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October update
Tanque
Member UncommonPosts: 46
Good to see things continue to go well,been quite a good while since you have been in mmorpg.com,anyway i'm to lazy to go back to the website but it basicly talks about monsters, how they act and are put in the world,go check it out!
Comments
I just read the Developer log entry for October on the dev web site. That's interesting! Did you notice the bit about 'Recreated'? Here is a bit of what they said:
devs:
For example they might be a Raiding party of Recreated... sent out of No-Man's-Land to enter the Citadel lands in search of free people to kill so that they can drag their bodies back to be used to make more of the Recreated.
Does this mean what I think? Creatures who kill you and use your body to make more of themselves? And... did you read the bit about how they can run across YOUR tracks and start hunting you? I wonder how that works, and if you can hide your tracks or have some way of knowing when some nasty creature is on you trail. Maybe you could listen to the ground and hear them, or have some magical ability to check you back trail?
As for some of the rest... no monsters that pop back into existence! Praise the gods (even those dead gods they mentioned in the 'Lore'). No monsters that pop back means no waiting around to grind endlessly! And we can track them as well! (According to the dev post). That means I can be like Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas tracking the orcs who took the hobbits... only I might be tracking down recreated who are out stealing body parts. Cool. But what happens when they reach this 'No-Man's-Land', can I follow them in? Darn, I want to play.
Dealing with wandering monsters
CoS Dev Post - October 2009
* We've spent a lot of time on making some design changes recently. We want a living world where monsters don't pop back into existence after being killed. On top of that we don't want players forced into a typical level grinding situation where they stand around killing the same things over and over. To keep this from happening we have been working on the wilderness monster system. This includes how monsters inhabit these lands.
To make the game even better we have recently redesigned the tool that manages the large wilderness portions of the world. We improved the design to make the monsters in the world both interesting, dynamic and changing.
The wilderness areas of the Reflected Worlds deploy NPCs (monsters) by giving them tasks and goals and then turning them loose to achieve those results. Those monsters can make choices based on what happens to them as they go about their tasks.
When NPCs are killed by Players they will replenish in that area over time, but not by popping back into existence. Instead, new monsters (or mobs) will move into the area. These new monsters have their own agendas and goals, and they will soon begin making their way into an available area to start their tasks.
For example they might be a Raiding party of Recreated... sent out of No-Man's-Land to enter the Citadel lands in search of free people to kill so that they can drag their bodies back to be used to make more of the Recreated.
They will have a target, like a particular town, village, farm, fort, etc., and head with purpose for that area. If they reach their goal they will try to take the free folk (NPCs), kill some and retreat with their bodies.
Players may come upon this mob of raiders on their way to or from their goal. But... should the player not run into them directly, they may still cross their trail. This is a visible and traceable set of foot prints. Depending on the player's skill level in tracking, they will know varying amount of detail about the tracks they cross, and can choose to follow them to the Recreated raiding party, if they wish.
Conversely, the raiding party might cross the player (and group) tracks and decide to alter their path to follow and attack the PCs. Thus, whether you run directly into your opponents, track down your prey, or become their prey, you may have to deal with this raiding party.
All of the mobs and individual monsters out there have agendas, and can make decisions to change those agendas as they interact with the presence of the players.
On this note, we also created two new classes of monsters for the game, the Dark Spawn and the Dark Defiled. We'll go into greater detail about these new classes of creatures, how they are created and what they are up to in the war between the Demons, the Citadel and Morphael.
But for now, the new designs for them are very evil, nasty and downright disgusting in some cases.
On other areas, lots of Level Building is being progressed on the game side. Work on the design of the Adventure creation tool has been completed.
There have been further delays on the Enact Event Tool, but we hope to get the issues with it resolved soon.
In art there has been a lot of progress on Dynamic object creation as we cut down the lists created by the Level Building team. New NPCs have also been added to the game, and work on key NPCs continues.
We are hoping to get a big push in the next few months to get us to the next major milestone, more on that in future updates.
If this lives and is out of development in under 5 years then i'll give it a try. Good to see NPC acting like players. And if I read right NPC raiding mobs that can hunt you.
This isn't a signature, you just think it is.
Very Viable in what is essentially a small group game for adventuring......
The NPCs will just wander to a set of rules and appear to be doing more than standing at a spawn point.
Mount & Blade has a very similar system where roaming mobs track based on skill, pretty easy to do when you may only have 1-10 players in a world instance + all the NPCs.
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Sorcery must persist, the future is the Citadel
Very Viable in what is essentially a small group game for adventuring......
The NPCs will just wander to a set of rules and appear to be doing more than standing at a spawn point.
Mount & Blade has a very similar system where roaming mobs track based on skill, pretty easy to do when you may only have 1-10 players in a world instance + all the NPCs.
Well, no. Not exactly. Your comment about having NPCs act like players being 'viable' in this system is certainly correct. Where you went wrong when talking about Citadel of Sorcery is the idea that NPCs will 'just wander to a set of rules and appear to be doing more than standing at a spawn point'. This is NOT how NPCs behave in CoS.
They will not 'appear' to be doing more than standing around... they are out doing things. They are given a goal to accomplish. They will attempt to accomplish this goal. They have true purpose and take action to accomplish that purpose. They are also reactive in that other world events like running into PCs, or running into other NPC enemies, will cause them to react and change their short term goals, though the may return to their long term goal afterwords. This is not an illusion of NPCs moving around to make it look like they don't just stand there, we're creating a living world where every NPC has a purpose and uses our A.I. net to accomplish those goals.
When we repopulate an area, it isn't by respawning the same mobs, or randomly creating new ones to do the same things. What we do is monitor populations of NPCs in a given area and when it falls too low we set new goals by the enemy forces, who then make plans and send in their minions to try to accomplish those goals. It is unlikely that you have played any other MMO using this system since we wrote it specially for this game engine and game design. We hope you'll enjoy it.
Very Viable in what is essentially a small group game for adventuring......
The NPCs will just wander to a set of rules and appear to be doing more than standing at a spawn point.
Mount & Blade has a very similar system where roaming mobs track based on skill, pretty easy to do when you may only have 1-10 players in a world instance + all the NPCs.
Well, no. Not exactly. Your comment about having NPCs act like players being 'viable' in this system is certainly correct. Where you went wrong when talking about Citadel of Sorcery is the idea that NPCs will 'just wander to a set of rules and appear to be doing more than standing at a spawn point'. This is NOT how NPCs behave in CoS.
They will not 'appear' to be doing more than standing around... they are out doing things. They are given a goal to accomplish. They will attempt to accomplish this goal. They have true purpose and take action to accomplish that purpose. They are also reactive in that other world events like running into PCs, or running into other NPC enemies, will cause them to react and change their short term goals, though the may return to their long term goal afterwords. This is not an illusion of NPCs moving around to make it look like they don't just stand there, we're creating a living world where every NPC has a purpose and uses our A.I. net to accomplish those goals.
When we repopulate an area, it isn't by respawning the same mobs, or randomly creating new ones to do the same things. What we do is monitor populations of NPCs in a given area and when it falls too low we set new goals by the enemy forces, who then make plans and send in their minions to try to accomplish those goals. It is unlikely that you have played any other MMO using this system since we wrote it specially for this game engine and game design. We hope you'll enjoy it.
I had understood this should not have used the word "appear" with " and act on these". Some of us enjoy games for what they are and play them in a similar way. For me I will be happy with the concepts you guys are working to and the capability to move away from a Zerg mentality, and play something online with new friends whilst actually acheiving. (Dozens in shards and thousands in the citadel
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Sorcery must persist, the future is the Citadel