ZEQ2 Lite

Sunday, March 16, 2014

TL/DR: How, without mimicking the poor attempts made in commercial games, would you make the Dragonballs and Wish-making work in ZEQ2-Lite or ZEQ2?

Alright, it's been years now, and we're still no closer now than we were before to getting Dragonballs (and by extension Wishes) into ZEQ2-Lite, or for that matter ZEQ2 either. The subjects to be discussed here can technically apply to either, since this is more of a "Game-Logic" discussion as opposed to an actual question of technical implementation.

To summarize, the purpose of this thread will be to discuss in an open forum how to approach Dragonballs from a functionality aspect, balancing them, and maintaining at least some sense of accuracy and usefulness to gathering the elusive orbs when running around on any given server. Note: Some features required to make Dragonballs work fully as described below are not as of yet in place, and would be things to look into in order to make a fully functional system.

To start us off, the first major issue to pop into my head is the wishes themselves, and how to approach them in a way that's not as absurdly restrictive as most commercial games make them out to be. Example: Wishing for "Ability Capsules" in the Budokai game series, which usually resulted in something random and likely lacking in identifiable function...

Now obviously, if we're going to look at the goals of characters from an intrinsic point of view, most of the Z Warriors really only used the Dragonballs to wish back fallen friends (Which only works if there's some sense of "Perma-Death" on a game server), where as pretty much all the villains (Save King Piccolo and Lord Slug) wanted to wish for immortality (King Piccolo and Lord Slug wanting Youth instead). So right there, there's two wishes that have been commonly used as the primary goals for gathering the Dragonballs. Resurrection is easy enough to figure out once more team-centric frameworks are in place (A simple "No Respawns Unless X" type dependency forcing anyone who dies to have to wait indefinitely for someone else to wish them back). Immortality on the other hand....



Well that's just it. Assuming Immortality in ZEQ2/ZEQ2-Lite works as it did in the series, a player who gets that wish would become unstoppable in all senses save someone hurling them into the Dead Zone (A place that no one {using intrinsic knowledge} can open a portal to except for Garlic Jr.), or maybe someone else using the Dragonballs to "undo" the wish(Which would take a while to be able to do, see next point below)... So how would such an eventuality be handled in a way that keeps things balanced and fun for the rest of the people on that server? I myself know for a fact that after the first few minutes of dealing with an Immortal Frieza I would probably get fed up and leave, so what can be done to prevent someone from simply "Rage-Quitting" when someone makes that wish? Then of course there's the question of what other wishes should be available to be made?



The next problem is how to handle properly handle the "inert cycle" between when the Dragonballs are being used, and when they can be used again? In the series, originally, it was a full year before the Earth Dragonballs "recharged", and later they were upgraded to 2 wishes, where as the Namekian Dragonballs "recharged" in 6 months and could grant 3 wishes. (The number of wishes can be dealt with as a separate issue...) Of course, it would be impractical to expect a 6 month to 1 year cycle in real world time to be used (After all, would you seriously wait a full year just for a "chance" at making a wish?)

One solution would be the establishment of so-called "In-Game Time" which would pass by much quicker than real world time. I.E. a month would pass in about an hour or so, and so waiting a "year" would be about 12 hours(Much more reasonable than an actual year). Note: the above number was just an example...



Once you gather the Dragonballs, where should you be able to summon the Dragon at? Can you summon him from anywhere? What if you're indoors, should he bust through the roof...? He's kind of big, so I think that he would be annoyed with that, so you probably couldn't successfully summon him like that... Personally, I suppose a simple "height clearance" check should be done to make sure he'll fit in the space he's being summoned at, and that's about it... But I'm bringing this up because I'm curious if anyone else can think if there are other potentially abusable flaws with being able to summon him from just about anywhere outdoors?



