theWulfen 2 – Blog

Travel

Have had a thought about travel within W2.  Its going to be difficult to have user interaction without going into complex maps, enemy tracking and allowing the player to direct their character.  So I’ve come up with what I reckon to be a good compromise.  Now there will have to be maps, that detail settlements across the land.  Settlements will be friendly and hostile towards different races – these will be mixed and matched as I fancy.  Once you’ve visited a settlement, you can quickly travel between them.  Quickly however will still take a portion of time – but you know a safe path between the two, so can’t be attacked.

Each settlement will have areas of ‘wilderness’ around it.  What you do is to enter a wilderness and then wander around/explore.  Each wilderness will have two settlements attached and a relative size.  This size will indicate how long it will take a creature to wander from one end to the other.  Each wilderness will also have a enemy chart, which represents the percentage chance of encountering an enemy, based on how far away you are from a settlement.  As such its possible to have Large Rats and Swarms of Vermin appear only within 5 minutes wander of a settlement, and that chance to become less the farther out you go.  Additionally there will have to be a density of enemy, which matches the percentage.  This should give:

Large Rat:
Chance: 95%, density: 5, distance: 0
Chance: 0%, density: 1, distance 5*60

So the key element will be distance, and then the chance and density can be calculated.

Now the way wandering will work, is similar to combat, in that there will be a poller that kicks off communication to the server.  Unlike combat, this time will likely be 5 seconds.  A panel will be present that shows enemies nearby (based on the above calculations).  I’ll have to come up with a clever mechanism that makes it realistic, as if you’re seeing one set of enemies its not going to completly change in 5 seconds…  Maybe it does a reverse calculation to see if you can still see an opponent and then adds any extra enemies necessary?  Either way the end result will be that enemies appear and disappear gradually.

During wandering there is always a chance of combat.  This can be established by the player clicking on an enemy, or by a hostile enemy engaging the player.  Now the exact mechanics of this needs to be worked out, else as soon as an enemy appears they’ll attack the player, so something along the lines of how long the enemy has been visible and give each a hostility rating (basically a percentage chance of them attacking the player).  Thinking about it, a hostility rating would be good as it means that we can make some enemies slightly hostile.  Perhaps the chance an enemy will attack has a increase/decrease based on the length of time they’ve been visible?

Anyway, thats going to be the way that travelling works.  Hopefully its going to be realistic enough to keep peoples interest, and not too tedious.  The pure issue of the player not being in control of travel is a difficult one.

Background v1.1

Tada

Could actually have Tada settlements within Fens as well as other lake/watery areas.