How to make Drones part off the gameplay

[Anaximander]

Yup you completely missed my point...

I have no worries that somebody would build a self replicating army at all.

That would really a epic thing to accomplish. (but I doubt it will happen, not at a SkyNet scale)

What I want are constructs that are allowed to stay active even if no one around.

I don't care at all what it does how it looks or what its purpose is.

 

But any simulated part put loads on the server. If you want to go the mine craft road the "license" is the equivalent to a "chunk loader" introduced by various mods.

So clearly you need to set restrictions on that part or the server gets overloaded with "virtual players" because that is a "chunk loader" in its essence.

 

There will be production blocks that somehow turn one thing into a other ting with a timed delay, that is stuff that gets unloaded when the player is offline.

It is a simple Time passed / Time it takes to do stuff = Stuff made equation which quickly caches up when the player returns so I don't see problems there.

 

I see problems with constructs shaping the world while the player is gone. That stuff won't happen because it needs proper simulation in order to work.

That is my worry....

So, if I get you correctly, you are worried on automated factories as well?

 

 

Out of luck, that's a thing in the game. Automated factories would run while you are offline. That means automated drones (to some extend as always).

 

Except if you want your automated factory to be the numero uno farm house for trolls. I don't. I will put as many turrets and drones active if I can to protect my crib or factory.

 

You can't ask the devs to limit how many factories a person can have. It would take away the point of focusing on becoming an industrial tycoon that owns all the market because you worked hard.

 

Again, having simplistic, reactive drones, does not overload the server. Especially if the scripts are written without much memory needde, simple stuff. "walk there, scan for material, go to location of material, mine, go back to X Y Z base location's material dumping container, repeat". This, does not take as much as a real NPC would take. And again, complex drones, shaping the world, won't be a thing due to power usage of coomplex DPU systems.

 

Botting won't be a thing in the scale of other games, because those drones will eventually run out of material or resources at one part of their chain of operations and they will turn off.

 

So yeah, drones are not forever, nor they can be overly complex in their A.I.

[MrFaul]

Dude please tell me that you are trolling me.....

Ok I clearly misplaced "That is my worry" but man....

 

To clarify once again I'm worried about:

 

Not getting shit done because my stuff freezes in time when I'm offline

or

Lag because everything keeps being simulated and no proper restrictions are in place to avoid that.

 

 

I'd welcome if everything keeps being simulated but that is a pipe dream performance wise and total op.....

[Anaximander]

Dude please tell me that you are trolling me.....

Ok I clearly misplaced "That is my worry" but man....

 

To clarify once again I'm worried about:

 

Not getting shit done because my stuff freezes in time when I'm offline

or

Lag because everything keeps being simulated and no proper restrictions are in place to avoid that.

 

 

I'd welcome if everything keeps being simulated but that is a pipe dream performance wise and total op.....

Cool. Much better. Simulation is not something you'd have to worry. The way the built the servers mitigates server load on you because someone far away is running the Droid Army from Stars Was Episode I : The Quest to destroy Darth Vader.

 

 

And no, as I stated above, factories run while you are offline (up to a point that is, materials are not forever).

 

 

So cheers, seems the devs have your worries covered.

[MrFaul]

We will see about that my goal is to load the blueprint into to core and let the "welder" bots do the work so when I login the next day I have a shiny new structure on my property....

 

I don't think this will be possible.... factories and environmental changes are two different things. But maybe the devs surprise me.

 

I just hope I can obtain a lifetime subscription when the kickstarter goes online tomorrow :-D

[Anaximander]

We will see about that my goal is to load the blueprint into to core and let the "welder" bots do the work so when I login the next day I have a shiny new structure on my property....

 

I don't think this will be possible.... factories and environmental changes are two different things. But maybe the devs surprise me.

 

I just hope I can obtain a lifetime subscription when the kickstarter goes online tomorrow :-D

The Element associated with blueprints is a 3D printer. It looks like it needs a LOT of power you know, molecular pritner and stuff.

