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.
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.
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!
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.
"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."
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)
UO's original designer, Raph Koster, recently announced a new MMO project where he intends to revisit many of those old simulationist ideas.
"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."
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.
A fact you could [ab]use by sneaking it into other players' inventories.
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.
The lead developer of CivCraft went on to do a lot of founding work on Althea mesh networking (https://althea.net/)
Anarchy minecraft has gotten super popular on youtube. I wonder if there's room for it to reboot.
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:
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
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
>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.”
The "optimise for gameplay" quote was in reference to how developers decide between two equally valid but conflicting outcomes to a given scenario.[2]
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.
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.
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.
I saw it was on Steam the other day, I guess they tried to add some storyline to it.
Picture my disappointment when I realised they meant wurm like a dragon wyrm.
GPLv3, unfortunately, but interesting nevertheless.
Both of them combined would literally be a step towards living in a Matrix. :)
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.)
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.