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Comment by Razengan | Hacker News Reader

A multiplayer persistent world like Minecraft with physics would be amazing, and probably replicate Minecraft's success.

e.g. If I chop down a tree at the top of a hill it could roll down and potentially wreck your house.

Or causing cave-ins and avalanches from indiscriminate mining. Building dams and rerouting rivers. Building realistic defenses and then siege weapons. Fun

Add in critter breeding and predation for dynamic populations that interact with each other. So if you slay too many Gorgs soon there would be none left. Leave them alone and they'll eat all the Fraggles. Players would form culling expeditions every week. Pretty soon you'll have players giving each other quests. :)

I think the venerable Ultima Online had a few features like that, or was supposed to, not completely sure.

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> So if you slay too many Gorgs soon there would be none left. Leave them alone and they'll eat all the Fraggles. Players would form culling expeditions every week. [...] I think the venerable Ultima Online had a few features like that, or was supposed to, not completely sure.

Ultima Online tried to have such an ecology, but the players didn't react to it as described despite the game designers giving players minimal rewards for killing herbivores so that they would focus on killing the carnivores. Instead the players indiscriminately killed both the carnivores and the herbivores, because the players were human. The ecology was removed.

https://youtu.be/KFNxJVTJleE

Sounds like the game was perfectly realistic then.

That was in 1997, a time when nearly all players were using dialup modems and server hardware was pitifully slow compared to today's. The attempted ecology was no doubt very simple.

UO's original designer, Raph Koster, recently announced a new MMO project where he intends to revisit many of those old simulationist ideas.

>because the players were human

It's a very compelling story, but that wasn't actually the case. The real reason was the flawed design. People just had to kill everything for the materials because of the way equipment was implemented.

Mmo designers are very constrained in their game mechanics because they always have to deal with players that will exploit every possibility to grief. This unfortunately leads to things like extremely unchallanging encounters for random matchmade groups as any group will have players trying not just to get a free ride but actively trying to get the party to fail the objective.

I think one YouTube comment named another good reason: The animals were too easy to kill.

"The problem is obvious. The animals were too easy to kill. Imagine trying to chase down a real rabbit or deer with a sword. You will never catch either one and if by some chance you corner them the deer would actually stand a chance of beating you."

As best I recall (it seems it's not easy to find sources now) the biggest problem was with player-killing and griefing. The devs left player-character interactions relatively unrestricted in the expectation that social order would be (largely) maintained by the in-character actions of the PCs. Similar things had worked in text-based MUDs of the time. When they naturally got a Hobbesian bloodbath instead (classic MUDs have many more hours of active games-mastering per player than any MMO) they began the retreat that led to the fake-roleplaying, theme-park experience familiar from World of Warcraft etc.

https://gametyrant.com/news/ultima-online-spent-3-years-deve... has some quotes from the creators.

"Similar things had worked in text-based MUDs of the time."

Not really, in my experience. In MUDs with unrestricted player killing, in-game policing did very little to stop it (unless you count intervention from immortals/wizards, I.e. admins)

Original lead designer of the game here.

Richard's recollection is flawed on this (he wasn't close enough to the tech to know why it failed).

Reason #1: the closed loop fell victim to hoarding, particularly because the advancement system encouraged the production of goods with no value, as explicated in great detail in Zach Booth Simpson's detailed paper on "The In-Game Economics of Ultima Online."

Slides: https://studylib.net/doc/9778818/the-in-game-economics-of-ul...

Paper: https://web.archive.org/web/20090207141813/https://www.mine-...

Reason #2: the cost of pathfinding for the searches was too great. The Sims later solved this by having the agents in a very similar system use simple hillclimbing, with resources broadcast into a map.

wow, this is why I love HN: An incidental thread on a subject sometimes ends up having a key figure on that subject joining the discussion. :)

I never really got to try Ultima Online during its heyday (I was averse to MMOs and saw them as a step backwards from the narrative qualities of single-player games.)

Re: the ecology, other commenters here and on YouTube have also noted that it was too easy to do things what you shouldn't be able to do, like chasing down rabbits and deer with a sword. :)

Thanks and looking forward to your next game!

You may be interested in TerraFirmaCraft (https://terrafirmacraft.com/f/info), then. It's a Minecraft mod that tries to increase the realism of the game, I don't know if there are avalanches or tree rolling mechanisms, yet the mining system is greatly changed to include cave ins and other structural changes.

"TFC has thrown out Vanilla generation and started on a fresh slate. Sea-level has been raised to twice the height to accommodate 3 separate, varying layers of stone underneath, each spawning their own ores and minerals depending on which of the 23 new stone types it is comprised of.

Caves and underground ravines can be massive, with stalagmites and stalactites scattered throughout. Cave-ins are also an added risk; mining ceiling blocks that aren’t properly supported may result in metric tons of cobblestone falling down on your head.

