I'll just get started by saying that I'm not a programmer, just a gamer. I know my idea is very large scale and would probably require Squaresoft style rescources, but here it is anyway... Just to warn you it's very long Wouldn't it be cool to have an RPG in a galaxy setting, with 5 different planets you can visit within that setting? In this galaxy would be two suns, a red giant and a white quasar that cycled at a different rate than the giant. The game would be very rich in depth and have very detailed overhead and first person 3D graphics. At the beginning you could pick out your main character from one of 3 planets. The first planet would be a large world consisting mainly of water, with small tropical islands scattered throughout vast seas. It would be mildly populated with small humanoid/alien tribes and filled with exotic plants and animals. The tribes would be primitive yet technologically advanced, with high speed water craft to get from island to island and solar power generators to fuel machinery. The aliens would live in accommodations that resembled dome like green houses, with antennas and solar panels attached to their roofs. They would also be a peaceful people that coincided with their fellow beings and the laws of nature. On this planet you would start out as a 20 year old tech student who used mechanical bracelets that worked with nano-bots to heal, perform special tasks, and fight if needed. The second planet would be small and desert-like, consisting of ice plains and black sand valleys with small patches of tall grass scattered throughout. It would be populated with two races of humanoid creatures, the sand dwellers and the ice dwellers, both being quite similar exept for certain facial features. There would be a few small camps and villages in the desert area, left over from a recent resource war with the ice dwellers. The ice dwellers on the other hand, would live high above the deserts on top of harsh weathered mountains. Their living quarters would consist of high rising, dark metal towers covered in circuitry and flashing lights. The tops of the towers would have protruding antennas and dishes for communication with crafts from outer-space. On this planet you would start out as a disgraced 40 year old war veteran, who lost his family and his home to the ice dwellers. He would live in a ram shackled camp on the edge of a desert valley, practicing the use of various projectile and sword-like weapons and vowing revenge on the ice dwellers. The third planet would be a gas giant, filled with hovering cities that stayed afloat with magnetic propulsion systems. The people would be ancestors of an advanced race who abandoned their planet after it collided with a large meteor. The cities would consist of agricultural domes and enclosed alloy metropolis areas for civilians to live. People would travel to and from the areas with various space craft, which were fueled by condensed forms of the surrounding gasses. The civilians would have no special abilities, but the upper class would be infused with special bio-technology that produced magic like effects called "combat energy". On this planet you would start as a 17 year old female who was the daughter of a rich upper class member of the metropolis. She would have the ability to absorb energy from beings and objects, and convert it into different types of combat energy. Her goal would be to find out what happened to the planet after her ancestors left it behind, and visit it if possible. The only problem she would have is her restricting father, who is the guardsman for the supreme ruler of the floating cities. He is set on watching her every move to keep the family in line, and to make a good impression on the ruler. The other two planets would be in the far reaches of the galaxy and have little known about them, other than one is black as night and home to a mysterious alien race, and the other is thought to be inhabitable due to extreme conditions. The characters would come together by chance after a serious threat is posed to the galaxy by the mysterious race, and others in working secretly with them (the supreme ruler and the ice dwellers). They would meet as part of an inter galactic army gathered from a remote space station in a far away nebula. It would start by an emergency transmission signal sent out to all habitable planets in the galaxy. The signal would ask for all willing beings to join forces in an operation to save their lives, and the sanctity of the galaxy. When the characters volunteer to help the efforts and leave their home worlds, they learn that the enemy's are planning to take all the resources of the galaxy and destroy it when they are finished. This game could have a battle system much like Final Fantasy, or possibly a real time system like Legend of Mana or Drakan. It would also have a diverse selection of weapons, magic and other tools of variable strength. Characters could level up as they kill villains, and would buy or steal items and weapons from shops, enemy's and other places like houses, containers and the like. The characters could also learn how to pilot different space craft in Wing Commander style, and be able to fly to other planets and fight with their crafts. The pilots would use radar to find their destinations, then piont the craft in that position and set hyperspeed. You would be able to see the planet grow closer as you flew towards it, and when you arrived, you could pilot the craft directly into the atmosphere and land at a docking bay or any place that look decent on the planet. Of course sometimes on your way to a destination, you would be stopped by various enemy space craft and have to fend them off or escape in order to proceed. You could also land on certain disabled enemy craft if you were careful when you attacked (like freightors or stock vessles) and walk inside them to loot or gain information (like enemy interception paths ect.). I suppose you could also use boats and land vehicles the same way on planets as well. It would also be nice if there were moons near some of the planets, with very little or no life, but you could land on them and explore with proper space suits for juicy tidbits and subquests. The game could also be linear yet freestyle in it's approach... A somewhat daunting task of course Anyway this is what I have right now, it's definitely not complete but it could work as a very innovative new game in retrospect to the RPG genre. Is this a good idea? Edited by - Cranium-Ticker on September 4, 2001 3:11:09 AM

