RPGWO Forums

1 - haven't encrypt them yet but I plan to before I every release the server, not using any sql database yet

2 - not doing open source. Prefer to do it myself I guess but later once we have a good code base (in 1 year?), I am open to the idea

3 - Don't know really. I think anyone could host but would need a secure, shared account for users. Not sure what API you mean unless you want to be able to expand the server. Like add AI behavior or new map creation, etc.

4 - Not sure if Karma plays a role in death since it similiar to mana but used for prayers. Vitae, morale or some other death penalty is still up in the air. I want to try morale since it will give little valued skills like coooking, fishing, tailor, etc, some real use in the way of "comfort" food, relaxing/entertainment and "comfort" clothes (the nicer the clothes you wear, the better you feel).

GitHub I guess would be used later for open source I guess, right?
I know it would speed up development, getting others involved but since V1/V2 made money, it makes me nervous letting anyone have access to code that they could sell or market as their own or whatever when I don't have an official company formed with legal ownership and rights, etc.

1- hokay. Thanks for being honest.

2. I understand, but if you open source (but don't grant commit rights to master) on github, others could do code review or just help. We can do a pull request, basically we clone your code, make changes, and submit the changes to you. You can decide if you want to include them or not. Really there's not a losing situation there. At worst you get some crappy pull requests, at best you get better code/issue fixes/improvements for the small price of looking at it.

3. It'd be nice to be able to expand the server. Basically just make your methods overridable for certain things. For instance, http://xathis.com/posts/ai-challenge-2011-ants.html has a good example of how to make amazing AI using local vs global decision strategies.. It'd be harder and probably something for later versions, but it'd be nice to see that functionality in your game.

4. Just try not to make players balance too many resources.. WoW does this right with like 2-3 resources, tops. You now have 4..

If you license the code under a restrictive license, wherein you retain copyrights and limit redistribution, you could sue them with or without a company. You as the creator and developer own the IP and the rights over the code.

What you have to consider is the possibility that someone would actually take your code and try to either
A) pass it as their own; or
B) do it better than you.

Any half-ass web dev can make a Facebook clone, but FB did it first (and arguably better) than anyone else. That's the mentality you should approach it as.

You could license it under the following:

GPL - If you touch the code or your code calls a function of your code, you must have a compatible license with GPL.

AGPL - Closes a loop hole in GPL wherein hosting a service now counts as distributing the software, and the source must be disclosed.

OSL - If I use your code, my code has to be OSL too. Also closes the loop hole.

Say you license under OSL 3.0... You could issue two licenses: community and enterprise. Enterprise will let them modify the source privately, but they have to pay you a sum of cash. If they modify the community, they have to release the entire contents of their change. If they don't, you have legal grounds to sue them.

If nothing else, this project could become a game framework! That'd be exciting

Given that they made money, I understand the hesitation, but I feel like you're missing out by not doing this.

V1 and V2 were perfect; I've been playing on and off for 8 years and have never put so much time into any other game 3D or not.  Who cares about the 2D graphics?  The skill/attribute/crafting system is what makes RPGWO, where can you find that in any other MMORPG? 
What I'd love to see and I hope others agree with me is a V2 world in which weapon skills are equally balanced from the start, quests are abundant, an Admin (preferably Mickey) ensures that players are listened to and content is updated regularly, the perks/donations system re-implemented (maybe a little online advertisement to get the game back out there) and lastly of all a few of you old school players back in action.
I haven't played for over 3 years but recently decided to dabble again, and it made me remember how brilliant this game is.  Just a little bit of time and I'm sure this could happen. 

I don't know how interested many of us 'old school' players are in playing again, but at least we're offering our input as some of the first hardcore players..

In terms of camping corpses.. I retract everything I said about a corpse remaining on the ground for a player to retrieve it or their items.

The player should have a % chance to drop items of each type. I think this was posted earlier in an almost identical manner but I'm too lazy to look.

Something like..

100% chance to drop 100% of the player's gold (don't keep it on you all the time!)
20% to drop up to 5 random items from the player's inventory
5% chance to drop a currently equipped item

The drop would be instant and the killing player could pick it up immediately (would the killing player have ownership over the items or could another player jump in and snipe them? If ownership is used, perhaps both the original player and the killing player would retain ownership for 10 mins or so. Otherwise, free for all).

This is way too punishing. PKing would basically be like killing a boss in Diablo, and there's no incentive at all to PK unless you're grossly overleveled compared to everyone else. This doesn't fix the issue.

