Icon question!

[Arcana]

That's actually a bad example, since spawn points and patrol routes are in the map files on the client. Likely it would have been too much work to strip them out and maintain two separate copies of every map.

What's missing are the "spawndef" files that the maps reference that tell the game what to spawn there, what scripts to run on them, etc. Some of them can be somewhat guessed from the name, others are a mystery as to what their contents would be.

That's true, I should have been more specific.  The data regarding map locations specifically are in there vis-a-vis editor mode, but I was thinking in terms of recreating how those worked dynamically in the game.

Worth noting as yet another example of how the information can be "sort of there, but not exactly" in a way that unless you know the technical details of implementation it can seem like there's more than there is, or less, relative to what it would take to reconstruct the game.

[Azrael]

Azrael,

I would point out that the COH recovery effort doesn't really NEED the mission information -- and in some ways would be better without it. 

If a reverse-engineered game had the powers and character AI management... Then imagine what could be done with a tool that let you CHOOSE what gang to spawn on each spawn site.  Imagine a tool that could let you build missions with AE and then attach those missions to mission entry points and contacts -- where you create everything from the contact script down to the mission completion result.  Imagine you can save all that creation into a file you could post online and share with others in the community.

"A lot of work to recreate the game that way" you say?  Yes.  But THE COMMUNITY could rebuild the game -- all the technical work would be done.  Further the community could create THOUSANDS OF VERSIONS of the game -- each playable offline or on private servers.

First of all.  *Nods in sage like understanding to Arcana.  'Colour Commentator.'   I'm a great deal clearer on things thanks to the examples you listed and the thoughtful responses. 

...and to Code Warrior.  I've just been in Icon playing around.  It's great stuff.  A beacon of hope.  (I finally got to try the Celestial Armour!  I was one vet token away from getting it when the game was cruelly shut down. :/  Ironically, I now have a rig to run Coh in ultra mode which I didn't have at Coh's closure either...  Double bah. :/ )

I note both your and Arcana's point that A.I i.e. the brains i.e. the Server are needed to make the puppet 'body' of the gaming client and it's 'resources' come to life.  Basically, crack 'combat' from the server and the game is fundamentally back?

And to Ohioknight.  I enjoyed your response.  Because, basically your saying the community can rebuild Coh into a COh 1.5 or Coh '2'?  We played all the original missions to death?  So maybe we don't need them.  Maybe the community takes Coh back and recreates it in their own image.  Coh was the community.  The interface.  The chat window.  The powers.  The critters.  The maps.  Once we have combat and the chat window - the game is back?  Does it really matter if they're not the original missions?  To me?  Not really.  I can live without the Positron TF.  Or many of the TFs.  Many of which I found over blown.  Be nice to create some new ones?

The mega icon thread has had 50,000+ views.  If there was a tool (in terms of ease of use...similar to the A.E mission creator...and we could save missions and share those files...) that allowed the community to create 'thousands' of versions of the game...

...EACH playable offline (the Holy Grail for me!!!) or local Lan or on private servers.

Many hands make light work.  (The content would explode under such a huge community effort...because the impetus would be to match or replace the original missions in quality...and some people would just do their own thing with it.)

The pivotal thing then is getting Server A.I engine working.  Which controls the character and powers i.e. combat working and a 'mission creator' that can give the community the tools to re-forge the content of Coh then?  Pretty much like the A.E.  You could design the critters and decide where they spawn and what the mission objective etc is.

I can live with that.

Thanks to Arcana, Code Warrior and OhioKnight for stimulating the discussion.

Azrael.

[Ohioknight]

And to Ohioknight.  I enjoyed your response.  Because, basically your saying the community can rebuild Coh into a COh 1.5 or Coh '2'?  We played all the original missions to death?  So maybe we don't need them.  Maybe the community takes Coh back and recreates it in their own image.  Coh was the community.  The interface.  The chat window.  The powers.  The critters.  The maps.  Once we have combat and the chat window - the game is back?  Does it really matter if they're not the original missions?  To me?  Not really.  I can live without the Positron TF.  Or many of the TFs.  Many of which I found over blown.  Be nice to create some new ones?

The mega icon thread has had 50,000+ views.  If there was a tool (in terms of ease of use...similar to the A.E mission creator...and we could save missions and share those files...) that allowed the community to create 'thousands' of versions of the game...

