Comments on: Hello Kitty Online and Emergent Behavior in Raids

By: Tipa

Tipa — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 20:28:45 +0000

That’s really the opposite of what I’m proposing, but it’s legit, too. Making the mobs smarter and less predictable would be pretty nice, but I’d want the reward for defeating clever foes to be better than a little experience and a small amount of coin. People don’t want to ever LOSE a fight in an MMO, but they would like to always be on the edge of losing — but mostly win.

I want to make more mobs, and make them individually pretty dumb and easy to kill. The players would be way more powerful than the individual monsters — standard stuff from heroic fantasy — but enough of them and the situation would be too complicated for any player to easily figure out. And especially if each monster class had a couple little rules. I don’t know what those rules would be, though. I want to get this in code soon so I can try stuff :)

By: Silvermink

Silvermink — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 20:04:58 +0000

Dev’s might want to start with letting mobs be a little more flexible using their skills. Having a mob do the same skill at the same HP every time you fight him is pretty unrealistic. I’d love it if they actually used some sort of advanced AI, either direct or your emergant idea. The people setting up encounters are usually designers, not programmers though.

By: Einhorn

Einhorn — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 18:32:58 +0000

This is cool, and promises to be a revolutionary new feature in ALL games.

But I have always been a simple creature at heart. I would be more than impressed with simply randomly generated mob features – have them randomize their facial features/colors. I’ve wanted this since the first time I played DOOM.
“Hey I just killed that guy…THERE HE IS AGAIN…confound it, it’s a massive explosion of clones that can only be countered with a massive explosion of fire!”

Anyone who’s raided in Guk has wanted this as well, heh. Something about Old-World Frogloks that just made them look somehow even more alike one another than any other race.

I’m not talking about just male/female. I mean just give it enough options to randomly select from that every mob seems completely unique. The first place I saw in EQ 1 that STARTED to do this was Dulak’s Harbor. They had a lot of different mobs spawn as different races, but it was always the same features of that race. “Great, it’s that shirtless dark elf pirate again…ok ladies time to stop drooling and start healing. No seriously, he’s killing me”

By: Tipa

Tipa — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 16:47:08 +0000

Holy wow, almost every project on that page deals with emergent behavior from simple systems! That looks AWESOME. Thanks for the link! DEFINITELY will be looking at it. Here's a link to flocking behavior done with "Processing".

By: Cow Nose the 50 Pound Cat

Cow Nose the 50 Pound Cat — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 16:33:17 +0000

Hi tipa, I have done a lot of research and programming with the intention of modeling and creating emergant systems. For two years in my high school I was part of this group called the Super Computing Challenge, where groups from all the schools in New Mexico (and I assume states around the USA) get together and try to model an emergant system, or just make a computer model for something.

Our team modeled pharmaceuticals as they move through our water system.

But anyways, if your really interested in making this raid emergent system StarLogo would be a fantastic place to start. It’s quite easy to program as you just do it in the Logos language which is pretty uhm, I dunno the right way to explain it, but it’s not the same as like C or anything like that. More like scripting in StarCraft or something where you just use terms and stuff and have them interact with eachother.

I believe a raid type thing would work fantastically! There have been groups that model bacteria fighting one another, and all kinds of things. The system is definitly flexible enough for this.

Anyways, check out star logo on the web: http://education.mit.edu/starlogo/

By: Tipa

Tipa — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 16:25:01 +0000

Metaplace will be awesome, but you’ll still have to do the hard bits of writing a game — designing it and programming it — anyway. It’ll be trivial in Metaplace to make a copy of someone else’s game or to do a vanity project nobody will care about.

I’m pretty guilty of this, obviously, since my at-home programming time has been spent not writing my own game, but working on a program that solves one particular puzzle (and which it is just days from solving at this point). With that nearly done, maybe I’ll be able to think about writing an original game I’ve wanted to get coded for a long time now.

I hope!

By: Relmstein

Relmstein — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 16:19:49 +0000

I’m kind of guilty of wanting to design and write games also. I’m looking forward to metaplace to see if it gives me an outlet on my hobby without requiring me to buy a lot of additional software.