Respawns in areas that you aren't in

[Pyrizzle]

Beirlis+ rijackson741 + Zukero: You all have a great concept here. I would love to see something like this get fully fleshed out and added to Andor's Trail.

The only thing that does concern me is that it will make the earlier levels a bit harder, and with the last update the difficulty of the lower level was definitely raised a lot.

fiernaq: ^^ agreed, i also feel like the rate should be flipped. The respawn rate should be slower at first and then start to pick up more at the end.

[Thread Moved: Ideas Section] <----- Don't let this thread die guys and gals, we are onto something good here.

Also: http://andorstrail.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=4374 <---- looks like this idea is in the works. =)

[Beirlis]

..... I don't see why this is a bug, how about a move to ideas and future development.

I would call this a flaw or bug in the design as the current behavior is counter intuitive and the proposed is much more intuitive.

If that's your logic okay, it was designed to be that way, even if it is in need of a revamp. Is every concept you don't approve of a bug?

Well no, and I didn't mean to come off as cocky. I've just learned from my own loooong history of design mistakes how to better identify one. My logic is based upon the assumption that we have a game world with some general rules, monsters are in the world, they can kill you and you can kill them too, but they will come back (unless they are unique of course). The player sees monsters respawn in the areas that are visible on the screen and it is natural to presume that this happens in areas of the game that aren't visible on the screen. The distinction of one subdivision of the world from another is just an artifact of the implementation, not the design. (I'm not sure what terminology is used for in this game, I'm guessing it's "map", but other games also call them "areas", "zones", "regions", etc.) And in fact, if the "map" is large enough, monsters will respawn off-screen. It would be unnatural to think that the rest of the game world ceases to exist just because it is either not on the screen or that particular "map" isn't loaded. This is also the case for the behavior of monsters, except that they can't attack you when they are miles away.

Also, players will take assumptions with them from previous games that they've played, although breaking those assumptions can sometimes be the fun part!

Of course, you are indeed correct that it isn't necessarily a design flaw, but if the game's requirements includes a cohesive and intuitive game experience, then it I would say that it must be. It's not a big deal. In fact, if something like this is part of my learning experience, then all the better!

EDIT: I meant to include this response as well...

Edit: I just realized that what Beirlis suggested is also a linear ramp. The only difference is that I am suggesting the ramp go from 0 to 6 minutes, rather than 0 to 3, so that the average number of monsters is unchanged from the way it works now.

Actually, that wouldn't be accurate if you are trying to keep the average number of monsters the same. The fact is that the average number of spawns that are *possible* varies widely dependent upon player behavior. If I want to keep spawns low, I can quickly run from map to map, I can probably cover an area of 6 maps or more and reduce the spawn rate to 17% of "normal" (all monsters respawn every 3 minutes). Or I could sit in the same map, as fiernaq pointed out, and get a much better spawn rate, probably 250% of everything respawns in 3 minutes, if I kill them quickly. This is another reason that I consider this an actual design flaw, because you can exploit the game's behavior to some degree to alter the rules. Alternatively, if you are sitting in a room with only two respawn points and waiting, but you end up not waiting long enough and you visit other maps, now your timer has to restart.

Oh yeah, so I was bored earlier and put a patch together. It's untested because I haven't figured out how to build this thing yet. Also, I didn't look closely at the numbers, I just grabbed the constants and did a single roll adjusting for ticks, which isn't statistically accurate and I think ends up respawning everything sooner than 3 minutes. Anyway, it wouldn't be too hard to fix up to use your formula, which sounds more accurate. However, most of these random determinations are done with integral values, which is weird to me because I'm used to working with floats. Then again, maybe it has a benefit on platforms that don't have a hardware FPU!

==EDIT #2==
OK, thanks to Zukero I did manage to figure out how to build & run and the patch does work as expected. Also, the respawn rate is definately too high, but the mechanics are correct.

= = = post 2 = = =

The probability of a respawn in one respawn area is P=1-(1-p)^n, where n is the number of attempts, and p is the probability per attempt (in this case 0.01). So calculate n as time * 2, then calculate P (time is in seconds of course). Then generate a random number between 0 and 1. If the number is less than P a monster respawned in that respawn area. After 3 minutes the probability that a monster respawned in a given area is 97.3%, so I think it would be a good idea to then set it to 1. That way you don't have the bookkeeping overhead of always having to keep track of the elapsed time since visiting every place in the game.

Done (patch here). I'm not using any hard-coded numbers however, I'm just taking the spawn chance directly from MonsterSpawnArea.spawnChance and calculating the number of ticks via values from Constants. Anyway, gotta run for now, give it a try; it seems to be working correctly.

= = = post 3 = = =

fiernaq: ^^ agreed, i also feel like the rate should be flipped. The respawn rate should be slower at first and then start to pick up more at the end.

Ok, so I'm quoting you backwards Pyrizzle. I wanted to cover this one first. When I first started playing this game, one thing I found rather surprising is when I kill a monster and they instantly respawn, mostly when they are blocking a passage way and you have to kill them twice, or even better, when I kill them, move past and then they reappear and hit me in the backside, ouch! I would be for "flipping this", but only if it also applied to monsters in the current map as well. IMO, the formula should be consistent unless there's a good reason for it not to be. It would have to be tuned of course, because just inverting it as is would terribly starve any poor soul who's trying to grind. Most RPGs I've played that have respawns use a fixed length timer that starts once you kill the original monster. I don't think that's necessarily the "right way" to do it, but I like the idea of having a lower chance that it will re-appear shortly after you kill them and a much higher chance the longer you wait.

Also, I would propose that instead of testing every world tick for a chance to spawn, the time when the spawn should occur be determined in advance and then at each tick, you just have to check to see if that time has arrived. However, here I mean "world time" and not "wall clock time". (I think that there's a tick count kept in the game?)

Beirlis+ rijackson741 + Zukero: You all have a great concept here. I would love to see something like this get fully fleshed out and added to Andor's Trail.

The only thing that does concern me is that it will make the earlier levels a bit harder, and with the last update the difficulty of the lower level was definitely raised a lot.

Well, I haven't dug into the architecture of this game deeply, but spawn rates can be made to be effected by any number of possibly relevant factors:

• player level
• average kills per minute (have it scale to how fast the player is killing mobs)
• "level" of an area
• eventually even scripting as you mentioned in the project meeting link, so maybe after a quest reaches a certain value (point in the quest) spawns happen like mad or even stop.

I suppose it's just a matter of figuring out how people want it to work (what makes it a "fair" grind, etc.)