Testing, Testing, Testing. ugh!

After lots of testing with the canvas tag I've come to the conclusion that trying to use just the regular 2D canvas will just not work for me. I mean I can get a lot better speed than a lot of the other engines I've seen trying the same thing but still it isn't good enough, then again i am overly picky with things like this.

What I am working on now is trying to use the new WebGL structures to simulate a 2.5D environment. I do not yet have anything to show you, primarily been reading tutorials on shaders, OpenGL and such. From what few demo's I have managed to find concerning WebGL it is very very promising and many times faster than the regular 2D canvas.

Will post something on the site when i get a good test working.

Isometric Sprite Maker

Ok, since my "game engine" is primarily based on an isometric view I started trying to find a way to better automate my sprite creation. I've played with World Creator 1.5 before but sadly they have discontinued the free version and only have World Creator 2.5 available now for about $120.00 USD. I did order a copy of this because i know it works well and does walls along with the floors. Still waiting on my order to finish, been almost 24 hours now though.

I checked out some demo's for some other stuff as well. Primarily what I was looking for was something I could put a 3-D model into, move the model into place, then let it cycle through all the animations in the model creating a sprite set with either 4 or 8 views. The only demo I even remotely got working kept crashing due to "missing files" of some sort. Un-installed it. :/

So I i'm hoping it will be Unity3D to the rescue! Going to do some tests but pretty sure I will be able to create a web-based version where I can load up the model and have it do all the things I am looking for. Even better would be if I can also get it to automatically render the clothing and armor. If it works i'll announce the beta of it here along with a link.

Hopefully I will also be starting an alpha of my Nemesis Star game soon too. But as previously stated my time is limited so it may be a bit, sooner the better I think though. Feel free to leave me a message if you are interested in participating.

Many Many Voltrons Later

Got a few days of vacation left. I notice that I have really neglected in working on quite a few things due to life situations (again). Not going into any rants this time though. I have however decided that I'm tired of life getting in the way and will begin some real work on this despite other's, and I will just leave it at that. Got a few days of vacation left which I will be working on this, specifically I will be ironing out the kinks in the JavaScript Isometric Mapping. Been almost a year since I worked on it now so will have to relearn my own code but I do remember the last thing was that I did get it working but was having a problem with it dynamically changing/loading new sectors.

The first two days of my vacation where spent enjoying Fallout New Vegas, but i have already become quite bored with it seeing how i finished it on hard-core mode in two days. If i pay that much for a game it shouldn't be so easy. :/

The next few days I spent updating my new JavaScript Game Developers site that you can visit by clicking on the link there. The blog and the site there will be for more theory and code not specifically related to this engine.

That's it for now, got to get to work. Yes vacation for me means only having to work one job instead of two. But i'm the only one in the house willing to keep a job (much less two) so I gotta do what it takes to make sure the bills keep paid. Hopefully By this weekend I will iron out the bugs in that map and can show it off with a character walking around.

Our Trip to Mars ...

People who have gathered themselves into a nation NEED something to believe in so that they may remain a nation. I have wondered recently if Kennedy wasn't shot like he was, if we would have even went to the moon. Or would we have given up their too? Belief stirs hope and hope for something is the only thing that keeps a great many of us going. When our nation does something great that stirs joy in every one of that Nations citizens.

Do you really understand why the Hover Damn was built? Not only did it provide a water reservoir and electricity, it stirred hope in people. It let them dream again. With those new dreams they had the willpower to build all that we now have today. But dreams and hope are fickle and easily swept away under a tide of problems.

If our leaders fail at this, if they fail us yet again .... I cannot remember the last time something truly good came out of our nations capital. And corporations ... well that's the same thing isn't it? Peas in a pod so to speak? Can we really continue to trust people to adjust their bottom lines by the number who have died? Once a upon a time if one person died it was too many ... Now as long as the dollars paid out in the lawsuits are not as much as the cost of the recall then it's business as usual. I think I will keep placing my trust elsewhere thank you very much.

It doesn't seem to be ... 'if our leaders fail at this ...', they already have. They are bought and paid for corporate lackeys who see the tax dollars that we earn through our blood and sweat as a giant piggy bank. Our tax dollars .... the last time my parents needed a fireman, yes they showed up but then refused to put out the fire because they had not donated $50.00 into the fireman's fund. THAT is our tax dollars at work.

