September 2002
- A "dev chat" with Brad McQuaid Vincent Archer
- Article on Griefers Rayzam
- Article on Griefers Stephen Miller
- Article on Griefers Michael R. Estepp
- Serialization, dealing with changing classes. Neil Edwards
- Serialization, dealing with changing classes. Sean Kelly
- Serialization, dealing with changing classes. Ammon Lauritzen
- Serialization, dealing with changing classes. Brian Lindahl
- TECH: Serialization, dealing with changing classes. Mark Kochanowski
- Ballerium: Interesting Game John Arras
- Ballerium: Interesting Game Valerio Santinelli
- Ballerium: Interesting Game John Robert Arras
- Ballerium: Interesting Game Crosbie Fitch
- Ballerium: Interesting Game shren
- Ballerium: Interesting Game Peter Tyson
- Ballerium: Interesting Game Valerio Santinelli
- Ballerium: Interesting Game Vincent Archer
- Ballerium: Interesting Game Mark Cheverton
- Ballerium: Interesting Game huserl@yahoo.com
- Ballerium: Interesting Game Adam
- Ballerium: Interesting Game Valerio Santinelli
- Ballerium: Interesting Game Jon A. Lambert
- Much Respect to JessicaM apollyon
- Much Respect to JessicaM Michael Tresca
- Much Respect to JessicaM Sean Kelly
- Much Respect to JessicaM Dave Rickey
- Much Respect to JessicaM Matt Mihaly
- Much Respect to JessicaM Michael Tresca
- Much Respect to JessicaM apollyon
- Much Respect to JessicaM Daniel.Harman@barclayscapital.com
- Much Respect to JessicaM Sean Kelly
- Much Respect to JessicaM Michael Tresca
- Much Respect to JessicaM Paul Schwanz
- Much Respect to JessicaM Richard A. Bartle
- PK/PD (was Much Respect to JessicaM) justice@softhome.net
- MudDev - FAQ 1 Marian Griffith
- MudDev - FAQ 2 Marian Griffith
- [decentralization] Reputation device (fwd) J C Lawrence
- [decentralization] Reputation device (fwd) Daniel.Harman@barclayscapital.com
- [decentralization] Reputation device (fwd) Crosbie Fitch
- ANNOUNCE: Open Betas Daniel.Harman@barclayscapital.com
- ANNOUNCE: Open Betas Vincent Archer
- ANNOUNCE: Open Betas Richard Aihoshi aka Jonric
- ANNOUNCE: Open Betas Mordengaard
- ANNOUNCE: Open Betas Mordengaard
- Charlie Munger on the Psychology of Human Misjudgment J C Lawrence
- Charlie Munger on the Psychology of Human Misjudgment [summary of points] Sasha Hart
- Point of View Ted L. Chen
- Point of View Shane P. Lee
- Point of View Damion Schubert
- Point of View justice@softhome.net
- Point of View Shane P. Lee
- Point of View listsub@wickedgrey.com
- Point of View justice@softhome.net
- Point of View John Robert Arras
- Point of View Ted L. Chen
- Point of View Ted L. Chen
- Commercialization of virtual spaces Koster, Raph
- Commercialization of virtual spaces Jessica Mulligan
- Commercialization of virtual spaces Derek Licciardi
- Commercialization of virtual spaces Mike Shaver
- Commercialization of virtual spaces Justin Stocks
- Commercialization of virtual spaces Russ Whiteman
- Commercialization of virtual spaces Justin Stocks
- Flexible Perl MUD-like Server Project Luke Parrish
- Flexible Perl MUD-like Server Project stanza
- Flexible Perl MUD-like Server Project Joshua Judson Rosen
- Flexible Perl MUD-like Server Project Lars Duening
- MMOG growth Matt Mihaly
- MMOG growth Koster, Raph
- MMOG growth Daniel James
- UO Advanced Character Service Christopher Allen
- UO Advanced Character Service Jessica Mulligan
- UO Advanced Character Service eric
- UO Advanced Character Service Jessica Mulligan
- UO Advanced Character Service Matt Mihaly
- UO Advanced Character Service Matt Mihaly
- UO Advanced Character Service Amanda Walker
- UO Advanced Character Service Matt Mihaly
- UO Advanced Character Service amanda@alfar.com
- UO Advanced Character Service Marc Bowden
- UO Advanced Character Service Ted L. Chen
- UO Advanced Character Service Freeman, Jeff
