Andon's List of Things

[Andon]

So I've had a look at MV3D, and am loving the fact that it exists. However, it is still lacking a little bit in some areas, a lot in others, and I have some suggestions for it.

First: Looks are important, but still secondary for what MV3D is intended for (Being a backbone for a MMO). Keep that in mind while reading the list, since many do involve looks - But the key thing is that they're there to be worked upon.

1) A combat system of some sort. Nothing too fancy, but that involves things like calling a player's attributes, calling an NPC's attributes, etc. Just something that people can build upon or take apart and recreate how they like - It's much easier to create one if you have examples to look from.

2) A basic UI - Some form of menu, action bar, options, player health, etc. As above, it's more to showcase what can be done than to actually do it.

3) A character creation screen. Again, more of a showcase than anything - examples on how to set attributes, set models, etc.

4) A character selection screen. In any MMO, people are going to want to make multiple characters to play around with different things without having to make multiple accounts - Especially so if the game is a pay-to-play one.

5) A more in-depth chat system. Chat by area, and multiple channels - Maybe just two, just to show how it works so that users can expand on them as they see fit. Also needed is a "Whisper" capability to talk to other players directly.

6) A "Confirm Quit" dialog when hitting "Escape" to exit. Because going "Oops! I just quit!" is annoying.

That's what I can think of for now. I'm sure there'll be more ideas in the future, but these are the "Big" ones. I'm about to go through your Trac and see what is and isn't there.

[Andon]

Adding to the list:

7) Some form of inventory. Because everyone needs giant sacks' worth of stuff to cart around.

8) Some form of shop interface, and some way to link it to NPCs - Purchasing and selling stuff is pretty much necessary.

9) Some form of auction house. I'll be fair, this doesn't seem entirely easy, but even a simple one can be expanded on by whoever's using MV3D as a base.

10) Some way of getting rid of stuff in inventories without selling them. Sometimes, you're in the middle of something and can't be arsed to find a shop (Or it's just too far away) to sell things, and simply need to get rid of them.

11) Some form of looting - While I doubt I'll use it in my plan for a game, a lot of games use picking stuff up from the corpses of their enemies (I prefer a chest at the end of a quest).

12) Some form of instances. Most MMOs use them - Some more than others - but they're greatly useful by allowing many people to do the same quest at the same time.

[SirGolan]

Let me start of by saying these are all great ideas that MV3D should support as example implementations in a basic form. I'd be happy to include any of them in MV3D as such. However, there's quite a lot of work involved here, and these are mostly features that I would prioritize below core features (minus instance support, which is a core feature). Anyway, what I'm getting at is probably the best way to get many of these done is to contribute them to MV3D.

1) A combat system of some sort. Nothing too fancy, but that involves things like calling a player's attributes, calling an NPC's attributes, etc. Just something that people can build upon or take apart and recreate how they like - It's much easier to create one if you have examples to look from.

This requires NPCs plus some sort of statistics system which possibly includes levels and experience. #816 is the ticket for this. Feel free to update it with more info or ideas. #819 is for the stats system.

2) A basic UI - Some form of menu, action bar, options, player health, etc. As above, it's more to showcase what can be done than to actually do it.

I agree that an in game UI would be good. Obviously an action bar requires a system to support actions / spells, player health requires stats, etc. Unless you are just suggesting an example UI which doesn't really hook into anything. That would be pretty easy to do using guide. However, art support would be needed.

3) A character creation screen. Again, more of a showcase than anything - examples on how to set attributes, set models, etc.

There's already a character creation screen. It's pretty basic, but it is there. #169 is sort of the ticket for this. It seems to be a bit of a throwback from when MV3D was a game and not a framework.

4) A character selection screen. In any MMO, people are going to want to make multiple characters to play around with different things without having to make multiple accounts - Especially so if the game is a pay-to-play one.

There also already is a character selection screen and you can have multiple characters per account. It's not too fancy, but it's there.

5) A more in-depth chat system. Chat by area, and multiple channels - Maybe just two, just to show how it works so that users can expand on them as they see fit. Also needed is a "Whisper" capability to talk to other players directly.

I definitely agree that the chat system could use some work. This would be relatively straight forward to do and I'd suggest scrapping the current system completely. Another team recently added chat via XMPP to MV3D for their own project. There currently isn't a ticket for this (feel free to create one).

6) A "Confirm Quit" dialog when hitting "Escape" to exit. Because going "Oops! I just quit!" is annoying.

We very much need this. I just created #841 to address this.

7) Some form of inventory. Because everyone needs giant sacks' worth of stuff to cart around.

Inventory would probably be pretty easy. Equipment would be pretty hard given a complete lack of art support. Basically it requires quite a lot of work and a lot of 3d models. It's annoying to add assets to the world that gets created by Overseer since you have to do that in code. Maybe that's just asking for a better solution, but right now even if we had the models for this, it would be very hard to support in that way. Adding it to the actual demo world would be easier since assets there are added using the normal pipeline. #817 is the ticket for this.

8) Some form of shop interface, and some way to link it to NPCs - Purchasing and selling stuff is pretty much necessary.

Prerequisite: NPCs. We have a spawner object now, so that's a start, but there's no concept of NPCs other than that. There currently isn't a ticket for this, feel free to create one.

9) Some form of auction house. I'll be fair, this doesn't seem entirely easy, but even a simple one can be expanded on by whoever's using MV3D as a base.

It's not that hard to do.. It's just pretty far down on my list of priorities. However, the person writing the code makes the priority, so I'd definitely accept submissions for an example auction house. There currently isn't a ticket for this, feel free to create one.

10) Some way of getting rid of stuff in inventories without selling them. Sometimes, you're in the middle of something and can't be arsed to find a shop (Or it's just too far away) to sell things, and simply need to get rid of them.

This doesn't seem like it would be that helpful as example gameplay code. If there was an inventory system, its API should make it clear how to implement this for those who want it.

11) Some form of looting - While I doubt I'll use it in my plan for a game, a lot of games use picking stuff up from the corpses of their enemies (I prefer a chest at the end of a quest).

Also requires NPCs. And inventory. There currently isn't a ticket for this, feel free to create one.

12) Some form of instances. Most MMOs use them - Some more than others - but they're greatly useful by allowing many people to do the same quest at the same time.

This is definitely in the works and will hit before 1.0. Not scheduled for this release, but possibly the next one. It's pretty high on the priority list. I can't seem to find a ticket on this, but I think there are a few that relate to it including #612.

Anyway, good suggestions! Keep 'em coming!

Thanks!

Mike