Just some thoughts on this. I know technology isn''t here at this point in time to even think about doing this. Im just wondering, if technology was able to handle the changes and such that could handle, how would you like to see a game that took place in three different time periods?

hehe... i think the mightiest character class would either be builders or farmers.

imagine a pvp fight: encounter -> travel back in time -> telefrag your enemy with a house



i actually dont think the idea is a good one. to a certain reason:

thanks to allmighty mr. logic its not possible to create 'real' timeperiods - it'd be more like 'back to future' (the film with micheal 'parkinson' j. fox) where every action you do in a lower timeperiod will instantly alter reality in the ones above. but i dont see any really interesting ideas to do in such a world


[edit1] hm... IMHO todays technology would actually be able to handle this.

[edited by - Pext on August 23, 2003 2:31:42 PM]

quote: Pext: thanks to allmighty mr. logic its not possible to create ''real'' timeperiods - it''d be more like ''back to future'' (the film with micheal ''parkinson'' j. fox) where every action you do in a lower timeperiod will instantly alter reality in the ones above. but i dont see any really interesting ideas to do in such a world

Zork III comes to mind.

It''s been over a decade, but as I recall there were certain puzzles that you had to solve via time travel: a passage that was blocked, and a scepter you needed. To get the scepter you had to travel back in time to the precise year that the scepter was in an accessible area, grab it quickly, and return. I forget the other puzzles, but it really did make it interesting.

Instantly changing the time(s) above could be neat in a faction-based RPG. You start out in a land inundated by orcs, discover time machine, go back, kill off just enough orcs (or whatever), so you can return to a better present day. This could be looped (perhaps killing the orcs meant that some other creatures became dominant) several times, thus introducing brand new story lines into a moderately familiar world.


Another interesting idea might be: you "exist" spread across several time periods. Realtime, and you must decide which period to be acting in at any point in time. Your goal is to advance society so that: your most future self becomes ruler; you acquire certain artifacts/treasures; you advance technology to a certain point. If you act in a past timeline, changes could propagate forwards instantly; you would just need to keep an eye on future selves.

(idea shamelessly ripped from the Dr. Who episode "City of Death")

I personally don''t see how Time Travel could be realistically modelled in a MMO setting. How can you travel back in time to interact with other players, and expect those other players to act, speak, think, react and even exist exactly as they did when they were played at that point in time?

As an example, say a player has a character who at some point in time gets killed. So the player starts a new character. Now, if another player travels back in time, it should theoretically be possible to meet that old character. Would the player who started the new character be required to use the old character in your context? How do you handle the multiple contexts for each player? How do you handle the paradoxes that will result from travelling back in time and killing a character that will end up killing you sometime later?

If at any given point in time an MMO game has a given state, allowing time travel in the conventional sense adds an entirely new dimension to that game state. To realistically model time travel, you would need to be able to retrieve the exact game state at the exact point in time to which you wish to travel--and you would have to expect the game in your context to proceed in a normal fashion once you got to that point in time (ie, players saying the same things, same events happening). Any miniscule change turns a linear progression into an infinitely branching tree of "possibilities" that must be accounted for.

Now, the OP indicated that it is to take place in three different time periods. I take that to mean three different epochs (similar to Stone Age, Iron Age, Industrial Age) sort of things. To me, this says it is not a time travel problem, so much as it is an online world partitioned into three different segments, which do not modify or interact with each other. Players in one epoch can only interact with players in the same epoch, and actions performed in an "earlier" epoch have little or not affect on "later" epochs--or you return to the infinitely branching tree of possibilities again.

Three isolated segments would be relatively trivial to handle. Just partition the world into three spaces, and control the transitions between those spaces.


Josh
vertexnormal AT linuxmail DOT org

Check out Golem at:
My cheapass website

Well I guess I should put it in this context. Time travel is not so much a technolgical thing where you can travel to 0845 on the 25th of august....but more along the lines of this.

Three time periods (times may be adjusted for play)
-100 years
present
+100 years

Each one starts out at a certain point and then moves forward. (similar to Zelda TOOT, or Chrono Trigger) Actions in one time COULD affect actions in another time, but you can''t go back and interact with other characters...When a character dies he no longer travels forward in any of the three eras, but on the other hand, you can affect the present and future by doing actions in a previous time period...Just not sure how it would work.

The problem I see is with actions in the past affecting things in the present or future era. Say, you go back in time to the -100 years era and build a house. In the present-time era, that house has to have been there all along; if it just suddenly appears at the instant you (as the player) perform the action to build a house, it destroys the illusion of time travel.

Another player is in the present era, standing in the location you are building the house. You build that house, he is suddenly inside the house, perhaps inside the walls-- a location he should never have been able to get to had the house been there all along.

Rest assured that if you go back in time to effect an action, some other player is going to go back in time to undo it for his own nefarious purposes, or do something else to change whatever it is you are trying for. If you impose arbitrary restrictions, such as characters not being able to interact with each other in past time-frames, then you end up with a wildly disjointed, severely schizophrenic, and self-contradictory "present time" dependent upon a number of past time-frames equal to the number of players who have gone back into the past to fudge around with things.

Just because it is a game, doesn''t mean the knotty problem of paradox magically disappears, and all the technology and memory upgrades in the world (up to and including an actual time machine) won''t change that.

If you discard the MMO aspect, then you could come up with a pseudo-time-travel scheme that could seem at least nominally realistic, in the fashion of Chrono Trigger/Zelda. But by definition an MMO environment would wreck the entire concept with an ungodly glut of contradictory variables.



