Sanctimonia Update: Now With Particles!
Kevin Fishburne announced, in a comment on the site, that he had managed to get a new particle system working in the engine for his online, Ultima-inspired game, Sanctimonia. To prove the point, he uploaded a video of the new system in action:
NOT the official game soundtrack. Fans of Ys will recognize it.
Take-aways from the video: rudimentary alpha tiles, which bridge terrain textures, have obviously been implemented. The particle system is of course there and at work (Kevin calls the particles ‘wisps’). The particle buffer is evidently cleared when a player moves out of a cell, it should be noted, which leads to some odd-looking ‘wisp’ behaviour. And the digging feature also produces odd results on occasion, as the engine attempts to rebuild vegetation in the tile that is receiving the excavated dirt.
It’s also worth pointing out that the landscape data is being streamed from a server; this video was apparently taken from within (or of) the Sanctimonia client. Multiplayer hasn’t been implemented, but everything else is in place.
FYI primitive multiplayer is now working with the exception of a small but annoying bug that makes the other players disappear for a couple of frames when moving outside the center cell. It will be fixed, as it really pisses me off.
Sanctimonia, while currently devoid of most features that make a game, well, a game, is now technically an MMO supporting up to 2000 players. Once I implement some fun features I’m going to try an open alpha test to see how the server handles as many clients as possible over the Internet.
That’s cool!
Also: gah! I can’t keep up!
Me neither. It’s moving pretty quick. Just trying to keep my code tight and without ambiguity.
Because it’s easy to miss, notice in the video how the water expands onto the tile dug down to below sea level. Once I allow digging into bedrock you could make water anywhere. When inventory is in place you’ll need a blade to hack down vegetation, a spade to move earth and sand, and an ax to break away bedrock. Bedrock will also be required to build stone walls.
I started and am about to finish the extended Garriott interview, but I also wrote up a tentative game plan for the eventual financial success of the project. It’s a free-to-play, as they call it, and subscription hybrid. FTP’ers get to play as random animals, to see what’s going on. Basically something like this:
Sanctimonia will monetize gameplay on a two tier front.
Both methods will allow client downloads and user registration with a credit card authorized for a $0.99 charge. It will also show a clear intent to purpose before asking them for personal information. This will reduce fraud, spam and theft.
Method one will include no other charge. Introductory and instructive gameplay will be demonstrated by allowing the player to assume the role of an animal in the game, temporarily taking over their behavior while online. A different beast will be selected every time they connect to emphasize the order of natural behavior. Communication will appear as friendly, neutral or aggressive animal sounds (grunts) to subscribed and other animal players. Beasts behaving errantly may be corrected by others of their species, whether AI or non-subscribers.
Method two will require a subscription and include full character creation, backstory, inventory selection and entering the game as a human. This method will require a three-month registration at $5 a month, or $15 initially. If the player wishes to keep their subscription, they will be charged $5 monthly per account. These will be the peace keepers who hunt the free-to-play’ers for food, teaching them the way to self-sufficiency.
Hopefully they won’t do as British said in the recent interview, ‘Killed everything’. Made me sad when he talked about the ecology.
Yuck, pay to play.
Keep in mind that every Ultima game was pay to play, starting with Akalabeth and ending with UO. $60 a year isn’t that much. Most people pay $60 for a AAA title and get 20-40 hours out of it before it goes back to GameStop’s used bin.
I’d like to make it microtransaction based, but don’t want to compromise the fairness of gameplay by biasing it toward the wealthy. Anyone have any ideas about how to include microtransactions that don’t affect your success in the game but would still be interesting enough for people to pay for?
I also have to take into account that a F2P model would introduce a flood of “garbage” accounts, basically people who just want to grief or would play the game for five minutes then quit. Players in the game stay active via AI after signing off, so the garbage accounts would populate half the game until they were weeded out. Even a minimal subscription would keep a lot of these types at bay and by doing so create a stronger community.
Maybe you could do something kind of like what Puzzle Pirates did – there are a number of vanity items like pets or fancy clothing that do nothing as far as gameplay, but are just there to make you feel special. The players in that game had to spend dubloons (money bought with RL cash) + some in-game money to get those things.
Now, they also applied this model to -useful- things like swords & ships, but they also setup an in-game exchange where the F2P players can use in-game money to buy dubloons that other players are selling. What ends up is, the wealthy keep the game funded by buying dubloons and selling them in-game so they don’t have to farm gold, and the people who have a lot of time use their farmed gold to buy dubloons when they want the fancy stuff.
Just an idea, don’t know how the code works for that, but hey, something to think about 🙂
That is an interesting idea. There’s a mathematical coolness to the balance between players with less real money but more time and players with less time but more real money.
Something to note is that while Sanctimonia will have a “controlled” port in Britanny Bay, everywhere else in Britannia will be a free for all, sorta like UO in the beginning once outside of town. This may affect any real-currency economy, as bartering systems and other alternate currency solutions could be used without limit outside of the main port.
I’m still leaning heavily toward a subscription system, because I’m not an economist and the complexity of tying in-game assets to real-world currency is pretty daunting. I don’t want the financial mechanics of the game to interfere with the natural order, or be exploited to the point of unbalancing the game or creating bizarre behavior amongst players trying to circumvent it.
Lately the hot thing is to make a “free to play” MMO, but the reality of that kind of game is often more disturbing than its promise. I think this may be an example of a superior business model trumping a superior gameplay model (big surprise).
While I obviously want the game, and by proxy myself, to be successful, I am a very stubborn and sometimes idealistic person and only make concessions or sacrifices to my vision when there is literally no other choice. I have a gut feeling that fooling around with the F2P model will unnecessarily complicate and possibly destroy the game’s chance of success.
I’m also in a bit of a silo, so any opinions are always welcome.
Damn, I forgot to mention that the multiplayer bug has been fixed. Had to do with the way I converted “world coordinates” to “cell grid coordinates”. It also ended up fixing problems with particles and anything else that used those kinds of conversions, so good news all around.
Unrelated but I also added “sparkles” to the water using the new particle system.