WorldForge Community

Hello, I am a frustrated gamer. I like crappy indie sandbox games because I hate mainstream Pavlovian paddlewhacking. I started MUDding with Realms of Despair (Smaug) so you might say I hated WoW before it had the cheap graphics everyone loved. I watch people, study history believe in the GNU/FOSS philosophy. Games of note that I've participated in have been Haven & Hearth, Dwarf Fortress, battle for Wesnoth, Sauerbraten, shadowbane and Nation States. Though I've puttered about with just about every GNU/FOSS Game at least once. As for RPGs, since FFVII turned out so awful I stopped playing linear rpgs and just watch friends play and spoil it for me. As for MMOs I've never admit to playing runescape back in the day. This is roughly a short essay of my most prominent thoughts and desires for game design. I'm good at math, logic and language and am trying to learn C++ atm so I might be useful later building this after I create a more organized version of of the logic arrays I've got in mind and scattered about a bunch of notes and essays.

I'd like to bring to the table a process for easily declaring and managing concrete and abstract psychological functions and social interactions through a system of procedural generation and processing to produce a matrix of unit(or 'sentient' game creature) value that can be fed through a decision tree for creating an AI capable of producing conversation with players and building and sustaining civilizations by working with resource trees and remembering how to reproduce them, and giving them motivation to do so. Individual units should be capable of reiterating daily habits based on necessity and desire to create a completely functional civilization. How exactly a given civilization operates depends on the players construction. Development occurs as players find stable values for social and technological development.

As things such as reproduction, marriage, social status and recognition of it develop through world progression and players managing small villages in social simulations within the primitive psychological mainframe and adding more values, potential experiences and recombinatorial results, seeking to explore new combinations in order to unlock new technology, development and civilization possibilities while maintaining the infrastructure to sustain them both socially and physically in a PK anywhere environment that uses physical and social infrastructures to keep other PLAYERS out of your development and sustaining peaceful domestic work within the safety of home. Allowing PvEers to run amok from the various hers or hunters to run about the free world gathering resources and investigating new territory and recording information about it (Mineral prospectus, new wildlife and notable large herds and migration routes, new plants, crops, herbs, trees, stones, fruit etc.).

A procedurally generated fruit tree consistent for a world and biome with a procedurally generated name and development value to the consumer would only limit the number of variety and resource trees. Fruit could be eaten, crafted into a potable sapling, jelly, pies, or canned & preserved against decay with sand and glass-making production trees.

Eventually Skill development can be a direct result of unit awareness and processing capability relative to environment. With Civ trees for education institutions and rapid development for intelligence and cognitive maintenance capability.

Integrating a Civ and tech development tree and making them interdependent this way.

At it peak, it should be able to neatly dispense with shopkeepers that stand 24/7 vigilantly willing to buy your vendor trash and then sell you the most valuable piece in his collection: high end newbie vendor trash.

The end result is that because there is no difference between PC's an NPC's functionally other than user interfacing overriding psychological decision tree of the AI. Let me extrapolate on the value of that though. Lets say I want to create a small military for my tribal almost a village civ, SO I generate a nice soldier template and put up a barracks because that's the quick and easy way.

Then when my template runs I see things that might be of value to create dimension to these soldiers. Give them some uniqueness even if they're missing some background because I've hand inserted them and copied skill values from other units. maybe add a few personalities I've seen elsewhere that I think make for a good dynamic. Maybe not, maybe those soldiers are just gonna die or operate as a placeholder for some real civ defense mechanics and development. Eventually someone generates and posts an interesting squad template that works. Probably not before exploiting it and raping easy targets first but that's just a fun way of showing people "Hey look what I created" whether they release their template or those affected by it get together to figure it out and create their own system to defend against it.

In this way I also advocate Open PVP anywhere with mechanism within the development tree giving players the ability to construct in game defenses and a system of attributional warfare that cause the attacker to spend resources in order to make war and thus it doesn't ever simply become about that a no-lifer can rape any little ol' nub. Rather, a no-life must spend part of his development in order to do something offensive to something someone else has created/is creating.

Also, logging out should never remove the character from the game. Rather, the AI simply picks up control of the character. With a player having access or influence over unit value being able to affect the character's behavior off-line. In this way things such as maintenance may be automated. Skill and building decay may exist and be kept up without the player ever having to preform 'the grind' simply by specifying that the player wishes this thing to be maintained will give it priority in offline, AI maintained, decision tree.

A bit about memory, code and skill caps.

A good attribute and skills system would keep technical values low enough to be counted in integers because so many units are being managed. With higher than 255 potentials the effective memory requirements for hosting a unit becomes doubled. Instead I should Suggest that raw attributes such as strength intelligence etc. be measured in very small value iterations with each iteration being a significant difference representing a more comprehensive investment and potential capability. What I mean is that when we step into this from an open source, we're quickly going to move toward eliminating the grind one way or another bot. To eliminate the grind you need what mainstream games lack: Procedurally generated content that simulates the experience of discovering new T-shirts.

Big numbers are cheap carrots. Having limitless development is not mutually exclusive from having a hard value cap. Eventually it just doesn't matter how good your horseshoe is. Sooner or later someone is gonna build a car. Quality and skill should be about granting the player certain choices in lieu of certain other choices. Not that Jacks of all trades should be discouraged, it's just that specialization should mean having a handicap. If you're uber, you have to have an Achilles' heel for some plucky band of heroes to kill your evil @$$. Content should be content for a unit to choose between upon development. Classes should arise naturally through practical development choices. Making subclasses and unique builds as a dimension for player/host exploration of game content.