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[TheSpaceMan]

I know many people have talked about this here and there.
But the interesting aspect of it hit me on a disscusion on www.gamedev.se  a person took up the disscusion about a close curcuit mmo economic system where supply and demand are limited by what is produced by the player and how boring it would be for the poor sucker playing the miner.

Would this kind of design be possible / fun on a smaller scale then DF. What i see before me is instead of makeing a character you make a fort administrator and have df controll over a number of dwarves, You start from a home fort depending on your race (must not be dwarves) distance traveled consume the resources you have to place on equipment and skills on your dwarf. But if you pass (friendly/ allied) fortresses that have roads and connection you gain extra resources that allow the design to spread outwards. You move around in a "spectator" view to get the possibility to watch over the terrain, makeing sure you don't build directly on a enemy camp being instantly killed.

Resources traded would work the same way you can load cart with goods and send it on it's mary way. Only trade would be trade between players and some kind of bulltin system would allow players to post requests off goods with possibilty to rank the fort on if they can buy the goods they requested.

Oh and the game would have to be capped at a constant FPS and sieges and battles would have to be mutaly decided within a week since we can't all be fulltime cartakers.

This has nothing to do with the real "Dwarf Fortress" at all. It's just a fantasy on how it could work.

I understand and expect that toady wouldn't have the time energy to design a working 10 000 player server solution with a dynamic map system.

There are probably many more out there dreaming about how it would work.
What are your 5 cents?

[Lightning4]

Actually, what'd be nice if it were a Wurm-esque way.

Each person controls their own seperate dwarf. There is no one player that rules as "supreme entity", rather, they all collaborate to build the fortress together. It could be from a sort of adventure mode perspective, only continually updating. Probably at a slower timescale than dwarf mode, but faster than adventure mode.

I think it'd bring DF to a whole new level... plus it'd set the grounds for a full fledged Multiplayer mode based off of this. You can adventure alone, or gather a bunch of friends, obtain some items, and set off to make your own fortress. Or, you can adventure with friends too. All in a massive persistent world. But obviously many, many changes would need to be realized before such a thing were possible.

Plus as a side effect, you could build a fortress solo, if you really wanted. It'd just take a while!

It'd be interesting to figure out how a mood would work. I suppose the best way is that you lose control of your character until the artifact is created... because, if you were shown a list of items you must obtain, you could just tell your friends specifically what you need. Impossible to lock down any means of communication. Players would find a way of circumventing it, like IRC or something.
It could take a new concept, maybe a puzzle-ish way or something.

[ October 08, 2007: Message edited by: Lightning4 ]

[sclark13]

quote: Each person controls their own seperate dwarf. There is no one player that rules as "supreme entity", rather, they all collaborate to build the fortress together. It could be from a sort of adventure mode perspective, only continually updating. Probably at a slower timescale than dwarf mode, but faster than adventure mode.

No no no, that wouldn't work. I don't want to be a miner. I'm for the idea that there should be a server that resets periodically, and generates a new map every time. But there has to be an ability to control more than one character. Repetitive tasks suck.

[Temp]

Im all for the lone adventurer kinda way, brutal reality. If you want to build a fort you better get help from your friends. This is the way it works in for example A tale in the desert or Eve Online. It would be cool if you start as a child with parents (or not, depending on some random startup factors or something) or, if you already have a character that got a child, or if you play a character that got a child you could get a friend to start playing as your child or something.

It would be cool, as an experiment, to make a game with absolutely no NPCs, with no rules over economy and so on, just a big sandbox, and see what kind of culture evolves. Its probably not fun to play a shopowner though and its not fun if you want to buy a sword and the owner is just there a couple of hours a week but.. there must be some way to make a game that is completely alive and non-static (which NPCs and strict rules over currency and economy represents, at least for me and the kinds of MMOs we have now), built by the players. Theres some MMOish things being made in Second Life in that way but I think an Dwarf Fortress kind of engine (and development) would be well suited for this.

And of course you should be able to fight and kill anyone you meet, but, since his 10 brothers might come after you (with the friend-play-your-children-system) you might think twice about it.

I really dont like when the game-creator decides what you can and cant do   I guess thats why I really like what I have seen of Dwarf Fortress so far.

Edit: Added some stuff

[ October 08, 2007: Message edited by: Temp ]

[PTTG?]

What I like about a multiplayer fortress mode is that it may be able to have a play-by-email setup. One person can send a trade caravans, or an army, and it is sent as an Email, encoding all the dwarves, mules, items and so on. There would also be a status update sent at the end of each season, and the game would not let anyone involved get more than a season ahead. This way, there is no fixed cap on number of players, and even better, no server is needed. One downside is that one player can mod his raws, but some kind of checksum for both players' raws can do some to protect from this. This idea, however, only really works for competing fortresses. What I think we all want is a way to share a single map.

[Eagleon]

I think the only reason why it hasn't been fun to be a miner, shop owner, et al, is there hasn't been enough depth to it. For mining, DF has that depth - there's real geological formations in the new version, there's the worry of cave-ins, there's nasty critters you could encounter if you're not careful, and you're actually digging to someplace and creating a new area, as opposed to just hitting a rock that respawns periodically ala WoW.

Shopkeeping has potential if/when items gain more flavor and individuality. If you opened a shop in adventure mode, you could later also do things like "find" a powerful monster that then increases demand for weapons and armor as it pillages nearby towns, or scout out and report nearby mineral deposits to dwarven kingdoms, who might choose to send an outpost, thus giving you first access to what they dig up and make.

[Armok]

Some of these suggestions sound a lot like Cantr.

The game mechanics are awful (not that awful, awful compeered to DF) and it's VERY slow-paced but the part whit the player societys and roleplay enforcement and production chain is enough to be worth giving it a try.

[mickel]

I dunno, I've grown very cynical about online games and prefer bots as superior opponents. Then again, highly original games with a small and tight-knit playerbase (DF and Air Buccaneers come to mind) can be really fun online.

I made a big suggestion about this as one of my first threads. It's probably buried in the archives somewhere. I could revive the main ideas if anybody was interested.

[Lightning4]

Well heh, not mining in the Wurm sense. Mining there sucks.

But rather, it'd be nicer to see the fast-paced mining DF offers. Plus I would imagine that not everyone would have the same skills. You could specialize, but a lot of people end up doing different things.

Still a theory though. I kind of like the idea of Community-run Fortresses here and there.

[Goran]

Actually there is a very similar MMO called Renaissance Kingdoms where you do glamurous and heroic things like plowing fields, growing wheat, feeding pigs, makin bacon, etc.

[JT]

What about feeding bacon to pigs?

[Faces of Mu]

Here's two of the previous Multiplayer threads, food for thought:

Mickel's Thread June 07

Faces of Mu's Thread, 5 days later

[martinuzz]

quote:Originally posted by mickel:
<STRONG>I dunno, I've grown very cynical about online games and prefer bots as superior opponents. </STRONG>

A bit off topic, but how about evolving an entire ecosystem with programmable bio-bots?
Try "Darwinbots" www.darwinbots.com/WikiManual/index.php?title=Main_Page

[Asehujiko]

In every mmo there will always be atleast one(or 95% of the population coughdarkfallcough) jackass who's sole intention is to ruin the fun for others.

Because DF is so vulnerable to such behaviour(world flooding) it would not make a good mmo.

[Eagleon]

Er... Because a bug exists that has been fixed in the next version? I'm sure there will be a ton of interesting exploits with the new mechanics, but none quite so catastrophic, probably.