It has been a while since I posted but my job has kept me away from my computer, now I am back, and humbly will start asking advice and opinions from this great thinktank. I have one thing I would like to get as much ideas and opinions on as I can get, and I think this will be a great question to start with. As a player of many MMO's I personally find myself looking at details and graphics in game. The more realistic the better I like it. I have also heard other players in these games comment on the details, some like them, some want more and some say they are just not needed. Reading through post on this site, again I see these 3 common responses. So I ask all of you for your ideas and opinions. What do you all think is too much detail, or too little? Give me examples of what you would like to see in a game, any genre, but I am trying to concieve a MMO, so please keep that in mind. Now I am not trying to steal ideas from any of you, I have thousands of ideas for my game concept. I just want to see how many and of what type would be worth integrating into a finished game design concept. So to get this started let me give you some of my ideas, and please feel free to criticize or compliment, to me both are a form of constructive learning. And remember this MMO that I speak of is a concept, and long time dream of mine. With all of your guidance, help and ideas, I hope to make it a reality. I would like to see during the character creation phase of my MMORPG, the ability to make changes to every aspect of the body mesh. i.e. Take The Sims 2 facial customizing and allow it to be done to body, arms legs and so on. A fully deformable 3D world. i.e. If a Mage casts a fireball in the middle of the woods it can knock down trees or catch them on fire or even leave a small crater in the ground. When a creature or animal is killed, the player is given options to skin it not just have an icon show up that there is a hide they can take. Also since I like realism why not make it so if they have the skills they can collect other stuff from the corpse like blood or bone or meat, all of which can be used in skills or studying or arcane rituals or even the making of in game objects. OR lets say the group has just slain a mighty dragon, they could take the head of the beast and mount it for hanging in thier guild hall. The combinations are endless as to what could be done. Have it where plants, animals, monsters even NPC's and PC's grow up and age. i.e. A pc has farming skills so he plants a crop and then over time it springs forth from the ground and grows to maturity, and then gets harvested. Like I said I have thousands of ideas, but I do not know how many would work with todays technology, or how many would be worth it for the players enjoyment.

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Original post by Lonewolf Darkmoon When a creature or animal is killed, the player is given options to skin it not just have an icon show up that there is a hide they can take. Also since I like realism why not make it so if they have the skills they can collect other stuff from the corpse like blood or bone or meat, all of which can be used in skills or studying or arcane rituals or even the making of in game objects. OR lets say the group has just slain a mighty dragon, they could take the head of the beast and mount it for hanging in thier guild hall. The combinations are endless as to what could be done.

Yes, there endless possibilities. As a gamer, the amount of detail that becomes too much is when it starts getting awkward, or impractical to navigate throughout the world and generally play the game. When gameplay, and I'm referring to overall gameplay, starts to become burdonsome then it's time to start thinking aout redesign.

If I need a complicated series of button/keyboard presses to accomplish what should be simple actions, then I get frustrated, lose my train of thought and, inevitably, my interest in the game.

It all depends on the type of game of course. The dragon head-hanging is a neat idea, and depending on how it was implemented, I would consider it a nice touch. However, again, if the process was tedious, then I would probably not enjoy so much. For instance, who's going to be carrying this huge dragon's head back to the guild hall? I would assume you'd need a few beefy warrior types to accomplish this feat; anything less and I would consider it unrealistic.

Just some thoughts - I'll post more as they come.

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Original post by Lonewolf Darkmoon OR lets say the group has just slain a mighty dragon, they could take the head of the beast and mount it for hanging in thier guild hall. The combinations are endless as to what could be done.

Do you have a lot of experience in the programming and layout of aspects like this? First of all, this exact feature (mounting animal heads) would need to be hard coded into the game. Every animal model in your game needs an unanimated detachable head with which the neck fits nicely onto a wall plaque. That, or you'll need your artists to model seperate heads for this - for every animal. Your animals also cannot vanish after they die. And the player needs to have methods to tell the game engine that they want to cut the sucker off and mount it. That means buttons or menu commands, and don't forget to let them choose which guild to display it in (unless they can only join one). If there are already too many other heads hangning, you need to let them choose which to remove. You might also want to let them choose which spot to hang the current one, so perhaps an overhead view of the guild with a selection brush? Don't forget that resource management might be very difficult to handle with unknown critter heads in every guild. If your gigantic dragon which uses a gigantic texture doesn't use a seperate texture for the head, that will be a lot of wasted texture memory being used for displaying it.

