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[Soulwynd]

Alright, I lost track of time while playing gmod for the first time in years and it turns out it's 6:00am and I have a headache.

But I was talking with lordcooper earlier and he proposed one thing that I liked and talking to him inspired me with a few ideas for game mechanics:

(Note these are highly inspired by shadowrun 3rd ed)

What is the player's character - They could be be sort of free-floating entities. They're not jacked in the net but the code running belongs to a given host, such as a haven or a homepage. There are several possible random backgrounds for when someone creates a character, perhaps each with their own statuses, flaws, and bonuses. Such as a rampant virus, a military AI gone mad, a TRON style person transported into the web, a mad trojan and whatever else we can come up with. They will take a form based on a birthplace random link. So yes, you can end up being something crazy no matter your background.

Bandwidth - A mix of mental stat and weight limit. The more bandwidth you use, the higher the cost of switching domains. Bandwidth also determines how much you can 'wear' or rather, carry along with you. On the other hand, the more free bandwidth you have, the faster you can take 'true' possession of items found. As in download them to your homepage/storage. Otherwise you will only have temporary possession. Also, the more bandwidth you're using, the higher your latency. This should increase in a logarithm scale, so you'd only really feel the change on your latency at >80% of bandwdith being used or so. Some things can 'damage' your bandwidth, such as 'ad spam' attacks, but once you kill whatever is attacking you, it will return to normal. Also, attack chains and certain attacks should cost bandwidth temporarily, so it should be a very tactical stat to keep an eye on.

Byte - A mix of weight and health. The better and more complex an item, the more bytes it will have. So you can carry along as many bytes worth of stuff your bandwidth allows. If an item receives damage, its bytes will become corrupted and thus its effectiveness will drop until you reload a fresh copy if you have one. The bandwidth cost always remains the same, even if it's damaged.

Latency - A mix of a reaction stat and a tiredness stat. The more links you pass through, the higher your latency and the harder to block/dodge/evade stuff. You can lower your latency by infecting a domain.

Infection - Being a free-floating entity means they aren't being run by any specific computer except for their 'homepage' or current haven domain. Whenever beat a dungeon/site/link, you have the opportunity to infect it with bits of your code. By doing so you reset your latency to the place you're in until you switch back to a haven or your homepage. You also might gain access to 'cores' and 'processing power' from the domain you're in. Of course, there's a limit of how much you can gain from a domain and you will have to beat several dungeons in it to gain it all. If the domain gets reset from inactivity, you lose what you gained from it. Several people infecting the same domain will gain reduced bonuses from it the more people have their code jacked to it.

Cores & threads - Basically how many things you can have running at the same time without lowering your processing power. Wearing active items that work as armor/boosts/etc will use a single thread each. Some complex items might use more than one. Also, any attack or action will use one or more thread temporarily until it's completed.

Processing power - Measured in FLOPS (FLoating point Operations Per Second), it represents the sum of the processing power available from all the cpu cores you have access to. It determines how fast useable items will be used (Example, if you have 50 G(iga)FLOPS free and a program uses only 10 GFLOPS to run and you do have a core available, it will be ran instantaneously) and how many active items can be running at any given time. Some things like infection, can take several giga/tera FLOPS to run and thus will take several turns to complete depending on your processing power.


And that's it for now. I have some ideas for player health and damage, but I will leave that for later. I want something DF-style.

[Farmerbob]

Let me get this straight: You want an MMO where everything including the player character is generated from webcrawlers randomly crawling on the web? But... wouldn't that mean that, statistically speaking, 90% of the MMO world would be porn? O.o

Hrm, have you ever actually looked at the female avatars and their clothing in most MMO's?   

[DrPoo]

Holy shit i wouldnt see it getting that far! What ideas makes sometimes..
I think, that it should be Rogue-likey, think Cataclysm or HellMOO, we could also make a client wich connected to the moo, the server sent picked out image links for every object in the game, the client renders it.. Could easily be done with a bit of VBasic or Python, or something.. maybe i could do a mockup client in Construct if i am given a few details.

I would like that, other than just being about fighting, maybe there is some kind of different threat, like hunger and thrist and fatique. Also you could occupy a page, say Google.com or bay12forums.com by having 1 or more people camp there, to reinforce it, you build walls and traps and other structures too, so we could have a dwarf fortress buildt on top of this forum, and people would fend off the spambots and what not with weapons they craft. If everyone's character is random, everyone would have to deal with their things, a zombie would have to deal with its brain diet, the robot would need power, the Bill Cosby would need jazz. A character would be anything, with the added atribute of being able to walk and stuff, things that normally are incapable of locomotion would gain legs and arms, so a player toaster would actually be a player toaster mutant with legs and arms, the ball can roll, so it wouldnt need anything. Crafting recipes would be generated by finding the "need" word and then picking up everything that is seperated by ","'s and "and", so for example to craft a youtube poop, you would have to combine a "nonsencial" with a "random"(this means anything) and a "movie", resulting in a youtube poop, i dont know what that would do, but that will the webcrawler figure out.

Room size, the generator would generate a landscape with (size of webpage in bytes/kilobytes) amount of tiles, if the generator runs out of bytes, it would end in void, or maybe it would put links in the untied ends, giving dungeons made of small pages a ruin like feeling.

Edit: Soulwynd you are a genious, i thought instead of being stock characters, you could be something random, to balance that, you can have other players change you.
Very few things should be hardcoded, for example damage and crafting mechanics, building handling. And a few keywords such as "compiler" and "tool" and "weapon", wich aid in crafting, combat and such.

