ok I think there are two seperate issues here, multiplayer and single player. Many single player games benefit from having well done NPCs, some games require good NPCs. Multiplayer games on the other hand should not have NPCs. If they do need NPCs then some other part of your design is flawed, and you are trying to use NPCs as a bandaid.

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Original post by Daedalus

The biggest problem with making more complex NPC AI in MMORPGs is that every extra CPU cycle used by the AI code is multiplied by all the NPCs in the game world. This adds up to a lot of extra hardware needed to support the game which cuts into the game developer''s bottom line. This combined with the fact that present MMORPGs don''t even have _enought_ NPCs to make the game world seem fully inhabited makes it kinda hard to concider better AI.

-Daedalus

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Personally, I don''t think that NPC''s in an MMORPG[-like] really do cost much in CPU time. The AI code may be multiplied by all of the NPC''s in the game world right? But you have lots of users with machines who are not doing the AI! So you can share the NPC AI code out to each of your users. MM really allows a LOT of SMART NPC''s instead of very few but very stupid ones. But the real reason people tend to use NPC''s is to tell the story, so in MMORPG[-like]''s they become redundant. Maybe designers should find a new use for them if they intend to use them...

But it would be rather bad once you set up your system and the first user makes the FIRST appearance on your MM server... And there is NOBODY there... That is when you need NPC''s

-Chris Bennett of Dwarfsoft - Site:"The Philosophers' Stone of Programming Alchemy" - IOL
The future of RPGs - Thanks to all the goblins over in our little Game Design Corner niche
          

Come on, my idea has to have some merits. A world without NPCs doesn''t have to mean goggles of PCs.

(start crazy thinking)
Hmm, what about a multiplayer game where you never see the other players, but rather, the effects of what those players did. Like, um, you would share the same world with the rest of the PCs but you couldn''t see them because they are on a different plane or something. Then, to communicate, you couldn''t talk, but you had to manipulate the environment somehow to get their attention. And you could solve puzzles by making areas that only people in certain planes could get in or something. So, to get in, you''d have to find someone without knowing where they were.
(end crazy thinking)

To answer the last post. What if, say, you had a world with so many NPCs, and after so many players came in, 1 NPC got killed by a dragon or something, so eventually, it was just players in the world? That way, when somebody first entered your game, there would be people there, albit dumb, and eventually, all the "dumb" NPC''s would disappear and only leave the PCs.

-Blackstream

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Original post by Blackstream

Come on, my idea has to have some merits. A world without NPCs doesn''t have to mean goggles of PCs.

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I realise this... I am writing up a bit on this thread in the GDCorner doc which is based purely around single player. It gives you a Myst like world which has been abandoned. And Ecco the Dolphin also comes to mind when thinking about a world devoid of life... Though Eccos world wasn''t devoid, it was still teaming, just his family was gone....

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(start crazy thinking)
Hmm, what about a multiplayer game where you never see the other players, but rather, the effects of what those players did. Like, um, you would share the same world with the rest of the PCs but you couldn''t see them because they are on a different plane or something. Then, to communicate, you couldn''t talk, but you had to manipulate the environment somehow to get their attention. And you could solve puzzles by making areas that only people in certain planes could get in or something. So, to get in, you''d have to find someone without knowing where they were.
(end crazy thinking)

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I think that they still count as NPC''s if they do stuff, even if you can''t interact directly with them. I think it may even require more AI than currently used for just the simple dialog tree conversations that some NPC''s have as their total AI.

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To answer the last post. What if, say, you had a world with so many NPCs, and after so many players came in, 1 NPC got killed by a dragon or something, so eventually, it was just players in the world? That way, when somebody first entered your game, there would be people there, albit dumb, and eventually, all the "dumb" NPC''s would disappear and only leave the PCs.

-Blackstream

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That didn''t escape my notice... I was just stating that you need something there at the start... You could remove them later

-Chris Bennett of Dwarfsoft - Site:"The Philosophers' Stone of Programming Alchemy" - IOL
The future of RPGs - Thanks to all the goblins over in our little Game Design Corner niche
          

Actually, when I was talking about the plane shifted world, I was talking about a world void of NPCs. The characters you would be interacting with would be PCs. So there would be no dialogue trees or AI. The only special coding you have to do is make the other PCs invisible and intangible to the other PCs. Then you could see some dang weird stuff like floating rocks and stuff Of course, coming up with a point for the game would be interesting. Maybe your quest would be to align the planes back to normal or something. And yes, this multiplayer game would have to be non-static.

