f13.net

Be nice.

It just sounds like they're promising the moon here.

Nothing

That's the simple answer anyway, because we are making the gameplay we want to make, so we don't really think about the choices we've made as concessions.

Having said that, we've naturally made decissions that allow us to invest our time in AI. First and foremost we use third party software for our graphics engine, network system and other things, and thereby save us the development time needed for these facilities.

Secondly creating a 'simple' AI system with dialogue trees and the like, may require less effort to code, but it requires a huge effort to flesh it out with content. Of course our system requires content as well, but hopefully the investment we have put in creating a more autonomous AI framework will allow our content providers to focus on creating interesting stories, and not on thinking up hundreds of inane dialogue trees.

Thirdly by creating this extended AI system, we create gameplay. We create a system that our users have to get to know and a system they can use to accomplish tasks in the game. Our AIs don't beat the Turing Test, so you can't just type any old thing and have them understand you - a Language Engine is in play, and the player has to learn to use that, just like they would have to learn to use the skill system in another game. This means that fx we don't need to launch with quite as extensive a skill system as might otherwise be needed to provide an interesting game experience.

Finally we've simply focused on another type of gameplay, namely conversations and other social interactions. We are not making a system with 20 classes and 10 races that have to be both diverse and balanced over 100 vastly different levels, for both PvP and PvE and who knows what - So we avoid (or at least postpone) the massive design and balancing work that is required for that sort of game. But that was a conscious design decision and not a concession.

I hope this clears up some of your concerns.

mvh

Nis Haller Baggesen
Lead Programmer - Runestone Game Development

Yes, indirectly. The progress in the large scale storylines depends on the number of people working on them. If you foil a blackmail attempt made by an advocate for terraforming, the exposure will probably cause damage to the advocates own terraforming projects, and it might cause his collaborators and other colonists to rethink their position on the subject.

Kind regards,

Morten

Hey all,

I'm an active lurker here (good to see the activity!) and I thought I'd say my piece on stories, quests, roleplaying, tasks and whatnot. Beware of long post

The quick confession: We use quests like every other game out there. The quest structure is so basic and useful that it's hard to avoid. But I like to think we use them in a different way. How? Glad you asked

A bit of ranting first: IMO, an important and fundamental concept of roleplaying is the choice, what you DO as a character. When I can express my character through actual gameplay - how I do stuff, if I do stuff, who I do it for - AND my choices have consequences, THAT'S where I think roleplaying gets interesting. Applying this to Seed, stories have to offer interesting choices, respect my choices and throw me interesting consequences, no matter what I choose. At least that is the vision

Back to stories and quests. As Raguel mentioned, we do have a "micro" and a "macro" story level, and it's the micro one we're working on right now. We're going about this by working our way up from when a PC meets an NPC: What can happen, what can come of it, how we can turn it into a longer lasting thing. When we're done with the "micro" level, we'll turn our attention to the "macro" ones such as large-scale projects resulting in new locations.

Seed is a game heavy on social networking, influences, politics, who owes who what and when. We expect a very active "favor economy", and that's what the "micro" stories are based on.

Under the hood, the small Seed stories shift NPC friendships and alliances back and forth. You do somebody a favor, they like you more and owe you one and their enemies like you less, and vice versa - basically like every other faction-oriented quest out there. We use fed-ex quest types as well as more difficult ones such as "I haven't seen Borm for a while and he's not answering my 'links. Could you look him up and see what's up?" or "Could you please make sure Zoe looses that admin bit in 10 days?". The interesting difference here is that a Seed quest often only cares about the result - how you solve it will often be more or less entirely in your hands.

An interesting point about quests is how and why they're offered. In Seed, the small stories trigger when something happens in-game, something that the players have started or are responsible for. It's all about actions and consequences again.

The NPCs are the story carriers in this scheme. So, right now we're building a library of AI personalities. At the basic level, this ensures that NPCs respond in an interesting and individual way to for example emotes - you threaten, they react, you smile, they might smile back and so on.