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

If our nation will not do it, and we cannot trust corporations to do it, then perhaps it is time to do it ourselves. We are the ones who build this nation, it is our money, our blood and sweat .. our tears. We are a nation of adventurer's and explorers. It is time to expand that spirit and venture out of our womb that we call Earth. If we do not then I fear the last of our dreams may very well be lost as we seem to enter this new age where we are no longer individuals or people, just a statistic. And after we are gone and hope no longer remains the title of our obituary shall read ...

327,000,000 Dreamers Lost

quick post

busy as hell doing everything in the world but what i want to be doing (working on this game engine). But i did some reading on IE 9 and wanted to say something about it ... not that i think Microsoft gives a crap what the developers really think or want ... If IE 9 does not have support for the canvas tag i will ban the IE browser from my sites. A simple check and redirect to a page telling them to download a real browser that does support the w3c standards, why they should do it and links to the most popular browsers will do nicely i believe. I do encourage everyone who is trying to set up canvas-specific sites to do the same. If they don't want to support us ... they can talk to 404.html. :-)

going to go beat up a pillow now. cheers!

Progress

Ok, court could not have went more wrong but i won't vent about that but that is over now. Now to just get the move and holiday stuff out of the way! I did work on it a bit as soon as i got home while the wife woke up though. Added the image preloader so that it works fine the first time instead of having to press the browser 'reload' button to get it to go. Next is to get it to scroll beyond the current 3x3 grid which will involve some duct tape, a crow bar and a 10 lb sledge hammer. :)

This first version will remain as a flat-isometric plane but i do have plans on adding a layered isometric plane later on. Performance is good in Firefox and Opera but in chrome it just flies! IE ... screw IE we don't care about them. :p perhaps in the next version they will add canvas support but i'm not getting my hopes up. not going to post a new link or even upload the newest version yet. I will do that when i get it to dynamically load a map from the server and it is scrolling beyond the current 3x3 grid. Maybe i'll even add in a fence or a cow or something else in addition to the trees and grassland.

Court Week has finally arrived!

ok, my wifes insurance claims are finally going to court. Doesn't seem like they are going to offer a real settlement at all so i guess we'll have to go the whole nine yards with this one. Bleh! like i have time for this! STILL in the middle of moving ... my wife, bless her heart, has us moving tiny bit by tiny bit. Move a few things then set them up in the new place, move a few more then set them up. Me i just want to get the crap over their and then set it up then. At this rate it seems like Christmas will be gone before we are finished.

Ok so it's like 5:36am and i have to jump in the shower in just a minute but I'll throw out my idea for the first game the canvas engine will be laid out on. I purchased a domain called moghack.com. No it has nothing to do at all with hacking mmo's. :p Instead it will be a multi-player version of nethack. Though I will be getting a lot of ideas from nethack it will not be a duplicate or a web-based clone of it. That's been done before for starters and the current base design of nethack does not lend itself to multi-player options. Their are two features that will be absolutely migrated over, random-dungeon generation and perma-death. I have several ideas laid out on paper for the multi-player aspects of it but they are still in their infancy so will not be releasing those ideas quite yet. More details to come in January i hope if everything goes as currently planned ... which it never does. :p

-Matthew H.

aka Wetlander

General FYI

Ugh, Christmas is in full swing so working all the hours that I can get. Along with 2nd job, trying to drum up more business for home and in the middle of moving i barely have time to breath. Come January though this should all settle down though as by then we will have finished moving and have the new house unpacked along with reduced hours at one of the two jobs. a heck of a lot less travel time is going to help as well, about one hour per day that i won't be sitting in traffic.

Good thing about working at wally world though is that it's pretty mindless so i'm carrying around a small notebook in which to write down ideas and plan my January to-do lists. Doubt i'll post much till then though so merry Christmas to everyone!

The Universe is a Big Place ...

Ok anyone who has done any sort of research on the universe at all, or attended some basic science classes, or opened a book, or looked up into the sky ... ect, knows that the universe is big. Very big, really big, we has humans cannot even grasp exactly how big it is much less see across the whole thing. Currently we can see somewhere like 13-14 billion light years away because that is how long it has been since the big bang.

So what?

Some games have lots of different playable worlds, which according to string theory is plausible, but the main reason for this has been server limitations. For a web-based mmo game however there is no real good reason for this limitation if you design your engine to work across multiple servers. Their has been great advances in cloud computing so as such I believe it is entirely feasible to create a JavaScript version of this and apply it to an mmo game.