Gathering the Dragonballs themselves should be fairly straight forward, so I'm not seeing too many issues with that part. They can be picked up and carried in a player's inventory, and dropped on the ground when the player dies where the Dragonballs will remain since they won't be able to "despawn"(because honestly they shouldn't). they'll spawn in random places on the maps when the map is first loaded up (Literally random, not just picking from spawn points, since that would be unbalanced at server start if someone memorizes the spawn locations...), and potentially recover from their "inert" state at what ever location they happen to land in after being shot away after the Dragon leaves (Possibly invisible until after they recharge to prevent people from sitting on them until they become active again, otherwise they should appear as generic rocks that should also be scattered around on that map...).



Finally, as was showcased several times between Dragonball and Dragonball Z(technically GT as well, but that's not cannon, especially since the latest movie debunked the idea of "Super Saiyan 4"), summoning the Dragon sometimes doesn't go without interruption. Should such a feature be allowed here, and how should it be handled? Example: Player A(Goku) summons the Dragon to make a wish, Player B(Frieza) sees that the Dragon has been summoned and wants to stop Goku so he can make his own wish instead. How would Player A being interrupted be handled? Who gets the wish? Would it be an interruptible interaction with the Dragonballs (I.e. a meter pops up with a count down to see if you can state your wish without being hit by some form of attack, kind of like World of Warcraft "interrupt casting" meters, and if it completes you get the wish, but getting hit causes it to fail and you have to try again. Because let's face it, stating a wish is difficult to do if you're being punched in the face... Just saying...)?


(Are you still awake...?)

Anyways, those are just off the top of my head, but I'm hoping we can get productive discussion going here on how to approach this in a way that's accurate but not unbalanced, and it definitely needs to be reasonable(I.e. the above mentioned 1 year Real Time to re-summon the Dragon...). If there's any other things related specifically to the Dragonballs or Wishes themselves that you feel I missed, feel free to chime in here, or add your own thoughts. Any thoughts or suggestions on this subject are welcome here. I just want to see if we can get an accurate picture of what it would take to build the Dragonball/Wish system, and maybe light a fire under someone's rump (potentially even mine) to get started on this so that we may one day see it, but the first step is to plan out the how of implementing it.

Monday, March 17, 2014

Collection
As far as ZEQ2 plans were concerned, the Dragon Balls were to be naturally (and randomly) placed "around the world" with essentially one existing per segment server. This would require the player to actually travel between multiple (potentially hostile/dangerous) locations in order to gather and collect each.

Wishes
While the nature of wishes was never discussed in great detail by the team, I would imagine canonically the most logically allowed wishes would be : immortality, power (be the strongest), revival (bring someone back from the dead), and restoration (reconstruct a destroyed location / segment server). Unless I am gravely mistaken, almost all wishes in the Dragon Ball Z universe were of these natures.

At a cursory glance, one might assume that beyond the latter two constructive wishes, the others are far too great to be contested in any way. This is not true. Immortality does not imply being the strongest -- or being incapable of incapacitation/imprisoned. For instance, an immortal Raditz could easily still be stopped by a Super Saiyan Goku.

As far as being the strongest goes, it becomes a matter of relativity and time. Even if we assume one wishes to be "the strongest in the universe", this would apply only to the current status quo -- meaning that someone could always surpass the wisher and become stronger at a later time.

Downtime
As you mentioned previously, the inert cycle of the Dragon Balls could easily be server controlled based on a timescale factor. If someone REALLY wanted to be authentic, they could always set it up on a 365 day delay (which would be the 1.0 baseline).

Location
Again, unless I am mistaken, the dragon was only ever summoned outdoors. One could argue this as a literal prerequisite. If you wanted to play it safe, the map creator could specify a certain location for the dragon to appear (which would encourage guarding tactics at certain locales); however, this would obviously break the variable accuracy that summoning normally has. I do not believe any complications would arise for summoning anywhere outdoors (even on Kami's), but if you really wanted to prevent underwater or obscure location summonings, I'm sure such options could exist on the server level.

