Ah, I’d consider that an NPC->Player interaction. Nothing wrong with that.
I meant players dropping items onto the ground for other players to pick up. Thats a pain in the rear where networking is concerned.
Kev
Seems like the poster before yours was thinking specifically about loot. The easiest thing would to make the corpse a container that has the loot. This is the same the idea as Kevin was saying earlier. It certainly sounds like not putting items on the ground would be a lot simpler.
Just a few things I thought about. (written down in a messy way)
-Will there be weather effects? Day-night/rain-snow…
-Disappearing/altering tiles? Like you pull a lever and a bridge appears/hidden door opens.
-What about in-game time?
-Will player vs player combat be available?
-Will object be static or dynamic. Like “short sword” has only attack=5, def=8 (static), or unique attributes too like quality/demage (dynamic).
-Max number of players per server, and what about the others waiting?
-What if somebody has been attacked (by monster) and the player looses connection.
-Will there be under ground dungeons/caves, multi-storey houses?
-Real estate things owned by users (for example houses).
Some of theese may be answered “depends on editor-made script” i hope 
I just got a chance to log in… its been ages… how cool
Kev
Editor screen shot comment.
I think your map makers will love you if you allow the grid color to be changable. Or just set it at a neutral gray color, or a bit darker, but not black. Right now the yellow over powers the items you really care about, the tiles.
Not sure what people mean by turn based. Neverwinter Nights was a sort of turn based game that ran in real time. You just need to indicate what different action you were going to take before the turn started. Otherwise you get the default attack for what you have equiped.
WOW is different, time is kept seperate for each player depending on when they entered combat mode. There are no turns. This allows combat speeds to be slightly different, 1.5 seconds per swing vs 1.8 seconds. In the NWN version you only had the number of swings per turn 1, 2 ,3 etc. So the effects of a WOW version are more subtle and allow for more advancement ticks (50 levels) over the course of playing the game for a year. The NWN version is more coarse grained you just a few big jumps in skill.
If you mean pausing the game for a player to take his turn, how is that a multiplayer game, if 10 people in a group need to wait for a guy to take his turn.
Is the network code for WOW so advanced that we cant do something similar? All MMOGs work this way.
Chat sever
AC and MEO have chat servers. These could be on their own box or whatever. The chat server is not integrated into the game server, its seperate.
World
AC and MEO have the world broken up into landblocks. Each Meo landblock is 160 meters square. The landblock any player is in plus the 8 adjacent blocks are loaded into the box, this means all the dynamic objects need to spawn and start scripts. Any landblock with no players nearby is not loaded. I dont know how MEO decides which box runs which landblock. AC broke the world into vertical strips of landblocks. The width of each strip was changed dynamically based on load. This occasionally caused a problem when popular cities and dungeons occured on the same vertical strip. MEO does not use this system, for that reason.
Dropping Item on the ground
No modern MMOG allows you to do this. By dragging an item to the screen, it asks if you want to destroy it.
It was possible to crash AC by dropping piles of torches, that have a particle effect. They eventually decreased the cleanup timer, so some items got removed from the gameworld faster when dropped. A snowball will only stick a round for less than 10 seconds. But a sword will stay for minutes. When a landblock is unloaded the timer stops so its possible to drop an item on the ground in AC and go back to that area a month later and still see it there, if nobody else had gone there.
Looting
MEO -Corpses are considered containers.
Nonparty looting
AC - whoever does the most damage gets to loot it for a certain time period (lets say 60 seconds) after that its open for anyone. Grief play: a newbie needs 20 hits to kill, and starts fighting, a high level guy comes along and kills in one hit, the high level guy loots, and the newb is left to swear at the kill stealer.
WOW - Whoever hits the creature first tags it for himself, and only he can loot it, forever. Nobody else can ever touch that corpse. Grief: Well when you see someone else fighting, you cant grief him, only help him kill it, since you will never get the loot. Not sure how the exp is divided. The only way a grief works is if you tag a creature just before another guy then let him kill it, then you loot it. Its not very easy to do, since if you hit it first it will aggro on you.
In WoW, the player (or party) that tags a monster is the only one that gets experience. This perpetuates the goal you stated. Players cannot “steal” experience by assisting others.
That still seems pointless… if you want to chat… start an IRC channel… If you’re desperate for bespoke chat… start your own IRC server. Why waste time writing an additional chat server?
I’ve no idea, it could be brilliant. Who knows what the community can come up with heh? No signs either way yet.
Where turn based combat is concerned the only restriction so far would be that it can’t be real-time… i.e. it can’t really take into account if you’re close enough when you press the button to take a swing at a monster (a la Zelda). Simply becaue you can’t guarantee what the two people are seeing of the world is identical. You can get round this in FPS in a multitude of ways but it just won’t work for large numbers of people playing.
I just remembered I wrote this on the MiniAd forums a while ago which at the time I thought was a bit more novel way of fighting that the average:
Twas inspired by something dsellars and I were talking about IRL one day.
I never really liked step 4.
Kev
[quote]Where turn based combat is concerned the only restriction so far would be that it can’t be real-time… i.e. it can’t really take into account if you’re close enough when you press the button to take a swing at a monster (a la Zelda). Simply becaue you can’t guarantee what the two people are seeing of the world is identical. You can get round this in FPS in a multitude of ways but it just won’t work for large numbers of people playing.
[/quote]
If it cant be done why is every single MMOG doing it this way. The server is always the final arbiter as to where all the players and creatures are. In any MMOG you will have times where you get hit and see the monster 20 meters away, or swing and hit something that is too far away, or see something right in front of you, try to swing and get the error message that its too far away. This rarely happens, but it does happen, its not really a game breaking thing since after a few seconds the client will be back to normal. This happens more often when the number of players on the server gets to be too much for it to handle.