Josh
vertexnormal AT linuxmail DOT org

Check out Golem at:
My cheapass website

Man, you people have no imagination.

Put some kind of catastrophic disaster between time periods. Why isn't the house you built in the past in the present? It blew up. Or better yet, don't even allow players to have houses. How many MMOGs allow players to construct and place houses, 2? It's not even that great a feature really. You could just allow players to have apartments like in AO or rent pre-placed buildings.

Players would have to be confined to affecting the timeline on a massive (prevent catastrophe maybe) or miniature scale. For example, hiding some loot in a hole or cave and retrieving it in the future. This would be even more interesting if there was no way to bring physical objects through the time machine. I like that idea actually. You can "bring" items from the past to the present and from the present to the future, and retrieve them from their hiding place to use them in the original time period. You wouldn't be able to take anything from the future, which is a nice balancing feature if the past few centuries of this game world resemble ours in any way. Perhaps some kind of quest or crafting element would allow a player to memorize a schematic of some weapon from the future and have it assembled in the past.

Anyway, enough rambling. I like this time travel MMOG idea. I likes it alot.

[edited by - mumboi on August 25, 2003 10:15:33 AM]

It still would be neat to have something in the past affect the future. Not everything can be reset by a calamity.

quote: Original post by mumboi
Man, you people have no imagination.

Put some kind of catastrophic disaster between time periods. Why isn''t the house you built in the past in the present? It blew up.

So, basically, you contrive some artificial means of eliminating any possible benefits of time travel. You come up with any number of "convenient" tricks to keep disaster at bay. In other words, negate whatever purpose time travel would serve. How many "catastrophes" in how many areas will the players swallow before they decide that something they do in the past actually has no effect on the future, so why bother?

quote:
Players would have to be confined to affecting the timeline on a massive (prevent catastrophe maybe) or miniature scale. For example, hiding some loot in a hole or cave and retrieving it in the future. This would be even more interesting if there was no way to bring physical objects through the time machine. I like that idea actually. You can "bring" items from the past to the present and from the present to the future, and retrieve them from their hiding place to use them in the original time period. You wouldn''t be able to take anything from the future, which is a nice balancing feature if the past few centuries of this game world resemble ours in any way. Perhaps some kind of quest or crafting element would allow a player to memorize a schematic of some weapon from the future and have it assembled in the past.

Anyway, enough rambling. I like this time travel MMOG idea. I likes it alot.

[edited by - mumboi on August 25, 2003 10:15:33 AM]

Say, you found a nice little hidey hole, perfect for stashing a backpack full of goodies. You put your backpack in the hole, and skip ahead to the present to retrieve it, only to realize that somebody else had put THEIR backpack in the hidey hole before you put it there. That is in our "real" time, they put their backpack in the hole in the "present" era, then five minutes later, you put your backpack in the hole in the "past" era. The other player''s backpack wouldn''t be in the hole in the past when you put your''s in, as objects can not travel backward in time, so it would be perfectly valid for you to do so; but when you skip ahead and look in the hole, all of a sudden your backpack and his backpack will be occupying the same space--a patent absurdity in real life, and one with tricky implications in the game itself.

I''m not saying time travel is a bad idea, I''m just saying you should think things through to their full conclusion before you pop off at the mouth with insults.


Josh
vertexnormal AT linuxmail DOT org

Check out Golem at:
My cheapass website

quote: Original post by VertexNormal
The problem I see is with actions in the past affecting things in the present or future era. Say, you go back in time to the -100 years era and build a house. In the present-time era, that house has to have been there all along; if it just suddenly appears at the instant you (as the player) perform the action to build a house, it destroys the illusion of time travel.

Another player is in the present era, standing in the location you are building the house. You build that house, he is suddenly inside the house, perhaps inside the walls-- a location he should never have been able to get to had the house been there all along.

Rest assured that if you go back in time to effect an action, some other player is going to go back in time to undo it for his own nefarious purposes, or do something else to change whatever it is you are trying for. If you impose arbitrary restrictions, such as characters not being able to interact with each other in past time-frames, then you end up with a wildly disjointed, severely schizophrenic, and self-contradictory "present time" dependent upon a number of past time-frames equal to the number of players who have gone back into the past to fudge around with things.

Just because it is a game, doesn't mean the knotty problem of paradox magically disappears, and all the technology and memory upgrades in the world (up to and including an actual time machine) won't change that.

If you discard the MMO aspect, then you could come up with a pseudo-time-travel scheme that could seem at least nominally realistic, in the fashion of Chrono Trigger/Zelda. But by definition an MMO environment would wreck the entire concept with an ungodly glut of contradictory variables.



Josh
vertexnormal AT linuxmail DOT org

Check out Golem at:
My cheapass website

I think it can be done. Take two epochs as an example. A single set of players (playing different characters in different generations) are playing in the two time periods concurrently. In the first time period, there is nothing. It's barren. There is no history. In the second time period, there is a big city, and some small towns.

The goal of the CHARACTERS in the first time period is to do their best to create the future world. The PLAYERS would be able to do as much research as they want into the past using their CHARACTERS in the future world. Future details and artifacts can be added as various stories are played in the Past - a particular house for instance must be in a particular place but who knows who built it or owned it? When these details are played out in the Past, artifacts show up in the future.

Comments? Problems?

-ParadigmShift

[edited by - ParadigmShift on August 25, 2003 3:58:33 PM]