When will the game be ready? And did you fix that drowned thing? It's kinda pissing me off that 3.000 have drowned and i'm losing subcribers because of it! I love your game BTW :)
The Official 1.1 Progress Log
(152 posts) (13 voices)-
Wish I had an answer for you, Kris! The game will be ready when it's done.. but that's probably going to be a while longer, yet. At the moment, between work and social life and suchlike, I'm generally only averaging about an hour's work on MMORPG Tycoon per day. So you can probably understand that progress has been a little slow.
As for the "drowned thing".. I'm not entirely sure what you mean. When a user travels over water (the deep blue unlabelled and unoutlined regions), he slowly takes damage over time. If he dies due to that damage, that's "drowning", which generates the complaint in the "Issues" report. Right now, users don't try to avoid water (that's one of the post-alpha tasks planned for version 1.1), but they will prefer to use roads, if the roads don't take them too far out of their way. And roads are treated as bridges; that is, users won't take water damage while travelling on a road.
So the easy way to avoid users drowning is just to place roads that travel over the water; users should then use the bridges instead. (Note that due to optimisations in the pathfinding code, players will not use multiple disconnected roads on their journey to a destination; they'll only use the best available road. So it's highly recommended that you link up these bridges to the rest of your road network!)
Post-alpha in 1.1, the pathfinding code will be improved to avoid large-scale hazards such as water, so you won't even need to place these bridges to help your users navigate over water hazards.
Posted 1 year ago # -
Interesting. You might check why your users are travelling over the water to begin with. Maybe you've placed your zones so that users have to travel over water, to get from one levelling zone to another one? If you pause the game and find a user who's in transit, and click on the user, it should tell you what that user thinks he's doing, which might give you an idea of why he's where he is.
(Are you running v1.0.16? Or v1.1p1/2?)
Posted 1 year ago # -
Ah! That explains it. In 1.0.16, users didn't try to avoid water at all, and roads didn't travel as bridges over water; they acted like they were paved underneath the water (so users would still drown, even if they did follow the roads).
Best thing to do with 1.0.16 is to put your towns in places such that your users won't travel through water when they're moving from one town to another. Remember that users will move between towns of similar levels if their home town is highly congested, and that they'll move to higher levelled towns once they've gained enough levels. In 1.1, users are a lot smarter about avoiding water (and will be even smarter still, in the next build I put up)
Posted 1 year ago # -
I've been working on 1.1 for an awfully long time (although just in my spare time; still gotta pay the rent! ;) ); I'd say that I've really been working on it for about three or four months, now. Whereas by comparison, I wrote all of version 1.0 in just one month.
In the final version of 1.1, you'll be able to rename all the quests, yes. You'll also be able to configure what they have your users do (monsters to fight, places to visit, etc) That's not really implemented yet, but it's just a matter of wiring up some UI to set the quest values which right now are being set randomly.
Posted 1 year ago # -
25th November:
Been ill for a while, but I'm back now! I've got the tech tree now basically working, including purchasing+developing buildings and suchlike.
Stuff that's still to be done on it is basically save/load, and saving the tech tree configuration into the save file; if someone changes the contents of the TechTree data file between save and load, that could lead to all sorts of havok, so it's just safer if I save the whole TechTree configuration into the game save (so changing the TechTree data file after starting an MMORPG game won't change the techs available within that game)
The technology tree is now over 50 techs; I had to add a few techs to be automatically awarded to the player at the start of the game, in order to ensure that respawn points and basic towns and suchlike are available to him.
Incidentally, during my illness, I briefly reactivated a couple of my old MMORPG accounts and had another look at those MMOs. I have to say, MMORPGs look very different when you're looking at them from the point of view of simulating their core setup! I was most intrigued by City of Heroes's game system, which seems to be doing exactly what I'm doing with the configurable Attributes/Abilities system I've been writing, though they have a third element as well ("Statistics"? Not sure what to call it. It's basically a trait that can be increased or decreased by abilities, and which can affect the results of abilities, but which doesn't increase or decrease on its own, and which doesn't show up in a "health bar" display. This is stuff like "Defense vs. Psychic Attacks" and suchlike, which can be buffed/debuffed by player abilities, and which also affects other attack calculations.)
Posted 1 year ago # -
token88
Memberwouldnt we all like to beta test it!!
i really like the sound of the tech tree btw. also will the techs be easy or hard to get. i personally think they ought to be harder rather then easier. as it will give the game longevity, and provide us (rather then sims) the much needed addictive factor and achievement factopr as we get them. similar to level in a mmorpg.
