![[de]](/mwf/flags/de.png "Germany")
So with the trainable physicals we have inherited this broken feature from Clonk Rage. It's somewhat mitigated by the faircrew feature, but that shouldn't stop us from actually fixing it.From discussion on IRC, I think the fundamental problem is that Clonk has three kinds of scenarios:
- Where you compete against other players
- Where you compete against the computer
- Where you play just for fun
For the first two types, trainable physicals actively break the game by either making scenarios unfair, or easier for more experienced players. One can mitigate the latter by providing multiple difficulty levels or harder scenarios, but it still is absurd to help veterans instead of newbies.
For the third type, trainable physicals simply reward playing, which is good.
So I think the answer is to have per-scenario training. A campaign would have in scenario two the amount of training the Clonk had in the best round of scenario one, and just-for-fun scenarios would all share their training data. Standalone competitive scenarios would start out with standard Clonks, or can have custom Clonk abilities just for the scenario, regardless of the player. This would make interesting challenges like only one or no Clonk that can scale available to every player whenever they want.
So how do we implement this? Can I just remove the training from the engine, and someone else writes scripts to store the training data in the CrewExtraData?
>So I think the answer is to have per-scenario training.
I beg to elaborate: I don't see how the player's game experience would be improved if the achievements were only saved on a per-scenario-base, because I would like to have achievements that actually require a good amount of playing time and I would rather not want to force the player to play the same scenario over and over again if there are maybe a few dozen decent scenarios with different maps but the same playing style on the CCAN that he could download and have fun with instead.
On the other hand I completely agree that those achievements are not useful for your first two types of scenarios (competitive) and therefore I suggest having a mostly script-wise implementation of these achievements that is bound to an ingame rule, that is active in those scenarios where it fits. CCAN-authors would not have to worry about the achievements more than to activate that rule if their scenario fits. Achievements would be saved on a per-crew base instead of the per-scenario base allowing the player to try out new scenarios without losing all the achievements.
Additional thoughts:
Are the achievements going to belong to the player or to the individual Clonks? Making them belong to Clonks would actively introduce some kind of role-playing element into those free settlement scenarios (note: we are not talking about f.e. Gold Mine here but about scenarios you start just to build up a huge empire).
What effect are the achievements going to have on the game? Since we are only talking about free-play scenarios here, we do not have to worry alot about giving older players advantaged over newer players (and therefore they can be more or less "strong" (for example: when the Clonk unlocked the achievement "chop down X trees" he gets one chunk of wood more from trees than other Clonks - stuff like that)
And of course we have to think about an interface to present those achievements to the player (ingame vs. outgame)
See "just-for-fun scenarios would all share their training data." But I don't want to restrict training just to those scenarios. It should be available to competitive scenarios, too, if they are designed for that. But a rule for the shared just-for-fun training is certainly a good idea.You didn't answer my questions, though :-)
>See "just-for-fun scenarios would all share their training data."
That's why I said "elaborate", not "yoo is wrong" ;)
>You didn't answer my questions, though :-)
Those?:
So how do we implement this? Can I just remove the training from the engine, and someone else writes scripts to store the training data in the CrewExtraData?
>So how do we implement this?
Well, using a scripted ingame rule ;)
>Can I just remove the training from the engine, and someone else writes scripts to store the training data in the CrewExtraData?
I think you can remove the physical training code - whether we need engine support for the achievements later, is another question, though. :)
This is not directly a reply to you, Zapper. I know you just gave an example in passing and I am not quite sure if that kind of "achievements" are really that form of achievements Günther originally proposed:>for example: when the Clonk unlocked the achievement "chop down X trees" he gets one chunk of wood more from trees than other Clonks - stuff like that
Uh, I hate these kinds of boring "achievements". They are even far worse and generic than the "mine 100 gold" goals of the C4 era. Do you really think it is a mentionable achievement that some player completed some enormously repetitive and boring task? Those achievements are nothing else than tricks onto which certain people, a good portion of the "gamers" are taken in by. They are both designed to regularly reward the player randomly and give him the feeling that he actually did something meaningful (instead of wasting his time, which he actually did) and by that to try to keep him playing the game as long as possible. I don't like that culture of rewarding the player for every little shit he does, or well, rewarding the player that he spent soooo much time with the game. It fucks kids up, really. They get so spoiled by those constant rewards in their computer games, that they stop seeking the rewards in real life because they are so "hard to get". Life is not that easy, but that is THE life and you only got one, so don't waste it on computer games! And an achievement system is one of those things that heavily support this development.