The community would determine which ones became the "standard" missions by simple popularity if agreed-to standard file formats allowed the ability to share files on public forums (as has already started with custom replacement ICON costume skins)

With the additional benefit that... should NCSoft object to Private Server Alpha running the reverse-engineered code... Alpha would be using NONE of NCSoft's Intellectual Property on their server -- and the client assets were handed out publicly for free.

(oh BTW -- remember in that 50,000+ views, I'm at least a couple of hundred of those -- it's not one view per lurker)

[Mouse-Man]

I, for one, should the means arise, plan to completely revamp the radio missions. I always wished they had added more to them as issues came out.
Several of my characters went to 50 JUST on radio missions.

You can only rescue Dr. Frank N. Scott so many times before you want to branch out a bit.

[Arcana]

The mega icon thread has had 50,000+ views.  If there was a tool (in terms of ease of use...similar to the A.E mission creator...and we could save missions and share those files...) that allowed the community to create 'thousands' of versions of the game...

...EACH playable offline (the Holy Grail for me!!!) or local Lan or on private servers.

Before the game shutdown, I laid out a pie-in-the-sky blueprint for an MMO design where the game was nothing but private servers, all playing a single player game on the player's PC.  This would be impossible to shutdown.  Then those private servers were connected into a distributed peer-to-peer network where players could host other players in a sort-of Lan party over the internet style of shared (not-so-M)MO.  Then "super-nodes" of just extremely souped up servers could act as more-so-MMOs that players could connect to and enter a much larger persistent shared environment and play.

Architecturally, I can see how it would work.  Unfortunately, my design skills vastly exceed my current coding skills.

[Azrael]

I like the logic of your design ideas.  If  you have a local copy than can join over a distributed peer-to-peer network.  Everything is a private server, merely connected peer to peer style.

As corporations try to push for an internet 'kill' switch so they can corner and host the internet as gateway to their content and surpress rival content through over zealous  copyright acts....then your design ideas show tremendous potential.  i.e. we go peer to peer to bypass their greed.

it's just a shame that the current morg companies are thinking so short term or in terms of their own interests.  Or NC Soft did. 

I remember playing Unreal Tourney.  There was the local game which I loved with 'bots.'  I played the game over Lan which was nice enough.  I was never fussed about playing it online.

The problem is when somebody pulls the plug (usually a profit driven corporation) politically if it's no longer flavour of the month then you have no more Coh because the intravenous drip has been severed.

Hmm.  Yes.  I like your super hub of private servers connected via peer to peer distributed.  What else is the internet?  Just a load of computers?  0 and 1s.

I like the idea of offline play and Lan and Peer to Peer and the CHOICE of joining a greater hub of fellow players IF I choose.

Just don't like the perpetual renting idea only to have a company turn around and say, 'That's yer lot.'

I want offline capability in any future morg.  If I don't get it.  They won't get my money.  Simple.

Just out of curiosity, Arcana.  Didn't Paragon ever consider an offline mode for Coh and it's player base?  Was it too difficult?   I guess they, like us, thought that Coh would continue forever...

...now it's a cautionary tale.

Azrael.

[The Fifth Horseman]

Just out of curiosity, Arcana.  Didn't Paragon ever consider an offline mode for Coh and it's player base?  Was it too difficult?

"Do motorcycle manufacturers ever consider a jet ski mode for the vehicles and their owner base?"
No offense, but that's the sort of question you are asking.

[Arcana]

"Do motorcycle manufacturers ever consider a jet ski mode for the vehicles and their owner base?"
No offense, but that's the sort of question you are asking.

Its more of a "did Hostess ever consider printing pamphlets with the recipe for Twinkies and the blueprints for the Twinkie machine before they went out of business?"  Paragon Studios job was to keep City of Heroes running and profitable for as long as possible, not to keep the game alive in some form by any means possible.  I'm pretty sure individual people thought about it, but I am unaware of any serious thought at the corporate level put into making CoH a single player game.  A single player CoH would have been a potential threat to the MMO's existence by sapping away players and subscription revenue, plus fragmenting the community.  And nobody makes such a thing on the off-chance they might need it down the road.  That would be like you going to your boss and asking for permission to spend corporate resources on a project that will benefit you on the off chance he decides to fire you.

[FatherXmas]

You have to remember that the rank and file was working business as usual.  And who designs an MMO with an offline mode?

[Arcana]

And who designs an MMO with an offline mode?

