Developer update #7
Hi and welcome to another Grid Online Developer Update. For first time readers, the developer updates gives a brief overview of Grid Games’ past weeks work on Grid Online, our upcoming sci-fi MMORPG. Last update I talked about our Attribute System, so please head over to Developer Update #6 for more info.
Persistence
Work has continued on world and player persistence: inventory, equipment and other items are now persisted throughout the player’s sessions. The process is relatively easy and straight forward using our custom networking code using Unity’s TransportLayer. Once a player connects to the slave node — the area in which the player currently resides or last logged off — it will request the player’s last known state from the master node and synchronises it with the player’s client.
Cloning Facilities (aka insurance terminals)
In Grid Online dying actually sucks; there’s no easy mode like you’ll see in today’s RPGs. Walking back to your corpse without penalty? Nope! We’re taking a different route. When you’ve managed to land yourself in a pretty shitty situation and end up killing your character, you’ll be moved back to the last visited Cloning Facility; a rather fancy place that allows you to create a copy of yourself and get an overly expensive insurance. Throughout the game world there’ll be the occasional Cloning Facilities, placed there by the Global Insurance and Registration of Citizens company. The Insurance Terminals you’ll find at the CF creates a copy of your character and stores your currently awarded Experience.
Rewinding back to that shitty situation you landed in and dying. Once dead the Biowaste Cleaning Group will deploy small little bots that will remove the … uh … waste you’ve left. A new copy of your character will be deployed at that last visited cloning facility, minus the experience you’ve gained since your last visit. The player’s inventory is always secure, it works like a remote and secure uplink directly to The Grid so you’ll never lose anything that’s stored in your inventory. Equipment however, is something entirely different; you’re actually wearing it and once death and not insured you might actually lose it. We’ve three different setups in mind:
- You simply don’t lose anything but experience;
- You’ll lose equipped items that you haven’t insured;
- You’ll have to wait for something like a Waste Collector (?) to retrieve your equipment from your death other self so it works like a time penalty.
The idea behind this is that you’ll have to make a decision when you’re equipping items in the field. You either take the rist of (temporarily) loosing your uninsured equipment or you wait until you reach a Cloning Facility, equip your items and then insure your character.
