EQ3

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Deckerd Smeckerd, Nov 12, 2019.

  1. Deckerd Smeckerd Augur


    You may be right.

    Simulated Anatomy: You'll be amazed by the complexity of gameplay. Your character has appropriate anatomy and each member of the body can be affected by gameplay. Imagine..poisons that affect certain organs, ears that can go deaf, a brain that can be concussed.
  2. IblisTheMage Augur

    +1

    Don’t split the community, don’t break “backwards compatibility”.

    If the speculated mobile game gives in-game advantages, it could be made to be shared between EQ and EQ2, fwiw.

    A “tripple engine” game that holds both current EQ and EQ2 game engines for existing zones, and a new that 95% emulates the EQ experience for future zones, seems to be way out of reach from an engineering perspective... but it is a nice fantasy that I will happily indulge in.
  3. Deckerd Smeckerd Augur


    I might be misunderstanding what you mean by "triple engine" but, I will guess that such an engine is not possible, because the data set for an EQ1 character is different from an EQ2 character, without a converter. For the purpose of moving character's into an EQ3 format, which will probably be different from both previous versions, EQ1 and EQ2 characters would need to be interpreted and converted into EQ3 characters.

    A conversion process could be done that takes all assets into account. Maybe. The more important might be preserving identity. There might be many naming conflicts. For that reason it would probably be best to have additional identifiers such as last names or prefixes such as permanent titles.

    I think it would be smart to try to bridge the games even if the bridges were only one way toward EQ3.
    IblisTheMage likes this.
  4. IblisTheMage Augur

    I do agree. But I don’t think it will happen.
  5. Deckerd Smeckerd Augur

    How hard is it to make a MMO anyway?

    Do you build your systems as services? For example, I build a banking service. Its a cluster of computers that can scale as needed. Databases and servers. All it does is keep track of currencies associated with a character ID.

    Then another cluster for character inventory. Another cluster for chat. Another for item storage in the town. Basically everything that is stored in a database is an independent system.

    Then you tie them together with the client. Artistic window for each service. Then you can grant permissions for individual services. So like if a flag gets thrown by a computer that thinks a player is cheating with currency it could suspend the banking service but the player might not be locked out of everything. Or chat could be suspended for infractions but the rest of the game functions.

    Then you have systems that perform transformations on things. So say I am crafting. I combine some items. That request goes to a computer cluster that performs the necessary look ups and transformations and returns the result.

    I am not saying it would be easy but I am saying these features might be possible. Lets take the weather systems. When you program and build the model and associated object data it has a field for wind direction and force. The client uses that number to change the animation of the model. So if it was a tree, then with high values the tree would sway much more. Some other cluster of computers (weather service) calculates the weather conditions for the entire world. Then the client periodically requests weather updates which it applies to the correct field on the models. There could be some randomization programmed into the animations so they don't all sway in unison but the general swaying is of same intensity.
  6. Nennius Curmudgeon

    To make a successful one (I think) would likely take a LOT of time, more money than I am likely to ever have, and a fair bit of luck to boot. Bit of a crap shoot mate.
  7. Vumad Cape Wearer


    I don't code but I am going to attempt an analogy.

    Say you go to the races and you think, that's exciting. I want to do that. A buddy tells you to go buy 2020 V8 Camaro and and bring it to the track. Sure it will cost you 40k, but you get to drive in the race. You are going to lose, so you need to plan to drop another 40k into headers, tuning kit, suspension, etc to even qualify. All of these parts are available and bolt on, but you will still probably need another 100k in modifications to match the performance of the other cars. And, after you spend all the money, you need to pay your entrance fees, and it's all a big risk because unless you are a top notch driver you wont recoop these costs.

    Now take that thought, and realize that what makes you happy is driving your dad's old 60s matching numbers mustang. Sure, you can make some changes to make it faster, but it wont be a matching number stock car anymore. It will also be the poorest performing car on the track. By the time you are done modifying it enough to keep up with a car made this century, will it even resemble the car you loved because of the memories it carries?

