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When we roved planets in our terrain vehicles, we did so to make money because mining was the most lucrative activity in the game. But that got old, quickly, unfortunately.

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True, but think of the possibilities a modern graphics engine could provide to enhance the activity... lush outdoor scenery, realistic 3D terrain (adds to the mystery of exploration... "what''s just over that hill?"), exotic out-of-this-world locations, and enough other bells-and-whistles to keep the exploration/resource gathering aspect from getting old too quickly. Probably couldn''t build an entire game around it, but then neither did Starflight. Most of the game may have been centered around planet hopping, but there were enough other aspects to keep things interesting.

In addition to the eye-candy delay (of apathy setting in), one could add oodles of different "resource" types to spice things up... after all, what is a rogue-clone like Diablo (or most RPG''s for that matter) without the "ooh, I haven''t seen that before" gratification while exploring a new area (whether it be a new +15 great sword of uberness or a new type of rock :-p). Another nice feature would be to liberally sprinkle unique and personable NPC''s throughout the land, providing the "gotta talk to ''em all" motivation for vehicular exploration, though that might be a little too time-consuming on the development side.

I should add that I''m assuming the use of relatively slow vehicles for exploration purposes, as one would likely miss out on the above motivations while zipping over the landscape at Mach 8. I''m also assuming that exploration would play a more significant role than a mere "game within a game", as pulling off the "let''s solve the motivational problems by making a huge, varied universe to mess around with" solution would be rather expensive. ^_^

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Original post by Ramius
True, but think of the possibilities a modern graphics engine could provide to enhance the activity...

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My dream would be the detail of a Morrowind mixed with the planetary scale of Starflight. Just knowing that I'm bounded not by a map but by my fuel tank would probably drive me nuts.

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lush outdoor scenery, realistic 3D terrain (adds to the mystery of exploration... "what's just over that hill?"), exotic out-of-this-world locations, and enough other bells-and-whistles to keep the exploration/resource gathering aspect from getting old too quickly.

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The trick here is figuring out what "old" is. Vvardenfell in Morrowind feels like an entire planet, even though it's just one island. Now, something on the size of an entire world would have alot of repetition, simply for lack of texture variety alone. Terrain can be wildly varied, but it would look the same around the globe (which might be okay, look at Mars).

But when you say "exotic, out of this world locations" I'm expecting for life-bearing worlds you'll want just about every form of terrain we have on earth: tundra; snowy, granite, red sandstone and basalt mountains; various forests and swamps whose plants vary wildly from planet to planet; and tons of wild new animals.

The problem is that with Starflight, you filled in the lack of details with your imagination. When you encountered, say, a sessile predator, it was an icon of a tree that did damage to you by drawing a line to your terrain vehicle. So much more is required today, though.

As soon as you give an exact form to things, you start getting tired of seeing them. And across multiple planets, it would mean that you'd have to model, texture and animate how many creatures, plants and special items????

Even procedural textures and procedural geometry for flora and fauna can only be of so much help. Players are going to want monsters with different attacks, different AI, etc. I'm not sure if they'll accept anything less simply because of what tightly focused, single-subject games have offered them to date.

Don't get me wrong, btw. I want to see this come about. But it's an ugly challenge to face.

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Probably couldn't build an entire game around it, but then neither did Starflight. Most of the game may have been centered around planet hopping, but there were enough other aspects to keep things interesting.

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I'd be curious to know how pared down this could be before it would be unacceptable. Say, twenty creature types total, with about 3 skin varieties each? Fifty different plant shapes, with about a half dozen textures each. You'd end up with "your basic big cat (panther, tiger, lion0", "your basic simian (monkey, gorilla)", "your basic bovine form (water buffalo, bison, cow)".

The only hope of making this interesting would be not to vary the forms, but to vary the properties and stats the flora and fauna had. So a spikey redwood on one planet would yeild a cure for a disease, while on another the same mesh would attack with metal eating spores. You could not hope to have hundreds of unique plants and animals times dozens of life bearing worlds.

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Another nice feature would be to liberally sprinkle unique and personable NPC's throughout the land, providing the "gotta talk to 'em all" motivation for vehicular exploration, though that might be a little too time-consuming on the development side.

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More than anything it's the world "unique" that massacres a concept like this. The cheapest way to make something unique is via text. A "Sword of the Moon" is little different from a "Sword of the Stars" except in text, and then in stats. Next cheapest is gameplay variation (a sword with one attack versus a sword with two special attacks), but that still requires bug testing and balancing.

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I should add that I'm assuming the use of relatively slow vehicles for exploration purposes, as one would likely miss out on the above motivations while zipping over the landscape at Mach 8. I'm also assuming that exploration would play a more significant role than a mere "game within a game", as pulling off the "let's solve the motivational problems by making a huge, varied universe to mess around with" solution would be rather expensive. ^_^

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Yeah, your ship would be the Mach 8 through the atmosphere, but the terrain part would of necessity have to be slow just to update things. Morrowind takes some time to load its new environments, and that would pose a significant problem to a fast moving speeder at ground level.



