Eisenstern : The RPG project

by Aardappel_ on 05/10/2006 01:20, 317 messages, last message: 12/12/2010 14:57, 205217 views, last view: 12/09/2021 06:24, closed on 12/12/2010 15:10

As you all know, we have been silently prototyping the RPG project for a while now, mainly in the form of Levels and design.

Today marks the day of the more official start of the project, with a name, a domain, and something hinting at a game design.

Check out the website: http://eisenstern.com/

Particularly note the design notes linked from that page. If you want to have your say about the direction this RPG is going, or feel that certain features "won't work well", then now is a good time to discuss that, in this thread :)

Just because we have a website doesn't mean that we should start announcing this project everywhere, unlike most people, I don't like advertising thing that I am going to do, I prefer showing what I have done :) But it is good to have a home for the project, because we'll shift a lot of our focus towards it as the FPS is getting more mature.

I will be doing some of the core gamecode for this project soon, so people can start to play around with it.

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#101: it is not excluded...

by Aardappel_ on 08/11/2006 20:55

that eisenstern SOME DAY will include coop or evolve into something MMORPG like. But we will FIRST make a very polished and complete SP RPG, and THEN we will consider our options. So lets talk about this again in a year from now :)

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#102: Speaking of RPGs

by pushplay on 08/12/2006 03:29

Someone brought this game to my attention:

http://www.heroesofae.com/en/

It's supposed to combine RPG and RTS elements, which brings to mind Ogre Battle. The page is thin on details but the shots are pretty, so we'll see how that turns out.

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#103: Re: Speaking of RPGs

by Passa on 08/12/2006 04:04, refers to #102

reminds me of Warcraft III, hailed as one of the first RTS games to incorporate RPG elements (heros level up etc)

whoo just realised that the BETA is for download!!

whoo just realised again that the BETA is mirrored on my ISPs FTP, yay no quota usage :)

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#104: Re: Speaking of RPGs

by JamesB on 08/13/2006 08:52, refers to #102

Have you guys checked out http://www.projectoffset.com/
Graphics are amazing!!

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#105: Re: Speaking of RPGs

by Chaos on 08/14/2006 17:48, refers to #104

I've been checking back on those guys every few months. It's almost too hard to believe that's in-game graphics.

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#106: Translate

by Max of S2D [Fr] on 08/29/2006 13:13

I wanna know if it will be possible to translate (into french or other languages) the in-game texts (talkings, etc.) of Eisenstern...

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#107: Re: Translate

by MeatROme on 08/29/2006 14:04, refers to #106

Everything using scripts can be translated, although all special chars a language may use that is not on the newerchars.png (see sauerbraten/data/) will not be displayed on-screen - only the console will show it (like for echo's and things said in-game).
Stuff that is hard-coded into the engine would require re-coding, re-compiling and re-distributing the binaries.
This includes stuff like "quad-damage will spawn in 10 seconds" and the like.

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#108: ..

by Max of S2D [Fr] on 08/29/2006 14:29

Translate the texts is ever good. In the Eisenstern menus we will include translations of this terms :D

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#109: About quests...

by Kotch on 10/09/2006 10:26

Would it be possible to implement quests the way the GTA games do missions?

The number one most annoying thing about Morrowind is how the quests can interfere with each other. You can break the game entirely just by wandering around and messing with stuff.

In Grand Theft Auto, the characters and items associated with a mission are put into the map when you start the mission, so you don\'t wind up accidentally killing the wrong NPC or losing the wrong item and stopping your progress through the game.

I imagine that sort of system would save you a lot of work in the long run too, because you wouldn\'t have to sort out the tangled mess of interfering/mutual exclusive story elements.

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#110: ..

by Max of S2D [Fr] on 10/09/2006 12:33

I don't like GTA, but their quest system is good.

About Eisenstern, i hope "savegame" will be here :p

Or do a bit smaller maps. Like Metroid Prime Hunters, every map can have a mission finished in one-two hours, but they are A LOT of others quest if you come back a second time to the map :p

(if you didn't understand my crappy english : Sorry.)

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#111: Yeah...

by Kotch on 10/09/2006 16:31

That sounds okay. Maybe a bit linear, though.

It seems to me that to make a really good RPG, you need a good game mechanic to write the story around. (And, of course, the devs here would want something possible to code in the real world.)

Being able to break the story down into discreet parts, I think, would be a good start. Instead of doing one huge map and trying to juggle all the quests at once (which would be a nightmare to debug), you could do it in stages. You'd start with a smaller map, with a smaller number of quests, which might actually be acheivable, instead of trying to do something the size of Morrowind and failing. Then you could go on and add new areas/maps, with new sets of quests, which are opened up as the story develops. You could eventually end up with something the size of Morrowind, but without suffering from being overly ambitious, as Morrowind does.

That's nothing to do with the engine or the code, though. That's just map design.

I can think of ways I might do quest code. But I'm not a programmer, so I can only describe it in layman's terms. You'd go up to some NPC and they'd offer you a quest. There'd be some dialogue to explain what you have to do, and then an option to either accept the quest or not.

If you accepted, the game would add the elements of the quest to the world -- the monster you have to kill, the item you have to fetch, a teleporter to some otherwise inaccessible area of the map you've set aside especially for this quest, or whatever.

There would have to be some conditions, to decide when you've completed the quest. (You kill the monster, you pick up the item, etc.) Those conditions could have certain consequences attached to them -- that is, more items you would add to the map permanently. E.g. the NPC rewards you with a new weapon that spawns nearby, a changemap thingy appears which lets you move onto the next part of the game, etc.

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#112: continuing...

by Kotch on 10/09/2006 18:14

Okay, let me give an example of how I might use this in an actual RPG.

