What if we created a singleplayer world that was actually active all the time, whether the player participated or not. Sort of like in the Thirteenth Floor. The NPCs lived out their lives, civilization went on as normal, and you could choose to look around and see what's happening, or just let things evolve on your own. For instance, you could kill the king. Then later, you load up the game again, and see what's happened. Has the kingdom collapsed? Have the lords been battling for power? Or has some other kingdom decided to attack? --- P.S. This post was inspired by watching "The 13th Floor". A lot of times, movies inspire new game ideas ("Aliens" and DOOM, for example). - DarkMage139 ++++++++++++++++ I can do things, things you never knew, I can change your world if you only knew. I can do miracles if you want me to. Anything is possible, I'll prove it to you. Edited by - DarkMage139 on 8/13/00 10:16:29 PM

nice idea,
but i don''t want to be the guy that programs the AI...
and also, u''d have to leave task running while doing diffrent stuff. (Could be a performance costing task!)
That''s just my opinion and i''m a programmer. At least that''s what i call myself *g*

cya,
Phil

Visit Rarebyte!
and no!, there are NO kangaroos in Austria (I got this questions a few times over in the states ;)

Cool idea i must say, definitley an AI nightmare. Just plop in a few civilizations and let it run, and see what happens. Of course there are endless possibilities to what you could model. Would each civ have a tech tree? Will they have to learn to make their tools from trees and rocks, then from ore or something? How far could they advance? Talk about a big project. What if AI was someday so advanced, that you would model humans, model the elements on earth, model the environment world-wide, and model space as we know it today, and let the people advance themselves. Perhaps they would evolve so differently that we could watch them solve problems and possibly even solve our problems. Maybe they could think of some newer and more efficient ways of doing things that we havent thought of, like finding alternative energy sources, or more efficient methods of travel, who knows. Like a quantum reality i guess, but only in the computer.

That''s a wild idea. You mean the game''s actions will continue even when you''re not playing it?

I''ve got to check out that movie soon...that and Fight Club.



"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." --William Blake

"The road of excess also just ends up making me tired because I'm too lazy" --Nazrix

hmm... sounds cool except that the user would have to wait a min. for the saved game to load just to calculate the changes that took place while they were away... either that or make it one of those mmorpg''s. that would be very cool, like someone had said earlier, the npc would move about and there would be a delay of one of your actions affecting others by when they see the action.

ack! i''d finish my thoughts but i''m tired and i''m going to bed!



-mike


(btw sorry, i''ve never seen the Thirteenth Floor)

Believe it or not, this has been done!

Not by me, of course, and not as a game. Some guys at MIT or somewheres made this little virtual universe, and ran it on a huge supercomputer for a month(24/7 nonstop). It was full 3D, and they made it have different types of objects in the world, like plant,animal, and human life. They made an entire food chain and stuff, so everything interacted, and when they checked back, the world had grown from 100 meters by 100 meters to 1000000 by 1000000, and their animal life had evolved to have 53 separate species. I read about this in a Popular Science issue a while back. I don''t remember the rest of the details, but I remember that their computer crashed from memory overlow, even though it had like 2 gigs of RAM.

Yeah, well I wouldn''t make a 3d game with that AI (not in the next 20 years at least! ). I''m thinking tiled, and the game takes place on a large island (that limits expansion, etc.)

Of course, the AI algorithm should be interesting...

- DarkMage139
++++++++++++++++
I can do things, things you never knew,
I can change your world if you only knew.

I can do miracles if you want me to.
Anything is possible, I'll prove it to you.

Of course, there aren''t going to be that many cities. Keep in mind, a small town in the United States is about the size of large medieval city.

I could test out the algorithms on one town first, and see how it all works out. And then, I''ll see if works on larger towns, etc...

Oh well, I always though AI was an interesting subject. This should be a good test of my skills...

- DarkMage139
++++++++++++++++
I can do things, things you never knew,
I can change your world if you only knew.

I can do miracles if you want me to.
Anything is possible, I'll prove it to you.

That is one fortunate thing that we can all be happy about... Yay, it isn''t too CPU or memory intensive to have a resonable medieval world! YAY!

-Chris Bennett ("Insanity" of Dwarfsoft)

Check our site:
http://www.crosswinds.net/~dwarfsoft/
Check out our NPC AI Mailing List :
http://www.egroups.com/group/NPCAI/
made due to popular demand here at GDNet :)