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Home again after the trip.  It’s been hectic.  😉  I’ll get back into the swing of things and get back to everyone later this week.  Really tired right now though, been driving all day; but I DID say I’d get something in this week, sooo…  Hope everyone had a great holiday!

100 Days

There’s now 100 days left.  Out of 365 to start.  Technically, only 69 days left before the contestants need a demo up, or they’re – disqualified? docked points? – not sure, the rules are not really very clear on that.

But one hundred days to get the game done.  Which means 265 have gone by, during which I’ve accomplished some writing and some modeling, and not a lot else.  I’m looking at Talentraspel’s community version of the PG Kit now, and it seems to run pretty smoothly.  Modding it is still going to be a bear, though.

I’m taking next week off.  Really, haven’t done much THIS week, either, been so busy getting ready for travel over the holiday.  I’ll try to pop in while I am away to say “hi”, but it won’t be a big post, most likely.

Going to do some thinking about where to go from here.

Realmcrafter

OK, couldn’t help it.  Reinstalled RC and dug back into it a bit.  Been getting more active on the RC forums, too.  I’m getting the feeling the releases I was mentioning before are not really due out for a bit though…  Maybe another month, or more.  The new server code for RC1 should fix a lot of the major issues that exist, though, and really make it a viable engine for a larger scale game.  Not talking thousands of players, mind, but maybe for hundreds.  That would really be ideal.

I wished from the start that I could have entered an RC game in this contest.  Still think I could have done well with one, even without the DX9 rendering and shaders of RC2.  But the contest was Torque-only, and I thought it would be a good way to get motivated.  That, and RC was having server issues that made a game not really possible, last spring.  Two betatests were attempted by decent teams, and both died because they could not keep their server running.  It’s been a long time, and those problems still exist.  That said, there HAS been one official released game with RC now, which is very exciting.  It’ll be interesting to track how it does, albeit difficult – it’s an educational program for history teachers in Denmark!  Dansken Online, it’s called.

Reworking/detailing design doc

In the process of working on the subplots, I noticed that the design doc I submitted last spring had never been adequately revisited.  It was a bit rough then, and has not improved overmuch since then.  I’m spending some time right now fleshing it out a bit, adding some detail.  Hopefully can have a version of it released before the Dec holidays, although I’ll probably still trim out the details on the storylines.  😉

Gryphon

Well, I have to say I’m a bit frustrated with Gryphon.  It’s been underway for many moons now, and by the early projections was supposed to be very nearly done at this point.  Which would have been perfect.  Unfortunately, it’s not.  It’s not even close.  It’s not even nearly close.

I can’t blame Dave at all, though.  What with quitting his job to work on indie programming contracts, and ‘little’ life changing events like, oh, having a baby – born last month, and congrats! – he’s been a wee bit busy.

So I guess it’s more disappointment than frustration.  I was looking forward to working with the engine.  It’s hard to draw up the motivation to build anything with the PG Kit.  There’s a new “community version” of the PG Kit that someone is cleaning up, making sure it all runs well, and documenting a bit.  I might check that out some.  I’ve also reinstalled Realmcrafter – with the new server due out soon, the source code already released, and the RC2 version coming out hopefully soonish, it might be a better option.

Of course, that would mean swapping engines.  Again.  And dropping the contest.  And admitting that this past eight months has basically been wasted as far as game design.  *sigh*  Just having a hard time really digging in to the PG kit, and not seeing a lot of other options as far as Torque goes.

Happy Turkey Day!

Been traveling all week, so not much done this time.  Just checking in fast to hope everyone had a great holiday, if you’re in the USA, and a great day in general if you’re elsewhere.

Be back next week!

Working on Story

A major part of development is going to be plotlines. To make this game work, we need a primary storyline (in this case, the ongoing battle between Life and Unlife as represented by the necromancers and undead vs the living) which is pretty well laid out. Players start on the side of Life, but can swap. Players can battle to alter the face of the world by ‘flipping’ magical nexus points to Lifestones or Deathstones – which act to influence the area, and as bindpoints as well.