@Deagan: this was to replace vitae, not to add to it.  

high level vitae is insanely tough to fix low level vitae its not even worth mentioning...there really should be some balance to it if it stays.  I think there should be harsher penalties for death, and I still like the morale idea(but as I said not tied into death).  it would need several ways of improving morale, ie: taking a head(or some type of trophy, maybe the things like antena and elf ears) from battle would improve your morale.  that way a pure fighter would be able to improve morale just by fighting...as long as they're winning.

I'm fully aware of the intent of morale. I'm advocating against a mechanic that has a % loss/gain related to death entirely - whether it's vitae or morale.

Having a random item drop was punishing enough. If it were damon, and you dropped it during a PvP slug fest, then you're pretty well screwed if you're on the losing end of a guildwar and it dropped. Getting a vitae penalty on top of having to fight to get your item back was extremely annoying.

A game should punish you in ways that make sense and don't set you back extreme amounts. As mentioned, at low level vitae isn't an issue. Around 55+ it becomes a huge deal. The amount of experience required to raise it to normal is huge. Even if that's addressed, it doesn't make sense. What's the point of having a punishment that LINGERS from a death? It doesn't encourage high levels to engage in fair PvP.

Morale seems to be a good step towards fixing that issue, if implemented correctly. The question still remains, however: "is this fun?". Resoundingly, no. No it's not. It's a third punishment for death. It doesn't make sense to me to punish players in multiple, unrelated ways.

Quote from: Daegan on May 14, 2012, 11:44:06 am

That would make it easier to be griefed. If you get dropped in a PK fight, they could easily kill your clones.. Now they have X items in addition to sending you to whatever zone you're attuned at..

Maybe being PK, you get a 10% XP bonus on all activity that way their is risk/reward other than just being PK to kill other players. This idea ties into my other one where people choose their difficulty level of play. Forgot where we talked about that.

I'm not sure I understand the intent behind this implementation, to be honest.

If I'm set as PK, then I get a +%bonus? Thereby the incentive would be, ideally, to go PvP as early as possible in order to PvE more efficiently?

I'm not sure if you've ever played WoW, but it does a wonderful job of keeping the PvE and PvP worlds pretty separate. The gear you attain for PvE doesn't help you in the same way that gear attained via PvP does. While I'm not advocating for a different set of gear for PvP over PvE, as I think that'd be really confusing, it does have a good point implementation wise: players should reap no reward in one area for excelling in the other.

If morale boosted +%xp for PvPers, that means that if you WEREN'T a PvPer, you would get screwed out of maximizing your character. Therefore the choice to go PK is an illusion - you HAVE to do it to keep up. If you don't, you'll never be within 10% of a player that's been PvP. Worst yet, this system rewards you the earlier you do it, leading to an influx of low levels that aren't prepped for PK.

IMO if you were going to tie morale to XP, you'd be better off keeping vitae (after fixing the formula to scale better!) and make morale reduce/remove the vitae penalty. Even that's not good, but there's no immediate benefit to doing it over other players, other than reducing time sinks to return your skills to a value that they're already at.

edit: grammarz

That would make it easier to be griefed. If you get dropped in a PK fight, they could easily kill your clones.. Now they have X items in addition to sending you to whatever zone you're attuned at..

I'm confused as to the point of this..

Vitae in v1 was used to punish you for dying, on top of having to retrieve whatever item happened to drop. The problem was, at high levels that penalty became insane. Ursus (lvl 90+) practically quit the game following two deaths due to the Vitae penalty and the time to return it to normal.

Since you're starting from scratch, you need to ask yourself this for every step of the way, and for every mechanism that you add:

"Is this fun for the player?"

If it's not, don't add it. There's no point. Games should reward the player for playing, not punish you and make you do annoying things to get back to where you were pre-death..

WoW gives you an item durability penalty on death and makes you run back to your body. It gets annoying, but it's not too bad, and is widely considered one of the least punishing penalties for deaths in MMOs.

When I played RPGWO, I was pure combat-PK build. It'd honestly be pretty annoyed by having sit sit around, pray, listen to music, etc just to boost my morale following a death. Or worse than that, to raise it in order to get ready to go fight again. It's an unnecessary step, but not doing it would mean that I haven't maximized my skills and abilities.

Where's the fun in that? What does that add to my experience? Nothing. It's a time sink for the sake of being a time sink..

I read somewhere that you were thinking about making the server list where players can run their own server, but the problem was handling updates.

