"Event-Engine" (a refinement of drek's story-based

[drek]

So long as we are clear:

Technically we have nothing. Brainstorming is just that...we shoot the breeze and think up stuff. Nothing is formalized until it's brought up in a design thread, vetted in public review, and finally receives the stamp of approval from the various project leads (most importantly tzlaine, Aq, and Tyreth).

Aq has posted some stuff on the Design portion of the wiki, which I've taken the liberty to add to. It's a description of the design process:

http://www.freeorion.org/wiki/index.php ... ame_Design

You can take the stuff Aq posted as law, and the stuff I added below as my view on the design process as it has existed in the past.

[Lyx]

i think i will wait 1-3 days to:
- wait for possible ideas to polish
- do my own homework and prepare some more examples and put the whole thing in a more well laid out and structured package.

Do you think it would make sense to combine it with story-based combat right away, or instead only take the event framework alone and propose to use your story-based approach as a system-level combat-engine?

Thanks for the docs.

- Lyx

[drek]

Formal combat DESIGN: threads probably won't be popping up any day soon. Right now, the roadmap is set on v.3 issues--the tech tree and buildings.

There's no rush to finilize anything for combat/ special events. It's gonna be a looong haul before it's needed.

[Gusset]

This is my first post to these forums, and I haven't been reading them for very long, so I hope I don't bring up anything that is inappropriate or that has already been said, or violate the spirit of a Brainstorming thread.

First off, my personal opinion is that any 4x-type game with "Orion" in the title needs a tactical combat engine of some sort. Story based combat may be a good thing, but I don't think it's in the spirit of what I understand this project to be about.

I like the "Event Phase" idea. Diplomatic exchanges and other items could probably be handled more efficiently this way (with tactical combat happening during this phase, as well). Order of events should be enforced, just for the sake of both consistency/player expectations and programming, with diplomacy events happening sometime before combat. If two players reach a truce prior to their entering a combat phase they can simply retreat/exit the field/some other option.

My above comments, however, don't further this brainstorming discussion and are not what made me decide to post.

Generally, I'm getting the idea that any waiting between turns of a multiplayer game, such as waiting for other players to complete their turns or during a combat/diplomatic event, has been categorically labelled a Bad Thing. As a rabid online MOO2 player on Kali, I'm mainly, but not totally, in agreement on this.

A little waiting between turns does serve a purpose: it can allow a chat opportunity between the human players. This can be important, because it's a human being on the other end of the connection, and periodically it's necessary to communicate for various reasons: "Can we save? I need to get to bed"; "Can we restart this game? My map is horrible and there's no point in playing this one out"; "Someone's connection is slowing us down, let's save and resume it with another player as host"; "Long turn coming up for me, I need to put the kids to bed"; etc.

Certainly some of the above examples are specific to MOO2 and/or long games played late at night. My point is simply that going to great efforts to see to it that nobody ever has to "wait" with nothing to do other than chat with the other players would be unwise. Teamspeak/whatever else people might use is nice, but should not be relied upon as a good substitute because we may not all be able to put it to good use. MOO3 tripped up here in a big way because you could only chat with other players during your time-limited turn.

All this to say, you may not want to put too much priority in these discussions on minimizing wait/idle time. Obviously turns and combat should be optimized to minimize time requirements, but slavery to "no waiting" can hurt. I view a little waiting as the price you have to pay for a good TBS multiplayer experience.

Thanks for reading.

-Gusset

[Hexxium]

All this to say, you may not want to put too much priority in these discussions on minimizing wait/idle time. Obviously turns and combat should be optimized to minimize time requirements, but slavery to "no waiting" can hurt. I view a little waiting as the price you have to pay for a good TBS multiplayer experience.

I completely agree. We never should sacrifice features just to minimize waiting time.

Besides, there are many ways of making waiting time less boring:
EA TCM 2004 displays some statistics during turn processing (sometimes important, mostly unimportant but interesting). We could do the same thing, display some info that may be accessible in some galaxy info or history graph but isn't viewed that often.
Star Wars Galaxies displays some info on the SW Universe planets, inhibitants, characters and so on during loading times. This can add a lot to immersion.

But that's off topic here, I'm sorry It's just to clarify that it's not that important to eliminate waiting time. So I'm against "Event-Engine" Combat as the only available option.

It could be great for other parts of the game though (well... events for example? ), or as an alternative to tactical space combat. I could live with that approach for ground combat though, but that's because it's not that important to me, personally. I'm sure some people would disagree.

