Street Wolf
Member
Trevs! You wanted a music recommendation? I think I found just the thing. The artist's name is Sulatus, you can find his (I think it's a guy. 0_o) work here: http://www.jamendo.com/en/artist/sulatus
You can use any of his music because it's under a creative commons. So just credit him and you should be fine. I'd recommend checking out his album ...Go..., but they all have some good ambient music.
Edit: King-o-page 5.
Thanks for that, Street Wolf! None of it really screamed "MMORPG Tycoon" to me, but I'm keeping it in my list of bookmarks for use on future projects. :)
October 5th:
Huge amount of work done today, but I'm realising that MMORPG Tycoon probably won't be ready for testing this coming weekend. Might be one extra week.. but we'll see; I might still meet my self-inflicted deadline. :)
New today.. you can now place "Quest Givers"; these are buildings which are where adventurers go to pick up quests (they appear as WoW-style exclamation marks on the map). When you place a "quest giver", it randomly generates (currently) five quests.
There are currently two types of quests; hunting quests and fetch quests. Fetch quests are boring; the player just needs to visit a designated spot and then return. Hunting quests designate a small area of the region, and spawn several monsters of a single type in it. Players trying to complete a hunting quest must defeat the correct type of monster inside the quest designated zone, to get quest completion credit. (In my most recent testbed, the quest giver I placed generated the following quests: "Find the letter", "Kill the Soldiers", "Cull the Orange Snakes", "Fight the Bears", and "Locate my left sock")
In the same way that players keep a "home" of the correct level which they return to before logging out, they also now keep a current "quest giver", and keep track of their current progress through the quest giver's quests. Once they've completed all the quests, they'll move to a new quest giver. If they run out of quest givers, they'll resort to grinding (and complain about having to do so)
I've also done an awful lot of work on the adventurer AI. Previously, adventurer AI worked by alternating between "go home" and "walk around randomly, occasionally fighting a monster until I've fought enough monsters". Now adventurers have a set of several competing drives which they're trying to keep satisfied. Adventurers can stop in the middle of pursuing a quest in order to socialise, they can choose to grind instead of questing based upon several factors, etc. But there's a lot more work to do, here. I still need to implement parties, and I need to reimplement the old "try to avoid congested regions" behaviour in the new AI model.
So overall, there's been huge progress today.. but it's made me realise how much is still left to do. I've blocked in most stuff, but.. there's a bit more still to go before it's fully stable and reliable.
October 6th:
Very little code written today. Didn't sleep well at all last night, so I'm taking it easy and trying to get some extra rest tonight. And not create more work for myself tomorrow by trying to write code today.
However, I did set up a bug tracking database here, so that there's a structured way for people to report bugs once the v1.1 alpha is released. Anybody who's interested in an advance peek, it's over here: http://www.vectorstorm.org/bugs/
You can login anonymously to see what's going on, but filing bug reports requires an account.
October 7th:
Adventurers now use taverns and quest-givers, and act on the quests they pick up. This means that the new "Drives" system is almost complete; the only one remaining to be implemented is the "Exploring" drive. The particular values used for the drives (how frequently they need to be satisfied, etc) do still need to be adjusted, but the basic systems are now fully functional.
October 10th:
Rewritten adventurer AI is almost complete. As it turns out, the AI code needed almost a complete rewrite, but the new system is much neater and easier to code, and should be far more reliable and easier to extend than the old code was. Also, the process of refactoring it showed up a number of major logic bugs already lurking in the AI code (introduced when monsters were placed on the map).
There are two remaining AI tasks: The first one is that right now, adventurers often sit around for a long time after pausing to heal (due to the heal task not resuming whatever they'd been doing before), and the second is that players tend to unsubscribe rather quickly at the moment, because their drives are expiring too quickly; I definitely need to tune the frequency with which players expect to fulfill those drives. Currently the worst is 'socialise' and 'fight a monster', each of which expect to be fulfilled at least once every ten minutes. But in practice, doing one tends to distract the players from doing the other, so I probably need to extend both of them.
Also, fixed a small visual bug which was causing buildings marked for deletion to stop being drawn in red, if you moused over them with the remove tool after having marked them for deletion.
October 12th:
Actually finally finished player AI. Needs to have the values controlling player drives tweaked, but the core system is in and working really well.
Buildings now cost money to place. The money is charged when a building is actually constructed by one of your developers; if you just tag it for creation and then remove it again, that doesn't charge you at all.
The "Build" buttons on the toolbar now have tooltips which pop up when you hold your cursor over them. The tooltips state the name of the building, and the placement cost. This has been implemented in a nice, generic way so that if I have any other UI items which need tooltips, it'll be trivial to add them.