 

 

So yeah, seems the devs know what they are doing :V

[Wicpar]

i think you should be able to make infinite drones, but it requires two things: turrets that can auto target drones without needing to code ai (coding ai would allow to target player ships too with different kind of weapons), and a control center in comm range to control these drones, as ai centers for "powerful" calculations would be quite big to put on a small drone, and would be very expensive, but could control multiple drones and coordinate them.

 

with these things set, it is easier to defend, as you would have a main target to destroy to kill everything, so just get an orbital canon and code it to target the control ship, or have a 10-20 of these turrets (that could also be used to fend off natural disasters like meteor showers) to defend a gainst a 100 -200 tiny drone army (with similar cost) thus equalizing the balance, of cource this is speculation, a very good ai will triumpth, but a bad one will be decimated.

 

I plan to make the Borg, i have studied genetic algorithms quite well and i think if the api allows interaction with the code base i could easily make an evolving faction.

 

an interresting aspect would be to add weapons adaptation (matching weapon and shield frequency allows for the shields to be rendered useless, so you have to have your shields and weapons synchronized to be able to use simultaneously and a hack could be employed to get it, or deduct it with an energy feedback of weapon-shield collision

 

We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile. (imagine it said with the text to speech module )

[Lethys]

In the kickstarter video they talk about ai but those would only function while you are online.

[Anaximander]

In the kickstarter video they talk about ai but those would only function while you are online.

Not really, if a person who has authority on the constructs is near. So, you can own the drones and apoint me as an operator.

 

 

 

Genius idea. Yes, it's botting, but it's not "fire and forget" kind of botting. If drones are active = a person is near

Kill the person, drones go down.

[Violet]

Really tricky, swarms of drone ships would be so OP it could ruin the game but I'm not sure how it would actually play out.

 

Making a bot that can fire at the nearest hostile target is one thing but being able to use tactics and defeat intelligent players without glitching out and falling in random ways is a really hard proposition especially without perfect information.

 

What is possible and what is practical really depends on the APIs that NQ decide to grant players. Having a script that makes a ship move is useless unless it has a

destination, knows its position in the world and has plan to get there.

 

Writing efficient code to do path finding is super hard in a cell based game like minecraft where you can "see" the world in terms of block type at x,y,z.

 

IRL You would need 

 

- Radar/ladar system to gather relative world telemetry

- Positioning system, so it knows its current location

- Complex programming that build a "model" of the world that learns where things are from its imperfect vision of the world

 

If I was EQ I would be very cautious about introducing new LUA API functionality, you cant really restrict movement controls but I would be very cautious about giving DPU too much information about the game world and I would defiantly include some sort CPU limits/costs that makes it worth writing more efficent code. 

[Cozzmo]

Star Wars Galaxies had droid which could for example automatically gather stuff for you while you were grinding, so for example you could grind some kind of animal and the droid would ride around and gather a set type of item like "leather" from anything lootable in around.

 

That's how I would see droids or "drones". You build a simple weels + cargo + mechanical hand, add default "gathererer AI" script, set it to "gather bones, alert when full" and boom there you go.

[MrFaul]

Well considering the kickstarter video making a crap ton of dummy bots calculating prime numbers to slowdown the attacking player (because it is apparently local) while you are offline is one way of electronic warfare 

 

But it only confirmed my hunch how that stuff is handled by the game.

[Anaximander]

Really tricky, swarms of drone ships would be so OP it could ruin the game but I'm not sure how it would actually play out.

 

Making a bot that can fire at the nearest hostile target is one thing but being able to use tactics and defeat intelligent players without glitching out and falling in random ways is a really hard proposition especially without perfect information.

 

What is possible and what is practical really depends on the APIs that NQ decide to grant players. Having a script that makes a ship move is useless unless it has a

destination, knows its position in the world and has plan to get there.

 

Writing efficient code to do path finding is super hard in a cell based game like minecraft where you can "see" the world in terms of block type at x,y,z.

