Before the flaming commences, let me just say that I''m not foolish enough to be taking on more than I can handle, even though I did state it is a MMOG. This started off as a senior project, and has now become a full-time personal project. I''m designing the game to play through a web browser, programmed with PHP and &#106avascript, with player information being stored in MySQL (would like to move it all over to a nice Flash front-end once completed). I''ve been developing it for the past three months now and have already established a very solid foundation. It''s basically a space empire builder, starting the players off with one lowly planet. I understand there are already several other web-based games out there based on this very concept, but I feel that my ideas and final quality of the game will be enough to draw players in. For most of these types of games it''s basically "research technology, explore, build military, conquer other player, move on." The point is to conquer the galaxy and the only way they offer the player to do this is through the "hack-and-slash" method. In my game I''m planning on implementing complex clan, trading, and diplomatic systems. Rather than make the point of the game to be to become the most powerful player/take over the galaxy, the point is to become Emperor of the Universe over the other players, and hold that position for as long as possible. For the diplomatic system I''ve taken a lot from the Dune series, half of the power in the empire is held by the emperor, the other half held by a federation of other lesser houses. Instead of "clans", the game will have "houses", run by the players. When a new player joins in, he''s automatically under protection from the federation of houses until he pledges allegiance to one of the player-run houses or reaches a certain power level. The idea with the houses is to hopefully have large-scale wars between the houses for political reasons, control of the throne, control for strategic resources, etc. If the player doesn''t want to fight others, or expand his domain, fine. He can simply build up his homeworld to increase his power, research the entire tech tree, and engage in diplomatic and trade alliances to increase his political power. The federation of lesser houses (players who are not the emperor, and meet a certain power rating requirement) have the ability to pass new laws, such as the empire''s tax rate, tax on certain resources, etc. They also control the empire''s fleet, determine its movements and actions. The players are all of the human species, yet there will be other races in the game (haven''t implemented them yet simply because of the large size of the task) that are AI or GM controlled, some hostile and some friendly. The federation controls the empire''s fleet, which ultimately helps to protect the players. So it should be pretty interesting, players making alliances for personal gain, houses fighting each other for political power and competing for the throne, yet having to work together at the same time to combat the alien species for the general protection of the empire. Like I said before, I''ve already gotten a very solid foundation programmed for the game. I''ve been very careful to make sure I don''t bite off more than I can chew, and haven''t been afraid to throw out ideas that were unrealistic. I''m just taking a break at the moment to flesh out the plot behind it, and polish up some of the game ideas. This is an extremely shortened (and probably confusing) description of the game, but any comments/suggestions welcome if I didn''t lose you :D

The idea looks good, but how do you deal with the problem of players getting eliminated?

Do they start a new kingdom from scratch? If so, what if all the current planets are occupied? If you keep generating new planets you''ll run out of memory fairly fast.

What about overbearingly powerful players?

The problem with persistent RTS games isn''t in the idea itself, but with the fact that RTSs are designed to be won. And the idea of ''winning'' doesnt mesh well in an online environment.

This isn''t really the type of MMOG that people get told is too big a task for an amateur/one person/whatever. The flames are generally reserved for inexperienced pie-eyes who are single-handedly trying to make the next Everquest or Jumpgate. This type of browser-based strategy game is easier to accomplish (although they can grow into massive projects, too).

That being said, your game sounds interesting.

quote:
Rather than make the point of the game to be to become the most powerful player/take over the galaxy, the point is to become Emperor of the Universe over the other players, and hold that position for as long as possible.

What''s the difference?

A game played using PHP? So it's turn-based where you set parameters in a form (like to move a unit to a position) then click a Submit button which changes the variables? Hm. That sounds like a good way to do things if you don't mind a game with no animation (unless, as you say, you eventually add Flash).

But won't you run into the problem of forcing a refresh on the other clients? If Player A does an action and ends his turn, the other players' screens should be refreshed at that point. But you can't do that with PHP or &#106avascript. Or are you using a time limit and not letting turns end before the time expires? That would be annoying.

