VectorStorm Blog

Riddle me this, Batman.  My original thinking was that I’d up the maximum number of entities in a region to 300 (was previously 100), but would count the number of monsters against that.  So you could have region servers that supported lots and lots of players, but only by lowering the number of monsters.  It was a clever plan, I thought.  Until I saw this, just a few minutes ago.

It’s a randomly generated starting area the game just gave me.  Each region has 200 monsters in it, leaving the same 100 adventurer maximum as was present in version 1.0.  As you can see, the monsters are very, very sparse in the large northwest region, but very dense in the tiny northeast region, just because the game is spreading 200 monsters more or less evenly inside each region, regardless of the region’s size.

Is that reasonable behaviour?  I’m not convinced.

The more I play with this, the more I’m thinking that I don’t actually want to have nearly so many design options that affect the whole world;  that really, what people want to do is affect a single region, or a single group of regions.  So you could have a region with a town, and allocate very few monsters to it so that the region server has space for a lot of players, and then have outlying regions which have lots of monsters, as fewer players will be visiting them.  And while I’m at it, maybe you should be able to create monster types individually for each region, instead of having one “master list” that’s used for the whole world.

But that’s going down the path toward micromanagement, and I really didn’t want to go there, initially.  But maybe that’s the natural directon for this type of game to move into.

New in 1.0.15:

• Autosave support.  The game automatically saves every two minutes.  Just because not doing that was tempting fate far too much. 
• Fixed a silly display bug which caused subscribers who were online at the time of the last save to not be counted in the “Total Subscribers” count.
• Fixed a bug which caused adventurers not to have their XP return all the way to zero after gaining a level, if the player had turned up the “XP Per Level” design value past 10.

And yes, I’m still working on the “Game in a Week”;  sorry for the lack of updates!  I’ll post an update in a few minutes with where that’s going. 

Also, holy cow:  http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/16-08/st_wte

So I’ve been a bit busy the last few days.  I’ve once again shrunk subscribers and monsters (or expanded the world, depending on your point of view), and I’ve increased the maximum number of entities allowed in a region.  The new maximum is 300 per region;  I find that 200 monsters and 100 players per region feels about right.. but this will be wired up to options in the “Design” area, so others can tune things differently.

Subscribers are now drawn using the vector sprites I created for “Ill-Timed Petition Damsel”, and the monsters are drawn using the Muncher sprite from “The Muncher’s Labyrinth”.  I know, I’m totally ripping off my own work.  It’s probably just temporary;  I wanted to see how things looked, animated.

So now if you really zoom in on the map screen, munchers actually chase meat (and petition damsels), instead of just having little geometric symbols slide along the ground.  I think it’s a big improvement.

I’ve also fixed a number of extra AI bugs on both the subscriber and the monster side.  Getting monsters and subscribers to actually approach each other to attack is surprisingly non-trivial.  But it’s pretty much working now.

Devs are also now in the world, though they aren’t really doing anything yet;  they’re just little arrows (like the player’s arrow cursor, only they don’t rotate and they’re fainter) that move around in the world.  Eventually, these will scurry around fulfilling the player’s build orders and assisting players in distress.  But that’s not been implemented yet.  Soon!

In other news, I’m pretty sure that next week I’ll be taking a break from development on MMORPG Tycoon, and doing another Game in a Week.  Need to clear my head a bit with a change of pace.  More on that as we get closer.

Wow, has it really been a full week since my last post to the blog?  Time flies..

This has been a week with some real ups and downs, and it’s kept me away from programming rather a lot.  But even so, there’s been some progress on MMORPG Tycoon.  This week, I have gotten monsters and players to fight each other properly.  Players can theoretically gang up on a monster, or a player can be attacked by several monsters at once.  Monsters chase after nearby players, and respawn after a while, when they’re killed.

What’s more, players now try to run away from monsters who are too dangerous for them, and will totally ignore ones that are too low level for them.  This will probably lower the penalties for having users in an incorrectly-zoned region, since most users will attempt to run away from particularly nasty monsters, rather than fight a hopeless fight.

I’ve also done some more map rendering cleanup.  The game map now sits in an infinite ocean, instead of being a big square in the middle of nothing.  I think that makes it look nicer.

There’s also been a lot of code cleanup behind the scenes, in preparation for adding Devs to the game.

Finally, I’ve been rethinking the “placing individual buildings” thing that I’d been talking about before.  The more I think about it, the more I realise that there’s no really good reason for someone to place just one of the buildings; people would just end up placing one of each type of building for every city that they wanted.  So to minimise micromanagement, it’d make more sense for players to still just place towns, but to instead define a few different types of towns for them to place.  For example, we might have three types:  An “outpost” (contains only a small shop and an inn), a “City” (contains a normal shop, a tavern, and an inn), and a “Castle” (contains a shop, a tavern, an inn, and an auction house).  Each of these would cost substantially more than the previous, and you would need to achieve a certain number of subscribers in order to be able to place them.