On the surface, there are 16 different types of trees, large boulders, and smaller surface rocks scattered about. Grass, saplings and flowers slowly grow back depending on the temperature, while foliage changes colors to match the season. TFC also adds new crops and fruit trees as alternative food sources.

Inhabiting the surface are the same standard Minecraft mobs, but with a TFC twist. Animals have distinguishing features depending on their gender and breeding is changed so that females are pregnant for a period of time before giving birth to a believable amount of offspring. Drops have been changed so that all animals (including squids!) drop some form of meat, and mammals drop raw-hide or sheepskin that needs further processing to obtain wool and leather."

I believe there is also an aspect of food spoiling if you keep it in your inventory for too long too, along with stats for protein, carbs, etc.

Keeping bad meat in your inventory should infect everything else.

A fact you could [ab]use by sneaking it into other players' inventories.

Spoilage would happen even in storage, but the rate was temperature-dependent so you could make it last longer by keeping it somewhere colder. I remember there being some work on preserving food indefinitely by storing it in a barrel of vinegar.

You'd have to adjust your food production strategy to fit your climate. In a cold climate, you'd have a short growing season and need to set up cool storage/pickling barrels in order to survive the winter. In a very warm climate, you might not be able to get anything to keep very long, but you'd be able to grow crops year-round.

Shame it's stuck on 1.7.10 with no update in sight. There is a modpack, RLCraft, that PDP has played recently that tries to do something similar, if more vanilla minecraft-y. If that one were overhauled with more hardcore TFC mechanics, I'd be very happy.

I just want to say, thanks for posting this! I was just playing Minecraft before reading your post yesterday, after a long break (months to years of barely playing at all), and this was exactly what I was longing for.

Used to a play a server called Civcraft that was persistent for several years - server-side plugins enabled preservation of structures (to an extent) through reinforcement (Citadel), culling of mobs using "Mustercull", biome-specific farming with RealisticBiomes, and an imprisonment system (PrisonPearl) which gave players the power to ban others from the server.

People naturally formed their own laws, governments, societies, and over the years the balance of power went from a fractal multipolar world to a massive "red vs. blue" cold war with minimal conflict. Quite interesting really. Not to mention the massive international infrastructure works, including rails, bridges, tunnels, massive towns, and lag-inducing automated farms.

Civcraft 1.0 was amazing. I remember hearing about people having bots to show player's locations on an online map using jukealert messages.

Anarchy minecraft has gotten super popular on youtube. I wonder if there's room for it to reboot.

There are still direct descendants of CivCraft around; CivEx, CivClassics, and CivRealms are currently online.

The lead developer of CivCraft went on to do a lot of founding work on Althea mesh networking (https://althea.net/)

All of those are pretty awful, honestly. There's no guarantee of permanence like the original had (first one shut down due to hacked map, second due to mass duping ruining the economy), the admins are pretty one sided, and the culture is ruined due to everyone focusing on building megavaults. Ttk did do well with Altheanet, yeah. I think he's on this forum as well.

>>A multiplayer persistent world like Minecraft with physics would be amazing, and probably replicate Minecraft's success.

That is something that I'm actually trying to create. Although my focus is a world where you can create machines that are simulated by a physics engine. Users will be able to create humanoid robots, a mechanical giant clock, etc. Think Minecraft for machines. I'm still in the early stages right now so don't really have much to show anybody yet but that is the plan.

I already tried once[1] without success so this is my second go at it.

This is my first attempt from several years ago:

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRWENHLgEnk

Looking for help?

Thanks for the offer. I will need people to try out the first release if you are interested. Will announce the first usable release here in a couple of months.

Space Engineers might be interesting to you

Though the physics strains to keep up with more complex creations/scenarios, I have had great fun building big ships and then smashing them into things (or each other). It's another game where they give you a sandbox and the possibilities are up to you

They even give you a super-threadbare programming environment with which you can write C# code

The lack of PVE kills it for me, but it's a really fun creative game. Build a cool thing, smash it, repeat.

Try Empyrion. I was a Space Engineers player who has switched entirely to Empyrion. It’s SE with way way more complexity. Food and starvation, recipes, mobs, biomes, and so much more. It’s a criminally underrated game.

Is the game still being developed? I bought it in pre-release and haven't looked at it in years.

Yeah, it recently hit 1.0. They're also adding some things they said they wouldn't, namely more PvE stuff. I'm hoping they add NPCs of some kind with scriptable behavior to give us something to fight

> Minecraft with physics would be amazing

Chris Delay of Introversion (Prison Architect, Darwinia, DEFCON) mocked up something quite like that back in 2011. I always wished it had been developed further: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQMBGLMtdFE

Never let realism get in the way of game play...

What game play..?

I mean a sandbox is about having a world to tinker with.

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/designing-user-interfaces-to-...

