Aug 29
Subscribers
Still ill, but am finally on the mend; coughing up all sorts of improbable things. But as they say, it’s “better out than in”, right?
Anyhow, I’ve been doing a bunch of work the past two days, and finally have something visible to show for it. What you’re looking at here is the guts of the MMORPG Tycoon 1.1 development branch’s player AI model ported into MMORPG Tycoon 2. Each blue cube is a logged-in character. The tall white monolith is representing a MMORPG Tycoon 1.1 “Town”. (The required respawn point and starting point aren’t visible here; they’re actually a lot further over to the right).
Right now, all of these characters are wandering around trying to grind levels, because there are no quests for them to do (as I haven’t converted the “quest” system over yet). Unfortunately, there aren’t any monsters for the players to fight (as I haven’t yet set up developers to place monsters into the world), and so they’re just wandering around at random hoping to find something to do, their subscribers slowly becoming more and more frustrated, until they finally give up and unsubscribe. Every once in a while a few of them will seek some social interaction and return to the town, and feel a little better after sharing their misery with another subscriber. And then they wander off to explore or grind some more.
So right now I have the subscriber system and the “toon” system working, and pathfinding also works, although it’s not yet paying attention to the third dimension (that is, it doesn’t know about walls or cliffs or anything). And as I mentioned before, the system is now set up to allow subscribers to have more than one character — it’s even possible to simulate multiboxing, where a single player controls more than one character at a time, via playing on multiple computers at once.
One big task left to do on this is to add the ability for players to pathfind between regions; right now, each region is entirely self-contained; a character cannot yet move from one region into another.
August 29th, 2009 at 9:54 pm
That is just too cool.
It’s actually going so well I have no suggestions right now.
August 30th, 2009 at 3:59 am
The upgrade from 1.1 to 2 is so much better than I expected. I’m just as excited about the first MMORPG Tycoon 2 release as I am about games coming from multi-million dollar companies.
August 31st, 2009 at 2:30 pm
I’m guessing that without quests and monsters you don’t need to worry to much about players wanting to go from region to region, so problem solved by re-working the requirements! Well done!
Actually, without monsters or quests I think I might be MORE interested in some MMOs, as long as I COULD go from region to region just sightseeing and exploring! :)
I can’t remember whether you have the concept of exploration badges (or rewards) in your current or new model; allowing the developers to reward exploration (either through placing explicit reward points, which might draw some players to them and thus whatever content was near them; or through a general “reward exploration” option for the world, giving a general bonus for those who simply ramble around)…
Glad you are getting better!
September 1st, 2009 at 12:39 am
Looking pretty cool. Out of curiosity, how many subscribers are you Sim-ing?
September 1st, 2009 at 9:36 pm
Caligari: Manually placed exploration points are in the on-paper design, but haven’t yet been coded (they’ll be easy to implement, though; they’re just low on the priority list); they’ll plug straight into the subscriber “exploration” goal, which already exists and works.
JD: When I took that screenshot above, I believe that there were about 20 subscribers to the MMORPG; I took the screenshot very soon after putting the MMORPG online, and I’m not yet simulating the “launch rush” effect, so they were just signing up and logging in every once in a while; quite infrequently.
Right now, I’m using basically the same subscriber system that I used in MMORPG Tycoon 1; that is, every subscriber is fully simulated all the time, whether online or offline (when offline, they run a simple offline simulation to determine whether or not they’ll log in right now). This approach worked in MMORPG Tycoon 1, but it did impose a practical limit to how many subscribers could actually be logged in before you ran into serious performance problems; in the version 1 series, the limit I imposed was 10,000 subscribers. My goal for MMORPG Tycoon 2 is to support up to at least 10,000,000 subscribers, with support for at least 10,000 actually logged in at once. This means I probably won’t be able to fully simulate every one of them, and will have to do something clever, instead. I have ideas about this, but I’m not quite ready to talk about them yet; I’ll put this information into its own post, when I get closer to switching over to the expanded subscriber/toon framework.
September 1st, 2009 at 10:57 pm
Interesting! I had written a similar simulation a while back. 20k was about my ceiling before I started suffering on performance. Of course, it all depends on the depth of that simulation cycle (and frequency).
10 mill, though, heh. You’ll definitely need something clever for offline subscribers so you can dedicate cpu time to the active ones.
September 2nd, 2009 at 3:37 am
You should get sick more often :) Get down with the sickness!