Tied into this librabry is a more complex set of reactions to a long range of dynamic events in the game, for example sudden disasters, being burned in a deal, being asked to team up for a round of repairs, that somebody got an admin bit, that a ring is growing too powerful, that the local cluster is experiencing a drought in raw resources, that you made an NPC very happy.

Example of player-triggered story:

You heard that Borm, an NPC administrator in ringlab alpha, is a bit of a pushover. It's late, your ring is waiting for those grid test results, so you decide to try threatening him into giving you quick priority access. It seems to work, and you make it to the ring meeting with test results in hand. You left Borm in a really bad mood, however, and his personality profile calls for revenge. Borm 'links around until he finds a PC friend willing and able to help out. The week after your ring is assaulted by a barrage of PC poll attacks. You also discover that all priority access with another admin has been mysteriously revoked - she suddenly doesn't seem to like you. Seems Borm had a larger network than you thought. Now what to do?

An example of a story triggering on an in-game event or situation:

For some time, damages have been spreading in the loading bays. Seems nobody has the time or energy to handle the repair jobs. Ruger, an NPC with a specific interest in how well his environment works, launches one or more templates based on the amount of damage. He starts 'linking his PC friends and bugging them about it. He tours the location urging people to get their hands out of their pockets. He tries to get repair crews to handle it. He makes sour comments about how everything's going to pieces. He won't shut up or leave it alone until something is done, and if you burn him favor-wise, he'll make sure to send trouble your way.

In both examples, the story runs on favors (quests). Something one or more players did (or didn't do) triggered it. And both stories actively tried to involve more players. An AI will have a hard time delivering better roleplay than a human, so ideally we want the stories and NPCs as firestarters and "matchmakers".

In closing, I think the most interesting (and scariest) point about Seed stories is the thin line between pre-scripting and emergence: Of course we have to script content like every other game out there, but it will be triggered by player-driven in-game events and happenings we have little or no control over.

This is a very open, chaotic and fragile system, and it places a great deal of responsibility on you, the player's, shoulders. The control over story has switched hands. What you get in return is freedom, impact and hopefully a sense of ownership - that this is YOUR game, rather than ours.

/Alex
__________________
Alex K. Uth
Lead writer
Runestone Game Development

On day-to-day basis you’ll be presented for several story options. A NPC will ask you to repair a wall section, to vote for him, to get him a mono-wrapper, to examine a spore sample, etc.

These stories are indeed based on templates, which come into play according to where your character is at the exact moment. They could be based upon who you know, who your friends are, what items are currently in your inventory, who you recently voted for, etc.

It is up to you which stories you want to go for and which you turn down. Making these choices you’re defining your character and personality, and thereby determining how fellow player characters or NPCs think of you. It is not necessarily more rewarding accepting a task than declining one, e.g. if you do favours for the unpopular damage controller you might risk getting unpopular yourself. Some stories will carry rewards in themselves, though; in form of items, friendships, votes, etc.

I just now actually read that giant post above.

Sort of, yes. Seed repair gameplay, for example, is very interactive. You need to use your skills actively, choose between trade-offs like "Jury-rig" or "Thorough fix", use the right tools for the right thing, make sure your tools don't overheat, pay attention to various forms of damage spreading and interacting and so on. The item and machine crafting, on the other hand, is basically fiddling to get the right tool for the right occasion, so involves a lot of interesting decisions on your part. Both examples might sound complicated by the way, but it sounds way worse than it looks and plays. :)

Cheers,

Alex

A little step by step run-through of the mechanics of the repair gameplay might be in order:

Anything that can break, can basically do so in five ways (In seed that is. :-) ):

Structural damage: broken pipes, tears, rents etc.
Mechanical: moving parts that are malfunctioning somehow
Electrical: Which in seed is pretty much always high power electrical systems
Electronic: computer circuitry and the like
Contamination: Bio hazardous waste, radiation leaks, rust and plain old dirt

Similarily, different types of tool functions can be used to fix different types of damage. A crowbar can be usefull for structural and mechanical, but is useless for electronic etc. Some tools might be extremely usefull for e.g. structural, but create a mess, thus having negative impact on contamination damage.