I might set the first part of my game in a medieval style walled-town. That takes up one map. The walls around the town would make a pretty good map boundary. The story would be that the town is under seige, and all the gates are locked. You, of course, are one of the town\'s people.

The first bunch of missions would focus around holding the town against the enemy. You might have to do things like kill the bad guys who\'ve snuck over the wall before they get to the gate tower and open the gates. But I imagine the pivotol mission would be one where you go off somewhere out of the way to fetch your first decent weapon (maybe through some crypts under the city). Only, when you return you discover the seige has broken and the town lies in ruins.

This would come courtesy of a map change. This new map would let you explore the ruins of all the places you became familiar with in the first part of the game. And there would be a bunch of new missions based around cleaning up the remaining marauders and helping out the NPC survivors. I have the added advantage of being able to add a breach to the town wall through which the character may now leave the town.

This sort of thing is what I would like to do. It\'s why I want to spread my rpg across different maps, and trigger map changes via the quest system. It\'s got nothing to do with making massive worlds. It\'s just that when there\'s no moving parts in the game, the way to bring the world to life and make it seem effected by the unfolding events of the story is to make different maps of the same areas with certain changes made.

Another example. Once your out of the town, one of the story arcs might be to build your own stronghold, from which you would wage your campaign of revenge against the enemies. So what I do, as the mapmaker, is have a little valley off to the side of the main wilderness, which is a separate map, accessible through a narrow pass. You have three different map versions of the valley. In the first, it\'s a wilderness, in the second, your stronghold is under construction. In the third its complete and ready for you to take up residencs.

If the game worked by the mechanism I mentioned in the previous post, it would be trivial to implement. Your first quest is to clean out the monsters so the builders can begin work on your stronghold, and the persisting consequence of this quest is a change level trigger to the second version of the map, placed slightly in front of the initial trigger. So that when you go walking back to the valley from the main area, you walk into the second map\'s trigger first.

How would you code this? Maybe you have two classes of things -- one that makes the object only appear in the map when the the associated quest is flagged as in progress, and one that makes it appear after the quest is flagged as completed.

But hey, I\'ve babbled enough already.

I\'m just saying. If you allow for flexible use of map changes, and adding triggers and things to the world through quests, people could make some unbelievably good single player games using the kinds of techniques I\'m talking about.

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#113: Re: Yeah...

by Aardappel_ on 10/09/2006 20:22, refers to #111

Kotch, you would do good by reading the design doc on the web page, it answers a lot of questions you seem to have. You make a lot of assumptions... Eisenstern won't be your typical rpg.

It won't be very much like GTA. The problem with GTA is that its too much of an "arcade RPG", and spawning all elements of a quest just before completely breaks the illusion that you are in a living, breathing world. I think rather the opposite way: getting quests which involve characters in the game which you have already dealt with gives a certain sense of depth and immersion.

Yes this means it will be possible to kill quests by killing the npc that gives you it. But Eisenstern is not a game that requires you to do quests in a rigid tree-shaped order to complete the game, it is much more free form. Not all quests have to be completed in order to finish, and quests are only very loosely coupled.

On top of that, NPCs will be very strong compared to you. You'd need to rise to quite a high "level" before killing NPCs is even an option for you. At that point, if you want to finish the game by just killing everyone, this is one way of "winning". But it is excessively hard compared to just doing the quests.

The game is about allowing you to find creative solutions to accomplish things, and about non-linearity. GTA is the opposite.

Oh, and there generally won't be much map loading. My original incentive for designing the sauerbraten in the first place was to create an RPG that could be entirely in one large persistent world without loading, and I knew Cube couldn't handle that.

Don't worry, we're not doing the complexity of morrowind. I have my ways.

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#114: ..

by Kotch on 10/10/2006 01:39

Fair enough. I'm still just learning how to map at this point.

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#115: Re: Yeah...

by Max of S2D [Fr] on 10/10/2006 12:45, refers to #113

Oblivion ?

Characters rate you with a mark from 1 to 100.

If you do good actions, your mark will increase (eg. complete a quest, help someone)

If you stole something in a market, it fall.

It can be easily implemented in Eisenstern, i think,
but the defined actions with low marks and high marks must be implemented for EVERY character... and annex quests :x

Also, every character have to rate you. Savegame size would increase a LOT...

Good idea or not ?

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#116: Re: Yeah...

by Aardappel_ on 10/10/2006 20:29, refers to #115

we plan the opposite score for eisenstern, "evilness". The higher it is, the more people will hate you, but also the more they will fear you and do stuff for you.

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#117: Re: um...

by metlslime on 10/10/2006 21:38, refers to #98

"People don't understand what an insane engineering effort making a solid MMORPG is. Pretty much 100% of people on the net who say they will be making an MMORPG are dumbasses who don't understand game development (yes, 100%.. those few people who DO understand it are a rounding error)." - Aard

My day job is making an MMORPG. Let me assure you that even the professionals find it challenging. :)

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#118: Re: um...

by >driAn<. on 10/10/2006 21:54, refers to #117

So your a professional mapper. Thats cool, what game are you working on?

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#119: ..

by Drakas on 10/10/2006 22:59

yeah, some people do not actually understand how software and hardware works.

They undervalue it.
They undervalue the prices everything costs.

Making is a game is not really just saying "Well, I want an ogre that can talk."

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#120: Re: Yeah...

by Passa on 10/11/2006 03:25, refers to #116

Sounds like Fable's system (where you get evil points and good points).

If you're really evil you grow horns, if you're a nice person and whatnot you develop a halo around your head :)

BTW is the point of view Eisenstern going to be changeable? Say like in Oblivion, where you can switch the camera to 3rd person and to 1st person?

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