RunUO: Civilizations

[Mentose]

Update: 11/5/07
I have added a discussion on city structures and sieging to the threads (part 2). Check them out and post any suggestions you may have.

RunUOForge > Projects > RunUO Civilizations > Home

Update: 10/22/07

I have added the RunUO Civilizations project to runuoforge.

RunUOForge > Projects > RunUO Civilizations > Home

I have been away for the past semester studying abroad in Australia and will be returning to this project in December. Until then I would like to make a solid plan of the game mechanics with the community interested in this mod.

I've posted a topic detailing the direction that we want to take with this modification, I invite everyone interested in this project to join in on the open discussion.

regards,
Mentos

___________________________


So this is a pretty long post, you can break it down into 4 parts.
Part 1 explains new mmorpgs like DarkFall and Shadowbane so if you know about them you can skip it.
Part 2 is where this is going.
Part 3 is "it".
Part 4 is a debate of the logistics.

I've bolded the main points in each part. But if you have the time read it all.

1.

Currently in Ultima Online there is a lot of risk in comparison to other games. You die and everything goes to your corpse for anyone to loot. It’s what we all like to boast about Ultima Online, the risk, the stakes. It’s what separates the men from the sissies; the winners from the losers.

Well, I don't know if you guys are familiar with games like Shadowbane or Darkfall Online (Darkfall Online). They are attempts at making a 3D UO. Darkfall is currently in beta testing but it is pretty much just a clone of UO. It has skill level gain (out of 100), so if you use a skill you gain in it. You can attack anyone outside of town, but you are accountable for your actions so you can be attacked freely by anyone else if you do. In order to survive you have to organize with others and form clans (guilds) that will protect its members. It has an economy with money and player crafted items. It’s very similar to Ultima Online.

Darkfall differs however in the fact that its PvP is not turn based, it is FPS, and it boasts not only PvP but CvC (city vs city). You have to WASD yourself around while swinging/casting/shooting arrows in order to attack. You can ride mounts, use siege weapons to attack cities, and even attack from the shore on ships with cannons. There is a video from beta showing some of these things, download it and watch it.
(http://files.darkfallonline.com/darkfall_battle.zip)

A few weeks ago when this video came out I was pretty excited to see the direction things were coming in this game. For a while it seemed like vaporware, but now they've made some solid progress. Hopefully this game will shape out to be what UO2 might have been. My biggest fear come beta/release is the lag but only time will tell.

But enough with Darkfall.

2.

I was in mIRC yesterday talking out my ideas about coding the ability to add cities and sieges. Allowing players to build up cities, with city walls around their town, having the ability to elect a governor that could appoint other positions in the city, etc. Someone was like "Well you'd have to rewrite the client to allow sieges.." and I was like "no you could just fake it by making siege weapons out of, lets say cannons and putting fire around the house as it takes damage.." Someone then said, "Arte Gordon already did it." So I searched the forums for 'siege' and found his post with screenshots and all. As I scrolled through them it was like I was looking into the future. I had pretty much all of those ideas and here they were fleshed out and already coded, wow. This was the trickiest part of my idea, faking siege weapons with multiple items all in synch and Arte pulled them all off (unbelievable).

I also did a search for “city” and found that Avelyn has put together a government system that takes a whole nother chunk of coding out of the to do list. I still have to look through all of it but it has a lot of great parts that overlap with my idea.

So that brings me to my idea that I’ve put together which has pretty much been coded. Take Arte Gordon’s idea (picture it in my right hand) and Avelyn’s idea (picture it in my left hand) and fuse the two together (picture me slamming my two hands together.)

I typed this idea a while ago, here it is.

3.

Imagine, if it was coded so that players built up their cities in levels... Let’s say a player starts off with a guild stone in the center, placed right on the terrain. From that he plants houses around it and links them to the stone. At this stage he can barely call this area a town, its more like just a collection of houses.


