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Okay, the biggest problem in a game this long is people joining and leaving at any time. We can make some modifications to the formula to make it work, but it can’t be competitive and still be fair. It has to be a cooperative PvE, I think.
With that in mind, here are some things I’d have to do to make this work:
– Create separate inventory world, preferably with visible border.
– Random join locations.
– 3-5 minute mob immunity with a notice for when it starts and when it’s about to end. Maybe just invisibility for start instead? This is needed just in case people join in the middle of the night surrounded by mobs.
– Health regen turned off.
– Regen potions disabled.
– Leaving penalty? Maybe if you rejoin it gives you weakness or something, equivalent to how long you left for? I don’t really want it to affect balance, but it still needs to be fair.
– Scoreboard health
– etc. (Things I haven’t thought of right now)The ships need to be equally destructable. This in part means materials need to have a balanced blast resistance and be flammable. You also can’t currently put attachables on certain sides of blocks. (ladders, torches, no doors at all) That might be fixed later by the plugin authors. The spacing of the TNT needs to be enough to create the occasional chain reaction, but not too close that it’ll do it most of the time. The larger the size (mostly length and height) the longer it takes to regenerate. A shorter mast would be nice — probably should shorten the current ones. Any island should not have material going below the bottom of the ships for the same reason.
I know why it didn’t work. 😛 I was hoping it would spawn some spontaneous tag events, but I never heard any that did. It was an experiment. A straight-up game of tag sounded boring.
What about villagers on the ship that act as single respawns? Each villager counts as a life, basically, so if the other team kills some of the villagers on your ship, you lose them as respawns. I could maybe even put some emeralds in the ship just in case there’s a neat trade to turn the tide.
Hide and Seek can be done already. Froggerooh has even started some games. Use “/dynmap hide”, then find a place to hide, then press sneak button so people can’t see your name. (or don’t, if you want it to go faster.. maybe tease them with 1 second of visibility)
Frogware is sort of a Simon Says game. In fact I plan on adding one task that plays on that concept. It’ll do something like tell you a random color block, action (break, stand on, drop, pickup), and either a negative or positive. (eg. “do” or “don’t”) I’m calling it “PK Says”.
I actually had a game of continuous tag going on for a while, but it never became a thing. An on-demand game might be more enjoyable, but it still needs something more.
Here’s some challenges:
– Allow for players to enter and exit the game at any time.
– Keep games from becoming stalemates.
– Prevent monotonous grinding/mining.
– Cheats (intentional or not)The compass tries to solve the second one. An mcedit filter to remove hidden ores would help prevent the third. I can only come up with weak ideas on the first problem. That’s one of the reasons the enderdragon was a good endgame. It didn’t matter if people logged out or logged in late.
I too am a big Mindcrack fan. We actually did UHC on April 1st, 2012 with the goal of killing the enderdragon. We had to cut the process of finding the stronghold due to time constraints (dead people wanted to play), but we got potions and defeated him. It was fun, but a very long day. (~7 hours)
The problem with competitive UHC is it’s really easy to cheat. It works so well with the Mindcrack guys because they all record their play sessions. That’s partly why we did the enderdragon fight instead (which is what UHC Season 1 was). I’ve tried coming up with ways of making this work, but it’s difficult enough getting everyone to play a short 10 minute game (and fairly), let alone a game that lasts a few hours. My favorite idea is to use compasses that point to one random competitor.
This is already planned. My current idea is to have something like a /share command that would apply to several different features. For example:
“/share horses sydneef”
or
“/share shops ChelseasPinky”
These would add their name to your profile’s shared section under the specified type. So it’d look up the owner of a horse, then check if that owner is sharing their horses with anyone. If the person clicking the horse is in that list, then it would allow them to interact with the horse like normal.
I’m not sure about the syntax or limits. I know different people would want to use it for different reasons. I need to consider these possibilities. Some people would want to share everything with a specific person. Others might want to share just one horse. I’d not likely support that. However, I will have a command to give a horse to another player.
I’d help a little, during podcast time. Maybe first order of business is to figure out a minimum material requirement? Not an exact number, but the enough to get 90% of it done before we can reassess.
Right now I’m styling the website with some more recent features. It’s fun not worrying about backwards compatibility.
Some thoughts on web development…
I don’t do this nearly enough anymore. I think I got stuck on css structure. There doesn’t seem to be a good way to organize this. Theoretically you’d split things up into files, but that’s horrible for load speed. Maybe I should investigate having a source version and a “compiled” version.
I also notice that some developers split up styles into different sections based on style or structure. This bothers the hell out of me when I go to edit things. It makes for a much more bloated file, too. I tend to put tags first, then I put ids and classes in order of first appearance. That way I always have a general idea of how far I have to scroll to get to the applicable section, and there’s rarely duplicated identifiers that will cause confusing behavior. It still feels horribly clunky, though.
I’ve also always struggled with CMS vs MVC vs scratch. I like doing most things in scratch because it gives me a lot of freedom. However, I hate doing specific things that CMS are great at, like user authentication. I end up jumping between all three of these between projects and never feel satisfied. With FSMC I just dropped WordPress on the server with some integrated plugins and moved on with my life, as I got tired with struggling with those decisions.
Expanding down or up is a bad idea because it would affect performance in the area. It’s already on the edge in terms of entity counts. We could expand the structure up and down, but not residential or shops.
I’ve considered it, but any expansions would probably be non-residential. The entity count in the area has reached the maximum reasonable amount for performance. Squeezing in more people would be bad. Still, I do want to use more vertical space in some way. I already have some plans, but it’s slow going until they’re solidified.
The other thought I had was expanding Final City into some satellite towns. They’d be far enough away where the performance impact would be nullified, but close enough where it might be more convenient. Negotiating the land might be challenging, though. Actually, adding some more to the platforms on the edges of the city might be reasonable too, but it’d risk impacting the style of the city.
Fortunately there are other cities to build at, and if you wanted to start your own, you can do that as well. Warps can be provided to active towns that have several residents and a market.
