I was thinking about how the AI respawns in mmos, and also how the equipment never matches what they're wearing. One problem is scale. The populations of mobs are too small to reproduce in anything resembling a 'realistic' way, and also there's some problems with swarming when the populations get large and smart, and economics with spawning large amounts of easily lootable valuable equipped items that also give the mob reasonably good combat buffs/abilities.

So one option is to handle the game design differently.

I would suggest first implementing a terrain system, with a design that includes minerals, plants, animals, humanoids/primates, and humans npcs, and players. The terrain map and 'global' layout would be very group-oriented, with human cities being the popular player areas, plants and animals being everywhere, and the humanoids and human npcs being in groups elsewhere, with the npcs being in factions and gangs of a large number of sizes.

It may or may not be practical to not actually lay out the specific layout of the map, instead using menus for 'long distance' travel and then generating the destinatinon with the npcs....although having a very large map would be neat too, with most of it marked as 'nonvaluable' surface materials, grass/dirt etc, and rarely exposed metal or precious materials that are mineable near the surface or towns, and with some deep caves drawn in and occasionally updated with or without npcs digging at them, and more exposed materials for harvesting there. Trees can also be chopped, and food may or may not be essential or have other positive effects. I'm also a fan of using skills instead of levels, with attributes being more or less fixed or increasing with age, and allowing all skills to be practiced and having high effective skill caps on each one to encourage specialization....and also overlap to encourage generalization as well, while trying not to stack it towards either one.

Plants would be seeded on a new map first, and this could be a single player game to begin with with AI playing everything else. The plants would reproduce via 'normal' mechanisms at a high rate of speed provided they have water from marked river areas that are pre-drawn, or rain, or human interaction, and maybe marked dirt and animal nutrients. Animals would eat the plants, and also have an accelerated and 'natural' reproduction, with tagged males and females. The map would have to be of sufficient size to support this, and some 'cheats' might be necessary to make it work good, also it may be good to generate a very large map from tiles, possibly with random mods to generic tiles programmatically. The humanoids would be a good hunting source, and would reproduce quickly, eat plants and animals (capping their population or forcing them to expand), and manufacture crude equipment from surface harvested materials into weapons, and also stockpile food and materials from the surface. They could manufacture some items and would drop recipes for those items, or the recipes might be in the stocks or something. They could also manufacture buildings on the map, such as barricades, huts, shallow tunnels into the terrain, nests, and other primitive things. The humans and players would have identical capabilities, with npc human areas having deeper mines and better recipes and being more rare and requireing more effort to take, including most probably large groups of players and hired npc humans, since they would hopefully have good AI that presented a challenge, and there would also be smaller groups of humans with fewer resources and no mining such as bandit camps and small primitive towns. A recipe would exist for every item in the game, and the 'tools' to make other items would also include things such as buildings that the players could place on the map (also the ai humans, animals, and primates) with a resource cost, possibly a time cost too although most of the game would be at 'fun speed'.

Recipes would require materials and tools, and the first tools are made with no tools just materials and a recipe. Inventory could be a bit sped-up and abstracted like warcraft. Fighting could be done warcraft like as well, with a variety of realistic weapon abilities...or with a more realism action slant, possibly with a focus on ranged due to technological limitations in melee, or with rpg style mostly to use less resources. Crafting should allow as much player input as possible, especially with higher skill via practice and/or instruction and/or item consumption/use. Also the recipes should be very dynamic programmatically like the items in diablo, so that one recipe template for a sword can include a range of items, and a range of outputs, and the recipe a player gets might have some restrictions and bonuses/penalties with a variety of allowed materials and options.


Players could spawn near human npcs, and it might be neat to use a mixed survival/respawn system....where a player gets bonus points for playing a lot, so for every hour played they get 100 account points on their account, and having more account points allows the player to spawn in a nicer human area and/or with more skills/equipment, while also making it easy to stay alive (sort of), and allowing the player to keep their upgrades and equipment and making those come in fast, but are lost when they die....although some of that might get buffed onto the account point boost at start....or just do it a more normal way with keeping items on death for players, and maybe having both regular and 'hardcore' style drop items on death and restart servers too, with the hardcore ones having a higher leveling rate / skillgain rate.

I like the general idea, that of a more realistic MMO, but I don't think you're getting close enough.
Instead of having anything "spawn", it should be set up in such a way that nothing exists in the gameworld without "growing" there. You mentioned characters coudl have age, well, why not play character since birth? Yes, it could be troublesome if players are used to going out and slaughtering hundreds of monsters in a day, but this isn't about what players are used to. A truly realistic MMO would contain the data for a large area, if not a small planet. It'd have a large population of a few races, and one possibility would be for players to directly control members of that population, instead of "creating" a huge population of characters. The population would have to be pretty big, if it's an MMO and you want to have 1,000 players on a server, running around killing monsters, you'd need a whole, functioning society to backup that population of adventurerers.

