That would be The Sims, right?


What makes sense and is realistic can be fun if you do it right.


Who said you would need to?


Why? Because it's not fun? What if it were?

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To me, in game terms, 'realism' is what makes sense within the setting, and also makes at least some sense within the realms of human badies and interactions.

Also, the player wouldn't need to spend hours at a shooting range to increase their stats. The character would though. Its just a case of saying 'you spend 2 hours at the shooting range, your pistol ability goes up by 5 points' to the player.

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theraje: 'God doesn't love stupid people, they're just easier to make'
http://sharedillusions.blogspot.com

That's the basic idea behind levelling in most pencil and paper RPGs. That's one way of doing it for our game, although there has to be something to keep the player from just going back and training until they're a master gunsmith.

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Microsoft XNA MVP

You could make it happen over time (i.e. make it so that a character can only train a certain amount of times between levels, or make it so that training only improves a skill after a certain amount of time has passed since the last training session). It works in real life - there comes a point where you've absorbed so much in one day that you just have to rest a while and come back later before you can learn more.

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What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

Good ideas.


Silly idea of the day - make training with guns a first person shooting range that the player has to actually do well in for the character to increase in skill.

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Microsoft XNA MVP

Or just make it so that it can only take you up to a certain level. After all, shooting ranges can only give you so much experience, after which you need to actually go and do some real shooting.

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God must love stupid people, he made so many.
theraje: 'God doesn't love stupid people, they're just easier to make'
http://sharedillusions.blogspot.com

Perhaps a little of both ideas can be used. We'll have to think about it a bit.

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Microsoft XNA MVP

Could make said caps based on character attributes. After all, someone with a low intelligence for example would most likely never be able to successfully run a large corporation, just as a character with low strength would never be much of a professional weightlifter.

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What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

Well, three pages of posts and some IRC discussion and no finality to this. Here's what I suggested originally:

Strength
Agility - coordination of the entire body
Dexterity - hand/eye coordination
Constitution
Intelligence - ability to learn
Will - mental constitution
Charisma - not physical appearance
Movement Speed - could be calculated by strength and agility (ST+AG/2)

I added the last three, two of which I originally just suggested. Will would be used for psionics and Charisma for NPC interactions (somewhat). I'm suggesting a 1-100 scale with starting values of 75 for everything except Charisma, which could be 50 or so. Also, I would suggest allowing the player to customize the stats by giving him a pool (say 20 or 25) of points to distribute as he sees fit at the start of the game.

We need to finalize this within the next day, then move on to finalizing skills. These two areas need to be finalized before combat discussion can seriously begin (as far as the combat calculations).

Please keep discussion to only discussion of the actual stats, their range, and customization at the beginning of the game, unless there's something else you feel needs to be discussed that's relevant.

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Sounds fine to me. Would suggest a lower start for stats though. With a 1-100 scale and the player having most at 3/4s max will mean that we would either need to go over the scale for nasty monsters, or have some other workaround. Having the player start with about 60 in stats, and the same amount of points to allocate will allow us a bit more freedow with nasty monsters stats.

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God must love stupid people, he made so many.
theraje: 'God doesn't love stupid people, they're just easier to make'
http://sharedillusions.blogspot.com

Stat progression doesn't need to be linear, thus the difference between 50 and 51 might be less than the difference between 80 and 81, which is less than the difference between 90 and 91. This might be making things more difficult however.

The player character should be somewhere between normal human and Olympic-caliber as far as stats. If we assume 50 and 100 are respective of these types of people 75 should be about the average for an agent, correct? I'm open to the starting range, but we shouldn't quibble over it right now. It can be tweaked during balancing playtesting.

Also, we could allow the player to actually decrease a stat by up to say 6 points to give him more points to add to another area, although he only gains 1 point for every 2 deducted. Say, decrease the Agility and increase the Strength for a more fighter-type agent than a thief-type agent.

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I would say the range 25-75 corresponds to the worst and best of human capabilities, as the stats will be used by everything from sub human to superhuman abilities (for example, a leopard can run faster than any human ever could... even an olympic runner). 50 as average human ability sounds about right, and you may be right with the idea of an exponential scale Would make augemntations really powerful with high stats, but would also make a creature with 100 in a stat really really good Exponential scale would probably take more tweaking and balancing to get right though.

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God must love stupid people, he made so many.
theraje: 'God doesn't love stupid people, they're just easier to make'
http://sharedillusions.blogspot.com

Actually, thinking about it, this is better. Thus the character would start at around 60 as you suggested. See, I can be wrong and see another's idea as better than mine.

Wiki updated with this, with a "NOT FINALIZED"

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Any further comments on the characters stats to use or their value range? If not, we can mark this as finalized. Here's what we have so far:

Strength (STR) - the ability to lift or carry something. Helps determine the amount of damage inflicted with melee weapons
Agility (AGI) - coordination of the entire body
Dexterity (DEX) - hand/eye coordination
Intelligence (INT) - the ability to learn something
Constitution (CON) - the ability to recover from exertion or physical damage
Will (WIL) - mental constitution. Helps determine how resistant the character is to psi attacks and how powerful his own psi is.
Charisma (CHA) - not physical appearance, measure how well the character interacts with another person
Movement Speed (SPD) - could be calculated by strength and agility (ST+AG/2)
Stats will be measured on a scale of 1-100, with 25-75 being the range for normal humans. Anything above 75 would result from some type of enhancement (chemical, genetic manipulation, psi-based buffs, etc).

The player character will start with a 60 value for each stat, which can be customized by the player at the start of a game. A pool of < # > (probably 20-25) points will be given to allow the player to add to the character's stats. In addition, the player may decrease a stat by up to 6 points, although he will only gain 1 point added to the pool for every 2 points he decreases.

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Okay, since those look like really good stats, What background stats are we going to have? For instance the stat of healthRejuvenation, and energyRejuvenation are good to have. Since in my item system, I have to buff a stat. This is semi critical and makes things a lot easier if I just buff healthRejuvenation when a player uses an item.

look at my XML file if you don't understand. a buff effects an attribute... aka player stat. (the copy and paste seemed to mess up.)

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/\/////////\\ //\\\\\\\\\/\I - Assault Wars
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I would think CON and WIL would control this and not be separate stats.

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so in order to rejuvenate heatlh we'd just buff the players Constitution. Should work as long as Constitution doesn't govern anything else that would cause the buff of it to unbalance the game.

Oh yah are we gonna make a super class for controlling unit stats. I really think we should. It could encapsulate the units stats along with stat modifications like buffs.

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/\/////////\\ //\\\\\\\\\/\I - Assault Wars
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An entity's stats would probably just be a vector of stat objects

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Microsoft XNA MVP

yah, I figured. or if we got fancy we could use a std::map, but I'm tired right now, so I'm not really thinking straight.

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/\/////////// \\\\\\\\\\\/\S
/\/////////\\ //\\\\\\\\\/\I - Assault Wars
/\///////\\//|\\//\\\\\\\/\R - - Work in Progress
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Never used it before. What's the advantages over a vector? I guess I could look it up.

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Microsoft XNA MVP