General Discussion on the MMORPG for Wc3

this project sounds like it could actually go somewhere, especially with hero saving bit.

However just make sure when you make the map, it CANNOT be played in single player or else someone could just use cheats to get a really high level hero.

Dakan, I'm still having trouble with adding another hero into the saving system. Could you please make a short guide on how to add another hero to your test map by showing all the steps?

PS-If you need any help with you project I'd be willing to help, just tell me what to do!

send me another PM or email of the exact problem your running into, or e-mail me the modified map and ill take a looksi when i get some time.

Fyre, im having 2nd thoughs about saving the hero using a custom stat system. Using the remove item trick to boost stats will be a PAIN to reproduce... maybe for this MMORPG we should stick to the 3 built in stats.....

I just wanted to say that i think its a wonderfull project you're working on. but i don't think it will be much of a mmorpg if you can't work around the two big limiters of wc3; only 12 people allowed to play at the same time, and as soon as a game is started others can't join.
As for the map switching, how will you do that?
i mean it wouldn't be fun if everyone was switched to a map when one player reached a specific area. Neither would it be very fun if you made a system that only sent the player who reached the area into the next map if no one could follow him to the same map.
How will you solve or work around those problems?
I think you will need a massive amount of servers too in order to open upp all those maps, or will every game be on personal games on bnet?
How you can endure my questions, its probably nothing new to you people :]

If you do have a working solution then i bet yer game is going to be lots of fun, i for one will sure play it.

the screenshots are awesome

and pls dont listen to that annoying "pls pm"-guy

I agree with the not being able to play in single player thing, we can create a workaround for that no problem, so it's only multiplayer.

Dakan, I don't think it would be that hard, it would just be a long trigger but it can be done fairly easily.

The anti-single player thing is easy. Just set it so that if initially the # of human players in game = 1, end game in victory for that player.

Also, if i'm stepping out of place by answering some of the questions (Since I'm not actually on the team) feel free to politely remind me not to in future :).

Lofwyr: I believe their aim is not to create a MMORPG in the true sense of the word, but rather a Diablo-style map system where people at the same difficulty level can play together on the same map/area. Should a person complete that map, I assume they get the code for their hero, leave the map and simply find/create a game with the map of the next level of difficulty/area. As for your question on the viability on the 'fun factor' of one person trekking it onto the next level alone, I'm sure that as the creators expect the game to grow in popularity that there will be sufficient numbers of people to support at least a couple of games for each progressive map.

I hope for both your sake and mine that I was both informative and correct to at least some degree:gsmile:.

~kharma

Kharma is onto the right idea. We consider it a MMORPG because of the fact you can save your hero, and restart on a different map picking up exactly where you left off, as far as different maps go, each map will have "newbi" areas for people who are just starting along with progressing harder areas for the higher level people. There will be no "switching" of maps during the game, doing to forces the game mode into singleplayer i belive anyway.

The purpose of different maps is so the player doesnt get bored with the game playing the same map over and over and over. Each map will have a head boss who will be extremely hard but drop the best items. Many mini bosses and tons of monsters to make it challenging

Frye: Im thinking about making each "group" of units into a unit group and respawning them every 10 min maybe? using timer arrays from the moment the entire group dies.

Had a great idea while on my lunch break from class today. Cinimatics a single player. I think i got a way to do it. If you dont know, if you turn on cinimatic mode (or letterbox mode) for 1 player and not the others, they will "descyn" and get disconnected from the game. So you cannot turn that on. But..

We can disable user control, using the cinimatic transmition from a unit will display the unit's portrate on the interface, but the only problem is subtitles must be on for them to see the transmition text. And if you display the text manually and the user has subtitles on, they will see it 2x.

But in theory we can display a transmition from a unit with a blank name, and blank text, then manually display the text to that player using the function in Scio's editor and basicly script quest cinimatics for a single player instead of everybody....

Thoughs?

The cinematics are a good idea, as for quest items I think we should store it in the password somehow, so they can still do the quest but they won't get the "uber 1337" item they drop, otherwise you can just do quest runs and get 6 massive items, it will ruin the game.

that could perpose a problem, the more quests we add, the longer the PW becomes and we dont want it getting too long... converting the PW to hex is going to be a little more harder than i though because i wrote the entire thing using intergers, so i have to redo most of the code to store strings instead of intergers, but it can be done.

On a 2nd though, we can set up the items this way:

For beginners, quest items, they will be better than the stuff that drops randomly off low level monsters.

For intermediate, they visit a local shop (when they have cash) and buy equiptment they desire or fight the middle level monsters

For Higher level players, they can fight the epic mobs for good equipment, (monsters that a player cannot solo)

and for the godly items, can be found off the map boss who will be very hard and take a long time to get to, that way a group of friends cant just kill the boss, reset the map and go do it again until they have godly items.

Higher level quests can be for exp or gold

As far as gold goes, lets make this enity actualy worth it, unlike in diablo.. gold was 2 easy to come by. And we defantly need to make the purchasble items worth it. I can see quite a few new items being added to the abilitydata.slk most being based off current items but varried in thier fucntions. I think actual cutom items have a limit of 3 or 4 abilities on them, so instead of adding 3 +12 dmg modifies we can make a +25 damage spell in the slk file.

Here's an idea:

We reduce the natural amount of damage that the Heroes deal normally. Simply lower their starting damage and reduce the amount gained by their primary stat to something like .25. So for each stat their damage is increased by .25. This is where the items come in.

They have to by their weapons and armour at shops. But they can't have more than one weapon or piece of armour at any one time. So to do more damage you'll have to earn more money and buy a better weapon. Same would go with armour. So you would have like 75 different weapons. Each with different damage and/or abilities.

If you wanted to get really fancy then you could produce class specific weapons and armour. Only heroes of that class could equip them.

Mithrandir, that's the purpose of my custom equipment leaderboard thing, everything is modified by triggers anbd you can only have 1 armor, 1 weapon 2 rings etc.

I was going to do something like this a while back but i had to put more time into school. I didnt ever complete my code but it was around 15 chars for a lot of info.

heres some things to note:
wc3 cant detect case sensitive input (that i know of)
you can have 64 common variations for 1 code variable without case sensitive letters !@#$%^&*()_-+=[]{}\|/?><,.;':"

this can dramatically reduce code size.
99 items is probably enough.. how many can you save with your hero?
exp can be rounded to nearest 10 to save a lot of space.
similar for gold.
you could store other variables for the hero such as a reputation variable (is the hero a PK, are they honorable, do they do a lot of quests etc.) and whenever there is a game message that refers to them you can use this. Note: depending on what they do in the game affects their reputation =D

Okay Dakan, I finished redoing the EXP system, the 100 level ups are now further apart and also when a unit is killed, that has been reworked and the exp is partly randomized in a small area. So from 10-15 up to 3244-3319

lots of room for different levels of EXP, there are also 10 levels of units ranging from 1-10, there is a 0 level, which gives up to 11 exp and a minimum of 1, so this is for things that are extremely easy to kill, like a door or something, just so you get exp from everything, unlike d2 where you dont even get anything from spawnlings.

sounds good.

I a little more than 1/4 of the frozen desert done. THe part that is going to take the most time is the natural terrain, once i get to doing the tunnels (using the manmade walls set) those wont take as long. But there will be natural caves also. So maybe in about a week this map will be done.

Did you get my PM about adding the extra 5 symbols to make it a even 100 for a base 100 system?