VectorStorm Forums » Tag: MMORPG Tycoon

VectorStorm Forums » Tag: MMORPG Tycoon - Recent Posts http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/tags/mmorpg-tycoon Discussing games, one brightly glowing comment at a time en-US Sun, 01 Aug 2010 04:20:01 +0000 http://bbpress.org/?v=1.0.2 <![CDATA[Search]]> q http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/search.php Awesome Dino on "Milestone for myself" http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/milestone-for-myself#post-492 Mon, 21 Dec 2009 21:48:01 +0000 Awesome Dino 492@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ Putting it up on the main site would probably be the smarter thing to do. I rarely check the forums myself because of the low activity. trevor on "Milestone for myself" http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/milestone-for-myself#post-491 Tue, 08 Dec 2009 20:41:26 +0000 trevor 491@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ So I've been playing with a lot of stuff over the past few months, but I'm starting to feel like I really need to put my feet over the fire, and so I'm setting myself a milestone to meet. My goal is to produce a fully playable miniature version of MMORPG Tycoon 2, representing a portion of the full game's feature set, and to have it done by the end of the first week in January. Let's call it January 4th. I'm calling this miniature version: "MMORPG Tycoon 2: Starting Area". In this, the player is tasked with creating a new starting area for an established MMORPG. He has a particular budget to create the area, and is paid according to the number of subscribers, level 5 or higher, who graduate out of his starting area and into the rest of the game, potentially with bonuses for happy subscribers and/or for generating forum buzz. This version will primarily be based around the building and theming of a single region, and setting out quests and other activities for the new players to take part in. The player will get both on-foot and on-graveship controls. The third game mode I've mentioned in the past will not be included. Crossing fingers. Hope I can pull it all together into a fun experience within this timeframe! :) (And yes, I expect to distribute it once I've finished it, to get people's reactions to it. Perhaps I'll only link to it here in the forum, as I did with the 1.1 development version.. or perhaps I'll actually put it up on the main site. Haven't really decided about that yet. We'll see how it looks closer to the date.) token88 on "Some quick general musings" http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/some-quick-general-musings#post-451 Sat, 09 May 2009 00:07:44 +0000 token88 451@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ the progress sounds great. with the zooming in thing maybe you can use a zoom like warcraft 3 or empire earth or RA 3 (they all use the same zoom type) i understood the other two points but im at a loss at how to help. i know nothing about dev work really. though all sounds great. the 3d structure stuff sounds awesome though. i am looking forward to trying it trevor on "Some quick general musings" http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/some-quick-general-musings#post-449 Tue, 05 May 2009 20:50:20 +0000 trevor 449@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ Yes, the current plan is to have multiple terrain types available within your MMORPG world (grass, rock, ice, etc), though the difference between them is likely to be purely aesthetic. They ought to help remind you of which region you're looking at, when you're zoomed way in, though. wickedgenius on "Some quick general musings" http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/some-quick-general-musings#post-446 Mon, 04 May 2009 08:22:43 +0000 wickedgenius 446@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ Yay progress, Sounds cool. Kris015 on "Some quick general musings" http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/some-quick-general-musings#post-445 Mon, 04 May 2009 03:06:36 +0000 Kris015 445@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ "there's still only one terrain type being used" Does that mean there will be more terrains you can use to comstumize your world? Like snow and sand and stuff? If yes, then try looking at the game Guild Wars, it has a lot of different terrain types... trevor on "Some quick general musings" http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/some-quick-general-musings#post-444 Sun, 03 May 2009 23:18:30 +0000 trevor 444@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ Extra note. I've now got MMORPG Tycoon 2's basic terrain system working. It's a bit complicated, as it supports having an arbitrarily large world, but only keeps the nearest bits of it in memory at any given time. (You can consider it to be similar to most real MMORPGs; there's a huge world, but only a small portion of it is actually in memory at any given moment) There's still a little work still to be done on it; right now, there's still only one terrain type being used, and there's still a minor bug which occasionally leads to slightly incorrect surface normals at the boundaries between terrain patches... but by and large, you can now fly over a huge basic world mesh using the mouse and wasd keys. Next step is probably going to be bringing over some of the 2D UI classes from MMORPG Tycoon 1.0, to start setting up placement tools to let the player craft terrain and place structures in the world. trevor on "Some quick general musings" http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/some-quick-general-musings#post-443 Sun, 03 May 2009 16:30:14 +0000 trevor 443@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ I probably shouldn't have posted about the bloom question without presenting screenshots to let people