How do you figure if A has met B?

        //declared earlierCharacterDesc *met;CharacterDesc A,B;met = A.Knows;// we do our searchwhile (met){   if (met == &B) return(TRUE);   met = met->Next;}return(FALSE);        

Not really that difficult. Though some optimisations can still be made

-Chris Bennett of Dwarfsoft - Site:"The Philosophers' Stone of Programming Alchemy" - IOL
The future of RPGs - Thanks to all the goblins over in our little Game Design Corner niche
          

Edited by - dwarfsoft on October 30, 2000 11:41:44 PM

"bitch, on your knees"
Thats fiction of course!
Ferrett

www.shogunmod.com
Its your time to choose.

Just wanna say I like the general idea. Used to be, before Europeans came to Canada, that it was rude to ask someone what there name was. If they wanted you to know, they''d tell you. Wish the people at Safeway would adhear to that so they''d quit mispronouncing my name.

What about the possibility of allowing aliases or the ability to give false names. The false name thing might be tough, but if a character had a list of names they went by, a simple index of that list could make life difficult for a player. Damn, I know there''s a coherent thought in there somewhere.

eg.

NPCharacter #47
Name: Jim Bob.
Alias 1: James Bob.
Alias 2: Jimmy Bob.
Alias 3: Alice.

They player has met NPC#47 and knows him as his name & Alias 1&2.

Something like that.

For online games:

Serverside: each NPC has a code.

During game, player will encounter NPCs. When a player learns the name of one of these, he has to manually input the name of that character (in a pop-up box or something).

Clientside: this is where the name that the player typed is stored. Whenever the player sees an NPC walking by and has for example a ''show name'' option running, the name will be displayed when it is stored on client side, otherwise it will not show up.

I have NO clue if this is a possibility as far as programming is concerned, but it would also open up a nice option where players can give descriptions of players when they don''t know their names (which would work wonders for PC interaction).

There could for example be a ''show description'' option running, that would display the description that the player manually put in for a certain character. ''didn''t want to help me out when I was dying''

Plus, a system like this might finally open up a ''disguise'' feature, where if a player disguises himself well enough, his name won''t display to players that have formerly met him etc.

Silvermyst

Dwarf, what the heck do you program in.. perl? LOL.

Silver.. you could store data on client side, saying if they know that person or not. And i''ve looked into that, but it''d hafta be encrypted. I''m actually putting checksums on all of my data client side. Should the player mess with ANYTHING, they''d be locked out until we figured out what was changed and why. I''m dead serious about this.. and i should know. I helped hacking in the old days, tearing appart code in yserbius and NeverWinter Nights. In NWN, i had the GM''s coming to me asking if someone else was hacking! They knew i knew what was possible and what wasn''t, in ways many people never knew.
Manipulation of data has always been my forte I can''t program for snot, but i can look at code, figure it out.. rearrange it like i need, and bang it home. The Windows API makes things even easier than ever to manipulate. Being able to intercept something, change it, and pass it on is a great ability. Therefore.. you must think about what you''re storing on the person''s end. They can touch that data. They can play with it. If you want, i''ll put together some info to help people understand their data, how to manipulate it, and what you can do to stop it..

J

I''d have to agree more with Silvermyst''s aproach. From a security standpoint, storing the information about NPC on the server is much more secure. Only send info about an NPC to the client when that particular client meets that particular NPC. For NPCs that haven''t been met, simply refer to them by a unique number or code as Silvermyst called it.

The problem with storing NPC info on the client side before they should really have access to it is that, even with encryption, you should always assume that someone out there wil find a way to break it. You can put checksums in, but they aren''t that hard for a competent cracker to find. Even if you put a ckecksum on the checksum and a checksum on that checksum and a checksum on that checksum... (you get the point)it wouldn''t be that hard for someone to find them and disable them. In fact, the more complex you make your access control system the more interesting the challenge will be to a potential cracker (just look at the, proported to be unbreakable, piracy protection in the Bleem Playstation emulator. It was broken in less than a week). Your best bet is simply to give the minimum amount of information to the client and then supply it as it becomes available to the player. Besides, in a MMORPG you''re probably going to be adding new NPCs pretty regularly and NPC names/descriptions aren''t something like textures or geometry that will take a long time to download.

-Daedalus

Well, Niphty, it looked just like C++ to me . Also, if the data was stored client side you''d get weird situations.

For Example, a bounty hunter needs to find someone to collect a reward. He has never met the person, but has a description of what they look like, but there are hundreds of people just like that...

Now, someone (for example a high level, rank, monarch, something) who has met lots of people has met this person. He could email the file with his names within it to someone else, and the other person could instantly know his name.

Messing with an already made file would be fairly easy to do, just make it as if it was your characters.

In other words, server side would be safer in these cases. Can you imagine Ebay? No longer armor/currency/misc. items and accounts for sale, but lists of names .

Null and Void
It is an inexperienced programmer who speaks of the length of his works.
It is an experienced one who speaks of the briefness.
http://www.crosswinds.net/~druidgames/

Niphty - It was supposed to be a fairly simple to follow C++ exampe of pointers and referencing... I thought that people could understand it... Did you really want me to define the

"typedef scruct CharacterDesc_st {...} CharacterDesc, *CharacterDesc_ptr;"?

Null'n'Void - I am glad to see that someone understands the basics

. And NO.. I don't like Hungarian notation

-Chris Bennett of Dwarfsoft - Site:"The Philosophers' Stone of Programming Alchemy" - IOL
The future of RPGs - Thanks to all the goblins over in our little Game Design Corner niche
          

Edited by - dwarfsoft on October 31, 2000 12:58:35 AM