The general game structure has been modified; when starting a game, you now begin with $5000 in ready cash, and a $500,000 loan to pay off.
Finally, I've gotten the Win32 build up and running with the new code structure and AI and suchlike. This means that when I'm ready to release a build for alpha testing, I should be able to put up the Win32 build at the same time, instead of scrambling to bring it up to date after I've uploaded the Mac version.
Anonymous
Unregistered
Holy fuck, that's one big loan. The guy you play must have a gambling-crazy mom or something!
October 13th:
As I mentioned over on the main blog yesterday, there are four features to be implemented before I'll be releasing the first alpha version of MMORPG Tycoon 1.1 for testing.
Well, there are now only three features to be implemented, as I've now implemented the building locking/unlocking system. Like most of the systems, it's not yet finalised, but it's basically functional. Right now, you need to build a respawn point first, so your developers can reach the map. The new building types are then progressively unlocked as your subscriber count goes up, with quest givers unlocking at 100 subscribers, taverns at 500, dungeons at 1,000, and capitals at 10,000. (Eventually, you'll only be able to place one capital per 10,000 subscribers, but that's not yet been set up, since I still haven't modified the subscriber system to support more than 10,000 subscribers at a time).
Anonymous
Unregistered
Pretty clever. Is that like some sort of beta-test period?
Well, beta tests are really about fixing the last few bugs before release, whereas alpha tests are more about figuring out which bits of the game really are fun and which need to be fixed/removed. In the commercial industry, alpha tests typically start about two to three months before beta testing.
14th October:
Two features left to be implemented. Today, I added subscriber "friend" support. Here's how it works:
In MMORPG Tycoon, "Friends" are the real world friends of a subscriber. If someone is happy with the game (currently this uses the 'satisfaction' level and doesn't consider the 'addiction' level), then when they log in, there's a chance that they'll bring a friend with them. Friends are mutual; that is, if A is a friend of B, then B is also a friend of A.
Right now, subscribers have a maximum of three friends (but this would be trivial to increase, if we eventually find that three aren't enough).
Eventually, subscribers will attempt to spend time with their friends, but this hasn't been implemented yet (needs parties to be implemented). Having friends who are subscribed to the MMORPG acts like being addicted to the MMORPG; it stops people from unsubscribing even if/when they're not happy with the game.
Making "friends" with other subscribers within the game world will be handled via the "Guilds" system, which is one of the two remaining pre-alpha tasks; "Friends" are exclusively being used as strong outside-the-MMORPG relationships.
That's a really good idea, moncheese! I'll do that.
Also, I'll give "socialiser"-type players more friend slots, just to further differentiate them from the other players.
Let's be honest; socialisers are a bit annoying, from a "these people don't migrate out of my starting regions nearly as fast as regular users, but instead just sit inside a tavern and talk to their friends, making already-heavily-used regions even more congested." point of view. So giving them another reason to be liked is bound to be a good thing for game balance!
October 15th:
Rested. Played de Blob. No code today.
October 16th:
Rested. Watched old James Bond film. Back to proper feature coding tomorrow.
But on the theory that everything is bigger and more complicated in 1.1, I went ahead and made the cursor even more fancy than it was in 1.0.x. I clearly will not be happy until everyone has turned off the "Rotate Cursor" option. ;)
So now in addition to rotating, the cursor runs a simple softbody physics simulation, and bends, stretches, and distorts as you move it around.
Street Wolf
Member
Hmm, sounds interesting. Is there any chance for a check box for each? I checked off on the rotating cursor because it confused me when I used it, but the stretching distorting cursor sounds kind of cool, so it might be nice to try it without the rotation aspect.
Unfortunately, no; the stretching cursor's been implemented in such a way that it has to rotate. I could conceivably do a version which doesn't rotate, but I think that'd be even harder to understand. On the plus side, though,
October 18th:
- Adjusted the flexible cursor to be drawn opaque (still with glowy vector outline), which makes it much easier to read against a busy backdrop. So the rotation may not be an issue any more. :)
- Lots of polish onto the left toolbar; what I'm learning from polishing the left toolbar will eventually be applied to the top toolbars and the main information screens as well. This polish includes the addition of a background gradient, and a very, very small amount of slow, gentle motion. This motion is so slight that you probably wouldn't even have noticed it, if I didn't mention it here, but it really does make the toolbar feel more "alive" and like it's suspended above the MMORPG world.
- Added a text log at the bottom of the screen, which can show up to five lines of text at once. This area will be used to announce instantaneous events, mainly when you're inspecting an adventurer.
- Finished designing the MMORPG Skill Tree. I'll be talking about this soon; it's probably the #1 core new gameplay mechanic in MMORPG Tycoon 1.1. :)
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