RPGWO Forums

Quote from: Powerfox on November 06, 2018, 03:55:54 am

You don't hit a black wall when then load the next area, once you get within a certain distance of the edge it starts loading in the next area ready to go, it should feel seamless to the player.

Quote from: Mickey Kudlo on October 31, 2018, 01:27:02 pm

So it a lot of data at first but should be minimal as the player moves around. The server sends more 50x50 sections as you hit edges. This is for large maps. Smaller ones, like a 100x100 dungeon would send all at once, when you first enter it.

your way of thinking is similar to how it is now, which works fine.  Mickey said new stuff when you hit the edges.  say that edge is considered 5 tiles, and the monsters have an attack range of 8, they can hit you from up to 3 tiles into the next 50 section while that section hasn't loaded in the client...atleast potentially, which is why I have concerns with it.

I think it's just bad phrasing, if you play the V7 client now you can see it print to the chat when its loading new 50x50 areas and its always off screen, it would be nonsensical to wait until the player can see the edge before loading more versus just doing it a bit further away.

This is pretty much the standard for games with large changing worlds anyway.  Minecraft for example, when you join a multiplayer server you receive data for ~500,000 blocks at once and it unloads/loads ~200,000 blocks or so at a time as needed to keep it seamless.   For a 2D game the impact of this should be negligible if the data is stored properly and isn't all being rendered.

Only thing I noticed from giving V7 a whiz was that it the game seems to hang for a good few seconds when receiving new chunks so could probably do with this being handled asynchronously.

p sure dungeons only support one z-level; i used staircase/cave images with warp properties to another dungeon

Yeah you can't go up or down within them.

Can there only be 1 surface dungeon, though? The first dungeon I created (100) with true as the surface flag was surface (Still couldn't move though), but every dungeon I created after that was underground regardless of the surface flag.

Been around 10 years since I last touched VB, even now it just looks like a relic of the past.

Dungeons work, main issue is that I can't warp in there without an @ character, and non @ characters can't move there if they are spawned in there.

Most annoying thing about RPGWO servers is the huge lack of docu'mentation, it wasn't so bad after playing the game for years and when it was all fresh and you could remember everything, but going back to it now it can be a ballache just to do something simple because there's a billion commands and config options with no docu'mentation to back them up.

(Doc'umentation is censored to dopigentation)

Still unsure about the headers for the .map files, the ones I reversed have 30 bytes of header info before the elevation data, which doesn't seem to match up with the save code before the elevation data:

    Put #filenum, , Map(MapIndex).Xsize
    Put #filenum, , Map(MapIndex).Ysize
   
    Put #filenum, , Map(MapIndex).WorldBaseXpos
    Put #filenum, , Map(MapIndex).WorldBaseYpos
    Put #filenum, , Map(MapIndex).WorldBaseZpos
   
    Put #filenum, , Map(MapIndex).ConnectGrid
   
    Put #filenum, , Map(MapIndex).flgSurface

The header info for 1x1 looks like so:

200 0 200 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 21 0 0 0 3 0 23 0 255 255

1x2 is:

200 0 200 0 0 0 200 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 21 0 0 0 3 0 23 0 0 0 5 0 25 0 255 255

A lot of the values change fairly predictably when going through sectors but I still can't really say I know what the values are for.

Obviously the first 200 200 is the size of the sector.

I'd like to know how to get maps into the dungeon folder and be able to use them freely, but not sure how to get them into a readable state by the server, I'm guessing having the proper header data is what is missing. That and/or configs.

It was a long time ago so I don't remember it well but RPGWO never really took off in the first place, did it? It and Star Wars Galaxies have always been my gold standard of open world sandboxes that were entirely powered by players and communities.

No MMOs really capture that nowadays, in vanilla, WoW had that community feel where you would regularly bump into the same people and talk to the same people every day in global chat. Like SWG there were server celebrities, in-jokes, popular communities etc and everything felt a lot more meaningful.  Nowadays when you play an MMO there is little to no player interaction and it actually makes people a bit uncomfortable if you try to talk to them at all.

The surge in multiplayer survival/sandbox games is a step forward but none really have the same scope that RPGWO has, and it doesn't help that the amount of resources you'd need to create a fully functioning procedurally generated 3D sandbox MMORPG is orders of magnitude higher than something like RPGWO, which is basically a (Not so) fancy windows gui that sends and receives packets every so often.

So the concept is kinda stuck in a catch 22 situation where its very difficult to make it attractive by today's standards  due to technical limitations so nobody really bothers trying to make it, but in its current state its too basic looking for most people to bother even giving it a chance.


Anyhow the world generator is pretty much finished I think. It's an unholy mess that I'll need to go through and clean up if I even want to think about releasing it.  Still been toying around with settings but it produces worlds that are playable in that the sloping lands have plenty of flat on them so building isn't an issue, and have some more interesting features than the vanilla one (More chance of islands, 'hidden' flatlands in the middle of mountain ranges etc)

Did biomes ever make it into RPGWO? I swear I remember farming in a desert area on V1. It wouldn't be too difficult for me to add varying biomes to this generator if there was a relatively easy way to define them.

(The map viewer in the server makes maps kinda ugly on account of not properly showing mountain snow nor green)

Good stuff Powerfox i remember the days of the file formats and hexing the updater/client learned a lot back then.

Yeah I was only like 15 back then when I first did the autoupdater hex, can't even remember where I learned how to do it, probably here somewhere.

I knew 2d tile based worlds are usually stored fairly simply, just converted all of the bytes in the .map to decimal strings and dumped them to a text file then sifted through the numbers. After making a few changes around 0,0 (Removing water, changing elevation, /surface etc) then saving and comparing the two files, its fairly easy to determine what most of the sections of the file are storing.