[Impaler]

I am not familar with these "events" that are being refered to? It sounds like they would be some interaction between players that interupts the turn and needs to be resolved with the input of 2 or mor players. Is this correct?

If so then this should be eliminated, nothing would interupt the players turn, when the turn begins the player has access to all pertinent information and recives reports on new developments. He can look at and twiddle everything in his empire and then when happy submit the turn.

As an analogy thing of a game of Rock, Paper, Scicors in which each person writes down their selection and puts it into a Hat. Nobody gets to see what their oponents choice is untill the resolution. Likewise no particular choice is inherently the "right" or "wrong" thing to do, only the COMBINATION of your and your oponents choices determines who is going to have an advantage or disadvantage. Now consider that this is going to be an ongoing game, any combat, diplomatic effort, Trade, espionage ect ect is going to stretch over several turns. So now you start to get in a very personal and intense poker match with your oponent as each trys to antispate the others actions (and antisipatre the other persons antispation of your antispations...). Will you make the "safe" moves or the "risky" (but potentialy more rewarding) moves. In the end it may just come down to who has the Balls to not flinch longest.

By the way has anyone played Balance of Power? If not you can find a free download of it at http://www.the-underdog.org If you havent you simply MUST try it out to get a taste of what I am talking about, the game consists of little more then 2 choices in response to an oponents actions "Escalate" or "Back-Down" and your trying to push the Rusians as much as you can without going over. I Nuke the world so often its hilarous, I just cant help myself.

Heres an example of a potential exchange between 2 players.

Turn 1:
Ale (player A) Desides to dispatch a task force of Raiders into his neibor Bob's (Player B) border system. He select the desired task force on the Tactical map of the Grobnium system and orders it to use the nearby hyperspace Lane to move to the Yitrium sytem. Their orders are "Wolf Pack Raiding" and he selects the desired area within the Yitrium system they are to asemble at.

Bob is ofcorse blithly unaware of all this and gives no special orders, the system is lightly defended and has only a small Destroyer task force ordered to "Patrol Cautiously" in the sytem.

Execution 1:
The Raiders hyper space reach the system on the same turn (it was close by). Their are no targets nearby as they enter the system and they expend the rest of their movment points going to the rally point Bob Placed. Enemy sensors have detected something though.

Turn 2:
Ale recives report: Ships encounter no resistence or prey but scans indicate a small colony and light patrols in the system, unable to identify adsact location or composition of enemy force. Inteligence estimates it is of modest size, Fleet admirals indicate sensors are showing only a light force though.

Bob recives: Sensors pick up unidentified ships near our border colony, sensors indicate a light force equal in size to our own though we can determine nothing about their tecnological level.
Bobs Destroyer Task Force is within range of the Blip area and he has several choices.
"Move in slowly non-agressivly and try to identify and Haile the ships"
"Move in swiftly and demand they identify themselves and leave the system or you will open fire"
"Move back towards our Colony world and atempt to hide the fleet behind that world"

Bob picks "Move in Slow.." and selects the Blip

Ale gives a general "Raide targets of oportunity and Engage any comparable or weaker forces"

Exicution 2:
Bobs ships move in slowly and try to Haile Ales ships, Ales ships seeing that they are being aproatched and Hailed by a roughly comparable force lull the trusting fools in and open fire on them in a devastating broadside. Results (+10 Initiative to Ales forces in any engagment in which your oponent tries to Haile you first), Add to that Ales race has the "Sneakyness" bonus for an additional +5 Initiative and its practicaly guaranteed Ale will shoot first. All kinds of various other stats about the ships get crunch along with some random modifiers and the results get spit out for everyone to see.

Turn 3:
Ale gets: Raiding taskforce encountered and engaged a modest enemy force that was "moving towards us slowly trying to Haile us" your admiral took desisive advantage of the situation and attacked inflicting moderate damage to the enemy force and light damage to his own.
Options:
"Press Home the attack to the fullest extent possible"
"Cautiously persue them and pick off stragalers"
"Disperse out forces and retreat"
"lick our wounds and regroup"

Bob gets: Unidentified ships now identified as belonging to player Ale of the Rooblo Empire, they viciously opened fire upon us as we tried to Haile them [Reciving a +10 Initiateve bonus] and our force suffered moderate damage, as we fought back we inflicted light damage on them.
Options:
"Counter attack imediatly as they muster their forces"
"Retreat to our Colony and atempt to Hide their"
"Retreat to the nearbly moon of Praxis and Hide their"
"Scatter forces, every ship for itself"

