new engine and a hope..

[MalaTempora]

sorry if i open a new thread to just yell my only and unique hope "to see soon"
the "solidity" of the players..
I hope to see this game put off the "ethereal" feeling that so many mmorpg have, this will give a lot (IMVHO) of bonuses to this game:
- the zergs will suffer becoming nearly impossible to attack a little group with all the total number.. (with solidity none can stand where i stand.. so i can really
be a block to be destroyed before heading mage or archers)
- there will be no more ppl passing over you ... maybe also mob solidity?
-tactics in fights will be much more deep
-zerg (yea again) will suffer also on movin... think on holdin the bridge with
a little strong and able number versus a lot of ppl zergin on.. :-D fantastic?

just my thoughts..

Mala Tempora (Hunter Ignis)
Massenzio Treesimo (Knight Ignis)

[UmarilsStillHere]

As much as solidity would help the game it has be spoken about before and the most we could deal with might be a knight spell to create a sort of "wall" stopping people from passing him untill he dies.

To have everyone 'solid' is to much load on the server.

[Pizdzius]

That's true, collision detection would really slow down the game and increase lag ;S

[Froste]

Not to mention we wouldn't be able to enter forts due to all the dead corpses (if anyone remembers) :p

[DemonMonger]

perhaps if we could pass through dead bodies but not living ;)

[UmarilsStillHere]

perhaps if we could pass through dead bodies but not living ;)

Because having to make solid entire zergs and run constant hit tests off moving targets wont increase server load?

It would be great if it could be done, but for now the servers just arnt good enough.

[MalaTempora]

Because having to make solid entire zergs and run constant hit tests off moving targets wont increase server load?

It would be great if it could be done, but for now the servers just arnt good enough.

thanks all for the answer..

Yes this could raise the workload on the servers, BUT this can be done, truely, and this
can really give a lot of BONUS to all the game..

a bit of lag more but a lot of fun (also, there will be less bug with people vanishing from
your face... cause if they are "BLOCKED" by friends on his back..they cant go away :D
and die like a real spartan do :D

just my 2 cents, but having Living Solid (and etheral dead body also :D) can raise the
fun so much..

[_Enio_]

http://regnumonline.com.ar/forum/showthread.php?t=49056&highlight=solid
http://regnumonline.com.ar/forum/showthread.php?t=46731&highlight=solid
http://regnumonline.com.ar/forum/showthread.php?t=25552&highlight=solid

[MalaTempora]

http://regnumonline.com.ar/forum/showthread.php?t=49056&highlight=solid
http://regnumonline.com.ar/forum/showthread.php?t=46731&highlight=solid
http://regnumonline.com.ar/forum/showthread.php?t=25552&highlight=solid

lol i see the point...

so a little idea to help knight (and maybe barbs too) to become the
"first line" :
give them a spell (or better a automatic-feature) that "if stay in position stand still" for some seconds enemy that passed you throught will be autoknocked..

so this force them to fight the first line without passing over like you're a ghost..


but my hope is that solid char will be implemented in the future!

@enio: I read the threads you mark on, in one a guy tell that in the old UO times (i was
a hardcore player of UO) the solidity was implemented and work well..
TRUE : solidity in UO work using the "stamina" statistic --> you can walk over a guy if you
are FULL stamina but doing this will remove half your stamina so this will let you move over
one guy (losing half stamina) but not passing over 2 (unless you use potions to recharge
stamina) this give FUN, a some sort of REALISTIC block (you can dodge the first in a a crowded
zone..but not passing over a "moltitude") and have a very good feeling when fighting versus
other players in narrow zone.. giving the feeling of a war field and the need to kill the "wall guys" to reach the 2nd line ones.. (healers and mage in uo)
People hidden (stealther in UO like thieves or similar ) can do the same.. just walk over the
first (remaining hidden but suffering a check if remember clear the thing.. and my main char
have 100 stealth skill and 100 hide skill :-D) but lose stamina and need to wait to pass over
again..

