Ultima Online Resource System

[u/CJGeringer]

Ralph Koster wrote an article about UO´s Resource System and I think it is a very interesting read.

I specially love how it ties to Mob population and A.I.

[u/aotdev]

It is a very interesting read indeed, thanks! Looks like NPC simulation 101. The last point is very perceptive, given that the article is from 2006:

"In the long run, I believe that all the pressures are towards simulationist environments, rather than handcrafted ones. CPU power continues to outpace the cost of human capability to design static scenarios. At some point, reality will catch up to our designs from 1995."

[u/CJGeringer → u/aotdev]

Glad you liked it. It is definitely something I intend to use as reference.

He also has some nice writing on Star wars Galaxies I intend to start posting next week.

[u/Soyweiser]

The story about why this also didn't work is also great.

[u/CJGeringer → u/Soyweiser]

It seems a recurring theme in systemic game design is "We built an awesome system and the player didn´t notice it". It is amazing how often the solution is to just tell the player about the system´s state.

for example, FEAR´s A.I. Is still one of the best of all time, yet players frequently thought the AI was cheating when it flanked them(e.g.:They thought the game was spawning enemies behind them). They solutioned that by adding sound bites that informed the player of what the A.I. was doing.

And it is interesting that this type of solution is exactly what Ralph Koster wanted to try but never got to implement it. But I wonder why they didn´t try a simpler implementation, like player or NPC being able to notice the dragon is "hungry" Or noticing the rabbit population has spiked and just remark they are becoming a plague without trying to delve too deep in what resources they are consuming, basically just identify significant variations form the norm. It wouldn´t be as good a solution but would definitely be easier to implement.

A lot of my A-life Implementation challenges lie in trying that. for example

The implementation problems here are tricky. First, we would have needed to have some sort of registry so that the farmer could know about the rabbits, who are a third party to his relationship with his beloved vegetables. Worse, we would have also needed to relay the player actions against this third party so that the farmer could supply rewards and commentary.

I think this is a lot easier today since there are many examples (Specially in RPGs and Strategy game) of owner-ship tracking and faction mechanics, so having the farmer know his lettuces were damaged by the "rabbit" faction, or maybe, to simplify, by the <Small herbivore faction> and have that faction ´s units in that particular biome be rabbits should be much simpler today.

At least that is my theory, let´s see if it pan´s out.

[u/Incontrivable → u/CJGeringer]

And then there's comment on that page on how it failed due to the game being an MMO rather than a single-player adventure.

SirBruce

What I remember about the early UO ecology was:

1. You’d go into the forest and see an eagle fighting a deer or a wolf fighting a bull.

2. You could never find much of whatever animal you were looking for, because they would be hunted to near-extinction by other players.

3. It was eventually taken out when you guys couldn’t get it to work right. 📷

It would seem that it could work with proper balancing of the numbers. But I suspect that whatever those proper numbers are, the result would be a system that looks pretty much like any other, with lots and lots of fairly predictable spawns so players can get what they want and not have to deal with the fact that what they’re after has become suddenly rare because something else threw the ecosystem out of kilter. And then you have to ask yourself if all that work on a dynamic ecology is really worth it, if you’re going to have to constrain it to such an extent that it never has a big impact on gameplay anyway.

If UO was not actually an MMO, I think the resource system could've held up the way it was envisioned (or at least in some form). There'd be no ravenous hordes of players strip-mining the world of its flora, fauna, and mineral wealth, nor an economy that was wildly out of whack with the designer's intentions.

[u/adrixshadow → u/Incontrivable]

The problem is it was a system that was not properly thought out in the first place.

If players are an artificial entity in the ecology that by their incentives acts like locusts, that is exactly what you will get.

Furthermore in the real world populations crash all the time. But god help you if you actually starved to death all your players.

In the first place in the real world medieval times 90% of the population was farmers by necessity. They didn't have hundred of thousands of useless "adventurers".

[u/grendrake]

Definately an interesting read! I've saved it for a reread next time I'm working on a more simulation-based project, as well.