[Help Wanted] - Realms of Forlorn Hope

[Insomniacp]

what I meant by open ended is they can do whatever they feel like doing, we have a lot of things planned for people to be able to do and they are free to choose which they want to go about doing. For example in the staff forums I tossed up the idea of free building of things, players can go around and if they have enough wood and supplies on them they can build themselves a home somewhere. Though houses and things can be destroyed, if someone really wants a spot they must defend it, otherwise someone who wants some money from whatever is in the house will simply destroy it and take what they want. Though if you get enough people building around each other you get a nice little player made town. Another thing would be castles, owned by clans/guilds. They can build wherever they want as long as its relatively flat ground and isn't too close to another castle or city. Clans can then battle each other for castles. Castles act as a very large bank for the clans where they can store items and treasures since the bank will only hold so much. But if you lose the castle you lose the items making it a risky venture that only strong clans will undertake.

Another idea was player controlled governments where towns that come up will be able to be governed by a player. This player can use his own money, or collect money from the players living there, to build things like a shop, an armory, a bank to make the town useful. They can also hire guards to protect the town so if someone decides they want to make some money off of looting some houses they have to deal with the guards. The person in charge can decide who builds things in the town limits and what kind of people the guards let in. You can make a town for evil people or good people or anyone, whichever you prefer to have. You can also base it off of players race so if you want only humans then you can do it that way.

There will be things to do for everyone, there will be a story line but you are not required to follow it. Kind of like Oblivion or Morrowind, you can follow the main story line or go off on your own doing side quests and killing things.

To Pera:
I do like the idea of having a lot of choices for races, I plan on having any humanoid type race available to be played, though things like badgers and bears, most likely not, atleast not any time soon. You will be able to change your race in game by losing some of your experience and can become something else. I plan on having demons and things like that, so a bear may not be too far fetched once that is done it would make things quite interesting. Some bosses may end up being played by players, most likely admins so you can have a dragon flying around killing things every once and a while and it won't be predictable like ai usually is.
At start the ai will be quite simple since it would take up a lot of server resources to make something that acts like a human enough to confuse people.
As far as some kind of game I plan on having quite a few games like that throughout the full game, for example a group of people could start attacking a city to try and loot it and make some good money and items. the guards then come out and if you help the guards you will get rewarded for helping or you can join those attacking and get some good items and maybe even a better reward from a successful attack. Though you may make a town mad enough at you that they attack you on sight, so you wouldn't be able to use the shops there anymore.

To Lost Climate Games:
Hey, fancy seeing you here . I am doing good, sprained my ankle Monday and I am going camping this week xD.

Well that was a lot of writing hope I answered some questions and cleared up the "completely open" issues.

[pera]

Cant wait to see some demo, do you have any source/bin to show?

[vermeer]

Question: since we tend to get a generic goblins and fairies project announcement most every week, why would anyone choose to contribute to your project? What's so special about you, or your team, or your project?

I like goblins and faeries(I like certain books (not some cheap novels so best sellers in the last decades... ))... just not as the whole inet load of projects tend to put 'em on screen...

[Insomniacp]

My goal is to have it online by the end of august. Online meaning you can go around kill some things level up, talk to other players and things like that, chances are there won't be much to do at that time but it will at least be working. Though if things don't go as planned it will be delayed, August is just an estimate of when I plan to have the code done, graphics will most likely be the deciding point of a public release at that time but we will be testing it at my house to make sure things work and once we get graphics in and ready it will go online. I don't know if the source will be released for the game or not. I personally want to build it up into commercial quality and make some money off of it, having the source out there doesn't do well for that though. The database is pretty much done so it won't be long till things fall into place and I can toss a demo out. Though I am not here next week.

[vermeer]

keep it going, sounds nice.

[Insomniacp]

Okay, time to update everyone again.

Character creation has begun, meaning after registering you get to make your character and then login and begin playing.

Environment Control, this will be changing the maps when needed, basically when you get near the edge of one map it loads the next one so that it will be there when you get there. Also places the buildings, foliage and things of the like.

Character Control, this will control all of the other characters including players and NPC's. the game loop will access this to determine where to place other people and things, also what those characters are doing, attacking, sitting, walking, etc.

