If eventually we see the ability to hire bots, and write scripts to control them, how about an in-game software market, or some other interface to these things. I'd like to see some mechanism that would allow those capable of scripting things to share them with others in game, but somewhat restrict distribution, so that not everyone would have them all at once, just to keep things interesting. Maybe one nation would develop technologies different from another in this respect.

Basically this somewhat ties in with the direction in which I'd like to nudge Vendetta. There were some great concepts that were beginning to be explored with the likes of MUSHes and MOOs back several years ago that once graphical games took off were almost forgotten. These games were very pure role playing games. Most of them didn't have battles, and those that did were usually fairly simplistic about it. (There were MUDs as well, that had more sophisticated battle systems, but usually didn't have the other features I'm about to discuss.) What these games did have was a system where anyone could hack up a new room, object, or AI, and stick it in the persistent text-adventure-like game world. These were probably the first MMORPGs, and that's all people did in them - role play - talk to each other and play as their character.

This probably sounds very, very different and far away from what Vendetta currently is, or even what most current MMORPGs are, but with a little thought, they enhance and balance each other very well. I have discussed and gone into some of the details of how this would work in a few areas in the past, those being player run/terraformed sectors and stations, in the context of macros, I discussed shortly some of the possibilities here, and I briefly mentioned the possibility of mine-laying bots being interesting.

For any player to be able to design and implement a little widget or frob and add it to the game world, or to go and discover a new sector and change it into a place they can call home, this is a powerful concept.

No player should ever have to do such things in order to have a good time playing the game, due to all the other elements we can be sure will be there (battles, trading, perhaps mining, possibly quite a few others). These suggestions are strictly additive, they shouldn't take away from anything that would otherwise be there.

Note that it's only reasonable in all of this that the frobs and widgets and bot programs that people create will be restricted to the rules of the game world. The base parts of any widget or frob would need purchasing, bots would need ships and maintenance, and could only do things that those ships would allow. A minelaying bot still needs credits to go and get the mines, and still has to make trips back and forth to get the mines to lay.

I'll paint a picture or two (which may be somewhat exaggerated, or somewhat conservative, or both) in order to make an attempt at giving an impression of what I mean. I think that the pictures I painted before in the player run stations thread were maybe a little prettier than these, but they're still on the forum, and these are some more examples of what might be done if the game tends towards MOO-like features.

One problem is that everyone seems to have different ideas as to what they want weapons to do. Custom weapons, maybe even engines too, built by combining requisite components and controlled in simple ways with small scripts would be really cool. That is, the combining would just be buying and selecting the parts which would give the scripts their capacity to do certain things (like fire a kind of energy blast or missile), and the scripts would control the things like firing rate and so on. They'd do damage and have properties proportional to the amount of money you spent on them. Components for seeking missiles would be much more costly than non-seeking missiles. More powerful energy weapons would cost more and drain more energy. More efficient ones would simply cost more. After designing some, you could set up a shop that would sell them, and get traders to visit your shop and sell you the parts you'd need for more to get sold, or hire bots to do that.

Programming communications widgets would also be neat - a special encryption script just for your flight party or long range communications channels that might get spied on, to keep your opponents on their toes working on decrypting the signals (or maybe they have already broken it?).

Bots and player scripts would probably be the most interesting thing to work on though. Possibly the length and/or runtime of the allotted code could influence the credit cost of running a bot. Making different programs take up "space" in the bot's memory would be one way to limit the complexity of bot behaviour by cost/availability of memory, while still allowing interesting things to be done for a price.

Non-fighting bots could do things like handle flying messages back and forth between areas where communication is blocked - to flight parties back to home for example, form a basis of cheap labour for easy trade routes (dangerous ones would not likely be very profitable for bots to do) serve as early lookouts for player run bases to use, and set up and maintain defences like minefields and turrets.

Fighting bots would likely have less room for sophisticated abilities but would be able to get in formation, take simple orders, and know beween friend and foe. The AI for fighting/movement currently being worked on would be a pre-existing module and likely take up a good chunk of space in a bot's memory. Otherwise, these would be handled the same way as the non-fighting bots.

Anyway, those are a few things relating to how such freedoms might get tied into the game. The ideas there are perhaps a little rough around the edges, and there might be simpler implementations to give that sort of gameplay. The concept I want to convey though is how perhaps to create a certain open-endedness with respect to the various game elements by allowing players so willing to insert their own code at various points and share it with others in-game.

