Sorry I haven't gotten back to this in a while. It's still a project, but my coding time has been all taken up with work (RL).
The engine has had a major push to update and make better, and I've been checking in on it to see how this affects things. So far, I've seen nothing but positives.
Still, a MAJOR stumbling point I'm having is that I can't
see anything without artwork, and I'm trying to figure out what the best direction will be on this point.
By the way, if anyone wants to work on generating character templates or backgrounds or ANYTHING, feel free to post, contact me, or what have you. At this point I'm getting less and less picky. I apologize for not providing examples. If you are wanting to get a feel for how the game perspective is laid out, go to www.netgore.com and look up "top down" or to see what someone has already done look at some of these: http://www.skyon.be/category/image-galleries/offical-screenshotsSince I'm not really figuring that I'll get anyone interested in artwork until I have something to work off of, I'm trying to figure out some ideas to get sampple graphics going, if only to see the thing running and spark some ideas.
I can either spend more time that I have drawing some characters pixel by pixel, which I could have done for the last year or two, but obviously haven't.
I could just use place holder graphics from other games or the demogame, but it would look terrible, and one thing I've noticed among all discussions I've started on EQ is that, if it doesn't look like anything, no one will be interested in seeing passed the bad imagery to look on how to improve it. Again, I could have done this already, but haven't.
Finally, the current idea I have rolling around in my head is to use live bodies as templates, using a camera to capture poses, and reducing resolution or otherwise 'shopping the images to scale to the game. I (or someone else) could far more easily modify the images into character sheets, backgrounds, items, etc. It would also be far less time consuming. Currently, however, my issue is cost, as ideally I would use 8 cameras, set up in a circle, slaved together to get the 8 directions the character could be facing on the screen. This would be ideal so that each pose would be more closely the same and I wouldn't have to worry about forgetting actions or poses when rotating the model. The camera(s) would be roughly a 45 degree angle from the subject, at a height sufficent enough to reduce the fisheye effect from the lens. (of course, that means high ceilings or outdoors, which then you have to worry about light... yeesh. If any of you actual artists have a better way of doing things, PLEASE LET ME KNOW!!!)
Setting up a forum for it, you wouldn't need to look too far in the EQ community for help on it. I'm sure anybody would be willing to put the work into doing it. And as for the Logo/banner/splashpage, you can bring it up to Maggie or Treefox and I'm sure they'll be willing to help you with it, it sounds like a fun idea.
Kind of unsure about this though. Sounds very complicated and might put some people off, but I like the idea of the palace being available to those who want to travel far, have you thought of a time system? Like, not depending on your local time but instead on in-game time. When the player logs in, it starts at a time that everyone else has, let's say its night. They are at blue mountain and need to travel to the go-back den. They can either take two days and so and so hours walking or take the palace and be there in a few minutes. Let's say they choose to walk. Maybe have a fast travel screen, showing how much time has passed, day to night, day to night, and the sun just getting ready to rise. That way the player can interact more with the environment, and maybe have different creatures for the times, like day have humans and night have trolls. And also for different times have different dangers too. A wandering sunvillager, as an example. Not used to the night, they might not be able to see as well. It would be more dangerous for them to travel than a Wolfrider who lives by the night. With the newer players, fast travel screen might be a better way, then they won't have as many monsters to worry about. Will the be a solid leveling system or just points to see "Your character is getting stronger by thiiiiiis much..."?
These are just some ideas I was brainstorming. But it seems it would work better to the game world. Have you figured if your going to have the person able to save anything? It might be frustrating to have a character you work hours on and not be able to come back to later. But the die once and for all thing is kind of cool, it makes the player more cautious.
Lets see here...
Thanks for the pointer on who to contact, when it gets far enough along that someone can get a feel for what it will be like, I'll contact them. I'm also going to be setting up a test forum using my friend's server and using off roading as a theme to get some practice. I'm still not sure if it would be better to set up a site and a forum before a beta-test is ready and bring in all those that want to work on it there, or wait until there's something to actually talk about.
As to the Palace and time system...
Palace: with the cliffhanger left us a the moment from WaRP, doors have been opened for using the Palace for travel. No, we don't currently know where the pair are going, but we know they are going
somewhere else, and that's good enough for a mechanic. So far as it looks at the present time, as long as someone with piloting skill (or whatever it ends up being to fly the palace) is present, a transport bubble can be formed from the Palace and go whereever. According to the theories of the Elves discussing the creation of the pod, there may or may not be a limit to the number of these pods that could be split from the palace. (for that matter, it seems to hold that such things could be done with the Little Palace as well, I would think.)
Time content:
Hmmph.... This is the beast I have been battling with for quite some time. I want time travel to be a part of the game, but it is EXTREMELY hard to make it work without actual, RL time travel, which is impossible,
so why am I talking about it? Be quiet. ...No, you be quiet. ...No seriously, you are starting to tick me off. ...Well then leave. ...I would but we are kind of attached. ...Uh, do you realize we are still typing? ...Oh, sorry, I'll shut up then...
*Flogs Muse and Self with furvor*Anyway... I don't want to make the Trolls and Humans pure NPC factions or races. When the origional Warcraft 2 came out (well before WoW), I was quite frustrated that everything was Human centered. You could play Orc if you wished, but there wasn't as much content or "fleshing out" of the Orcs as there was for Human, and while the Undead NPCs were an available faction for map building, you could not play a third party/race/faction, and you couldn't do anything with the Undead except set up NPCs. NPCs are necessary, but if we demoted Humans and Trolls (and perhaps Preservers, not sure about them) to NPCs that you could use the skin of as basically a troll-looking Elf, I think it would be a mistake. As such, setting certain races as primarily time dependant NPCs isn't really on my to do list.