this was exploited (or better USED against you :-D ) by Looters (players expert on blockin
your way out from heavy mobs, that will kill you so they can rob your dead bodies.. yes
in UO when you die all your possessions remain on body... :D) and by some others, but
this feature was a real add on "realism" (ok it's a game :D) so i can easily remember when
we fight clan vs clan (guild wars in UO was added and was fun) in narrow zone..

fort door will become fun battle, and i read in some thread that this can lead to a mess in
exiting from a "taken fort" when all the enmy are dead... yea true.. but it is realistic no?

[Pizdzius]

but my hope is that solid char will be implemented in the future!


apart from the rest of your interesting post which I am not quite healthy enough to give you some not stupid answer, this part made me wonder a bit.

There are games like Single Player ones (let's say, Fallout3) and MMO ones (like Darkfall) where this solid player thing is essential, mostly because combat is real-time - you attack and block with your own decisions and the result of battle depends on your skill. In games like that collision detection is quite important for every hit.

In games that use mostly autoattack and just buttoned skills like Regnum, World of Warcraft and other similar ones, this isn't needed. It would be a "luxury", since it's not essential in the game's design. And that luxury could really drain down performance, and increase the lag - believe me, not "a bit".
It's a not a huge corporation which can supply us with great quality servers like Darkfall does.

Also that "luxury" can be exploited like it was in Age of Conan I think (remember kicking players from bridges?) or Oblivion (yes the best way to kill all the Imperial guards is to push them off the edge...)

[MalaTempora]

apart from the rest of your interesting post which I am not quite healthy enough to give you some not stupid answer, this part made me wonder a bit.


hi Pizdius, (btw thanks a lot for the 1000 laught you make me reading your
very wonderful comics :D)


There are games like Single Player ones (let's say, Fallout3) and MMO ones (like Darkfall) where this solid player thing is essential, mostly because combat is real-time - you attack and block with your own decisions and the result of battle depends on your skill. In games like that collision detection is quite important for every hit.

i was an old time player that stopped mmorpg in DaoC times, cause work
and reallife drain all free /spare times :D so forgive me, i don't have seen
Darkfall and Fallout3 (i've played the Fallout1 indeed... like all the Ultima
series from 1 to 7 and others..)



In games that use mostly autoattack and just buttoned skills like Regnum, World of Warcraft and other similar ones, this isn't needed. It would be a "luxury", since it's not essential in the game's design. And that luxury could really drain down performance, and increase the lag - believe me, not "a bit".
It's a not a huge corporation which can supply us with great quality servers like Darkfall does.

Also that "luxury" can be exploited like it was in Age of Conan I think (remember kicking players from bridges?) or Oblivion (yes the best way to kill all the Imperial guards is to push them off the edge...)

have to look at darkfall example, (and oblivion yes..i remember this cool single
player game :D ) and probably i'll pay more xymer in the hope that NGD
will buy better servers?? :D

[Pizdzius]

have to look at darkfall example, (and oblivion yes..i remember this cool single
player game :D ) and probably i'll pay more xymer in the hope that NGD
will buy better servers?? :D

Very good idea ;D

[Erikose]

That's true, collision detection would really slow down the game and increase lag ;S

Metin2 has collision detection which works fine. It's the numpties that play it that let that particular grindfest down. xD

[Pizdzius]

Metin2 has collision detection which works fine. It's the numpties that play it that let that particular grindfest down. xD

Tibia does too, but Metin still sucks like Tibia even if it's 3d ;P

[Erikose]

Tibia does too, but Metin still sucks like Tibia even if it's 3d ;P

Lol xD

True

[Razvan87]

real colision system suck big time.I played age of conan ,darkfall and it is realy weird...

So a big NO from me

[ArcticWolf]

That's true, collision detection would really slow down the game and increase lag ;S

Exactly.

