29 Dec, 2010, David Haley wrote in the 41st comment:
Votes: 0
Scandum said:
Lets assume you have a coordinate system and have all the information, how are you going to display this non graphically?

You are answering an entirely different question, namely one of interface. The statement made earlier was that one had a fully functional system that addressed the various concerns I brought up, all without using coordinates. That is the statement I was talking about.

You are talking about game design with respect to how to present your information to your players. That is not what I was talking about, although it is an interesting question in and of itself.

DemiGod said:
you may feel that it is not complete

It's not that it's complete or incomplete. I've tried to take pains several times to say that it's perfectly fine to do whatever thing depending on what your game design goals are.

What I object to is that I bring up a list of questions, and you say that you have taken care of all the problems without using coordinates, and now it turns out that you have not actually solved them, you simply have different design goals. That is fine, of course. But it means that you did not solve the problems brought up, so I'm not sure why you said that you had.

In the end, the goal is to develop a fun system for players. I'm not saying that the issues I brought up are critical to a fun game. I was giving them as examples of why you might need coordinates after all – if you want that level of detail. Anybody who says that they don't want coordinates but do want detailed positional information needs to understand the trade-offs that are being made. You need to understand that some notions simply won't make sense in your world, such as two-pronged flanking where movement speed matters etc. Is it a mistake to change the design goals? No, of course not. It's perfectly fine. But solving a different set of design goals is not solving the more complex positional problem.
29 Dec, 2010, DemiGod wrote in the 42nd comment:
Votes: 0
David Haley said:
Whether or not you need coordinates here depends on how much you care about position. Yes, you can just "hide behind" a car or table as KaVir suggested, but then you've lost the fact that if I circle around the car you're not hiding behind it anymore. So, if you care about things like that, you need at least basic notions of position beyond simply "hiding behind" the car. Whether or not you care depends on your game design.


The flanking command did take care of the question that you proposed to ME at least. So if you're simply going to critique the way I ask questions, we could be here all night.

The relative position of the player can be disguised to him or her based on the output text and attack/defense modifiers applied to said player. I don't believe I ever said I want exact coordinates of a player as they move through the room. I wanted to be able to offer a cover system and this does just that. Whether you know that I am by the tire or the grill doesn't really matter, in my opinion, and I never stated that I was looking for that kind of detail. I don't see what positioning information you would need beyond the system knowing that there is an object between you and the mobile.

What I did do, wrongly, was to use inaccurate coordinate terminology to inquire and explain the long range system [cliff or building window]. This would better be represented with a grid system, from what I believe Kavir was trying to explain. Coordinates could be of use, I suppose, to create a cover system but I garnered from this thread that it was not what I wanted to use to solve my issue.

I appreciate any and all comments and criticisms but I do believe that I solved exactly what I set out to.
29 Dec, 2010, DemiGod wrote in the 43rd comment:
Votes: 0
29 Dec, 2010, David Haley wrote in the 44th comment:
Votes: 0
Well, solving what you set out to do is very good – but I am not sure why you are insisting that you have solved the problems that I posed when you haven't. I think that you might be mixing up your particular design choices with the greater question about coordinates, positional information, etc. But, since you are happy with your design, that's all there is to say here, isn't it? :smile:

In case you are curious (and for whatever it's worth) the objection that I have to your cover system – from the perspective of realistic movement – is that cover can disappear depending on where people's relative positions are. Flanking is fine for limited scenarios, but it does not suffice to say "flank Bob" to automatically remove Bob's cover. What if the place you'd need to be is in fact unreachable? What if moving to flank him actually puts you in a protected position with respect to other players? Where are we both now with respect to George and Frank? And so on. Now, again, this really isn't a superior system, it is merely one that attempts to model more realistic positional information. I think you might be taking this as criticism but it's not. I'm just trying to understand why you told me that all of my problems have been addressed when really they haven't at all – at least not in general. Perhaps you have addressed them as far as your design is concerned in that you don't care about them for your game, but this is (I thought) a general conversation, and hopefully useful to other people than yourself (or myself or ……).

DemiGod said:
That's supposed to be an object between you and the mobile.

What are you referring to?
29 Dec, 2010, DemiGod wrote in the 45th comment:
Votes: 0
Understandable. I did mean all of that in regards to questions only proposed to me, and I did say earlier that the system did not cover all the bases that you were discussing in general.

You are right, the flanking aspect could put you in cover compared to someone else. This is something my team may decide to investigate but currently, that level of detail simply isn't necessary. I imagine it as unless you want to be behind cover, you are not behind cover. If you flank my position, being behind a car, then you could still simply be standing upright and quite accessible to other people's fire until you actually decide "oh crap, i better get down and behind this car for cover." If it's a big truck, yea I see your point to the realism of it. But I suppose that level of detail isn't necessary now and I wonder if, for a text game [yes I know that some systems can be even more convoluted than graphical ones] the strictness of that visual variable could even become cumbersome if you had to decipher exactly where everyone is all the time.

So yes, I see your point, but the detail you are involving I believe could actually impact the game negatively unless a really easy system was provided to quickly assess the room at any given time - especially during a battle.
29 Dec, 2010, DemiGod wrote in the 46th comment:
Votes: 0
Quote
I don't see what positioning information you would need beyond the system knowing that there is an object between you and the mobile.