The player’s guild slowly gets funds together however, and they can upgrade their town to the second level, lets say for 200,000 gold. (But the money is never lost, however, it’s saved in the town stone.) Now at level two, he can access a “town builder” which would be very similar to the housing builder. He can go around and place exterior walls around his collection of houses at about 4 to 8 “clicks” in size (a click is one screen worth of land). He can add a door or gate to the city that only the guild members can access. Now they can keep enemies out of their town. Their city grows.


And keeps growing…The guild gets another 200,000g together and they upgrade to level three. Crafters of the city are now allowed to craft anvils and forges for the city. The crafters can place these anvils and forges in the city and blacksmiths can begin crafting Grand Master armor and weapons for the guild and town vendors. (There will be no other way to create high quality, gm armor unless made at a level three town anvil). Soon word gets out that this town has reached this level and has an anvil and forge in which you can create gm armor and hundreds of blacksmiths seek to craft here. Business is good and the town grows even more.


The guild puts another 200,000g together and purchases a stable for the town (level 4). This is the first town to reach this level and is the only source in the world in which to obtain horses. The town is now booming, players from all over the world come to buy horses at $1000 a piece and the guild’s capital is soaring through the roof. (Note: The money is not going into any player’s pockets, but into the town stone.) The guild is enjoying great success and it seems as though the sky is the limit.


A mile or so away, another town has formed. Within a few weeks this town gets to level three and they are enjoying great benefits and nipping at the heels of the other city, pulling some of their business away. Soon they level up again and have attracted enough players to rightfully call themselves a city.

Members of the first city ride by and are jealous at their success for at one time they were the only source of gm armor/stables.They form a raid party and start harassing this second city, killing anyone that tries to enter or leave it. Members inside begin rallying their own forces and ride out to defend their city but after killing them off, they come back hours later to harass them again.

The raiding goes on for weeks between the two cities and tensions rise to a boil. This second city has decided they are going to try to go to war with them, they place a poll box in the city for two days and allow their members to vote and officially go to war. After two days the vote is up and only 45% of the city wants to go to war, while a lot, it is not enough. Tensions rise within this very city, members are getting fed up with the players that enjoy crafting in safety but won’t fight.

The governor sends a message across the world to a third city governed by his brother asking for support. The brother explains that he is enjoying peace in his remote area and does not want to bring any weight down upon his city. The first brother is infuriated at his response and demands that he come to his aid and go to war with this first city. The brother concedes and explains the situation to his townspeople, after a vote the brother is surprised to find that 90% of the town wants to ally with the city-in-need and go to war. They leave their city behind as a last resort, if fighting does not fall in their favor. They travel across the land to ally with the second city.

Now almost double its size, the second city declares war on the first. The first city accepts and goes straight to war without a vote or poll of its members. For the next two hours the two cities are vulnerable to siege attack.

Siege tents are placed, siege weapons are made and fired upon enemy walls. Crafters in the city pick up weapons for the first time and wait, praying the attack doesn’t reach them. After two hours of waiting word finally rides in, telling the crafters that the battle is over. The first city has been reduced to rubble and a new stone has been placed in the town center where the second brother will rebuild.

Life goes on, cities form and cities fall, etc etc

So I would continue with the story, lol, but I think this conveys my idea pretty well. I’d like to code all of these aspects into not just an addition to RunUO, but a full fledge modification. Something like “RunUO: Civilizations”. It would not be an addition to a server, but an entirely new one started from scratch.

UO doesn’t need an overhaul in its client, it doesn’t need new spells, new lands, new monsters or other “filler”. It needs a completely new direction that doesn’t just tack on, but builds up.

I think if enough of you like this, we can work together to really shape this idea into something worth coding. Below is a list of logistics that I’d like to debate.

4.
-Players will start off in an NPC run town like Britain. It’ll be days before we start seeing guilds planting their town stones and probably weeks to months before they can afford their own houses.

-should houses be new or old school?

-should players be able to place a house outside of a city or should they only be able to place them once they are apart of one?
-If they can place them outside of a city, what disadvantages or dangers should they come with so that they would be compelled to make a city or find one to place in?