I very much believe in the K.I.S.S. method even in programming. I've seen many programmers over complicate things just to prevent theft of their work or to justify their jobs. In it's simplest form this is what i'm thinking:

Servers ...

1. 1 login server
2. 1 chat server
3. 1 AI server (?: possibly a cloud depending on the number of units it needs to control)
4. 1 server for every X number of users
5. 1 database server (?: possibly it's own separate cloud at a later point) to bind them all in darkness.
6. (?: possibly) Star-map server. The only thing it does is path-finding as the star-map is fixed. Would be a behind-the-scenes server like the database-server.

With exception of the database server itself all of the other server programs should be a single entity to make installing and expanding easier. The base program will load the required modules for that type of server so as such initially they can all be loaded onto a single server and then expanded outwards as required.

Client Side ...

• Each user is given a list of of user servers (#4) to poll for data, the system polls the list and uses the one with the fastest response time.
• The servers are re-polled every (x) minutes to help reduce server lag and overloading.
• Script will keep track of data return times and will force a re-polling in case of lag from a single server.

So it seems fairly simple and as such should be possible, but what about new players?

• Players are not given a starting world, they must find their own world to colonize (possible addition to 'autopilot' to a inhabitable planet.
• Players are given a copy of the the latest available copy of the compendium (all publicly available knowledge)
• You start as a colony of the faction you choose, not your own independent nation (this however does not mean you can't be attacked even as a noob).
• Technically speaking you can be a leach and never leave your colony and never perform any research at all. Factions share group knowledge with their members including leaches ... this however may make your leaders unhappy but that is up to the players themselves.
• New players will naturally migrate out towards the edge of the known galaxy.
• Their are fixed travel lines between stars (though it is possible later to circumvent these travel lines but it takes a much longer time)
• More than 1 player can inhabit the same planet ...
• That's right you can start on the same planet as your bestest buddie in the whole world.
• You don't have to colonize a planet, you can choose to build a space colony instead. Though this idea does have strategic advantages it comes with it's own obvious set of problems such as expense and habitation limitations.
• Shared Knowledge: Just via interaction with other players, trade ... ect. Knowledge is shared with each other in the form of bonus points, the time it takes to research something is reduced.

I will expand more on these ideas in later posts.

Moving, ugh!

Ok, so for like the next two weeks we seem to be renting two places at the same time, talk about expensive ... but can't afford for me to take any time off either. So for my next couple of days off will be spent trying to get the lead out of my butt and get this moving thing done. Good news about the new place is the fact that we will be paying less rent than what we are here, and we'll have about 400 sq ft more space! The wife and I are definitely hoarders and seem to have issues throwing anything away! lol. Instead it get's tossed in a box where it will remain for 2-5 years before donation to the salvation army. :p

I've set my DVR to record episodes of 'The Universe' on the discovery channel to see if I can get some more ideas for the Nemesis Star game. Still thinking to do that one first but at this stage I'm still flip-flopping quite a bit so anything is up for grab's. Everything that will be needed in both games is very similar for the JavaScript engine, the only big difference is the addition of a flat or 3/4 view perspective in addition to the isometric drawing routines ... which is infinitely easier.

For the server side I've been doing some research on SSJS (Server Side JavaScript). There seems to be way too many choices and confusion about it with little real information. I have though ruled out using any SSJS engines that are programed in php or any other server side scripting language ... i don't mind sacrificing a little bit of speed for ease of use, but not that much. Hell at this point it might just be easier to program the server side in C# with spider monkey overlaying it for the scripting routines.

Well i got to get my lazy butt to work get these next couple of days over with (work two jobs 3 days of the week). Then it's moving time! Ugh!

General Updates

Busy busy busy! The freaking Christmas season is almost here! Ok at least at good ole wally world it is. Yes yes, I'm still working two jobs one of which is for Walmart ... hey they have benefits! Just about anyone working in the computer field as a web programmer will tell ya ... unless you get a great gig working for Google or some other large company you probably won't get benefits anywhere. Getting ready to move soon again! ugh! but at least now with this move I will be 1.6 miles from work! which means more time to do the stuff I want to be doing (aka, this game design thing)

Was reading through a forum news feed archive and came across this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=751075 Instead of resurrecting an old thread (3 months at the time of this writing) I figured i would cover one of the topics that someone their suggested.

CSS Sprites and Javascript Canvas ...