Ahh, anyway, you get the point. I'm sure there are plenty of other problems with this scenario. Even the smallest features take a massive amount of consideration when placed into a dynamic, living world. So make sure you know what needs to be done to impliment these features and make sure they are worth the effort. You should never add a side feature that hinders some other part of your game. If mounting heads means 30% more model development time, that means less critter variety in your game. And the variety would be much more important than mounting heads, IMO.

It does sound like you have some very good ideas, but I am not sure most of these are really that feasible given modern broadband limitations. Here is what I mean. When you are playing an MMO, lets say world of warcraft for example (although this is essentially the same model used for every mmo i am aware of) when you run around the world, enter dungeons, enter cities, whatever, all that geometry is static and therefor can be stored on your local drive. However if you did implement something like you were detailing...deformable worlds (which i think is a super-awesome concept) that would mean that the server side would have to maintain a complete updated version of the world and update each clients world to reflect any changes (which I assume would be constant and massive in scope if it is truly an MMO). Most likely this would mean that the world data, the terrain, the texturing etc. would have to be stored on the server side and transmitted to each player at run-time. I do not think that this would be a conceivable model given the fact that not all of your players are on 5 megabit connections and for various other reasons as well. If you can find a solution around this problem then my congratulations, but it seems to be a fundamental flaw with that side of the design.

The completely customizable characters is another really good idea and one that I think could definitely work but again it would strain the user system in that it has to be able to store and represent an almost infinite set of characters and textures, meshe,s etc. Games such as Tiger Woods golf do this very well but this is an at most four player game and does not need to represent thousands of possible models per game.

The aging life of the game is another really good idea but I think it has the same drawbacks as I mentioned for the deformable world. I'm not saying these things are impossible to do but they would require immense amounts of work (as does any MMO) and probably a lot of research into as of yet untapped areas of online game design.

These are just some things that popped into my mind at first glance, but good luck with your project, I hope to see it some day.

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Original post by Lonewolf Darkmoon A fully deformable 3D world. i.e. If a Mage casts a fireball in the middle of the woods it can knock down trees or catch them on fire or even leave a small crater in the ground.

Unless you make trees grow really fast, I can see players abusing it just for kicks and soon you'll find your world w/o trees.

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Original post by Lonewolf Darkmoon When a creature or animal is killed, the player is given options to skin it not just have an icon show up that there is a hide they can take. Also since I like realism why not make it so if they have the skills they can collect other stuff from the corpse like blood or bone or meat, all of which can be used in skills or studying or arcane rituals or even the making of in game objects. OR lets say the group has just slain a mighty dragon, they could take the head of the beast and mount it for hanging in thier guild hall. The combinations are endless as to what could be done.

It could be to much, depending on how far you take it. As far as mounting a creatures head on the wall, UO did that to some degree.

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Original post by Lonewolf Darkmoon Have it where plants, animals, monsters even NPC's and PC's grow up and age. i.e. A pc has farming skills so he plants a crop and then over time it springs forth from the ground and grows to maturity, and then gets harvested.

Designing Virtual Worlds touchs on this. Growing up & aging brings up perm death, or at least brings into question how well a 95 yr old can swing a sword (especially when the goal is realism). As to the original idea of farming, I don't know how many people would see watching the corn grow would be alot of fun.

Well... The real world is such that you can look deeper into anything and we don't really know where the details end. Then you can look further into space and we don't really know how big it gets.

In a game world five details can be too many while 500000 is good. The question is, how well do they fit in.

I think high graphics are acceptable so long as they have a purpose other than fluff in the game. Theif 3 for example hinges on Dynamic Shadows, because a major gameplay element is sneaking through shadows so having Dynamic Shadows has a fairly good purpose. By comparison Dynamic Shadows in Doom 3 are virtually worthless other than the occational monster briefly making shadow-puppets with his claws on the wall.

The only MMO i can draw on as an example for what you intend would be Second Life. The terrain itself is static (which is how it generally is in all MMO's i've played), however the players in Second Life can customize their Avatars using textures and primitives near limitlessly (even writing scripts for movement and objects), and those who own land can also build custom buildings and landscape it however they wish.

Deformable terrain seems like more trouble than its worth though, at least at the moment and especially with all the other features you have in mind. I'm not saying it's impossible, and if you did manage to get it to work it would certainly be interesting. :D

[Edited by - Gyrthok on October 3, 2005 12:13:27 PM]