What I’m doing right now is detailing the second string of plotlines – the subplots. I plan to have at least a few major subplots for each general area of the game. I’m starting off with the Knights’ Keep ones. These I’m going to keep quiet for the most part, although I may post an example, or at least the starting point for one.

Once these are done, I’ll detail specific mini-tasks. More like traditional quests, these will be things players can do, right then, to have some small impact on the world.

Ditched EasyBuilder

It was a cool experiment, and I could certainly see using it for some other game in the future.  I’m just not sure it meshes well with the concept for this one.  I’m concerned that a real retro look like that could be detrimental to immersion, and hurt the roleplaying in the game.

So we’re back to normal Torque terrains.  I’ve got a number of textures gathered or made up, and I’m starting to work in L3DT on heightmaps to import into Torque for texturing.

New Toys

I’ve spent the last few days tinkering around with a new toy, one which I might put to use in ROTH.  From Empower Games (http://www.empowergames.com), it’s a beta-level software called “EasyBuilder3D”, and basically what it does is generate old Zelda-style levels.  It uses a set of simple prefab models to quickly snap together a large section of, with each prefab textured on all sides with your choice of a wide variety of built in textures – or your own ones.

The programmer has been working on a remake of the old Zelda map as a demonstration of what the software can do:

It’s pretty cool.  Looking at it, you can see how making dungeons, for instance, would be a snap – literally!

What *I’ve* done is found a path to get those models into Torque.

Originally created for use in Realmcrafter and other B3D apps, EasyBuilder only exports to .b3d format and a special datapoint format I haven’t quite figured out yet.  A .X export is coming, and possibly, thanks to my suggestions, a DIF export as well.  In the meantime, however, I have had moderate success using Deled as a converter.

Deled is a nice modeling package – really one of the best two for modeling DIFs, IMHO (3DWS being the other one).  It’s noteworthy because it attempts to break normal ‘polysoup’ meshes into DIF-legal brushes.  In the case of EasyBuilder models, it’s actually pretty easy, since all the chunks they are made of are DIF-legal to begin with, so all the software has to do is break them back up into their original components.  In fact, the EB->Deled->DIF trials I did were exporting with half or less as many brushes as there were chunks in the original EB model, so it works pretty efficiently.

Simply download and install Deled Lite (free).  Download and install the B3D import/export plugin.  Download the trial DIF exporter – it’s limited to 25 brush exports – or pay the $15 for the full exporter.  I already had Deled Pro and the full exporter, so I was ready to roll.

Make your model in EasyBuilder, export as B3D.  Import to Deled.  Ecport as DIF.  Simple as that!  Now, right now there is a texture issue on the DIF export – EB merges all textures used into a single texture map, which doesn’t work for DIFs.  So while I am getting good exports into Torque, they have no textures.  The program’s creator said he’s going to patch EasyBuilder to let you toggle that, however – so you’ll be able to export with each texture still as a separate file, at which point I should have perfect exports.

I’m really happy with the first looks at this tool.  I think it’ll create some nice looking adventure areas, with a very stylized appearance, very rapidly.  Even more promising is that Empower Games is looking into a  full DIF export native in their program.

I’ll get some screenshots up once I have some textured models in Torque to show!

Creating Interactive Story

There’s a lot of garbage that has been written about the theory of interactive story in an online game. Garbage, because most of it is useless theoretical crap. Theoretical, because no one has done it yet. Not in a graphical game, anyway. That’s a serious problem, because it means that interactive online storytelling is essentially an unfounded medium of communication, something that has no easy templates or examples to draw from.

There have been some failed stabs at it in the past, of course. Asheron Call 1 had an ongoing monthly “story” that in theory players could affect but in practice was simply patched in the same on every server regardless of whether players had done anything to progress the story or not. The story there was backdrop, not core. It was not interactive, because it progressed in the same way regardless of player action. Shadowbane briefly tried some GM-driven storyline events, but these again tended to be brief and without lasting impact. Players who happened to be online got to go see the event, kill some mobs (or players!) maybe get a cool item, and that was it. The results of the event really never changed anything in the world. Eve Online and other games have introduced what I would call “ongoing backstory”. As the months go on, new backstory is introduced, talking about the changes in the world around you. Again though, this backstory rarely has any impact on the players. It’s flavor, designed to make the patches more interesting and explain away any oddities added in a patch.