I am not that madly in love with clonk that I want people to play clonk longer than it makes fun for them. Clonk should be a fun game, nothing else and not try to "busy" the player by adding parts that are not fun, but nevertheless let him continue playing. (Hope you know what I am talking about. I know plenty of games which are fun initially, then you play, play, play, there is so much that still has to be done and after hours you realize that it stopped being fun hours ago, you just kept going because there was so much to do.)
If any achievements, I'd vote for anti-achievements, which go like "yaaay, you managed to chop down 1000 trees! And, was it fun? Cause you know, I am sorry to tell you that what you have been doing the last X hours has been ABSOLUTELY IRRELEVANT, you might as well knocked your head on the wall that whole time. So, here is your achievement 'chop 1000 trees', be proud!"
To be honest I don't get your point. Are you saying we should stop developing computer games because they keep kids from going outside and playing in the park? Because, actually, playing a Melee is also most likely a waste of time compared to what you could do with your life.
Even though, there are some players who like playing Melees - as they are players who like spending a lot of time on free settlement (be it Minecraft, Dwarf Fortress or Clonk). And, quoting Luchs again, I'd say that unlockable achievements can actually provide additional fun for players (of what nature those achievements are going to be is another question): "I'm running the Steam version. TF2 isn't fun without all the items. " (Source)
The problem about unlockable features (not just "optical stuff", although it makes sense this is usually stored online too) is, that they need to be saved centrally and distributed centrally. This is possible, okay, but it would require additional coding on both engine and masterserver side. Another problem would be, this could only be possible for specific scenarios.But as my CMC-teamleader said, it would be awesome for scenario-creators to assign for some league-like online storage of points or unlockables. This in fact actually really sounds very similar to league concepts - only that everybody could request his scenarios and the hashes to be saved, and then code the scenarios to exchange data with the masterserver. The server could then offer a limited amount of data storage per scenario/pack. Combined with a central masterserver login (= Clonk Rage League login, just without the pointproblem) these verified and hashed scenarios could request playerspecific achievements and item awards, which the same scenario or another one from the pack could request the list of again in the next round.
>The problem about unlockable features (not just "optical stuff", although it makes sense this is usually stored online too) is, that they need to be saved centrally and distributed centrally.
No, why? To prevent the players from cheating? If a player wants to cheat he can enter "/script DoWealth(0,100000)". Do you also want to prevent that?
No, of course not. My point is that we should leave the clonk game experience to the fun parts. Does sound chopping 100 trees fun to you? The "rewarding" should come from the actual game experience, not from some redwardment system.
>Does sound chopping 100 trees fun to you?
Does "mine all the gold from the landscape" sound fun to you? Or gaining 2000 settlement points to win the round? Or even stupidly build two castles and one windmill to win the game? Still that is how the goals of the old settlement scenarios worked - and guess what: players actually had fun in those rounds.
The achievement with the trees is actually one that you achieve automatically after some playing time (because you _will_ chop down some trees every round). Of course we can think of more fun achievements that do not require repetitive action (like, kill one shark by dropping him from a blimp into a lava lake) - but that does not mean that we should forget the achievements that simply reward playing time
> Does "mine all the gold from the landscape" sound fun to you? Or gaining 2000 settlement points to win the round? Or even stupidly build two castles and one windmill to win the game
No, not at all. That is one of the first things I wrote about that was bad design in C4. That clonk still was fun was not because of the 2000 settlement points goal but independent or even despite of it.
>Of course we can think of more fun achievements that do not require repetitive action (like, kill one shark by dropping him from a blimp into a lava lake)
Ha, thats exactly the point! Yes, that sort of thing would be ok achievement design. Reward difficult stuff, reward things for which the player actually has to achieve something. Not "wow, you pushed that button 1000 times!". So, yes, we should forget about achievements which reward playing time because there is nothing to reward! You also don't get awarded for the time you already spent in school or the time you are living - you are rewarded for the stuff you achieve! - just biding your time is no achievement. .oO("Achievement unlocked: Watched 1000 hours of television")
>Not "wow, you pushed that button 1000 times!".
