vbGore Free Online RPG Engine

I've just been to see Avatar, pretty cool.

As you probably know, there's a fairly blunt theme of ecological/environmental conservation running through the plot.

It got me thinking about a game which had a working ecosystem as a play environment instead of just a regular sterile set of levels. I can think of very few games that touch slightly on, or hint vaguely at something I have in mind.

Red faction introduced advanced geomod (along with forerunners like worms etc...) that had reactive destructable environments, and pretty much every strategy game since chess has scratched the surface of resource management/ conservation. For instance: Age of Empires has you forage, this then determines you military capability etc...

None of these examples come anywhere near to a definative likeness of what I have in mind though.

What about an environment where plants grow and cross polenate as randomly as they would in the amazon, insects infest, herds roam, predators prey on... er... prey. All of this wildlife would be linked into a circle of life (regretably to quote Elton John).

The real proof of good programming and design would be if you could get the ecosystem to find its own balance/circle of life as a byproduct of the wildlife's natural reaction to each other - without needing to manually tell the game world what to do.

Only then, would a player be able to properly observe their own unpredictable impact on a world.

Granted, a few species would become extinct/surplus to the game's requirements as the game world simulated its own process of virtual-natural selection - and if the ecosystem were too sensitive, it would become impossible to play the game for fear of triggering a virtual apocalypse by treading on the wrong twig, but a balance could be met, surely.

Discuss...

You're kidding right?

I've lost a lot of interest in self perpetuating worlds, i used to think it would be awesome but they just don't seem to work very well right now. Having good content and lots of it is much more important i think.

i've always liked the idea. sure as hell not something thats easy to pull of but is absolutely doable to a degree. something you see mentioned an endless number of times on mmorpg forums is demand for immersion in a "living breathing world" and thats pretty much what this would give.
mobs that dont respawn but reproduce would be cool. critters actually attacking each other keeping one from overpopulation would be simple enough to pull off, and on top of that the horrid staple kill ten rats quest would finally be useful. getting sent out to thin the herd would ACTUALLY thin the herd.

i could also see it being very interesting if some crafting item became high in demand and the impact it would cause. think everyone suddenly wants bear hide vests, and within a week bears are extinct. that fancy plant needed for the flavor of the month potion would suddenly be impossible to come by. an extra add on would be having player housing where you can grow plants and raise beasties. imagine an actual market place popping up over time where a player is raising cattle for slaughter and selling meat to adventures. that would be fucking immersion right there.

instead of just thinking of the changing world itself, gotta think of how that changing world will effect and add to the standard content and actually make it worth doing. having a non static world without the same repetitive content is going to be the key to success. the theme park mmo is not getting the numbers it used to. full on sandbox aint doing much either so a nice middle ground could be where it's at and this type of thinking could create that.

Now that you put it into a different light it does sound a bit cooler. However isn't this just a simple case of supply and demand rather than an entire ecosystem?

People will churn through the bears and make them extinct, and if making them extinct makes the hides more valuable, what's stopping them?

And if the bear does become extinct in a few days on release, how much are you willing to pay for the artist who made the bear?

I also can't see this as an ecosystem being the main focus of a game, it would also be hella expensive to pull off as a side feature.



Sorry I missed this part (I know i am nitpicking sorry ). Resource based RTS is about churning through as many resources as possible, not conserving them. A bad player is one who doesn't have constant peon production and overloading trees/goldmines with them and spending all the resources that come in as fast as possible.

This is why Starcraft has moved from micro to macro based play. Fast expansions are now the norm, where as they used to be perceived as really risky before. Macro, strats and timings are much better so they are able to deal with having masses of resources coming in and spending them all and defend from 1 base rushes.

