Hiyas,
Firstly just wanted to say I came across your article and absolutely had to stop to read every last bit. (downloading a 105meg Counterstrike update also being good reason to find something to keep me entertained!!) I liked it, some very interesting ideas that have inspired me further to actually get off my butt and start thinking/working on my own ideas in this area.
I got to one of your sections and immediately thought of an alternative method of dealing with the situation.... and currently have another browser window open at that section ready for me to finish reading what remains. The section I''m reffering to is the one with ideas of dealing with the subject of sleeping and energy restoration.
Now my ideas for this are certainly only half-baked at best, but perhaps something worthwhile for consideration and discussion.
Okay the problem at present... sleeping in most games is not a necessity so long as you''re topped up with energy from food and drink. The reason for this problem being that sleeping is not easy to implement in games.
n.b. Im most interested in how sleeping would be dealt with in a constantly existant world that doesnt sleep when you do, ie a MMORPG
* Sleep takes time, if you are forced by the game to sleep and do nothing for a period of time, this may conflict with the times the player wants to actually be playing the game and not be sitting looking at a blank screen or whatever.
* If you made it so that sleep somehow is something you perform for a couple of seconds and is represented by a cut sequence or something along those lines, when your player awakes, the world has had no more than a few minutes to change (specifically meaning in MMORPGs where it is impossible to skip ahead in time)... unrealistic
My idea in dealing with this is to aim to keep realistic, but never be boring. The player should be forced into sleeping at some point, after all in real life if we stay awake constantly, at some point we are going to fall asleep whether we like it or not. Again in R.L. if we push at the limits of sleep deprivation we cannot guarantee when we are going to finally succumb to sleep. Many a time Ive been sat up watching a film and fighting to stay awake as I''ve been up so long, and fallen asleep part way through. In game I think I would choose to represent this by having some kind of indicator to show tiredness, perhaps this indicator would mark a danger zone where we may start to randomly succumb to sleep, the further towards 0 this indicator is, the more likly inevitable slumber becomes. This way the character is unlikely to head off into a dungeon and accidentally fall asleep mid battle as he has prior warning.
What needs work here is how sleep would be dealt with in certain circumstances, ie the previous idea of being in the middle of a battle, no matter how tired you are it is unlikely you would fall asleep mid battle!! Perhaps when you are in danger areas your sleep indicator could be temporarily raised to allow you to stay awake, but be put into debt once in safety, meaning once the battle is over and you reach saftey, you immediately collapse to the floor and fall to sleep.
Secondly sleep itself, nobody wants to be forced into stopping playing the game because their in-game character is too tired when they are still raring to go!! The way I would consider dealing with this would be something like as follows. Once the player falls to sleep, they enter an alternative world, their subconscious dream world. This alternative environment for the player would focus on personal mental development, perhaps the player may encounter horrific scenarios which enable him to become more resistant to fear effects in the real world, or he/she may encounter beautiful dreamscapes to explore and interact with, improving his/her meditational abilities. Many combinations could be used to allow a whole other side to character development. Environments could be a lot more flexible given that they would use a different set of rules to game world rules (or perhaps almost no rules at all). Another point to consider, would this part of the game world allow interaction with other players? Perhaps when you fall asleep you could be randomly linked with a random number of people also sleeping (or maybe there is some way of determining who is linked into your dreams) Perhaps it would even be possible to have people you have known who are not asleep included in your dreams as NPC''s somehow (difficult I imagine). This kind of system would allow the player to be forced to sleep (and for a realistic period of time), while not forcing them into hours of boredom.
Something else to consider - when characters fall asleep and enter this dream realm they will have no interaction in the real game world with other characters, this could create some frustration if the player fancied just talking to someone or in some way interacting with others. The problem as I see it is this, take for example Everquest, in this game if you go LFG (Looking for group) it can take a loooong time to find one, if you were then forced to sleep and lose your group, the player is gonna be peed off as it may have taken him/her a long while to build up a steady going long lasting group. IMO this needs to be dealt with in one of two ways... either fix the whole problem of it taking so long to find a stable group or allow some other way of mantaining the group despite the necessity to sleep (or both I guess... in fact ideally both!)
Anyway if you find these ideas difficult to follow at all, it''s because I''ve been writing it as I''m thinking it up, so appologies if it comes through poorly! It''s just the starts of my thoughts into the subject and others feedback would be much welcomed. If the ideas are deemed good enough I dont mind at all if they''re included in the article (or not if u think they''re plain crap
) Hope they inspire someone to take it further and if not its something I may at least work into my own ideas,
thanks again for an inspiring article
Steve aka Mephs
==Mephs_uk@yahoo.com==