Oh, and I’ve also fixed that old bug about the “Inspect” window not clearing some lines of information, if you switched from inspecting a player to inspecting a town.  Yay, UI code.

Next step is Devs.  Then the town building, then the subscriber AI to use the new town buildings, and then we’ll see where we’re at.  So there’s still a little ways to go, but progress is being made. 

So I thought I’d post a little bit with what’s going on.

Between work and mild illness, I haven’t actually gotten much at all done on MMORPG Tycoon v1.1.  But here’s my work log from this week:

1. Substantial modifications to the map and subscriber code, in preparation for rendering monsters and devs on the map.
2. Monsters now spawn on the map, but do not yet interact with users.  (In the 1.0 series, monsters were handled using probability calculations, a bit like random encounters in many single-player JRPGs.  In the 1.1 series, monsters now have individual placements on the map, will attack nearby subscribers, and will respawn after being killed, as generally happens in real MMORPGs)
3. Made substantial (CPU-side) performance improvements to the graphic engine.
4. Added a nice effect to the roads when loading into a game, so that they don’t just “pop” into place any more.
5. Small modifications to map rendering, to make it more GPU friendly and less cluttered for complicated maps.
6. Began work modifying the “Build” toolbar to support the new building types (resizing and moving buttons, etc).
7. Dramatically simplified building handling code, to make it easier to add new building types.
8. OS X build now saves preference files in ~/Library/Preferences and save files in ~/Library/Application Support/MMORPG Tycoon, as Apple recommends.  This should stop occasional user permissions problems with preferences not saving correctly in multi-user OS X situations, and will also make it much easier for OS X folks not to lose their saved games when updating versions.

Note that this is all going into the 1.1 build;  there is no new build available for download yet.  It’s just work in progress.

Anyhow, hopefully the progress summary will be a bit longer, next week! 

So now that the PCG competition is over, it’s time to consider future directions for MMORPG Tycoon.  Development will be slowish, of course, as it’s really a side project for me.  And I do expect to continue to do occasional “Game in a Week”s, just to stay fresh.

But on MMORPG Tycoon, I have a pretty good idea of what I’ll implement for version 1.1.

More beneath the fold.

Continue reading “MMORPG Tycoon development timeline”

The results are in!

I’d like to congratulate everyone who entered the competition;  there were lots and lots of really good entries, many of which I’m still playing in my spare time!

So how did MMORPG Tycoon do?  Well, by the current count, it looks like it came in seventh out of sixty entrants;  not bad at all, considering how badly it needs a hold-you-by-the-hand tutorial to help out starting players! 

For those who haven’t yet played the various games entered in the competition, I highly recommend you check them out.  Every last one of them is an interesting play!

Just a quick note that I’ve uploaded the final new version in the 1.0 series of MMORPG Tycoon. 1.0.11 adds an “Options” screen which allows you to change the game resolution, enable/disable shaders, modify the music volume, enable/disable the rotating arrow cursor, etc.

I’ve also fixed a bug which occasionally resulted in offline or unsubscribed players appearing on the map, after loading a saved game.

Other little improvements.. I’ve slightly optimised the bloom shader, so it should run a wee bit faster than it did before. There are some improvements to the mouse UI (clicking through the toolbars if you miss a button has been fixed), and the little ‘+’ and ‘-’ buttons on most of the report screens have been replaced with up and down arrow icons. Much more attractive that way, I think.

Saved games from 1.0.10 should be fully compatible with the new 1.0.11 build; just copy the SlotOne.sav (etc) files into the new version’s Data/Saves directory.

It was a little silly that MMORPG Tycoon didn’t support them before, but I’ve just released version 1.0.8, which does now support saved games; your game is automatically saved every time you exit (either using the ‘close’ button on the window, or exitting back to the title screen, within the game).

So if you’re interested in this, go grab it from the link in the sidebar!

Next on my plate is in-game adjustment of resolution, fullscreen, shader, and other options settings. (Yes, music volume and the rotating cursor will both be part of that!). Once all that’s out of the way, I’ll be moving forward on the big new gameplay features planned for version 1.1.

And maybe I’ll even do another Game in a Week, sometime soon.

Quick note that due to a mistake I made in previous OS X builds, MMORPG Tycoon wouldn’t run on OS X 10.4 as I claimed it would. I’ve put up an 1.0.7 build for OS X which adds 10.4 compatibility.

If you’re running OS X 10.5, there’s no reason to upgrade; there are no major changes other than 10.4 compatibility.