Oh, nice. The new UI looks seeexy. :)
The Official 1.1 Progress Log
(152 posts) (13 voices)-
Aw.. I missed post 100. ;)
So let me give an update on where things stand right now: I've promised myself that I'll have a build up for people to look at tonight (probably about four or five hours from now), and so I'm trying to solidify things as much as I can as quickly as I can.
However... this won't be the proper alpha build for real testing, as too much stuff is still half-complete. Here's my current list:
1. Dungeons are not yet used by adventurers (but may be placed).
2. Capital cities are not yet used by adventurers (but may be placed).
3. Quests may not yet be customised (they're randomly generated, and cannot be modified)
4. Character classes do not have full customisation yet implemented (they're still exactly like in the 1.0.x series, but with editable names0
5. The MMORPG Skill Tree is not yet functional (but is visible).
6. Still a 10,000 subscriber limit
7. Quest progression is subtly broken, in that adventurers will happily re-start the same string of quests which they just completed, if they're still within the correct level range.I do want to warn people that save files are not compatible between the 1.0.x series and the 1.1 series, and probably will not even be compatible between different builds of 1.1 during the alpha and beta periods.
I'll start a new thread once the builds are up, with details about what feedback I need. Only a few hours to go. :)
Posted 1 year ago # -
Just a quick update.
I've been rather tired and mildly ill for about a week, and so very little (read: nothing at all) has been done on MMORPG Tycoon during that time. Plus, I've effectively been doing one of my "Game in a Week" games for work, and that's been using up all of my remaining creativity.
I assume that work will settle down again soon and whatever bug has got me will go away again, and things will get back to normal. But at the moment, it's all a little bit stalled.
Posted 1 year ago # -
October 30th:
- Fixed a bug which caused the length of time before a new subscriber joined to be undefined after loading a saved game. Could be almost instantaneous, could be several in-game hours.
- Adjusted how you're charged for placing buildings. Now you're immediately charged when you place the building, and are given a refund if you remove the building before it's activated. The attempt to place the building will now fail, if you don't have the funds to place it. TODO: Needs a little red 'cost' floater to rise up from the building site immediately after you place the building. TODO: Needs a 'failed to place' sound effect if you're out of cash.
Posted 1 year ago # -
November 2nd:
Still very busy with paying work, so not a lot of progress being made, but here are a few little tidbits:
Added "floaters"; the little numerical indicators which tell you when you've spent or received cash. Right now, these are only wired up for to appear when you place or remove buildings. I'm not sure whether or where to show them for non-location-based costs and profits (subscription fees, purchasing things from the MMORPG Skill Tree, etc), but I'll figure something out.
Fixed a bug in the cash display which would cause it to show the wrong value if your cash went negative. Of course, I'm trying to stop the value from ever going negative in 1.1 by not allowing you to buy things you don't have the cash for, but it'll probably always be possible to go negative if your maintenance costs are higher than your subscription fees.
First steps toward a functional MMORPG Skill Tree; I'd say that it's about 70% functional now. The only major piece missing is the visual display of whether or not you can buy a particular skill right now, and stopping you from buying the same skill twice.
I've never described the MMORPG Skill Tree before, so I'll do that here. Those who've looked at the pre-alpha build probably have an idea of what it is, but here's the basic concept: in the same way that adventurers in an MMORPG gain skills when they level up, and these skills differentiate one adventurer from another, in MMORPG Tycoon the MMORPG itself gains "skills" as it grows, and it's these "MMORPG Skills" which differentiate one MMORPG from another. You can think of them a little bit like the tech tree in Civilisation.
So for example, one of the early skills you can purchase is "Party". If you buy that, your players will be able to form parties with each other and adventure together. And that's awesome, because it'll allow your players to fulfill their "socialise" need at the same time as fulfilling their "complete a quest" need, whereas otherwise they'd be separate activities. In fact, there are several different levels of "Party", where each increased level of "Party" allows for larger and larger groups to adventure together.
Most buildings need to initially be developed on the MMORPG Skill Tree, before you can place them in the game. That includes taverns, dungeons, and so on.
