It's a snarky word someone around here made up to pick on us folks who want some sort of ongoing activity outside the doings of the human player and the computer players. It's fairly good rhetoric; makes me feel almost tainted by my love of the early, pre-EA work from Will Wright's shop, Maxis. But not enough to make me leave the 'living world' crowd.

A living world would make you truly fight to become the star, and not just hand it to you on a plate and say, "Go get 'em!" No other game has done this for me yet - and I am hoping that Elemental does it. And so far, I like what I see. Not on the Beta, no, but just the fact that Brad and the others keep us informed, actually read the forums (so many people made amazing ideas on the Elder Scrolls forums pre-Oblivion, and whenever I play Oblivion I keep seeing moments when I have to say, "That'd go great here...") and work with us.

-applause-

If I were to get "Living Worlds" (as some define), I'd demand "Living Cities". And then enjoy people complaining about micro.

Yeah, I was disheartened by how quickly Frogboy dismissed the living world suggestions as "Sim Fantasy." 

When I hear Sim Fantasy, I personally think "cool!"  After all, a world that I can watch grow is a world I want to play in!

The problem is that this is a Civ type game, and that's where the focus must lie. I'm all in favor of including things that make the world feel alive, but not at a higher priority then other parts of the actual game. And the fact is, a lot of these ideas have been completely unfeasible for Elemental, and yes, belong in a simulation.

The way you and others have been using the term "simulation" is a matter of degree and not kind. Civ I was as much as simulation as SimEarth, it just had a different UI for interfering with the results of an iterative process, and branding almost always makes practical matters harder to apprehend. The "actual game" is whatever an individual player wants to twiddle in an instance of the given modeling, or simulation, system.

But my thinking could be especially bent at the moment because I'm just past halfway through Neil Stephenson's Anathem and have recently been reminded that the '4X' thing is a reviewer's idea and not a designer's idea. I was briefly entranced by the pre-release MOO3 talk about 'the 5th X,' but in the end the whole thing seems rather pornographic-in-the-pejorative sense to me, and I'm a lifelong supporter of free speech and unions for sex workers.

I love the direction this is going ( I have since day one). One note for dev's and Frogboy I think that if you wish for two or even three years or beyond of evolution of the development of Elemental it must have a very good and MEMORABLE foundation so that the first time player including those from other play styles will be keen to seeing its potential and become involved in the evolution of Elemental's future. There is nothing I have seen so far to suggest this is not the direction Elemental is heading but the consumer can be so... well you know.

I really think that first impressions are always powerful and I keep going back to my first impression when I saw a cloth map turn into 3D and what I thought (now corrected ) an Icewind Dale style tactical screen so it was as if one had the ability to play both AoW and Icewind dale in the same game engine. My thought was WOW! the possibility for developing Fantasy based campaigns in the different settings would be incredibly easy yet very rich and detailed. I belive that if you leave the options to expand the game into more than what is realistically possible in the first release the mere notion that this is possible to archive will bring flocks of fresh minds and ideas from those who been wishing to have their cake and eat it too when it comes to playing fantasy games and you will most likely find Elemental will be appealing to various generations and styles of play.

This is pretty much what I think. It would be cool to have a living world, but this is a strategy game and not an RPG. However some suggested features, such as "living lairs" should be considered for implementation.

I don't really understand this remark.  Elemental has been touted again and again as a game that draws you in to a setting; a strategy game that feels like an RPG.  Now, from my understanding, an RPG is supposed to make the player feel like an actor or character in a play or novel, and a very important measure of a good play or novel is whether it can easily make the watcher/reader feel as though they are actually part of that setting or world without having to suspend much disbelief.  Why do you think Frog wrote a novel for Elemental, after all?  So what can do a better job of that than to make the game world feel alive and active?

If Elemental were a straight strategy game, the units and landscape could be represented by abstract geometric shapes for all I care.  But it's not.  It's a strategy game in an RPG setting.  In civilization, suicidal barbarian that appear out of thin air is fine.  It's not fine for Elemental.   

Granted the sovereign serves the same purpose as a settler or a scout in Civilization, on his own the sovereign doesn't alter gameplay that much from your standard empire-builder - but it's an important first step, hopefully the first of many RPG-like additions to the strategy game formula.

I agree.. one addition that would work great toward adding more interesting RPG aspects would be adding a wider range of individualized traits for the sovereign/children/heroes. A fully developed skill/trait tree a la Heroes of Might and Magic would be a good model.

It would be especially cool if the traits of children could be partly influenced both by parental traits and by choices made during their upbringing; like how in Crusader Kings you can assign kids to Church Education, Court Education, Military Training, etc; their upbringing can be influenced by number of Universities/Churches/Barracks/Libraries in your realm; and you'll occasionally get a childhood vignette where your choices can push them more toward Pious or Apostate, Modest or Arrogant, etc.

