Goblin Squad Member
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I can’t discuss the coding part of this issue, but I will mention a few things that may make it a meaningful skill to possess. I did attend S.E.R.E. training back in 1987 and learned some nifty skills that could be useful in the River Kingdoms.
A good tracker can follow his/her prey by using prints (footprints, hoof prints, or any other type of treads or tracks), creature droppings, trails (such as animal runs, or the frequent path animals take to the nearest water source), broken twigs, depressed grasses, food waste, camp sites and cold campfires and the sounds and smells of the prey. Additionally some supernatural tracking skills may be possible depending on how hard it would be to implement in game such as the spells “Stone Speak”, “Commune with Nature”, “Speak with Animals” or in some cases “Speak with the Dead”. Also, a character may be able to scry using a spell or a crystal ball if implemented.
When characters move throughout the landscape a trail is left behind. In many games this feature is already included when moving through snow or mud. The residual trail usually only lasts about 20 seconds, but that time could be extended for hours or even days depending on the weather, condition of the landscape crossed, the prey’s ability to mask or cover their trail, and the type of ground covered (it would be far more difficult to track a creature or humanoid over rocks in dry weather than through wet sand or soft or muddy soil).
Skills/spells to consider:
Tracking (several levels of expertise)
Recognize prints (several types, i.e. humanoid, animal, magical creature, supernatural)
Recognize droppings (several types; humanoid, animal, magical creature)
Land Navigation
Map Reading
Cover trail (several levels of expertise)
Conceal
Camoflauge
Evade (movement to avoid detection, building concealed fires and shelters)
Survival
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Goblin Squad Member
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Tons of opportunity here.
In GW2 the map showed your trail. This could be used only for tracking either mobs or players perhaps if the information can be sent from their movements to visualize in your map?
Again skill-training to hunt mob types that are valuable no doubt and improving the skill tackling more types of mob and/or success/rate/speed of tracking and so on.
The converse of those skills (cover trail (run up a stream!)) could lead to an interesting game of cat and mouse for our bush craft pros!
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Goblin Squad Member
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A nice thought. It would enhance RP and character interaction.
1) Would here be a limit on the size of a group that can have their tracts covered, to say, a small bandit group?
2) Would these skills be viable for formation movement? (Assuming that formations on the move far from hostile territory don't break into individuals to move then reform at destination.)
3) I can see these skills as beneficial in tracking PvE opponents. Would you limit these skills to just those, assuming that PC would be better at not leaving a trail, like droppings?
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Goblin Squad Member
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I think tracking NPCs and PC would be similar, as the game mechanics should only make animals poop, and that really only for the purposes of tracking. (While we haven't agreed how food should be implemented, I think we all agree humanoid waste removal is an unnecessary detail, best left out.)
If a PC were fleeing a pursuer (PC or NPC) all these skills would come into play. If the play by play of each "roll" were known to bystanders, every chase through the woods would be a dramatic game of cat and mouse. It would be incredible if all of these mechanics could be in place for a group of bandits to be chased by a posse; the bandits split up to cause the posse to have to make a choice; the bandits split again. Does the tracker follow the largest group, the trail they think will lead to the bandit with the loot, or are they trying to catch the assassin that drew the blade?
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Goblin Squad Member
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In my experience, if you are attempting to move in such a way that you leave either minimal tracks or mask your tracks, you are a) moving more slowly than normal, and b) not carrying much of a load. In my opinion PCs should leave tracks, and if Donald the Chaotic/Idiot Bandit decides to unwittingly lead the way back to the hideout, well, there ya go!
Tracks/spoor fade naturally due to weathering according to the environmental conditions as well as traffic over top of them. Generally the tracks would only be visible to those actively looking for/following them, and anything below a threshold (determined by the skill of the tracker) would be invisible to the tracker.
Tracks themselves are limited in the information they can give, arbitrarily I would say creature size, maybe even race, intensity, and direction of movement. Hidden data would be an intensity timestamp. To reduce load on a server tracks would be placed every X ticks, setting an intensity based on the creature's movement (running, walking, skulking), skill, terrain condition (possibly), and encumbrance, a direction of travel, and the timestamp. When someone actively tracking scans the area the intensity is adjusted by the age of the track and the amount and intensity of activity over it. The timestamp is updated when the intensity is adjusted, and when the intensity is 0, the track is removed. Additionally the timestamp entries could be indexed so a cleanup process serverside could quickly and efficiently remove those old enough to render their intensity zero.
