Complex encounters (from Rho's Twitter)

From: https://twitter.com/Rhopunzel/status/397365649258713088

From: https://twitter.com/Rhopunzel/status/397366613843800064

Alas no screenshots (yet!) for an encounter of this variety, but it is very promising to hear. Personally I am quite pleased to know that there can be situations in which there are multiple NPC/MOB factions that are hostile to one another. Alas I suspect that any intervention by the player will peg you as the new hated/favored enemy of the moment as the second quoted tweet indicates.

I am left to wonder though, if you can be careful & selective of your combat abilities; will it be possible to sway the outcome of an encounter like this? In a battle of this sort, do NPCs have to worry about hitting fellow friendly entities on their own side?

 

This is the type of stuff I love. Makes the world feel alive, dynamic... "living" outside my influence. This behavior adds to the exploration factor, coming across something unexpected or changed since you last saw it. It would be awesome if this was extended to more structured behavior like developing and failing cities. Admittedly, more structured "living and dynamic" cities would most likely have to be post release or relegated to the modding community. Here is a suggested entry and thread further exploring the idea. Thanks to MrMas35 for submitting the suggestion.

Suggestion - Evolving/Devolving Villages
http://playstarbound.com/suggestions/?p=view&id=6996

Threat - Evolving/Devolving Villages
http://community.playstarbound.com/index.php?threads/evolving-devolving-villages.24582/

 

Complex encounters of the Rho kind.

 

I saw that tweet. It made me wonder about 'threat levels', as it were. Like... what's the priority when it comes to an enemy engaging you? We know that guards will attack monsters to protect a town/village and will only attack you if you don't put your weapon away, but what about bandits and monsters themselves? Will they prioritize whatever target hit them first? Whichever has the least HP? Whichever is the smallest/largest/has the least max HP? Race? Gear? Personal preference?

I'm really hoping there's ways to manipulate threat levels (via gear or tech, perhaps). That way when playing with others it'll be easier for one player to be a designated 'tank' that gets all the aggro while squishier members will be less likely to be attacked. It shouldn't be absolute, mind you! It would be boring if the 'tank' was the one always and forever taking damage and the squishes never have to worry. More as I said 'less likely'.

 

Sounds like Stalker Clear Sky to me. I would love that to be the case, the variety of outcomes was awesome, would take a signifigant amount of programming AI though.

 

The problem with things changing while a player isn't around is the load on the server.

I love that suggestion you linked and it could be a good work around, but it isn't literally the world ticking without you; the best thing we can do is have a facade of that.

A world truly ticking on even when a player isn't around is something I've always looked for in games, but our technology isn't strong enough yet(cheap enough to be viable).

 

There are ways to "fake" it though. If they kept the calc to only when you entered a system via hyperjump, it wouldn't be that much of a burden on your processor. Add in it only being a small chance that some random changes happen to a system, and it would further reduce the load on a system.

 

Would like to see them build and expand! Like a cultist building shrines and bandit camps being built into bandit towns.

 

It'd be neat if you could hide out and see who's winning (or who's after something you're interested in) then run, guns blazing on their enemy so they'll let you on their side.

 

This is how you do it, you "fake" it. You sneak in processing at down times if you are limited to a single thread. The game is not really processing all those moves. It would be more like some fairly simple formulas to generate outcomes. So when you visit again things will have changed. It is completely possible today. I have a similar system functioning on a tablet game I'm developing.

 

That's exactly what I said when I said "I love that suggestion you linked and it could be a good work around..."

Also, I didn't say the workaround wasn't possible. I said that actually(not "faking it" calculations) having the places all loaded at once just building/fighting/living even if you weren't there isn't possible today, as in it isn't easy on the wallet to have servers do it currently...

Please read what a person says before misrepresenting them... Otherwise they have to repeat themselves... It's a tiring effort and makes talking on the forum feel pointless if nobody listens to the other person.

 

I like the fact it makes the world feel alive, as the different NPCs/Mobs/Bots can fight eachother. I also hope inside monsters itself it some is friendly it can be attacked by other monsters and defend himself, it's more interesting see stuff happening than everything to be around you and only triggered by you.

 

It could save "last visited" date and use that to as number of iterations to run, so if you visit planet at start of your journey and then visit it again after long time, it would change a lot

 

This has been worked around so many times it's not even funny. Granted, the workarounds usually lend themselves to exploitation, but who cares in a game like this?

 

Yup... That's why I addressed the workaround thing in my second sentence...

 

My interest has been piqued.

 

Also, modern servers can handle things like this. Some games have done so.

 

Fair enough, your second post was more clear. I was thinking more of a single player game. A server would be more taxing for sure.

However, I believe we have the hardware to do a live ticking world, maybe not at the scale of Starbounds countless worlds, but for other titles. It is more a lack of software that takes true advantages of threading. This is very apparent in GIS software, much of which can be attributed to basically zero competition for Esri. For example the top GIS processing software ArcGIS just put the Geoprocessing packages in their own thread in the last version of the software, allowing the GUI to function (somewhat) while processing.

At the same time, there is little reason to have the world ticking, just to give the appearance it was once the viewport of the player returns to a given location.

Blah, but whatever, it doesn't really matter. I'm loving the sound of these complex encounters.

 

How much "All of my yes." could you release from your body upon landing on a planet where there are burning villages and mutant zombie Florans overrunning human research labs? Someone answer this.

 

Haha, this would be a great find. Terrifying if playing a human... leftovers if playing a Floran.