IVAN in realtime??

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As everyone knows, I'm still working on my project for mp Ivan. But something has troubled me the last few days, and I'd like to hear all your opinions.

The original idea was to keep Ivan like it was: turn-based. That is, everybody has to make his turn, and then stuff happens. Yeah, sometimes you have to wait for eachother, but you do have some time to think, and there could be kicks for idlers, some kind of buzzers, whatever.

But I had another idea... Why not make it realtime? Everyone moves to his own liking, and monsters too move around even when you stand still (but not extremely fast ofcourse). The game would work with an exhaustion bar, which depletes when you move a square, and gradually refills while standing still. This means you could quickly run a few squares, but would then be exhausted and have to rest, drink some water or whatever, or just move at a slower pace.

Any comments/More suggestions? What would you guys prefer?

I wish you best of luck with the project. I certainly hope it wont be one of them eternal projects that dies and is forgotten =/

Like IVAN?

Exactly :/

Mkay, seems like I'm gonna have a lot of work to do. :/ That last poll choice wasn't really serious you guys...

But whatever.

I'll continue the single player turn-based stuff first, and implement the multiplayer. Then I'll see what I can do for the realtime, I have the idea I'll only really have to change one class a lot for that.

A whats-it-called multiplayer variant of ToME is (or was) done in real-time (kinda slow, IIRC?) and even succesful.

Yeah, I'm 100 % sure it's possible. I'm just not sure if I'll be able to pull it off. But these are just ideas that'll be added to my project after the engine & stuff has been remade.

À propos the two games game, I even think an IVAN-type game is more fit for multiplayer than ToME...

I can easily imagine a bunch of players progressing to UT3, one of them being killed from e.g. poison, and starting out back in New Attnam - since one can win IVAN in one day or even less, he'd be as little as 20-30 minutes of real progress behind the other players.

A thought I have on the difficulty of a real-time game is that in IVAN sometimes, especially during tough fights in the later stages when we're super-careful, we tend to ponder our moves quite long - even a, let's say, 3 second wait for Golgor-Dhan to move would make snap decisions and 'sticking to the plan' a must for teams.

I dunno, but perhaps coding the whole engine (that is, single player too) to real-time with a variable interval for monsters to wait before their move (altered for every monster according to their speed etc.), BUT with the option of having it reset whenever the player makes his move, thus making them move instantly would be more 'versatile' now, since setting the base interval to, like, a couple of minutes would essentialy make the game turn-based. Perhaps. I think I got lost.

You're talking about real-time type here, right?


That was one of the things that kinda ruined my idea. Maybe real-time will only be fun in teams then. At any rate, it'll go quite slowly, since you just have too many commands to enter one in a split second.

Another problem I just thought of: teamwork requires chat, chat requires time.


I'm lost too. Lemme try rephrasing. So the game waits for user input, while the monsters that are faster than the user are able to move a (few) step(s), but, when the player does something, all the monsters make a move once and have to wait at least their respective intervals entirely again.

Is that it? If so, I don't really see the logic in this... Explain plx

It's turn-based, but everything is resolved when you make your move. So faster monsters might take 3 steps to your 1 because they have that much more agility. Or they might take 6 swings at you when you crack a shot at them. Slower monsters might make a move for your 3 because they're that much slower.

I hope that clears things up? I wasn't entirely sure what it was that you found illogical.

I have a feeling that if you removed the "wait for player action" part in the script, that everything would move blantantly fast and you would not have any time to react. To see what I mean, go on IVAN, overfeed yourself and hold down the wait button ( . )

Chaostrom, what you're saying is just that speed doesn't only affect walking, but also some kind of combat speed... That's certainly doable, and would maybe even provide a new challenge.

One other thing I thought of, when you'd have multiplayer turn based, would it be logical to make some kind of queue, and let everyone resolve their turn one after another, or make it so that the player's actions are resolved at the same time, and then the monsters? That last one is gonna be a pain in the ass to code though (think of zapping wands).

For the real-time chat function, I had a new idea yesterday: use 3 commands ingame: whisper, chat, and yell. And disable chatting outside the game. That way plans should be made beforehand, and then you'd have to hope everyone does what he has to do; just like it would be in real life. With the 3 different commands, you could also backstab another player by whispering a plan to another, and killing the third one together, should be fun. Chatting is heard in a certain radius around you, and yelling is heard across the dungeon. As a downside, if you yell, sentient monsters would be able to track you down by the sound.

I don't know yet what the coding difficulty would be, but I bet it would be fun to have.

I like the idea of shouting! You can also consider adding a new "status" - telepathy. Words rendered by someone "afflicted with" telepathy (for example, wearing certain radio dispatchers or having eaten mind flayer brains or something) can be received by the other players (perhaps one does not need it to hear). Or hell, just add it up to ESP, and make it generally some brain-weirdness state.

Great idea, I'll add it to my to-do list.

I like the idea of hearing. You could look at the whistle code to help you with that.