[lostclimategames]

Environment Control, this will be changing the maps when needed, basically when you get near the edge of one map it loads the next one so that it will be there when you get there. Also places the buildings, foliage and things of the like.

hey insom..... sounds like a familiar map changing system..... *ahem* gekkeiju *ahem*

[rogerborg]

I'm glad to hear you're making progress.

If I might offer a few suggestions for your release:

1) If your design is robust - i.e. doesn't trust the client - then there should be no security issues with releasing the source of the client.

Reverse engineering the server will be way beyond the capabilities of most Script Kiddies; it's only giants like WoW and Battle.Net that attract that kind of attention.

Since the server - i.e. managing accounts and selling subscriptions / pimp gear - is where you'll make your ongoing revenue, it's actually in your interest to encourage people to modify and improve the client, as long as they can't gain any advantage by doing so.

2) It will save a lot of bitching and moaning and threats to leave/hack you/stab you if you make it clear that the game is in a alpha/beta phase and subject to wipes. In fact, regular wipes might even be less contentious than one big wipe at the end of beta, since by then your beta players will be heavily invested in their characters.

[Insomniacp]

LostClimate:
it is completely different from gekkeiju's map system, gekk has it where you leave a map you go to a load screen and load the next one, Realms of Forlorn Hope will have a seamless map meaning you won't notice when you change maps and they will all look like one big map, no loading screens, no little path you must go across. I can make a flat plain with 20 maps and you won't know that you changed map locations since it will be as if it is one giant map. If you have played Oblivion it will be kind of like that, you can go quite far and never know you are changing maps when you most likely have changed between quite a few.

Rogerborg:
I won't be trusting the client too much. I can release the source but I do not see a real need for it. It will be getting updated by us continuously as we add new features. Sure it isn't a security issue for the game but I do not want someone taking it and calling it there own. So unless I get copyright stuff going I won't be releasing it. I also don't see how it is of any benefit for people to modify it. What I may do though is release it to some people in the irrlicht community upon request, I will talk it over with the other members of the team.

I will definitely make it clear that it is in alpha/beta stages but I do not foresee a wipe of the database, we are planning all future things into the current database so that we won't need to modify it and cause a possible wipe. If anything I will write a script to transfer all old items into new ones if a change were to occur.

Thanks for the feedback.

[full.metal.coder]

I do see one good reason to release the source of the client : getting it to work on all platforms supported by Irrlicht, at least the majors ones (Win, Mac, Linux). You see, even a static build is unlikely to work on more two different distros, let alone on all...

There are a dozen of widely used distros and more than a hundred available... Do you plan to support them all or to drop most, if not all, Linux users?

Besides client sources freely available means you are more likely to get help to work on it : not only compatibility but little things like performance, memory leaks, good old segfault may be fixed by community in a a matter of weeks while it would take you monthes, at least, to do the same alone...

[lostclimategames]

i see, the way you worded it before, it sounded like you were going to have a static map that changed once you left the edge.

[Insomniacp]

full.metal.coder:
That is the only reason I see why to make something open source, though I plan on making it work on linux and windows myself. If someone wants to port it over to another platform I will give them the code to do so. There are currently 2 programmers working on the game and a third could but he is doing graphics. In the long run I would rather just make the team larger and recruit the people willing to port a game to another platform then just let anyone do it. I believe I said this earlier but this is the first of many games we plan on making so instead of letting random people do things I would rather take people on board that can help out with more than just one game. We are taking it into consideration though.

Lost:
I agree I did word that quite poorly, thats what you get when you do too much at once

[Insomniacp]

Here is a new screen shot for you guys, this is the current login page



Character movement has been coded, the client can now calculate movement of other players and npc's, I need to code the server to send the start info though. Changing animation will be done soon, need a model to test with which should be finished in the near future.

Map loading will be done in the near future, I am also going to add this to the map editor so that you can line things up and make it look more like one big map. Saving and things will need to be adjusted to save all maps that were edited. I am also bouncing around the idea of an online editor so that more than one person can work on a map at a time and we won't have to worry about over writing someones work. This would make map making easier, since we can easily make changes online and not have to upload files to the server whenever we change something.

[full.metal.coder]

I like the drawings but the colors could definitely be better (though I wouldn't be able to make them any better myself ).

[rogerborg]

I won't be trusting the client too much.

Super, you're planning to fail. Ah well, it's your project.