    That's the difference between EverQuest and your banking system.

    EQ3 can be done, but will the result still be EverQuest? The graphical updates in old zones were rolled back because the TLP purists like their old Mustang. Even EQ remastered is a loss for them if they don't have old world graphics options.
  8. Deckerd Smeckerd Augur

    I had thought for a long time that EQ1 would be cool if they developed some AI. I purpose a BOSS computer. Basically it would be the brains for special creatures. These creatures would subscribe to the BOSS service. Periodically BOSS requests a knowledge packet from each special creature. BOSS cycles through the subscriber list requesting them. It returns an instruction set.

    Lesser creatures can subscribe to YARD TRASH. This service answers a question. Whenever a lesser creature gets close to another creature it asks YARD TRASH whether it is attracted or neutral or repulsed. YARD TRASH looks up the answer and returns a direction, distance, and speed. Or a waypoint and speed. The lesser creature executes that instruction.

    See these services could provide more detailed instruction sets. It could tell a creature to howl and bristle at a target. That can be graphical but also a message. That message gets passed to message service to which it is subscribed. The service delivers it to the target of the howling and bristling. The target then passes the message to a BOSS or YARD TRASH, or probably some other service provider, which returns an instruction set.

    That is just an example. AI services could be programmed in a more specialized way. Such that both lesser and greater creatures might use the same services but greater creatures may have access to more services.
  9. kizant Augur

    If you encounter a NPC it does a faction check and decides if it wants to attack you. If it's near friends it can ask them for help. If you injure the NPC and it runs or gates away it may bring friends if it can find any. They can roam around or stay in one spot and some NPCs even attack other NPCs when no players are around. In some zones if you wait long enough the NPCs will reach water and become diseased from drinking it, etc. EQ does a lot of interesting things already doesn't it?

    The game also has a way to effect your character in ways related to different organs or body parts. You can slowed down, charmed, rooted, disorientated, and blinded just to list a few options. Those are done by restricting your legs or messing with your vision or takes control away from you as a player, etc.

    The weather in EQ doesn't do much but in some zones like south ro you may go through water faster than in other zones. If they really wanted to they could add detrimental effects based on your encumbrance or types of armor you have on. But what would be the point? Everyone would just switch out a few items and then ask for new bandolier slots for quality of life. In the end it wouldn't add anything of value.

    Obviously, the graphics are a bit dated but most people don't care about that and some people even prefer the art style. Personally, I still play plenty of old games and never once think they need their graphics to be updated. It's the least important thing in most games.

    Do you have any specific examples or use cases for what you want to see in the game that they don't already support? Maybe they could try and implement them. I just haven't seen anything in this thread that looks interesting or isn't already doable.
  10. Laeadern Elder

    If they had the resources and manpower to remake EQ1 into a full blown EQ3 with the ability to transition EQ1 players over I'd be 100% BEHIND IT......but let face it....the cost would be extreme.
  11. Deckerd Smeckerd Augur

    Let me expand on AI services.

    A psychic creature which can see around corners, for example, could request a service which returns inhabitants of an area. Arguments might include the creatures psychic skill level. Using the skill level the service returns a list within an appropriate size area.

    This list is passed to a service called DANGER which attaches a danger valuation. Along with the list is the creature's relevant info.

    Why did the creature request the psychic info in the first place? Sound? Suppose sound information is passed through a broadcast service. This service takes sound intensity to determine max distance in perfect conditions. Compiles a list of creatures within the area. Checks for obstructions. Removes appropriate creatures. Delivers sound messages to remainder.

    The psychic creature received the message. Sent the message to a service called ATTENTION. This service evaluates whether the message receive attention by checking if the creatures has a focus, concentration break check, returns a new focus when appropriate.

