Have a read of these crazy ideas I found...
(they have a vague relevance)
FIRST ONE...

Basically I think that it would be highly interesting to take a FPS online multiplayer (like TFC and CS) and introduce some resource management into the mix. Simple stuff. Nothing highly original, but hey.

A MINER would have to make his way to certain “fertile” areas, do a spot of digging and bring back the goods to the home base. There could be a range of values of raw materials to mine. Jewels and Gems could bring in more money than Coal etc. but would be harder to reach (perhaps up a mountain, near the enemy base or something).

In each case the aim is for money to be given for collected minerals to the entire team to be spent on new weapons and ammo or simple defence structures perhaps.

This raises a few questions...

Who decides how the money is spent? Perhaps there would be a team captain responsible for this duty or perhaps it could be left to the MINER. There would be some, say, computer terminal at the base where one of the above could go when enough cash had been accumulated.

Can the MINER himself carry a weapon? Tough one. If I say no, then it might make such a class boring to work. If I say yes then strategies such as trying to eliminate the MINER to stop their cash fund will be harder. Perhaps a weak weapon could be employed.

Who can use the weapons that are purchased? The rest of the team I think. The weapons could be placed at set pick up points (in the base and at little outposts belonging to the team) and its first come first served.

Are we talking CS (once your dead your dead) or TFC (respawns)? I think the latter. Otherwise funding would dry up too easily.

So why kill there miner if he’s just going to come back? Well it will slow things up for them financially, as he will lose everything he hasn’t yet deposited. And so more minerals for your team to mine.

What happens when minerals run dry? Another toughie. There should be plenty available in the first place, but the team will have to revert to using the more basic / default weaponry that doesn’t require purchasing.

Will there be silos like in C+C?

Possibly yes, all money would be stored there and it could have to be separate from the main base. This way enemies could blow the thing up, getting rid of all your cash.

How much can you hold?

This will have to be carefully discussed and balanced when we “playtest” the thing.

So what kind of things can you buy?

Right well.
Timed Bombs could be used to blow up bridges, small enemy defences and other players in the game.
Sentry guns could be purchased and then built (wherever), but unlike TFC they should be manned by the players. This way, clever opponents can sneak up behind and blow the thing up.
Huge Rocket launchers on wheels could be built and pushed around (hey I hope you programmers are up to this) to be fired to blow up bridges from underneath, take out large amounts of players or a silo structure.
Medic Top Ups or Body Armour could also be used. That way certain players could heal their fellow troops (without any of the injecting the opposition), despite being unrestricted on the other weapons they use (unlike TFCs medic).
Better quality weapons with faster reloads and inflicting more damage.

I have plenty more ideas, but I just want your comments and any interested folks to join me in my quest to make a fun mod.

HERES ANOTHER

"Firstly I will apologies for the low quality of this document. I have never written out a design document in my life so I have no ideas as to how they should be. Secondly I will apologise for my lack of effort with the aesthetics of the document. Hey if you wanted pretty pictures you would never have read this far!

At this point I was going to describe my love for Team Fortress and Counter Strike, but I have realised that is not why you are here. So on to my aims

Aim and Game Outline

To create an ONLINE game that combines the genres of Role Play with FPS. Ridiculous you snort. Abstract ,yes, ridiculous no.

Imagine a game where you are part of a nation. You have your own job to perform and life to live. You can interact with your fellow countrymen. Trade goods and services. And much more...

All will be experienced from a first person viewpoint, creating that feeling of the players’ actual existence that many RPGs lack.

Perhaps you will be a farmer, growing crops or rearing livestock for sale. Maybe you’ll be a poacher, stealing these things.

Perhaps you will be a trader, underselling you fellow shop owners.

Or a doctor, curing your societies sick.

If you want to you can go round breaking the law, fighting with other gamers in your local village, stealing things perhaps. Or perhaps you will be the one upholding the law, the local Cop, fining those who step out of line.

Maybe you will be involved in politics. Part of a political party, aiming to get the vote of people at the forth coming election campaign. You’ll need a distinct set of policies to be voted in by your citizens (the other players). On the other hand you could be a group of terrorists going round killing people, seizing control in a different way. However guns will not be easy to get hold off so killing sprees will be something of a rarity.

Every player will need their own unique character with several information fields.
When they first play the game they can decide these different things:
Name/Job/Appearance (choice of several)

They may be allowed to change their Job if they wanted to.

There will also be a data field keeping a check on what the player has done. The type of information recorded here will be how rich they are, how good they are at what they do, what items they are carrying etc, how healthy they are etc.

The players will enter one of several levels, depending on which one the server is playing at that time. They will be carrying different equipment depending upon who they are.