"SimFantasy" is easier said than done I think. The closest thing you'll find to that is Dwarf Fortress, but that's been in development for 8 years already and is likely to take 20 more before it's close to finished. It is pretty fun however. I just finished a new world builder utility for that which I will shamlessly plug here. It's fun to just generate worlds and read the legends and watch empires rise and fall.

For Elemental, I would be happy with something fresh and new that doesn't rely too heavily on tired game mechanic paradigms. 

I think making things have a 'reason' is good. Random trolls attacking for no reason is no fun. But they can't go overboard and make every entity on any random map have a complete life story. Adding some background info and basic goals, I think, would do a world of difference over a lot of games.

I think my original post about living worlds might be misconstrued a bit.  From the start I've never suggested giving mobs anything more than very limited AI algorithms.  To be honest, I don't care about monster backstories or backgrounds at all.  Rather, I care about monster objectives.  That's what I mean by giving monster's "motives."  Give them objectives that they are trying to fullfill and allow the player under certain circumstances to see those goals so that they can come up with strategies to work around/with them. 

What I would do is create a modding program like we have with spells, quests, etc. but make it for "dungeon and monster personalities."  The program would include what resources they are drawn toward, how brave or cowardly they are (willingness to stand and fight superior forces), how quickly they reproduce, to what degree they can be "reasoned with," etc.  If Frogboy can program immensely sophisticated opponent AI's, create simple monster AI's that are many orders of magnitude more simple than opponent AI should be a sinch. 

In the end, stuff would be happening in the world that an astute player could analyze and build strategies around.  Not only does it make a richer game world, it also gives the player a more strategic landscape.

He tried to put "abstracted properties onto objects", such as a tree is made of wood that regrows.  Objects could have properties such as production (trees produce wood that regrows), food (rabbit eats grass/etc.), shelter (trolls seek caves for a home), and desires (dragons desire gold, magic, meat; wolves desire meat and being pack animals desire other wolves).

The properties define behaviors -- rabbits seek out grass, wolves seek other wolves and hunt meat, dragons seek treasure and meat.

Part 1 ends with: "I’ll post later about how this was supposed to work in terms of AI behaviors, the way the world populated its data, and why it all didn’t work."

Part 2

The (in)famous dragon example:

"The “virtual ecology,” as Starr Long, the game’s associate producer calls it, affects nearly every aspect of the game world, from the very small to the very large. If the rabbit population suddenly drops (because some gung-ho adventurer was trying out his new mace) then wolves may have to find different food sources – say, deer. When the deer population drops as a result, the local dragon, unable to find the food he’s accustomed to, may head into a local village and attack. Since all of this happens automatically, it generates numerous adventure possibilities."

Implementation:

"Most of this is actually fairly straightforward, in terms of AI implementation. The basic AI behavior of a creature was

• If I’m hungry, search for items that produce stuff on my FOOD list, and attack or eat them. Wander as far as needed to accomplish this.
• If I am not hungry, then start looking for a home base. If I already have one, then go there. If I get hungry while doing this, go back to hunting for food.
• If I am sheltered and not hungry, then look around for stuff that I just like. If I can pick it up, bring it to my shelter. If not, just hang around there — until I get hungry."

Problems included:

-"The problem was that the constant radial searches were incredibly expensive, and so was all the pathfinding."

-hoarding of resources (such as furs) prevented respawning (there were 'banks' of resources -- limits on how many existed)

Part 3  talks about uses (quests, transmuting) and more problems.

Applying this to Elemental:

-quests.  For the rat quest, maybe rats desire grain, as do farmers.  Rat population increases because its grain desire is met, reducing farmer's grain.  Farmer now has unmet desire, so now has new desire to have this impediment removed.  Farmer seeks adventurers to fulfill this new desire, and if successful, farmer loses new desire and rewards adventurers.  Rat population has been reduced and unless something is done (give farmer cats or rat traps?) the rat population slowly increases and...

-Champions.  Champion's desires may include loot, combat, fame, etc.  They'll seek out these things, so... etc. etc. etc.

All this gives motives to the actions we see ingame, and makes it dynamic instead of just scripted.  It allows the player to have more of an effect than just ticking off a list of static scripts.  No need for "...monster backstories or backgrounds at all."

Good post.  I remember very well UO's attempt to insert a game ecology into Ultima Online (I was an alpha tester, after all!)  It's also exactly what I was elluding to for Elemental.  Unfortunately, Ultima Online experienced pitfalls in the form of... you guessed it... thousands of players behaving unpredictably.  Players were far too prevalent in relation to ecological actors.  With Elemental, an in-game ecology would seem much more plausable because we have far more computational resources now a days and it is single player.

I'm with Demiansky. All that I really want is for randomness to happen. Honestly, how many games have you played that are just the players doing stuff on a map? How many maps have events and just random things that happen because they happen, and not because they were specifically scripted to happen? Why should Elemental, being the next evolution of PC games, be limited to things that have been done to the point of boring?