I'm not saying that there won't be times and places with specific races. I figure that all OC tribe locations and times will be populated with NPCs appropriate to the time or place. Father tree forest will have Wolfrider NPCs running around mostly at night. Troll Caves will have Troll NPCs running around in them. The Citedel will have Humans running around in it... This is necessary anyway, as the NPCs would fill roles to make the game playable, such as Quest Givers, Stores (people to get supplies), Guards, elders, leaders, storytellers... stuff to fill the worlds when there's not enough players to do all the functions needed to have a tribe work.
But as for Time... now that's a tricky one. I want time travel. I don't care how impossible it is. I want this game to have a semblence of time travel, since it's such a key part of EQ and potential outcomes of quests... It's in the script, darn it!
So what I have come up with is this:
The game engine generates logs of what's going on in the game. Normally, these logs are used to tweak performance in the game, spot glitches, and catch cheaters.
Way back when I started this thing, I thought about dear ol' Pike, and thought, I wanted Storytelling to be a part of the game. I wanted to have Storytellers actually be able to tell uncanned stories about things that happened in the game, to characters that had died, or living legends, I figured that a handful of Dreamberries would go a long way to making an interesting aspect to the game. At the time I wasn't thinking about the logs, I just figured I'd 'invent' something to generate a storybook, and characters could access this "Scroll of Colors" within the game, and outsiders could read the stories outside the game. So how does this play into time travel?
Without getting all phylosophical (which I started a thread on EQ in one of my sub-groups if you want to discuss it), "real" time travel does not allow for changes to the past, which is just fine for the game. What I mean is, a character can instance an event where the player's character interacts with an environment at a different time frame than the other's characters (at least as far as the Scroll is concerned), and other characters can go to that same time frame, just like an auto-generated map that is created when a character goes somewhere that other characters can go to, we just say that the character is in the "future" or "past" and just don't let them interact with other players that aren't in their time frame.
The log will still timestamp the events that the characters go through, but "date" the shorthand as happening at a previous or future date or time, so that when someone accesses the Scroll, they can see what "went on".
For example, lets say we have"
Cutter and Skywise leaving for a jaunt through the forest. They don't time travel, they just go from Sun Village to the Father Tree Holt and meet up with Pike.
Meanwhile, Leetah and Ember take a palace-pod to go look for missing tribesmates. They go to the future a few centuries to see if they can find someone to tell them what happened to those villagers and where they went, so they could go back and look for them whereever they ended up.
The pair of villagers, We'll call them Bob and Jenny (I don't have the drive to come up with elfy names at the moment), fall victim to a pool of bad magic that sends them back in time to when the Palace crashed. As a result, they putter around for a few thousand years looking for beings that won't kill them, and then settle in with a (now AU) tribe of Gobacks for the long haul.
Cutter and Skywise, in their "time" finally meet up with Pike, who tells the tale of Bob and Jenny turning the tide in the battle with the Trolls at some point in the past, and whatever results there was from that (but as the full story of those two characters may not be played out yet by the player who is playing them, Pike's story would have to end and "wait for some other time, I'm out of Dreamberries"), But he would not know anythign about Leetah and Ember.
Leetah and Ember come across and Elder NPC who recalls Pike's story (if they run into the elder after Pike has told his story), or quest around until they find someone who can say something about them. Obviously, if one player is trying to get time-distorted information about another player/character, they can't know what happens until after it has happened.
So, what it boils down to is, essentially travel (time or space or both) generates story (in the form of server logs), which can be accessed by characters with special skills (fortune telling for future reading, storytelling for recounting the past).
The server log generated about everything that goes on (each character gets a log, BTW, this is what is, in essence, the characters' save game file), will be in a shorthand that a process can convert to a "story", or plain text using grammer rules. It's a gimmick, but it's what I have thought up after watching five seasons of Dr. Who in three weeks.
In regards to your final question, yes, of course you can have your character saved, I just haven't figured out how it will mesh and flow with the feel of the game. Traditionally, you would find a place to sleep and go to bed, then when you started the game again you'd wake up and keep playing. This, however, does not account for server/client crashes, loss of network connection, or other issues. It also does not account for what happens if the place a person decides to sleep gets destroyed. (such as the Father Tree getting burned down, or troll caves collapsing), or if a player decides to go to sleep in the middle of no where and someone or something decides to have some fun with the sleeping character. I haven't figured that out yet.
Usually, if there's a technical problem, your character will say wherever it was for a short while, then is swept back to a "home base". There's no allowance for this in Elf Quest, though.
The only thing I have been able to figure out is to convered all player characters to NPCs on logout or disconnect. Depending on how good I get with working with the engine, the player's character could have a user editable behavior that takes over when the player leaves the game. This would kind of be like a game that is made up of all NPCs, and a player seizes control of a character for a time, then releases it back into play.... I think this would be a good way to think of it. The saved/sleeping character would just avoid danger and follow the local population of freindlies. In this way, if the forest burns down and the Wolfriders run away, your character would run with them.
Just a rough thought.
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Topic: Elf Quest Multiplayer Online Game... (Read 14853 times)