Feb 28
Quest visualisation
Quests can be difficult to see, with a 3D view. Here, I’m experimenting with setting up quests using variants of buildings and roads. In the foreground, you can see the quest giver. The big black bridges would eventually be arrows, and point the way to the quest destination. In this case, we’re looking at the NPC’s first quest, which involves going to an area and fighting some monsters (that area which is glowing in this screenshot), and then travelling to another location, further in the background. The player can move these destinations around, or place more of them, or insert new ones in the middle of the sequence exactly as he places regular roads.
It’s actually a pretty nice system, I think. It needs a lot of graphical polish, but in terms of a GUI, I think that it basically works. Just need to make it look a bit nicer, and fill out the toolbar on the left so that you can set which quest you want to edit…
2 Quick questions:
1. Will we be able to create events? (Like Santa Claus at christmas showing up and handing out presents and stuff)
2. Will we be able to make the MMORPG Free 2 Play and then with a store where the players can buy stuff, or will it be only subscribtion based MMORPGs?
I guess my worry about a DLC-based payment model is that the game would have to model things that players could buy. I mean, there’d need to be something in the game economy about how much it costs the player to create a new outfit, or how much it costs the player to create a new weapon model or whatever, so that players have to make a decision about whether it’s worth spending the money to make those things in the hopes that the DLC market will purchase them.
Both suggestions are things that I’d really like to support.. I’m just not quite sure how to fit them in yet. I’d probably want to save them for sometime after the initial release.
Alright, thank you for a great answer!
Will there be a maximum limit as to how high a mountain can get? I want to create the Mountain of the Gods with a max-level group quest on it.
In practice, yes, there is a maximum height limit for a mountain. Right now, that limit is 512 meters above sea level. (the region borders you see in the screenshots currently average about 120-150 meters tall)
With that said, it’d be really easy to change that limit; it’s just a trade off between “maximum supported height” versus the amount of RAM needed to store height data.
If those borders are just 120-150 meters tall, then my Mountain of the Gods has no real limits, as I wanted it to be roughly twice(or perhaps three times) their height.
Also, and I know this is a tad unlikely in the near future, will MMORPG Tycoon 2 be moddable at some point?
Well, the whole point of MMORPG Tycoon 2 is to modify and create a game. As to whether MMORPG Tycoon 2 itself will be modifiable.. right now, I’m not planning to intentionally make the game easy to modify. But whatever data files I use to set up the game will all be exposed for end-users to modify, probably in plain text. For example, the “tech tree” which I implemented for v1.1 (and which still exists in v2.0) is entirely defined in a simple text data file, and could easily be modified by anyone. Similarly, the data which defines what objects look like is also all stored in plain text files.
Finally, almost everything in the third game mode is completely defined by data which I’m absolutely relying on being modified by end users. But more details on that when I finally reveal that third game mode, sometime around milestone 2.
Apologies for the lack of posts recently; been going through a busy patch at work, and chose to spend my remaining home time writing code, rather than updating the site. Next time I do an update, it’ll need to be another video. And I’m not really feeling up to creating another video just yet.
This game sounds like its gonna shape up to be quite something! I can imagine when its done its gonna be one of those massive time sink games… Thinking civilisation hehe.
On a more random note… Anyone happen to know a guy called Anthony (tony) griffiths at reading uni? Hes my house mate and was telling me a mate of his told him about this project…. Thought it was quite funny, really is a small world
Anyhow, look forward to the next update
I do occasionally have people tell me about MMORPG Tycoon, not realising that I wrote it. Hasn’t happened as often this last year as it did the year before. Might become more frequent again once #2 comes out.