FOnline Development > General Discussion

100 years plan - Call to keyboards.

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Fettel:
I totally agree with most of these and its funny to see how some of these ideas are also same way thought as I do. Like share same ideology/same ideas.

Lots of these ideas are also under development in Fonline Forever too.

as a game designer I think that fonline got still long way to go and have potential for anything.

Slowhand:
Thanks for the feedback so far.

About contour colors, I never had them in any version of FOnline, I do not know what it depends on, whenever I press A, everything had red contour. For example I press A in a town and the militia is colored RED, where it should be GREEN, but so it shall be in random encounters, where you meet Junktown scouts fighting pig rats. Maybe I was missing something, I play mostly on Reloaded, and there I do not see it working for me.

About jack of all trades and classes, I do think classes work better for every game. I did play games where you could have 100 skills or more, barely able to have hotkey for them, but the simpler version, where you could only have a selected few from those, was much-much better. For an MMO to work, you may not able everything to a single character, I mean you may, but they may not be able to be as efficient as someone specializing in that. Hence the roles/classes. If this is neglected, game play devolves into one or two metas, and everyone plays the same. Less diversity, less fun. One hitting someone should not be possible, not even with an Eye-crit or 1 hex burst. Lower TTK is needed, to allow people to react, and different crippling/healing and melee combat mechanics. This is why a moba mini-game would bring a lot to the table, as players would be able to sort balance out in a fast way and give feedback. There is/was a lot of dead time during/before server wipes/developments, where people would have nothing else to do, but test combat balance while enjoying it in mini games.

That chat window looks epic, but it clutters the view and I want the chat windows to be available all the time if the player chooses to. Basically every GUI component should be movable/resizeable, or customizable in other ways necessary. it should be up to the player to set it up as they like, and without editing CFG files.

NPC factions and player factions would be different. You would never join an NPC faction, but what would happen is that you would be friendly, neutral or enemy to them. Friendly means access to a lot of stuff, neutral is a stage to get friendly with them, and enemy is obviously the state where if you enter enemy faction territory you would get random encounter attacks from them, and guards on map shoot you on sight. The main purpose of this would be to have players stop the mindless killing of people friendly (aligned) with the same faction/faction alliance. It's a bit more complex than this, but solveable and imo needed in the MMO world. Think of WoW, Horde vs Alliance, except you could loose your affiliation to one, and join the other or be hated to any and use only Neutral towns like Gadgetzan, Dalaran, etc. The faction balance can be solved via higher timer on repeatable quests the more active (faction points gained total, and not number of characters/alts, etc) members a faction has compared to other factions, and other dynamic measurement. Mini-games on faction vs faction would have a capacity, so a fight of 100 vs 5 never happens and the people with most recently achieved points toward that faction would have priority joining them. This would naturally push some people to join the lesser populated factions, to be able to have fun. (+ other balance/exploit fixes that come up, it's to early to say, but helpful to contemplate on it)
The sand needs to be filtered by a lot of layers before players can play with it. Again, this is very complex, but doable and needed. Else player interaction will reduce to kill on sight in 90% of cases, a very bad design for an MMO, specially for one with full loot.

Idea of how Quests should balance on level performance / player+character skill.

* First and foremost, Quest shall be able to FAIL. PVE needs to be engaging, and there shall be a risk to it as well, for starters let's say, repeatable quests shall be able to fail.
* If you fail your PVE quest (= you entered your private area and died to mobs, not on the way or on the way to rewards, as there players might kill you as well) the level of that repeatable quest is lowered, let's say instead of 10 dogs generated, there will be only 5 or their quality is reduced, you get 5 dogs and 5 weak/injured dogs.
* If you complete that repeatable quest, the level of the quest rises for next time, so instead of 10 dogs, you either get 15 dogs to clean up, or the quality of the dogs upgrades, either in health/dmg or type, like rats < pig rats < molerats < tought pig rats and so on. Dogs would become wolfs, maybe having a pack leader and so on.
* I would add perma death for character if it fails its main quest line and dies at quest location, but that might be too harsh, idk, has to be tested. Have a warning before you accept. Have some shivers in PVE.
Creating new engine is too costly imo. The thing is, that you do it, but then again, all that I listed above, needs to be done, and you are barely ahead. Current engine might have limitations, but to think that creating a better one in reasonable time and that that would solve the FOnline problem (listed above), is foolish. I think at the moment it's better to go what we have here, and slowly replace the problematic parts, like hard coded stuff. When the whole thing is in my grasp, I might go for a shot on creating an open source version of this, but that way far ahead. I was also thinking first of replacing the animations by doing their 3D models and introduce new animations, but it seems I do not have much talent for it, however exploring this area would be good to influence people who have the time and knack for it, but lack the coding skills to add it, etc. (I would need too much time to get it done and we aren't even talking about quality.)