Broken stuff registers as "repair jobs" in the environment. Sometimes it is something that has broken down, as haller describes above, sometimes it is a repair job commisioned by an admin that wants extra stuff added to his factory machine, sometimes it can be something else.

For now, broken service hatches spread damage as described above, but doesn't e.g. cause elevators to malfunction. We may quite likely add stuff like that at a later stage.

When you target a repair job, you get a GUI view of which kinds and which magnitudes of damage the job consists of. You then choose the tools you have that you believe are best suited for the job, and activate them on the repair job, until it is fixed, or until you give up. If you manage to fix it, you receive an access point reward, and possibly an "inspiration drop". The inspiration job you can use to train your skills, or give to someone else, so *they* can train their skill. You can use your own abilities to e.g. improve your odds for getting an inspiration drop, at the expense of repair speed, or choose to trade off between quality of repair job (affecting AP reward and the longevity of your repair) and some other parameters.

With better repair skills, you get access to better tools, and better tradeof abilities.

As Haller mentioned, we are planning on hazardous repairjobs as well: Repair jobs of e.g. a broken steam pipe, scalding anyone close, unless they are suitably protected. Some of these may be so close to each other that they overlap, creating really bad places, with radioactive steam rushing out, and showers of electrical sparks igniting the noxious fumes.

This is where the real tool heroes goes to work !
__________________
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Lars Kroll Kristensen
CEO
Runestone Game Development

I think this is answered elsewhere, but still:
Players can obtain new skills, when they meet the requirements of the skill. E.g, when Foodge has learned engineering to level 4, he is eligible for learning advanced engineering. In order to learn it, he needs to find a suitable trainer to start him off. This will give him advanced engineering level 0. Foodge can now assign adv engineering as his "training skill", and it will progress with time, whether or not he is online. Whenever Foodge uses a repair skill (adv engineering is a repair skill), he can get an "inspiration drop" which will reduce the time he needs to train to get to the next level. So: it is a combination of train over time, and train on use.

Oh dear, they're anti-grinding.  That tears it, now I have to check this thing out.  There's all sorts of room for them to fuck up the implementation, of course, but everything they've said so far leads me to think that at the very least they have good priorities.

It also sounds a bit like a job. Come home from work, log in, get an assignment, go back to work...

I never tried EQ2.  What was it about the crafting system that was so grim?  Having some sort of vaguely twitchy mini-game didn't sound to me like a terrible thing.  And the specific complaints I heard about it (most of which seemed to involve taking damage if you fuck up) wouldn't apply in this case since they don't have a combat system.

Haemish logs into game.

NPC104543 says "Hello Haemish, today I need you to fix my toilet."
Haemish says "Unclog your own shitter you sheep-raper!"

Haemish logs out of the game.

/cancel sub

The mini-game was basically a whack-a-mole type game where something would "pop up" and you would have to press a particular key to whack it back down and for any given production job there were only like 3 or 4 keys you had to be able to press (though it varied depending on the station you were using) assuming you had your hot key bars setup properly. The other huge problem was the moles would pop up slowly enough that you were bored out of your mind if you watched the screen the whole time and fast enough that you couldn't just go AFK and take the damage to finish the crafting cause you might die. If it was a twitchy style mini-game that required some thinking and you had to be focused all of the time -- a la Puzzle Pirates -- that would've been a huge improvement in my opinion.

It's actually not a bad mini-game.

Based on an early Gothic II task

<derail> Having never played the game, I've been searching for it nonstop (and obviously at all the wrong places). It would same I will have to breakdown and for the first time in my life, order a PC game online. I NEVER order stuff online, I always get it and a corner is bent, or the box is ripped or punctured or there's harm to the product of unknown origin. Basically, I fucking hate online ordering. And no i have to do it for Gothic II. This game better wet my fucking whistle.</derail>

Bah. No love for me :( I guess I don't post enough.  :-P

Aren't they starting off with only 500 and building up to something like 10K by the end of March?  I bet you ALL get in!