I have a few suggestions on this, and a general writeup on how I'd like to see hosting in general:

Server Governence/Creation

In order to host a server, an individual must submit a Proof of Concept to you, or to some governing server authority. This authority could very well be the rpgwo.com website itself, and have RPGWO.com accounts vote on it.

RPGWO.COM should have a central store for user accounts. The client would connect to this database for users, and depend on the local server for ranks/roles. This would be -extremely- simple to do. More on logistics below.

They must be able to answer these questions without sounding like a 12-year old.

1. Who is your staff? What makes them qualified to run this server?
2. Who is hosting this server?
3. How is it being paid for?
4. What are the specs on the server?
5. What is the expected uptime?
6. What company is hosting the server
7. What is the theme of your server?
8. What sets this server apart from other servers? Why would I want to play it?
9. How do you envision this server being able to retain players, or bring in more players?

As mentioned in another post, the ability to code against the servers is pretty dire. INI manipulation isn't enough for servers to -really- diversify. Sure, you can get different game modes, but at its core it's still going to be the exact same game, dressed up in a different costume. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, and was really successful in RPGWO for a long ass time.

Some additional thoughts on servers
Since you're pushing the burden of hosting off on other people not affiliated with Mickey Kudlo, INC, they'd need the ability to monetize their server. In years past, this came in the form of "perks" that they paid for. The downside to this is simply that you no longer reap the benefit of perks for money.

I have no easy solution to that problem. You could try to make admins pay YOU for a license, but that's really unfair given that the chances of actually turning profit from a server is pretty damn nil. I don't see you wanting to become a hosting company, either, so them paying you for the physical server is probably also not an option..

You could probably charge to have it "officially listed" but I don't know how the community will respond to that, either.

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Server Logistics

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Server Logistics: Administration and Authentication
As mentioned above, you should validate ALL client login requests through RPGWO.com

Since YOU'D be adding servers to the server list after an approval process, create a cross table that would have this layout:

ServerRoles
ID | PlayerID | ServerID | Role

Roles would be:
Member (They have a character there)
Moderator
Admin @
SuperAdmin @@
UltraAdmin @@@

Essentially, if the server is allowing new accounts, if they don't exist in that table, add them.

Whenever you add a new server, you'd simply tie their RPGWO account to that UltraAdmin table.

You'd create the ability for UAs, within the client while logged into their server, to /addUserToRole <rolename> <username>.  You'd have to validate on both ends that this request to the server is valid. That's not tough to do. Obviously it'd take the ServerID from the server they're logged into for the request. Again, you'd need to ensure they're not able to edit that, as they could grant themselves administration rights to other servers.

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Server Logistics: Files and Updates
Because these servers would require you to add them manually to the list (or have a community manager do it, whatever), you can REQUIRE them to provide a dedicated server with a location for the files.

On the file server that holds the updates, they'd have a file titled something like: version.txt

Upon connection to that server, you'd pull the update URL. You'd check the versions.txt file for a revision number. If the version number doesn't match the one that's sitting locally, you'd run an update. You wouldn't have to code the server updates, ever, because it'd be the responsibility of the server admin. In order to run a local content update, the server admin would have to change this version #. That's it.

Since YOU can specify the way files and updates are handled, you'd create a method to essentially check the server version downloaded on the computer (xml/plain text would be fine, but not secure). If the version doesn't match the one listed on the server, then you'd

But Daegan.. How the hell would I update my game?!
Game updates for non-centrally hosted servers tend to break them. That's not a good thing! BUT you could easily release beta versions of updates to server admins. Server admins could then test these clients with a dev copy of their server to ensure it won't break it before a RC is cut.

Also, assuming servers have that nifty API I talked about, the only way you'd "break" a server is if you changed the API. With this philosophy, all updates coming down shouldn't affect the 3rd party servers..

As mentioned above, you could also release the new client/server versions to Server Hosts a few weeks in advance, so that they could patch their content ahead of time. If they don't patch it, they're not doing their due diligence as hosts.

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Additional Thoughts
I'd argue that the community can run a server better than you, Rhaorth (lolol), Jon, and UT combined. This is a simple fact. You're a software developer, not a sociologist. RPGWO, historically, has been pretty awful at giving the community what it wants, or even being in touch with it. I recall times on Liberty where simply disagreeing with an @@@ would get you permabanned. @@s were ran top-down from the @@@s, and not allowed to host events or do anything fun, by order of UT. Free speech and community (read: Daegan & Friends trolling, looking back) were policed out of the official RPGWOForums board, and that sort of policing is what lead the RPGWOForums.com domain to be created in the first place, and a sub-community was born here. It eventually died. Doing that in a tiny game like RPGWO is, what I believe, what killed it.