The long story short ... don't waste your time using CSS to clip the sprites from a large png image ... all the browsers have big performance issues when clipping and if your going to build a GUI or game of any real scale this alone will kill any good performance you would get. This isn't to day that the persons idea was so off either ... the advantage to using fewer files is faster load times especially if you are using xmlHTTP requests to tell it what files to load.

A simple tile prototype ...

function Tile()

{

this.img = new Image(); // create a new Image object.

this.width = 128; // width of the tile. defaults to 128

this.height = 64; // height of the tile. defaults to 64

this.offX = 0; //X offset for drawing abnormal sized tiles

this.offY = 0; //Y offset for drawing abnormal sized tiles

}

From the above i think you can get the picture here already ... you simply load the big file then you piece it out into actual tile objects thus pre-clipping everything. You get the speed performance from using smaller images that don't require clipping and reduce server latency time because you are pulling fewer files.

Also another way to get great performance increase ... use multiple canvas's! ... How many you use and what each of these layers does is of course entirely up to you just remember that the top most layer is the layer the user actually interacts with for your event processing.

If their is interest i will discuss this in greater detail with actual numbers to back up my claims here. I've done quite a bit of testing and this is the fastest way to process canvas games of any real size or scale.

M. Hagston

Moving On!

ok, i told myself no games, no nothing on my two days off here so i can get stupid map working....and then i get a cold. So with my blankie and an entire box of tissues done and i'm sure a nose that is kin to rudolf i finally fixed the error.

javascript isometric map

perhaps if i get comments then i'll post how it works, otherwise you can just figure it out yourself. The super-short of it is it has a 3x3 buffer, it the data from these buffers to actually render the current viewport. Next phase is to get it to update these buffers as the user scrolls in order to create the illusion of an infinately scrolling map. after that it will be to get an actual charecter into the map and walk around. :-)

i'll spell check these posts later, but i'm going to bed now and fein death for a few hours. ughhhh. **sneezes**

FINALLLY! making progress

hour here, hour there, finally making some progress! Nothing i wish to post quite yet (but the same url is in the blog history if you really want to find it map test 002). I warn you though with all the test stuff activated (and new ruler bar that's dynamicly drawn), it takes like 10-12 seconds to first render in google chrome. With the test draws i would not suggest any other browser besides chrome untill it's optimized again.

Anywho! Finally got that error somewhat fixed, at least on the vertical axis it seems to be working correctly for P1 (top left drawing panel). I finally figured out if i make it clip correctly then it draws it correctly, something i planned on doing for optimization because letting the browser clip anything outside the window leads to slower draw times. Now i just have to get the other 3 panel layers clipped right and then the inital map phase is well under-way to being completed! Might have to increase the buffer from a 3x3 to a 4x4 area though in order for it to properly preload a map in all directions. Will do some testing as far as that goes though, would prefer to stick with the slightly smaller size just to avoid being a memory hog.

So hopefully soon i'll have a little guy walking around the map and behind tree's and such, first rendition i will avoid collision and pathfinding but neither should be that complicated to add (yeah right). I do have some simple pathfinding already programmed for javascript that navigated across and old starmap type thing, just have to locate which file it's in. Well lunch is almost over and I need to get some more work done! Hopefully i'll have something for people to actually play with soon, the first thing i'm shooting for is a small grassland to walk around in, then I will create a small space-station which will help test the collision and pathfinding. Not to mention it the type of map that will primarily be required for the Nemesis Star game. Seeyaz!

Life Get's in the way ...

Ok, has been WAY too long since my last post and that's going to stop now I hope. Still don't have any more time than I did a week ago, just getting a bit better at managing it. :-)

Going to begin working on this again starting first thing in the morning, though it will be the nemesis-star version of my javascript mmo and not the lychgate version. Nemesis star is more space-based and not fantasy land-based, and it has been fleshed out for a few years now on paper. I have done a fair bit of graphic testing on it already and given the current canvas support i belive it will work out better overall than to start with than lychgate, due to ease of implimentation. Maybe by next weekend I will have a link to post to start showing off the work. Well on my lunch break and it's already over, got to get back!

Will also see if i can find the initial story line and post the alpha copy of it for your review in the morning :-)

M. Hagston

General Updates

Been working here and their as I have time. I accidently (hehehe) installed the old 'Call to Power 2' on my puter ... between that and playing Fallout on the weekend I do belive I have neglected my programming for about a month now.

