Month: December 2007

Today’s bit from Douglas Hofstadter relates to realizing you made a mistake back at the beginning:

…suppose you had written [a program for deriving theorems in number theory] but had forgotten to include TNT’s Axiom 1 in the list of axioms. After the program had done many thousands of derivations, you realized your oversight, and inserted the new axiom. The fact that you can do so in a trice shows that the system’s implicit knowledge is modular: but the new axiom’s contribution to the explicit knowledge of the system will only be reflected after a long time — after its effects have “diffused” outwards, as the odor of perfume slowly diffuses in a room when the bottle is broken. … Furthermore, if you wanted to go back and replace Axiom 1 by its negation, you could not just do that by itself; you would have to delete all theorems which had involved Axiom 1 in their derivations. Clearly the system’s explicit knowledge is not nearly so modular as its implicit knowledge.

A fundamental system in your game is broken or inadequate. You know it, the developers know it, everyone can see the proud nail sticking up. Why do they keep making tweaks to make the game work around it rather than just fixing it? Because fixing something upon which a lot depends is difficult, time-consuming, and risky. Adding something new is relatively easy.

Continue reading Band-aids and Surgery

We’re coming up on the new year, so this seems as good a time as any to ask:  what do you think the future holds for MMOs? More to the point, what do you hope it does? I’m not talking about The Future where we’re jacking into the cyberspace and hacking the Gibson, I’m talking in the next few years. What are you hoping we’ll see in the near term future for MMOs?
Continue reading The Future of MMOs

I forget which of our blogger friends pointed me towards Granado Espada, but it does not matter because it does not excite me. It does, however, have some interesting ideas, some of which may be worth pondering further. The basic gameplay is Diablo: click to move, execute some powers, get loot and level up. The fee structure is Korean: free to play with built-in RMT.

There are three significant variations in gameplay. First, it is small-unit Diablo, in which you control three characters. You walk in with your own tank, healer, and damage. Second, it uses a RTS-style auto-attack, so that your characters will attack, heal, and even self-rez without further guidance. Your participation is needed only for special abilities, moving them around, and picking up loot. You might think this would lead to AFK hunting, which leads us to the third point: AFK hunting is explicitly allowed.

Continue reading Sword of the New World

Douglas Hofstadter explains in Gödel, Escher, Bach:

There is an old saw which says, “Computers can only do what you tell them to do.” This is right in one sense, but it misses the point: you don’t know in advance the consequences of what you tell a computer to do; therefore its behavior can be as baffling and surprising and unpredictable to you as that of a person. You generally know in advance the space in which the output will fall, but you dont know details of where it will fall.

The context here is that as you move from machine language to assembly language to higher-level languages, you gain abstraction at the cost of perfect predictability. The more abstract your commands, the more room there is for gaps between what you meant and what you told the computer to do. At any level sufficiently abstract to think about the whole program, significant parts will be unpredictable, especially if you are trying to cross levels. See the Wi flag.

This is a reason why we have test servers. Large programs have too many moving pieces for anything to work as intended on the first try. Even if the coding is perfect, its aggregate effect on the system may not be what was intended. The developer did not think of what rule change X would do to ability Y when used with item Z, and now players can one-shot raid bosses. Oops. And that can happen with any moving part, which is why you want thousands of players to beat on the code, going through enough combinations to find the inevitable problems.

Back to the code level, documentation exists to reduce this. If we all programmed with textbook-perfect processes, you would be able to track any change throughout the system, and unpredictability would be lower. Unfortunately your crafting system is only half-documented, the comments are haiku in Gaelic, and the guy who wrote them quit to pursue his dream of becoming a pastry chef. Expect surprises every time you change anything. To cite a non-haiku issue along these lines, City of Heroes recently noticed that the taunt/aggro system was documented incorrectly, and no one knew that no one knew how taunt worked until someone traced back why the code was not doing what it was supposed to. It was doing what it was told to.

: Zubon

I saw a friend’s new MP3 player this weekend: 8GB plus the software to run it, and it is about the size of five credit cards. It could probably be smaller, but there would be no way to plug in headphones or have a screen/buttons. Looking back a half-century, a 4.4MB hard drive was 5′ by 6′ by ~2′ and reportedly leased for $3,200/month. If that is before inflation, that would be $23,934.75 per month in 2007 dollars.

Many of our people will be receiving electronics this holiday. As you are opening your gifts, enjoy the benefits of Moore’s Law and its parallels in all manners of progress. You are already living in the future.

: Zubon

H/T: Grumpy Gamer. Check out the links on his right side sometime.

As I take a moment to step away from my yet-again broken snow blower only to find that the water heater is no longer working (I *really* needed a shower after shoveling the driveway), I wanted to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. If you celebrate a different holiday, enjoy that as well.

In the meantime, check out the Zubon interview at WorldIV.

Safe travels everyone!

– Ethic