I'm not trying to call you out, as most of this was Rha/UT's fault, but you can't put assholes in charge of something critical that involves people skill. *it does not work*. However, using the ideas outlined above I feel that you could easily address this by letting the community be itself.

After browsing these boards after a several year hiatus, it's clear to me that you're trying to bridge the gap between you and the community, and I applaud that. The bottom line is that the community needs to be able to host their own servers and cater to itself. Whether that comes via updates, custom servers, or some form of autonomy (letting the community decide on what servers will go up), that's ultimately up to you, but I feel like this is a good model on how to handle this.

Essentially, you'd ultimately be creating an engine for players to create their own sandbox world, and host it out for others via your central source..


I'm willing to take questions for things I didn't think about/address.

Just FYI, WinForms can cross-compile with MONO to Android and iOS, and I don't feel like RPGWO in the sense of V1/V2 would ever be able to be played effectively on a tablet or iPhone, and trying to make the same game work for both would create an inferior product than either could have had on their own.

If you decide to release this (especially with the intent to have others host servers), for the love of god either make a very friendly API to program against, open source the project on GitHub, or find a way for server hosts to directly impact how the in-game world works.

There's several people that used to play RPGWO v1 that went into Computer Science, myself included. The only way to make worlds distinguish themselves from others is to give them a viable way to script events and AI that exists outside of the in-game commands. Otherwise you just get rehashes of other ideas or projects that are blatently ripped from each other.

Take a look at how the game Freelancer worked. Basically, the server would run the add-ins that could change literally any aspect of the game engine/physics/items. They changed these through an incredible API that allowed wanton access to the game. Through this, servers were able to exist that had thematic experiences, such as a StarWars world, wherein you could chose which faction you wanted to be on, and hunt down the rebel spig if you so chose that path.

APIs and mods are proven to increase the longevity of games. A game that neither lets hosts mod servers nor change events within it won't be commercially successful, at least in the RPG sector. Half-Life stayed around for YEARS and spawned at least two best-selling games from its engine, all because it allowed easy modification. (Counter-Strike, Team Fortress)

I, along with several others, would be very interested in helping with this project. The only problem I have with helping you, and others probably feel this way as well, is that when you're done with a project, it dries up and dies. The code never sees the light of day, and the players are screwed out of their time investment. Even if they wanted to spend their money to continue the game, they can't.

If you'd have released the source for V1, I know for a fact that others would have picked it up. There wasn't a shortage of ideas for the game, or even ideas for individual servers. Even releasing an API and the server would have made the game last longer. As a professional developer, I understand why you didn't want to - you wrote it and you wouldn't be seeing money from it anymore - but killing a pretty fabulous game and ignoring it for several years doesn't give you any money either, and it just alienates the community that  your product helped build.

All of these things are some pretty serious commercial and roadmap decisions that you should make about your software before you decide to commit your time (as well as the player's time/money that want to play these products).

Honestly, you should come up with a good RPG idea, based heavily on RPGWO classic, for the desktop and put that wolf on Kickstarter. I'd chip in some money to get it started. Games have gotten $200k with VERY vague ideas, just because gamers are starving for something new and fresh.

Know what I liked about RPGWO? I'll itemize it for you:

• PVP was fluid and largely open ended. Kill anyone anywhere at any time for any reason
• /guildwar
• The admins lead events that were fun. Last Man Standing, anyone?
• Similar to EVE, the events within the game were largely player-driven. As long as the player wasn't breaking an arbitrary set of rules, they were free to raise hell, and raise hell I did.
• Land ownership. No other RPG has really pulled this off in the way that RPGWO did. It was tigering BRILLIANT. It's been what, 8 years? I still have yet to play an RPG where I warp home at the end of the night and lock the door =]
• Bazillions of skills.

RPGWO was fun until development came to a cold stop. The community stuck around on the same version of the game for a year or more. "Third party servers" were mildly successful merely because they provided some updates.

This is a game from my childhood that I dearly miss, and I feel like you could do something great again. I honestly agree with an aforementioned product that Minecraft is an inferior product to RPGWO, even if it IS 3D.

This is what i used to change mine

http://www.mediafire.com/?0ynxmljcbam

The previous poster before yours literally died in Afghanistan. Way to resurrect a thread thats over a year old you pissant.

OMG LIEK I CHANGED SOME NAMES AND STUFF AND THAT MEANS I MADE A NEW MAGIK LOLZ NOT BAD FOR COPYPASTA AMIRITE?