I can't tell you how painful it is to design a reliable, fast and accurate collision & boundary detection algorithm without being too technical, but I'll do my best:

First, you have to check if you can move to a certain position, so you have to query the objects along the path (i.e.: if you want to move from A to B and you have a wall in the middle, you shouldn't be able to move, unless you're Chuck Norris or Surak). But that requires you to first calculate the path and then query the objects. With static boundaries it's easy because you can load the map in memory (you don't have to re-calculate them, so why not cache the data?), and pathfinding isn't difficult. The problem is, well, you do this for each movement message the client sends. And that's awful.

Now, suppose you have a super-efficient algorithm, but it doesn't do any checking on speed. That's right, you got speedhacks! How can we avoid that? We can calculate the distance over time. Sounds simple, and in fact it is simple, but that adds to your previously super-efficient algorithm, which is now a little less efficient. And you end up having roughly twice the memory footprint than your previous version, because now you have to "remember" your previous position.

And add status effects, such as paralysis or slow-down spells. That requires you to do some extra checking.

Ok, no problem, we can live with that. Now it comes the really awful part: checking against mobile objects. Now you have to tell your now-a-little-less-efficient-pathfinding-and-collision-detection-algorithm that it has to ask for all the objects along the path, check if there are any of those objects, check if you can move to that physical spot, check your speed, check if you can move and then move. That requires more memory.

Well, we could make use of parallel computing and multithreading! Not so fast, buddy. Two objects can't be at the same place, at the same time (unless you make characters non-collisional), so now you have to make your entire movement system thread-safe or process-safe. And that adds more overhead to your now-not-so-efficient algorithm. Split the map, and make boundaries non-safe environments, or maybe define groups based on density and topology and then assign a thread to it.

Or just throw your idea away and keep it simple.

:)


PS: And remember that you have to flush changes to a database, and that movement functions are called quite a lot per user (and that you may have a lot of users online).

PPS: And, just in case, assembler won't do the trick for you this time. It's not worth it.

PPPS: You don't have to do all this for each message the client sends, because you should make an equipotential system: that is, ignore repeated or similar messages within a period of time.

That period of time may be variable, depending on the ratio of total incoming messages and total repeated incoming messages over time.

[surak]

.....

:clapclap:

[NaturalBornKiller]

That's true, collision detection would really slow down the game and increase lag ;S

It would not, if done properly

[Razvan87]

No solidity ...bye

[ArcticWolf]

It would not, if done properly

Which requires massive re-factoring, that at this point is not worth it, IMHO.

It would take months, if not a whole year, to get the system working properly.

[Snoid]

(about collition detection)

Ok, we can understand that solid mobile objects are difficult or imposible to implement. But maybe we can hope for some more realistic physics. And im not talking about shadows or light only (hey, nice work, but i wont use it).

A crazy idea would be a knight skill (to be developed) that makes that knight a wall, literally, granting her solidity against enemy players (like any rock out there) and of course, she cant move while it's active. Yeah, i said it was crazy.

Other changes could be (not about collition, but im still on topic -see title-):

Gravity: I'd love to see little dmg if the player falls down from certain distance.

Fire burns: Lava and other heat sources should deal some damage too.

Improved AI: Actually mobs and NPC artificial intelligence is poor. I dont know a lot about it, but I think a little effort and creativity could make Regnum "life" more "alive". What happened to that old topic about monster factions, fighting each other? And what about (this one is mine) mobs migration? Make monsters move from one zone to another, that would make leveling more like a quest, not just killing the same mobs at the same places.

Well, this is not a post about suggestions but about hope in the new engine. If new engine is more than shadows (and they changed sunrise, damn it!) it could be a real new world for all.

oh! and more emotes, please! it's impossible to make machinima now!

[ArcticWolf]

Ok, we can understand that solid mobile objects are difficult or imposible to implement. But maybe we can hope for some more realistic physics. And im not talking about shadows or light only (hey, nice work, but i wont use it).