A doctor will require medicines, bandages, syringes etc. He will have some of the standard ones by default but may need to buy others (not any old player will be able to buy these items - they will need to be medically certified). He can go around looking for other players who are in need of treatment. People who have been injured by a fall would have nasty bruises or a limp so the doctor would use say bandages for them. Others who have infections or food poisoning might look off colour.

The player working the doctor would require the ability to correctly diagnose. Some common sense may be involved or perhaps the need to research information by talking to more experienced players or looking for books from traders. If the doctor finds someone seriously injured, perhaps from a fight then CPR may be needed to resuscitate them. Doctors could be paid for medical care by agreements with ill people (mutually agreed amounts). They also may be rewarded by others players (say by a president who wants to fulfil his promise to invest in medical care) for good work or any old generous player (helping out a friend). The game would record how many people the doctor has treated and heeled in his/her time.

A farmer will need various farming tools. They may wish to hunt animals (these would have to be bots) and sell their catches to traders. They may be equipped with a standard bow and arrow for this purpose. Or they could buy traps from traders once they have saved up enough funds. However hunting might be illegal in certain servers (if the president in certain servers had made such a law). Note: anybody else may hunt if they bought this equipment. The farmer can also breed animals that he catches (alive - certain traps would kill others would just capture) to sell them for food. Alternatively he could grow crops. He''d have to buy seeds and plant them in fertile land or use fertiliser. They would require water too so a bucket may be required to transport this. Alternatively variable weather could play a role, but I don''t want to get carried away just yet. They would take x amount of time to grow and could then be sold to traders. If they weren''t given long enough they would be smaller and would fetch a lower price. Bad farming may lead to "poisoned" food or other farmers (wanting to damage the competition) could take the law into their own hands. The result of this may be infections and disease for those eating the food.

Did I mention you have to eat to survive.

Now obviously servers will not be able to remember where all different farms are if people are planting crops and all that. Here is the solution. Farmers will plant their crops or drop the cages where they will keep their captured animals when they are on the server. They will do as much business as they can: producing and selling and then when they leave the server these items will be removed. It will be like nomadic herding. You take your little farm round in your rucksack. You take it to where you want to use it, grow or rear stuff, then sell and pack up. You can move to another area in the server and begin again or go offline and next time you join a game begin again.

HELP...... Ok so I realise that this design document stinks bad, but just be constructive. What sounds impossible?
Where are the problems? What else do I need to mention?

quote: Original post by Wavinator

Already we know we can''t lockpick a cow, or heal a gate; but to replace scripting we''d need to know whether or not either a cow could be: poisoned, crippled, burned, hidden, blown up... etc., etc. (And the results of such).

Wavinator is speaking about cows here. [inside joke]. I knew he was speaking about cows somewhere and I couldn''t remember where, nor could Wavinator, for that matter. But here it is. I found it.

In reference to his remarks about a cow, the point I was making to Wavinator is the value of knowledge in regard to cows or anything for that matter. Not only is such knowledge valuable to a simulation machine, but it is also simultaneously valuable to an NPC. An NPC should know that a cow is not a worthwhile thing to lockpick, and an NPC should know that a cow is not a worthwhile tool to use to do lockpicking. Does this have anything to do with this topic? Probably not, but at least I found Wavinator''s cow remarks.

I do agree with Bishop_Pass here, knowledge is the way to go.
With a query system, you can ask an object what are it''s attributes. For example, the cow would return something like health=x, damage_loc="leg", eatable, kind=cow, kind=mammal, attitude=friendly and so on. With this info the interface can display possible actions and the AI can select actions to be done...
Possibly you could determine some levels of examination, superficial would give only some info whereas complete would take more time but returns all info.
For example on superficial examination the door is closed, but on complete examination the attribute lockpickable is returned so the NPC knows that he can try to lockpick the door.
I think that with this level of abstraction you can simplify objects description and avoid to have a lockpick flag for each game objects.

quote: Original post by Wavinator

Do you think that better skill integration could come through simulation?

It also seems that any move in this direction would need more detailed objects. If you dump scripting, then the game world''s objects themselves would need to be information heavy. Already we know we can''t lockpick a cow, or heal a gate; but to replace scripting we''d need to know whether or not either a cow could be: poisoned, crippled, burned, hidden, blown up... etc., etc. (And the results of such).

You could just have the available actions programmed into the cow and leave the others out. Also, you would definately have to utilize some form of inheritance so that the cow is an "animal" which acts like a normal animal, but you can also milk it. It would still be a lot of work doing it for every object, but it provides more interaction (what games are all about) and is much more interesting than scripted.