A lot of MMO's are fantasy based. What's realistic for a skeleton?
Monsters don't necessarily need to have a present population to have a presence. Rift is a fairly new mmo, it has invasions from another plane. With these invading armies, there would be plenty of fodder for the players, without creating a devastating population of monsters.

I like the thread of your idea, but the problems are massive and many. If you go all-out, what you wind up with is a world entirely populated by the functional equivalent of bots. They'll be growing and advancing and achieving new levels of strength, skill and gear around the clock, and before long, the NPCs will outstrip player characters so severely that gameplay will be broken. We'll all be the low-level grunts in a world populated with min/maxed elites. You'll have to do a massive amount of work to balance players against that kind of diligence and perseverance. You can do it by either capping NPCs, or by giving players some kind of enhanced growth potential, so that they can--with limited, realistic (in terms of play time) exposure to in-game resources--compete with NPCs who are exposed to those same resources 24/7.

The flip-side of that problem, of course, will be NPC depletion. If you wipe out the goblins of Goblin Mountain, then next time someone goes there it'll be either deserted or populated by a tiny number of low-level goblins who are working around the clock to bury their dead comrades and re-establish agriculture and trade with other goblin outposts. The world will be dynamic, and the endless, tireless, sociopathic engine of achievement-style gameplay will wreak devastation on the NPC population.

That's a lot of words to not mention why this is a good idea.

Sorry if I wasn't clear about the respawning, there's a lot of censorship on the issue and I'm worried. ;p Anyways, I'd do it sims like, and there would be bi-sexual reproduction modeled in the aforementioned idea, with plants, animals, primates, and humans all having it modeled. Due to 'fun time' compression, I'd not actually 'hot coffee' animate it, maybe just make it a gameplay option that is kind of clean and vague (or not, alhtough they canceled that we dare game), where any male & female humans can consent to make a baby, which spawns near them without much fanfare, and then must be fed and raised....probably at a very high time speed, so that the baby grows up fast into a playable character, at which point a player could spawn into it via an interface, or it could be controlled via AI.

Note the players would have a few advantages against AI humans to ensure human fun-ness, a key element. Making a game new, fun, and also relevant to the world and reality like a serious science book, is probably a good way to make money or build rep/skill/practice, and also making 'new' gameplay elements from the void is hard, but making them from the world is much more doable....easier if you have been a lot of places and done a lot of things in the world, otherwise you have less to ponder upon. The account points a player might get from playing and winning and paying could give the human players a starting advantage, such as having the humans be typically born in the best places in the world when possible, hopefully with a short spawning queue....possibly with some gameplay enhancement cheats, such as doing it as a single player game and spawning a new game world for the player each time, while also doing the game in a 'mmo quest single player' style, and I should note that single player games lack the technological challenge of networking, a hard task, to synchronize a bunch of programs over the less-reliable-than-a-pc internet...while also introducing the challenge of having good "AI".

File swapping is a bit underutilized these days....possibly with the association between files from random people, viruses, and illegal pirated or otherwise illegal files. A valid concern, users are notorious for transmitting illegal images to each other without warning, at least according to chatroulette rumors. That being said an easier way to make multiplayer games is to swap a save file, since then you just have to load and save files, and then allow the users a mechanism for trading program resource data files.......a safer file type than a .exe, which can openly be mysterious and do anything possible with no restrictions when ran, whereas a program data file is limited to interfacing with the program, although they can more rarely contain hostile arbitrary code, but only due to specific bugs in a program, and thus are a bit more rare than the 'trojan horse' .exe files, which is where a program is mis-labeled, so a program labeled as a game or anti-virus program might actually have the code to break your computer or send spam with your computer while demanding your credit card to run programs....these are hazardous, moreso to novices who fall for online scams and tricks more easily. For this reason, while .exe files are also the fastest and most powerful programs, it might be good for novices to always consider making 'safer' programs, including things like facebook plugin programs, java browser apps, ms silverlight (haven't tried it, looks like flash, might work amazingly good for a browser running env...), and I should note that the browser might contain bugs ("probably"), and people probably know about those bugs, but a chrome or ie or firefox bug is a valuable and precious thing, so at least the virii aren't random college students just erasing your hdd and breaking your pc....the serious virii are typically invisible, so even though your computer might be sending out some spam, at least it's doing it discreetly when you get a browser virus, whereas those .exe files are dangerous, I worry about running them,,,,,,,yet I'm also not too worried about it too, most people are friendly and I try to avoid throwing money at them unnecessarily, and I can also trace my boot and clean up the extra files usually with msconfig, and if I smell a laggy virus wiping the hard disk and reinstalling windows can be a fun way to layout some new software and spend an afternoon.....although I'm not too worried about it, they can potentially hide in hardware and other subtle locations as well, but as long as it works and I can keep writing (hopefully useful) things on the internet and get you all to like me, that would be awesome. Maybe someday I can work with powerful people to build things....I've never been much of a builder, yet it seems like it's the key here more than anything else, and that building impressive things with computers, in particular with regards to matter-assembling computers with future tech that can assemble cars on demand connected to a PC (maybe a inkjet-sized matter printer, could print the parts, with easy or do-able assembly......or a larger one might be available and popular too! Note you must fill up the ink cartridge with various materials, and a car does require a lot of metal, also electricity to melt the metal and flow it onto the piece by mechanical control, and a human to pick the design from a catalog and/or make/update one. With current tech this can be accomplished with one of those computer router thingies, where you can "print" a 3d model onto any material with a spinning cutter and 3-axis arm....I forget what they're called......computer aided router or something, works with a 3D model, very impressive videos on youtube, and square/cube/rectangular materials can be obtained by melting old metals or materials in a smelter into blocks with a lot of fuel, or mined then smelted.....with a bit of evaporative waste, but 99% of the metal and materials stay on the earth when remade.....all the metal dug up through history should still be up here, ready to be resmelted into new blocks then carved, or later printed into exact and/or overlapping shapes in all the popular materials at a given cost....some day.....maybe even food air & water from random cheap inputs and lots of electricy, which we will probably chase towards jupiter or a smaller easier planet that's also bigger than earth, maybe closer, also the near-sun planets might be interesting too, and some day we will get our electricty and metals from the middle of the sun, and I bet the quality of life for average people at that time will be very impressive, and we'll all look back at now as a bunch of primitive half-monkey days with no replicators or holodecks or space travel...and some odd historical notes that aren't obvious yet.....kind of disconcerting, especially what was happening secretly in the 80s...remnants of which continue strongly to this day.