~CGameProgrammer( );
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[edited by - CGameProgrammer on April 17, 2003 2:05:22 PM]

[edited by - CGameProgrammer on April 17, 2003 2:06:37 PM]

You can with flash as he had said. Flash can post variables to a server and get a response. However the coding in flash would be vvery difficult.

If you''re attempting something as grand as you hope, try to keep as many begaviours as simple and emergant as possible

example: planetoids can be exploited for mining elite-style. If there is someone willing to invest, a new colony can be established and be used for trading/safe deposit of goods etc. The sucess of this colony depends on the availability of resources for expansion. Can you see where this is goind.

example: creating new ships, don''t just stick engine A onto shape B. Say there are continuous paramaters for cargo capacity, dimensions etc and placement and direction of engines, armour etc are arbitary. Characteristics like agility emerge from having low mass and powerful engines far off-centre and so on etc. Appearance and engine type etc are dependant on what''s available. From this a price and material demands list is generated. Introduce build time, component trading (introducing technology to other systems!)

Basically, the cause-effect system should force the player to consider cascading concequences. Everything should be a case of scissors-paper-stone in some respect.

Investigate thoroughly the game mechanics of things like Sim City, C&C etc.

********


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I'm sorry I didn't clarify very well how the turn system was being handled in the game. This isn't set in stone, but it currently works by starting the player off with say, 100 turns, and then granted him another turn every 15 minutes. To prevent someone from hoarding turns the maximum is going to be around 200 stored turns.

To handle the problem with players being eliminated, I've tried to design it so that a player can't be eliminated in say one day while he's out at work. Depending on the defender's size, it should take anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks to defeat him, depending on his attacker's strength and the number of players attacking him.

To prevent the game world from becoming flooded with new players and players rejoining after being defeated, I plan on creating a lot of "Independent" planets, or static planets controlled by AI and not players. Hopefully players will focus more on defeating/raiding those planets rather than other player-controlled ones. Instead of making it a "persistent" gameworld, the game will be ended after a set period of time, say a couple of months, and then restarted. This will help to prevent flooding of new player planets when players join.

"Rather than make the point of the game to be to become the most powerful player/take over the galaxy, the point is to become Emperor of the Universe over the other players, and hold that position for as long as possible."

By "become the most powerful player" I mean the hack-and-slash system you find in other games that players go through in order to max out their characters or units. Rather than forcing players to travel that path to "win" the game, I hope that they'll find other means to become emperor and "win" the game. Like gain political influence through alliances with other players and houses. There really isn't that big of a difference between the two types, if any, but I hope you can see what I'm trying to get at, can't really think of a good way to explain it. I haven't really established yet what will determine who the "winner" is when the game ends. Should it be the player who last controls the throne? The player with the highest power rating? Most political influence? Hopefully I'll work this out in the near future.

Thanks for the comments.

[edited by - yellow5 on April 17, 2003 5:22:58 PM]

Ouch, I like the idea but dispise the fact you plan on having players take a week to destroy another (or less depending on the many variables that can be in play) and then just "restart" the whole game after three months :-/ Would hate to work up a nice army just to be wiped out every three months. Big difference with that and other games (starcraft/UT/CS) is you build up fast and it's over, you do not sacrafice a lot of your time to have it ended -- just another thought for you to consider




Edit: weeks = week

[edited by - zern on April 17, 2003 5:33:16 PM]

Very Very interesting Idea, sounds like you got it all worked out, It sounds alot more interesting then any of the other web based games that I''ve seen before..

Good luck and I hope to one day play a game like this..

it would also seem that this could be a game where if you''d like to keep it small in size you could allow people to download a package of some kind and host it themselves.. for that you''d need some way to protect your work for being looked at (if your going for closed source) but I''m sure there is a way..

maybe you could even make it so that the user can set up the database and just host that.. that would allow you to have control over the PHP code and it might releive your mySQL server a bit if the game got very popular.

Please visit Turt99 Productions

Ah, so you mean players can gain power by means other than combat? That sounds cool. I''d definitely like to see more RTS games where factors like a strong economy and good diplomatic relations can be as effective as invasions and war tactics.

Good luck with it. Toss up a link when it''s ready to test, I''m sure you''ll find plenty of people willing to kick the tires.