Posted 1 year ago # -
The techs will be both easy and hard to get.
The earlier you get a tech, the less it will cost you (on the theory that as your MMORPG becomes more complicated, it costs more and more to add new features to it). And yes, advancement of your MMORPG is intentionally paralleling the advancement of players within the MMORPG (this is why I used to call the tech tree the "MMORPG Skill Tree", until that became too confusing, and also why MMORPGs have statistics and levels).
In addition to the above, different techs cost different amounts. For example, the social tech "Friends List" isn't very expensive to develop at all, whereas the building tech "Capital Towns" is quite expensive (and also has a number of prerequisite technologies you have to develop first), and then requires even more cash to place into the world.
And I'll be putting up development builds for people to test out from time to time, as I did with 1.1p1. But just like the techs in the tech tree, the more complicated MMORPG Tycoon becomes, the longer it seems to take to get new features implemented. :)
Posted 1 year ago # -
Much progress is made, and many of my passwords forgotten. Next time I am definitely writing it down, honest! :3
Being the "ZOMG HAWRDCOAR LOZL" gamer that I am, I didn't really find the Skill Tree name that confusing. As long as you put a description of it in the tutorial, people probably won't mind. Except me because I'm too strong and incredibly gorgeous to bother with tutorials.
Edit:
Also, what's with the shocked avatar? All shocked and all, as if it were shocked over something. Is it shocked? That would be most shocking indeed.
Posted 1 year ago # -
Still alive! Just been very busy lately, between paying work and various distractions.
Recent distractions include: briefly reactivated my World of Warcraft account, for MMORPG Tycoon ideas (my character is still only level 32). Briefly reactivated my City of Heroes account, also for MMORPG Tycoon ideas. Played far too much Little Big Planet (which is awesome on many levels). Midway through Fallout 3. Midway through Loco Roco 2. Midway through Aquaria. Still occasionally dabbling with Dwarf Fortress. Reading "Sam and Max Hit the Road" which I somehow managed to avoid actually reading before. Learning to use Quicksilver (I'm almost to the point where I'd be upset to lose it). Watching Iron Chef, Top Gear, and a few other similar television shows.
Oh, and I merged all the VectorStorm engine changes back from MMORPG Tycoon into the library trunk, and then from there out to the Nicholas Spratt sequel (which really hasn't had any development done on it since I wrote MMORPG Tycoon 1.0, but which I still intend to return to one of these days).
But virtually no work on MMORPG Tycoon in the past week; stuff at work has just had me too tired to want to write code when I get home in the evenings. But I'm sure I'll get back to it soon!
Posted 1 year ago # -
December 4th:
I actually got some coding done today, again. Yay, me! ;)
It's not much, but I've broken ground on the class ability creation process. The class design screens now have buttons for their various abilities, which let you customise them.
The first ability is "Attack" by default, which is targetted on an enemy, and drops the enemy's health (or whatever its first attribute is, if you've changed it into something else). I'm not sure how to auto-generate abilities beyond the first one, but I feel like it's important for the game to do that, to keep it accessible for those who don't want to customise their game's rules at such a low level.
Maybe it'll randomly generate an ability without considering the ability's usefulness or anything. Not sure. Or maybe I'll just keep assuming that the first attribute will be some form of "health" and a second attribute is some form of 'mana', and drain that for the auto-generated abilities beyond the first. Not sure.
Posted 1 year ago # -
Explorer
MemberWhat if for the auto generation of classes, there were some hard-coded templates that told what sort of abilities were more likely to get generated for the class? There could be templates for fighter types, cleric types, mage types, etc. so that the abilities could kind of fit the class. If the user wished, he could assign a different template to a different class to change its growth type, or just let the default settings get used if they don't want to mess around.
Posted 1 year ago # -
I like that thought, Explorer, but I'm not exactly sure how I'd implement it.
I can pretty easily put an option on each class page to say what type of class it is ("Fighter", "Tank", "Healer", etc.. and perhaps "Custom", which wouldn't auto-create abilities)..
Then when auto-generating abilities for a Fighter, it will pick a random attribute which results in death when depleted (typically, this will be 'health' or a variant of health), and set the ability to damage that attribute on an enemy.
A healer would get abilities which do the opposite; find an attribute which results in death when depleted (again, typically this will be 'health'), and set the ability to increase that attribute on a party-member.
And tanks could get either the abilities of 'Fighters' or 'Healers', but their attacks would be weaker than those of fighters, and their heals would only affect themselves.
I'm going to have to think about this more, but it's an interesting idea!
Posted 1 year ago #
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