[MUD-Dev2] Meaningful Conseqences (was: Comparing Worlds)

[John Arras]

On Wed, Dec 2, 2009 at 4:31 PM, Eric Lee <saintgimp at hotmail.com> wrote:

> Christopher Lloyd wrote:
> >
> The only answer I can see is that as a successful roleplaying game where
> there is such a big world to explore, it's specifically designed NOT to
> have
> other people in, because they would mess it up. It's a truly consistant
> world - When you die, you're dead. The trainers and shopkeepers aren't
> uber-powerful NPCs who will rip off your own legs and beat you with them if
> you try to attack them. They can be befriended, annoyed, robbed, killed and
> then later avenged by their neighbours. Players love that level of
> "realism", but it would be instantly lost if the shopkeepers respawned
> every
> hours. Similarly, I'd soon tire of the game if the shopkeepers or quest
> givers that I used always got killed by someone just when I needed them.
> >
>
> I had the same thought about Oblivion - "Man, this is a great world but I'm
> lonely.  I wish this were an MMO!"  Of course the game as designed would be
> broken as an MMO because it allows way too much permanent altering of the
> environment.
>
> Current (large-scale) MMOs can't allow permanent altering of the
> environment
> because people would instantly and thoroughly trash the environment,
> ruining
> it for everyone else.  Why is that?  Because people are jerks . . . um, I
> mean, because there are no meaningful consequences for being anti-social,
> or
> at least no meaningful consequences that scale to thousands of mainstream
> players.  Some games have tried to solve that problem (Ultima Online comes
> to mind) with only limited success.
>
Players will try to trash things, so to work in an MMO, you will need to
make the
world altering actions difficult to achieve or you would need to make the
actions consume resources that the players can't have in unlimited amounts.

So, killing a wolf doesn't mean no more wolves appear at a location. It
might mean an
underlying wolf population in some simulation is lowered by 1, but it will
take
a while to actually make an area barren.

Maybe taking over a village or a city doesn't mean killing the NPCs, but
instead
it might require some more formal battle, such as a port battle in PotBS.

Are there NPC forces working to shape the world outside of what players are
doing?
Can players influence these NPC forces? Can the NPC forces hire players to
perform quests or missions for them based on their goals? So maybe you the
player don't get to decide to sack a city. Perhaps you are well liked by a
faction of NPCs and you might influence them to sack a city and you might
help,
but you don't get to unilaterally change the world because you and your 99
other
buddies are bored at 3am.

Many of the points of interest you wish to allow to be dynamic have to be
generated
within your world on a higher level than you could achieve by hand so that
you could
have enough of them to make taking over things seem meaningful. This need
for
such a large amount of content is why I think true storytelling or
meaningful actions
will only occur within (mostly) procedurally generated worlds. People work
with
terrain generation and plant generation and virtual ecologies all the time.
There is
a lot of procedural content in games.

Are there seasons? Do plants grow? Can you plant new trees? If you cut down
a tree will
a new one grow there slowly? Could you set it up so the more you cut down
trees of a certain
type in a certain area, the longer it takes for them to return? Could you
use magic to
make the trees grow faster? Can you allow changes without allowing a single
character action
to dramatically change the world?

How would you generate a village? Could you create a template for a village
and then instantiate
it in an interesting way depending on where it is and who owns it and how
powerful it is?

How and where would you generate roads? How could you show a road being
built through a
hill? If you can do enough content streaming, perhaps you could deform the
terrain and
place new textures as the road is built. You could plow into high areas, and
fill in low areas,
and perhaps drop a bridge (prebuilt with the terrain morphed to fit it at
each end) over really
low areas. You could maybe show this road building process in stages so
every day the road
moves forward X feet. You could show a bunch of workers with shovels and
pickaxes at the end
of the currently built road with supplies sitting there. You would have to
define what this
work camp looks like, then move it forward as necessary.

If you're really into this, you might have your artists create the bridge or
building using a
number of meshes, each one representing a large beam or piece of the object.
Write
code to take a model like that and for each mesh, find the meshes below it,
perhaps by
moving the mesh down slightly and checking for intersections with other
meshes. Use
this to create a partial ordering of the objects used to construct the
bridge or building by
saying that an object depends on everything that is "below" it.

Then, take that ordering and create a linear ordering and if you want to
display something
being X percent built, only display the first X percent of the meshes in
your ordering, with
some of the other "next" meshes on the ground nearby showing the next phases
of
construction. The art is heavier, but there shouldn't be that many of these
buildings
being built and they aren't doing complex character vertex animations.

This kind of procedural art could allow you to show a village or city being
built. It also requires
sending data about what kind of building is at that location and
updating collisions and
pathfinding and so forth, but it might be worth it and things like this will
be necessary
to have a really dynamic world with meaningful interactions.

This is something I've been interested in for a long time, but I think it
will require thinking
about other things that can be dynamic other than whether or not an NPC was
killed.
I believe the things that can be changed by players will have to be set up
so they can't
casually change huge pieces of the world.

John