You mentioned characters coudl have age, well, why not play character since birth?

You could look at how Fallout 3 did it, not playing through the character's entire young life, but touching on the highlights while growing up as an extended character generation / tutorial. It would also be a great way to get the player more invested in the character and the game world.

Perhaps something more involved than Fallout 3, though. With child-level quests and walking around towns, sneaking about and normal child shenanigans. You could meet child-versions of later important NPCs, witness important events in world history, and get to know other players in child mode. Obviously the child-mode wouldn't be nearly as combat centric (no-one -who'd I'd like playing my game, at least- wants to see a child get hurt)

I'll be honest, I'm still not quite sure what your topic is past "let's make an MMO that's unapproachably complex for no real benefit", but that's mostly due to your habit of typing in stream-of-conciousness mode and forgetting to put in line breaks once you really get going, making it hard to pull out the central idea you're trying to share. It looks like you have a TON of potential ideas, and you want to throw them all out there (or into a game) at once. Here's a question for you:

What's the point? Of most of these ideas?

If you're writing a simulation, that's great. You can construct a whole host of dynamically generated plants and animals and cogs and widgets and weather systems...etc. etc. But if your goal is to write a game, think about how much of that will be visible/of interest to your players. You might expend massive system resources and design efforts to implement a "more realistic" model that no one even pays attention to. Does a soccer player stop and think about why the grass on the field is growing in a certain pattern due to the layout of the sprinkler system? The field is just the stage. It provides the minimal required components: boundaries, scoring mechanics (in this case, two goals), and a game context. MMO's have a somewhat more complex "minimal requirements" list, but the idea still carries over.

As far as the tangential essay on file sharing (or is it 3d computer-aided construction?), I have no clue how that's relevant, but you certainly wrote a lot about it.

I share information because my lifestyle choices have prevented me from being able to personally implement these. I have sufficient personal resources, and am at the item cap personally, so I enjoy sharing my vast trove of firsthand information in a way that isn't too controversial or anti-ts.

Its interesting..

I once made a simulation game which touched on a basic model of this. The funny thing was it showed some real world scenarios such as there was a point of critical population, once that population was reached, they would eat more food then was grown and that would spiral out of control until they all died.

The problem with my simulation is i didnt introduce an animal that would kill the plant eating animals so effectively my simulation wasnt complete.

Basically, if you try an make a real life simulation, it actually turns out to be quite a delicate balancing job as in my case, if i then made the animal eating animals too strong, they would kill off the plant eating animals and there fore run out of their food source and die. If i made them too weak, the plant eating animals would still increase in population to the point that they eat out the world again and die off which in turn makes the animal eating animals die aswell.

I think it would be an interesting concept but when you try and make a life simulation, there are alot of factors that need to be balanced because having any of the factors wrong will break the entire system.

I think the best point made in this thread is the question of "What's the point? Of most of these ideas?". Does the life simulation serve a purpose?

I think its interesting to try but just realise that its a delicate balance - i had a ball running my life simulation over and over and seeing the results but it wasnt really a game.

In wurmonline all trees use the seeding system. You could plant a tree on an empty island and half a year later you'd have a small part of it covered in forest(depending on the tree type/growth speed). That's around three servers 256 KM squared each.

Also has full terraforming(terrain deformation).

and all towns are player made.