The pictures that I painted here are actually fairly conservative as to what purposes players might find for being able to script some things, in that, though fairly complex, they are probably not so hard to imagine. When you get enough players thinking about what might be done with in-game scripts, or with the possibilities for new sectors, unexpected, creative, and interesting things can start to happen that can involve a player in a deeper way than simply blowing things up all day, trading, or otherwise performing actions already possible when the player joined.

Whoa. Complex post. It is going to take me some time to disect and digest all that, so if I don't get it all on the first go don't assume that I'm not thinking about the rest.

I doubt that we as players will ever have the ability to script NPC's except by very special dispensation. I just can't see the utility in loosing that much control over your game environment. Also, a broken AI script is a bug in the world, and I can't imagine the developers wanting to lose the ability to control the quality of thier gameworld.

I'm a long time MU* player. Yes, those are MMORPG's, albeit nowhere near the scale of an Everquest or a UO. The most I ever say in a MU* was about 130 people on at once. Most of them had about the scale of attendence that we have at Vendetta. I was an admin on a couple of them (not that that means much, see below). Not even the MU*'s gave that much freedom to players. Many of them denied players quota. Others insisted that new rooms had to be approved by a building admin before being linked to the grid. Most if not all had minimum standards an object had to adhere to.

Also, most MU*'s didn't have to worry about the scale issues that modern MMORPG's have to. Did you ever try to have a conversation in a room with 60 or text typists? Do the words 'table code' mean anything to you? Even so, the shear volumn of messages generated by players leaving and entering a room could be spammy. The MUDs had it the worst.

You clearly never played the Btech MUSE's and MUX's. In my opinion those where the most sophisticated MMORPG's ever designed. Battle systems of the first rank with group chat systems that would be the envy of any modern MMORPG. And we even had graphics! Ok. It was a hex map drawn in ASCII, but you could run it through a client side script to get it in color. :D

In a game like UO you can already have your character create new widgets to add to the game world. In fact, arguably that's all UO players do. :D It sounds awefully repetitive to me, but there is a certain elegance to having every component in the universe contructable. Custom widgets might be asking abit much though. (And what does custom widgets mean in a graphic game anyway? Custom widgets in a text game just had custom descriptions and custom scripts for ... making more descriptions!) For one thing, you think its hard to balance weapons. Try balancing a weapons contruction system.

But that doesn't mean that I don't think it would be cool if you could set up shop manufacturing Gauss Cannons and sell your wares at a profit cheaper than the other players could buy them in a station.

But then there is the danger presented by a game like EVE online. That development team put all of thier work into letting players organize and build things and didn't develop any of the gameplay that they had promised which would make people want to organize and build things to support the game. Cart before the horse sort of thing. They are doing alright I suppose (3000 or so people on average) but I doubt they are making enough money to last much less pay for the huge team of artists (its a good looking chat room) and years of development.
They really need to be hitting about 30,000 people on average.

So there is some danger in giving geeks what they think they want and not what the really want. Micromanagement is only fun if you are building up to something fun, its not a means in and of itself of attracting a wide audience.

Like I said, I loved the old MU* communities and I loved having games by gamers, for gamers. But the two aren't completely analogous. The MU* communities where labors of love. Vendetta has to and deserves to make money. The MU* communities folded in part because of the introduction of graphic engines and partly because the cost of running the hardware became too much to bear once the Universities that had been hosting them started closing down the servers and telling the Grad students that had started the community and written the software that it was time to move on. The MU* communities were often no more than 20 or 30 friends, mostly DM types like myself, who were hosting the game for another 40-60 geeks. They were VERY admin intensive requiring lots of oversight and intervention (don't ask me about what happened the first time I attended college). All those admins were working for free, and even so administrative quarrels closed many a good MUSH. Vendetta is going to be hosting (hopefully) maybe 40-60,000 geeks and can't afford to be admin intensive at all. You can't afford to have team of building admins approving every object. You can't afford to have an admins for every 5-10 players. Besides which, creating new textual objects is easy. Anyone that can write can do it. Creating things in Vendetta might not be so trivial.

It might be possible to ask some of the community to write AI scripts in exchange for a months free service or just 'labor of love' and a 8 point font at the end of the credits. But all of that will have to be reviewed for correctness, thematic consistancy, quality, and fairness before its installed which might be as much work as outsourcing saved.