Also on the skill tree are extra character class slots, class ability slots, additional monster types, and my personal favourite, "Graphics". Graphics is like the "Future Tech" technology in Civilisation, in that there's no limit to how many levels of it you have.. there are benefits if your graphics are the best of all the competitors, and penalties if your graphics are the worst.. but otherwise, the graphics don't actually matter all that much. It's basically a money sink for the MMORPG. :)
Your purchases on the MMORPG Skill Tree produce a "desirability level" for each of the game's five subscriber types, and your game's levels compared against your competitor's levels will heavily influence the movement of those types of players between the different MMORPGs. So for example, if my game allows 8 players in parties, and "Sword of Swords" only allows four players in parties and everything else is equal, then socialisers are likely to tend to migrate from that MMORPG to mine. This means that as you're playing MMORPG Tycoon, you'll be watching what the competitors are doing, and making strategies about what features your MMORPG needs to develop to win over subscribers from those other games.
Posted 1 year ago # -
Hopefully you'll put in a "running tutorial", basically one that tells you to do something, and why, as any tutorial, but lets you do that and experiment a bit as well.
10 pages of instructions are tough to remember. Trial and error is always more effective for learning. ;)
(Also, forgot my old password and couldn't remember it, that's why I'm on this one.)
Posted 1 year ago # -
Yeah, the tutorial will be in-game, once it's written. With the MMORPG Skill Tree there, players will be presented with far fewer things they can do at once, which should also make the game a lot easier to learn than it is right now.
And on that note, I'm working out the last few bits of design on how the MMORPG Skill Tree should function, and I'm interested in people's thoughts.
My current plan is that it'll cost a certain amount of cash to purchase a 'skill' on the skill tree (right now, everything costs $100,000; enough so that you can take out extra loans at the start of the game to start with a few extra features if you really want to, but won't be able to buy everything right off the bat). Once you've "purchased" a feature, your developers then have to actually develop it. Basically, each skill will have a development time associated with it, measured in man-hours.
Every developer you have who is not currently on the map is considered to be working on whatever game feature you're currently developing. Once enough time has gone by, that feature activates, and becomes available. So for example, developing "2-adventurer parties" might take ten man-hours. If you have ten developers sitting around not doing anything on the map, it'll take them an hour in total to develop the tech, once you've paid for it (that's about six seconds, on the fastest time setting). Once they've completed it, adventurers will be able to form parties together.
The goal is to give the player a lot of interesting choices they can make, without making the game mechanics too complicated. So here are the things I'm thinking about and trying to decide:
1. Do I need to provide a way to set a certain number of developers as "don't go on the map, always develop tech instead"? Maybe this goes so far as to have separate employee counts for "GMs" and "Devs", where GMs are the only ones who can go on the map, and Devs are the only ones who can develop new tech? This is more realistic in terms of real-world MMORPG jobs, but I'm not sure if it actually gains us much besides more micromanagement.
2. I've been thinking about increasing the time it takes to develop a new feature based upon how many features already exist. So like, it takes ten man-hours to develop "2-player parties", but if you've already developed taverns and dungeons and stuff, then there's more work involved, as your developers have to make sure that all those existing features will work with 2-player parties as well, and so it might take 12 or 14 man-hours to develop. As a simple first step, say, everything costs one extra man-hour per feature you've already developed. Does that sound reasonable? Or is it a pointless adjustment? I'm not convinced whether this adds any strategy or real useful gameplay..
3. Is there any benefit to requiring a server reboot after adding features? Right now in 1.1p1, there's no reason to ever require you to take the servers down. (I'd talked before about needing to perform zoning and similar tasks while they were down, but in practice that turned out to be difficult to do; I'm not sure how to obviously show that a server is down while still showing its zoned color!)
4. Any benefit to letting features introduce "bugs"? I'm not sure whether I want to open that can of worms yet. (edit: No. I still like the idea of having to manage bugs, but I'm not going to introduce them until 1.2 or later)
Posted 1 year ago # -
1. It's probably be more useful strategy-wise if you controlled how much they worked on certain things, or even going as far as to letting individual employees work on their own tech.
