I would call this genre "Travel&Trade".
Cool.

Hi Steven,
I''m not sure that you understood my post... I will try to clarify. The Multiplayer versions of this genre have failed (at least in my opinion) to capture the feel of the games that you listed. I have played all but Solar Winds (I even though of another that you did not list - Tachyon : The Fringe) so I can''t comment on it. But, there is something intangible missing from these games.

I fear that it''s the multiplayer aspect.

I remember playing Elite and Frontier: Elite 2 for hours on end - late into the night and never being bored or missing sleep but with Jump Gate (an online MMPG) I can''t stand more than 30 minutes. Ususally because I''m gettin chased or killed by another more experienced pilot... It''s no fun being shot down *LOL*

As for losing the feel by allowing the purchase of bases - I think that you can allow it and still maintain the feel .

But - it is your game... make the game play fun... and keep it balanced.

Dave "Dak Lozar" Loeser

OK, now I think I get what you mean.

When you play the game in single player,
you feel like the hunter rather than the hunted.
The reverse is true in multiplayer mode.
But this goes back to what I said earlier.
This genre is based on pirating of traders
or trading and avoiding pirating (or both).
PKing is actually required in order to
succeed in this type of game.
I guess I'll have to come up with some kind of
a system to limit PKing and encourage players to
kill NPCs instead. Or limit the penalty placed on the
players at death. Any suggestions?

Actually, I recently posted the following in
a different thread.


Although it's technically not a MMORPG, I thought it
would be interesting to mention how Interplay's Hardwar takes
care of violent DDIs. First of all, once you shoot another
player twice, that constitutes an attack. If the attacked player
is innocent, then the police issue a bounty for the attacker.
If the innocent player dies because of the attack, the
bounty is raised. Once a bounty is put out for you, you can visit
the nearest police station to pay off the (corrupt) police
to cancel the bounty. The more people you kill, the higher
the payoff has to be. After the warrant has been out for
a certain amount of time (and not paid off), the police will
attack you. If you kill a police officer, then you lose the
option of paying off the police to have the bounty removed.
If you kill another bad guy with a bounty on his head, then
your bounty is automatically cancelled.

The weaknesses:
1.
Even though it takes 2 shots to constitute an attack, I
have accidently "attacked" innocent NPCs when they got in
the cross fire. The action is this game can be fast, so
this is not unusual.

2.
The police are wimps. Once you build up enough firepower, you
can kill the police without too much trouble. They become
more of an annoyance than anything else. But you still have
to deal with bounty hunters.

3.
All you have to do is kill one bad guy and suddenly you get a
clean slate - even if you've killed police!
Consider the DDI that kills innocent (human) players and then kills one bad NPC. (Yes, NPCs can have bounties on them too.)
The DDI gets a clean slate and no one can touch him without
getting a bounty on themselves.

4.
You can kill players without "attacking" them. If they've taken
a considerable amount of damage in a previous battle, you
can ram into them and kill them. The police don't care.


Hardwar's system isn't perfect, but it does have
some good ideas that I think are worth using.

And as far as allowing the ownership of bases,
I'm still considering both sides. I might miss
having bases too much. I know I really like having
bases in Hardwar. Perhaps I could allow the
ownership of small capital ships instead of bases.
That would take care of the mobility thing.
Or I could allow ownership of both bases and capital
ships and let the player decide what to do.


Steven Borkman
Home Page: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~borkman/
Video Game Page: http://www-student.cse.buffalo.edu/~borkman/projects/game/index.php

Edited by - borkman on December 28, 2001 2:43:02 AM

Ever played Trade Wars?

It was old-skool multi-player BBS game. You and other players could start corperations, fly around and trade, go to the space dock, kill evil (or good) NPC''s, build planets via genisis torpedoes, start colonies, become a pirate, join the good Federation, upgrade, or buy a new, ship. In the end the goal was simple: acculate more wealth and power than anyone else.

Good times...

quote: Original post by borkman
Does anyone know of any other games in this genre?

If you''re still looking for example of games in this genre to draw upon for inspiration, the game "Sundog" for the Atari computer was an excellent example. It''s a shame that such a good game was released for such a dead end system.

Sundog is probably right up there with the Starflight games as my favorite examples of this genre.

quote: Original post by RadGuy
build planets via genisis torpedoes, start colonies

Cool! I've never heard of actually building planets and
starting colonies. That would allow the game
universe to expand dynamically.
To what extent were you involved in developing the colonies?

No involvement - Colonists basically run colony themselves.
Some involvement - You protect them / bring supplies
Total involvement - You govern them / design building layout.

Did you collect taxes from them?


Steven Borkman
Home Page: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~borkman/
Video Game Page: http://www-student.cse.buffalo.edu/~borkman/projects/game/index.php

Edited by - borkman on December 28, 2001 2:43:47 AM

quote: Original post by borkman
Is there some "official" name for this genre?
Does anyone know of any other games in this genre?

I often hear this simply called the "space trading genre." A couple of other games:

Escape Velocity and Escape Velocity Override (Mac only, but a very good 2D series with arcade action and decent trading)

Terminus (I didn''t get into it, but you''re supposed to be able to be a pirate, merc, or trader; can be found for $10 these days)

Independence War 2: Edge of Chaos (very disappointing to me on the trading side; very story constrained; but excellent combat, freeform travel, ship upgrading and breathtaking graphics; FAIR WARNING, though, is not an Elite)

quote:
Often in this genre, once the player has
upgraded to the max and there''s nothing
left to buy to upgrade the ship, the player
just keeps accumulating wealth with nothing
really interesting to do with it.
What could be done to solve this problem?
Is there anything interesting the player could
continuously pay for that would be fun.

