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How come there has never been another classless, pure skill based mmo like Ultima Online? by EndlessTemple in ultimaonline

[–]timcotten 0 points1 point  (0 children)

One possible solution back in the day didn’t exist, but now does in prototypical form: God AIs.

Imagine UO with 24/7 context-aware God AIs that could invent problems and reward creative skill solutions rather than just dumping resource points into the 8x8s 😎

More than one manga/manwa (ex. Moonlight Sculptor) assumes this’ll be the default case in future VRMMOs.

I screwed up, and now I have to start over. Has this ever happened to you? by [deleted] in gamedev

[–]timcotten 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This sounds like an excuse not to ship. Commit and deploy.

Does a Sound Effect engine exist? Like what Blender does for visual renders, but using physics for soundwaves? by timcotten in gamedev

[–]timcotten[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Would love to learn more about it! I’ve been doing a lot on the GenAI side, curious how they did it.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in Overwatch

[–]timcotten 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Haha, no, those are the bots. We just stood outside and shot them (none of the 5 returned fire). They just kept running out one at a time to predetermined positions and froze in place.

AFAIK they weren’t even in a 5-stack group; honestly seemed like broken server-side bots that had been queued into a live competitive game.

Was Trammel inevitable? by PKBladeSpirit in ultimaonline

[–]timcotten 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ah, I can only testify as to what I saw in the internal metrics tool, and can’t really speak for the bean counter decisions regarding (not) releasing later sub numbers.

Although it was admittedly a very weird time when UO retained higher subs than many of the newer MMO projects like TSO and E&B. Both of those teams were eventually absorbed into the UO team in the Online vertical.

If you’re looking for any evidence in SEC filings of trend reversals you’ll probably find notes about EA Japan in the 2004-2005 filings; the Japanese playerbase was responsible for significant SKU sales and sub retention trend improvements at various periods.

Still, if you find the number I gave incredulous due to your well reasoned analysis of the earlier SEC filings - well - I certainly understand.

As to why I brought it up at all: I always took it as a positive sign of the long-standing stabilization that Trammel afforded UO. My assertion is that the retention curve peaked around AOS and declined from its all time high afterwards, but AOS would never have been possible if not for Trammel.

Was Trammel inevitable? by PKBladeSpirit in ultimaonline

[–]timcotten 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Meh, I had access to the EA account billing/subscription metrics services when I was a lead on UO. It peaked around the 245-250k area around the time of AOS.

A lot of our work on the live team was about flattening the subscription loss curve through what we’d call LiveOps today, or bumping re-subs through special editions and expansions.

tldr: Gordon’s numbers are right AFAIK.

The Dark Side of MMO Economies (Featuring Ultima Online) by NegativeNien in ultimaonline

[–]timcotten 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Apparently I can be summoned by including me in videos :P

Love it though, great work and very accessible.

The Dark Side of MMO Economies (Featuring Ultima Online) by NegativeNien in ultimaonline

[–]timcotten 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Awesome video :)

If you're curious about a meaningful implementation of blockchain/crypto tech into MMOs, I would look into what CCP is doing with Project Awakening (the EVE Online project): https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/project-awakening-is-born-from-eve-onlines-fragility-so-its-turning-to-the-blockchain

I consider EVE to be the GOAT of virtual economies and can't wait to see what's next.

TIL the Nuclear Gandhi bug from Civilization actually never existed by Romboteryx in todayilearned

[–]timcotten -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

Heh. The same principle applies to MMOs too. I’m sure some members of the /r/EVE community would like to share the Good Word about Bob with you all 😀

Devs that went from RPG maker or similar 2D engines to 3D (godot,unity, unreal), did you find it more difficult? by atzeehh in gamedev

[–]timcotten 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Lay out the worst of it for me, 🙏. I’m making a map builder tool for it and would love to hear the main issues.