2. Makes it more realistic for sure, I say keep it. Perhaps tone it down a bit though. The game takes a while as it is.
3. You could make the zone blink, with the tutorial describing why, nobody would mind it.
4. Could perhaps be a chance thing? If you develop early tech, you have a low chance of bugs that make it take a bit longer, but say you develop the biggest thing in MMORPG history, that'd likely be bugs a plenty!
Posted 1 year ago # -
November 4th:
- Continued development on the Skill Tree. There are enough skills now that I've had to break it up into a number of different screens. ("Skill Tree" now has its own top-level button, with sub-options underneath, split into features which will primarily appeal to the various different types of players, and a 'General' tab as well)
- Reimplemented all of the various random text generation systems to use a data-driven approach, which means that if you want to add more region names, monster types, class types, quest names, etc. that could be randomly generated by the game, you can just add them into a text file in the game data. Once a new build with this goes out for testing, I'll be asking for contributions to these text files.
Posted 1 year ago # -
November 9th:
Again, busy enough with paying work that I've little energy left for coding in my spare time, so progress has been a lot slower than usual, lately. :( Oh well. And of course, the recent releases of things like Fable 2 and Fallout 3 and LittleBigPlanet and all haven't done a lot for increasing my productivity, either. (pocket reviews: Fable 2 is fun but buggy and slightly short, Fallout 3 is sort of fun but lacks polish and was pretty clearly rushed out the door before it was ready, and LittleBigPlanet is unspeakably awesome and would be a price-of-entry game if the PS3 wasn't still -- STILL -- so obscenely expensive. But in my book, it's far and away the standout title of 2008.)
But with all that said, I did get a fair amount of work done today. And if I'd finished it all up, I'd have uploaded a new build with it.. but alas, I didn't quite get there. Hopefully within the next few days. Here's what's new:
- In the "Design" toolbar, there is now an "Attributes" screen. That screen allows you to define up to six "attributes" for your players and monsters to have. (When you start, you only have one; access to further attributes may be purchased from the MMORPG Skill Tree, discussed earlier). By default, this first attribute is "Health". On this screen, you can specify the attribute name, what colour it should be drawn in the little status bar you see above your subscribers' heads, and how fast it should regenerate. Also, you can specify what happens if it should run out. (Right now, the options are "do nothing", "die", and "unsubscribe".. but I'm sure people will suggest more).
Now, this probably suggests the next bit. On the "Classes" screen, it no longer squeezes all the data for every class into a single monolithic "Classes" screen; instead, it now has a separate screen for each class. This is because in addition to the current class statistics, classes now now also have "Abilities".
At the start, you can set only one ability per class, which by default is named "Attack". This ability is of "attack" type, has a melee range, with a target-damage of "1 health", a duration of "instant", a recharge time of 1 second, and is made available from level 1. But you can modify all of that if you desire. And if you want more abilities for your classes (trust me, you will!), you can buy extra ability slots from the MMORPG Skill Tree.
There are three types of class ability; "attack", "buff", and "travel". And honestly, "attack" and "buff" are basically identical.
"Attack" abilities are focused on dealing damage to foes; the only standard attack feature that isn't present here is splash damage (as I didn't want to spend the CPU time figuring out what monsters were close enough to be hit, if 10,000 adventurers all threw their grenades at the same moment).. but I will probably add that later, just for completeness. These can raise or lower any attribute both on the user, and on the target (most commonly, this will cause direct health damage to the target, and may decrease a "stamina" or "mana"-type of attribute on the ability's user, if your MMORPG has an attribute like that).
"Buff" abilities are focused on healing friends. These can raise or lower any attribute both on the caster, and on the target. As I said before, there really is no functional difference between "buff" abilities and "attack" abilities, but right now the adventurer AI will only use "buffs" on adventurers and will only use "attacks" on monsters. But I may end up getting rid of this distinction entirely.