Well, chopping down trees actually means finding those trees (maybe even planting them, depending on the way things are going to work), chopping them down, taking them somewhere and making sure there are enough trees left to reproduce. Things that you do in your usual games without trying to hard on one task - I don't want the player to start a round just to chop down 1000 trees. I want them to unlock that achievements eventually without focusing on it - just eventually being rewarded and have one Clonk that suddenly has the ability to get one more chunk of wood out of trees (stuff like that actually changes the experience the player has because it adds new elements even later on after the player discovered all the features of the game)
Yes, designing compelling achievements is not easy. I think one good approach is to ask "What would be difficult to do, but not make any sense in the normal gameplay?" Chopping trees makes sense in the normal gameplay, so there's no need for an achievement. Burning a hundred trees (maybe at the same time) on the other hand is not rewarded in the normal gameplay, but might be a interesting goal. Other achievements can be rewarded for completing a small subtask better than is required for any scenario. Like chopping ten trees in 30 seconds (or some other time and number). Or completing some difficult scenario without any Clonk deaths.Maybe achievements are meta-goals: Goals only the player cares about. Normal scenario goals are things a Clonk would care about if Clonks were real. So achievements are a way to make goals more diverse without breaking the suspension of disbelieve that is critical for world-simulation games like Clonk. An abstract game like solitaire can define the goal whichever way makes for compelling gameplay, for games with characters we need the achievement trick.
Anyway, the achievement trend is just providing us with some more ideas we can use to make Clonk a better game. I sure don't know yet how best to use those ideas, but I think experimentation will give us interesting results. Just writing this post has given me new ideas, so there's probably a lot more to be discovered :-)
This topic has touched several times now and I remember that we reached more or less the consensus that trainable physicals should be thrown out of the game. Now that I am thinking about it, I can't remember the reasons that were stated back then for this.
Yeah, well, I just want to try to achieve consensus with Sven2 one more time before I just go ahead and ignore his objection :-)Notice how my proposal basically throws the feature out, but makes it easy for scenarios to reimplement it. I'd appreciate if someone would help me out with the interface design for that so I don't have to just make something up.
I don't think there's a consensus between keeping and not keeping trainable physicals. I think you should just go with the majority then.
So what do you think is wrong with my compromise proposal? Zapper - who's also for keeping the feature - can apparently live with that.
Which compromise do you mean? The training between rounds of a campaign would be a very limited feature and very specific to the campaign. E.g. the inventory and level takeover in InExantros was a really cool feature, but that's only because it was tailored to a very unique campaign. It's not a replacement for global progression available in normal scenarios. Achievements are also cool. But they don't exist yet and would also be very limited to certain scenarios.I just like the effect of getting rewards for normal, casual gameplay (The very same effect Newton dislikes, actually). Physical training is admittedly not the best way to do this; it would be way more cool to have something more visible (like skins for certain Clonk ranks, etc.). But it's the only thing that is implemented right now and shared globally across all scenarios, so I wouldn't want to kill it just yet.
Also the shared training between scenarios which are about "normal, casual gameplay".> But it's the only thing that is implemented right now and shared globally across all scenarios, so I wouldn't want to kill it just yet.
I think that progress in this area has been slowed down by the apparent widespread disagreement. If we just do nothing I fear that we'll just end up removing the feature shortly before the next release without a replacement. I hope that by changing the default now we can stop arguing about it and work together on something better.
>I just like the effect of getting rewards for normal, casual gameplay
The scenarios that are not meant to be competitive or a special campaign would have the "Achievements"(/"Medals") rule activated and you would play with your "trained" super special cool crew
>it would be way more cool to have something more visible (like skins for certain Clonk ranks, etc.)
Can be integrated into the achievement system without problems ;)
![[ca]](/mwf/flags/ca.png "Canada")
>So what do you think is wrong with my compromise proposal? Zapper - who's also for keeping the feature - can apparently live with that.
I am for keeping achievable changes to certain Clonks from your crew - not so much for the "you dig faster when you dig a lot". And even if we would want to keep that we could have a medal for that!! (Yes, Newton, I know that belongs into your 1000-button-clicks category!)
![[pl]](/mwf/flags/pl.png "Poland")
I'd remove it.
I don't think it is too desirable with how OC is currently, you know, all that tool-based 'professions'
I don't think it is too desirable with how OC is currently, you know, all that tool-based 'professions'
![[gb]](/mwf/flags/gb.png "United Kingdom")
> - Where you play just for fun
Hm, what does that even mean? Is playing "just for fun" just killing time, with us rewarding the player for not getting bored? More realistically, I would say it is probably allowing the player to set his/her own goals - like building that really cool castle into that overhanging cliff on that one scenario. So trainable physics would reward you on the basis that, er, if you didn't get bored then probably you did something awesome in the time? Note that mini-achievements wouldn't even help in this situation unless you could somehow build a mechanism into the engine that gauges the "coolness" of a castle.
Still very wary of this. Achievements are nice, but in terms of gameplay influences I'm still firmly on the "remove it" side.
Date 2010-12-12 03:19
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