Chiralos
Merchant Princes
3
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Posted - 2012.02.26 04:22:00 -
[1] - Quote
Torfi's Team Avatar dev blog got me thinking (way too much) about avatar combat in EVE. In the long run I'd
really love to have an avatar stealth / combat / rescue / exploration game, taking place on stations, starbases,
abandoned asteroid bases, derelict spaceships, ruined surface cities etc.
Ideally to do things the EVE way, you don't want private instances, you
want people to be able to barge in there and steal / grief / assist. The
problem is crowd control. Time dilation isn't going to cut it with
avatars.
You would presumably have to have population limits, which means you'd
have to have a mechanic to prevent padding the site out with extra friendly teams.
If you could pad, you could avoid PvP, trap other players, block areas
of etc. Is this a solved problem ? Are there other multiplayer
games out there that do this right ? Anyway, here is a sketch of
a solution.
- Avatar sites are a big graph (network) of chambers or subsites
(which could be quite large), each of which has a population limit. All
sites have a large number of chambers so it is impractical to pad a
whole site.
- Between each chamber are airlocks that restrict movement to batches
of players. Airlocks hold 1/2 the chamber population limit at most.
In order to open the other end of an airlock, you have to
lower the population of the source chamber to less than half. At that
point you have a window when you can close the rear door. Some time
later the destination door opens. You'd need to work out a protocol
where waiting time in airlocks was bounded.
- (this might be necessary or not) When a chamber fills to greater
than 1/2 occupancy, a timer is started. When it goes of the chamber
becomes uninhabitable (eg fills with radiation, vents everyone into
space, etc). Timer goes away if occupancy drops below 1/2. Actually, in
this case you would be able to trap and doom a chamber by
filling the surrounding ones. Maybe there is some protocol where the
doom timer in such a chamber is delayed until a surrounding chamber has
a vacancy or has its own doom timer go off ... (computer science content
- come up with chamber graphs and protocols that you can prove work
correctly).
- When there are multiple chambers with people trying to get into a
chamber with a vacancy, one is chosen at random. Or maybe you queue
entry requests, but randomness might be necessary to avoid carefully
choreographed combat-avoiding movement.
- Each chamber is connected to others in such a way that a blob of
occupied chamber always had a border. No bottlenecks where you can
protect a large number of players from attack with a small number.
- The objective(s) of site are in the interior (and entry / exit
points on the perimeter), so movement through a series of chambers
is necessary.
- Chambers have NPC (drones, automated defences etc). Initially the
chambers would be full. After being cleared NPCs could respawn (lootless
or low-loot) semi-randomly. You could throw in roving groups of NPCs too,
that would be cool.
--
In short, you can pad chambers and make them invulnerable, but to move
through the site (to an objective, or to intercept other groups), you
become vulnerable to attack. It would be possible with enough troops to
totally surround areas and wall them off, but it would take a lot of
troops, and the boundary around your blob and the doom timer would
give other groups a way to force combat.
Choosing the structure of the chamber graph correctly would be
important. With high connectivity, padding areas or trapping players
becomes very expensive in troops. On the down side, high connectivity
would make intercepting groups harder. Maybe that's OK. You could choose
to go in with a small fast moving group, and risk getting slowed down by
NPCs. Or go in with lots of troops, move slower, but risk other groups
getting in front of you. (Hm, I should sit down, scribble site layouts
on a big piece of paper, use poker chips for players and try things out).
--
OK, tear this apart. Why doesn't it work ? Why would it suck ? How would
solve the crowding problem in an EVE avatar combat game ? |
Chiralos
Merchant Princes
3
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Posted - 2012.02.26 04:38:00 -
[5] - Quote
James Amril-Kesh wrote:Chiralos wrote:James Amril-Kesh wrote:It would suck because EVE is about SHIPS. A) No-one would make you participate. B) Quite a lot of people like the idea of extending EVE to avatars. It strikes me that this is why we have DUST 514. What else do you need? They're making a whole separate game for this kind of thing already.
Fair point, so long as DUST could grow to be sufficiently sandboxy.
I get the feeling that in a wide open planetary surface environment (which you want for FPS vehicle action) though you are always going to have crowd control problems if you open it up to people just dropping in. In a station environment you have walls and doors where you can limit server populations but also allow interactions between groups. Maybe your right, this isn't EVE, its a DUST station combat expansion.
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