-NPC Vendors in Player run cities

-As the cities “level up” they are given Npc vendors, such as stable masters, that have fixed prices that contribute to the cities capital funds on the town stone.
-Maybe instead of having NPC towns like Britain with stable masters/mages/etc, take all of the npc’s out of the world (except for healers and some other less important npcs) and make them only attainable through player run cities.
-So if you can afford a town stone, it will come with vendors that you can place at the very start that will start making you money for your city. So as players come by and use these vendors your town grows off the bat?

-a bit drastic?

-Town Types

-Should players be able to maybe decide on their creation what type of town they want to have? Maybe three options that vary between levels of NPC and fully player run. That allow for carebear type cities of crafters or hardcore war states full of fighters?

-or should there just be only one type and only one direction a city can progress?

-A cities capital, level, how many deaths its players have had, kills, cities it has toppled, etc. will be displayed when you click on its stone.

-Modification needs to be done to the statics file to take out trees/rocks to open areas more for city placement

-Should crafting skills gain faster in cities?

-Should cities be able to tax players automatically (hard coded), or should it be a soft-relationship, which means that it’s just the relationship between the players?

-if it is hard coded then players must be given the option to vote on things such as war

-Should players be able to ban enemies from their cities? So once the walls have been constructed you can say “I ban thee” and kick them out… or should players go grey if they are not a member of the city?

-Should bankers be added to player run cities? If so should they be universal or only accessed from that one city?

I've included a poll with this to gauge interest, vote yes/no if you are.

[Mortis]

Not reading it all it looks very cool. I like it.

You should do it and release it to every one. As I have been shown the past for polling things. Make sure you state you are going to release it if the poll is good or bad.

I vote yes.

[ABTOP]

Yes, but i think what exist UO maps have a little places for this.
If you really wanna make this so make empty maps too))
And then players cant use Bank until build a Town.)

[HellRazor]

I'm interested and I think it's an interesting concept. Mostly doable if you keep the game mechanics simple and within reason.

Coding and debugging would be a challenge. Even with much of it already written (ArteGordon's systems) the integration into a cohesive system will be a big project.

You'll need to put some thought into how the player towns are built. I can easily see a number of crappy or half finished cities littering the landscape.

The other possible downside will be having the player base to fully realize the game mechanics. You would really need to have a fairly large player base for the system to FULLY work as intended (at least for having the player governments, cities, and sieges that would really make the system stand out and shine).

But anyways, I like it. I'm always interested in changes to the game mechanics that will add something new and fun to UO.

[David]

To address part of the issue of half finished towns you could have some sort of town decay built in. Either keep adding small amounts of gold to the stone (taxes on the vendors?) and/or the mayor has to click every so often, etc.

If the town is in disrepair then first the gates will open for anybody, then gradually parts of the walls would go.

I'm just thinking out loud here, feel free to ignore me.

[Mentose]

Yes, but i think what exist UO maps have a little places for this.
If you really wanna make this so make empty maps too))
And then players cant use Bank until build a Town.)

I've had a lot of experience editing maps so I would probably release a "patch" for the map files that would clear up space all over the world for cities.

Originally I was thinking about taking all of the trees and rocks and making them objects in the world that could be cut down, but then realized it would take up way too much memory in the world.
What I'm debating now is if I should make only sections of the world "choppable" so that players can clear certain areas for their cities.

But I have not forgotten this and I have atleast one good solution.

I'm interested and I think it's an interesting concept. Mostly doable if you keep the game mechanics simple and within reason.

Coding and debugging would be a challenge. Even with much of it already written (ArteGordon's systems) the integration into a cohesive system will be a big project.

Yea, my biggest concern is keeping it simple. It can't be some convoluted system, its got to be intuitional.

The other possible downside will be having the player base to fully realize the game mechanics. You would really need to have a fairly large player base for the system to FULLY work as intended (at least for having the player governments, cities, and sieges that would really make the system stand out and shine).

