theWulfen 2 – Blog

Update June 09

Well the last month was particularly crap, a number of things have kept me away from W2 which hopefully after a funeral this afternoon should ease up. I have however begun to rewrite the back end of the framework that I have created, so this is now becoming more efficient.

More online games are appearing in the market, a few very good (Warrior Epic comes to mind) and some total rubbish.  However the marketplace has become more crowded as a result.  Now one thing that seems to be becoming more apparent is player’s requirements.  Players like casual groups/parties, where they can conquer some objective and culmulativly gain a reward/xp.  Players generally dislike repeating the same activity over and over again, even if it has a tangible outcome.  Players like being able to group with friends (be they in or out of the game).  Players like the freedom of being able to solo parts of the game.  15 ~ 20 minutes is an ideal length for a section after which point most people seem to be happy to have a break, those who want to carry on will just head straight into a new section.  Players do want a way of investing money into their game experience.  Buying novelty items is largely pointless, but equally players don’t want to see somebody who is flush spending vast amounts of cash on the game and gaining an unfair advantage.

I’ve had a bit of a rethink about maps and similar as well and am going to tweak W2 into more of a dungeon based game.  Travel will still be dangerous, but not require the player to navigate miles before they reach their destination.  During travel time events may occur.  An inn will be available in every village, town and city where you can recruit other group members or be yourself recruited.  Each group will exist within its own ‘instance’ so there is no chance of other parties stealing kills.  Dungeons will be randomly generated in the same way as the old Warhammer Quest game and will have a mixture of forested, jungle and interior ‘board tiles’.

I need to spend some time considering how characters will level up as well.  Warhammer Quest (WQ) and in fact Warrior Epic (WE) both have a gold = xp type system.  Everytime you kill something in WE you get gold and at the end of a dungeon that gets turned into XP.  In WQ you get gold as a reward for killing things and then spend it on training – plus other provisions.  I’m currently verging more towards a WQ-esq concept.  Monsters will reward gold coins, and you will be able to purchase silver coins.  Gold coins must be used training.  Silver and gold coins can be used to purchase provisions, such as healing potions, rope, bandages etc.  All monster drops will be split equally amongst the party, unless the player is ‘idle’.  I’m toying with the idea of having the skill system linked to a more traditional XP method, but specific to what you do.  So if a character hits something with a slashing weapon, they will gain XP in slashing weapons and can purchase a skill from that pool – providing they have enough skill slots (1 per trained character level).

The biggest benefit from going this route is that there is suddenly a definate path to follow.  Basic city/town > Simple Travel > Dungeon Creation > Combat.  Suddenly W2 looks less horrific!

Never gets any easier

Blimey, life doesn’t get any easier does it!  I’ve had loads of high pressure jobs on at work, a few private sites that seem to be taking an age and loads of people breaking computers.  Chuck in internet explorer 8 and a number of common libraries that I use breaking and being updated and time seems to have vanished.  Up shot is that I have done no direct work on w2 for another 3 months.  At this rate I’m going to be retiring by the time I get it running…

I have however managed to find time to experiment with various map generation methods.  One possibility that I derived was using a canvas element.  This would work innately in FireFox and Google Chrome, but would need a hack for IE.  There is also a memory leak where a page refresh doesn’t clear the memory used by the canvas, so I’ve largely put that to one side as not being viable.  However I have generated a file progressive-downloader routine that would allow me to ‘prepare’ the images into an object and display a nice ‘loading’ progress bar.

A possible solution

Having thought about the problem I outlined in the post just now and having spoken to a mate, I think that I’m doing what many sole developers do and that is overcomplicating the problem.  Although the background of the game is that the game world is equivalent to the real world I shouldn’t be trying to shoehorn the game into real world physics.  One thing that makes the WoW world work as well as it does is that it is broken up into (large) chunks of land, mostly joined together with small pathways of land and bridges.  These zones also have level requirements and flight paths (instant teleportation).

So, I’m still going to aim for the rough land mass that I was going to, but it will be vastly smaller than I originally was contemplating.  As a note (more to me than anything else), traveling 1000 flat tiles would take 50 minutes – this is roughly 4 miles!

Oh, I keep forgetting to say that I’ve finally begun to code the travel aspect of the game, as with the rest of the game, using a combination of php and js it now loads up a 5×5 grid of tiles, caching them appropriatly.  The actual mechanism for moving the tiles is also in place and is far better than I original thought about doing it.  My next task is to configure it so that you can move in 8 directions and to load those tiles as necessary and remove the tiles that are no longer visible.  After that I need to start to think about putting in specific tile data to control the directions you can move in.  From there I can perform the necessary speed and performance testing and tweak the storage method of the data.

A Problem…

Ok, problem is perhaps too strong a word, but more of a challenge relating to the whole travel map part of w2.  I’ve done a few calculations so that I know potentially what scope of graphics I need an artist to produce.  If I aim for a tile (64 pixels) being equivalent to 20ft, then 1 mile is going to need 264 tiles (16,896 pixels).  Now in reality that’s only going to take 13.2 minutes to traverse (presuming its all level terrain).  Now using a common set of tiles would result in 1 square mile being able to be generated pretty quickly – though splitting them up may be fun…  The problem that I currently run the risk of is the same as Vanguard did a couple of years back, that the world will end up far too large and players could end up not seeing anything for long spaces of time.

Now my intention is to ensure that each race has its own themed area (1 mile across) in a specific theme for their background (plains, woods, swamps & desert).  Around this area would be large land masses with gateways to dungeons and such like (similar to diablo2).  Now my original intention was to have these areas gently blend into each other and for it to all fit within a world map.  However looking at this logically – the UK is 909 miles long, this would equal 239,967 tiles long.  Factor in that the UK is actually small in comparison to most other continents and you suddenly find that doing a ‘true’ map is not just impossible, but actually impractical as well.