Welp, since you''re one of those rare souls suggesting something other than yet another medieval cRPG (and a space one, too!) you''re forever welcome in my house!!

Something like this would be cool, but its major problem would be scale and graphics standards. Now that people expect all of this to be in real time, 3D, with thousands of texture maps, voice overs, and sound FX, it''s nearly impossible. It has to be tied to a major license like Star Trek or Star Wars, and usually that means that gameplay is reduced to the lowest common denominator: combat. So you''d have this big, huge, beautiful galaxy where you could only... kill everybody...

I''m a fan of old school games like Star Flight and Sentinel Worlds, which had a lot of the kind of atmosphere you''re talking about. Starflight got away with 200 stars and 800 planets (almost all which you could land on), and 7 alien races, all on 2 floppies! But they did it with EGA / CGA graphics, and icons. IOW, you were expected to use your imagination (and that''s all they had).

I think the only way something like this could be done at all is if it were done more simply. (At least, that''s some of what I''m trying to do, using an RTS engine... I''m not willing to wait for Squaresoft )



--------------------
Just waiting for the mothership...

HEY! WHATS WRONG WITH MIDEVIL RPGS? lol. I do believe this would be one of the greatest games ever made, and I agree, SqaureSoft(if they could even do it) would be needed to make it. I have to say I skimmed your idea, so if I bring anything up here that was already written down, then forgive me:

Have many different availible spaceships, the more money you have, the better one you can buy.

Have a trading market, like space merchants, this way you can take stuff from one planet to another, and be paid to do it.

Have space pirates.

Have clans you can join for protection, and more action in the game, since some clans don''t like others.

I am a writer/designer, and I have to say this idea caught my attention quickly. If you ever get a team going, please, email me. I would love to be part of this creation process.

bg_darkelf@hotmail.com

I may be busy for the next week, but after that I should be free. I have been wanting to make a game using the stuff I just mentioned to you, for a long time now, and your idea fits the topics pretty well. So, if and when you get a team, be sure to email me.


"I''ve sparred with creatures from the nine hells themselves... I barely plan on breaking a sweat here, today."~Drizzt Do''Urden

Well, I''m gonna do some advertising :p

I''m working on a game called Hypernovae, that will be a MMOG, and is inspired by ELITE.

I suppose some of you see what I mean, for others, let me just tell that the game allows you to do plenty of things, including finding you technologies, becoming a pirate, creating a manufacturing firm, piloting in deep space, creating Giants Warp gates to allow instantaneous space travel, using ship hyperdrive to do something equivalent (but a bit different, you''ll see), ...

The game will have a persistant universe, and all players will play together (no sucky ''worlds'').

We are a little team working on it, I''m not THE game designer, as all the team work together, but I''m influencing the game design and leading the team.

I expect the first screens to be available in... sometimes in the future
sorry cannot be more precise.


Since this game don''t match that proposition, I can propose you the 3D engine (licencing is to be discussed, it''ll be free of course, but I don''t want its code to be public).

Also the idea seems great but modeling an entire planet is impossible at the time, the best would be to make the players explore the planets, so you can reveal new areas as they are designed.