Starting to get the drift.
Each turn you get told what your action for the last turn was, what your oponents action was (if its logical for you to know that) and what the outcome was (idealy a mathematical breakdown of adsactly how your interaction was modified). Not all actions have the same risk or chance of success or of failing. As you can see the effect can be very story based, but the key here is that all of the Choices presented to the player are a direct result of whats happening on the Tactical map, the "Retreat to the Moon of Praxis" is an option of Bobs because that moon is within the ships movment range (ofcorse you can target stuff outside your movment range but untill you actualy get within range of it your just conducting a MOVE order). If we like we might also add some randomly generated "rare" moves that come up only intermitently as a Choice something (after meeting other conditions) on the lines of "your admiral so and so has a briliant and daring plan to Flank the enemy force with....", generaly these would be very risky plans though. They add some unpredictability to combat choices (and also test if the players has the Balls to use them or not)

[Lyx]

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[Krikkitone]

One simple note.

As there will definitely be an order for the event phase, I would suggest that Diplomacy take place before Combat. Such that agreeing with a Peace Treaty Effectively modifies the orders that fleets are presumed to get.
And it is best if you negotiate with what you have rather than what you plan to get. (Any Combat phase orders that are being carried out that conflict with the New Diplomacy state would have that Civ3 like Pop-up..'Do you really want to break our treaty')

so something like Diplomacy, Combat, Economy [if a newly conquered world is unproductive that means that no one gets its production for that turn]

[Lyx]

I am not familar with these "events" that are being refered to? It sounds like they would be some interaction between players that interupts the turn and needs to be resolved with the input of 2 or mor players. Is this correct?

Yes.

If so then this should be eliminated

Why? - Impaler, i understand your system now. However, i dont see much benefit from it, since the "bottleneck" isn't the "execution(event)-phase", but the "game-phase". With the two-phase system most waiting happens during the "game-phase", not during the "event-phase" - and because of our "informative waiting-screen" the system even makes use of that bit of waiting-time, so that players can already think about what to do in the next-turn, which will lower the time players spent with analizing their emipre's situation in the following turn.
So, most waiting would happen in the game-phase. This kind of waiting-time cannot be removed with your 1-phase approach as well, because even in a 1-phase system, fast players will need to wait for slow players at the end of the turn.

So, a 1-phase approach wouldn't reduce waiting-time much, but comes bundled with the disadvantages and limitations which i mentioned before.

[Lyx]

One simple note.

As there will definitely be an order for the event phase, I would suggest that Diplomacy take place before Combat. Such that agreeing with a Peace Treaty Effectively modifies the orders that fleets are presumed to get.
And it is best if you negotiate with what you have rather than what you plan to get. (Any Combat phase orders that are being carried out that conflict with the New Diplomacy state would have that Civ3 like Pop-up..'Do you really want to break our treaty')

so something like Diplomacy, Combat, Economy [if a newly conquered world is unproductive that means that no one gets its production for that turn]

True. Will change that - could you explain what you mean with economy?
Do you see any problems with letting random-events happen first of all? (so that i.e. players can react on random-events in diplomacy-talks)

hmm, thinking about it - one could as well argue that combat should happen first because it will change the way how diplomacy-talks will progress - and the players could move their fleets out in the following turn.

Hmm, twisted decision - any ideas or suggestions?

[Lyx]

@Gusset

discussion about a storybased combat-approach happens here:
viewtopic.php?t=679

Also, please take a look at this post and the following one:
viewtopic.php?p=10385#10385
I had the same opinion as you first, but then completely changed my mind.

[utilae]

I think we are talking about two different things in this thread. There's the story style space combat and then there is the event systems, which is merely the order at which things happen and how they happen (things like space combat and diplomacy).

Now I think that it is possible for the event system to be used with any form of space combat. So the event system could be used even if the story system isn't.

Also the best way to get rid of the feeling of waiting is not so much to reduce the waiting time, by cutting out interesting things, but by making the waiting time interesting. Why don't we make the waiting time a phase. Space combat takes place during the waiting phase. And during the waiting phase everyone chats. After all, the waiting phase is your chance to get some rest and chat to the other players. Everyone likes to chat or talk with there friends, so the waiting is eliminated.