Now I’m sure that I’ll think of ways round this, but initially these are some possibilities:

• zones have ‘magical markers’ that prevent characters from going over them
• zones are created with natural edges – mountains, crevices etc – would have to be worked into the background as some type of catrostrophy
• zones are linked via magical circles/transport stones
• everything lives within a small number of zones which are all border connected.  Background would have to justify why all races are so close – some continuity issues regarding variation of racial landscapes (swamp next to a desert)

Some kind of magical transportation would be quite useful regardless of what solution is found – characters ought to have some kind of spell or object that allows them to go home.  (Hearthstone, Gate Spells)

Tile Types

This post is going to be pretty much my musings on what data is needed for the travel map and as such I hope that at the end of it I’ll work out the best way of coding the ‘database’.

Each tile needs to be related to a target graphic.  Target graphics will belong to a grouping (e.g. grass) and then a sub item within that group, this would allow variation within these groups.

Groupings will have a inate passability/difficulty rating that effects how difficult that tile is to cross and in fact if it can be crossed.  I don’t think that there is any need to overwrite this on induvidual tiles as the graphic should provide visual recognition on how difficult that particular tile is.

The difficulty of the tiles around the character will effect what directions they are able to move in.

The above items indicate that all of the stats can be held on a tile grouping basis, rather than induvidually per tile.  This does make life a lot easier in certain respects.  Now the potential issue will come from how to store what could be thousands of tiles worth of stats.    I’m still thinking flat file that would contain serialized objects and use the fgets function (breaks on chr10).  If all of the required tile id’s are placed into an array then we need to only read up to the relevant line.  This way we don’t risk the chance of bloating ram with reading the whole file.  One thing that is worth investigating however is to see if its possible to pre-populate a variable across the whole website

Having thought about it overnight I think that a Zelda-esq map system is going to be the best direction to take.  Programatically its far more logical as it can use a regular co-ordinate system rather than an ‘offset’ system.  Even though I have coded isometric configurations before but it seems unecessarily complicated.  The key element is to ensure that the graphics don’t look cartoon like, else the game is going to end up as ‘yet another indie game’ or a Zelda clone, which would cheapen the whole game entirely.   Currently I’m thinking of (ultimatly) having 3 different map types.

Travel Map: each small square represents roughly 20ft by 20ft.  Character will be represented by a generic blob (initially) and travel from square to square.  A person walks at an average of 5ft per second, thus on flat ground would cover one tile in 4 seconds.  This is quite a long time, so creatures should be able to cross the same distance in 3 seconds intially, difficult terrain will take a bit longer to traverse.  When a creature fully enters a tile then it can do the necessary ‘what can I see’ checks etc.

Village Map: would be displayed when a creature enters some kind of village or area where they can select buildings to visit.  Should be of a larger scale than the travel map.  This scale map would also be the scale that I’d use for dungeons when they eventually get added.

Location Map: largest scale there is and used to shown things like the inside of buildings where you can interact with things.

I’m still unsure on how to create the chuffing travel map though   It’s a difficult one to be honest.  Creating a proper admin tool would mean that it keeps the control of the map within the game, however it would require a significant amount of development that in all honesty wouldn’t be used anywhere else.  This would mean the map would either need to be created by hand or using a separate tool of some kind, neither of which is that desirable.

Map Driv’lings

Ok, a few thoughts about the map/navigation system.

2 possible methods of data storage, both with advantages and disadvantages.  The physical creation of this is a different obstacle.

• Database storage
  Positives:
  • Efficient method of searching
  • Fields can be indexed – improving searching again
  • Pre-defined methods of access

  Negatives:

  • Searches take time to run, especially on large amounts of data
  • Inherantly retrieves more information (i.e. rows returned etc), thus has a fairly large overhead
• Flat file storage
  Positives:
  • Bespoke system could have low overheads
  • Good setup for data that changes infrequently

  Negatives:

  • Would need a bespoke read system
  • Indexing methodolgy would have to be created from the ground up

Next up there is the question of how we visually display the area where the character is.

The character will be able to travel in 8 compass directions and will only see a limited area around themselves .  Two basic concepts would work, that of a reveal system and that of a reload system.  In a reveal system, when a character moves in a specific direction, then an area drops off the screen and a new area is revealed.  In a reload system then the whole area around the character is reloaded.  I currently think that a reveal system would look better, but no decisions as yet.

Land could be either stored in a number of gigantic graphics, that we use the gd2 library to cut up (overhead warning) or multiple tiles.  Although I’m tempted to just say ‘use tiles’ that approach would result in either hundreds of slight variations, or the potential that we have tiles that just appear everywhere.

Finally I need to make the decision on if I want to do a top-down or isometric map.  Isometric would look fantastic but would create many more problems and technical considerations than a top-down one.

EDIT: Just been looking and there is a 3rd option that falls between the top-down and isometric views.  Basically its a zelda-esq effect, so that it give the impression of being 3d…

3 Months

Well that’s summer gone now – not that we had much of one in the UK anyway.  Just a small progress post to say that things are finally on their way again.  I’ve had an email with the UI graphics completed on, I need to download and ensure that I’m happy with them tonight.

I have also begun coding a chat element for the site.  I think that one key element that the original Wulfen game lacked was any kind of in-game player interaction, so W2 will have a chat panel off to one side of the game area.  I aim to have various channels within this (the usual world/town/trade chat’s), which hopefully should add quite a bit more depth to the game.