Honestly, most of this discussion can easily appease everyone by allowing plenty of server options for tweaking the various aspects.

Monday, March 17, 2014

Zeth wrote :
[you]Wishes[/you]
While the nature of wishes was never discussed in great detail by the team, I would imagine canonically the most logically allowed wishes would be : immortality, power (be the strongest), revival (bring someone back from the dead), and restoration (reconstruct a destroyed location / segment server). Unless I am gravely mistaken, almost all wishes in the Dragon Ball Z universe were of these natures.

At a cursory glance, one might assume that beyond the latter two constructive wishes, the others are far too great to be contested in any way. This is not true. Immortality does not imply being the strongest -- or being incapable of incapacitation/imprisoned. For instance, an immortal Raditz could easily still be stopped by a Super Saiyan Goku.

As far as being the strongest goes, it becomes a matter of relativity and time. Even if we assume one wishes to be "the strongest in the universe", this would apply only to the current status quo -- meaning that someone could always surpass the wisher and become stronger at a later time.

I agree with your points, and it makes sense that immortality by itself isn't necessarily the "end all" wish, but with instances of multiple wishes, such as with Namekian Dragonballs, you could potentially wish to be immortal and be the strongest(leaving one wish left over for, say, a ham sandwhich?). Granted yes, in a more perfect powerlevel system, eventually someone could surpase such a person and render the wishes less problematic, but that assumes that the powerlevel system can be better scaled between winning and losing, which last I checked it didn't work out so well for the people who lose fights(their powerlevel dropping, sometimes significantly).

This also assumes that powerlevels don't cap out at a certain point(as they do currently in ZEQ2-Lite), which would allow for someone to be able to surpass that person. Otherwise, if you wish for power, you're never going to be surpassed, only equalled.

The solution for both would be to take another look through the powerlevel system, and make some changes to allow some more flexibility. For starters, figure out some form of math formula to allow powerlevels to exceed the current cap(even if it's via some kind of stacking multiplier, or something...).

Anyways, I assume that an immortal opponent would instead of dying/respawning, would just faint for a few seconds similar to being over fatigued? I suppose that's one way to handle it.

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

AHHHH just understood now x)

Don't forget Piccolo Daimao's wish (being young again and forever (a kind of immortality but kind of different :3))

But even if it's done, ZEQ2 need a world map.. Was it for solo, multi or both ?

Zeth, have you made or began this project ? If this thread was created for a grouped work on it, it could be cool to work on an existant base (I suppose) (or maybe was it for the old ZEQ2)

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

well to start we would need a HUGE map to make it fair for the players and not only that you would need to make that map have places where the Dragon Ball carrier could lose there opponents

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

actually they can't wish for power beyond the limits of the dragon . wouldn't they just wish for power other wise ?

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Wh1t34Gl3(SAS) wrote : AHHHH just understood now x)

Don't forget Piccolo Daimao's wish (being young again and forever (a kind of immortality but kind of different :3))

But even if it's done, ZEQ2 need a world map.. Was it for solo, multi or both ?

Zeth, have you made or began this project ? If this thread was created for a grouped work on it, it could be cool to work on an existant base (I suppose) (or maybe was it for the old ZEQ2)

Already mentioned King Piccolo's (and Lord Slug's) wishes for youth. Not sure how that particular wish could be used really in a game-setting aside from story-related actions(such as reenacting the Lord Slug storyline), but it raises the question of what other wishes could be made that might not effect combat at all. Wishes for "World Domination", "Riches", and "Comfortable underwear", are just a few of the oddball examples of wishes that were either made or sought after.

Each of those could theoretically be done with little trouble.

Some examples:

World Domination: Gives you "minions" (A.I. controlled allies), and perhaps a texture swap of the world to show it's been conquered.

