You should check out the up and coming first ever mmofps Planetside (www.verant.com). It has tons of implications on both persistent worlds, and persistent characters. You should probably call you term "persistent online character". In planetside, your fps character can die, and respawn however it will keep a persistent set of certain attributes, and the player can go back to their old dead body and get thier old stuff ala everquest (made also by verant) Anyway, check it out (if you already have not)

You are referring to a players statistics, skills, experience, etc. I''m referring to a player''s continued existence in the game world. Persistent statistics are nothing new. If PlanetSide creates an AI avatar of the player when he/she is offline, or offers some similar support, then i''ll be interested.

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"Need more eeenput..."
- #5, "Short Circuit"
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It will cost more bandwidth for those who are connected. It would also require much more processor power and memory to handle all the characters. Server side and client side. For my own game it takes 950MB to handle 12,288 characters server side. For one million that would take 77GB of memory. I don''t really have that kind of money. That would require a dedicated HD to be used for virtual memory.

Then you have to figure in how many the client can handle at once. 768 is what I currently have the client locked at. Any more than that it starts to not run. 768 128x128x24bit textures takes quite a bit of memory. 36megs. I did a test and found a 56k modem can handle about 200 on the screen at one time.

Then you have to account for floor space. Where are these millions of people going to stand? Eventually it will become too crowded.

Ben
http://therabbithole.redback.inficad.com

How would the server treat a PC turned NPC? Are the PK fodder or are they immune, just there to make the game look busy?

I''d rather not have NPC AI take over my character I''ve spent months developing and risk it being killed when I log in again or missing some items for whatever reason.

How well would the server emulate the personality of the actual player?

It could be done no problem, but what are the benifits and risks?

Ben
http://therabbithole.redback.inficad.com

KYLOTAN:

Actually, Lineage supposedly has over 2 million subscribers (with at least over 100.000 player at any one time)

I still think that the best solution to create a persistent ''character'' is to create a logical answer to the question: why is the character not in the virtual world when the player isn''t.

I bet there are numerous answers to find. If you can design your game using that answer you''ll have your persistent character.

(as an example, you design a game where the player plays a player playing a virtual character. When the ''real'' player is not playing, the ''virtual'' player isn''t either, so the ''virtual character'' can''t be playing either. Or, you create a game where players control entities that can only live in the virtual world for certain amounts of time -maybe they can''t physically remain in that virtual world longer than a set time-. Or you create a game with several parallel universes. If your character is not in universe 1, he can return after even a month saying that he''d been in one of the other universes for a while)

If the issue is to give a character the same growing rate as the virtual world (if one day passes in the virtual world, the character should grow one day older, one day maturer, one day more powerful etc)... I''m sure there are answers to be found for that as well, without having to resort to AI controlling the avatar.