Yea, and I'm still debating whether or not I should even continue doing this. I see that almost 100 people have visited this thread, but only 14 people have polled and only 4 of you have responded. I don't know if that says something about the idea, or just the length of the post. If i do, I'm going to code this with a server population of 500+ in mind.

To address part of the issue of half finished towns you could have some sort of town decay built in. Either keep adding small amounts of gold to the stone (taxes on the vendors?) and/or the mayor has to click every so often, etc.

If the town is in disrepair then first the gates will open for anybody, then gradually parts of the walls would go.

I'm debating so many issues in my head on how a player goes about the first few steps of making a city..

Should they plant the stone, the houses and then the walls in time.
OR
Should they plant the stone and then they cant place houses until they have the walls down? No that doesn't make sense.

So i'm thinking, well there needs to be incentive to build up your city and not let it stagnate. City decay might work but thats kind of annoying? I do like the idea that as the city decays the doors open up to anybody and parts of the walls fall.

I don't know, my head is racing with ideas but none of them fit.

Because here is the problem, everyone is going to want to be the mayor of their own city. Thats not possible though.

What I'm thinking is that cities should not replace guilds as I first intended.

Cities should be run by one major guild, but within it, allow its members to have their own guilds and their own sections of the city.

So while you might be a member of an overall city, you can still manage a guild of players.


-What I want is for cities to be expensive to start, but not to maintain.
--the cities income should come from placed NPCS that are expensive to start, but the benefits far outweigh the startup prices
----the stable example. players will want to have horses and will buy them from these npcs, the money will go to the town
--------players will run a peaceful city because they don't want to drive business away

-At the most there should only be like 10 cities in the world.
-If each city had an active population of 50 players that would be ideal.

So many ideas, i'll put them all together and come back here later with them more organized.

[Ki Frost]

Because here is the problem, everyone is going to want to be the mayor of their own city. Thats not possible though.

You could change some of your ideas around.

Why not code it to where there can only be so many citys "built" at a time. First come first serve.
Then instead of making "mayors" of a city, make them kinda like kings. Then you could make it to where the "people" could revolt against the king and his commandable NPC army...

Dunno its a good idea in general your just taking to big of a jump. (no offense) Take a step back and rework from ground up, instead of working around seigable cities, start your work around how you want your cities, then implement the seige.

[dangan10511]

i think this idea is great on one condition though, youd need a custom map i think this idea would be the best idea runuo has seen in a looooong time but i dont think it would work great if it wasnt a custom map almost like a uo2 to where uo now works totally different and it would be great but the idea with having players be able to have their town monopolize something like stables or regs is wanderful but wouldnt work great if regular towns like brit already sold them which brings up the custom map idea again. the idea about having players be able to clear out an area is great but is it pratical? im sure it is in some way or form but just be alot of time proabably wasted. But if you had a custom map you could make areas that are very large that are clear with some trees here and there. Also i think their should be a city limit per facet. like 4 cities per cause seriously everyone would wanna start their own city, maybe just make it to where only certain amount, also be nice maybe to have some type of system in where you might be able to have different people as kings like a voting system or if they are dieing to many times they lose their postion and the next in command comes up. i got a ton of ideas for this i also like the idea of making it almost a whole new runuo and really changing a ton of stuff around making it a truly custom shard.

[TMSTKSBK]

I keep meaning to do something like this...and never getting around to it.

[David]

Ingame, auction off City deeds. Four deeds to start with then a couple more when "the king" feels it is justified. After that a lottery could be held to give newer players a chance.

[dangan10511]

yes thats what im talking about that would be awesome, also i was wandering about houses, if you do do this i think maybe even like a house theme for a town where a town can have its own house theme, where players can only have a certain type of house for a town, like a sandstone type house already deed'ed and have whole bunch of different sandstone houses that are similiar or like a renissance hosue for renisance town, this part wouldnt be hard to do i got tons of custom houses in deed i did that with my server to where players could only have a certain type of house for an area of the server to kinda have a town theme, and in there players can have vendors like town vendors selling the good they wanna sell, like a custom vendor that sells and buys just like a regular town vendor. just to kinda keep the theme, another cool idea would be to have a town already set up that is ran by like orcs where guild towns can go in alliance and go up against this town taht is incredably hard. maybe even have 2 of them a good and evil that way players can join in alliance with on of them dividing the world even more, i know it prolly be incradably hard to script an entire town that runs by itself let alone 2 of them that do all that but it could be a good idea or maybe an idea you can run off of.

