Dynamo

Re: Game Design: Champions Online As I recall, Herosphere was being done in someone's spare time. A programmer's spare time is fleeting. He'd probably love to get back to it, but after this much time, the code may be more or less impenetrable without a complete review, even to the original author. I'd be happy to see it further developed, but I would also be surprised.

Re: Game Design: Champions Online

Champions Online Character Creation Champions Online Character Creation (note: The below thoughts apply to the MMO side of this thread and are almost completely useless applied to a GM-arbitrated, turn-based game.) There are two major barriers to taking Hero character creation into the computer game arena in all its freeform glory. Firstly, its ability to model anything the player can conceive will forever be limited by available animations and artwork, and complicated, clumsy, or close-as-I-could-get-it constructs that the player can explain to a rational, sapient (hopefully) GM have every chance of confusing even the most detailed game engine into a jolly good crash. Secondly, we all have to admit to ourselves that Hero is NOT a gateway game. It's a game for players who've tired of the limitations of D&D/d20. Presenting a new player with a system to buy game mechanics and then assign any special effect they want to the result will have most potential players logged off and playing Halo in short order. It would be nice to design a game purely for Champions grognards, but part of my intent is to employ sound game development principles toward a game competitive in the marketplace. As Jkeown suggests, a player chooses an Archetype which will define an array of powers to choose from, though I would insert an additional step of choosing an "Element" such as Fire, Super Strength, Agility, Ice, etc... Once the Element is chosen, Power choices are presented, looking suspiciously like the USPD. A player may choose to display or hide the Hero mechanics of the powers, and similarly display actual point costs or rely on a "Power Bar" to graphically display remaining ability to add powers. Hovering the mouse over the Power Bar or Point Total will display information about spending points, including the tip that leftovers can be spent in conjunction with XP to advance the character later. This Design area is a tabbed environment, allowing a player to move freely between Characteristics, Powers, Skills, Talents, Perks, and Disadvantages until satisfied with the character. There are several gateway steps that will permit the next steps and affect subsequent choices presented. For instance, picking the Brick Archetype will present different Element choices than picking Speedster or Projector, though there will be some overlap. Each Archetype/Element pair will define not only which Power choices are presented at what level of power, but also define certain function sets of Powers that the player must choose at least one of in order to exit the Design screen. For example a Fire Projector must choose at least one ranged fire attack and one fire-based defense. Why? One the problems that freeform character-design systems suffer from in any group-play environment, whether tabletop or online, is the TankMage/Gimp dichotomy. A skilled player can easily make a character with optimized defense, attack power, movement and utility, limited only by the GM and/or the ever-popular Campaign Caps, and will be able to steamroll anything intended to challenge the average player. An unskilled player can easily make a character that will be woefully ineffective faced with the same challenge. By ensuring that at least one basic attack and one basic defense is chosen, the Gimp end of the spectrum can be mitigated at least somewhat. On the TankMage side, setting different point-cost weights for different ability areas depending on Archetype/Element pairs make it prohibitively expensive for a Brick to start the game with a massive ranged attack or for a Martial Artist to be nigh-invulnerable. Under the hood, the point costs for powers within your Archetype/Element are discounted by a mechanism based on the Elemental Control, which IMO is intended to encourage themed characters with point breaks. Once the Design screen has been completed, the player designs a costume, picks a name, chooses some details and enters the game.

Re: Game Design: Champions Online Best laid plans of mice and supermen. Try again tomorrow.

Re: Game Design: Champions Online Oog. Just got out of a 2 hour sales pitch on a Learning Management System we're evaluating. My brain hurts. Block & Missile Deflection as designed in the pen & paper game are not workable in a realtime computer game (aside from my complete dislike of the Block rules as a trained hand fighter). Either some mechanism must be devised to make it at least semi-automated or it has to be eliminated. Idea #1: Block is a toggle. While on, Block adds its OCV modifier only to its own rolls and its DCV modifier to HtH DCV. To represent that it requires time away from your attack chain, global SPD cooldown is penalized while Block is toggled on. The Block toggle has an individual SPD cooldown for both refreshing the cumulative blocking penalty and for toggling back on after toggling off. Note for later: Individual SPD cooldowns are calculated from the global SPD cooldown, so global SPD cooldown debuffs and/or penalties affect individual SPD cooldown times, but not vice versa. This allows for nastiness like Block applying a SPD cooldown debuff to the blocked attacker.