Quote from: Powerfox on February 19, 2017, 05:13:31 pm

Quote from: Raikaria on February 19, 2017, 05:10:25 pm

i'm more interested in floating sector maps with a full wall of teleports linking them..

What exactly do you mean by that? For example special maps that are completely detached from the main world?

Also I have to say although I definitely think there is a place for a 'traditional' MMO type server like RPGWO had, I think the 1 plot no-PK servers captured the sandbox spirit of the game a lot better.  I always loved server wipes and that initial scramble for people to try and buy good plots, get their skills up and work out the runes/plants/trying to be the first to get stuff like this and make some money from it.

On a similar note to that, in one of my posts many years ago I mentioned that RPGWO gets boring at endgame when you have reached the highest tier in all your crafting skills and you are just mindlessly grinding combat XP.  Looking at sandbox survival games today, I think RPGWO would benefit from some kind of 'seasonal' wipe, where you could say have a standard server which is permanent for those who want to set characters forever, but a separate seasonal server that had a full wipe cycle of an amount of months that would have to be determined.  If 2.0 ever had any form of official support again, this could be extended into having seasonal leaderboards and some kind of cosmetic reward or immortalisation in game for people who were at the top of their skills, and like a hall of fame with statues for players that were the max level.

That kinda thing, is a way to increase longevity and keep the game fresh. Especially if during seasons new content was worked on, then at the start of a new season comes with a huge content patch.

I know I'm getting ahead of myself here, but if Mickey gets around to reading this I just wanted to highlight the fact that despite the game is very old, there is so much you can still do to modernize it without changing the core gameplay too much.

You're getting way too far ahead of yourself. Build whatever server you want and see if you can keep any substantial amount of players on (20-30).

V2 will never have any official support - it's very clear Mickey is done and would rather try to rewrite the game first. Give up on the dream V2 has been carried by people who loved the game for years not by Micky. I don't believe there are really any of those people around anymore which is why we see no servers currently up.

Yeah I fully understand the fact that there's a good chance nothing will come of it and I won't be too disappointed if so, it's just a pity is all.  I was just spitballing about how the game could be modernized a bit, I know all too well the thing of seeing people posting with big ideas and intentions but they are always doomed to fail as its just a small burst of passion and they get bored a few days later/give up at the first hurdle.

I actually realized earlier that I have been going on about 2.0 this whole time but I only very briefly played Skull and didn't enjoy it (I think due to the low XP rates), so I'm actually not all that familiar with 2.0 myself and was thinking back to my time on all the 1.15 PK server iterations. I had it in my head that 2.0 was the last version I played a lot on for some reason.

The UI looks subtly different but other than that I'm really not sure the extent of the changes between 1.15 and 2.0. which leaves me at a bit of a disadvantage.

I have been messing around with a local server and getting to grips with things again since it has been around 10 years since we ran our server and I last touched 2.0.  Also been writing up some promotional stuff to be posted on Reddit, other forums etc.

With what I said about the world gen a few posts above, I was surprised that it was far more simple than I remembered just by looking at it. A few years ago I worked on my own procedural map generator in C# with RPGWO's style in mind (Complete with plot/sector lines), its far from complete but I have a lot of notes on how there are a lot of extra methods you can apply to create far more interesting and complex terrain past a simple cloud heightmap.

Would be interesting to fix it up and get it to export to a format readable by the server (Which I haven't looked at yet), then it'd be possible to create and use terrain completely different from standard 2.0.

Currently were in an era of 8 bit rogue like games that are receiving extreme popularity. Instead of constantly developing newer versions of RPGWO. Why not polish up V2 and try to get it on steam? I think it would have tremendous success with the current atmosphere of games. Obviously i expect to be told why this can't happen but hey its just a thought.

I definitely think there is a market for the game right now, it just never really took off like other free online games around the same time did back then.  To this day no other games have nailed the unforgiving sandbox MMO like RPGWO did.

That is not even his issue Jon he obviously has zero interest in improving the only version of Rpgwo that people give a wolf about. Clearly however he has time to work on some stupid minecraft copy or whatever the hell this is supposed to be.

Yeah I can appreciate that Mickey probably just likes doing hobbyist game design so he hops around projects, not to be harsh but one of the only things about him that has always stuck with me is that he seems to have a pretty short attention span and jumps around/moves onto new ideas very quickly, which is why I have never really trusted that any of his projects will take off in any capacity before it is abandoned for a new idea.   It's fair enough if that's what he wants to do and is enjoying it, but I guess it depends if he also wants to have a successful/even moderately popular game.

The point still stands though, that none of the newer versions of RPGWO have been nearly as good as the old ones in aesthetic, UI and gameplay.  I gave each one a chance as it came but they seemed to be really clunky and just generally ugly looking, iirc everything after V2 suffered from serious visual diarrhea and felt really clunky.

V1/V2 were really ahead of their time and struck a great balance, the game could have been much much bigger but nobody really knew about it in the same way they did with games like RS and Tibia. Trying to reinvent the wheel over and over and over clearly didn't work, the time would have been better spent directly porting V2 to C#, working on improving that and adding more features to give the game some longevity past mindless grinding and now with Steam/Reddit/etc it would be fairly easy to give the game a lot of exposure (F2P on Steam is basically guaranteed to get thousands of people alone to try it alone), more so when you can advertise it as a 'procgen sandbox RPG with basebuilding, PVP' etc, which is a massive market right now.

Releasing source code of V2 wouldn't help the game at all aside from maybe someone having a small private server with some changed stuff.  I would fully support the release of it anyway though if it definitely isn't going to be worked on, I have been working on some projects involving procedural generation and I'd definitely be interested to know how it was implemented in RPGWO since that was one of the first games I ever saw it in.

Also first post in 8 years.