It's more of an alpha right now.

It must be pretty low on the list.  I don't even remember signing up for the beta (though my memory sucks anyway)  and I KNOW I've never posted anything on their board.  Maybe they weren't getting what they were looking for in terms of sign-ups or something.  It happens.

You've become an iconic figure and the voice of women that game. 

Nevertheless, the Beta opened February 1st 12:00 CET. Our uptime was a
tremendous 13 minutes, before the first crash occurred – that was
about 12 minutes more than expected. We pretty soon accomplished uptimes
of 30-60 minutes, and thanks to our should-be-patented Sys-op-in-a-box
servers were restarted automatically and up again within a few minutes.

Did you just call me fat and loud?

Actually, I say "po-tah-to.

I believe the word is "wrongly".

Fuck grammar.

Okay, we now have at least two people who are in this thing, and the rest of us haven't heard about anything beyond character creation. Spill! :hello_kitty:

Run away. Run very far away.  :cry:

Off to read the past 3 months of front page articles...

There is no NDA (Non Disclosure Agreement) that you legally must obey as a part of the beta.

There *are* a few things we kindly ask you not to do, as this could harm Seed and Runestone...

got a Beta invite.  And curiously it said this:

Is there some strategy here that I'm missing?

It seems if two people make characters with the same name and log in at the same time, they become The Man with Two Brains.

Great MMO bug:

It seems if two people make characters with the same name and log in at the same time, they become The Man with Two Brains. 

1019  1019 is offline
Junior Member
        
Join Date: May 2006
Posts: 2

My Sympathies to the Devs
I'd just like to say that I feel very sorry for the developers of this Windows application. I can tell there is motivation to eventually make it into some sort of game, but as it exists today, it is nothing close. I suspect (as some forum posts have pointed out) that, had it been up to the people who created (not funded) the game, we would not be seeing a "retail" release for many months.

Instead, we are presented with this highly unstable glorified chat interface that has some decent art assets associated with it. I offer my sympathies to the original creators of the game, that you have been forced to call this "retail", and have start asking for money from consumers while you finish the months of development that should have been internal.

Whether or not this will someday evolve into an actual game is irrelevant, what's important to point out is that this is quite possibly the worse "retail" offering I've ever had the misfortune of interfacing with, and this is coming from someone who's played 99% of every MMO out there.

In closing, I again offer my sympathies to the original creators of this application, and hope that someday an actual game emerges.

*I take off my wizard's hat and robe*

Hopefully one of these failed MMOGs will go open source rather than be locked away.

Hopefully one of these failed MMOGs will go open source rather than be locked away.

Hopefully one of these failed MMOGs will go open source rather than be locked away.

I believe Allegiance also went open source.. or semi-open-source. Last time I checked, Microsoft Research had some kind of wacky license of doom on it that you had to accept to get the source.

Seed should very very go open source.

They should release a server client package for comic chat rooms. Seriously. I find it to be a very attractive game.

I haven't even heard of it before. Doesn't look bad.

Anyone here playing it?

[edit] Umm...Looks like 30 people are online at the Community website. Quake 2 has more MMO potential than this.

It's old; real old.  Like Six years old.

Back in the day, I LOVED it.  The Dev team had events that advanced the storyline and everything; I thought it was amazing.  You could play for free (well, minus the initial box purchase) if you wanted to, or you could subscribe and get the "premium" version (I wish some MMORPGs would do this; being able to play a shitty version of WoW over a LAN would be fun). 

It's not so much an MMO, though, as an RTS/space shooter hybrid.  Like Savage or Battlezone or Natural Selection, except in space with spaceships (a lot like EVE, in that regard).  I think there was a player cap of something like 64 per game before the servers started leaking smoke and the lag started killing the gameplay.