[MUD-Dev] [bus][des] Anarchy Online and the free MMORPG...

[olag at ifi.uio.no]

Adam M:

>   This is quite possibly a simple reflection of Damion's "AO
>   Purgatory" theory: that the business side of AO's catastrophic
>   launch and mediocre profitability led to them being unable to
>   afford to implement any new fetures properly or to any standard
>   beyond the most utterly minimal.

Except that Shadowlands (which isn't free) is almost a new game in
itself... Content from level 1 and up.

>   2. Especially don't document the fact that 20% of all keyboard
>   keys if pressed when the chat window hasn't got focus (i.e. 90%
>   of the time) will permanently remove elements of the GUI from
>   the screen, and CAN ONLY be brought back by pressing the exact
>   same key again.

Aye. Of course, those who bought the game would have a big map of
the keyboard layout. It is an interesting dynamic. I suppose many
who just download never read the "manual" or even locate the
keyboard layout map.  That will make a game look rather steep.

On the plus side, that makes the game more social!

Design guideline: Make basic functionality such as orientation,
walking, talking, basic fighting easy to master. The rest can be
left obscure as long as it is EASY TO TALK ABOUT. In other words,
make the interface easy to explain using text. That is one advantage
with text interfaces, they are easy to talk about:

  "how do I quit this game?"
  "hit 'x' then '/camp'"
  "k thxalot!"

Well, this works when you have lots of newbies anyway. Oldbies get
tired of answering.

>   4. Use a slotted/compartmentalised inventory with 48 slots that,
>   when you die, is returned to you in randomized order.

No XP loss... No level loss... No corpse recovery... The only
penalty is a very short timeout. (The messing up of the inventory
can be prevented, but I don't want to spoil your fun ;-D)

I personally am a bit partial about not having penalties, but I
guess that is a very difficult issue to balance out in a
subscription based system.  On the one hand you don't want people to
quit because they lost hours of XP, on the other hand you don't want
them to die carelessly as it makes fighting less exciting (and I
think it leads to some sense of detatchment from your character,
"oh, that thing is going to die again", rather than "oh hell, I need
to flee!!").

>   Doesn't sound too bad. Well. Wait till the player uses attack
>   type D for the first time in his life in the middle of a combat
>   (having used A, B, and C up until now) and watch him cry when it
>   turns out that C will happily cause you to attack YOURSELF if
>   you happened to be targetting yourself.

Wait til you try to both fight with a weapon and control three pets
at the same time, of which one is a charmed monster on a incredibly
short timer, which means it will turn against you as soon as the
time is up.  + a bunch of monsters you try to keep calm. MUDs should
have more of this chaos, not less! :-D

Actually, I like these things. Why should the gameworld prevent you
from making mistakes and slapping yourself in the face? I agree that
targetting yourself by accident should be a bit difficult, and the
F1 toggle (and any toggle based interface) is prone to making
mistakes for the inexperienced, but still... It makes for fun
situations and gives players a good laugh.  Once-in-a-blue-moon
accidents are fun, and they are shared on guild chat for mutual
entertainment: "guess what? I just did ...X... LOL".

But then all regulars on mud-dev should know I dislike narrow
streamlined designs so that can be fully described in a linear
tutorial... bah. I'll shut up. :-P :-)

>   I appreciate the concept of QoS for network packets, but how
>   many bytes, exactly, would it cost to send the animation-UID in
>   the hp packet? (a guess: at most 2).

Why would you do that? You only send the event, right? Anyway, I
think the right approach in general is to start the animation as you
send the action-event to the server and keep the animation running
until you either get a denial or approval event from the
server... This is just about basic feedback. If you are sure that
you will get approval, then why wait for the server?

>   Then, insult to injury, if you zoned into somewhere with lots of
>   people, your frame rate is approx 0.05 to 0.1 frames per second
>   for anything from 20 seconds up to 2 minutes. In one extreme
>   case, it was still only one frame every 2 seconds something like
>   5 minutes after entering the zone.

The funny thing is that I played AO on this mediocre Dell L400
laptop with a really horrible 4MB graphics chipset and slow HD a
couple of years ago with all the settings turned down... So it isn't
that bad...

However, if you up it a bit you'll get massive data/texture loading
from the harddrive when you enter an area. That you have lots of new
players with mismatched random armour, thongs, and sexy clothing in
one big crowd does make a difference :-). Unique avatars are cool!
Try to reduce your settings to the minimum, then increase. (RAM, CPU
and HD speed matters a lot too.)

I guess the graphics driver has been in use too long to really take
advantage of the latest Direct-X generations, but no matter what MMO
you develop you'd probably want to add more and better models and
textures throughout the lifecycle. So how to deal with this? Shaders
can obviously make a difference, but even without shaders, why not
just have some default lowres textures that always stay in memory?
Then use those until you get the right ones loaded? Well, if the
driver allows background loading of textures... Not sure if that is
true for older generations of Direct X?

>     Teleporters dump you into a small subsection of a zone where
>     there are, by definition, many many people, because there are
>     only 20 or so teleporters in the whole planet.

Oh, not so. There are many more exits, several requiring the
expansions.  And a lot more if you include the fixer grid. It
probably seems so because there currently are many new players
around and your gfx settings are far from optimal.

>     My longest recorded waits (5 minutes or more) were walking
>     along the road like this. God forbid you should accidentally
>     step backwards once the process is complete (yes, you do have
>     to wait ANOTHER 5 minutes to go back to where you were :().

You want a better harddrive, hun. :-)

>     again, which could be many megabytes. With AO, a simple beach
>     scene with large cliffs and little detail takes almost a
>     minute to draw the first frame, and you can watch each little
>     chunk of geom being loaded and blitted onto the background.

If you are talking about the start-up area, then it is one of the
more complex scenes in terms of geometry. :-) It came with AI.

> Even though some of that is tinged with a little bitterness too,
> it's worth pointing out that the major fundamental non-battle
> gameplay element of AO doesn't have any flaws at all that I've
> seen (PS: it's not crafting! that's the second biggest non-battle
> gameplay bit :)).

What is it then??? :-)

Anyway, one fun thing I've noticed is that players run the game
under Linux using one of those MS-Windows emulators. In a way that's
kind of fascinating, as it means that the players of hardcore MMOs
will to port your client themselves. Given enough time. (Not sure if
the devs have contributed. If anyone know, please email me.)

Wonder if you could target a emulator during development?

Ola.
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