Wish was probably the closest thing to my goal ever to be attempted. Wish intended to have no senselessly repeating quests, for instance; all quests would either be one shot deals, or would repeat because it was logical they do so. Dungeons would not automatically respawn; a GM would have to reinitialize a dungeon with new critters based around some new story sequence – “reinhabit” it, so to speak. Story would be driven by a collaboration between players and GMs, with GMs presenting challenges and players responding to those challenges with their actions, which in turn let the GMs develop the future chapters of the story. Wish sounded like a truly wonderful idea.

Wish was cancelled in beta due to unforseen difficulties with production. Go figure, eh? 😉

There are other examples of failed or halfhearted attempts, but essentially any sort of real interactive storytelling in an MMORPG is breaking new ground. So, with no strong examples to build on, the best bet seems to be to work from the failed attempts of others, and try to see where they went wrong.

The system I am roughing out is a mesh of some of the concepts of Asheron’s Call, melded with some of the flexibility planned for Wish. AC ran updates with fixed, preplanned content. This was necessary because the game used a multiple-shard setup. The same content needed to be patched to every server every time. As a result, player action could never determine the content being patched, because divergence between server storylines was not allowed to happen. A single-shard approach is not vital to a story based game, but it helps. Multiple servers would mean generating, tracking, and doing all the work to create content for multiple storylines, since divergence is almost certain. My intent was always to run a single shard, at least at the outset, so this part is easy.

AC1’s patches were not frequent enough to be reactive, however. Monthly patches don’t occur often enough to be seen as responding to player actions. It’s too easy to disassociate the patched changes from the actions the players did that caused them when there is a 2-4 week lag between the two. A faster update pace is required. Wish was the flip side of this coin, with GMs constantly spinning out new content in the form of quests, spawns, and such on an hourly basis around the clock. This undoubtably proved very time intensive, and it seems likely that the projected man-hours required contributed heavily to the cancellation of the game. So we need fast updates, but not as fast as Wish had in mind. We need content that responds to players, but not in a pre-scripted manner, since that would seem artificial.

The best answer I have come up with so far seems to be a threshold system. Storylines will be scattered through the game world, with various thresholds tracked by the server. For instance, if a certain critter infests an old mine, and players can recover the mine, then after a certain threshold of clearing activity, a flag will go up, and the GMs will patch the next segment in that story. That area might have a deeper dungeon at the bottom of it which now needs exploring. The critters might have moved, but where did they go and what trouble will they cause now? These sorts of continuations of the story can be patched as soon as the players have hit the critical trigger level. You can think of these threshold points as “turn the page” events which act as flags to tell the GMs to move the story along.

Comlpexity can be added as well. If there is a threshold for heavy player victory against the critters, what happens if the players ignore them completely? Do they just stay there, or would a threshold event be added for a certain level of non-interference? This can easily be a graduated scale; a point value which slowly moves up if they are not interfered with, and moves down whenever their lair is invaded. If the point scale goes high enough, they might grow bold, raiding farms nearby, attracting stronger allies, or otherwise becoming a bigger menace.

Further complexity can be added by mixing the thresholds. Undead infest the ruins of a nearby keep. The little goblinlike critters have always coveted those ruins, but are afraid of the undead. If players clear the ruins, the critters might move in to replace the undead – if the critter point scale is high enough. If they’ve been raided a bit, they might be more inclined to dig in. If they’ve been raided a lot, and want a new home though, they might head for the ruins anyway. And who knows what sorts of trouble small burrowing critters can turn up at an ancient ruin?

I’m sure you get the idea now. By introducing myriad small “turn the page” events, the GMs can be flagged when a particular storyline has been affected by the players enough to move it to the next chapter. By knowing in advance the possible outcomes, GMs can prep the content needed to quickly apply the patches required for any new story segment. The overall system is still rough, and I’d welcome other thoughts on the subject. But it looks to me like it is a system which should work – providing ongoing interactive stories in a manageable manner.