ALFA: The next platform

[Castano]

We should look into what license we get from owning copies of the FR campaign setting. Almost all of us own this book.

That said even without FR, I am for this if it has a large enough user base. $200buys all of us a license or just one of us?

[Castano]

Note the FR wiki falls under a creative commons license:

http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/D ... _&_Dragons

http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/F ... Wiki:About

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Of course TSR has gone after wiki's before:

http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/F ... Plagiarism

[Castano]

apologies for my first triple post lol:

So I do not want to hold out any false hope we can utilize FR as a setting. Having read everything it seems WOTC is content to allow what they perceive as infringement on the wikis because they after all drive business to WOTC. Building a substitute for Neverwinter Online or DDO is an entirely different story. Not sure the license to use the source campaign books would allow for an online use (or if WOTC would construe it to allow for one), even a private members only use where everyone owns the campaign setting...though that seems a bit counter intuitive, since all we did was move the table online.

[Castano]

and for the quadruple!!!

Ditching FR may just be the thing we need to invigorate the community. We've sort of ground out the setting. At least the popular Sword Coast portion of it & Amn & the Dalelands, UD, Sembia.

[Ronan]

For what it's worth, I've never thought D&D to be very conductive to a persistent world setting like the one we have. Mainly due to the exponential power growth per level.

Agreed. The SO devs have said they dislike large power spreads between PCs, and I am guessing will be shooting for a more UO-like experience. In UO a new PC could be become useful in a day, though some skills could take many months to max.

I would think Shard is thinking about 100 players and one admin, which can never really be anything but hack'n'slash, with this:

Server admins have the tools to generate content on the fly like the ability to possess creatures and spawn items. Citadel Studios official servers will have regular live events where your interactions will change the course of history.

But the tools should be the same to create a true DM-led adventure where the PCs can do anything - not just anything that has a "do this button" programmed into the game.

If this game is "Ultima meets NWN", the players will be able to do a lot more on their own. The Ultimas were always more simulation than story, whereas NWN was more focused on story. Even a game as old as UO had a more interactive environment than our servers ever have - NWN just makes simulation difficult.

For the record, if I do something with SO it won't be through ALFA as it currently exists. I don't believe ALFA is the best institution to make a good PW. Whenever they start handing out the pre-alpha I'll probably start coding an open-source HCR-like ruleset, and decide what to do from there.

I think setting selection is very important. It needs to be something a good number of people are familiar with or is compelling enough that players are willing to get familiar with it. It needs to work with a ruleset which is close to what SO ships with, because we don't want to force everyone involved to learn something completely new (and SO's ruleset will probably be a pretty good base).

Castano, I've pledged for the pre-alpha admin backing, but I'd imagine once the game gets released it won't cost anywhere near $200. I'd assume the admin tools will be included with each $40 (or whatever) copy.

[Castano]

I'm pledging for a slot at $200 also. I don't think a DnD type ruleset is something I would go with on a new build project either. Let's talk more offline Ronan - we may be more aligned than you realize.

One thing that will be super important is SO's player base size, we will be recruiting largely out of that pool and ALFA

[boombrakh]

I think setting selection is very important. It needs to be something a good number of people are familiar with or is compelling enough that players are willing to get familiar with it.

OMGSHADOWRUNBBQ

[Zelknolf]

It is, of course, worth noting that distributing someone else's intellectual property (via text, website, or video game) is not the most-stable ground to be on. The owners usually don't care, unless you get big or make money, but then we're in the curious position of trying to puzzle out how small is small enough to be under the radar instead of able to just produce our work and promote our work.

[Heero]

The setting can be the ALFA forums circa days past. We will all pick our favorite (ex) forum posters and duke it out in a video game rather than via forum text.

Dibs on playing Elorn.

[Ronan]

IMO there is a rather major flaw in Shards Online as it currently exists: the lack of an action queue. I go into detail here:
http://shardsonline.com/forum/#/discuss ... tion-queue

Because actions cannot be queued up, timing is critical when chaining actions. This makes the game highly twitch-based, especially for spellcasting. This is similar to how UO worked, which is why you had macro programs like UOAssist. It managed the many concurrent actions your PC could take during combat which were difficult or impossible for a player to do on their own. In NWN, concurrent actions are generally impossible because actions are queued up and executed one at a time; i.e. you cannot melee while picking a lock while drinking a potion, but you could in UO and currently can in Shards.

Hopefully this will be addressed, though Logrus's response was not as encouraging as I'd of liked. Being UO devs, I expect they see nothing wrong with how things work currently.

I do not believe a robust action queue is something which would be addable to Shards within scripts, but I could easily be wrong.

[Zelknolf]

Provided they keep their promise to make the handling of all actions customizeable, a queue should be inventable. Have the actual action add an item to the queue and have the queue process at whatever pace you want play to happen at (with a few actions set to clear the queue-- like moving or attacking does in Aurora). If we play nice and do our open sourcing of things well, some broad concepts like that should be shareable among our various projects.


But yes, the game is very much designed to be twitchy and lacks a lot of the cerebral and/or strategic elements you tend to find in D&D. Getting the feel of persistency and an environment meant for roleplay (instead of run-and-gun with swords, which seems to be about where it is now) is probably going to be a challenge on a few levels.

[Ronan]

Action-y actions should be queue-able yes, but movement likely won't be. If we don't have a OnClickedToMove event or similar which can be used to flush the queue, we might run into a lot of annoyances which wouldn't be present with a more robust design. Hopefully we can persuade the devs to rethink this design decision with a good proof-of-concept.

Its more than just the twitchiness which annoys me though - the lack of an action queue really makes lag a killer, which is obviously a bigger problem in permadeath worlds.

[Zelknolf]

Action queue could check location, presumably. Or I hope. But here I am speculating probably a little more than is healthy.