[MUD-Dev] Re: The Future of MMOGs... what\'s next?

[Valerio Santinelli]

From: "David H. Loeser Jr." <daklozar at insightbb.com>
> From: Sean Kelly

>> I was kind of hoping BioWare would put up an official player
>> vault to facilitate this...  along with a few web boards
>> specifically for organizing games, helping server owners
>> interact, etc.  Still, I think NWN has a fantastic chance of
>> becoming the game UO could have been.  Better late than never.

> Am I missing something here? I mean NWN is not massive; I think
> there is a max player count of 64. NWN is not persistent - as UO
> is.  How, then, can NWN be the game that UW could have been?
> Don't misconstrue my questions as being sarcastic... I really want
> to know what you are comparing between the two games.

NWN can be massive. The limit on 64 players is not fixed. You can
bring it up to more players. It all depends on how much CPU power
you've got. And you can link together more servers to build a
shard-alike cluster.  NWN is semi-persistant. At the moment all the
changes to your world are saved in a savegame that you can import in
your original module before restarting the server in order to have
them applied. Characters can be saved on a server's vault.

The only problem about making it a fully persistant game is that
variables tied to characters, that are used to track quests
completion and similar thing, are not saved with the characters
themselves. I guess Bioware is going to release a patch fo this
behaviour.

Now, if you've seen the toolset released by Bioware, you can agree
with me that creating a world with that tool is really easy. I am
building a persistant world for NWN myself and I can make new areas
in a matter of minutes. Adding content is easy and can be done in
whatever fashion you like. I even got to spend 20 or 30 minutes
creating a single item and tweaking all its values to my liking. But
you can also drop standard items into your world with a single click
and build such content in 5 minutes. It all depends to you, the
server builder. And I see great power in that toolset.

You also get NWScript, which is a scripting language with syntax
similar to C. And you can do virtually everyhing with it.

I've had a look at the original scripts from Bioware. You can see
that all the code related to how combat works, how XP are assigned,
how spells affect other creatures, and more, are all done with
NWScript. This means that you can completely rewrite the rules of
your game. NWN holds great power. I agree it's the next step after
UO, but not only UO. It's the next step of what UO emulators have
done till now. Bring server-building capabilities to the masses.

--
c'ya!

Valerio Santinelli
tanis at mediacom.it
HateSeed Gaming Magazine http://www.hateseed.com/
My Lab http://tanis.hateseed.com/
In Flames Italia http://www.inflames.it/


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