{"id":1157,"date":"2010-02-20T14:14:02","date_gmt":"2010-02-20T03:14:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vectorstorm.org\/?p=1157"},"modified":"2010-02-20T14:18:40","modified_gmt":"2010-02-20T03:18:40","slug":"with-monsters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/2010\/02\/20\/with-monsters\/","title":{"rendered":"With Monsters"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Folks might remember in the 1.0 version of MMORPG Tycoon, there was a limit of 100 players per zone; \u00a0if the zone filled up, any new players who attempted to enter the zone would be knocked offline, and the server could crash (unlikely; \u00a0from memory, it was about a 1% chance of a server crash each time a player was knocked offline). \u00a0In the 1.1 version of MMORPG Tycoon, that limit was raised to 300 per zone, but the monsters in the zone were counted toward that limit. \u00a0Still, in most zones you’d have around 70-80 monsters, so you could still have far more players in one zone than before.<\/p>\n

In version 2.0, I haven’t yet decided what sort of limit to put on the number of players in a zone (right now, there’s no limit, but eventually there’ll have to be one, both for performance and for gameplay reasons). \u00a0But I’ve been populating the regions with monsters, just to see what different numbers of monsters looks like. \u00a0(In this screenshot, monsters are represented by red boxes, one meter wide by 1.5 meters tall. \u00a0I’m planning to make proper models for them and for players for milestone 2)<\/p>\n

The first thing I need to mention is that the regions in version 2.0 are approximately the same size as the ones in 1.0 and 1.1; \u00a0they’re still about a kilometer across. \u00a0However, since we’re able to actually zoom in and stand on the ground, these 2.0 regions look a lot bigger than the regions from the previous revisions which were only visible in a top-down view, and so some things which seemed okay in the previous versions seem wrong, here.<\/p>\n

This screenshot is the first example. \u00a0The spacing of monsters looks pretty sparse, doesn’t it? \u00a0If you took this much space from a real MMORPG, there’d be a lot more monsters than you can see here. \u00a080 monsters spread evenly in a v1.1 zone this same size looks about right for the space there, but in v2.0.. well.. suddenly it looks empty. \u00a0 And there weren’t just 80 monsters in the region I was standing in for this screenshot; \u00a0there were 651 of them, approximately evenly spaced. \u00a0And even with more than eight times the number of monsters in the region, it still looks empty compared to v1.1.<\/p>\n

Why did it look right in v1.1? \u00a0I’ve gone back to check. \u00a0Part of it was that the monsters (and the players, for that matter) were drawn huge. \u00a020-30 meters tall, generally. \u00a0Having the graphics for the characters larger than life made them easier to see when zoomed out, and helped make the regions feel “full”, even when they actually were even sparser than v2.0 appears to be in this screenshot. \u00a0It embarrasses me that I didn’t notice how huge I’d made the characters in v1.1, when I was coding that.<\/p>\n

So what do I do to fix this for v2.0? \u00a0Well, I’m thinking that I’ll probably make the regions a little smaller, to begin with. \u00a0That’ll mean I’ll be able to make them feel “full” without having quite so many monsters in each.. \u00a0though it’ll probably still be around 600-800 monsters per region. \u00a0Making the regions smaller will also make it less frequent to be unable to see the mountainous border at the far end of the region you’re in, if you happen to have a clear view that far. \u00a0 I might also intentionally make monsters and players a little bit larger than they are now. \u00a0Not to the silly extent from 1.1, but it might be reasonable to make the players, say, 2.5 meters tall by 1.5 wide, instead of 1.5 by 1.0.<\/p>\n

But it’s kind of neat to find this sort of fault in old projects; \u00a0discover that I’d overlooked something like the scale of the character graphics, which caused all sorts of other little bits of bizarreness in the project. \u00a0Years from now, I wonder what I’ll see when I look back on v2.0.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Folks might remember in the 1.0 version of MMORPG Tycoon, there was a limit of 100 players per zone; \u00a0if the zone filled up, any new players who attempted to enter the zone would be knocked offline, and the server could crash (unlikely; \u00a0from memory, it was about a 1% chance of a server crash…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[24,25],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/po9WK-iF","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1157"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1157\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}