It's been quite a while since anyone has written a blog post for BYOND RPG, and this topic has been on my mind lately, as I've been toiling with the topic of creating my own RPG on BYOND.
Most of the RPGs I've seen on BYOND have similar traits, fighting monsters to gain levels, completing quests to further yourself, and unfortunatly dying. This topic today however doesn't have anything to do with the former, but rather the latter.
Every RPG that I've played on BYOND so it seems, when you die all do the same thing roughly. You go back to your spawn point, which is usually a home town or save area, and you lose some experience and/or gold. However, while playing some recent console RPGs, I've been curious as to why the online roleplaying games we have done implement a game over function. Why is it that online games don't give you a game over, send you back to when you last saved. You did die, did you not? Is it to prevent cheating and item duplication? Perhaps giving away gold, and having it recovered after death? These scenarios can easily be overcome with proper trade monitoring.
With that said, another topic comes to mind. How do you prefer your roleplaying game to save? Do you prefer a scenario where when you stay at an Inn, your characters or saved? Or do you prefer a Dragon Warrior approach where you need to talk to a Priest. Perhaps a save booklet or crystal? In an online RPG, do you prefer to save where you stand, or return to a spawn point? Tell me, how do you prefer your RPG to handle your character?
My theory would be that the player would manually save at a certain location, like in town, and the only wait trading would be possible is at the save locations, making it so that both players have to save to trade.
As for players losing connection, mobs retain the information about who is connected to them. It wouldn't be hard to leave have a manual way to log out of the game, and to have it so that sudden disconnections simply disconnect the client from the mob. Leaving the mob in the world(perhaps saving the location of said mob, and moving it to a null area to prevent them from dying, and returning it when the client reconnects to the mob. As for players abusing this to cheat death, it wouldn't be hard to save whatever they are fighting's location as well, freezing the target, and moving them to a null location as well. | |
For an online RPG, my idea would be to auto-save during any large action. Usually it would be when the character has gained/lost anything including experience.
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And then what bout PvP? Are you just gonna take that other PvPer and make them sit and wait in the middle of nowhere because the other person tried to escape by logging out?
Also, is every enemy in the game going to be in an instance? You could log out right as you start fighting a monster to make it sit in nowhere land while your friends happily walk past and get to the loot/etc. | |
Actually, when you disconnect and the mob is sent off somewhere like that, if PvP was an arena based thing the game would send the opponent out of said arena, and when there is a reconnect, the person that disconnected would be sent out of the arena as well.
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Any good designer knows to include a link-dead feature for player handling, so if any player were to log out in a non-safe area their character would remain for a little while.
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Well you can't exactly just leave an empty mob alone in the wilderness, if a player is disconnected from a faulty connection in the first place, when they reconnect to the mob the mob would be dead from said monsters. And you can't exactly just remove the mob from the map and place it back without consequence, since this can be used to avoid dying.
That's why you could move the mob, and the opponent off the map, and freeze them in the state they are in, so that when the player reconnects, both the monster and the player can be put back in the state they were in to continue from where they left off. | |
That's the beauty of it really, with safe zones players can log out right away, but link-dead just makes disconnecting on the run more dangerous than staying for the fight.
Sure there'll be some that will lose connection by other means and pay the same price, but as far as it goes I feel this is the best way. If you did your theory of taking both the opponent and the mob off the map then that would be the same as letting the player run away from battle. Freezing them is even worse when it's in the aspect of PvP. Remember, you're talking an online RPG not console, and I feel my theory (And most other MMORPG's) is probably the best way to handle such a thing. | |
If they were in PvP it wouldn't freeze them as if it were a PvE fight. It would move the disconnectee from the map, and move the opponent out of the arena, as if the fight was over, and upon reconnection it would move the disconnectee outside the arena as well.
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Zaole wrote:
And then what bout PvP? Are you just gonna take that other PvPer and make them sit and wait in the middle of nowhere because the other person tried to escape by logging out? "Oh woe is me, stupid noobies have left me in blackness. Woe!" Also, is every enemy in the game going to be in an instance? You could log out right as you start fighting a monster to make it sit in nowhere land while your friends happily walk past and get to the loot/etc. This could be easily solved by making the loot on the monster. | |
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"Leaving the mob in the world(perhaps saving the location of said mob, and moving it to a null area to prevent them from dying, and returning it when the client reconnects to the mob."
Big flaw: Assuming a player is going to come back on in 5 minutes and reclaim their mob. I wonder how many d/cing players it takes to fill a server up with hundreds of soulless mobs... =P "My theory would be that the player would manually save at a certain location, like in town, and the only wait trading would be possible is at the save locations, making it so that both players have to save to trade." I'd hate that. So players can only swap items in some very specific place? What if you're out in the wild and you need to give your friend a sword or special bit of armour. Ah, you can't... No need to cripple your game in some way just because you don't think respawning back at the nearest town is a good idea... =P I don't understand what you're really getting at, Mikau. It's as though you're disagreeing with this nonissue, then actually degrading your game to 'fix' a problem that wasn't one to begin with. | |
Actually, I have no saving in Lunno as of yet. It's just something I've brought up to get different peoples opinions on the matter. I'm trying to come up with a better way to handle things, other than just stealing experience or gold from a player, and spitting them back out into town.
As for TheBigRyo, there's a difference between a Role Playing Game, and a Roll Playing Game. I'm more interested in statistic based games, not a story based one. | |
Saving in front of a priest is stupid in online games.
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I will admit that I for one have often wondered over the Game Over function and even missed it when it comes to online games. However it is simply not feasible to have such a feature in an online game.
Now, as to the saving thing, what happens if the game goes down while your (in the words of Elation) soulless mob is stuck in the middle of nowhere. What happens to you when you log back in? What happens to your frozen opponent? All of this is good when it comes to console games, but when there is an online game such options simply are not feasible no matter how much an older player may miss them from back-in-the-day. | |
How about turning the mob into a ghost when they die? Ghosts can't take damage and die (again) and player's must find a priest or statue of sorts to respawn. As for the saving, In my experience, for an online game, its almost always best to implement a save system that auto-saves at logout. This keeps people from saving, trading a good item to a friend, then logging without saving so they still have the item when they come back. I've been using Byond since about 2000 and in all my days haven't heard of or seen a better system.
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I dunno. I think spawn points are easier to deal with than players being able to save. "Saving" implies that if you died, you'd come back with all your stuff- it'd be saved. But in your example, you'd lose the stuff if you had traded it on or dropped it.
Ultimately you'd have to call them "spawn points" or somesuch that players could then define whenever they wanted- which would be exactly the same as what most BYOND games (and MMORPGS) already use.
The whole idea of a save point that, if you die, the game resets back to is only really feasible in a single player game- where the entire world can revolve around the player. In a game where there are multiple players then you couldn't just reset the entire game for just a single person. Spawn points work much better in terms of dying in a multiplayer environment.
I'd also like to add that implementing manual saving would be a definite bad thing for an online game. Because of the way internet connections can be so unreliable, players who accidently log out (for whatever reason) could lose hours of effort. That's why most online games auto save when you log out.