EQ Never

cinge_sl said:

There was a post before from someone about UO. They had a nifty AI system or something but they had to scrap it because players would just camp a stage forever, never letting it expand.

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That's not AI-type stuff, that's ecology. We had numerous talks with UO devs at Nevrax back when Ryzom was started about it. And the end was that it was a "Turing error" (it was Alan Turing who said something like "when I design a submarine, I don't look at fish biology", and yes, it was his analogy for computer stuff): to make a dynamic world, simulating an ecology isn't the correct answer. The ecology behaved exactly as would an ecology react when you introduce an invasive species of fast reproducing apex predators (the players): it collapsed.

If you want a dynamic world, you can use a fields system (that's a physics term: a "field" is an abstraction where you have a value at each point in the world). Take the dynamic orcs the devs have placed as an example.

Ok, first, your world has a population of 10,000 orcs. Not one more, not one less. An orc gets killed, 22mn later, it respawns. No more and no less. But it doesn't respawn at its "spawn point", because there's no such thing as a spawn point. That's where the fields come in.

Ok, your orc likes forests and camping roads to ambush travelers. So, you have a "Forested" field, whose value is equal to all the trees in the current square (you use a square mesh, to keep memory and calculations reasonable) plus all 8 adjacent squares. You also have a "Road" field, with max value on squares where there's a road, and a decreased value in adjacent squares, say 1/2, and a 1/4 on squares once removed, and so on. Those fields are static once the world is generated and change only if the world is altered by a Rallying Cry (or maybe a guild installs itself, build a road to the adjacent city and plants some trees?).

Your orc hates guards, so it has a field "Guarded", which is equal to the number of guards nearby. That's a dynamic field, since guards move, get killed, respawn, etc.

Your orc wants to rob travellers, so there's a field "Travels", which increases every time an humanoid NPC goes thru the square, and slowly decays.

Orcs hate get hunted, so there's another decaying field, "Orc kills", which increases every time you kill an orc nearby, and decays a bit more slowly than the travel one.

Finally, orcs have various degrees of gregarity. Orc Pawns, Scouts and Centurions have no problem being on their own, but an Orc Shaman would like to have at least one friend orc around, while the Orc Legionnaires needs 4-5 orcs to boss, and Emperor Crush never goes without 15 orcs retinue. So there's an "Orc presence" field.

You also add "Orcish Camps" whose presence orcs like (Orc camps put a bigger value than Orc outposts, and the Orc Army Camp that spawns during a Rallying Cry an ever bigger presence).

So, now, you have an Orc Legionnaire that was killed 22mn ago, and who respawns. What happens is that all those fields get combined to make a global field "orc legionnaire respawn", which combines the attractiveness of the area, the risks (guards and kills), the spoils (roads and travellers), the current orcish presence, plus a small random factor, and it gives the Orc Legionnaire a best location to spawn in. Pof, that's where the orc spawns (another Legionnaire spawning 1mn later might spawn close by - but it has a slightly different random perturb, plus things have changed, travellers moved, guards moves, so it could spawn somewhere else).

And you get real stuff. If you have adventurers going around and slaughtering orcs, the orcs are going to leave. Unless there's a lot of merchants travelling the road nearby, in which case the orcs are going to stay a bit longer.

That's a very simple process, it is resilient to player wanton destruction (all it makes is the orcs moving somewhere else), it has an hysteresis built in (once enough orcs have been displaced, the orc camp despawns because its own attractiveness has gone down enough, and without the camp, the orcs leave en masse). It reacts well to changing conditions (the evil minded guild plant copses of wood and create a road that NPC merchants will travel - poof, more orcs incursions around. Divert a stream, chases some guards from the farms close by, and an orc camp will surely get established soon).

And then, of course, there's the combat AI, which is entirely different.

Grumpus_sl said:

Just have a system where like they said, mobs act the way they would actually act. Every action has a value and the boss responds to those values on the fly.

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It's a bit simplistic. The "aggro" is a good basic model, it dictates your target. What you need, rather than the base model of increasing aggo with modifiers is a per-ability aggro list with highly dynamic values.

There's a general "threat" value, which is, for example, equal to the current DPS (not damage done, DPS) over the last 15s, from the each player, plus a potential threat which is equal to the theoretical DPS the character class could do. Then this base value is used as one of the input of the "per-abilty" aggro. Say, the mob is a kind of melee, and has 5 abilities: its basic attack, a leap, a bleed dot, a cripple snare and an aoe sword sweep.

The aggro for basic attack is a combination of general threat, plus proximity, plus current health (if someone has low health, enough that you can kill it in one or two swings, it makes sense to deal with him first). The leap is a slightly different combo of general threat and current health (with proximity useless), PLUS the aggro of all the other three abilities. The dot is a again a combo of threat, health and the presence of the dot (and he's going to apply the dot only if the target is in range and one of the top 2 or 3 of his threat - otherwise he keeps the dot in reserve). The sweep is the combination of the aggro/health of not just the guy considered, plus 80% of everyone in range around him. The snare uses how much the player moves around and what escape abilities its class has (I'm assuming the AI doesn't want to cheat and looks at which movement ability you actually have slotted).

Each ability generates a different ability aggro, and that means the mob is going to use different abilities against different targets, and switch targets fast (here, the mob may suddendly leap on the wizard who's running around and blasting, bleed and snare it, and might keep smacking on it, or use the fact that the guy was passing just next to another guy to chain with a sword sweep). And yes, casters become deadly because they pick targets of opportunity fast.

Quaid_sl said:

I just really hope I have the option to drop a year of sub money and buy all the classes. Really not interested in jumping through their bullshit hoops to load out my character how I want it loaded out. Marvel Heroes recently did this for $200 I think, and while I wasn't interested in dropping that kind of scratch on THAT abortion of a game, I'd certainly do it for this one.

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I really hope classes aren't what they're going to monetize. Especially if classes acquisition is done via quests or other similar stuff, and not "kill 200 shadowknight NPCs to unlock the shadowknight class" kind of shit. In general I don't like the "unlock shit by spending x time or by spending money to do it instantly" in F2P games, and that's especially true for core gameplay elements such as classes or skills.