"Travel" abilities allow adventurers to move faster than normal. So for example, you can give a player a "sprint" ability which allows him to move at 1.3 times his normal speed, with a duration of 15 seconds, a maximum range of "infinite", a recharge of 15 minutes, and costing a certain amount of health (or other attribute) to activate. Or you can even use these "Travel" abilities to give a player a "teleport" power, by setting the speed to "infinite" and the maximum range to however far you want that class to be able to teleport.
Now, all that's probably a little overwhelming, so here's a practical example of the new "Attributes" and "Class Abilities" systems. Let's assume we keep our MMORPG's first attribute as "Health", and have bought a second attribute which we've named "Mana". We've also bought an extra ability slot, so all our classes can have up to two abilities available instead of only one.
So on our "mage" class, we give him a "fireball" spell which requires a certain amount of mana to use, but does lots of extra damage and can hit enemies outside of melee range. Also, we set the mage class to regenerate "Mana" faster than normal players, so he can use that spell frequently. But we set his health very low; if a monster closes into melee range, he's not likely to survive for very long.
We also have a "Tank" class. Let's get tricky with him; let's set him to regenerate "Mana" in a negative direction; that is, if he ever gets mana somehow, it will slowly go away again even if he isn't using it (We do this by setting his "Mana regeneration" value to a negative number). We also modify his basic "Attack" ability to cost him -1.0 mana; in effect, he now gains mana every time he attacks something, but slowly loses it again when he stops using his "Attack" ability. We can then use his second Ability slot for an attack we'll call "Rage"; Rage will require a certain amount of Mana to activate and will do some extra damage to his foe, compared against "Attack". And since we want this class to be a proper tank, we'll have the rage attack increase the tank's "Health" attribute every time the tank uses it. Also, we'll set that the tank won't gain this ability until he's reached level 4 (for example), which will give tank-playing subscribers a big boost in satisfaction when they reach level four and learn the ability. Subscribers absolutely love unlocking new class abilities, so it's probably worth unlocking at least one extra ability early enough for subscribers to access it on their very first play session.
Finally, we have an "Empath" class, who will be our healer. We have lots of options here, but I'm going to pretend that our empath works by transferring wounds from one person to another. So we'll take away his "attack" skill altogether, and instead give him a "Transfusion" buff which costs him health and mana, and heals a target's health. And just to be weird, let's have his second class ability be an attack which causes him to transfer a target's mana to himself. (Note that someone of this class would be totally unable to defeat a monster on his own, so it's not worth making a class like this until you have parties working. And probably not even then; the subscriber would likely become frusterated at being so useless in combat, even while just trying to find a party.)
Note that all of this is only an example. You could just as easily name your attributes and classes something else entirely. For example, you could make some sort of underwater MMORPG where your adventurers don't have health at all, but instead have "Air" as their primary attribute, and all the actions available to them cost or restore "Air" to their oxygen supply.
And also note that if you do nothing with these systems, the game works exactly as it did before; the current "health" and "basic attack" system is automatically created for you when you first start up a new MMORPG. The difference is that you can now change that, if you wish to.
So where we're currently at.. most of the above is implemented and working. There's still a lot of work to be done on the subscriber AI, particularly in regards to combat strategy (the main point where this is tricky is when you have two or more critical attributes which can cause death, it can be tricky for a subscriber to effectively pick which of the two attributes to focus on whittling down to zero). Once the subscribers are fully working this way, then I want to move monsters over to the same system, so you can specify special abilities for them in the same way.
Oh. And for those who've played the 1.1p1 or 1.1p2 builds, the "<person> has gained a level!" and "<person> has finished quest "<quest>"!" spam is gone now; it now announces when the maximum level of a subscriber goes up, and announces full information about the doings of any player who you're inspecting.. but it doesn't announce every achievement of every subscriber all the time, any longer.
And this post has gotten way too long. So I'm going to stop now. Hopefully I'll have more to say tomorrow, though. :)
Posted 1 year ago # -
Anonymous
UnregisteredHah, found my password!
Also, keep those long posts coming Trevor, sometimes they give a pretty interesting read on a boring day. :3
Posted 1 year ago # -
Anonymous
UnregisteredWhat's the limit on attributes and skills?