>Some muckety-muck architecture magazine was interviewing Will Wright about SimCity, and they asked him a question something like “which ontological urban paradigm most influenced your design of the simulator, the Exo-Hamiltonian Pattern Language Movement, or the Intra-Urban Deconstructionist Sub-Culture Hypothesis?” He replied, “I just kind of optimized for game play.”

This is a bit misleading. From what I've read, the modeling in sim city is heavily influenced by Urban Dynamics by Jay Forrester, a 1969 book which was highly regarded in urban planning circles when it came out and has since fallen out of favour [1].

The "optimise for gameplay" quote was in reference to how developers decide between two equally valid but conflicting outcomes to a given scenario.[2]

[1] https://logicmag.io/play/model-metropolis/

[2] https://www.princeton.edu/~starr/17star.html

> dynamic populations that interact with each other

It feels like every open-world game dreams of this, and backs up on it. The problem is you need so many things to go right for it to work and be fun.

* It needs to be resilient to player shenanigans * It needs to respond to player actions * It needs to be coherent and connect to the actual gameplay * It needs to reward player interaction while not breaking the economy

That's a pretty tall order when most MMOs struggle to even motivate the existence of simple NPC vendors.

> A multiplayer persistent world like Minecraft with physics would be amazing, and probably replicate Minecraft's success.

To a point, yes. After that it is EVE online and lacks general appeal. I was watching a video tonight of some players trying out a new mod that has some basic and limited physics - waterwheels can rotate shafts. Two different sized cogs let change up rotational speed. Belts can connect shafts, transferring rotation and also creating a converter belt.

All cool stuff, but part of the appeal is the unrealism. As soon as work starts reducing torque it goes from fun mental puzzle approachable by many to math and frustration approachable by few.

Minecraft's success is not only in the freedom to build, but in the reduced realism that makes that potential open to so many as fun.

Empyrion has block building and working structural integrity, the settings is in the future so it might not be to everyone taste.

> If I chop down a tree at the top of a hill it could roll down and potentially wreck your house.

There's a Minecraft like game with this mechanic right now. When you chop down a tree it goes rolling down the hill and can damage you/enemies. It's as satisfying as you'd hope it would be. I'm not affiliated but I enjoyed playing the alpha.

https://dvoidis.itch.io/valheim

IIRC, Markus Petersson, the creator of Minecraft, worked for a long time on Wurm Online, an MMO where you can kinda do what you're talking about - as a group or individual, you can level forests, dig down mountains, build roads, cities, etc. It's a slow and labor-intensive grind but it is a game where as a community you can change the whole game world's geography.

I saw it was on Steam the other day, I guess they tried to add some storyline to it.

When I read this for some reason I envisioned a game where you need a huge group of players to slowly accomplish changing the landscape, like you’re a literal worm digging away at your patch of dirt with millions of others.

Picture my disappointment when I realised they meant wurm like a dragon wyrm.

There was a game or tech-demo called "upvoid miner" a few years ago. It had worldgeneration similar to minecraft and proper physics with rolling tree logs. It allowed arbitrarily shaped terrain and I think liquid physics were worked on. But sadly the studio had to shut down due to not getting enough sales. I think you can still download it and test out the free tech demo though.

Wow, that looks quite interesting. Seems dead, but the folks behind it open-sourced the code: https://github.com/Upvoid/UpvoidMiner

GPLv3, unfortunately, but interesting nevertheless.

http://teardowngame.com

A township tale has persistent world with physics, not exactly minecraft though https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfgjJOUW_KY.

Yes! That's somewhat better than what I had in mind! (the granularity of chopping down individual branches)

I would love to see the breath of the wild physics engine in a persistent MMO.

Yeah! People are hyped up about VR but I think MMOs with physics could a big milestone in gaming too.

Both of them combined would literally be a step towards living in a Matrix. :)

Try out Gliby's Physics: https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/glibys-physics

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cj2vG5HuSCA

The performance would be pretty bad. Every time someone placed or broke a block, the game would have to check if there was a heavy object above it that now has to fall, if there was water flowing through that voxel that now has to be rerouted, etc etc. Combine this with many players in one world and you will not get many server ticks per second.

That can easily be engineered around using geosharding.

Just from the top of my head without thinking it through:

If it was all deterministic, servers might just send player input and the physics simulations could happen locally on players' devices.

And as the sibling comment said, multiple servers each handling a small region of the world (both gamespace and meatspace.)

User-side calculation makes it prone to hacking.

One of the neat things with multiplayer games is that you get to see quickly how players creatively leverage/abuse the game play primitives (the basic physics rules) to their advantage.

Eco is that game

https://store.steampowered.com/app/382310/Eco/

Eco is getting close to that. But the whole idea of consequences and interaction somewhat doesn't give the same carefree vibe you get from being in a virtual world.

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