[MarciXs]

And how long I would like to rebuild my city? I mean like its get destroyed because none of city members were online and the NPc guards were killed(if there was any) And all over again, making a new city. Cool.

[Mentose]

Originally Posted by MarciXs

And how long I would like to rebuild my city? I mean like its get destroyed because none of city members were online and the NPc guards were killed(if there was any) And all over again, making a new city. Cool.

You gotta read the whole idea first before assuming you know what it is.

The first city accepts and goes straight to war without a vote or poll of its members. For the next two hours the two cities are vulnerable to siege attack.

[dangan10511]

if you want id be willing to build the world. The world build have to start out with 1 city, 1 main like starting city. With few vendors more of just a blacksmith and tailor and thats about it. cause that way the players have just enough to have armor and a wep to hunt or enough to hunt. then the rest could be started out by people going off and gaining skill and some better armor. then once they get enough exsperience/ money people can go off and start the first town, besides the starting one. Or you could make a player and act like your a player there and you start a town before anyone enters that way players have access to buy regs and things. idk it take a few people brainstorming to come up with a main idea. idk pm me though if you actually wanted to start doing this

[Mentose]

Well currently I'm scripting the town stone and gumps for the players and mayor. I'm taking pieces from the latest Goverment system that is out. Once I've perfected the town stone I'm going to come back here on the boards and start discussing alot of this stuff.

I've got alot of ideas from little to crazy in scale.

Im debating if we should remove player houses as we know them and allow only realistically looking buildings like those you find in britain to be placed in a city.

Like imagine if all of britain town was bare and you could place your houses in place of the old structures.

But not the old crappy houses or new custom plots. No, you'd place houses that looked like the ones that used to be there (not exactly like them though). Houses with real A shaped roofs and the city would follow a design pattern.

But they're just ideas.

Once I script the town stone and gumps I'm also going to post the code on here so that I can get some help fine tuning the "base" of this project. I've got spring break in a week so I don't think I'm going to be getting much done untill afterwards.

Thanks for the ideas guys.

[Nevaeh the Genie]

I am a little confused. After reading this through isnt the basic concepts of this already in the custom release scripts?

[viront]

You have some very interesting ideas, some of them are things I've been thinking on for a long time now.

I like the idea of completely player run cities but as you said it isn't a script modification but nearly a complete rewrite.

I've been planning on an economy based UO and in fact found this post by searching for 'economy'... this has opened up a new train of thought for me so I thank you

[Hienrich Jager]

I think it is an absolutely fantastic idea. If you need any help scripting this contact me through these fourms!

Jager

[Nagash]

I like the idea pretty much. I've been fiddling myself with many ways of territory conquering and alternative evolution.

It could work like....
Let's say that there is an X number of "barbarian", savage, primitive villages/civilizations scattered around. Could be savages, orcs, trolls, whatever it is. Each kind of savage civilization would have a similar resources avaliability, creatures and problems in its whereabouts.
Perhaps most orcs hoard lands good to grow spicy condiments, full of iron and dull copper, but have problems with the Titans kinda nearby. Or perhaps the savages love gold veins as they are attracted to shiny metals, as well as a good amount of trees and wheat plantations for their needs. They could be more civilized and would be already using bulls and cows. Or even perhaps the lizardfolk tries to settle in regions rich in verite for their poisonous intents and close to swamps.

So these villages would have the regular monsters we know in UO and perhaps some kind of bosses. The location of these villages shouldn't be told to all players. Just let them find out that they exist. Perhaps scattered books with their history and hints is a good reward for the intrepid player who likes to explode the world you've built.