    In this case the creature focused on the sound. The sound message contain source info when there is line of sight. Since this came from around a corner the creature requests a service called FILL IN THE BLANKS. This service checks if the creature can attempt to do this by looking up skill info. It looks up if any of the creatures skills can possibly identify sound sources. It returns that skill or skills in order of quickest to slowest. The skills returned are psychic and motor skill.

    Well this example is not well thought out but I am illustrating that AI as services might be worth exploration and could even enhance a game like EQ1.
  12. Deckerd Smeckerd Augur


    Yes your point is made very well. EQ1 has good AI. I don't know how theirs works but look at my expanded idea on AI services. Many services could be imagined.
  13. kizant Augur

    You may want to define the problem you're trying to solve a bit better before jumping into an implementation approach. How about describing some game play scenarios that exist in the game, as it is today, and how you think they could be improved? Come up with some alternative scenarios and define some use cases the devs can use to sell the idea. I mean use cases in regard to how they improve the game or keep players engaged, etc. It would obviously be a bad idea to spend time on a new gimmick that nobody cares about after they see it once or twice. Especially if it doesn't have any significant impact on game play.

    After you have some good examples to work with you could help come up with a list of high level requirements. But even at this point it's probably better to leave it to the devs. Although, as an example, maybe you think NPCs should respond to more player states. Say that an animal is indifferent to you if you keep your distance but if you walk near their home they become more aggressive. The new requirement may be that the current aggro calculation is updated to look for additional faction modifiers. And in the case of a 'home' that means at least one location needs to be stored somewhere. But then this is where you really need to be a dev to be helpful. Maybe they already consider the initial spawn point of an NPC as its 'home' and this data is already available.

    Now, is it worth generalizing this idea further to support other cases? Maybe. But it's still probably a good idea to come up with those scenarios and get a good understanding of the larger problem before committing to something complicated. Especially when performance is such a big concern for a video game like this one. If all I said were that they should have an agro service that works off some arbitrarily set of rules and it can rely on other services as needed.. I wouldn't really be helping in any way. May as well suggest they add code to do stuff.
  14. Benito EQ player since 2001.

    Sony Online Entertainment sought to include "cutting-edge" AI (Storybricks) and destructible environment (Voxels) in Landmark and EverQuest Next. From what I recall, word on the street at that time was that they were multi-million dollar money pits (vaporware/engine).

    Do we want to go through that again? NO THANKS!

    Cautionary Tale:

    Storybricks:

    https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/08/game-over/

    https://massivelyop.com/2017/09/13/storybricks-ceo-shares-early-everquest-next-proposal-documents/

    Voxels:

    https://www.voxelfarm.com/games.html

    *Voxel website still advertises Landmark. lol.
  15. kizant Augur

    Now I want a voxel farm. :(
  16. Zamiam Augur

    cant be any worse than the " Luck" stat :p
    I mean how much time and resources were wasted on that ..
    dont get me wrong I appreciate what the dev's were trying to accomplish, but I feel (and its jmho) that time and money could/should of been put to better use ..
    maybe an extra zone or 2 .. or something
  17. Deckerd Smeckerd Augur

    Well EQ1 offers gameplay opportunities unique to itself. Let us take a small zone for example. Now it has been a long time since I have been to Crushbone so forgive me if there has been a revamp of the zone. In EQ1, I would attempt to develop a ZONE AI ENGINE as an experiment. The goal of the engine is to provide strategic defense of the zone as long as the zone BOSS lives. It has to abide by rules, however.

    1. It can only see what is seen by living mobs.
    2. It can only communicate information or knowledge from mob to mob. (If entrance guards see invaders, Emperor Crushbone cannot personally react unless a runner or a series of runners relays the information to Crushbone.)
    3. It cannot spawn mobs within line of sight of a player.
    4. It can spawn mob types from a finite pool. Each mob type has its own pool. Each pool refills at its own rate. (For example, orc pawns, orc guards, and orc runners all have separate pools which replenish at separate rates)
    5. It must act within character of the MOB. (Attributes like intelligence, loyalty, and other character qualities would be applied to decision making. These attributes can be accessible by the ZONE AI ENGINE in a separate file/database.)