see what I was talking about. :) I spent a bit of last night working on it, and am currently playing with HDR rendering... though that's probably a bit over the top for what I actually need. The basic goal I'm now pursuing is to have wireframe-rendered stuff still bloom brightly exactly as it did before, but to not perform bloom on regular 3D geometry.. with the possible exception of bright specular highlights. I don't have it quite working yet, but I don't really want to spend huge amounts of time on this just yet; too many bits of actual gameplay to get working, before I worry about fine points of presentation! wickedgenius on "Some quick general musings" http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/some-quick-general-musings#post-442 Sun, 03 May 2009 04:00:34 +0000 wickedgenius 442@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ Kris: The saving of games and files has always been something I've had to look at because I do some programming myself (although I have found it hard learning some stuff so I mainly stick to web development). The problems I come across mean that I have different thoughts about it all the time, I often get up just before I fall asleep because I'm having some great ideas that I have to right down. As soon as I get the hang of some stuff I will start on a game of my own for which I have 3 or 4 very good ideas which I think would work well. One includes a Civilization type game, one a browser based MMORPG based on the Half-life world and another one which is similar but is a first person game. I just wish I had the skills Trevor has, and some time. Kris015 on "Some quick general musings" http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/some-quick-general-musings#post-441 Sun, 03 May 2009 03:30:21 +0000 Kris015 441@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ Ups, i meant the Main Menu screen, not the interface, sorry :P Very good interface indeed.. I like your idea about the saving Wicked-G. wickedgenius on "Some quick general musings" http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/some-quick-general-musings#post-440 Sun, 03 May 2009 02:36:19 +0000 wickedgenius 440@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ My thoughts, 1. How about making it save the games with incremental names within the games directory and then reading in the save game files and listing them under a load menu. For example when you save you get a file called mmorpgtycoonsave#.* where # is an incremented number for each save and * is the used save game extension. So you would essentialy have a folder within the MMORPG Tycoon directory called save and within that you would have: mmorpgtycoonsave1.* mmorpgtycoonsave2.* mmorpgtycoonsave3.* mmorpgtycoonsave4.* Then you have a load menu which reads certain details from each of the files within the save directory such as the MMORPG name and lists all of them for the player to choose one the play. If that's not that clear then please say so. 2. I, like Kris, didn't really understand that. I'm guessing what you are saying is that when Bloom is off the whole thing is too dark in which case can't you simply increase the intensity of the lighting system. 3. I thought that the interface in MMORPG Tycoon 1.0 was very good. You would take the zoomed out overall look which was helpful in knowing what space etc you had to work with while also being able to zoom in to take a look at where people are. If you keep this and somehow factor in the 3D aspects then great although I can't think of how that would work right now. Maybe making it flatten out when zooming in (I think Lord was like this but I can't remember). As for water will your subscribers still wander aimlessly into it and drown? Thought that was rather irritating. -Wickedgenius trevor on "Some quick general musings" http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/some-quick-general-musings#post-439 Sat, 02 May 2009 16:55:28 +0000 trevor 439@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ Yes, water is planned for mmorpg tycoon 2; oceans, lakes, rivers, and possibly waterfalls. I haven't really figured out how the interface would work yet (it's a lot further down my list of priorities), but bear in mind is that mmorpg tycoon 2 isn't trying to model the real world, so there won't be realistic rivers or water dynamics the way that you see them in (for example) Dwarf Fortress. They're likely to be map features that you paint into the map, and which will just stay wherever you've put them. Kris015 on "Some quick general musings" http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/some-quick-general-musings#post-437 Sat, 02 May 2009 15:39:33 +0000 Kris015 437@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ Alright these are my thoughts: 1. Saved games: I think it would be nice with option 2 here, the one where it let's you save and load the games somewhere on your computer as this would allow millions of saves :P 2. Alright i have to be honest.. I didn't understand that 0o 3. How about a man with his hands in his sides looking satisfied up at his spinning creation/world/mmorpg (i hope it was something like that you were looking for) Also one more thing, water, will it be in mmorpg tycoon 2? It could be really nice... That was just my thoughts around the game :) trevor on "Some quick general musings" http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/some-quick-general-musings#post-436 Sat, 02 May 2009 14:28:46 +0000 trevor 436@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ First issue: Save games. VectorStorm, as a library, was built around the idea of emulating a fictional vector graphics game console on the PC, complete with a basic game engine wrapped around it. You can see this behaviour in many places, particularly how most of my games refer to the "A" and "B" buttons (which typically are mapped to the <space> and <alt> keys on the keyboard), because they're thinking about this fictional game console. Similarly, in the original release of MMORPG Tycoon, it had three "save slots", exactly as used to be done on old cartridge-based games. For MMORPG Tycoon 2.0, I'm thinking about saved games again, and how they'll be handled. I see two possibilities; either I can continue with the way things are done now (which can lead to conflicts under certain multiple-user-accounts-on-one-computer issues), start storing the saves in per-user directories (maybe somewhere inside the "My Documents" directory under Windows, and the "Documents" or "Library" user directories under OS X), or else actually use a standard file selector box to save and load your saved games to wherever you want. This would, of course, mean that you could have as many saved games as you want, and put them anywhere you want. It would also mean that the standard OS GUI would encroach into the game.. so I'm a little hesitant about that. I guess I could also do a FPS-style "we pick a save directory somewhere and have an in-game file browser that lets you pick from anything inside that directory". Second issue: The bloom visual effect. I really like the "glowing vectors" bloom pass that's automatically present in VectorStorm games. However, making that effect look good for glowing lines drawn over black has caused some problems for games which don't draw over black.. the issue is that it makes absolutely everything on-screen about 50% brighter than it would otherwise appear to be, so if anyone plays the game with bloom disabled, then the game appears extremely dark. I'm thinking about seriously toning back the bloom shader, to make bloomless-rendering appear closer to bloomed rendering. (On the other hand, I still want some glowing-wireframe-over-black sections in MMORPG Tycoon 2.0, so I'm not quite sure how to reconcile the two. Maybe I just require people to support bloom, in order to run at all?) You can see the problem if you go back and run 'Lord' with bloom switched off; it becomes a very dark game, because most of the light shades were only appearing due to the brightening of the bloom. Anyone have any thoughts on this? Third issue: I'm arguing with myself over the user's interface to MMORPG Tycoon 2.0. Whether to give him an interface much like he had in 1.0 (omnipotent deity looking down upon his creation), or whether to give a more up-close interface; put him closer to the ground, looking forward. The big benefit of being closer to the ground is that you get more bang for the buck out of the 3D terrain and constructions, which can be much larger on screen, and can tower upward into the sky. The downside is that it really isn't what people expect from a "Tycoon" game.. and maybe it'd hurt gameplay, compared against a facing-downward, north-oriented view that can simply be panned across with arrow keys, as happened in MMORPG Tycoon 1.0. Anyone have any input on any of these things? Am curious to hear any thoughts, to maybe kickstart something in my head. :) Kris015 on "The Official 1.1 Progress Log" http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/the-official-11-progress-log/page/8#post-384 Sat, 17 Jan 2009 20:53:41 +0000 Kris015 384@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ Dude, could you make "The Official 2.0 Progress Log"? moncheese on "The Official 1.1 Progress Log" http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/the-official-11-progress-log/page/8#post-379 Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:00:19 +0000 moncheese 379@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ Sweeeeeet :D trevor on "The Official 1.1 Progress Log" http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/the-official-11-progress-log/page/8#post-378 Wed, 07 Jan 2009 18:48:16 +0000 trevor 378@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ I'm not saying anything. :) But I'll probably have a quick tech demo that I'll be asking folks to try out within a day or two, just to verify that the VectorStorm 3D stuff actually works for more people than just me. Lots and lots of new tech has gone in, recently! Kris015 on "The Official 1.1 Progress Log" http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/the-official-11-progress-log/page/8#post-377 Sun, 04 Jan 2009 08:46:15 +0000 Kris015 377@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ Hmm... Are you saying that the game will be finished tomorrow if we're lucking? Kris015 on "The Official 1.1 Progress Log" http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/the-official-11-progress-log/page/8#post-376 Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:17:31 +0000 Kris015 376@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ Okay, but could you plz update the progress log :) trevor on "The Official 1.1 Progress Log" http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/the-official-11-progress-log/page/8#post-375 Mon, 15 Dec 2008 23:53:46 +0000 trevor 375@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ One of the major reasons I skipped 1.1 and moved straight ahead to 2.0 was that with the vector approach, I couldn't fit the UI for configurable game rules into a reasonable amount of space. Having glowy vectors for everything (especially text) meant that UI elements had to be really huge in order to be legible on the screen. As an example, configuring abilities for your classes required you to navigate four screens deep into the UI, simply because I didn't have enough space. So the UI is definitely going to be moving away from the glowy vector look, for practical reasons. I haven't yet picked a look for the map and the rest of the interface for the 2.0 series.. although I have a few contenders. And a 3D vector map is still on the short list. :)