So the leaders of them could drop the deed to the townstone which had to be placed in the region. Upon being picked up by a player it would cancel the spawn in the region. Now the player can build its own city.

If the city is forgotten (mayor not paying repair taxes, people not logging, etc), the old savage civilization would then see the opportunity of taking back their lands and rebuilding their own. And then the place would be avaliable once more to be conquered by another group of players.

Just an idea I had.
Other thing that I dislike in UO is the possibility of o a player being self-suficient. The magery spells says it all. Teleport, damage, healing, invis, etc. I would really like that the character possibilities would force players to cooperate more, instead of it happening just because there is some uber strong monster. I realize it's really out of topic, but I got excited cause I'm working on this remaking of character abilities and perhaps basic combat system. The main point within the topic is that perhaps should be found some way of making players more dependent on each other.

[Pyro-Tech]

I haven't read through all of the information here for it is late....but i will say that this concept is accutally what im designing my shard around. I have, like you, already discoverd the town gov system, and the seige/damageabl structure's bit. and with a little bit of editing (not too much on part due to the nature of the siege system of arte's) it's all there already. Only difference between this, and say shadowbane which i play(ed), is that the bane circle gives the defender's time to prep up. and know when it will start to be able to be sure there will be people on. currently, with the set up i have found, you can just start bombarding at will and be done with it.

This idea is something i have been developing from different systems kinda meshing together...only i figured the whole egg and pan routine instead of getting my hands dirty

I am interested in a system that handles it all however so....if you have anything, please share....or if you want suggestion's and what not, i would be more than happy to help you....so you can later help me

[Mentose]

Well I'm on spring break right now, so I haven't been working on this.

In reading your guys comments I've decided on making this modification something that is highly customizable. When I left last week I was working on making the Cities save just like guilds to their own file, with their own generic read/write methods to allow for easier scripting. While this may seem silly, because how many shards can possibly run this effectively (you need atleast 4-500 users), I'm still going to aim for that.

Once the foundations for this project have been laid I'll probably look for help in scripting the extremeties. Theres a whole lot of work that would take me a while to complete alone. But like I said in previous posts, alot of the work will be in laying out the complex workings of this system. From how cities will be built, managed and grow. To how they will defend, attack and destroy others.

[Mentose]

Alright so its time for an update. The past 5 weeks I've been wrestling with this project and tests/exams but I have gotten in about 50+ hours on it and I've made some exciting progress.

I've programmed:

-the city stone, some rough menus for players and the governor (needs more work though), regions, the complex generation of city walls based on width/height and not preset boxes.

-the notoriety between city members and between attacking cities

-I've finally solved the last few problems I was having with custom houses (im making it so players can place and maybe will only be able to place realistic looking structures with A style roofs/etc).

-I've integrated Arte Gordon's siege equipment and have it so that when you attack the city walls based on the type of ammo you are using it will affect the wall accordingly.
----Exampe: If you use a fiery ball when it strikes the wall a flame errupts at its feet that damages enemies when they step on it.

-I've made it so that if you attack one of the custom city houses with a fiery cannon ball it will ignite the wood. The fire then after a few seconds begins to spread exponentially and finally will destroy the building piece by piece if the fire is not put out(looks pretty cool) But i'm still deciding on how the fire will be put out if either by "healing" it with a spell or something.
---im considering making the custom town structures in 2 or 3 different types of material. Example: wood/straw/stone. Each being more expensive and more durable to siege attack.
------in order to take out a wood structure you can use a firey round to burn down the house
------but in order to take out a stone house you must use an iron ball that only works at taking out one wall at a time

Alot of this work is all over the place but I'm just tackling the big chunks in this project first so I can then maybe delegate smaller things to programmers that are interested in helping out.

I'll try to get some screenshots, heres an RPV razor video file showing the exponential fire and catapult. unrar it and place it in your C:\Program Files\Razor\Videos then load up razor, go to video capture and click open and navigate to the file

http://www.runuo.com/forums/attachme...1&d=1177730788