- UO Advanced Character Service Damion Schubert
- Storytelling in MMOGs article Koster, Raph
- MUD-Dev Storytelling in MMOGs article Jessica Mulligan
- MUD-Dev Storytelling in MMOGs article Valerio Santinelli
- MUD-Dev Storytelling in MMOGs article Paul Boyle
- MUD-Dev Storytelling in MMOGs article Koster, Raph
- MUD-Dev Storytelling in MMOGs article Ted L. Chen
- MUD-Dev Storytelling in MMOGs article Poe, Lawrence
- MUD-Dev Storytelling in MMOGs article Dave Rickey
- MUD-Dev Storytelling in MMOGs article SpY
- MUD-Dev Storytelling in MMOGs article Freeman, Jeff
- MUD-Dev Storytelling in MMOGs article SpY
- MUD-Dev Storytelling in MMOGs article Derek Licciardi
- MUD-Dev Storytelling in MMOGs article Freeman, Jeff
- MUD-Dev Storytelling in MMOGs article Marc DM
- MUD-Dev Storytelling in MMOGs article Matt Mihaly
- MUD-Dev Storytelling in MMOGs article Marc DM
- MUD-Dev Storytelling in MMOGs article Matt Mihaly
- MUD-Dev Storytelling in MMOGs article holding99@mindspring.com
- MUD-Dev Storytelling in MMOGs article Sean Kelly
- MUD-Dev Storytelling in MMOGs article Marc DM
- MUD-Dev Storytelling in MMOGs article Sean Kelly
- MUD-Dev Storytelling in MMOGs article Mathieu Castelli
- MUD-Dev Storytelling in MMOGs article Matt Mihaly
- MUD-Dev Storytelling in MMOGs article Matt Owen
- MUD-Dev Storytelling in MMOGs article Damion Schubert
- Game developers gear up for cyber wars Michael Tresca
- Online Games Resource Guide Valerio Santinelli
- Critique this combat system Britt Green
- Critique this combat system Paul Schwanz
- Critique this combat system Edward Glowacki
- Critique this combat system hart.s@attbi.com
- [TECH] new linux thread library coming for libc Bruce Mitchener
- Zhe4 shi4 shen2me zhan4? Richard A. Bartle
- Grouping in MMP Games Dave Rickey
- Grouping in MMP Games Clay
- Grouping in MMP Games Amanda Walker
- Grouping in MMP Games Alex Kay
- Player Created Content - The Holy Grail? Matthew Dobervich
- Player Created Content - The Holy Grail? Matt Mihaly
- Player Created Content - The Holy Grail? Sulka Haro
- Player Created Content - The Holy Grail? Matt Mihaly
- Player Created Content - The Holy Grail? Michael Tresca
- Emoticons: When was the "big bang?" Randolf Richardson
- Emoticons: When was the "big bang?" Darren Henderson
- Emoticons: When was the "big bang?" Elia Morling
- Massive Online Gaming magazine Dr. Cat
- Massive Online Gaming magazine Matt Mihaly
- Massive Online Gaming magazine Dave Rickey
- Massive Online Gaming magazine Matthew Dobervich
- Massive Online Gaming magazine Dr. Cat
- Massive Online Gaming magazine Mark Cheverton
- Massive Online Gaming magazine Zach Collins {Siege}
- Massive Online Gaming magazine Dr. Cat
- Massive Online Gaming magazine shren
- Massive Online Gaming magazine Peter Tyson
- Understanding Simulation (was: Point of View) Ted L. Chen
- Understanding Simulation (was: Point of View) John Robert Arras
- Understanding Simulation (was: Point of View) Ted L. Chen
- Understanding Simulation (was: Point of View) John Robert Arras
- Understanding Simulation (was: Point of View) Derek Licciardi
- Understanding Simulation (was: Point of View) Matthew Dobervich
- Understanding Simulation (was: Point of View) Daniel.Harman@barclayscapital.com
- Understanding Simulation (was: Point of View) Travis Nixon
- Understanding Simulation (was: Point of View) Ted L. Chen
- Understanding Simulation (was: Point of View) Sasha Hart
- Understanding Simulation (was: Point of View) Ted L. Chen
- Understanding Simulation (was: Point of View) hart.s@attbi.com
[Ted Chen]
> Comon', that's like saying "I meant to do that." Of course you
> can flag anything as "successful" if you change the
> specifications/requirements for it. That's not very useful for
> avoiding that same situation in the future.