A crazy idea would be a knight skill (to be developed) that makes that knight a wall, literally, granting her solidity against enemy players (like any rock out there) and of course, she cant move while it's active. Yeah, i said it was crazy.


A skill-enabled collision would be as difficult to implement (if not more) than normal collision, but it puts far less strain to the server.

In fact, I'm working on something like that for a game with some of my friends at ITBA.


Gravity: I'd love to see little dmg if the player falls down from certain distance.

Fire burns: Lava and other heat sources should deal some damage too.


That requires just three or four lines of code, but again, you should optimize your code so it's not noticeable.



Improved AI: Actually mobs and NPC artificial intelligence is poor. I dont know a lot about it, but I think a little effort and creativity could make Regnum "life" more "alive". What happened to that old topic about monster factions, fighting each other? And what about (this one is mine) mobs migration? Make monsters move from one zone to another, that would make leveling more like a quest, not just killing the same mobs at the same places.


Reinforcement learning would be a good way to deal with most of these problems. Each instance of a monster could be its own thread and gather data of each fight. A genetic algorithm could then sort the most effective strategies and produce new using pseudo-randomization (mixing tactics).

Also, it would be nice to see a population-balancing algorithm: so when you need more mobs, the server creates new instances, and when you're done then it kills them in order to save resources. A minimal population number and population growth-shrink ratio could be established so it doesn't get out of hand. Oh, and please, pool the threads.

Migration would need a zone-balancing approach. The top-rated mobs (mobs that we kill the most) should be far from "active battle areas"*, and this algorithm would rotate the population.

*This way, if you want to hunt, you should go to the other side of the map. Action in the warzone would be more interesting, I guess.

[Froste]

What happened to the supposed mob factions?

[e30G]

Why can't character collision detection be done client side? Is it too hard to prevent abuse if done that way? Couldn't the verification stage of the game be enough to detect modified files that can be used for abuse?

[ArcticWolf]

Why can't character collision detection be done client side? Is it too hard to prevent abuse if done that way? Couldn't the verification stage of the game be enough to detect modified files that can be used for abuse?

Because then the server would need to coordinate +1000 nodes of a distributed computing system, which has to be encrypted and reliable.

But there should be client-side collision detection to avoid package flooding. :P

[MalaTempora]

Which requires massive re-factoring, that at this point is not worth it, IMHO.

It would take months, if not a whole year, to get the system working properly.

as said by Outlaw a proper work could lead to a good collision detection,
and ok, as said by you this is difficult to obtain.
But, some of the point you give as "defense" against collisions detec. is about
path - algoritm of search, i don't ask about mobs solidity (that could be very
very a luxury :-D ) but of players solidity..

About the risk of having cheaters if too much work are done by clients,
i see already some people running like hell, so i suppose that some sort of
speedhack exist already... i've not fraps installed on my pc, and this is not
the right place (or thread) to talk about it, but this game have already
some fault on stopping "cheaters" hope that new engine can help in this too..

please try understand that i like this game, when i discovered it "i pass the
words" on all my friends, and many (about 5-6) of them are playing too this
nice game now, what i feel is that there are some "sides" that can be really
improved to give the perfect feeling... and giving my 2 cents is all i can do
at moment (a part of buyin some xymers..things that i do, cause i know
that dev times is not for free..:D and my fun time can have some prices..)

[ArcticWolf]

I think you got me wrong - I'd love to see collision detection! But it's just not feasible at the moment, because they should fix other problems first.

And regarding the engine, the new technology has nothing to do with the server (or it shouldn't, because you should prevent any code from your server leak to a client app). Though, I'm sure they'll do something about it to enhance UX (user experience). :)


PS: I'm sure there are some speedhacks still working, but also it may be a server error, i.e.: a heavy package-dropper connection between the server an a client that may cause it to jump. This shouldn't happen, but as I haven't seen the code I can't tell you this for sure.