For me, the holy grail question about MMOG design centers on the vesting of persistence in the world itself rather than in the characters. Almost everything I find unsatisfying, both as player and as scholar of MMOGs, has to do with the almost complete lack of dynamism in synthetic worlds themselves, that the only thing which changes, grows, reflects persistence, is the character.
When I've ventured out before on this topic, I've found a reasonable degree of consensus on this point among scholars, developers and players, that dynamic, changing, responsive synthetic worlds are what we need. I've also heard on many occasions that they simply are not technically possible at the present time.
My basic problem is that I like to think about synthetic world design but lack the technical background to go past thinking fairly abstractly about what is and is not possible. So I want to start a series of fairly focused posts on applied world-persistence where I ask the technically adept among our readership just how difficult a particular fairly precise design would be to implement, especially in comparison to existing designs.
I want to approach this problem strictly as a problem in technical feasibility from the programming and server architecture side, not about whether or not this would pose difficult problems in management of the player base.
Applied design problem #1, then.
Let's say a design document calls for the following. I want to simplify this down to the basic essence of the problem, so wherever you might balk at graphical requirements, etc., imagine that the graphics and so on are highly rudimentary.
Let's project the space in which this problem takes place onto a hex map.
A series of ten interlinked caverns, roughly speaking running in two parallel lines from a common entrance that goes to two entry caverns.
In the caverns are one hundred orcs, initially spread evenly over each distinct cavern-room and remaining within the cavern to which they are initially designed. Each cavern-room is roughly circular, ten hexes in diameter.
An orc's hearing range extends for two hexes around the hex it occupies. An orc's visual range extends for five hexes around the hex it occupies.
An orc can move a maximum of two hexes per time step.
Each orc is an autonomous agent with the following rules governing its behavior.
a) If catches sight of non-orcs, each orc-agent has a variable weighted probability (e.g, at creation, each individual orc has slightly different weightings on each of these actions) of doing the following:
1) running in a random direction and making no noise until non-orcs are no longer visible
2) running towards the nearest orc and making an alarm noise
3) moving directly towards non-orc at maximum speed and attacking once they are in range
4) begin to build a defensive fortification.When finished with fortification in one hex, continue to build in random direction unless non-orc sighted. If non-orc still sighted when fortification finished, attack with ranged weaponry from fortification; fortification offers major defensive bonuses to ranged attacker. Fortifying orcs will not respond to alarm noise orcs.
5) move directly towards one of the two connecting caverns. Once in this cavern, build traps in each hex, moving in random direction when completed. Continue to build traps until non-orc sighted or alarm noise-making orc interrupts trap building.
b) If an orc hears an alarm noise, it moves towards orc making alarm and then makes alarm noise, unless already engaged in combat with non-orcs or building fortifications.
c) If alarm-noise making orcs are in hexes proximate to each other, they will move in same direction from that time step on.
d) If more than 5 alarm-noise orcs are proximate to each other, they will move directly towards visible non-orcs and attack once in range. If non-orcs are not visible, they will move towards nearest visible orcs and continue making alarm noise. In neither are visible, they will move in a random direction.
Fortifications prevent movement of non-orcs until they are destroyed, but orcs can move through them with no penalty.
Each trap space can be traversed with no penalty by orcs; non-orcs take damage unless they first detect and demolish the trap.
Ok, up to this point, this has no major dynamic world-persistent aspect to it--it's just a really simple AI routine with some obvious design problems. The next part, however, is this:
a) When non-orcs (e.g., players), leave the caverns altogether, record the number of remaining orcs. If more than 65% of the total cavern population remains, all orcs in caverns will move towards one of the two entry caverns and remain there. They will now have only one ruleset: attack all visible non-orcs.
b) If less than 65% but more than 45% of the total cavern population remains when non-orcs leave the area, the entire remaining population will move to (or remain within) the entry caverns and construct fortifications continuously. When the entry caverns are completely full of fortifications, each orc will occupy a single fortified hex and attack non-orcs from range if they enter the caverns. Any orcs which do not fit in the two entry caverns will move to adjacent caverns and revert to the "standard" ruleset.
c) If less than 45% of the total population remains, the orcs will construct traps continuously in the entry caverns and then retreat to the most distant interior caverns once the entry caverns are full of traps. Once they have retreated, they will stay tightly clustered and if they sight non-orcs, all will attack at 150% effectiveness.
d) Once all the orcs are dead, the caverns will remain empty save for whatever traps and fortifications were not destroyed by the players.
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Here's my basic technical question. Compare this design with a static world design where each of those caves have 10 orcs who respawn at a set rate and who never change their basic AI routine in response to changing circumstances.
How much harder and more expensive in technical terms and in terms of burdens on underlying infrastructure is it to design and maintain the dynamic design than the static one? Twice as hard? Ten times as hard? One hundred times as hard? Like I said, for the moment, don't worry about what happens when the players run out of orc-filled caves to attack, or similarly large-scale problems of dynamic world design. I'm interested in just the narrow scenarios and how they compare.
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