I didn't advocate making broken models for some purpose and then
relabeling them. I said that what is a broken model for one purpose
is not a broken model for another. I won't dispute that there are
broken models and non-broken models, given some set of requirements.
Really it is only that perfect safety from extinctions, big
oscillations, etc. is not a universal requirement.
I'll unequivocally grant that, changing very little else about a
game like AO, if you just dumped in even a single-pop. logistic
growth model it would die:
- That model can't recover (in terms of size) from zero population
(although if you triggered an exception and spawned some or some
cheat like that, it would just be bad because supply would
generally be low, providing many players distributed near the
critters - it wouldn't quite be useless if you wanted to reward
players for going to poorly explored areas, for example).
- NPC populations, both absolutely and relative to player kill
capacity, are generally small. Maybe that's due to technical
issues (polys on screen, cycles on server, memory, blah blah).
- Players are generally permitted to kill npcs quickly. If it took
a few hours to stalk and kill each critter, a lower birth rate
would be closer to acceptable, smaller populations would be closer
to acceptable... On the other hand, who wants to spend a few hours
killing an NPC in a genre which is all about bagging tons of NPCs?
- We don't even need to talk about adding predators to such a
scenario. Sheesh.
Of course, as has been discussed before, you don't need to have each
individual around explicitly, you could spawn in individuals at some
rate proportional to the size of the population, keep critters in
some (relatively) inaccessible reserve, etc. That could let you have
big populations relative to player kill rates.
Of course, that's not necessarily an improvement over spawning. If
you have 100 billion goblins growing on an S-curve, and they get
spawned in (say) at a rate proportional to their basically
untouchable population size, you've set parameters so that your
model is (functionally) a spawn. So it doesn't make sense to do such
a model if you are not actively interested in letting players at
least bash the population down a touch (in which case you can adjust
parameters such that players spending 2% more time could remove the
goblins.)
The strength of that kind of model is not that you get really
anything for free, I'd say rather that it gives you parametric tools
for accomplishing a range of possible effects. But you may or may
not even want any of these effects. In the big games I don't think
it would help at all - there you probably want monster supply to be
a close approximation to monster demand, so no one goes away unhappy
that they didn't get a monster, but also so you don't have to spend
too much computation on critters that aren't doing any good. On the
other hand, having *local* changes in population size is no big
deal, and supports players moving around. But the most appropriate
structure in the typical design is probably going to be a thousand
variants on the spawn. And that's just fine, within the scope it's
appropriate to.
> Seeing a population go extinct is just as informative as seeing
> one last forever. In MMOGdom, it's mostly yes. You'll be hard
> pressed enough to come up with different species to populate your
> ecology. Having to watch your work evaporate as they go extinct
> one at a time is not a very fun thing to do.
Yes, it would definitely be a bad idea to spend thousands of hours
doing animal art, and then set it up to be rendered unusable in a
few hundred hours. Of course, you could reuse art, or implement
procedural changes (e.g., switch to green and blue wolves). But
that's not necessary at all. If we are ready to contemplate
"respawning" individuals at the same locations, I think it's not so
bad to contemplate "respawning" whole species, e.g. in remote areas,
and allowing them to migrate. I don't think it would be so bad to
have to at least pretend the goblins came from somewhere in
particular :)
Come to think of it, I seem to remember that some games have already
streamed in new critters, or at least slight variations, on a more
month to month basis. If you can work up a system under which
extinctions are relatively controlled or predictable, you could in
fact add new content from time to time (assuming you're doing such a
game. It wouldn't be too time consuming in a text game or using
stupid tricks like recoloring, retexturing, rescaling). Not too
bizarre for a monthly-subscription service to release new content
periodically (that's not intended as a cheap shot or anything).
> I do think ecology systems are doable in code. However, I also
> get the impression that a majority of 'ecologists' on this list
> simplify /or ignore the dynamics.
Hmmm.
> The rest, already have an inkling of what components might be
> causing the dynamics (eg. predators) to avoid them. But that's
> wrong too as that throws the baby out with the bathwater.