Apparently I do.  But I'm considered a very unconventional systems designer.  I'm also poorly funded from an MMO development perspective.

[FatherXmas]

Well it's a debugging tool at the very least.  Sort of the old Quake days with a command switch to start up a server for lan parties.

[Codewalker]

There are Fundamentally Hard problems that have to be solved for an offline mode to be possible for an MMO.

For starters, people would want to be able to take characters played in offline mode back onto the server. That's a huge, HUGE opportunity for people to cheat. How many times have you played Call of Duty (a peer-to-peer game at its heart, even with Steam matchmaking) and run into somebody who obviously hacked their level to unlock all the perks?

"Well, just don't allow characters played offline to rejoin the server" you say? Hah, good luck with that, especially if your MMO is pay-for. No matter what anyone claims now, I promise you that if it were implemented that way (offline characters couldn't sync progress), it would get rightfully reamed by critics and you'd hear no end of complaining about it.

So how do you prevent people from cheating? Well, you can't, not really. Physical control of the program is the trump card and will always win. That's why Rule #1 of client-server programming is to NEVER trust the client, and store the authoritative copy of important data serverside only. If offline mode is allowed, people will be able to cheat.

You could try to police the cheaters, or just give up and ignore them, but then your game quickly becomes a cesspool (e.g. original Diablo) and you lose the playerbase that you really want.

Or you can try for a technical solution. You can make it harder to get away with. Sooner or later, someone will break it, and you'll spend a lot of time and effort (and money) trying to fight it and coming up with better methods.

Option three is to throw up your hands and give up, leaving it up to the community to police. Smaller player run servers can set their own policies. This is how a lot of first-person-shooter communities traditionally worked. The nature of this beast is that the community is inevitably fragmented, removing the "Massive" part of MMO.

So, just a thought experiment for discussion: You're lead developer of an MMO. What's your play? How does your business manager deal with it and what pressures can you expect from them?

[wyldhunt]

One possibility for an offline play mode for an online MMO:
1. Characters must be made/registered online first for any progress/changes to be recognized. Progress/changes are only recognized via online play.
2. Offline play is possible for social RP, player-generated content, and a subset of official online content, however allows no changes in the online/official character. Characters could even be created offline, however would never progress past start-level until registered online.
3. For supergroups/guilds, any changes in character ranking and such would have to be performed online, however the appropriate SG officers could make these changes in response to offline play.

In this way, primacy/security of the online character version is maintained, however offline play is offered as an alternate experience.

[Kyriani]

My ideal for an offline mode would be one where any offline play is considered its own server. If you connect to an online server your characters are stored there and there is no sharing of data between offline and online play. Nothing you do in offline mode can transfer to online. I'd still allow a local copy to be saved of an online character.

Consider the original Neverwinter Nights persistent worlds for example. Now don't get me wrong there was cheating on some PW's but it wasn't through direct character data alteration and usually a reset of the PW creator/host not building in specific precautions to prevent such cheating. You character was stored on the host's server. You could create a local copy of that character and even make changes to the local copy but there was no way to bring those changes to the online server character unless you had a way to overwrite your server character with the new data and the only way I know of to do that would be to actually hack the server remotely or have physical access to the server machine and the ability to interface with it.

I dont see why a similar offline mode couldn't exist so long as no data transfer occurs from local to server.

[Arcana]

For starters, people would want to be able to take characters played in offline mode back onto the server. That's a huge, HUGE opportunity for people to cheat. How many times have you played Call of Duty (a peer-to-peer game at its heart, even with Steam matchmaking) and run into somebody who obviously hacked their level to unlock all the perks?

"Well, just don't allow characters played offline to rejoin the server" you say? Hah, good luck with that, especially if your MMO is pay-for. No matter what anyone claims now, I promise you that if it were implemented that way (offline characters couldn't sync progress), it would get rightfully reamed by critics and you'd hear no end of complaining about it.

I don't claim to have answers that are guaranteed to work, but I do have answers.  The model to reference are console games that have a single player mode and a multi-player mode.  These are considered completely different experiences and the expectation is set that unlocking things in single player does not necessarily get reflected in multiplayer.  You'd treat the single player mode as a sort of "practice mode" for the multiplayer mode.