As for yours and Dreks idea of story based space combat, you mention all of these advantages, such as intuitive interface, etc, but how can that be, the interface does not exist yet. So how can you say it is intuitive, I haven't seen any proof of this. So, I don't know, some pictures would help me visualise it more.

[Lyx]

I think we are talking about two different things in this thread. There's the story style space combat and then there is the event systems, which is merely the order at which things happen and how they happen (things like space combat and diplomacy).

Not really. The story-based combat talks happen here:
viewtopic.php?t=679

I would like to focus in this thread only on the event-framework which - as you write in the following post, is only loosely tied to the system-level combat-engine and not to the single-battle-engine itself at all.

Now I think that it is possible for the event system to be used with any form of space combat. So the event system could be used even if the story system isn't.

Yes and no. The story-based approach gets bundled to all events in general - and the idea is to use it whereever possible for events, since it would make the design of the game more smooth and consistent. But at the same time, every single event(combat too) could be handled by a different system(like i.e. for combat). Its like every event being a seperate module, technically.

Also the best way to get rid of the feeling of waiting is not so much to reduce the waiting time, by cutting out interesting things, but by making the waiting time interesting. Why don't we make the waiting time a phase. Space combat takes place during the waiting phase. And during the waiting phase everyone chats. After all, the waiting phase is your chance to get some rest and chat to the other players. Everyone likes to chat or talk with there friends, so the waiting is eliminated.

thats exactly the idea of the "waiting-screen". And a chatbox at one part of the screen where all waiting players can chat with each other in a single chatroom would fit it well, agreed.
I would say, players "involved" in an event, should automatically leave this "chatroom" so that the players in it cannot send messages to players who are currently involved in an event. It would feel very strange, if an event starts in which you just found a far-away and special system, are involved in a small mini-quest - and messages from other players popup in the screen. That would kind of kill the "being-there"-feel.

As for yours and Dreks idea of story based space combat, you mention all of these advantages, such as intuitive interface, etc, but how can that be, the interface does not exist yet. So how can you say it is intuitive, I haven't seen any proof of this. So, I don't know, some pictures would help me visualise it more.

The talk about "being intuitive" or not, was more centered around the "in-which-order-do-events-happen" issue, not about the system in general.
But you're right - some mockup screenshots would help alot - will fiddle around with that in the next days maybe. However, i dont know where to upload it(hmm, but then again, i could just send it to someone else to upload it).

[Lyx]

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[Impaler]

I am still not very clear on this "event" consept that everyone is throwing around so casualy, is it something that got developed when I was on Hiatus?

It sounds like your saying the players will have his normal Galactic Turn phases in which he is looking at his system and desiding his production, diplomacy, ship building, fleet movment ect ect. After these are completed to his satisfaction he hits "End Turn".

Now he is in the "Waiting" Phase (multiplayer only). Inwhich everyone is simply waiting for the last person in the game to Hit "End Turn". Durring this Phase I think the players should continue to be able to view a "frozen" version of the galactic view. Basicaly they see what they sent in and can review but not change their choices. Likly they will want to spend this time doing things like ship design or replaying/reviewing past combats. They can also Chat with others durring this phase (though in all honesty I dont see why you cant chat durring the play phase as well)

Next comes the "Exicution Phase" it begins when the last player Hits End turn (so that guy experiences no wait because he is the one holdin up the show) or if theirs a time limit when said limit expires. Now things start to Diverge. If we have a back and forth combat engine like that of Moo2 then each player has to be systimaticaly presented with the option to play out the space combats they are involved in. These space combats get played out between the respective players as everyone else continues to wait.

Is this playing of space combats AFTER the last person submits the turn whats deing refered to by "event" (ofcorse you could include non-combat events that involve 2 person interaction as well). And then only after all these "Events" are resolved dose the next turn start? If so then we should get ride of these Events.

Instead we want to have orders given durring the main "play" phase determine any and all interactions happening durring the "exicution" phase which just consists of the Host computer crunching the inputs and sending outputs (so a minute at most). Then the next turn would begin and everyone sees the results of their actions. Ofcorse we will need to have very wide selection of nuanced choices avalible to the player durring the play phase to give enough strategic depth to the choices. Given that Moo2's combat desision were rather shallow (each turn each ship should either unload all its ordinace at the target that your can best kill or it should Retreat) it shouldnt be to hard to come of with straitforward tactical choices that exceed the tactical depth of Moo2.