This way tracking an old trail or one that is frequently used is difficult if not impossible
Tracking isn't an activity that targets a creature, instead it targets an area immediately around the tracker, and it's up to them to interpret the data. To this end, the system should only present the data, not interpret it for a character.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Apart from the map trail of footprint ui suggestion, you could have tracks that visualize in front of you and you have to jog to keep up. They effectively (in case of mob guide you randomly and have to keep up for a certain time as they fade to find "at the end" of the trail the mob. For players, the trail just indicates the direction they are in and you follow the trail towards them: More meandering the lower you are and the harder to keep up etc as well as range of use if the quarry moves out of range the "track signal" ie arrow pointers vanish for good.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I think it would really take a lot to make people's physical footprints stay visually represented in the world for hours at a time but a trail that's invisible to players but may be trackable by our characters could work fine.
In the only game I've seen this implemented, tracking was so hard it was only used to tell who was in an area if something went missing / were sabotaged. If you want it to be useable for tracking down players, things will have to be implemented to make tracking much faster.
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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I think that added "realism" doesn't add enough to a game that isn't about tracking to be better than a very abstract system where your character does something vaguely like tracking and you get information about your quarry.
Those suggestions are great for a game that is about tracking, and there might even be a niche market that can support that game.
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Goblin Squad Member
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For a more abstracted version, just apply some vector addition and keep a single vector value for a given spot. When someone tracks over it, add their vector to the site vector. In-game, if someone is tracking they see, perhaps, an arrow pointing in the direction of the vector and using it's magnitude as either a color or size variation.
I will grant that individuals do develop recognizable tracks based on sole/tread markings and gait, however, tracking an individual based on this requires at the very least a certainty that the identifiers do indeed belong to the target individual. Unless you can mark them with a spell or something like a dye pouch, or even a wound, then identifying them from tracks alone, especially on a well-traveled surface is extremely difficult.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Tracking NPCs: This should be pretty easy considering the game can make an NPC spawn anywhere. Have a character make the skill check to detect and the game can give some visual gui indication of where the character thinks the trail leads; accuracy being based on the result of progressive skill checks.
This could be especially fun in escalations. A small enemy group breaks off to warn/get reinforcements/attack POI/etc. but the players can track it down in time. Or the leaders run when the battle looks lost to rebuild and try again so no settlement gets a trophy unless they can track down the command group too and fully end the escalation. It's one way to add something interesting that increases player involvement rather than "oh we found the big group who will now once again make a suicidal last stand then we take the lootz".
Tracking Players(nonspecific): Guild Wars calls the dots left behind breadcrumbs. This can work with skill checks to find and follow the players' breadcrumbs either accurately or going astray to a dead end, countered if they're using their own abilities to cover tracks (moving slower, interesting choices).
This is where Ryan comes in and says any form of breadcrumbs will have to be data shared between the server and several clients, so people will write hacks to get that information 100% accurately without any gameskill and he doesn't want that happening. Which makes me sad because there's so much metagame potential there.
Still I'd love to see a rich NPC tracking game for escalations, crafting resources (a hunter meta profession), adding extra flavor to the spawned dungeons and catacombs. There are going to be dragons in the game eventually, right?
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Goblin Squad Member
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This is where Ryan comes in and says any form of breadcrumbs will have to be data shared between the server and several clients, so people will write hacks to get that information 100% accurately without any gameskill
The only time that information is 100% accurate is between the object client and game server, the server then sends the hunter subject either accurate or inaccurate information on where to go based on skill checks. If a player were going to hack the data stream to get 100% accurate information all the time wouldn't that mean breaking in to someone else's secure connection for all kinds of security breaches and use violations so they get punted from the game?
Maybe player tracking is back on!
Though tracking a specific player realistically requires some sort of physical or magical tag to follow and might involve magical scrying instead of the wilderness skill.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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The biggest cost of tracking where players have been is the database of where every player has been.
I don't know how Guild Wars does it- perhaps they just have very few breadcrumbs and low resolution on their exact location, or oly track them for players who are being tracked.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The biggest cost of tracking where players have been is the database of where every player has been.
