Something on the calendars/seasons thread just kicked my brain into gear on the old problem of supporting multiple time-rates in an MMO game - the idea of each character having a sphere of influence (and the number of other characters around having an effect on the rate of time''s passage for a single-player game) Basically, allow spells and other effects that manipulate the flow of time, but assume time has a certain degree of inertia, influenced by the presence of observers - so the spell that lets you skip an entire night while in a sealed private dungeon with no chance of anyone else getting in might only let you skip ahead a tenth of a second or so in the midst of a fierce melee. Also, differences between your time and global time tend to correct themselves - when you''re offline by preference - but if you meet up with someone who''s at a different time than you, your two time frames tend to equalise as you approach each other, so by the time you meet you''re in a compromise frame. This means that someone who agressively hastes to get an edge in combat against NPCs (effectively slo-moing the world) suffers a major disadvantage when a second PC shows up and the monsters suddenly get hasted themselves (assuming they''re not all dead by then) By the time the two characters can actually interact, the first PC should be caught up. Of course, slo-moing another PC should also be possible, but for a much shorter duration, and involves them being slightly fast-moed and you being slightly slo-moed as the spell wears off and you come to a compromise time-frame (a little behind global-time, meaning both of you get some (offline) fast-mo before you interact with another PC) I hope people can make sense of what I''m suggesting here

I could see it being possible in a sealed area, and perhaps even the reversion to global time standards, but as to actually speeding up one player while slowing down the entire game world?

I don''t think it is really as easy as it might sound, if even feasible.

It is an interesting idea, and perhaps a small number of time differences could be used, but nothing on the scale of say, Max Payne''s Bullet Time.

-Greven

You wouldn''t have to speed up the game world. You just change the speed of the world to the point of view of the player who get''s speeded up / slowed down.

Say for example in a battle Adam gets haste cast on him and Bob gets slow cast on him.

Both players see worldly stuff happen at the same speed but adam moves faster and bob slower.

However limits would need to imposed on the players. They shouldn''t be able to change time by say more or less than an hour.

See, the problem with this is that the players are all thinking in real-time, and if your character has "haste" cast on him, you still don't. So if my character is The Flash and your character is Batman, it makes sense that my Flash would be able to see the Batman moving in super slow motion, while he ran around at what felt like normal speed. I guess this could be imitated by slowing down everything except the Flash character, so that the poor guy playing as Batman is watching his guy slog through the air like a zombie, while I'm hopping and punching at normal speeds.

However, in an MMO setting, that would be unfeasible, because somebody out there would always be "hasted", and since the gametime would have to cater to the fastest character in the world at that moment, everybody else would be walking through jell-o all the time. And God help you if you get "slow" cast on you. You may as well go get a sandwich.

When all the other characters are AI, it's alright, because the computer can just calculate faster or slower and make them move, react, and think at the appropriate pace. But you can't do that with player characters, because the cognition and command structure (the player) is always rooted in real-time.

And just making the characters move faster or slower is no solution. Just having my guy run three times as fast isn't the same as actually slowing down the time around me. Heck, all I'm going to do is miss jumps and run into walls, and I don't even want to talk about what that would do to my aim. There's a reason competition shooters aren't allowed to take depressants before a match. Trying to aim a bow or gun while hasted would be like having three packs of cigarettes and four pots of coffee.

[edited by - Iron Chef Carnage on October 28, 2003 5:36:52 PM]

The only way I could see this work was in somthing like a mmorpg whith click and wait style combat. Then you could speed up your character because you wouldn''t have to try to aim with your mouse or whatever. You just get a bonus number of actions you can preform in relation to your opponent. Running could be a problem though depending on how was this acceleration is.

so don''t optimize for the fastest players, optimize for the average of all players. then give players the means to break the spells.

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Original post by Iron Chef Carnage
However, in an MMO setting, that would be unfeasible, because somebody out there would always be "hasted", and since the gametime would have to cater to the fastest character in the world at that moment, everybody else would be walking through jell-o all the time. And God help you if you get "slow" cast on you. You may as well go get a sandwich.

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That''s the point of having spheres of influence (which I somehow forgot to do more than mention very tangentially) - you have a region around the hasted player where local game time is slowed down, which steps back to normal time (or decays gracefully if you''re prepared to spend the resources to implement it) at a certain radius from the PC - if someone else''s sphere of influence encroaches, then you superimpose the two effects, but you have a maximum gradient before game time starts averaging out, and any residual haste/slow effects go directly to character motion. And, yes, the caffeine effect will potentially make residual haste effects moderately nasty. That''s the drawback in PC-PC interactions.

The big question I''m still mulling over is whether it''s better to force elapsed time to match up eventually, or just force time rates to match up. In other words, if Colin the Librarian uses haste on himself so he can do the 12 hours worth of cataloguing in 2, does he then have to be slowed for 12 hours, experiencing 2 hours of duration to let the world catch up (or some other level of slowing for the appropriate time) or can he carry on at the same rate as the rest of the world, but 10 hours older?