Things have settled down at good ole Wally World and I am on their perminant now (which i was hoping for for the benefits alone). Bad thing about working these computer jobs is that they never seem to last long and unless you work for someone like Google or Microsoft your probably not getting any bennies either. Family always comes first and my wife definatly needs medical insurance.

Nearly got my garden out! If you have a back-yard and you haven't planted a garden yet then get off your lazy ass and get out their and do it! I've started to late myself to get anything going from seed this year so we cheated and got some plants at Lowes. Not to badly priced either and some already have some little buds on them.  Couple of years back when tomatoes got to $4 a lb i was really thankfull that mine only cost me about $8-$10 total for all the 'maters i could eat! If you do plant tomatoes make sure you plant some marigolds (a flower) with them, they are a natural pest deturent for tomatoes. Planting some mint nearby (pots?) will also help to deture insects from getting into your veggies. So not only do i get all the veggies i can eat, they're chemical free. ;-)

Ok, not realy the kind of updates you were looking for aye? Ok, nothing that i'm going to show off quite yet but i nearly got the map scrolling perfected. I need to add in a few more little details then add in the ajax engine and do some load testing to and from the server.  If all goes to plan it should provide smooth scrolling with no noticeable loading. The only problem that it may have is when it actualy has to render the map. It takes about 3 seconds to render a 3x3 map (9 of my map grids). With the way the new system works it only has to redraw 3 of them instead of all 9. That's still a 1 second delay though which in human terms is very noticeable.  That though is only if the redraws take the same time as the initial load time which i'm hoping it doesn't as it is also loading the graphics as well. The new firebug timers don't work nearly as well as the old ones. At least they don't seem to provide the extremely detailed information that they once did. Time will tell!

Matthew's Miracle Diet

Ok, want a diet that works? This is especially for computer geek types like me who tend to sit at their computer a lot. Try not being able to get a full time job building websites and such and having to work full time night-shift at Walmart along with holding at least 1 part time job. Just being out 16+ hours a day means you won't even have time to bother with pesky things like food or sleep. :p Not to mention all that excersize that you'll be getting! Ugh, i'm too old for this sh*t. But hey! it's keeping my bills paid and the people at their are great, a few lazy people (but you'll find those in any job) but none of the back-stabbing that tends to flutter around office jobs. Just temporary work though, helping to reconstruct a walmart into a super-walmart so I maybe have a month left their tops. I do plan on getting back to work this weekend though on the engine as getting a working game that can generate me some mula may be my only option out of this hole.

On the plus side i think i've lost about 20 lbs now and just getting into my 3rd week working their. Not that i was really over weight but was starting to put on some pudgy marriage weight. :p

ok, gotta go don't wanna be late! Cheers!

Perfectionism

Wikipedia ...

Perfectionism, in psychology, is a belief that perfection can and should be attained. In its pathological form, perfectionism is a belief that work or output that is anything less than perfect is unacceptable. At such levels, this is considered an unhealthy belief, and psychologists typically refer to such individuals as maladaptive perfectionists.

Ok, i realize trying to make everything flow absolutely perfect is unhealthy and cannot really be achieved ... but i just can't help it. I mean it has to work right! The lives of villagers depend on it! Ok, not really ..  :p

Making good progress on getting the map to flow correctly though! What i've done is created 9 arrays that hold the basic map data. each of these arrays draws to a seperate canvas that is 2048x1024 ... i do this in order to speed processing. While i *could* try and make that canvas buffer larger that in itself would run into more problems, mainly having to go through map reloads. the 3x3 buffer allows me to reload and redraw areas off-screen and reduce the amount of time that the useri has to spend reloading data.

Also, the 3x3 array is dynamic ... meaning that the data as position 1,1 may not always be what's in the top, left corner. I simply have a pseudo-pointer (javascript doesn't do real pointers), that points to the current top-left of the drawing area. since the width and height of the array are fixed this allows me to draw the overflow sections by using 1st grade math ... p1+3 (right side), p1+1 (bottom), p1+4 (buttom right). Very simple!

The biggest trick is having to fit the pieces together smoothly. Because the minimap is click-able and draggable this changes a lot of the reference data. The good thing is that once i get this working, the same math applies to square tile-based layouts as it does to isometric tile based layouts.

And thus no code to show off today, perhaps soon though but again i only allow myself to work on this for a little while each week as bills come first. bleh!