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Just waiting for the mothership...

[edited by - wavinator on April 22, 2004 8:46:04 PM]

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Original post by NeoMage
Also, games are more fun if you have more freedom to explore, and if you do allow the player to do stuff that doesn''t help or hinder them in their quest to reach the goal, don''t be too obvious about it. Players who actually deserve to find secrets are the ones who will take time everywhere they go to observe everything and explore. You want the player to want to spend more time in your game and find out all they can. But make sure the distraction isn''t too great, or they''ll stop playing the game and just screw around doing nothing forever.

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Good points. The major problem is that in an open-ended game, everything''s potentially a distraction unless you''re on a mission. And even then, if the world is detailed enough, there''s a temptation to get lost even when on a mission.

I suppose, though, that that''s the flip side of having a lot of freedom. If the game doesn''t feel like it''s progressing, I guess most players will try to move on, despite distractions. So there will be two opposing forces pulling at them as they play.

I rememember encountering this phenomenon in Morrowind. I''d actually forgo exploring, which is my natural tendency, just because I wanted to level up or get more money. So I''d constantly walk past interesting areas on my way to get things done.

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Just waiting for the mothership...

Do you need a detialed person level view of planets? It would be a lot easier to have Low altitude flight system. You fly low over the area and interact with things from an almost map view. You set your bio sensor filters to detect to large animals, and they appear as red dots on the map or little animal icons. You could heave sensors for plants, structures, minerals. Diffrent levels of sensors would provide more detail and so on. so rahter then walk around a planet look for new species you use your survery vessel to fly low over the planet and use sensors and drones to detect and capture species for analysis or storage.

This way you could explore locations with hostile environments that a person couldn''t land on.

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"Fate and Destiny only give you the opportunity the rest you have to do on your own."
Current Design project: Ambitions Slave

Good thinking. I''m imagining this as being something like riding Flammie in Secret of Mana. You fly around and around, but you can only "land" in select locations. Once you''re down, maybe you can use the land vehicles, but you could optimize this by making the maximum range of the terrestrial vehicles just long enough to reach the edges of the "zoomed in" parts, and then require the ship to beam you back to the launch tube or whatever.

Or you could have the cities and significant regions done in detail, and make the rest of the globe into a fractal landscape. You can tool around forever in the fractal deserts and mountains of Mars, but "mapped locations" would be nested at important points on the surface.

Desolate planets would be just the ticket for this sort of thing. Optimally, I''d like to see an area so big that you could travel around it for days and days and still not find all the neat stuff.

There was an old flight simulator called "A-10 Attack!" that had some 10,000 square miles of Germany mapped in. You could fly around forever, finding little "easter eggs" and following rivers around, but you''d never really have to deal with more than a little bit of it at a time for missions. There were whole cities (simplistic ones, obviously) and airfields that never factored into the game, but if you had a map of Germany you could figure out what they were and amuse yourself by bombing the hell out of them.

Don''t know if this will help any, but even on some modern tankers they require the use of vehicles to get from one end to the other. If your ship is large enough, this is an option as well. It might even add a dimension of time/fuel management to your sim.

ld

In terms of the original question, I would agree if and only if the game in question is rigid. For example, I used to play Interstate ''76 and enjoyed the mission structure immensely, but in my opinion it would have been an even more awesome game if the landscape had allowed a more free-roaming structure.

This is tangential, but conceptually related: Some friends and I played Xbox all weekend. Three games dominated: KOTOR (only when everyone else was out of ''box juice), DnD Heroes, and Hunter: The Reckoning. DnD Heroes, however, ended up being the game that we played for pretty much all of day 2. Why? Because it''s not a game where the designer is getting in your face with GAME DESIGN. Rather, you can choose to cheat or not cheat, scale the diff up or down, drop in and out at random, etc. So in my experience the non-rigid game is best for hotseat multiplay. For online multiplay and single-player, the spectrum is considerably wider, but for my dollar they''re probably the most fun.

ld

all the gameplay you can get is essential. Think about Duke Nukem 3d and its "non-essential" gameplay. Did you have to flush to toilets ? no, but it was fun and gave you a little health. or the pool table, or the strippers. IMO, all gameplay you can get is essential. However, if you are squished for time, then I could see why only adding relevant gameplay would be necessary.

You might want to check out http://anywherebb.com/noctis.html
You can explore virtually endless space, land on and explore randomly generated planets, some with vegetation and wildlife.

-Madgap

Man, ghehe Wav - O - Rama lol, youre making some progress arent you man, im jealous !

My opinion on this would to if it aint essential limit it, I had the same problem I was like hey when my people invent this and that, they make a spacecraft, then I have to make a whole galaxy to roam in and make those planets, as detailed as this one. STOP... ghehe.

I would say to limit it, like Universal Combat does, you can land on some planets and there are some vehicles that are just neccesary nothing more. And remember it would always be a nice extra, it wont cost ya points it would always make for more.. So what ever you do in this you cant go wrong from my view.. Good luck !