In the real world, look at various endeavors such as auto racing, scientific research, war, espionage, and a countless number of other activites. What these have in common is a team like environment where high technology is merged with extremely talented individuals. In fact, a major theme here is the active pusuit of these highly talented individuals or the reverse, where the highly talented individual seeks sponsorship. Now, envision a on online persistent multi player game where individuals or teams with custom designed technology (could be bots, racecars, spy equipment, whatever) seek highly talented players to use the technology to compete or battle against other teams / players. A key element would be limited resources, both in terms of technology available and in really qualified and good players available. The teams / sponsors or organizations benefit from winning by gaining recognition in the player community, gaining virtual money to finance new technology or players, and thus attract higher quality players. The players benefit by gaining recognition, and the opportunity to be picked by the best teams / sponsors. The idea is to create an environment where one cannot survive without the other. As an added twist, perhaps some sort of spying on other teams might be allowed. Perhaps this could all be worked into some type of tournament play. But it need not be like this. Maybe the skeleton of this idea could be incorporated into some type of space war political saga with inter-galactic nations seeking dominance.

Bishop:
Your mind works like mine . Your not thinking gaming-as-usual KUDOS! I love your idea! In fact its quite similar to the model I had in mind for bot squads that are expandable and can be preprogrammed via simple gui interface ala UT bots, but a bit more beefed up with more tabs (mapping tab, to tell your bots where to go and how to get there..etc..). Same as your idea, you could 'hire' someone from the community to fight using one of your bots, and you could even control if this player has command over the rest of your squad, which could be a mix of bots and real players. When a real player uses your bot, the bots abilities to fight without human control would rise or lower to correspond with the skill of the player. So people who hire other to control thier bots would sift the community for highly rated players in a given type of play (sniper, demo guy, engineering, dogfighting, piloting etc..). Get where Im going here? I think this would create a whole new obsession and hobby for FPS/RTS players: Tweaking out the bot squad and upgrading thier skills.. or perhaps even stealing other peoples bots.. the possibilities are many.. brainstorm. (ala Battlezone1&2)


I've had Ideas about semi-persistent gameplay, with a save game idea.. and each player can have X number of bots which can be upgraded (see my post on AI upgrading http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=52761 ..) and if they have a bot stolen (in my vision nothing can be completely destroyed beyond repair unless its a mega nuke type blast) that player can then go on quest to get that bot back if its valuable enuff, or if he just want to get it back on principle. So, the games would be save game types, of a fairly large size, and each individual brings in his own tweaked out bot squad ( I actually have a game design doc written up if you are interested in seeing any part of it let me know). whatta think..?

Edited by - TheEnderBean on June 28, 2001 4:35:09 PM

A look at collectible card games may shed some light on this subject. I don''t know if anyone''s familiar with illuminati, but in this system the player is allowed to create new cards. Similarly in Magic the Gathering playtesters create new cards for every new set. Both of these types of creation are governed by a set of rules (e.g. a creature can''t have X ability unless their casting cost is Y or greater) The point of this is that each new invention doesn''t break the game, but is approximately as good as every existing invention.

I think the real problem you would face in making a game like this is making invention options such that making an invention was interesting and complicated and challenging, andthere were room for a lot of different inventions yet no single invention was more powerful than others.

That''s true, I''m not sure whether it''s relevant, unless we wanted to use periodic patched to build inflation into our invention system.

Anyway, I was pondering this problem, and I thought a good example to look at might be flowers, because we don''t have to worry about their functionality. Say a mmog allows players to breed flowers. And each type of flower can only be invented once, so people can''t just copy someone else''s invention. Automatic copyrighting, as it were. Now, flowers have 4 important visual aspects: color, color distribution pattern, size, and shape. Forget their nutritional or fragrance value for the sake of simplicity. Now, what kind of system can we have governing our flower breeding?

Color is quite simple: we can just convert parent colors to their numerical values and do math on them to find out what color the offspring will be, and we can display this color with a tint layer or a skin over polygons. And with a random chance of gene duplication or deletion, we can increase the number of colors with which more complex coloration patterns can be made. Size is equally simple - whether we''re using 2 or 3-d graphics we can just scale our flower''s image. Color distribution pattern is more complicated. There are only so many color distribution patterns that exist in the real world, so we could fake our selection of these IF all our flowers were the same shape. But if we want them to have different shapes, generating these shapes and the color distribution patterns for them is going to be a big headache. Any thoughts, anyone?