Artificial Life Engine

They've said our bags can hold 3 chairs, that plus perhaps 3 more in the 'large slots', and a road might span 8 chairs across. So if we have 30 people in a guild working together to block off a road, each holding 6 chairs, then can plan it just outside one of their houses, where additional chairs can be sitting on standby while they wait for the chairs in the road to decay.. How long do you think a chair will sit before it decays? I think it will be possible to block a road for a whole day once enough chairs have been stockpiled..

 

*maniacal laugh*

 

I heard in another thread they were thinking about implementing different levels of AI for different types of creatures. Maybe a boss type foe might be more unpredictable in combat, but deer for instance wouldn't fight with PvP tactics.

 

I personally wouldn't want too many super intelligent creatures in PvE combat. However the occasional intelligent creature or boss it would make sense. I think it would be cool if dragons were intelligent though. Dragons should be like the top of the food chain. They are intelligent and have more experience than anybody (since they live so long). I hope that even if dragons aren't the physcially toughest creatures in the game that they have the tactics to make up for it. So a tamer that tames or bonds with a Dragon will have to really earn the respect of the dragon and it shouldn't be that easy.

 

Yes! Wolf eat deer! Perfect artifshul lyfe! Perfect lyfe!!

 

heh I can't tell if "macro level" means global or local (or some combination) but any kind of confirmation is always nice.

 

I can relate to how 'little' 2.5 million is for even a 7 person(your 7?) team. It amazing how fast it goes once you include overhead and expenses. Not to mention LB's expensive thrones habbit.

We would love to see ALE implemented. But yeah, the goal should be getting the rest of the world excited on first release. Then make $$$, and load up the game with features.

I say, resurect the old calculations, dust them off, make the map more aggressive to "resources" spikes(AKA humans), and see how it roles. Ofcourse this is from someone that is assuming placing the claculations in wouldnt be to hard. Also, I'm someone that doesnt code. My experience level has been declaired... fair warning should everything go south.

 

I like this whole idea of Circle of Life and ALE. Is there some way to get players more involved in it rather than just creating a death miasma in a hex? Perhaps some sort of forest management, where gold can be earned by breeding rabbits, deer, wolves. When populations get low, the gold payoff goes up. Of, course you'd want to avoid this turning into a get-rich-quick scheme.

Status could be gained by managing to keep one or more hexes healthy. The trick will be to appeal to a different segment of the population, those that will pursue such things for the fun of it rather than the gold that can be earned - the Farmville, Animal Crossing, NintenDogs type of player.

 

I wouldn't want to see gold involved.. at least not in an uncontrolled way.

One of my first thoughts here would be that certain conditions might trigger quests related to the eco system. If for example the rabbit population is low.. then quests open up for players with a certain amount of animal taming/training skills to increase the population in certain areas. These would probably have to be given out by druids as I doubt any local organization would pay any attention to this sort of thing..

On further thinking about it.. you could use this as a means to establish a druid/ranger community among the players. There's always groups of roleplayers who enjoy certain types of characters and lifestyles and druids & rangers are no exception. Many of these people would love nothing more than to actively participate in the environment.. for good or ill.

So you'd need NPCs to provide players with this type of information.. which animal populations are having trouble.. perhaps there are too many predators or there's a plague causing harm in a certain area.. Having druid and ranger NPCs who can relate this information will make things much more noticable also. Players interested in nature within the game will be much more aware of what's happening.

 

Yea, I also thought about druids

 

25-40 people! Zoinks.... Very little time! But you guys are expereinced and been to the rodeo many times... No worries there.

Yeah the gold as an award is something to be careful of. It would be easy for players to cause the ecology to enter a certain state that might not be condusive to the story line. As you have outlined, quests to balance the ecology might be better.

 

Implementing an ALE believably and accurately depends on realistic resource management as the foundation. That means that resources must deplete and regenerate realistically and as we would expect them to within the context of the games reality.

Unfortunately, it ha been stated many times that the game will have gold sinks to deal with the never ending supply of resources. This makes ALE almost impossible to implement properly, and in a way that would work in the long run.

Players shouldn't be able to wipe everything out that crosses their path. That imbalance caused ALE to fail in UO, and it will in any game that has artificial resource spawns and gold sinks.

To be clear: I'm very much for an ALE and realistic resources... Was hoping for that from the start.


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I think that all would depend on the system would it not? Gold sinks are for gold while renewable and inexhaustable resources would be basically limitless.

One of the major problems with UO's system was that it treated ALL resources as limited and needed to recycle phyiscal resources before they were respawn on the map. If players horded rabbit meat.. no rabbits would spawn etc. That's rediculous.