Because there''s no driving end goal, and no end of story, one of the downsides to this genre is the almost cheated feeling a player can get when there''s no more progress to be made.

A couple of possibilities:
1) Use a limited lifespan for the player, as the old hit game Pirates! did. Players were warned a few years before their character had to retire, and the game became a race to amass as much plunder as possible before they went out. How they played determined how their personal entreprenuerial story ended (as a bum, or with the hand in marriage of a rich governor''s daughter )

2) Keep shifting the game universe. If technology marches on, then last year''s top lasers or engines aren''t as good as this years. Just like PC computing, if you want to stay on the bleeding edge, you''ll have to pay for it.

3) Investment Sinks. A time honored feature of this genre is the gambling parlor (Privateer and Escape Velocity have ''em; and Tachyon does, too). Well, for the ultra-wealthy end game players, how about a (JUST AS SIMPLISTIC) equivalent. They could be "financing" expeditions, mining outposts, or even wars against other powers, and could win or lose big. (Imagine financing a war that you can also fight in). Tie in with number 2, and you''ve got players gambling on advanced technology.

There''s lots of room in this genre for improvement, but I think you always have to be careful to make the game design symmetrical. If the game has more and better features in the end-game vs. the beginning, then players may become annoyed that they have to build themselves up each time just to get to the good stuff.



--------------------
Just waiting for the mothership...

I am planning to make the game network playable.
I realized early on I realized that I would have
to solve the following problem:

In Privateer(1&2), to travel from one game world
to the next, you had to hyper-jump.
Game worlds will be the same way in my game.
Since Privateer is a single player game, it
didn't have to keep track of what was going
on in worlds where you are not. For example, if
you are at planet X, the game only keeps track of
ships in that world. Once you leave planet X's world,
all the ships which are left behind are forgotten by
the game. If you jump back to planet X's world, NPCs
are randomly generated to populate the world.

Hardwar is the opposite. In Hardwar, there is only one real
game world (though internally, the separate craters may be
worlds, but that doesn't really matter). In Hardwar, every
ship in the game exists until it dies. Every ship is tracked
in every area of the game at all times.

A networked space sim would have to keep track of at
least every world where there exists a human player.
I would like to be able to track every world.
This could get computationally expensive.
Imagine writing a server program to track say 100
simultaneous worlds (solar systems / planets / jump nodes / etc).
What if there was an average of 100 objects per world?
Even the most optimized engine code could do
no better than O(# of objects) in the update function
between frames. That means I would have O(10000) work each
update. Imagine performing collision detection/response
and AI/3D pathfinding in all these game worlds
simultaneously. Is this possible?
I fear this problem might severely limit the total size
of my game universe. Comments? What design strategies are
there for massively multiplayer online games to overcome
this sort of problem?


Steven Borkman
Home Page: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~borkman/
Video Game Page: http://www-student.cse.buffalo.edu/~borkman/projects/game/index.php

Edited by - borkman on December 28, 2001 2:41:18 AM

quote:
Imagine performing collision detection/response
and AI/3D pathfinding in all these game worlds
simultaneously. Is this possible?

Short answer is, YES.

Long answer.
As I said in an earlier post - I have been designing a MP version of a space-trader since around 1988. The design has changed considerably over the years because of two factors: 1) Technology has changed and 2) I have learned more about the usage of said technology.

So, here is a very high level way that I planned to solve this problem.

client		       [PATCH SERVER]       \              /	{INTERNET}---+---[LOGIN SERVER]--------(DATABASE)client /   |	      \	                      /	   |	       \[UNIVERSE SERVER]----/           |                | |           |                |-+-[AI SERVER]                \               | |	     \		    | |	      \		    | |	       \____________|_[SOLAR SYSTEM A]		\	    |		 \__________[SOLAR SYSTEM B]... 

The clients connect through the Internet of course. Where they are updated by the PATCH SERVER.
The login server would validate user accounts (active,inactive,banned,tempoarary holds, etc...).

The UNIVERSE SERVER would be in charge of sending the player where they should be. For example when the player logs in the UNIVERS SERVER would determine what SOLAR SYSTEM SERVER they are in and do the hand-off. The UNIVERSE SERVER would also be in charge of hyperjumps (moving the player from SOLAR SYSTEM SERVER to SOLAR SYSTEM SERVER).

The AI SERVER would be in charge of all the NPCs in each of the SOLAR SYSTEM SERVERS (*note* this may be insufficient and each SOLAR SYSTEM would need to have it''s own AI SERVER).

This design is about 1.5 years old and should probably be revised but, it gives you a start...

Good luck,



Dave "Dak Lozar" Loeser

Hey, thanks Dak Lozar. That's a great idea.
It looks like I'll have to use distributed
computer resources to track all game worlds
simultaneously. I guess in single player mode
(off-line) I could just do what Privateer does
and fake it. I also realized that the game world
server could run at a lower refresh rate than the
clients actually run if I program interpolation
into the clients. That means, if the game server
updates frames at only 10fps, then I could still
get 20fps on the player's screen
if my clients are smart enough to guess
where the objects should be in-between frames.
That could help with the delay in network comms as
well.



Steven Borkman
Home Page: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~borkman/
Video Game Page: http://www-student.cse.buffalo.edu/~borkman/projects/game/index.php

Edited by - borkman on December 28, 2001 2:40:18 AM