Look at the scenarios I just quickly typed up. They called for only a few things - a lair, growth for creatures IN the lair, a radius that depends on extremely simple formulas, and food within that radius. And if things in the radius don't work? The lair dwellers go hunting for food. Only a handful of things that could make each and every game totally unique.

Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic had a random map generator. The miscellenious units there were just...there. Some could be recruited, some would attack you no matter what strength you were (I've had two skeleton arches attack a summon gold dragon. Quick and relatively painless for me, brutal for them) and they were boring. Mundane. Simple. They were of no value whatsoever except for some quick XP.

Is randomness feasible? I think so. Else, Elemental will be as varied as the players decide to make it. And in single player, life...will be fairly redundent game after game after game.

Lol, I agree with you completely Nathikal, but be careful when you use words like "random" on these forums.  Discussing Randomness is like discussing abortion or religion.  I think what you are asking for isn't really randomness at all, but predictable patterns of growth that add spice to the game.

I'm still thinking on the 'rat quest' thing in my previous post. 

If the rat population isn't reduced (by players or wandering champions or rat predators) then at some point the farmers give up and move away (new farm lands, or to town which might benefit players?).  Towns that service farmers suffer.  Rat population at some point creates disease which spreads, further depopulating the area and threatening players cities.  Land becomes increasingly uninhabited and because some monsters desire uninhabited land they move in.  At some point rats run out of grain and seek their food desire elsewhere -- towns then (player) cities, reducing food stores and introducing disease.

For champions and their desire for loot, they could get in over their heads and need rescuing, generating quests for players.  Or they could be competing with players for quests -- one thing I don't like about most games is that there's little pressure to do things in a timely manner.  If we put off a quest it's generally still there to do later, even if part of the quest is a 'save the town from mobs' where waiting 4 months would seem to cause the quest to 'time-out'.

A quest that 'times-out' could provide more quests -- the former townfolks may resent not being helped, and having no good options they become bandits, creating a new quest.  If npc gain 'xp' then the longer one puts off dealing with them the harder it gets.  Maybe highly skilled bandits become champions inimical to the players.

Knowing there's champions out desiring quests puts teeth into players having to make hard decisions on what to do and what to not do.  Knowing that waiting means losing a quest sends home the idea that the world is a living/breathing/changing place and that player actions count.

Hahaha, that's excellent!!! I was thinking of almost the same thing, example wise at least. True it didn't work as originally intended. The idea was sound but the computing power needed to do it smoothly, plus the hoarding you mentioned, made things incredibly difficult. I can't count the times that monster hoards, I.E. their loot and item hoards, crashed servers and caused "Lag Holes" in the world. The players didn't know it, but at times they were surrounded by us "Invisible GM's and Seers" as we were deleting and removing and re-spawning things while they were "virtually" feet away.

We did end up keeping part of the designed system though for AI use. Mostly in NPC "brain" programming. In the end we ended up extremely limiting the "radius" but keeping the simulated behavior. It's not something I can explain fully as I wasn't a coder and I'm "technically" still under a NDA as to what went on internally. I can tell you though we didn't "scrap" the whole system or the work that went into it.

Nice ... @ UO's attempt at a "living ecology"

I think breaking it down to resources/ food is a tad too micro for elemental, but certainly migratory patterns and pack forming. Maybe even certain monsters "prefer" to live in certain lands ... so some are content in their driveling caves while others wish to take the fertile land from the Humanz.

Nick, thanks very much for that reference to Ultima Online dev talk. Demiansky's response remark about 'too many players' being the problem has made me realize that MMO might not be a never-ever genre for me, I just have to wait to try it until computing resources are cheap enough that outrageously detailed background processes can easily and significantly outnumber players.

That's how I've read you all along Demiansky, but now that you point to it, I can see how folks might have been getting hung up on the idea that you were calling for every Troll to be part of his own N-generations lineage, with a forbidden love interest and a badly-healed broken ankle that aches in the damp. I'm perfectly happy making up those sorts of stories for myself as I play, but it is not fun or easy to do that when the critter behaviors look crudely random.

I think vast majority of elemental players would probably want an epic battle between factions and dragons. Not trying to figure out the airspeed of an unladen swollow...

These ecollogy systems I always think miss the point of the game. They fit in well in an ecollogy simulator where thats what your focusing on but when your focus is elsewhere they seem to be an extra layer of obfustification to the player. By all means have systems which govern the flow of the wildlife but they need to be simple and easy to understand for a player with a LOT more things on his mind.

We need a new journal lol

@Aractain ... by that I mean only the most Macro of creatures.

AKA, several small independent nations forming a "Pack" (A Confederate Alliance)

Or a giant pack of bug-bears splitting from the Lair and migrating south, burning villages and eating people as they move.

A few hours ago on the homepage I noticed that the 5 latest journals had come out with an average of 2-3 days between them and now it has been 4(!)

So I also expect a new journal anytime soon