Agree about 'pro' players wanting to have every advantage and replace art by wall blockers, I think it hurts the game, but it is used on a scale where (1) it's common place already, (2) you cannot ban for this, as you cannot catch users, except if they post video and report themselves, but doing so would result in less footages shared. Reloaded tried to solve this by having in-game option for it, but it still looks ugly. The transparent roof/walls are available at Reloaded, I do not know if this is part of the newer engine they use or coded from script, but I think this is one of the last issues this game has, as you and others have already solved it, maybe someone will share.

About joining a team to develop there, I am sorry, but I feel like that is least useful for the community as a whole. Whatever I do, I will share it here, as I do not have any desires or plans to manage a live server, other for testing maybe. Since rotators SDK is shared, (so is Reloaded, but that is a live server and people might not feel right to use that to their own server, I never checked out TLA, but don't plan on doing so, don't have that much time) it takes most sense to add new features/remove dead code from there, everyone can add the new stuff to their server if they have at least 1 person being able to script. Also, I do believe that running a server should be mainly about that job/hobby?, as that is more than enough. Developing should be a separate hobby, even though at the moment most server owners are needed to be proficient coding/mapping/debugging their server. Hence post above, to reduce the load from server owners/scripters, at least at this level. (Generic tools supplied, but modifications needed to fit into server.)

Wipe:

--- Quote from: Slowhand on October 06, 2017, 02:16:15 pm ---The transparent roof/walls are available at Reloaded, I do not know if this is part of the newer engine they use or coded from script

--- End quote ---

That's part of my old project, which is a collection of hacks exposing/using some of FOnline/AngelScript internal data, and providing AS functions to work with them in scripts. Base code works with r412, but older/newer revisions can be easily added; you're on your own to find proper offsets for data you need - there was no interest from devs so project has been canned, and i wasn't willing to reverse swarm of applications just for the sake of it.

kompreSor:
i'm creating battle royale with moba elements on fonline engine, in some weeks u can expect first screens and official info about it.

Zinthos:
Character customisation is always a concern so it would be fun to make use of the already done 3d models. Adding some blur and pixelation with shaders, and reducing their animation FPS to 15 would make them fit in the fallout scenery really well i think.

This game has its unique atmhosphere but that does not mean that it should not be updated and modernized to fit the needs of either old or new players. Overall the interface and the game is not user friendly at all.
Some ideas i had floating around:

- Bring back the old installer and launcher. Its 2018 damn it.
- There should be a proper ingame options menu, something like on FO2 but with more controls. I suppose there are engine limitations to, so the Launcher should have (and the old one had) an Options button which would bring up the (hopefully modernized) FOConfig dialog.
- The new-old interface could be the Tiny Tank, with some modifications. It fits into the rusty theme and very functional as well.
- Built-in VOIP, either ingame or via a lightweight application to start alongside the game
- Minimize the need of using third party mods or applications. Other than expanding the ingame possibilities to reduce the need of nowall mods or item highlighters, there could be an anticheat system to avoid hexbot users and such.


Now the two most crucial parts of the gameplay is the PVE and PVP question. Just to be clear, there is nothing wrong with hexing and full loot. In fact these 2 are by far the most interesting parts of the gameplay.


Regarding PVE...
Back on 2238 you randomly spawned near either Vault City, NCR, or Hub. I think it was a good conception because the major protected towns were good spots to meet players any time. Now later on Reloaded and on F2 every new characters spawns to Hub to "make players meet and interact more". To me it seems that it is an emergency patch to deal with the declining playercount... So instead of actually putting an effort to increase the playerbase, you just make the server around few players. Bright idea aint it? I think that is just a half-solution and it's not how one should think when developing a game.

Well imagine a system that selects the city near which your character is going to be spawned based on the population of the town. Unless there would be a larger worldmap, the traveling would be significantly slower or even deadly without a car or train, therefore you would be "forced" to make a living in that town. Obviously the by now unused locations should provide way more of content. Quests and jobs, also good opportunities to trade and level. Primary accomodation of the player would be a local house or apartment on the actual map, although some personal hideout like tentes or bases would be still an option, rather an expensive one. The faction controlling the town would profit from the players trading and living in the town.

Another interesting idea would be the fight for actual worldmap zones that factions can conquer. I haven't came up with an idea for their importance yet, though it could open some possibilities.

And regarding the PVP. As i said there is no problem with hexing, It (but rather characters themselves) might need some balance but overall it would be stupid to remove it.
The idea of random worldmap events is very good, again, the more the better, these should not become repetitive. Although the onscreen notifications (FO2) is not the best way to execute the idea.


egyébként szívesen beszállok a projectbe, habár nem igazán tudok scriptelni ehhez.

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