[PsyberianHusky]

So, is there anyone who has the desire and capacity to make this happen?

[DrPoo]

Soulwynd seems to, i would also, i just dont know what to do since art isnt something we are lacking, what is that MOO thing coded in?

[freeformschooler]

So, is there anyone who has the desire and capacity to make this happen?

I think Soulwynd whis currently making this hapen.

Anyway, out of all of these things, my two favorite ideas so far:

1) Each player is unique because of being partially generated from a random url
2) It's group-focused: you can solo or you can go as a group for an easier time.

Only thing is... when someone sets something as their homepage, should it be possible to, after like a day or so, attempt to push them off so long as they're online and in there?

[DrPoo]

Only thing is... when someone sets something as their homepage, should it be possible to, after like a day or so, attempt to push them off so long as they're online and in there?

Yeah, but it would depend on the amount of reinforcement and population, so an elf loving bastard wont push off the whole Dwarf Fortress off one by one..

[freeformschooler]

Only thing is... when someone sets something as their homepage, should it be possible to, after like a day or so, attempt to push them off so long as they're online and in there?

Yeah, but it would depend on the amount of reinforcement and population, so an elf loving bastard wont push off the whole Dwarf Fortress off one by one..

Alternately, we assemble a Bay 12 alliance just to keep away the elf loving bastards. Protecting every main page.

[Poltifar]

From what Soulwynd's idea entails, I think you can force someone out of a homepage by killing all the stuff in it, just as if you were trying to claim a page as your own homepage.

[quinnr]

I am watching it carefully and I will help out with stuff when it gets started.

[counting]

Can we get a "physical" meaning to the player attribute? Like Latency and Bandwidth. It can actually be measured. And the players will actually "feel" the different importance between websites. And under the current design, a player is an entity with many "pets" who can mine out keywords and hyperlinks in this "crawler world"?

P.S. we need to give a better name for this game. Crawler Fortress? Crawler War?

[Soulwynd]

What is that MOO thing coded in?

The core is in C/++ but everything in the game is programmed by an object oriented script language that is simple and yet powerful. It garbage collects like every OO language, it compiles on the fly, it is stored in text format, it has a built-in inline debugger that returns the exact code that gave error without crashing the mud, it is reasonably fast since it's actually compiled, it is threaded, it allows for raw input/output for binary transfers, it can create TCP connections to anywhere you want (so it can work as a webcrawler or connect to a SQL database), it allows for writing and reading of files in the server outside its own database, and so on. For example, it's powerful enough for you to be able to make a webserver out of it. You can also make an IRC client or server with it. It's also multi-platform as there is a winMOO compiled version of it, so you can have a windows host instead of a *nix one simply by copying your database over.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOO

I modified my MOO source only slightly to allow MCP (Mud Compression Protocol, it basically gzips data before sending it, to lower bandwidth usage at the cost of CPU usage), but I don't think we need that. As for images, if they are really necessary, a lot of mud clients already use MXP, which is a set of HTML-like tags the client interprets. For example, it's able to load images right off the web, create browser links, full RGB color, bold/italic/underline tags, etc.

I don't know if I will actually start and go through with this, but I think MOO is the best pick for making a mud easily and fast unless you have extensive C/++ experience.

If I do start and go only to a certain point then give up, I will give the database out to anyone who wants to continue it. I will make sure to fully comment the code to make it easier for people to pick it up. My database also started from minimal, so you don't have to deal with the bloated up shit that LambdaMOO is.

From what Soulwynd's idea entails, I think you can force someone out of a homepage by killing all the stuff in it, just as if you were trying to claim a page as your own homepage.

I think that was the idea, yes.

Possible ways of increasing the protection of your homepage:
-Being online at the time of the attack
-Friends/People who Bookmarked/clan(guild whatever) it will receive an alert
-Capturing and placing traps
-Capturing and placing 'monsters'
-If we go with a rogue-like kind of view, changing the map structure to make trap corridors, wide open areas with lots of monsters
-Equipping your monsters with items



I'm still not sure how to make this game *FUN* besides being a dungeon crawler and a silly random exploration game. Of course, that's enough for rogue-likes, but I'd like more things. I'm thinking about some fun ways of making stuff like crafting work.

Can we get a "physical" meaning to the player attribute? Like Latency and Bandwidth. It can actually be measured. And the players will actually "feel" the different importance between websites. And under the current design, a player is an entity with many "pets" who can mine out keywords and hyperlinks in this "crawler world"?

P.S. we need to give a better name for this game. Crawler Fortress? Crawler War?

Things that can be measured will be displayed to the player. Things that are 'feeling' based will just have a word for it instead of an objective number.

And I think the player will be the entity. He will not have pets, no. At least not at first, later we could let players 'program' semi-autonomous entities.

[DrPoo]

*FUN* could be different sicknesses and virusses, the crafting would also be fun, if the generator made crafting recipes. *FUN* could also be the possibility to make your own additions, like correcting generator fails, and we could try making a fortress somewhere in the really shitty part of the internet, and fend off the trolls and screamers and what not out there.. while crafting bill cosby's

[Soulwynd]

Bleh, I'm getting a winsocket 10050 error when trying to get winmoo to run.

It's probably because my mobo has a multiplex network card and thus it's trying to pick the network that isn't being used instead of the one that is in use. >.<

That doesn't help me getting started with this.

[freeformschooler]

I do think it would be more fun if you could capture the nonsensical enemies in the game and train/equip them, but ehh. Dungeon crawling, role playing and the quest for The One True Firefox Blade could certainly be enough.

As for crafting, that could be thought out later.

Anyway, hope you get the network problem sorted out.