[MUD-Dev] Persistent worlds in NWN (was: Retention without Addiction?)

[shren]

On Wed, 11 Dec 2002, Matthew Dobervich wrote:
> Valrio Santinelli wrote:
 
>> NWN is much like a graphical MUD :)
 
>> You can customize it a lot. But it lacks a decent PW support but
>> a lot of people (including myself) are making more and more tools
>> available to manage PWs.

> I'm glad to see a NWN Persistent World developer use this list as
> a source of wisdom for their designs, I was just competing to a
> friend the other day that I was surprised I hadn't seen any NWN PW
> developers pop in here.

If I'm anything other than a layman, I'm a NWN PW developer.  I
recently signed up to develop the Spine of the World for the overly,
overly ambitious ALFA project.  I'm not sure if I'm going to do it
long term, but it's interesting to see inside the project.

I know there's at least one lurker from an NWN PW project.  (Hi,
Sancus!)

> I also think the state of Persistent Worlds in NWN might be of a
> lot of interest to members of this list as they arguably have a
> larger audience than text MUDs do, due to their graphic nature,
> and share the same kind of open source ethic I see in text mud
> development.
 
> Not to say all NWN PW are open source, but one of the most popular
> is, and even worlds that aren't open source use open source game
> mechanics in their world (The Ambrosia trade skill system, or the
> HCR rule set being two of the main examples)

You left out the best bit - the NESS spawn system, which is unique
in that it replaces core script methods with methods that are
superior in the minds of many developers, especially PW developers.
It's a very impressive piece of work in it's flexibility.

> It's interesting to me to see the developers of these worlds run
> into the same problems faced by mud and MMORPG developers over and
> over.  An early game so challenging players leave, rampant
> inflation, etc, etc.  That being said, I'm also taken aback at how
> polished some of these worlds are considering NWN launched 6
> months ago, and as a result of this they've all had very short
> development periods.

Have you worked with the world layout engine for NWN?  It's a marvel
of creation - you can lay out terrain and encounters incredibly
quickly.  There's a sacrifice in flexibility compared to a MMORPG,
but it's an acceptable one if you're willing to design within it and
not pine about the things you wish you could do.

> It will be interesting to see how these worlds grow and mature.  I
> have a feeling the speed of game world evolution will continue to
> outpace commercial MMORPGs, it is yet to be seen if they overtake
> commercial games in time.

I very much doubt it - or, rather, if a modular game is going to
outpace commercial MMORPG development, it isn't going to be NWN in
it's current form.  That database backend would be a good step, and
it would be doubly good if we could put characters in it and not
have to do SAMBA hacks to span the character vault across multiple
servers.

If it does happen, however, NWN is a very important step just
because people are learning what it takes to do these kinds of
things.


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