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

[Valerio Santinelli]

From: "Damion Schubert" <damion at ninjaneering.com>
> From: Valerio Santinelli

>> 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.

> The people attempting to create true persistent worlds with true
> character persistance have run into greater problems with that.
> The one I've heard fairly frequently is problems adding
> substantial changes to the game after the game has been up and
> running without having to do a player wipe.

This is a problem because their starting point was using the
savegame generated by the server and merge differences between the
save game and the modified original world. This is a mess and is
prone to corruption of your entire module.  I have seen a better
method that consists of dumping persistent variables to the
logfile. Next, when you shutdown the server because you want to put
online a newer version of your world, you run a parser on the log
that generates a script to include in the starting event of your
module that recreates the variables associated to each character.
It works even if it's not a solution totally clean. It's surely
better than nothing.

> As a disclaimer, Bioware has said repeatedly that their game was
> not designed to run Persistent Worlds, and that while they didn't
> mind people trying, Bioware wasn't planning on adding features
> that supported PWs over the Tabletop experience (the Tabletop
> experience being, of course, the cornerstone of their game
> design).

Yes. David Gaider, one of the designers at Bioware confirmed
this. Here's an excerpt from a post on Bioware's forums:

An user was asking "What would be very nice, is if we could get any
kind of response from Bioware on this either way. Are they or are
they not working on a way to allow variables to be saved within the
vault character files?"  And this is the answer from David: "We are
not working on this. We may look at it in the future, but there are
no plans for it, currently."

To my ears this sounds like: No, we don't mind about this.

> That being said, the tenacity of the mod community for both UO and
> Quake have taught me that players can find numerous ways around
> these issues, and lord knows there are enough people out on the
> web attempting to solve these issues that I give good odds to
> workarounds to these problems coming, even if Bioware doesn't lift
> a finger to help (and I think they will eventually).

Yes, I am one of those working in order to have a persistant NWN
world online. And I think I can succeed.

--
Valerio Santinelli
One Man Crew Gaming Community (http://www.onemancrew.org)
My Lab (http://tanis.hateseed.com)
HateSeed.com Founder (http://www.hateseed.com)
In Flames Italia Webmaster (http://www.inflames.it)



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