I don't know how Guild Wars does it- perhaps they just have very few breadcrumbs and low resolution on their exact location, or oly track them for players who are being tracked.
They last 20-30 minutes or so? or up to a certain distance before the oldest breadcrumbs disappear to be replaced by the most recent. There's no tracking in Guild Wars (can't abbreviate it on these forums GW already means something :)) the crumbs are just on the minimap to help players during exploration and they're great at that.
The thing is breadcrumbs can stay on each players client until the server gets a tracking check and calls for the information. That greatly reduces the server load for the function.
The biggest challenge I see is how to deal with tracking a player that logged off in the meantime and their ability to just disappear from existence.
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Goblin Squad Member
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a few words:
Shadowbane had great tracking. If you could track, and few people could, you got a list that showed everything you could track in your range, which you could filter for npc or pc. You selected one name and you got an arrow for direction, and you got a 'reveal' power which was a small PBAE on a 10sec recast. Thief hunting took skill. Getting away took skill.
You could do a lot with training trees to fine tune a system like that.
High stealth wouldn't even show up, for one example. Putting tracking in as a 'class' exclusive ability so only someone with all ranger abilities slotted can use it for another. I don't want to see everyone running around with max tracking even after 5 years of play, without a trade off in abilities available.
Also, there is no tracking of players that are not online in that system. Or where they have been. Who cares where he logged out ? Oh that's the hideout? Well, you could locate hideouts via tracking without needing a database of every players movements to and from the hideout. A simple tally of how many trips (per day, last hour, total, w/e playtests best) and with what stealth rating each trippee had, could give a modifier to the hideout's 'hide' rating as constructed (which could degrade over time, or offset by maintenance, etc )
You'd get a server side check to find it when you got in range of it while tracking. With a built in random delay (maybe 1-10 hours? w/e tests out to be painful to exploit I guess) Just standing around, or endlessly circling a hex, would not find it. And nothing given to the client until you actually find it of course.
Settlements could 'build' tracking guards, that would have a list of people who had been in the hex over the past 24 hours , or week, w/e. If someone constantly shows up, they may be spying... lots of potential.
Footprints: Trying to follow tracks on the ground might work in isolated cases, but I do not think they need to be in the game. I train my ranger to recognise tracks , just give me a list of what 'he' sees in a form I can work with, don't ask me at the keyboard to learn Bob's track from Joe's.... 20k people in OE.... I would also note that pathfinder RPG has :
Scent
Hearing
Tremorsense
Magic to obfuscate
Magic to locate
Animal forms
Hunting dogs
etc
All of which bypass prints to some degree, all of which should eventually be in game. I deliberately leave flight out for now.
ps
I want to put reversed horseshoes on my boots if we have to leave tracks.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I wouldnt be surprised if Tracking in some form makes it in, just on the basis that Rangers won't be available until much later, it would suit GW's to dangle a carrot like tracking so that vet players with established characters will be willing to blow training on it.
If put to a crowdforge vote, tracking is an almost certain winner.
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Goblinworks Game Designer
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The biggest cost of tracking where players have been is the database of where every player has been.
I don't know how Guild Wars does it- perhaps they just have very few breadcrumbs and low resolution on their exact location, or oly track them for players who are being tracked.
This is correct. It's potentially a ton of data to ask the server to record about your character and/or attach to nodes in the world.
I believe Guild Wars' breadcrumbs are client-only; they're just there to show you what you've done, and I don't believe any other players can access them.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Neverwinter Online has sparkly trails lead to the player's next objective if they have them set to appear. Perhaps the tracker could try to activate the path to his quarry if that quarry is online from a 'bounty' interface. If the quarry was offline possibly an error message would be returned 'the trail has grown cold'. Perhaps if the quarry then came online a notification might pop up 'there are signs of <quarryname> present'.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I would be happy with a skill check giving me an arrow pointing in the general direction of my target. That would be both lightweight for the database and serve the purpose of "actively" tracking something. Improving the tracking skill could enlarge the search radius and/or the arrow precision and/or skill usage time and/or skill refresh.