Once i get this done, build some simple animation routines and get the basic collision working I will start making some mini-games in order to test the engine out properly. Not sure what i'm going to do first, i'm thinking perhaps a canvas-based tower defense game.

Guilds in RPG's

Not going to spend long on this today, too many things on the "honey-do" list not to mention sites that I need to get completed to keep food in our bellies. For starters in most mmo's their seem's to be a severe lack of real guild support for the players. Not to mention the fact that most of these mmo's are mearly about the grind and getting levels and seem to forget about other things.

Umm, idk why we can't get more female players ... i mean there's like 7 billion different monsters to kill! Ugh!...

That seems to be the general attitude that i've heard from admins and developers of games. Ok, well I guess i have the luxury of having a wife that likes to playe rpgs, well at least now she does. She very much doesn't like the grind and prefers to up her other crafting type skills and most monster-killing that she does do is related to that. Now i know that not all women prefer this type of thing ... which is really my point, no one strickly likes any one thing. But I digress I do seem to be getting slightly off topic.

The whole point being in order to even make these expansions of what guild can do, you also have to expand the content available to them. The only real problem with any of this is the fact that it expands the possibility of cheaters and scammers, but the only real way to deal with that is with the help and support of your player base.

In addition to guild and town buildings/housing their should be ways to organize this ... for both the players and the guild owners. Here is a breakdown of my ideas ...


MMORPG Guild Structures ...

• Nation -> County -> Town
  
  To form a Nation you have to have at least 2 Counties.
  
  To form a County you have to have at least 2 Towns
  
  
• Society -> Faction -> Circle
  
  Societies are secret clans, they may not form cities (that would defeat the "secret" part).
  Members of a circle cannot see members of other circles, only the officers and leaders can see this amount of structure.
  
  A society themselves may be public and have an office so that they may give off a certain appearence. The factions and circles however, and their intentions,  always remain secret. For example your Women's Society has a faction named the Black Widow's that is dedicated to only killing male players.
  
  
• Clan -> Guild -> Squad
  
  "Guild" is the starting point, they may break their members into squads if they wish. Multipul guilds can form a clan. You can be a Member of multipul guilds (i.e.: Your a member of Knights of Ni and the Gardening guild.)
  
  Guilds are usually based in towns that they help to support, but they are not required (obviously unless the town you build your 'base' in requires your help).
  
  Guilds can build bases in multipul towns ... for example Your Guild, The Brotherhood of Bronze has their main office built in Noviscus but a minor recruitment type office in nearly every other major town.

All of the above should be able to share resources, though societies this is obviously limited due to their nature. All of these resources though take up space so you have to have a place to put these donations.

This is definatly the early stages of this idea and up for change. But i think you see the basic idea that I am getting too ... more possibilities for players and stop trying to limit them. They do all of this anyways!!! If you impose a limit of 15 players per guild, all they do is make multipul guilds. Impliment it into the game, keep their possibilities open and just let them have fun with it.

Expansion on Housing

Ok, going to expand on my ideas for player owned housing. The idea of the players being able to build and modify the existing landscape will be one of the core elements on the actual javascript engine. This, like all other items beyond basic drawing routines will be built as a module so it can be added too and/or modified easily.

In the other game I am developing, Nemesis Star (a space-based MMOR), actual habitable planets are somewhat rare so the players have the option of construction massive space stations. In addition to this they will be able to rent sections of their newly constructed station out. As such it makes sense to me, since i have this similar idea in multiple games, that it should be built into the core engine. Not to mention the fact that a great portion of online players really like the idea of having their own little piece of the world that they own.

I have played way too many mmorpg's in my life, quite a few of them in their early release and beta stages. A great many of them totally flop on their ideas for housing, perhaps due to a lack of understanding of the wants and needs of their player base? Or problems due to lack of available land, or allowing them to build houses pretty much anywhere. I remember one 3D FPS types mmorpg that some friends and I played, we put our house on top of a gigantic tree. 

Anyways I'm rambeling a bit here so here's  an expansion of the list of core ideas that should be addressed.

• Guild Housing.
  
  Almost all players join a guild and as such they should be allowed special housing just for them! Any housing built for the guild is owned by the guild itself, not any one player. This is to prevent characters who go inactive but control the resources of the guild.
  
  
• Hiring Workers.
  
  Not all players will want to spend the time leveling up construction and building skills just to add a single room to their house. You should be able to hire other players to build your house for you! Not only does this encourage a few to work these skills, but it opens up a whole new market for the players beyond just crafting a billion arrows to sell.
  