I meant a car between you and the person you are fighting [make sure to check the previous page for the first post].
29 Dec, 2010, David Haley wrote in the 47th comment:
Votes: 0
Fair enough. I agree that more realistic positional information is very difficult to display using a traditional one-stream-only, text-only, linear-cursor display. In fact, I might make a stronger statement and say that it's so hard to display that way that it does, as you say, impact the game negatively. But I believe that such displays are not really the most interesting ones, and are in these days an unnecessary limitation. You can work around them using client plugins or custom clients. This is however a discussion for another topic. :smile:
29 Dec, 2010, Cratylus wrote in the 48th comment:
Votes: 0
So, when I have time, I've been working on vehicle systems for the purpose of
cool awesomeness. Part of the project spawned unexpected but (in my view) necessary
tangents. For example, if I get in my tank and try to drive it into a cave, should that work?
If I am in a small room and shoot the main gun, should I be able to hit something in
the next room? Should everything in this room be annihilated by the blast, or at
least should meat based livings be stunned?

And if I can shoot into other rooms, how far should I be able to see? And how do I determine
what is within my 10-room radius range? Suddenly I find myself unable to answer
these questions without a system that keeps track of the physical relationships between
objects in rooms…and more than that: what does it mean in terms of line-of-sight when
my target is 3 rooms east and 2 rooms south but there is at least one room in
that diagonal path that is supposed to be in a building?

One might be tempted to look at ships because the sea has few obstructions, and so it's
simpler, right? But if I have a ship with multiple rooms, What does that look like on the outside?
Does my ship have presence in multiple exterior rooms? How do I handle "spotting" other ships
and land? I still need a pretty sophisticated system of range calculation, azimuth finding, and
location tracking.

So I was working on this and happened to mention my project to some guy, he's like "lol I
got all that shiz solved, you are so 1999". I'm like "show me" so I log into his mud and he shows
off his awesome naval system which includes AI combat.

You know what his awesome naval combat system was? An object you carry that drags you
around "sea theme" rooms and gives you a bunch of nautical chats that simulate very poorly
the experience of being near a captain that yells a lot and is engaged in a fight with someone else
you don't understand the logistics of.

I didn't really have the heart to tell him that I was looking to have the player think carefully about his
own moves in relation to someone else's position, intent, travel, and armament, and make
tactical choices while inside a vessel that has a relationship with its environment.

"It's very nice," I said, and let him glow with smug superior satisfaction.

Hey it works for him, right? Who am I to say.

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net
02 Jan, 2011, Ludwig wrote in the 49th comment:
Votes: 0
You don't have to add line of sight features to your coordinate mud until the end. For now just start giving coordinates to your players, items, objects, and mobiles so they can exist within a 50x50 room (or whatever dimensions you want).
02 Jan, 2011, Runter wrote in the 50th comment:
Votes: 0
Collision detection in 1d games is pretty easy.
02 Jan, 2011, quixadhal wrote in the 51st comment:
Votes: 0
Cratylus said:
And if I can shoot into other rooms, how far should I be able to see? And how do I determine
what is within my 10-room radius range? Suddenly I find myself unable to answer
these questions without a system that keeps track of the physical relationships between
objects in rooms…and more than that: what does it mean in terms of line-of-sight when
my target is 3 rooms east and 2 rooms south but there is at least one room in
that diagonal path that is supposed to be in a building?


Kindof reminds me of an idea I had a while back. I was making the argument for npc's, players, objects, and rooms all being essentialy the same thing. The only real difference between a room and a sword is that room descriptions pertain to the interior of the object, while sword descriptions pertain to the exterior. Of course, there are details like rooms being very heavy and attatched to other rooms, but really…. if you were to just give all things interior AND exterior descriptions, and ensure that everything always has an environment (the largest of which would be "the void", if you like)….

The point I'm eluding to here is that there's no technical reason why you have to only have a single layer of rooms. Nightmare already had the idea of "enter" and "exit" exits as distinct things from NSEWUD. With a bit of fiddling, you could probably make nested rooms where the interior rooms maintain their coordinate relationship to each other, but interior rooms have their own finer-grained coordinates. Thus, your ship example would appear to be a single "room" of whatever size your coordinate system allows, moving around the map, but the ship itself might have a dozen interior rooms. To do it right, you'd have to have some kind of flags to say which "interior" rooms can directly interact with the outside – people on deck should be able to shoot (or be shot) from outside, but people below deck, probably not.

The last bit of the puzzle is how the outside can interact with the inside. If I'm on another ship looking at yours, do I get to see the sum of all the players/npcs/objects in any accessible room (IE: the deck and riggings), or do I just see a summary and don't get to choose specific targets? In the case of our sea battle, either way would be fair… I can see sharpshooters picking off individuals, or cannon blasts of grape shot randomly hitting whomever is on deck.

Now, for amusement, extend the idea outwards a bit. An area becomes nothing more than a giant "room" that happens to contain a great many other rooms. A "world" is a room that contains a bunch of areas. Having nested levels of containment makes for interesting weather systems, area effect spells, natural disasters… or really confused players if the admins can pick them up and move them around at will. :)
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