Also even when you are contained to one base you end up using your minerals faster to keep the same size army, you don't conserve them. Management is simplified to how fast you can spend them. If you find your macro is perfect and still aren't using all your resources, you build and pump from more barracks to keep your mineral count down or tech.

you gotta think a little bit ahead to see where the ecosystem bit comes in. the bears are extinct within a few days of launch, their AI which had them killing off rabbits was the only thing keeping the little wascles in check. rabbits are now breeding like mad and boy do they love how those patches of healing herbs taste. gives a good reason to drop in a kill X rabbits quest which will actually have an effect. now if those rabbits are programed to eat up any plant life around, there wont be much left for the deer which start dying out. the wolves which are coded to go after any critters their size are finding less local deer and start wandering out to find something to kill, bringing them dangerously close to town. wolf pelts might just become the new fashion of the season.

as long as mobs are reproducing at a reasonable rate instead of the same one respawning, it shouldnt be a problem with a species accidentally getting wiped out. a few afternoons of grinding may be enough to slightly screw with the "natural order" of the environment though. of course if the community decides they are really sick of the annoying giant slime population they could actually band together and permanently get rid of it.
if player built housing was allowed i could see that driving mobs out of the area and causing some environmental twists too. sure it could be abused and seriously screw with the game world, but if we're talking indy games ive noticed small populations tend to not be total ass hats and actually consider how their actions effect the rest of the community.
back when i played vendetta online, you could mine asteroids. mining heated them up and gave up resources slower, the time they took to cool also went up exponentially. what kept a player from just parking and running an auto mine script on the most valuable asteroids was pretty simple, he didnt want to be a dick. in a small game i think that same attitude would apply when the subject of killing off an entire species, just to drive up resource prices, came up.

it obviously wouldnt be a set it and forget it sort of thing on the dev side, and not everyone would care or even notice on the player side, but i sure as hell would get a kick out of a game like that. a good indy game is all about filling the niche the big boys dont think of. no matter how out there an idea seems it may get you a small but viciously loyal player base.

Damn, I now can't think how this would not be an awesome idea.

If I ever become a game designer, hopefully I can get you to speak at all the conventions on my behalf.

I'd copyright ecosystems, if only that bloody mother nature hadn't beaten me to it. She's shrude, that one.

The big Achilles heel would be griefers just ganking all of the bottom-of-the-food-chain critters, starting a chain reaction that led to mass extinction (players and NPCs alike). However, who can honestly say it wouldn't be fun to watch wolves actually resort to in-fighting once they had butchered all of the games novice/beginner population out of desperation.

Joking aside;

Firstly, I think it would be an incredible gaming experience to watch the low end critters die out - followed by the higher and higher level beasties. Eventually; the game would become so post-apocalyptic that gangs and clans would end up scrapping over the last remaining morsels of food from the now endangered, highest level monster in the game.

Secondly, it would be easy enough to implement an area (let's say a bit of woodland) that was restricted to NPC's only. The various types and levels of monster could spawn/breed within the safe-zone at a controlled rate - this way, once the game began to reach dangerously low levels of wildlife, it could gradually reset/restore itself.

I think it would actually enrich the play to have extinction (albeit temporary) as a possibility. It would teach players to A) respect the ecosystem and B) protect it. Now there's an exciting premise for some clan warfare.

i saw an java applet a long long time ago simulating genetics and population of plants and animals in a kinda like world inside a console simulation, it was kind of interesting. I wish i'd have saved it, it was quite a good article.

Let's not forget weeds.

If there are plants that are used for potions or food, there could be weeds that grow faster and take over the area killing the valuable plant life.

Then players would have to keep on eye on these areas to make sure the weeds don't destroy all the cash crops.

Yeah, that is a good idea, I aready thought about that.

Juts think as it:

There are this animal, it's a computer controled monster.
And there are this plant, it's a usable item that get you another item.
Then, this animal eat this plant to survive, and the plant disappears, thus the item that would be done with it.
The effect that the low number of itens made with this plant would do to the economy would be the pricing going up.

Now, think about the animal.
Gather as many plants you can, and we would have this animal to go extinct. So, their hides, teeth, and other things would go high pricing.
And that plant would just go overpopulated.

Ok, we're done with it, but there a plenty of other things we need to have in mind.
What will be the speed that this plant grows/spawn?
What will be the speed this animal breed/grows/spawn?
What will be the interval between the alimentation of this animal?
What will be the normal price of the animal and plant itens, and how rare are they?

So, this is just an example of what I thought, when we figure it, it's somewhat easy to handle... But try figuring that each animal, plant, has an interactivity with each other, NOW we have an ecosystems.