Re: Game Design: Champions Online Nice work Jkeown. Your post carries some similarities with my thoughts on character creation. I'll post those tomorrow when I should have some more time (14 hour day today, not counting commute). I'm looking forward to hearing more of your ideas. I could see two separate turn-based LAN/Internet and real-time MMO games being developed based on Champions. The turn-based game would likely come out feeling like a hybrid of X-COM and Neverwinter Nights, with the ability to play solo content or join a hosted GM-controlled game on a LAN or over the Internet. An open "level-design" system like the one found in NWN would enable scenario writers to share their work. An equally open power-design system would extend the same advantages to character designers. (Thinking while writing here...) The more systems opened; such as scenarios, powers, models, animations, costumes; the more chance the game has of hitting critical mass, a concept found in Open Source meaning that a sufficient number of contributors and users have gathered that a program may never completely exit development. The turn-based version of the game could be closer to the pen & paper game, since allowances don't need to be made for the reaction-speed demands of a real-time game. It would be interesting to discuss licensing with DOJ for an Open Source game based on the Champions rules engine. There would be advantages and disadvantages for them as the publisher of the pen & paper game, so I could see them coming down on either side. For now, this is just a pipedream and learning opportunity, but who knows...

I'm not too worried about implementation right now. This would be the Concept Development phase. Serious game programming is done in C++. No offense to anyone's language of choice, but if you want to wring maximum performance from the end-user's computer without learning Assembly Code, you do it with C++, with a little help from C (device drivers mainly). High-level languages make sacrifices in run-time efficiency for their ease of use. Chat is a definite must. Social tools will make or break an online multiplayer game. BOOYAH! Interactable, destructible objects by the plenty. Got it.

Re: Game Design: Champions Online Actually, this has a better chance of getting coded at some point, despite 1 and 3 being out of scope for my current thought exercise. I've been looking at some of the freely available game art, animation code, and other resources. I'm sure that a networked animated battlemat equipped with a die-roller and the Hero core combat rules wouldn't be that hard. With all the existing assets that could be imported, the only really time-consuming parts would be the Hero rules engine and the surface textures for the figures. (I'm having some trouble finding Superhero textures.) The texture work could be minimized by providing some very basic costumes and then adding an import feature so that player-made textures could be added and shared with other users.

Re: Game Design: Champions Online

Re: Super Names SMITE! Once again, I'll try to have a Roundup done before Dundracon.

As some of you may remember, I'm currently enrolled in a shake'n'bake game developer program at a local school. For the most part, I'm learning to be someone's Junior Code Monkey, but some of the coursework revolves around actual game design. Plus my wife bought me an impressively tall pile of books about games and play, which I am ploughing through with an appetite. I've been doing some thinking about interface and gameplay, and since my current gaming obsessions are superheroes (Hero & GURPS) and MMOs, I'm toying with the notion of Champions Online. Not that I think I'm going to burst onto the computer gaming scene with the next blockbuster MMO; this is just an exercise to crystallize my thoughts. I'm at the point where I need to write stuff down or forget what I've already thought about, so it seems like a good idea to do it here and maybe elicit some input. If you were to login to an Internet game called Champions Online, what would you expect to see and do? How would you like to see Characteristics, Powers, Skills, Talents, Disadvantages and all that modelled? Conversely, what sort of thing would you absolutely hate to see in such a game? I'll start with some basic combat. To avoid re-inventing the wheel, the interface uses the standard WASD arrangement for movement (up/jump on the spacebar, down on X), with a multi-tiered power tray tied to the alphapad number keys. Attack powers share a global cooldown defined by SPD. 3 SPD = 4 sec cooldown, 7 SPD = 1.7 sec cooldown, etc. (I'll refer to this as SPD cooldown.) Movement and Recovery are continuous. END/STN recovered and distance travelled per second are calculated by multiplying the Power/Cha value by SPD/12. Continuous Powers are on/off toggles with individual SPD cooldown. Departing from the pen & paper game, some or many defensive actions are automatic and on their own SPD cooldown. For example, when attacked in HtH, a Block will be automatically attempted. Each additional Block attempt will suffer a cumulative -2 penalty until the cooldown triggered by the first Block completes. A missed Block will end all Block attempts until the cooldown completes. Skill Levels are allocated by drag & drop tokens. The tokens can be moved between OCV, DCV, and Damage buckets and automatically apply appropriately to eligible Powers and Maneuvers. Not sure how to make different types of skill levels quickly differentiable to the player who needs DCV in a hurry. I'll let some comments accumulate and then post my thoughts on character construction. Don't feel constrained to comment only on what I've said above. The wider and wilder the brainstorming, the happier I'll be. Go nuts.

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... "OK, I got the plot hook, 3 locations to check out, and the name and description of the kidnapping victim. Time to activate the player character phone tree."

Re: City of Heroes - Online Hero Game

Re: City of Heroes - Online Hero Game The downside to this is that the PhysX support puts greater load on your video card (not a tremendous amount but noticeable) if you don't have a PhysX card to do the heavy lifting.