As far as skills go, I think rpgs usually look at them from the wrong direction: From the skill to the action. It should go the other way: from the action to the skill. Paper/pencil rpgs have to be simplified, and need to work backwards to eliminate die rolls etc. But in computer games, we don''t have to be so limited. I think you should walk up to the door and press the key that generally opens doors, or better yet, you press against the door to open it. Since it''s a locked door, a pop-up window says: "LOCKED - Use lockpick? lockpicks-5 YES|NO" This would be coded in the door as such:

States:open|closed,locked|unlocked
actions:open-if_closed_and_unlocked[state:open]if_locked[skill:lockipick-state:open]"

The code for the popup would be in the section of code that uses skills. It may seem to be a small and somewhat insignifigant difference to the way skills are approached normally, but I think it''s a fundamental difference. Instead of clicking on a button in the skills part of the gui, you just "do the action." Back to the lockpick example, if the attempt is unsuccessful, the character would say something to the effect, or maybe a simple sound effect would work better. This kind of simple script would need to be written for every object that you can interact with, but it would go a long way toward making it more immersive. Also gets away from dice rpg''s some too.

I really like the fleshing out the doctor idea too. That would be so cool, you could have a game where you go out and injure people somehow without them catching you, and then heal them for money. You could flesh out other skills as well:
Steal - in order to be effective, you have to sneak up behind someone and slowly move your hand into their poccket without startling them
Lockpick - you have to move the pick around inside the lock to try and get it right
Bargaining - hmm, don''t know about this one

Anybody have any more?

quote: Original post by Saluk


You could just have the available actions programmed into the cow and leave the others out. Also, you would definately have to utilize some form of inheritance so that the cow is an "animal" which acts like a normal animal, but you can also milk it. It would still be a lot of work doing it for every object, but it provides more interaction (what games are all about) and is much more interesting than scripted.

Of course being able to milk the cow would need to have gameplay effects;
can you drink the milk ; "heal" with the milk; sell the milk; bottle feed baby-calves with it? (Farmer. Joe's prize cow dies, you arrange to bottle feed it with milk from your cow! huh?);

does the milk have physical properties; can you slip on wet floors? hurt people with thrown milk-churns?

-----

Of course in most games there are just abstractions of this; ie. milk = healing; not a weapon; can't be turned into yoghurt or cheese !

- and this is okay, as it concentrates the gameplay on useful choices.

Edited by - Ketchaval on May 25, 2001 9:51:13 AM

...but sometimes the "useless" choices are invaluable - if I am running away from a mob of angry über-goblins (who are seeking to avenge their fallen comrades from a thousand other RPG''s ) and all I have is a bottle of millk, throwing it at the floor to make them slip over is more useful to me than the one shot (and blatantly unrealistic) healing I would get once they start beating the crap out of me. It is this sort of thing that makes paper RPG''s fun. And I might want to make cheese, I might even want to start a cheese shop.

The problem is, that we are not making paper rpgs, and we don''t have the benefit of a talented game master to weight every single thing. We can do a pretty fair job of simulating a lot of things, but the time it would take to flesh out all of those useless options might have the negative effect of making the project impossible to finish. Not that we shouldn''t try - on the contrary, I think the more you can pack in there in the way of interactions between objects, the better a game experience you will have. I''m working on an open-ended rpg right now and my goal is to have the highest level of interaction possible. It''s difficult, so I''m keeping the world small. Things like being able to dump milk out to use as a trap are kind of stretching its use a bit (unless the floor is already smooth, and you have a lot of milk) but do add to the experience.
Look at the zelda games - The destructable terrain really is a gameplay element in itself. It may seem kind of silly, cutting grass and digging holes everywhere to get money and other items. But, its kind of fun just to be able to interact with the GROUND in this way. A gameplay element that rivals the fun of combat - digging. Doesn''t seem like it would be fun, but it is. If you cuouldn''t do it, it wouldn''t be zelda anymore, would it?
You just have to come up with a large list of actions you can make and what kind of method and variables you need to simulate the action. Then, you can look for similarites. Going back to the zelda example, cutting grass and digging are the same action to the engine (most likely). If tile_can_be_digged <then> change_tile_to_digged_tile is similar to if_tile_can_be_cut <then> change_tile_to_cut_tile. You can use similar code, for similar actions. Making sure that when you code it, you remember to code the actions modularly, in groups. Dumping the milk out is similar to dumping water out, except the milk and water have different properties. So once you program dumping milk out, you don''t have to do much to dump out water.

Phew!

There would be a huge workload for little general-use gameplay to make everything work in even 5 different ways. (as Saluk points out).

But I think that the advantage of concentrating on flexible SKILLS, you can get a lot of interesting scenarios and gameplay Choices.. in most situations. as opposed to carting around a gallon of milk, which can only be used once or twice.

Ie.
Kicking + imp = imp runs away, growls at you.

Kicking + treasure chest = the lock does / doesn''t give way. [kicking - action: break lock]

Kicking + sword = you kick the sword over to your allies.