    Just to name a few rules. This zone AI would be a prototype for different types of ZONE AI ENGINES. There could be a raid type ENGINE that does seek to overwhelm invaders while the one in Crushbone might only seek to keep gameplay interesting.

    But these type of ZONE AI ENGINES are made to make zones more interesting and/Or challenging while being designed with players as opposition. That's different from an engine that simulates realistic behavior. I might want to design creature behaviors in other zones, such as flocking, and then just let the players create their own game out of it.

    Every zone would be unique. Larger zones might have multiple AI ENGINES associated with different social groups.

    All of these efforts would be a research and development strategy which could then be used in an eventual sequel.
  18. Deckerd Smeckerd Augur

    None of these ideas are well thought out. They are broad strokes. EQ1 could try out a new expansion or they could utilize existing zones. Right now there probably isn't as much use for lower level zones so I would just re-purpose them but it might take a lot of effort to get this sort of thing working so it might be better to make an expansion because one will be expected regardless.

    They could release a guild expansion. It is a set of dungeons for guilds. Since it is focused on guilds only, it would take less time to develop. Maybe.

    It works like this. It will be a series of levels. It can be like 5 levels for a mini expansion. Each level has a boss or perhaps multiple bosses. Instead of increasing the difficult by making the mobs have extremely high HP pools, they ZONE AI ENGINE will use the resources on the map to attempt to defeat the raid. It holds nothing back and shows no mercy but it still has to play within a set of rules like the one I started in the previous post. Once the BOSS or BOSSES are defeated, everyone gets an random class appropriate item reward in their email. The next level is unlocked which is designed with mobs with different abilities. So one level might be mostly melee and ranged. Another might be magic. The last one they might try creating a society of psychic creatures. Just ideas but there are people who are more creative than me to figure it out.

    Next they can release a mini expansion for solo characters. Same sort of thing. Another for groups.

    Really though, They could just recreate the zone engine to allow any zone to be loaded with any set of monsters. Then they could create new zone challenges quicker using all the assets that already exist. But I have no idea how the game code works. That might be too hard.

    But the general idea would be to beat the zone Boss or Bosses whether it be solo, group, or raid. The AI plays against you. They have so many zones in this game they could probably create endless scenarios.

    All this of course is research and development for the personal DM feature in EQ3.
  19. Deckerd Smeckerd Augur

    Also, on a related note. If the zone engine was reworked a little bit...

    Such as this...the server can have my client load in any model into the zone even after the zone has been loaded on my client. That way, in a dynamic real-time way, any creature could be made to appear in any zone.

    I don't really know how that stuff works under the hood but if it were possible, then you could have EVENT AI ENGINES. These engines are like ZONE AI ENGINES except they can access any zone and spawn an event and handle the AI for the members of the event. So that would give the game the ability to spawn random events using any asset in the game.

    It might sound like dreaming and maybe it is. But essentially, there are NPC files. You just add new ones to the zone list but these are subscribed to the EVENT AI ENGINE. The EVENT AI ENGINE loops through this set of character files processing them instead of the ZONE AI ENGINE. So if the zone server is part database to store the files for the NPCs then these AI Engines need to be able to read their particular set of NPCs at the same time.

    The AI Engines are then connected to all the AI services but the ultimate result of the AI Engine is the read an NPC file, update the file, and write it back to the zone database. Then it gets the next one.
  20. Deckerd Smeckerd Augur

    So a high level requirement is a good message service that passes information between NPCs or whatever. I guess that is the high level requirement.

    The implementation is perhaps:
    The message service is something like a sorted list. Each node is a mail box under the NPC ID. When the AI ENGINE processes an NPC file. It processes its mail. And then...who knows. I think you have to get one message working and then you can expand it.

    Well. I hope the developers can sell the idea.