Death

Published: 2012-05-17

Author: Teddi

It’s been an interesting past month in terms of our development. We’ve not been too focused this past month on RP as we’ve had a few other things to complete. All the developers are just sorting a few life things out the moment (exams, education, business) however development is still slowly chugging along and I’m going to explain how death works in Roleplay.

In your typical roleplay gamemode you die, sometimes accept some terrible thing about “NLR” and get straight back to whatever you were doing. This has various problems and in most servers causes some form of havoc. The typical issues are -

• Players return to their location and continue what they were doing.
• Players return to their location, kill the person and then continue what they were doing.
• Players hunt down the player that killed them, kill them, return to their location and continue what they were doing.

Because of the situations listed above you end up with a sort of infinite loop where the affected players end up continually doing this and it just ends up as pure chaos.  The only way this loop is broken is when an Admin steps in and attempts to stop it from going any further (which in itself can lead to more issues).

To counter this issue the entire premise around death has been changed.

Instead of just respawning and getting on with what you were doing, your character becomes locked. When a character becomes locked you are unable to spawn as them or perform any actions with them, including deleting that character. The unlock timers differ depending on how you die, however a characters death will be minimum 20 minutes (subjective to change). This gives the player time to cool off and it actually allows for the culprit(s) to get away!

The beauty of the system is that even if the player logs onto another character they’re not really going to be able to get back there and identify the killer(s) due to the identification system in Roleplay (in which you must know the person to see their name) so a huge part of the issue is outright eliminated. Plus if this occurs in the city then police are going to be swarming all over it attempting to defuse the situation and work out what went wrong.

However there is a risk this system could go completely wrong if we’re not careful with the distribution of offensive weapons which will lead to an interesting blog post for another day.

  Discussion Thread: http://www.bbservers.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?7884-Death&p=103818#post103818