Well, I've often said that predators aren't really an appropriate
way of controlling population sizes. Part of what makes them
exciting is that they allow more sensitivity to interesting events
like wolf extinction by the players. On the other hand, that
sensitivity usually translates into disaster for games in which
everyone needs wolf meat. So maybe even the baby needs to go for,
say, Anarchy Online. :)
It's certainly possible to be judicious about what disasters you
allow, e.g. provide a functional alternative to wolf meat and let
the wolves be mostly for show and tell, cool scenery. Or with
regard to predation, you can throw atmospheric predation in without
making the all-important rabbit population subject to fluctuations
in the wolf population. That way I think you can get the big
automated fictional happenings without the dire functional
consequences for the players. I don't think it's throwning out the
baby because you do have to protect certain key resources in the
game (such as xp in games which favor it).
I've certainly questioned whether there's even a point to doing it
if the critters involved don't matter to players (e.g., if they
don't give xp). I think the answer is that they do matter, but not
for the same reasons - high-caliber immersion is in the details, and
objects, even game objects, have more existence and value than XP.
Will players quest to save the wolves? Who knows, but I don't think
it's my business to ensure that everything that happens should be
urgently important. Models and dynamics are interesting to me
because they change, are subject to control, may be unpredictable,
may be complex. To the extent that the simulation has input into the
availability of key resources, that control is often going to be
"exploits," the unpredictability is going to be a reason to leave,
and the complexity is going to make managing parameters hell. Tie
the simulation to places where variation/control are tolerable or
even desirable and I think it becomes much more functional.
> In either case though, talk still degenerates into "if we use this
> lego-block with this lego-block, tune it, then it'll work"
> variety.
You're right, but anyone who gets down to working with said
lego-blocks is going to figure out the trouble spots pretty
quickly. (I assume!)
Not to imply that there's anything wrong with pointing out said
trouble spots to others.
> There's a grand difference between "including a factor" and
> "including a factor that improves the system," and that's where I
> hoped the System Dynamics references might be of some use to
> people.
Yes!
> And besides, I don't think human interaction nor interaction with
> other species is that much of an unnecessary demand.
Not at all, provided that the other properties of the world even
vaguely support the consequences of this interaction. At least,
that's the problem I've been trying to emphasize.
- Understanding Simulation (was: Point of View) hart.s@attbi.com
- Understanding Simulation (was: Point of View) Kwon J. Ekstrom
- MUD-Dev Storytelling in MMOGs article Clay
- Diamond Age (ex story telling in MMORPG) Mathieu Castelli
- visualization toosl for text mud builders... (aka automapper) fred@clift.org
- Understanding Simulation hart.s@attbi.com
- Understanding Simulation Damion Schubert
- Understanding Simulation Michael R. Estepp
- Understanding Simulation Ron Gabbard
- Understanding Simulation shren
- Understanding Simulation Sasha Hart
- Understanding Simulation shren
- Understanding Simulation Peter Harkins
- Understanding Simulation shren
- Future of MMOGs Valerio Santinelli
- Future of MMOGs Shane P. Lee
- Future of MMOGs Eric Lee {GAMES}
- Future of MMOGs Crosbie Fitch
- Future of MMOGs Koster, Raph
- Future of MMOGs Mike Shaver
- Future of MMOGs Crosbie Fitch
- Future of MMOGs Joe Andrieu
- Future of MMOGs Crosbie Fitch
- Future of MMOGs Jeremy Noetzelman
- Future of MMOGs Sean Kelly
- Future of MMOGs Dave Trump
- Future of MMOGs Matt Mihaly
- future of MMOGs Adam
- Future of MMOGs Brack, J. Allen
- Future of MMOGs Matt Mihaly
- Future of MMOGs Matt Chatterley
- Future of MMOGs Daniel.Harman@barclayscapital.com
- Future of MMOGs Damion Schubert
- Future of MMOGs Derek Licciardi
- Future of MMOGs Jon A. Lambert
- Future of MMOGs Valerio Santinelli
- Future of MMOGs Travis Cannell
- Future of MMOGs Dr. Cat
- Future of MMOGs Crosbie Fitch
- Future of MMOGs Koster, Raph
- Future of MMOGs Crosbie Fitch
- Future of MMOGs Adam
- Future of MMOGs Amanda Walker