Re: City of Heroes - Online Hero Game

Re: City of Heroes - Online Hero Game There's the problem. The ATI Radeon line is not meant to be "gaming calibre." Agreed. Since CoH is an OpenGL game, I strongly recommend a video card with the NVidia chipset. The 8800 line is new this year and delivers some very nice performance improvements over last year's 8600 line. But if you are bargain hunting, a high-end 8600 card will have better performance and cost less than a mid-grade 8800. EDIT: If you decide to go for an 8800, check your power supply. It may not deliver enough amps to satisfy the card's requirements. If you aren't willing to consider upgrading your power supply, look for a good 8600 instead. If you simply must get another ATI card, you absolutely must go to the CoH tech forums and read BillZBubba's work on CoH on ATI cards. BillZ is an ATI god and generally high-end video wonk. This will make some things prettier, especially explosions, but will not improve your overall video performance. I might toss one into my game rig later this year, but I was advised not to prioritize it over a beefy video card.

Re: City of Heroes - Online Hero Game I have no problems running CoH at 1680x1050, but I have an Nvidia 8800GTS320 pushing my pretty colors around. Your problem might have something to do with graphic processing power. Resolution isn't the only element to be considered. While your graphics card may support 1900x1200 at full color-depth, it may not have the horsepower to support CoH requirements at that resolution. CoH is a total resource hog, and a lot of cards just aren't up to the job. What is the make and model of your graphics card? With that info, we can check out its more esoteric attributes like core clock speed, stream processors, memory interface, etc. When I was picking out my graphics card, the denizens of the CoH technical forum were extremely helpful. There are some very knowledgeable enthusiasts hanging out there. In the meantime, you can cut down slightly on the ugliness of lower resolutions by picking a setting that is exactly half of your monitor's native resolution, 950x600. I have my older PC set for 840x525 for when I want to dual-box, and it's quite playable. You should be able to set your UI resolution to your native resolution to keep it from taking up too much real estate.

Re: City of Heroes - Online Hero Game

Re: City of Heroes - Online Hero Game Minor clarification: I'm on every server with no particular favorite (except for weekly SG on Guardian on Tuesday and VG on Triumph on Thursday). I'll gleefully swap toons to come team-up with Heroites. I think I'm still an operator on the Hero Boards channel, so you can send me a /tell for an invite.

Re: City of Heroes - Online Hero Game

Re: City of Heroes - Online Hero Game

Re: City of Heroes - Online Hero Game

Re: City of Heroes - Online Hero Game Lemming invited me to the Hero Boards channel and made me an operator, and I invited Gojira. The channel is public, so you should be able to join without an invite by right-clicking on your chat window and choosing Join Channel from the context menu. Type Hero Boards in the channel field and click OK. If we run into too many Damn Spammers, an operator can kick 'em and switch us to Private. Then we'll manage invites manually.

Re: Alternatives to Megascale for movement OK, I concede Range Modifiers. Didn't think of that one, and there are probably others that I also didn't think of. But I do not concede damage. I'm not talking about the force applied that a given quantity of dice is supposed to represent, but rather the game mechanical effect for a given point cost. 5 points gets you 1d6 points of Stun damage, 0-2 points of Body damage and 0-2" of knockback. Lifting capacity is doubled, but what does that really represent in game mechanical terms? It's an extra 1d6 of damage if you drop it on your enemy's head. We can arbitrarily change the lifting capacity of Strength to a linear, quadratic, or logarithmic function, and the underlying linear mechanic of 5x points for xd6 damage doesn't change. This is a good thing, because it works. Using a linear mechanic to represent an exponential scale makes superheroic strength workable in a (theoretically) balanced combat system. This is part of what makes Hero the best system on the market for what it was Originally Intended: Superheroics. This was my point to begin. Lessee... why did I bother to make the point in the first place... Oh yeah! I remember! IMO, the rated lifting capacity for Strength (and by extension the force applied by an Energy Blast) has approximately the same utility as Non-Combat Movement for the same price, doubling an extrinsic value for 5 points. Movement and Strength also have a linear value expressed as a concrete game-mechanical effect that can be achieved in a combat situation, but the exponential value really has no effect on in-combat game mechanics. Iron Man can rip a vault door off it's reinforced hinges in one frame and be mocked by Dr Doom in the next for hitting like a girl. So when Gazza mentioned Non-Combat Energy Blasts and Non-Combat Senses, it made more than a little sense to me. What feats should a given Power be able to achieve in a situation not governed by combat-balance linearity? I don't know yet, but the question intrigues me. To use Non-Combat Movement, a character must endure 1/2 DCV and 0 OCV. What penalties should a character take to get a non-linear effect from a given power? I don't know yet, but the question intrigues me. So what of it? What do you think could be done with the concepts of Non-Combat Damage (NCD), Non-Combat Perception (NCP), or more generally Non-Combat Effects (NCE)?