-* So many things to do, so little time to spend. *-

Hmm, good responses.. I really didn''t think it could be done in such vast detail actually, but possibly in a linear fashion. Lets say for instance the space craft piloting, you would fly around a small area of 3D cyberspace until you hit hyperspeed. When hyperspeed is set, it automatically takes a few frames of the space crafts position, view ect. and loops it in memory while the next scene loads. This would create the effect of fluidity while loading the next sequence. Hyperspeed would also be a basically uncontrollable scene, where you just watched your ship come towards a planet or destination in a smaller 3D environment. If enemy ships approached while you were in hyperspeed, the same frame loop would occur then suddenly your ship would slow down in another small area of 3D space when it was done loading. A planet could still be a parallax in the background as you fought. When you came towards a planet the thruster''s would automatically power down and a frame loop would occur as the world sequence loaded. Then you could fly into the atmosphere and be in a linear setting, like maybe only being able to land in certain areas or on specific docking bays. The worlds could be constructed much like the workings of the Final Fantasy 8 airship sequence, where the terrain looked decent but wasn''t overly detailed. I suppose the same sort of linearity could work for other things as well, like where you can go and how far in towns or landscapes. The story could also be told mainly in text, with a few sound bytes here and there at important scenes. Of course since I''m not a programmer I have no idea how the mechanics of such things work, but logically it seems possible given the right game engine and such. Maybe it could be kind of like realistic anime or something (like the upcoming Xenosaga). To tell you the truth I don''t actually have a clue about making video games or starting a production team, I just had an idea and figured it sounded good enough to hear what others thought of it. Right now my idea is completely beta and I don''t even have a complete story down, but I would be interested in seeing a game like this take shape... Given I could find enough time, resources and creativity to keep the whole thing moving as I plodded along and learned the basics. Heh, I guess I''m just a simple gamer who has big ideas but only a small canvas and limited skill to work with

I read the whole thing. I think you have great ideas for the different planets, and I also like your characters a lot. This is a great idea for a game. What particularly caught my interest was the vast amounts of worlds required and your mention of things like actually flying into and landing on planets. I''ve been considering things like this myself quite a bit. I''ve recently developed an interest in procedural world development. Not simply for terrain, but even more complex things like cities, buildings, plant and animal life, etc.
At some point (as we are witnessing with games like Star Wars Galaxies, now currently delayed until the end of 2002, which really means the middle of 2003), in order to keep making the worlds bigger and bigger the development time is going to shoot through the roof, or the costs for staff will.
Atleast the partial answer is to have as much of the common material in the game world generated for you, so the dev teams can focus more on the particulars. If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. If you want to walk around in a creepy forest a programmer shouldn''t have to model every tree.. When someone smart with a good algorithm could do the whole thing much easier.. and have the technology applicable to other scenes or settings. That same modeler could have his time much better spent on making the impressive state-of-texas sized super battle ship that much cooler.
Of course much respect must be given to Elite for this kind of idea. Seems like with the new technology and bigger budget available to games these days we could make a similar increase in the level of detail of these types of universes.

just make it a 2D Game (www.tibia.org) and go for it

I once read a short sci-fi called Heavy Planet . It was actually a speculative fantasy on Jupiter, a heavy, dense world of which very little was known at the time. Due to the prevalent knowledge then, the author supposed that the natives of Heavy Planet would be powerfully built, possessing thick skin (as much to protect them from the UV radiation seeping through their thin atmosphere as to shield their internals from the atmospheric pressure). Also, the planet was envisaged as being mostly aquatic, so the people had scales like fish and were powerful swimmers.

In the story a ship from another planet, which we infer is earth, crashes onto the surface of Heavy Planet. Naturally, it lands in the water. Because of the immense atmospheric pressure the walls of the ship become malleable - for those who''re still alive. The pressure was too much for the humans in the ship who were crushed instantaneously. And so forth.

What I''m pointing out is the interplay of atmospheric factors on development and ''restrictions'' which become an integral part of gameplay. If you know that you can survive an environment but the enemies in pursuit can''t then that environment becomes an effective hiding place - maybe even a base of operations. At least, until your enemies get their hands on some technology that allows them to deal as well.

Just a few thoughts.

There is a game coming out in a few months called Freelancer, by Digital Anvil and Microsoft. It's not exactly an RPG but it's got a few of the better elemnts from my game idea. Looks like it will be a great game: http://www.microsoft.com/games/home/games.asp?g=122

Edited by - Cranium-Ticker on September 5, 2001 1:25:38 AM

I won't support M$ monopolistic and illegal behavior.

Compared to the project I'm working on this game seems unintersting and without appeal, compared to the project of this thread it also seems less interesting.
New trailer is interesting, but as everyone knows that doesn't show the game as it'll really be, and that doesn't show gameplay at all.


-* So many things to do, so little time to spend. *-


Edited by - Ingenu on September 5, 2001 4:52:36 AM