Project Arcterus -- Thesis and Ice Cream

[HalcyonSeven]

{--Our "World" Ideas--}

I'd like to share a very small portion of what our goals are for our project.

First off, never have I played a game that was truely "alive". By alive I mean day/night, seasons, weather, characters that actually go about their business, cities that could actually function as cities, and a million insignificant details (ie: fireflies that come out at night in the summer, and move around realistically in realation to the player) that all make you feel like settling down and just accomplishing nothing all day.

Zelda has given me some prime examples as to what I want to accomplish. In the rather off-beat and not-as-good-as-OoT Majora's Mask, the way the town sprang to life as people went about their daily tasks fascinated me. In Graal, things like this could easily be accomplished. Day/Night systems are just fancy timers, and any NPC can just go off of this to decide whether to go to the store or stay in due to rain. Piddly, insignifigant details like these make games have a true "universe" feeling rather than just a linear set of paths that sometimes modify NPCs actions.

For instance, everything in a virtual universe must have a purpose. If a person is standing on a street corner, he/she MUST have a reason to. A normal human being would not appreciate a person entering their house in the middle of the night searching for hearts, a NPC shouldn't say the same thing over and over no matter how many times you touch him.

You might be saying "That kind of excessive coding is pointless and time-consuming". My retort is this, quality over quantity. It isn't hard to make an NPC do this: "If its between 6-8am and sunny, I should be at the cafe eating breakfast, if it's rainy I should stay in my house". You can even take it a step farther and throw some randomness into it all: "If it's noon and sunny I should either go to the park, visit a friend, or go shopping". Notice these are all simple IF conditional statements, and albeit the actual code would be much more complicated, the right attitude and persistance will pay off with a truely alive dream.

Another favorite is the pointless interactive "doohickies" simply roaming around the world. Clocks telling the time, streetlights that turn on at night by a NPC walking along with a torch, ambient sound effects that actually have a source, wildlife that intelligently sleeps, eats, and roams without the need other than to simply make the "world" a more magical place. Graal Kingdoms is already a wonderful world, and I myself would like to take a stab at making my own.

No matter how many "quests" or "items" you put in the game, eventually everyone just ends up sitting around one central area either talking, trading, or killing each other. What if you could have a world so massive, so intricate, so interactive, that you could spend and entire day just roaming around without any purpose in mind, and throughly enjoy it? What if you could actually enjoy spending time with NPCs, what if they all had their own personalities? What if you could communicate with them on a very basic level, and build relationships? Simple statistics like "if the player visits me on my birthday, +5 to me liking him/her". When you attempt to interact with the NPC again, you could have a different routine depending on whether that NPC liked you enough or not. This idea would never be too complicated, you could never actually get the NPC to marry you or start following you around, just maybe give you a better price next time on that new piece of equipment, or give a brighter "Hello" on the street.

Imaging this model. I have a NPC named Ariana. She lives in a little house outside of town, and occaisonally can be found walking in the park or visiting her grandmother up on the hillside. She normally buys random amounts/types of fruit at the store, then can be seen eating them later that day at dinnertime. She goes to bed at ten, unless she has a new book to read then which she stays up another hour reading. In order to make this possible, simple IF conditionals that read flags set by a global time/weather system, global flags for the NPC "instances", and random numbers can be deployed. The same NPC would have an "instance" of itself at every location it "could" be. If the conditions are correct for said NPC to be "active" at the current time or situation, the NPC simply "turns on", and does it's task while the other instances remain invisible, waiting for their turn to be "active". Now, I myself need to do a little reasearch, but I'm sure this could be accomplished by simple server-side global flags. I'm a bit rusty on the details of these, and right now I'm just throwing out my ideas, so bear with me. Simple logic forks and randomness in a well thought-out way can accomplish a lot when it comes to NPCs that "beathe".

It would certainly take a while, but given the eventual streamlining of the process, filling a town full of life and interesting situations is highly possible. Also, if the number of different "actions" of NPCs becomes too predictable, and players begin to find them boring, you can simply add a new "instance" at a certain place or move around others. Heck, you could even make a certain "action" that did this automatically every few weeks or so. The exponential randomness could make process that wouldn't become passe for months or years at a time.

The "instance" idea is just my lack of knowledge of the NPC programming language after falling out of it a few years back. What would be best is to have a single NPC that has the ability to roam from one board to another. I do not know if this is possible, but a server-side NPC that could move freely to whatever board it wishes instead of having many "instances" eating memory would be wonderful.

Our "world" isn't just wishful pointless interactivity. We DO have a nice little storyline. It's not a futuristic, medieval, or some other cliché that everyone has done before. I really don't want to go into details, so I'll just say that yes, there is an extremely tightly woven plot, complete with many friendly characters that the player can actually form an emotional bond with. What I want most is a completely open-ended adventure, where the problem at hand needs remedy, but you are never forced through a linear path of "go do this, get this, talk to this, then get this, now fight boss." The player should always have a strong direction and constant guiding as to what he/she SHOULD do, but never be forced to complete or limited until the task is completed. Only positive re-inforcement should be given. ie: "If you find a way to solve this problem, or explore in this general direction, you will be rewarded with X item that lets you do Y." I don't like vague games, where you are just thrown into a world you do not understand, with people that for some reason speak English, eat American food, never offer to help you out, or continue to jabber on about some task when you are obviously at a loss of what to do. Again, everything must have it's place.

Races play a very important role in our "world". The current situation calls for five different people, each vastly different from one another. I wont give details as to the individual races as that would spoil a lot. Each race would have sharp opinion of another, whether it is contempt, fear, anger, kindness, pity, or bigotry.

This all sounds like a pipe dream from a overly zealous nerd right? Well, I'm gonna try dammit. My whole team is gonna try even if we eat a year's supply of nachos and mini-pizzas. We may just be a group of hick high school students, but we are also extraordinarily bored with lots of free time and no girlfriends (yet). We'll start with one town, that's it. Once it is deemed "finished" we'll move on. All I need now is the new editor for Graal to get started.

Now, this thread has to have a purpose for response, and here it comes. I have many questions . Not playing Graal for a few years and the lack of an organized database of information relating to Kingdoms has left me with many concerns. Please, if you can help me out please reply and do so. I'll even number them so you can pick and choose which to talk about.


Questions:

1a.) For any good scripters out there, is my idea of "active" NPCs possible? More specifically, can I have a guy that moves around even when no players are present (server-side) and can move between different boards? I've noticed many NPCs doing this in Kingdoms, and I hope I am right.

1b.) Also, how are things like global flags or global variables handled? Can I have a set of information solely for the server's manipulation of an NPC without crowding the player's flags?

2.) When is the level editor for the "new" verson 3 coming out? The pseudo-3D landscape if very important to our world and being able to play with this is important to me.

3.) Does the new terrain generate itself by deforming specific "nodes" as it were, setting an angle of a slope with points, or do you use a heightmap grayscale image where the lighter the pixel, the higher the terrain? I know Tribes 2's engine used heightmaps, and I've done some work with them in Cinema 4D.

4.)Here's one for those who aren't involved with Graal much and just like posting in the forums: "Do you like Ice Cream, if so, what flavor?"

5.) Would it ever be possible for me to get a local server set up test out our game? For example, could I take a computer on my home network, turn it into a server, load it up with my levels, and play on it with my friends to test it out over the LAN? I have almost no idea how to properly do serverside/clientside programming stuff.

One last word, the project name "Arcterus" is the (I think) appropriate spelling of the project Homer worked on with his boss Hank Scorpio (Albert Brooks) on The Simpsons.

Ciao.