But more specifically, in the example I gave above the design wouldn't be separated into "single" and "multiplayer."  Those would be two extreme ends of the spectrum.  Sitting in between "in single player you have ultimately full control" and "when you log into the big server they control everything" there would be the peer-to-peer intermediate level of play.  Here, I envisioned a chain of trust model that is similar to, say, PGP keys.  If I trust you and you trust me, my game would allow you to import your characters into my instances and vice versa.  We'd allow that, because we get to decide what happens on our own instances.  Webs of trust could be formed whereby who gets to import what is arbitrated by trust levels and ACLs.  Maybe I trust all of your character progress, but none of your powerful items.  So when you "transfer" to my server you keep some stuff and (temporarily) lose other stuff.

Its how PnP games have been arbitrated for years.  There was an honor system involved that was enforced by the simple fact that in small gaming circles cheaters were risking being ostracized.  Peer pressure was the way to ensure cheaters didn't abuse the system.

I was actually thinking about this very model, on a smaller scale, with regard to the Arena.  One of the things I suggested to the devs was that rather than make the rules of PvP carved in stone, at least in the Arena allow players to choose their own rules by consensus.  That way the participants on an event by event basis could decide if they wanted to play with movement suppression, PvP diminished returns, heal suppression, etc.  Give players the ability to set "profiles" for PvP and have the game have a system where those are arbitrated among players joining an event.

Multiply that by, oh, a hundred, and you have a distributed peer to peer "house rules" system of what to allow individual players to use in other people's games.  In the big central servers the only things you'd probably be allowed to bring are the literal shirt on your back: you can transfer character appearance, but all items and progress must be earned on the server.  So when I play there, I'm "exemped" to what the server thinks I've earned.  On my home server, I'm back to level 50.  When I play on your server, I get to keep my level 50 because you've set that level of trust, but I cannot bring my full complement of incarnate powers unless I earn them there first, because you trust me, but not that much.

How to make the economics work is a completely separate issue.  Its related to the question of "why play on the big servers at all?"  And the answer is, the operators of those servers have to make it worth people's while through introducing worthwhile content and worthwhile overall player environments.  Not easy, not impossible, but probably a similar nut to crack as how to convince people to keep buying fruit bonuses in Candy Crush.

[Azrael]

[Felderburg]

Along with preventative measures, you could have a server reserved for offline characters, and another for online. That would at least keep all the potential cheating in one place. Players would have to understand, of course, what they were getting into on each server, and not be allowed to switch servers (or at least only go from online only to the offline server).

The Sentinel files had some sort of protection as I understand, that would prevent modified files being used to upload something crazy, so something similar to that might work for a while. Or even multiple something similars, so that if one was broken, others would still be in place.

There's also rate of advance. It's my understanding that an MMO's devs try to regulate time to level, amount of rare vs. common loot, things like that. Set an upper limit for whatever parameters like that you want, and anyone who exceeds that limit when uploading a single play character back to the server is either not allowed, or knocked down to where they were before they downloaded to single play. That might annoy someone who plays for the storyline of an MMO, and has to play through content a second time, but ideally those players would be well within the range of acceptable offline advancement.

I like wyldhunt's idea of just allowing certain pieces of content to be played offline.

Another idea is releasing a straight-up single player version of part of the game. So you could use, say, Apex, War Witch, or Horus (the original comic trio) and play through certain storylines. So you play as WW in the single player game, and go through the Vahz arc, then do a bunch of Council stuff, and end up finishing with Tina Macintyre's missions. If you want more, you can go to the MMO, with the online-only play that entails. Something like this would really only work in CoH, where there was enough mission content that it wouldn't be exhausted in single player for someone who wanted to go to the MMO part.

Edit: I forgot to add:

Its more of a "did Hostess ever consider printing pamphlets with the recipe for Twinkies and the blueprints for the Twinkie machine before they went out of business?"

Why yes, yes they did. They even sold it!
http://www.amazon.com/Hostess-Twinkies-Pastry-Recipe-Booklet/dp/B00A9T943Q/ref=sr_1_1?s=kitchen&ie=UTF8&qid=1389825350&sr=1-1

Edit: I mean, sort of. It's small scale and for personal use only, but that's all some people are asking for for MMOs or CoH...

[Ice Trix]

Along with preventative measures, you could have a server reserved for offline characters, and another for online. That would at least keep all the potential cheating in one place. Players would have to understand, of course, what they were getting into on each server, and not be allowed to switch servers (or at least only go from online only to the offline server

That's how I've always imagined doing it. One 'server' for offline characters.