Someone comes through an area and picks all the berries.. but berries were the food source for some animal then maybe the animal will be scarce for awhile.. but those berries should always grow back whether the old ones were ever used or not. More berries.. animals come back to eat. You don't need 'sinks' to manage those kinds of resources.. only a spawn rate.

 

Exactly, renewable resources, namely flora and fauna, all have natural regeneration rates, I.e. respawn rates. However, exhaustible resources, I.e. minerals, are finite, and would only have regeneration rates over 10s of thousands of years.

The main problem is that exhaustible resources are treated as renewable resources, and to make up for that, gold sinks have to be introduced in order to balance things out.

To make this work, everything needs to respawn according to realistic regeneration rates. Too fast, and the value deflates (due to artificial inflation caused by too much spawning) and too slow, and value inflates out of proportion, to where a loaf of bread becomes so hard to make that it can only be considered a luxury, not a necessary sustenance.

This is why things end up nerfed and unbalanced in games with artificial (or unrealistic) spawn rates and gold sinks. If the ecology of the game is realistic, it will balance itself out, and gold sinks are unnecessary.

That's part of my issue though: gold is a resource, not a separate system. Unfortunately games treat gold like it has nothing to do with other resources, but is created out of thin air, thus inflating the economy artificially, and requiring gold sinks to balance things out where possible. This shouldn't be the case.

Call me a purist, but I believe that gold created in-game should be mined, and if there is no coin to be had, people can barter. I know that SotA is not going to be the game I am hoping for in this regard, at least in Episode I. I do hope that it does manage resources in such a manner that might make ALE possible in future expansions, though.

 

The thing about exhaustable resources is.. in reality there's so much of it it will never BE exhausted. How many centuries have we mined resources that are technically finite in nature? Yet we haven't run out yet. We still mine iron, gold, gems etc to this day after thousands of years. It may as well be inexhaustable and we simulate this with spawn and harvest rates to control the flow.

Currency however is finite by nature but it comes pre-existing.. but I don't see how currency directly effects ALE. which governs spawn rates and behavior of renewable resources exclusively. If an area runs out of a particular ore.. it wouldn't effect the local fauna or flora.

 

Individual mines of finite resources DO run out eventually, but they last a very long time first. The "realistic" application of this is what real people do while mining, they stake claims. While this is all well and good for the guy who claimed a productive gold mine, and can create profitable and fun adventures, replete with PvP, for him and his cronies, they will be in the minority, and the vast MAJORITY will be in a different situation: no mining opportunities to stake, must purchase metals and gems by harvesting cheaper resources for trade.

I suppose that this would ultimately be a workable system, after all, it's worked for Earth. It would produce an economy run entirely by the players, as powerful guilds claimed, defended, and ran mining claims (probably stocked with hired hand NPC workers to do the incredibly boring and repetitive work) and defending the claim against theives and hostile guilds that wanted to "jump" the claim.

The solution I'm used to seeing is that the vein of usable ore breaks up near the surface, and tiny bits of it are found randomly, thus creating an illusion of a diffuse, renewable, and randomly encountered resource. I wouldn't be angry at Portalarium if they used the conventional solution, though I would be impressed and pleased if they actually had a system of player owned mines. A played out mine might even, months or years down the road, become a dungeon...

 

Mmmmh, this is kind of bothering me. Those resources certainly are finite and WILL be depleted someday. Which is why recycling of already used materials is becoming pretty much as valuable (and pretty soon more valuable) than mining for the resource. Also you have to take into account 2 things : techniques used allow for more collection of materials and the increasing rarity makes it more appealing to mine those resources, hence the appearance of infinity. For instance, gold mines nowadays are based on a rate of but a few grams of gold per TONNE of earth extracted, but the techniques used still make viable to gold mine.

But you can be sure the mining of certain resources will be stopped in the upcoming centuries.

Here again, maybe I'm not understanding what you mean by currency, but if you're referring to money, it is actually infinite, as it is created daily through loans and currency making (notes and coins). There is no actual limit to how much currency you can make, but it surely will affect the value of each unit of the currency.

Sorry I'm not adding much to the thread, but those two assessments seemed too strange for me to just not comment on them.

 

I don't think we should be able to kill animals into extiction.
But since we are dealing with intances it seems it would be easier to have some kind of ALE (Artificial Life Engine).
I kinda agree with each player having their own stats that would effect the ALE.

I'm not sure if you need to put every animal on a scale of lets say 1-20.
So if every time you entered a instance and sought out every rabbit and killed it then your scale would move towards the 20.
As you go into new instantces less and less rabbits would be found.

If you entered the instance with other players then just use the average number between the players to generate the rabbits.

Of course the other animals on the map my respond differently based on the scale of rabbits there.