Riches: Assuming an economy is integrated into the engine for buying things, even if it's just Sensu Beans, Clothes(Character Customization system?), or other non-combat things, you would basically be given a large fortune for which to splurge on those types of things.

"Comfortable underwear": ... Do I really need to spell it out...? Let's just say, using the above example of assuming some kind of clothing customization, you can wish for clothing items to wear...

And no, this is not something that's being worked on currently, this is just a discussion for the purposes of determining how they should be implemented when the time comes. A brain storming session, if you will.

najeeb wrote : actually they can't wish for power beyond the limits of the dragon . wouldn't they just wish for power other wise ?

That is a good point, the Dragon's power was limited, so I suppose after a certain point wishing for more power shouldn't do anything.

ryku220 wrote : well to start we would need a HUGE map to make it fair for the players and not only that you would need to make that map have places where the Dragon Ball carrier could lose there opponents

Well, the size of the map itself doesn't really matter too much, but the idea here is that the Dragonballs would be scattered around on a World Map where you would literally be able to fly from Kami's Lookout to Cell's Arena and everywhere in between. So the map would already be pretty big. Terrain detail and individual player skill should be the primary factors in evading and losing opponents so they don't steal your Dragonball/s.

Besides, unless someone has a Dragon Radar they shouldn't be able to tell if you even control any of the Dragonballs to begin with. Plus the Dragon Radar wouldn't necessarily be an always active HUD object either, especially when you consider that in the series, I believe they only ever had one of the devices total. There for, not everyone should be able to track them with such a radar function, but will need to rely on visual detection instead. And I don't think Scouters could detect them either, they were used for detecting and measuring Powerlevels.

However, it doesn't really matter where you are when you summon the dragon, because the effects from summoning him always seemed to extend for miles(possibly even across the globe), and Radar or not, you'll likely be able to see the direction the Dragon's in from those various environmental effects. Let's face it, summoning the dragon was never done "quietly" or "stealthily". Everyone else (who was familiar with the Dragonballs at least) always had an idea of what was happening.

Thursday, July 31, 2014

*slowly reminds everyone about the way Earth Special Forces does wishes*

Thursday, July 31, 2014

*slowly reminds everyone about the way Earth Special Forces does wishes*

Not sure anyone knows. As a game developer, I don't play other games.

Thursday, July 31, 2014

Zeth wrote :

*slowly reminds everyone about the way Earth Special Forces does wishes*

Not sure anyone knows. As a game developer, I don't play other games.

In Earth Special Forces there are only 3 wishes of Power, Immortality, and Friendship (which is only specifically for gaining points in the game mode the're in). Power simply gives you a large power boost, and immortality gives you temporary invinvibility. If we build on this I give it a tennouddaten

Thursday, July 31, 2014

Yes, but that's extremely limited and contrived compared to the above discussion analysis/breakdowns.

Thursday, July 31, 2014

I remember there was near 7 wishes. Some on stats, one on power on level, some on environment (moon, transformations) and 1 for potaras. Or maybe you are talking of another things :^

Friday, August 01, 2014

drako125 wrote :

Zeth wrote :

*slowly reminds everyone about the way Earth Special Forces does wishes*

Not sure anyone knows. As a game developer, I don't play other games.

In Earth Special Forces there are only 3 wishes of Power, Immortality, and Friendship (which is only specifically for gaining points in the game mode the're in). Power simply gives you a large power boost, and immortality gives you temporary invinvibility. If we build on this I give it a tennouddaten

The problem with their model being used for ZEQ2-Lite or ZEQ2 is that Earth Special Forces is a score based game, where as ZEQ2-Lite and ZEQ2 are not, and were not really ever intended to be. Characters in the series didn't keep score, so they shouldn't in ZEQ2-Lite/ZEQ2 either.

What this discussion was about was about handling wishes in a more accurate and practical way than just throwing out temporary buffs(a wish for eternal life should be eternal...) or boosting a non-existant score...