And actually, I kinda thought that if there were NPCs, they would be on a realm that all PCs could see. Kinda weird, it would be like this
Plane 2----------PC #2
Plane 1-PC #1----|
------------|----|
------------|----|
-------------\--/
--------------\/
Plane 0------NPCs

In other words, a PC can interact with all NPCs, NPCs can interact with all PCs, but PCs can''t interact with other PCs. The story line might be that there was a great magic battle between wizards at your town, and the planes were torn apart. Some people were unlucky enough to be at the place where the plane was torn apart, and were thrown into another plane. The people who play the online game would take the role of those people. NPCs would be the people who weren''t caught in the plane tear. And your goal would be to figure out a way to realign the planes. Could be anything from an RPG, to a Mystery Game, to an adventure game. Heck, it could even be a FPS, but that would be streaching it.

But that has nothing to do with the no NPCs thing, and I''m going off on a tangent. Bascially, I''m just suggesting a weird version of a NPC-less world, where you can''t see the PCs, but they are there.

-Blackstream

Whats the difference between a monster and an NPC?

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Original post by Blackstream

Hmm, what about a multiplayer game where you never see the other players, but rather, the effects of what those players did. Like, um, you would share the same world with the rest of the PCs but you couldn''t see them because they are on a different plane or something. Then, to communicate, you couldn''t talk, but you had to manipulate the environment somehow to get their attention. And you could solve puzzles by making areas that only people in certain planes could get in or something. So, to get in, you''d have to find someone without knowing where they were.

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I had a half-baked idea awhile back that involved players who affected other player''s single-player game. I was mostly trying to get around the problems of lag, and the idea was that players could run a server that held the world state. When players logged on, they''d download the world, make changes to it by interacting with it, and upload the results. Often times, they''d be interacting with each other strategically and either cooperatively or competitively, and there were things you could do to stop players from changing parts of the world you didn''t want changed.

Like I said... half-baked...

BTW, your idea reminds me of an old Star Trek: TNG episode. Two crewmembers were "phased" so that they were slightly out of synch with the world around them. They were like ghosts, and the rest of the crew even thought them dead. They couldn''t affect their environment, but by walking through walls and disturbing energy readings and such were able to call attention to themselves.

So maybe what you''re talking about is like this, or like being a ghost?

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Just waiting for the mothership...

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Original post by Sandman

Whats the difference between a monster and an NPC?

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Normally, you don''t save the monster!

Actually, depending on the monster, lots of things: Conversation, team-work / party joining, depth of culture, and variety of interactions are the major things. NPCs usually have more options (but, as some have pointed out, only because few are willing to break the mold)


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Just waiting for the mothership...

Dwarfsoft: I like your idea of distributing AI work to the clients, but it has some kinks in it.

First off, a reasonably intelligent NPC would require about the same amount of info for every world update as each player character would meaning that it'd be like having two people running the game at the same time over one net connection. This becomes serious problem for people running on a dial-up modem connection (as a very large portion ofthe population will remain on for the forseeable future. Broadband isn't frowing fast enough). The only solution I can see to this is to test latency and bandwidth for clients when they connect and only run AI on their systems if their connection can handle it. This would mean that a large portion of your user base would have to be exempted from the distributed AI system.

Secondly, any time you put something like this on the client side you open yourself up to cheating or, more likely in this case, general malitiousness. Its the same problem distributed networking projects like seti@home and distributed.net have to deal with. The only way I can see fixing this, and this method is used by at least one ofthe afore mentioned projects, is to run the same NPCs AI code on two random clients at the same time and check both systems for consistency. This means that the, already limited from my first problem, number of useable clients has do be cut in half.

On the other hand, there is a slightly brighter note. When dealing with a client that is on a direct connection to the net their latency/bandwidth should be good enough to allow multiple AI to run on their system at the same time providing their system is fast enought.

You really don't have to worry about the world being too empty for the first few people joinging up. Think of it this way, the fewer the people you have in the world, the fewer NPCs can be visible/interacted with at one time. For most NPCs, there is no reason they couldn't be "turned off" when not in view by a PC. As more people enter the world, more clients will be available to run AI code. The only real problem comes in when the first few people that log into the world happen to be all modem users. In that case, you'd have to keep some AI-running hardware at the server site to act as a buffer. If you balance it properly, it really shouldn't be a problem.

I have to disagree with you about the real reason people use NPCs thought. It seems to me that advancement of the storyline is just _one_ reason they're used. Another really important one is to populate the world with "average joe" type characters and keep it from looking dead. With the exception of a select few, most players want to be hero's rather than play merchants and creaftsmen 24/7.

-Daedalus

Edited by - Daedalus on November 3, 2000 6:49:18 PM

Edited by - Daedalus on November 3, 2000 6:50:05 PM

Surely a monster is an NPC? It certainly isnt a PC.