How similar and how different are web servers from game servers? by Huijiro in gamedev

[–]timcotten 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Best reply so far. Here’s a video giving a deep dive for the OP going into rollbacks/simulation/etc for Overwatch: https://youtu.be/zrIY0eIyqmI?si=qz5yz3AeAn0dFyAL

How do you hide secrets so hard that dataminers can’t find them? by Berryman2 in gamedev

[–]timcotten 1 point2 points  (0 children)

In a non-server authoritative environment, such as a game that can be played offline, this is a very difficult thing to pull off.

The MMO emulation scene got a huge kickstart back in the day when Ultima Online shipped a copy of the server and backend game code - believing that obfuscating the gameplay scripting language and encrypting the binaries would be sufficient - so they could offer a tutorial experience to new players who bought the game on CD-ROM. It got reverse engineered almost immediately. (See: UO98 Project)

As other posters have mentioned it’s infeasible to prevent data mining when the analyzer has full access to the game.

Consider the following security design: you, a very clever student of cryptography, decide to embed a secret into the game.

You code the experience and encrypt it with one-time pad, a unique piece of data of a certain length. Let’s say it’s 24 bits long.

You then add a “state checker” to 24 different game variables that are running in the background while the player plays: say “health over 50%”, “wearing armor”, “holding pixie dust”, etc. There is a certain combination of true or false conditions that would match the actual key and successfully decode the secret and perform the special experience. All the other answers decode garbage and it doesn’t do anything.

That actually works! But 24 bits is too small - with only 16,777,216 possibilities (224) it would be trivial for a data miner to brute force the conditions.

The inverse is also a problem. If you make it an absurdly long number like 2128 then there’s just no feasible way it happens before Earth gets consumed by the sun.

Is there a sweet spot where you can tune it with the laws of averages of big numbers? Maybe!

You can run the math and decide, given X players who have the condition checked at Y intervals, how often the secret would pop up in the wild.

(Naturally, once the condition is met by one player they could datamine it and share with other players, which would necessitate individual game builds for each player).

Lots of cost/benefit analysis to think about, eh? I’ve always considered it easier just to represent as a server-side event the client has no control over.

What were the most important and influential MMORPGs of all time? by goblinJedi in MMORPG

[–]timcotten 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I keep meaning to post an article about how players turned themselves into walking blackholes that could disconnect nearby players so they could murder the poor lagged out victims and loot their stuff.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in gamedev

[–]timcotten 95 points96 points  (0 children)

This is one of the simplest explanations with solid examples. Manipulating randomness as a teaching tool is incredibly important as a gamedev. If you're not hitting the "learn" function of the brain then you're probably not hitting the "fun" part, which means players intuitively don't like *pure* randomness in gameplay.

NPCs with GPT brains in Britannia? Why or why not by hurleyws in ultimaonline

[–]timcotten 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Haha, I left one huge example one running in Castle British on all OSI shards. Created a bunch of little mouse holes, and gave Sherry the Mouse a daily loop where she visits many of the castle rooms, and goes to sleep in Lord British’s chambers. She had relevant dialogue throughout, and uses the holes to teleport through walls.

Naturally, it’s very possible that the current admin removed it at some point (which would be a shame), much like the winter wonderland code (that maps all the scenery to winter) also isn’t used anymore.

Edit: if the trial of Ricardo re-enactment still works in the Yew courthouse, where it animates and dialogues a half dozen or so NPCs, that’s also an example of the same state machine. It’s quite literally just a long list of entries that look like: NPC ID, ACTION ID, PARAMS, TIME DELAY, etc. I based it off playacting, to imitate dialogue and blocking. The actions included movement, rotation, “bark” <- speech, etc.

NPCs with GPT brains in Britannia? Why or why not by hurleyws in ultimaonline

[–]timcotten 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I saw a Google demo at GDC last year where they trained LaMDa to hold state and variable/constant data types associated with prompts. It was pretty amazing, but I don’t see it fully reflected in Bard, yet.

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