Posted 1 year ago # -
Right now, the limit is six attributes (which are applied across all classes and monsters), and six abilities per class. (I still have to make monsters have adjustable abilities, too)
There's no reason that these numbers couldn't be higher; the purchase options just take up space in the MMORPG Skill Tree (which I should really rename to "Tech Tree"), and I'd need to make space for them in the class and attribute customisation screens. But with those UI concessions in mind, there's no real limit to what the game could support.
I just figured that with up to five character classes and ten monster classes, nobody would actually want to customise even (5+10)*6 == 90 custom abilities. :)
Posted 1 year ago # -
November 12th:
Hot here, today, so my brain hasn't been working too well and not much coding has gotten done.
There are two notable things that I got done today. One is that I made a really good optimisation to VectorStorm rendering (I was doing an expensive operation during the culling of offscreen objects -- this fix hasn't yet been migrated to VectorStorm trunk), and the other is that I finally fixed the fade in/fade out of the map screen when loading/exiting a game. It used to be this weird mish-mash of some bits of the map fading and some bits staying solid during the transition.. now the fade is clean.
I also have made an experimental change which virtually eliminates the freeze when loading a saved game. But it makes the code more complicated and error prone, so I don't think I'm going to keep it. Too bad, though; the transition is actually pretty smooth when the game doesn't freeze for a second or so in the middle.
Posted 1 year ago # -
November 13th:
It was another hot day today, but I found a way to beat the heat. I hid away in a little room with the portable air conditioner unit. I've done that before, but ordinarily the air conditioner makes so much noise that it makes concentration difficult.. but today, I used earplug headphones, and that was fantastic. :)
So here's what got done today:
- The MMORPG Skill Tree is now the MMORPG Tech Tree (because while calling it a 'Skill Tree' made a nice parallel between the MMORPG itself and the characters inside the MMORPG, it was also extremely confusing to people who aren't me. Instead, I'll make that comparison in the related tutorial text. I mean, once I've implemented the tutorial).
- The MMORPG Tech Tree is no longer a single screen inside the "Design" toolbar pane. Now, it has its own pane on the toolbar. The Tech Tree interface has no fewer than six screens full of different technologies which can be developed. Right now, there are 50 techs in total. Some of these are things you've seen in 1.1p1 which I've migrated over to the new unlocking system (taverns, quest-givers, etc), many of them unlock things which were always unlocked before (character class slots 3-5, monster slots 4-10, etc), some of them are new but I've talked about them previously (class abilities and attributes), and some of them are new and I've not spoken about them yet. Lots and lots of stuff!
- Here's a fun extra note. The technologies which you can develop are defined in a simple text data file, and so are very easy to modify; add new technologies, change their prices, change their names, etc.
Not all of these listed technologies are actually implemented yet, of course, but I finally feel like I'm within sight of the finish line for MMORPG Tycoon 1.1. There aren't actually too many things left to be accomplished.
Posted 1 year ago # -
November 15th:
No update yesterday, but I did get some work done. Just didn't post about it. Sorry about that. :)
Of course, once the heat abated, I've come down with either a mean cold or a nasty set of allergies; not yet sure which it is. I'm coping at the moment thanks to some nice decongestant, but it's got me feeling a little off-balance and vaguely nauseous. Stuff's still getting done, but progress is a little slower than normal while I recover.
- More formatting stuff in the Tech Tree screens. I've now got the data-driven technologies being sorted into the multiple Tech Tree screens correctly, and being formatted correctly (with dependencies and suchlike being drawn correctly).
- Discovered that I'd been writing and rewriting the same block of code many times. Factored out the common bit of code, and was able to completely remove about 20 classes from MMORPG Tycoon, and about a thousand lines of code, without changing functionality at all. This is one of those boring points for non-programmers (who are probably wondering why I even mentioned it), but for a coder, this is the sort of change that really brings a smile to your face.