In WOW I play on a high population server, during prime time it may happen once or twice in 4 hours of play. I think melee range in WOW is 3 meters for all weapons, in a forward arc, cant hit things behind you.
I think we’re still talking at cross purposes. Distance between players can be a factor of course but if you play Camelot for instance, there isn’t a “swing” button which makes your sword swing out in front of you which if it hits something allows you to hit. Or for instance, firing a bow doesn’t just allow you to point and shoot, it caculates whether you hit based on a set of factors… i.e. its not real-time. In WOW you select your target and indicate you want to attack them… the server then calculates how much damage you’ve done and whether you’ve managed to hit. Its not “real-time” per-say. If you were to decide to attack and swing your sword the other person can’t move out of the way “just in time”.
There is no reason that this project shouldn’t emulate the other MMORPGs around… just it would be difficult to emulate Quake 3 style combat for instance.
Kev
Ok, I think we are in agreement here after all (mostly)
I think you are refering to real physics interactions, so yes an arrow never travels to a target in real physics looking to see if its still there, same with a sword.
Its more abstact, but distances do count, and possibly lines of sight.
WOW is real time in the sense that you start to swing at a rate of 1 swing per 3 seconds. You start only after the button is pressed. The enemy player still needs to hit his button and he swings at 1 per 2.1 seconds. So there is no concept of rounds.
I guess that was my main point. MMOGS dont do rounds, they do real time combat. I dont mean real physics but the timing of the attacks are unique for each player/monster depending on when they start attacking and the speed of the attack. The player then needs to time his strategy changes with the pace of “his own” attacks, to be most effecient.
It does sound like we’ve spent a few posts agreeing
I think its the difference of definition of real-time thats confusing us…
However, what do you think of the ability to queue up your actions, so maybe you say I’m going to attempt to swing for 4 rounds (maybe it takes 2 rounds per swing so you actually only swing twice) then attempt my special super killer move in the 5th round. As the server plays out the rounds it takes whatever you’ve queued. I guess it means you’d have to be able to modify the queue if you wanted but you’d get less click-click-click-click action. Always irritated me in Camelot.
Kev
There are several games that allow you to queue up actions, City of Heroes did that. You just dont want the queue to get too big, it needs a smallish limit. I think the COH queue size was 2, SWG had a larger queue.
COH had no auto attack, you needed to click a button for every attack and you could queue up one more besides the one that was waiting to go off. Many people liked the clicking because it made them feel more involved in the combat. Since COH had no auto attack I liked the queue system they had, the combat played very nicely.
WOW has an auto combat feature. If you have a sword equiped and hit the attack button it will swing at the same timing until someone dies or moves out of range, just one click. Then you cast spells, or special moves with a click, these interupt the current auto swing. When the special move is over you go back to auto attacking with no click required. Because there are lots of other actions to take during combat the auto attack doesnt feel too boring. The special actions also use a resource, mana, rage or something that diminishes with use. Because WOW has an autoattack I dont miss the queue. Since many of my spells take 2-3.5 seconds this is plenty of time to think about what to do next.
Summary:
A game with no auto attack really needs a queue
A game with auto attack, its more optional.
I suppose you could say that Wow has rounds but each round is .1 second
By making the round time smaller you allow for a more wide range of timings and so the weapons will seem more unique. Players like to feel unique, if everyone is using the same weapon, players are sad. By puting in lots of different timings and damage ranges that all equal the same DPS (damage per second) you create a lot of variety for the players and keep the damage output equal.
There are also strategies that involve using faster weapons to interupt spell casters. But its possible that the dps of that weapon is equal to a low level two handed slow sword.
If you uses a queue system and the idea of choosing a stance and attack it might be possible to add a bit of statagy to the fighting rather than just sitting there waitng for combat to be over while you press a few buttons.
This would require a bit of thought as to how it would work though. It could allow the winner of a round to “beat back” the loser. Some kind of precedence idea could be nice too.
Gotta go now, sorry these ideas are half formed, it’s a long time since I thought about this.
Dan.
Sounds to me like tons of people have great ideas for the combat system, so it should be no problem getting a team to work on it 
hopefully we could have a basic system up rather quickly and then tweek it to perfection as we go.
In the meantime I’ve been trying to unite all the tools for game building into one cohesive IDE by implementing a framework of sorts. I should be updating CVS soon. 8)
I have a new screenshot ;D This one shows the Map editor in the new Integrated (IDE) view. All features should be working for editing. Now to pull the tile builder and the NPC editor in.
http://www.frontiernet.net/~krypto/shots/jrpg1.gif
Tell me how it looks.
Lovely! An uber-powerful!
Come on project approval, I wanna start designing a village
Kev
[quote]Lovely! An uber-powerful!
Come on project approval, I wanna start designing a village
Kev
[/quote]
Yeah!!! Kev; While I’ve got your attention what are the differnet fields in the Zones Dialog for? I’m trying to understand/Tie them into the IDE. I will probably replace the section where the Zone list lives now with a “Map Pallette” and give the Zones thier own tab. The map pallete will let you toggle vissibility of layers and the grid.
P.S. Is their any reason why I shouldn’t allow the user to enter a size for the Map’s on Creation. ALA wizard.???
Zones … hmm… can I remember?
I’ll have to take a look at the code unless you’re refering to assigning actions to the zones.
Kev
yippee 100 reads… Now if the project would only get aproved 
Kevin;
Could you explain the way the following dialog functions/ is intended to do?
http://www.frontiernet.net/~krypto/shots/zones.gif
I want to make sure I label all gui items appropriatly. If we make these tool easy to use and understand. The community will make better content for us