Gauging interest in a server hosted campaign world

[Aaron]

Project Code Name: Anchorage MMO

So I'm playing with the idea of making a persistent "world" that runs on a server. The server will basically launch AI merchants and warships from ports and send them sailing to a destination (port, patrol area, blockade). The merchants will try and follow shipping lanes and some will be escorted. The player's fleet will also reside on the server and will interact with other players and AI as they cross paths. You would access your fleet through a web browser where you will captain your ship such as setting waypoints, patrol areas, etc. I am thinking you would see this on your web browser:

Here is a player's fleet sailing near Barbados following two preset waypoints. The circle around the ship icon is the visible area of the map where sails can be spotted. The white outer part of the circle is areas where you may or may not see sails on the horizon based upon skill, luck, target size, etc.

(The example above came straight out of my software so you can see there is already significant progress.. the islands, map scale, compass all is "in game".)

I am thinking maybe 24 hours of realtime is a week in the campaign world so things would be accelerated. Also if we wanted to condense things the map scale can also be reduced to model a smaller world.

This isn't meant to be some fast paced MMO. This is a slower paced world where your ships are sailing across the ocean as you go about your normal day and you get notifications when something comes up.
So if you are offline and your watch spots a sail you will get an email notification alerting you and you can login to the browser and take action. You can also preprogram in automatic avoidance or close and try to identify without having to log back in. This is where the fun games can be played as who is it and should I close distance or not, raise colors, stop for inspections, etc. You get the idea.

So at some point there will be combat and that is where the physical copy of the Sails of Glory game will takeover. Through browser or email will get an order of battle for the ships that are involved and you play out the fight with your ships at home against AI rules or real opponents (spouse?). You could also use my software to play it out. After the battle you submit your results to the campaign world via the browser. Your ships would be held in limbo on the campaign map during this time to give you a time window of playing this out. These details would need to be further sketched out.

The initial player controlled side of the game will most likely be frigates out looking for prizes but there will be bigger fish in the sea. As you come across merchants and battleships and win you will slowly lose crew as they act as prize crews. Eventually you bring your prizes back to port or send them home on their own and hope they don't get recaptured.

If you run across another player and manage to close the distance you can hail each other and use threatening gestures (how you would fight each other would be up to you if you even want to attempt it, that's further down the road).

Anyway the server software would be built up in stages as we all grow with the game or if it isn't fun we can just dump it.

I would welcome any help such as figuring out how far you can spot a ship during different conditions and what is the realistic sailing speeds at various wind attitudes for the ships. Please comment so I can gauge the interest in such a venture. There will also be new actions such as towing crippled ships, ocean current effects around bays, dangerous shoals to avoid, etc.

The purpose of this is to give this community a means to play together even if it is solo for the SoG part of the game. The anticipation, chase, etc is what this venture would bring to the table.

Technically the server engine is not hard to make. I already have a world map partially built and moving the ships to destinations using vector speeds is simple stuff to do. The challenge would be to come up with game rules such as realistic speeds vs attitude, viewing distance, etc. The time consuming aspects would be research as to what were the frequency of merchants, shipping destinations, etc. Making it all work together is what I do best.

Now, I already have plans to do some of this on my own for personal reasons (the fun of doing it) but was limiting it to one player. I wanted to get a pulse of the community and if maybe 5 to 10 others want to really push this I am willing to expand my scope to include multi users

Cheers!