- I spent a fair amount of time today trying to work out how to format the Tech Tree screens; one of the screens actually has 20 techs available on it, which leaves very little space available for displaying descriptions, or confirmation buttons or anything, and some of the others have very wide trees, while others have very deep but narrow trees, so there's no consistant place to put this information on each screen. In the end, I've settled on displaying the description and purchase confirmation in a second, pop-up screen when you click on the tech's button.
- I moved the 'competitor' random name generation into a data-driven scheme like I did for class names, monster names, region names, and a few other things a while back; I'd overlooked the 'competitor' stuff, before. Oops!
- Made a huge improvement to the UI layering system, which will make it much easier to maintain the system if I ever need to add new layers again (as I did when I added the map fader, back on the 12th, and when I added the tooltips, further back than that).
- Started on the "Technology Overview" screen, which will display your game's current levels, as well as what's currently being developed, how many devs are working on it, and how long it's expected to take to finish being developed.
TODO: Need to generate these levels for the competitor MMORPGs, and also start displaying the player's MMORPG in that list (probably drawn in a different colour, to make it stand out?)
Also, I've decided on the killer feature set for MMORPG Tycoon 2.0. (I'm now thinking that after MMORPG Tycoon 1.1, I'll take a little break with a different project; I've been thinking a lot about elaborating on the simulator I used for the "Sir Nicholas Spratt" Game in a Week game. Now that I mention it, I'll probably do a few Game in a Weeks, too; I miss them! And then I'll start work on MMORPG Tycoon 2.0, which will be very very big and exciting.)
Posted 1 year ago # -
November 16th:
Whatever had me yesterday still has me today, so not too much work got done; I've mostly been resting and trying to recover. But here's today's list:
- More work on the Technology Overview Screen (which is the screen that shows your current technology level summary, what tech you're currently working on, an estimate of how long before it'll be complete, etc). Still not even close to complete.
- Modified "Class" editing to put each class on its own screen, instead of cramming them all together into that one screen. This is phase one of exposing the new class abilities as a user-editable trait (right now, they're still all being randomly generated)
- The game now calculates and updates your MMORPG level as you purchase new technologies, and actually keeps track of how many attributes, classes, monster slots you've purchased; this means I'll finally be able to wire the tech tree into the core MMORPG simulation and UI (previously, the tech tree was just a little oddity sitting on its own over in a corner, not actually affecting anything except for taking your money if you did purchase anything from it).
- Fixed cursor to handle two-layer screens (such as the Attribute specifications and Class specifications) more reliably. Previously, the cursor would occasionally get confused about which of the two screens were on top, and would activate buttons on the rearmost screen instead of on the frontmost screen, if the buttons were overlapping.
- Technologies can now be specified in the data file as "initially available"; these technology items are given to the player for free at the start of a new game, and the player is not charged for them. Right now, techs in this category are character classes number 1 and 2, and monster types numbers 1 and 2 (which, incidentally, override the usual random monster type generation and are always "rats" and "spiders" by default. Because every MMORPG has spiders and rats). Also, the first attribute is given freely in this way ("health", by default), and the first class ability for each character class and monster type as well.
And now I'm going to bed, in hopes that I'll feel a bit better tomorrow than I do today. Wish me luck!
Posted 1 year ago # -
November 18th:
Still ill, though improving.
- Tech Tree "Overview" screen now displays tech levels (your "attractiveness" to the various classes of player)
- Technology Buttons on the various Tech Tree screens are now drawn in different colors, to show which technologies you own, which are available to develop now, and which still have unfulfilled prerequisites.
And that's it for me today. Heading to bed.
Posted 1 year ago # -
November 20th:
More on the Tech Tree.- Added descriptions for every technology in the MMORPG Tech Tree. Minor adjustments to the techs themselves ("Instant Messages" now require "Friends List" as a prerequisite, "BackStory 1" is now "World History", etc)
- Added a "Tech Details" screen. When you click on a technology on the mmoTechTree, it now opens this "details" floating window, which shows the technology, its description, and allows you to begin development.
- Minor fix to radio button UI code; now when you activate a different radio button, the other radio buttons in the group don't have their "Deactivate()" function called unless they were actually active.
Posted 1 year ago #
Reply »
You must log in to post.