 

IRL You would need 

 

- Radar/ladar system to gather relative world telemetry

- Positioning system, so it knows its current location

- Complex programming that build a "model" of the world that learns where things are from its imperfect vision of the world

 

If I was EQ I would be very cautious about introducing new LUA API functionality, you cant really restrict movement controls but I would be very cautious about giving DPU too much information about the game world and I would defiantly include some sort CPU limits/costs that makes it worth writing more efficent code. 

Anything that takes effort, time and logistics, SHOULD BE OP.

 

A swarm of drone ships would take a lot of rigging a lot of planning the code out, a lot of materials needed.

 

And for that, you get a swarm of murder machines.

 

 

It won't be easy. It would be rewarding tho. If a person can build a Death Star, they should be able to build a swarm of drones or even drone battleships as well.

[Wicpar]

I agree with captaintwerkmotor, things that are difficult and long to make should be strong. For the online thing that is impossible. Since they advertized you could go on alone your base must be able to run and defend itself without the player online but with restrictions:

 

Screeps is a mmorts that uses scripts to work. Their system is that your level determines the max cpu usage of your scripts and your allocated storage memory. Something similar could be done here and this would prevent people from immediately creating drone armies and overloading the servers. For instance a script may be only allowed to run for n milliseconds thus promoting script efficiency and optimization.

[Anaximander]

I agree with captaintwerkmotor, things that are difficult and long to make should be strong. For the online thing that is impossible. Since they advertized you could go on alone your base must be able to run and defend itself without the player online but with restrictions:

 

Screeps is a mmorts that uses scripts to work. Their system is that your level determines the max cpu usage of your scripts and your allocated storage memory. Something similar could be done here and this would prevent people from immediately creating drone armies and overloading the servers. For instance a script may be only allowed to run for n milliseconds thus promoting script efficiency and optimization.

Well, let's be honest, if I make a swarm of drones the game turns to an MMORTS  from an MMORPG for me

 

[Wicpar]

Well, let's be honest, if I make a swarm of drones the game turns to an MMORTS from an MMORPG for me

 

actually, no. Those are more similar as you cannot pilot a ton of drones (unless they provide an amazing api that allows you to make your own client to controll them) to a npc shootthemall. A good flack and you killed them all. The more variety there is the more interresting the game. Imagine a one man faction composed of well programmed drones, it could be quite deadly on one target, but if the faction fights on multiple fronts, the ai wont manage on their own and die. The fun about these kind of threats is that they will imbalance the game such to create interresting political movements, and a one man faction can hardly manage diplomacy alone and would thus only be based on fire power.

[ShadowGamer5]

This was a very interesting topic, and wireing multiple ships to one console so one person can control multiple ships at once, or at least give them checkpoints and attack orders. I believe you create a robot that has an awarnece of its surroundings and can float or trace to it's objective without hitting any walls or falling off a cliff. But marking and firing upon engines would be hard unless there is a sensor that dectecs them, then hook it up to some programs that will aim up the gun and fire

[NQ-Nyzaltar]

This was a very interesting topic, and wireing multiple ships to one console so one person can control multiple ships at once, or at least give them checkpoints and attack orders. I believe you create a robot that has an awarnece of its surroundings and can float or trace to it's objective without hitting any walls or falling off a cliff. But marking and firing upon engines would be hard unless there is a sensor that dectecs them, then hook it up to some programs that will aim up the gun and fire

 

Hi ShadowGamer5 and welcome on the forum.

 

We have already clearly stated that it's absolutely not the intention of the Dev team to allow such a thing. 

There will be a need to have at least one human player to pilot each ship.

 

Best Regards,

Nyzaltar.

[MrFaul]

Welcome to a dead thread ShadowGamer5, but thanks to you I noticed that the damn dropbox link to the UEG logo broke ... well there was a mail that the public folder gets closed but I didn't care

 

And it is indeed a nice conversation but obsolete too.