The Masterized Game / Evolutive mod concept

[Foodstamp]

Aye, it wouldn't be terribly hard. Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2 both have support for external databases and such. You could have the program receive information from the Dom3 game file each turn, then have that info written to the database and NWN can make a call to that database once a day (or whatever the quickhost for the dom3 game is set to) and update the world accordingly.

I imagine the main benefit on the NWN end would be a dynamic world that changes according to the players moves in the DOM3 game. Such changes would include changing the guards at certain cities to match who is controlling the "province", have random events that happen in game happen in the NWN module as well, possibly even making it rain or snow in certain areas according to if it was raining and snowing in the province during a battle.

If the program could write to the Dom3 turn file, you could have the players in NWN affect the server by their actions in game. Say a roleplayer completes a dungeon and finds a Thistle Mace amongst the loot. He takes the loot to the proper person in town and presto, next turn the owner of that province finds a thistle mace. This example may be a bit more than what turn file manipulation programs can do currently but you get the idea.

[Gandalf Parker]

Another left-over project from Dom2 was a changing world-map. The DomMap generator for Dom2 allowed creating a map and then creating another version with the same "seed". I was going to pick a favorite map and then create an empty shell version that only had two colors (land and sea) and the boundarys. Then I would see if I could track the game actions from the game logs and have a web display of the game map where every province was colored to show who owned it.

It can still be done with Dom3 but it would be more work to create the empty shell version of the map.

[Foodstamp]

That is a very cool idea. I am guessing the players could just go to a website and see the current war status by viewing a clone map of the ingame map? If that is the case, very cool

[Ironhawk]

Twan said:
Logically, if it was an accident to boost an unit more than it should be, making lots of these units is to be seen as some kind of bug exploitation, and the player who has spend his gold trying to exploit a bug has no reason to be refunded.

No, the problem comes not from exploitation, but from misunderstanding. What if the host accidentally boosts the value of a unit more than it should be. And then one or more players invest in it because they legitimately think its a good deal. But then when the unit is deployed against other players they object, perhaps with good cause. What then? How can you get out of that situation without screwing someone over?

It is a problem that doesnt exist in normal games because there is only one mod, ever and everyone agrees to it. But when you have a single person making changes to the mod on the fly you very much run the risk of unbalancing the game and producing hard feelings all around

[Twan]

Near all online games organized/animated by someone/a company having the power to change things (artisanal pbems of all kinds, MUDs, MMOs, NWN Shards, moddable FPS/RTS servers...) may have this occasionnal "problem" of debates about balance and situationnal nerfs and it has never made these games unpopular. If this kind of game is launched using the Dominions engine it should just be clear that the game will be "a masterized game using the dominions engine" (and rules/fixes decided by the gm to preserve the interest of this particular game) and not just "dominions". Then players may want or not to test a game of this genre.

[Ironhawk]

Yeah, fair enough

[Gandalf Parker]

Twan said:
Near all online games organized/animated by someone/a company having the power to change things (artisanal pbems of all kinds, MUDs, MMOs, NWN Shards, moddable FPS/RTS servers...) ..snipped..

Excellent post Twan.
And I expecially like your list of examples (altho Id have put UO shards instead of NWN shards).
Ive been admining online worlds for decades and I fully agree that this is an old old topic. In fact, I jumped into the thread partly because its a subject that is alot like a project I did on a MUD, and I was curious that it looked as if it could be done for Dom3 also.