A hair brained scheme i''ve been thinking about for online games is to have online games that are different but effect each other. Think of Sim City and Carmageddon, what if you had a online type of sim city game with players playing against each other which was effecting the game world of another game like an online carmageddon or what not. That''d be pretty neat i think. I love Game Design and it loves me back. Our Goal is "Fun"!

Hahaha. Cool. So gamers create content for each other, just in the normal course of play. I like it.

You would have a problem, of course, in making sure you created the right content. If you''re playing Sim City and I start mowing down ALL your pedestrians, you''ve got a problem. Aside from that, you''ve got time scale differences, data differences, when and how often people play.... jeeze, I wouldn''t wanna fund it, but it''d be cool to play it...



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Just waiting for the mothership...

I like ...

One challenge would be the updating, though... take your example, with sim-city and carmageddon... updating of the city couldn''t happen real-time, because (besides buildings popping up right in front of where you drive) a player may end up driving down a road, then right in the middle of a building (not real fun...)

Of course, if you made it so the carmageddon-type game updated only the area of the city where the player wasn''t in, (that is, if it assumed the current area stayed the same, but checked for outside areas regardless of whether they were in cache or not) maybe it could work.

Or if you only loaded a new carmageddon map during initially joining the game...

I''m sure someone can think of a conjunction of games that doesn''t need to avoid this kind of interference...


I know I saw a game for SimCity2000 where you could drive and fly through your cities by reading the sim files... but it wasn''t online.

I would love to see SimCity3000 or the Sims online, by themselves, even... you''d get to meet the neighbors and all...

"Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be."
        --William Hazlitt

I kinda like that idea... especially blowing up the road and muilding a big office tower right in front of the driver doing 150km/h

Well, it'd take quite a good design to make that kind of thing fun - especially playing the "manipulated" game.


- JQ
pmjordan@gmx.at

lead programmer,
PWC Software


Edited by - JonnyQuest on August 16, 2000 7:29:02 PM

It could be done in many ways. Another one could be an online RTS combined with a FPS. One player starts a RTS and the other players can join in either from the RTS level or go into the game as a hero on one side and play it from a FPS level.

I love Game Design and it loves me back.

Our Goal is "Fun"!

Isn''t that Microsoft game Allegiance supposed to be like this? A couple of guys are playing a space RTS, but the units are actually players in FPS ships. Haven''t played it (being as I''m stuck on a P233 for now ) but I heard that you can''t really win if your side doesn''t have a commander and the other side does.

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Just waiting for the mothership...

Do any of you guys remember ZZT? That was a pretty good game based on a fairly good scripting language. If you haven''t heard of ZZT, then maybe Unreal will do.

Anyways, what if the game that was created was like this massive world. A player that joined this would could create their own world and/or join in another world(s). The player would create the world with a powerful and general script. The worlds would be joined by a sorta middle world with portals to all the different worlds. Then people could jump portals and people from the Super Mario 64 world could go to the Star Fox 64 world and jump on Andross. Players making their worlds could ban certain worlds in order to prevent Doom dudes coming in and blasting their buildings.

Like I said before, the script must be balanced so that somebody doesn''t create a world for the sole purpose of creating a super weapon and blowing up simcity...

Just tossing out my ( ( 2*sin(5) ) / (The Meaning of Life) ) cents.

-Blackstream

"See you later, I'm going to go grab a few Bytes. I'm so thirsty, I could drink a whole data stream."

quote: Original post by Paul Cunningham

It could be done in many ways. Another one could be an online RTS combined with a FPS. One player starts a RTS and the other players can join in either from the RTS level or go into the game as a hero on one side and play it from a FPS level.

Isn''t this kind of what Team Fortress 2 will do? One player views the action as a kind of RTS, where he can see all the action from a strategic point of view, and hands out orders. The other players are playing a FPS.

In this kind of cross-genre situation, would you be trying to set up competition between the two sets of players, or have them co-exist "peacefully"? The second of these options is a nice idea, but I know if I was building a city that was going to have a load of lunatics driving round in it, i''d do my best to put everything I could in their way to spoil their fun.

Neil

Imagine this on a really grand scale where the playing are is a whole world.

Some player plays as Kings (civilization-style). Some plays as Mayors (simcity-style) and some player plays as Generals (RTS-style). The Generals may have some number of Officers under them, right down to the players playing as foot-soldiers (FPS-style).

I think it could be really fun. But the internet connections isn''t fast enough to accomplish this quite yet I think.

Regards

nicba

One other (small) problem is time-scale, since it seems that what would be "just right" to the FPS player would be slow-paced to the RTS player.

Trying to explain this is kind of hard if that last sentence didn''t explain itself. It has something to do w/ the amount of "brain time" vs. "hand time" (can''t think of better terms at the moment), or the number of inputs per unit of time. Even though FPS players expect more inputs per minute than an RTS player, with less thought in between inputs; if the RTS player is controlling entire squads, (side note: how would the RTS player "control" a squad w/ autonomous units? not really a problem, just interesting) he/she will be issuing an order, then simply waiting for the real-time FPS players to carry it out.

Imagine if in Warcraft, (sorry, last RTS game I''ve played) you had to wait for an entire deathmatch to resolve itself *every time* you issued an order!? I think you can see the problem, and this is why RTS employs drastically simplified combat models. I''m interested in seeing solutions to this, since a game like this would just rock my socks, if done well.

BTW, I know the above RTS/FPS isn''t Paul''s original idea, but the conversation seems to have drifted this way. On the Sim/Arcade idea, I see no problem and it could be SWEET! The update issue could be solved "the old-fashioned way" like BBS'', where there was quite a delay between updates, sometimes an hour, sometimes a day. Players might gripe, but if you had a scheduled half hour of downtime every night at, say 2AM in the server''s local time zone while you udated, you wouldn''t have problems w/ buildings sprouting in the middle of the street. Of course, as has been mentioned, making it into a real-time competition between builders and destroyers could be alot of fun if balanced.