  
• Hiring NPC's.
  
  In order to get people from spamming the town square with their goods they are wanting to sell you will have the ability to hire a merchant to sell them for you. This obviously is not a new idea for any of those who have played Ultima Online. In addition you can hire protection for your house, expecially seeing how you can be attacked by "monsters".
  
  
• Traps and Magical devices.
  
  Certain sensitive rooms you may wish to put traps on if you are part of a PvP town. Their will of course be areas that you can store your hard-earned items but anything stored your house withing this type of town is up for grabs by an expert thief. You may have to feed and pay an NPC guard untill the day they die, but an Iron Golem never sleeps and doesn't care for gold.
  
  
• To Catch A Thief ...
  
  In order to prevent a massive uprising of theives their has to be a way for players to bring them to justic. And as such your traps and NPC guards always have a chance to capture the player roaming around your home. This can lead to prison time or even public hangings, it is entirely up to the town. I'm sure their will have to be quite a bit of tweaking work in order to get it to run smoothly, but it is an idea that has been mentioned repeatedly across many different mmorpg's but has never been taken seriously. 
  
  
• Environmental Changes ...
  
  Due to the fact that the map is saved on the server and delivered dynamicly you will be able to make some changes to the map itself. Things such as planting trees, cutting trees down that are in your way, leveling the ground out and more. Say for example your land area borders a mountain / cliff area. You do have the option to begin a tunnel and continue your town inside of the mountain. The downside, to that is if your town get's taken over by mob's, they also take over your new dunegon.
  
  
• Unbuildable Areas ...
  
  Their are none, but some areas may require a great deal more work to ... pacify .. than others. Not to mention if you just start throwing up a house just anywhere you may find the kings guards on your doorstep demanding their taxes and other fees. Or perhaps you build your house within a PvP town's area without their permission ... they now have the right to take the taxes out of your hide.
  
  
• Underwater Cities ...
  
  Yes, when i said you should be able to build anywhere ... with the right technology and skills ... you can build anywhere!
  
  
  

That about sums up the core ideas I have for housing, next i will touch on player guilds, factions, towns, nations.

-M

Goal for Lychgate

Nothing to report yet on my new logo page, having some problems still with the icons hopping around like little bunny rabbits. Pretty sure I know how to remedy it, just have to make the time to do it. But as always paying jobs come before any hobby work!!

Anyways, my primary goal for lychgate is PvE, not PvP. Almost all games that i've played concentrate more on PvP than anything else (except for graphics). Me, i'd rather have more of a real story-line and some real character buildup / skill base.

For example, one of the things that really made Ultima Online was the fact that it had a large skill-base and PoH (Player Owned Housing). Their biggest problem was also PoH ... the world seems quite large untill you figure in a hundred thousand players all trying to build their new houses on top of each other. 

My ideas for remedying this? ...

• Super large maps / play area.
  
  The Biggest problem with this idea, beyond the obvious server-storage issues, is movement time. This is easy to remedy though by allowing a more intriquite teleport and gateing system. Also allowing players to build transportation networks (roads, ships, ect.) to increase travel speed.
  
  
• Housing Decay.
  
  Yes, in real life if you don't properly maintain your house it will fall right on top of your head! Players who are inactive or just never visit their house will find that have decayed. While they will not dissapear entirely for quite some time, other players can take over the property and fix it up!
  
  
• Housing Prices.
  
  Prices for player housing in most of these games are way too cheap. Plus if you are within the bounderies of a kingdom you will have taxes to pay if the current king (emporer, mayor, whatever) deems it so. To offset these prices a rental system should be put in place as well. 
  
  
• PvE (Player vs Environment)
  
  Built your house right on top of a goblin village? You may find the goblins attacking your new house then! If you build a house / town / anything, you will have to defend it, this is not a human-friendly environment untill you make it so.
  
  
• PvP (Player vs Player)
  
  If you are part of a town that participates in PvP then your house and town can be attacked by other players as well as "monsters".
  
  
• Dynamic Construction
  
  You are not limited to a prefabricated anything. Build up your house one room at a time or all at once. Don't forget to put a roof on it if you have wood floors though as that will increase the decay rate of your home. When you purchase rights to build within a kingdom, you actualy purchase a piece of land to build on, so if you wish you can build a stone wall around your entire lot.
  
  

That's it for now, have to head out for the day!

-M