Originally posted by Deivos

Originally posted by Axehilt

Situation A with light population spawns no event.

Sitiatuion B with high population spawns an event.

The world behaved differently.  Based on player activity and which zones they chose to play in.

False characterization. Player activity and player headcount is not the same thing.

 

Or more accuratly you are obfuscating the issue by using player activity to refer to how busy a zone is, which is again a very different term from when player actitivy is used to describe the actions a player is taking (which is the manner in which I was using it, which is why I used the term headcount to describe number of players instead).

 

And back to the original point, no the world didn't behave differently. The world is explicitly scripted to behave like that without any variance.

 

Again I repeat how that is different from the mechanic I mentioned. The AI is tracking player activity (by this I mean the actions the individual players are taking) and generating content for the pleyers to respond to in real time. These are not coming from spawn locations, these are being drawn specificly to respond to the player's actions and success/failure. It's not a finite mob set either. It ranges across the different groups to make players change tactics against tank mobs, swarms, melee, explosive, ranged, and even elemental attrubute enemies all at the behest of the AI's perception of each player's challenge.

 

Another example would be the Director AI in Left 4 Dead. Aside from the mobs spawns, the director tracks how players respond and fare against the things present and adjust in real time the encounters they players face. Same thing as what's going on in Firefall, but in this case it does operate on some fixed spawn principles.

 

EDIT: Yeah the mobs stalking you actually does describe more than an aggro system. It's a response from the spawner AI to player's free roaming. It can actually take a few forms, such as swarm enemies lurking in missing cargo, a large predator, or enemy scouting groups. They are all generated realtime to respond to the player, not waiting for an explicit input.

 

This is also not mentioning the resource growth and corrosion that happens due to player activity.

 

EDIT2: Should come with the caveat that enemy AI is a little 'tarded and gung-ho at the moment. But this isn't a firefall discussion, it's an example of implementing dynamic systems. :p

Are you talking about setting up NPC reactions on a wide scale? I think "zones" would be a less than optimal way of doing that.

I may not quite understand what you are saying here, just take this as another idea if it's not related.

I've always wanted to see AI built on several levels that stack in ascending order and drop off depending on the NPC grouping.

• Individual NPC AI
• NPC Group AI (smaller)
• NPC Tribe AI
• NPC Kingdom AI (also think of this as world wide cults, etc.)

• Territory/Location- This basically gives AI instruction for movement, objectives, and knowledge. Think of Maps in games where parts are blacked out until a player gets there. Only add in a Perception skill along with Hidden things. A cave in a Valley that's hidden (maybe behind a water falls or boulder) would require the NPC to discover via Perception before it/they know it's there. Pathways, water locations, hunting grounds, resources, all this can be organized for NPC actions, which are based off of the NPC individual/group structure's primary goals (food, shelter, etc.). This is also where constructions can come in, where to build fortifications, etc.
• Arifacts and Items- Magic, Treasures, Hoards of Resources, these things need to give NPCs instructions on what to do with them. Especially in a social stucture sort of way. A religious artifact important to an NPC race should have something specific in how that race handles it. Maybe it needs to be placed on some central altar. Powerfull magical items should work their way up the social order to the top end. A tribe inside a Kingdom with access to good mines should be required to make weapons and armor to send off to other tribes inside the same Kingdom, or that Kingdom might send more Smiths to help work on weapon making and more warriors to help defend the area.

Yeah that's a different thing. Gaia is an AI independent of mob AI that tracks player activity and manages mob spawns so that the world generally reacts to the players instead of running through canned routines for spawn locations, resources, encounters, etc.

It's like a thinking random encounter system sort of, prepared to scale the challenge of the game against the players automatically or throw them a curveball if they fall into a routine.

I used it as an example of dynamic mob system because it does a lot to make the world respond to player interaction on a pretty direct level.

For example they do have a system like rifts that can happen. When the Chosen(the enemy npc soldier faction) spawn as a drop pod scouting group, response team, or base of operations they will start to take hold of the area, destroy local defenses, and place their own small scale architecture down to create a base as they spread out to control an area. If left unchecked, like a rift, they will be capable of consuming a zone and even the bases it contains for players. This alone isn't the most dynamic aspect because it's running through a routine path. Coupled with Gaia, however, this system is now capable of creating an actual warfront. With Gaia tracking player activity and assembling a border and areas of control, it can then respond by dropping these encounters in appropriate areas that are strong in Chosen presence to expand their territory in a logical pattern, without the Chosen's location or actual numbers ever having to be a strictly coded (static) thing.

The bulk of basic quests and resource mechanics is coupled with Gaia in a similar way. When a thumper (resource gathering tool) fails, scouting Chosen group spawns, or other activities are going on around the player they are automatically notified of it. If the player chooses to participate in salvaging, pushing back, destroying, harvesting resources, etc from one of these notifications they are rewarded as they would be for a traditional quest system. It's setup so it's just a streaming update on the activity of the zone based on the concept of a local network tower the character is tapped into.

Not sure I have the best explanation since I personally am not an engineer and I don't code, but that's hopefully the gist of it.

Originally posted by Deivos

Yeah that's a different thing. Gaia is an AI independent of mob AI that tracks player activity and manages mob spawns so that the world generally reacts to the players instead of running through canned routines for spawn locations, resources, encounters, etc.

