won\'t have to load the area every time you teleport, it\'ll be really annoying to follow in this way. By the time you teleported to the player, he\'s not there.
Teleporting is good when you want to get to a player that stays in one place.
Besides that, what I said in the quoted paragraph isn\'t teleporting. Teleporting means that your character disappears from one place, and reappears in another one.
What I suggested is that the GM will follow the player in an obstacle-free area. Not only the AI will be as simple as to just make the character move in the direction of the player, but it will also be uneeded to use an AI to follow the person. Auto-run will be just as good.