I would also add some specific knowledge of the target to be known beforehand. Tracking specific monsters/NPC would require the appropriate Knowledge skill. Tracking another character would require a bounty. I would even allow tracking players when they are offline so we can ambush them :D
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Goblin Squad Member
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Tracking for mobs could be different from tracking for players. For players it would need to regulated as per Stephen above ie bounty-hunter. Whereas mobs could be a sort of mini-game to spawn 'em ie following arrows which can be stylized as footprints using an algorithm to create a winding track.
Particularly useful to have said tracker for monster hunters after rare monsters, right?
For bounty-hunters: "You can run, but you cannot hide!"
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Goblin Squad Member
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The biggest cost of tracking where players have been is the database of where every player has been.
I don't know how Guild Wars does it- perhaps they just have very few breadcrumbs and low resolution on their exact location, or only track them for players who are being tracked.
This is correct. It's potentially a ton of data to ask the server to record about your character and/or attach to nodes in the world.
I believe Guild Wars' breadcrumbs are client-only; they're just there to show you what you've done, and I don't believe any other players can access them.
Stephen,
How much does it take to record the twenty or so steps left in snow (done in many games) versus maintaining a trackable trail for say like one game day (6 hours)? Or, what would you consider a reasonable amount of time a character could be tracked? Is this feasible? It seems a shame not to be able to track others. Everyone can think of many useful purposes for good and ill.
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Goblinworks Game Designer
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Steps in the snow are also almost certainly client only.
I'm not saying tracking is off the table, just that doing it by maintaining a detailed list of every character's previous locations is likely not going to happen. Getting approximate current location of your target interpreted to you via a medium of your skills, distance, etc. is certainly possible.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Steps in the snow are also almost certainly client only.
I'm not saying tracking is off the table, just that doing it by maintaining a detailed list of every character's previous locations is likely not going to happen. Getting approximate current location of your target interpreted to you via a medium of your skills, distance, etc. is certainly possible.
One compromise position could be to start tracking the quarry when the attacker begins tracking, and then give the tracker information starting ~15 minutes old 15 minutes after they begin tracking. I don't see any obvious impossibility there, but I think it's worse than simply giving information about the instant location of the target.
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Goblin Squad Member
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One compromise position could be to start tracking the quarry when the attacker begins tracking, and then give the tracker information starting ~15 minutes old 15 minutes after they begin tracking. I don't see any obvious impossibility there, but I think it's worse than simply giving information about the instant location of the target.Steps in the snow are also almost certainly client only.
I'm not saying tracking is off the table, just that doing it by maintaining a detailed list of every character's previous locations is likely not going to happen. Getting approximate current location of your target interpreted to you via a medium of your skills, distance, etc. is certainly possible.
But I want to track the stealthed assassin as he slips through our seiging army to kill our commander, I can't wait 15 minutes.
ps
Please tell me that is going to be a possible scenario in PFO.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I really like the spirit of Decius's idea, but I think it can be improved upon.
When you begin tracking, the current location of your target is placed on your map (or an arrow points at it, or whatever). From that point on, the actual path your target takes is saved and you can follow it to find them.
Ideally, you'd be able to store the path on the client of the tracker, but that is probably not fair since it would send data to the client that could be hacked to bypass the system. I'm quite sure I don't have a good grasp on the costs of storing it on the server.
One side benefit of this system is that players who believed they were being tracked might be able to loop around and ambush their trackers.
not meaning to Necro, but someone pointed me to this thread when I made a similar one.
My suggestion to tracking would be to have it be proximity.
Example of a Bounty System:
-Player is killed by a player
-Killed player puts in a bounty on the killer
-At the time the bounty is created the location of the bounty is embedded in it so that is where you start your search.
-Depending on your skills and luck you run your tracking ability and it tells you everyone who is within xxx meters from your current location and the direction they are in
-If the person you have is on the radar then their name is a different color
Finding their current location in the game is up to the bounty hunter, if someone really wants to hunt bounties? then they need to hunt and get paid. Not get an instant location go and collect in vengence.
This tracking ability would ideally be from a ranger skill set, and as such would also help someone track rare mobs/spawns as well for whatever looted materials come from them. IE: need a mammoth tusk for a sword? rare spawn? Go to the area they are from and run the Tracking ability and hope one is in range and know the direction.
I don't see this as the database needing to know exactly where everyone is at all times, as much as a query to resources/mobs in your vicinity. Starwars galaxies did something similar with resource harvesting, and as others have said Guildwars has a similar setup with tracking mobs