Bioware MMOG Likely Slated for 2009

InformationWeek is running an article looking at a piece of technology Canadian developer Bioware will be including into their in-development Massively Multiplayer Online Game. The still un-announced project, the article also lets on, is likely to launch sometime in 2009. The technology, called StreamBase, is a form of complex event processing. Bioware plans to use the ability to change the codebase on the fly, while the game is live. "One of StreamBase's functions is to analyze events and make sure no intruder is trying to disrupt the game's logic, make malicious movements against the activity of other players, or activate the hidden Easter eggs that are sometimes known to lurk in the game's logic. An Easter egg might make a sound that was not consistent with the game's design, show a message, or cause a character to move out of the logic of his role, Dalton explained."

Hidden easter eggs?

Back in my day, we called those 'mad exploits'.

The rest of that summary seems pretty pie-in-the-sky to me. If they've got the capability to change stuff on the fly, and better, to have the system perform these changes on its own, they're going to have to be very careful to prevent people from injecting their own changes, or 'socially' engineering the system to react in ways unforeseen by the developers.

*cough*Eve*Cough*

Doesn't Eve encourage you to try to beat the system? Every story I've read here seems to indicate that's the case but they don't have a Mac port so I haven't tried it...

I'd like to see a game with a "programmable" magic system like that. Given a base set of simple spells that affect the environment in some way and a mana pool that gets larger as you level up (Allowing you access to longer and more complex spells) I think it's quite feasible to do. It'd probably be interesting to a grand total of 3 of us, though. I suppose that if you could trade spells once you created them then you'd have two distinct classes of magic users -- the ones who just use other people's pre-crafted spells and the ones who actually write their own.

You'd still have to account for the people who want to play other classes as well. If you spend that much time in the magic system you'd probably want to do something similar for combat system and the abilities for the various other classes. Plus I'd hope that you'd be able to come up with more than "Go kill 14 things then come back here for some bling. That gets old real fast. And actually having the same NPC back 10 minutes after you kill him is rather off-putting too. I'd go for thousands of distinct quests which get applied to randomly generated NPCs in the world. NPC might want you to deliver something to another NPC. NPC might want you to kill one or more other NPCs. NPC might want you to do something your character class is good at (Assassin's guild, anyone?) NPC might want you to herd his goats while he runs off for some hanky panky with another NPC.

And as long as we're on the subject, I'd like to see NPCs much more interactive. It's easy enough to write a chatbot that is difficult to distinguish from human as long as you limit the scope to one field. So have the blacksmiths be able to talk to you intelligently about blacksmithing and the tailors be able to talk to you about tailoring.

That'd be a game I'd like to play :-)

How about taking the eggs out before shipping?

...make sure no intruder is trying to disrupt the game's logic, make malicious movements against the activity of other players, or activate the hidden Easter eggs that are sometimes known to lurk in the game's logic.

How about taking/commenting/compiler-directiving the "Easter eggs" out before you ship? This lack of control over the finished product makes me think this thing will really be in beta (if not alpha) long after they start selling it to marks who see the "BioWare" brand and start parting from their money...

Re:How about taking the eggs out before shipping?

Someone has obviously been told not to call them bugs, and was looking for another word. They chose 'easter eggs' with having any bloody clue what they were saying.

Obviously, it isn't an 'easter egg' if the developers did not put it there on purpose. And if they did, they would indeed remove any exploitable ones before shipping.

That aside, the whole 'change the code live' thing is a programmer's wet dream. As such, there's probably a reason it's not very common. Like, oh, it's a nightmare to actually use. Updating a cute little Lua script is easy, updating a library or even a big nasty lua script is not easy at all.

So when you have a deja vu....

they can swear it's not lag...it just means they changed something. Seriously, changing on the fly to me means high probability of entire realms going down for hours on end because some codemonkey forgot a semi-colon.

Too Much Tinkering?

I read this as they can also mess with the game's mechanics on the fly. I find that a lot of MMO players don't like it when their game changes. You spend 500 hours building up a mage that gets NERFed all of a sudden.

So, now, with this technology, they can tinker with mathematics and algorithms without even telling users that changes were made or while the player is in the middle of playing. I can see as much use in this feature from BioWare as the abuse it attempts to prevent.

Matrix?

Am I going to see the same black cat cross a threshold twice when they change the live code? Deja vu?

StreamBase is a Streaming DBMS!

StreamBase is a COTS (commerical off the shelf) streaming database with all sorts of on-the-fly analysis capabilities. They are more likely to use this technology to analyze how the players are engaging in the "world" and reactively modifying the behavior of the environment as result (altering behavior of NPCs), rather than dynamically rewriting code and so forth. This is actually in innovative approach, and not something that has anything necessarily to do with making the software bug-ridden and prone to crashes.

catching easter eggs?

If i read correctly, they use statistic based analysis of events, instead of proper QA of the code to catch exploits planted by their own developers? I loved most of Bioware's stuff (except NWN), but this sounds weird.

WarGames?

This will all be great until StreamBase decides "The only way to keep the classes balanced is not to play.." and shuts all the realms down.

Cheesy article, but might be useful.

The article makes it sound like they'll be using this system basically to track down the people who type in IDDQD and activate God Mode, but it seems more likely that it'll be used largely as a GM tool. Looking at some of the exploits in other MMOs, it's easy to see how this could be used to track down exploits, from botting to teleportation hacks to bugged mobs that give too much loot. ("Hmm, why has Lesser Bog Rat been killed 700 times more often than any of the mobs around it?")

It could also be a valuable tool for GMs. If it really does keep a detailed log of everything that's happened in-game, they should be able to track down lost items, punish bad behavior, and so on much more effectively.

Which world will get this new codebase

Heres to hoping that all this new codebase and exciting concepts gets put into a worthy sandbox. Personally as a somewhat jaded Star Wars Galaxies, on again, off again player I am hoping that this is the harbinger for a new Star Wars themed KOTOR era MMORPG. If not and Bioware is doing a unique world than hopefully something futuristic as I think we are getting a little oversaturated with elves and orcs and magic (Ohh my)