It's like a thinking random encounter system sort of, prepared to scale the challenge of the game against the players automatically or throw them a curveball if they fall into a routine.

 

I used it as an example of dynamic mob system because it does a lot to make the world respond to player interaction on a pretty direct level.

 

For example they do have a system like rifts that can happen. When the Chosen(the enemy npc soldier faction) spawn as a drop pod scouting group, response team, or base of operations they will start to take hold of the area, destroy local defenses, and place their own small scale architecture down to create a base as they spread out to control an area. If left unchecked, like a rift, they will be capable of consuming a zone and even the bases it contains for players. This alone isn't the most dynamic aspect because it's running through a routine path. Coupled with Gaia, however, this system is now capable of creating an actual warfront. With Gaia tracking player activity and assembling a border and areas of control, it can then respond by dropping these encounters in appropriate areas that are strong in Chosen presence to expand their territory in a logical pattern, without the Chosen's location or actual numbers ever having to be a strictly coded (static) thing.

 

The bulk of basic quests and resource mechanics is coupled with Gaia in a similar way. When a thumper (resource gathering tool) fails, scouting Chosen group spawns, or other activities are going on around the player they are automatically notified of it. If the player chooses to participate in salvaging, pushing back, destroying, harvesting resources, etc from one of these notifications they are rewarded as they would be for a traditional quest system. It's setup so it's just a streaming update on the activity of the zone based on the concept of a local network tower the character is tapped into.

 

Not sure I have the best explanation since I personally am not an engineer and I don't code, but that's hopefully the gist of it.

In a sense, that sounds similar to my idea of a territorial AI that attaches to an NPC Tribe.

I didn't play Rift (too much levelling games to be a true social world), but if I understand this correctly, wouldn't it be better if instead of just dropping Rifts in as spawns, they had NPC groups .... sort of "summon" the same things these Rifts do? In other words, give NPC's a tribal AI where part of its instruction is to grow, and by growing they build like in what you are describing in Rift. A tiered growth pattern that players can disrupt.

The difference here is that with Rift's system, they can alter the NPC presense dependant on the players present. I'd suggest that in this, overland aspect of a world, that a game shouldn't do that. Let the numbers be a big part of victory/defeat. Let players organize the numbers for their victories. Add in AI to the NPCs for retreat/escape, summoning aid from elsewhere, make it generally more realistic. I know some hardcore players expect a controlled victory condition based on their current state (whatever that may be), but that's just not very worldly. It removes the entire idea of planning and coordinating against the state of a persistent world.

This was how Asheron's Call was.  It's a pity more companies didn't do this.

Story arcs that changed the world would occur every year, and would be updated monthly to continue the progress.

It wasn't a single server game, but since it had less than a dozen servers, they were able to do live GM events consistently back in its hay-day.  I recall one of the craziest arcs was when Bael'Zharon was threatening to be released in the world.  There was this crazy build-up for months, where people were figuring out what was going on.  Eventually, a quest led people to a PvP-only dungeon (Bael'Zharon was who you had to pray to to become a PK) where there was a crystal.  It was a crystal that was imprisoning Bael'Zharon.

For a while before this, there had been 'shadow spires' crashing down into the world, and they were scattered around the continent.  One even destroyed an entire town, which remained destroyed for some years until the devs eventually rebuilt a new one in its place.  They weren't afraid to totally alter the landscape and world for the sake of story.  Shadows were released on the world and they were everywhere.  Some were scary, as at the time, not many people were very high level.

After the first crystal was destroyed and BZ was released, other servers started to figure out that they could defend against it.  Some players went PK and grouped together to defend the crystal from being destroyed.  One by one, servers began to fail.  The crystal was destroyed and BZ was released.  One server above all, managed to defend their crystal for months.  Eventually, the devs had to forcefully destroy the crystal between patches because they couldn't have a single server that was out of sync with the others.  Understandable, although it would have been cool if more servers managed to hold it off.  Maybe they would have allowed them to be different.

So at this point, BZ was released and the story progressed.  He started appearing in towns randomly and would start attacking people.  Sometimes he would appear peacefully at first and allow players to swear allegiance to him.  There were hundreds of PKs at this point, and his allegiance was huge, having thousands of players swear allegiance to him.

Eventually, Asheron himself showed up, and people could swear allegiance to him as well.  There would be battles all the time between players on each side.  Sometimes, Asheron and BZ would both show up in towns and would start fighting.  This went on for a while, until quests were discovered that would weaken BZ.  Players went to a dungeon where he 'lived' and gradually started to kill him.  It took a while.  Many a group perished multiple times before they killed him and imprisoned him again.

I just remember how much fun it was while he was roaming around.  I remember being in the portal hub once, which was where a lot of players gathered to trade and socialize.  Suddenly, he appeared and started one-shotting people like crazy.  There were bodies everywhere.  I stood to the side, being a lowly noob at the time, and he cast several level 7 debuff spells on me so that I could hardly move.  At the time, they were more powerful than any other spells in the game, so I was like NOOOOOOOOOOO and started to run.  Was pretty hilarious.

This was just ONE of many story arcs that took place over the years in that game.  They spanned for many months, contained many parts, and required players to take part in them to advance them.  GMs would take control of unique story characters and give missions to players, role-play with people, and let people be a part of something cool and unique.  Everyone's experience was different, and it's a pity no games have really tried to do something this 'huge' since then.