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Original post by Airhead Zoom
Krez - Good point! I think this Internet idea could really work. Just have some bulletin boards on which the players can post jobs and a chat-system to bargain about the deal.
A possible problem with this is that there''s no challenge involved in finding the juicy missions. In reality, I would think that''d be unlikely that the board for a station would be available anywhere in the universe.
In much the same way as I can''t go on TV and tell everyone that I''ve lost my watch and has anyone seen it, you shouldn''t be able to broadcast just anything to the universe.
Chances are that it''d cost you a lot of money to post something to a universal board, and most people would need to post to a local board. If local boards are used, we might have spam problems if you can post to every board in the game from anywhere, so we''d want to restrict who can post to a local board based upon location.
There may also be bandwidth issues. With millions of planets, and potentionally trillions of board messages on each planet, you''d need amazing bandwidth to transfer all that around and still have enough left for live videophone (or holophone, even) communications between millions of people. In reality, we would expect to see DOS attacks that force entire planets off the Galactinet (for want of a better name). Perhaps, of course, that could be a feature of the game.
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Jonpolly - Good that you noticed, but if the game has user-defined (and some pre-created) maps, the universe can be big on servers with many players and small on servers with only a few players. IMHO this is a must anyway since most popular games have more than one map to play on.
On the whole, I believe that Elite''s systems were randomly generated. Systems near Earth, and systems of particular interest were explicitly created, but most of them were made up at runtime (although they were always the same, of course).
I figure that most of the systems on the map don''t need to be pre-created: there are various programs around that can simulate accretion of planetary systems, so its a snip to read up on the topic and rustle up some systems at random.
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I don''t agree on using the old Elite''s graphics style. ...most modern gamers expect at high quality graphics...emulate the Elite graphics by setting a low detail mode of the models...
There are a few features of Elite''s grahpics that haven''t been matched by any other games I''ve played, like the atmosphere (with day/light effects and a primitive simulation of Raleigh scattering) and the ringed planets that I''m crazy about.
I don''t see any particular need to limit ourselves in terms of graphics. A good idea might be to provide a couple (or more) different ''renderers'' so people with a less powerful computer could use a low-power renderer designed to look good with less detail (low-detail mode on FreeSpace, for example, manages to look worse than Frontier on my computer).
A feature of Elite that I particularly liked was that a ship got replaced by a blob when it was too far away to see. That''s a nice feature that I think a real spaceship would have.
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Original post by jonpolly99
Space stations, both planet bound and in orbit had a wide range of features in the original game
Planetbound is an important point, I think. With our nice new flashy graphics for spacestations and ships, we''d be instantly let down if we had featureless spheres for planets. We need somebody who knows about ROAM and fBM in order to make a decent-enough planet.
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- 1) You can buy/sell ships and ship parts, including engines, weapons, detection equipment, shields, crew cabins etc.
Some generic categories...
Generator. A source of power. Might be a reactor, a battery, a transducer (of light or gravity), or something more exotic.
Drive. Something that moves you. Might be reaction-based (like a jet engine), or reaction-less (like a hypothetic ''warp'' drive).
Capacitor. Something that stores power from the generator. Allows us to legitimately limit the use of powerful weapons.
Weapons. Something that kills people. Might be a projectile, beam, missile, some kind of field, or something more exotic.
Shields. Something that protects you. Might be kinetic (protects against projectiles), reflective (protects against lasers), gravitational (protects against almost anything) or active (protects against almost anything and can adapt to the situation).
Cabins. Something that contains people. Might be for crew members, passengers, prisoners or slaves. You might also have a sick bay, galley or lounge. If you have a passenger ship, you might also have a cinema, casino, basebal court, etc.
Computer. Something that controls your ship. You need a computer to run computer programs: which may include the autonav or autofighter. More powerful programs require a more powerful computer.
Storage Unit. Something contains something. You might have different units for storing solids, liquids and gases. Certain commodities might have special environmental requirements. To store those you would need a more expensive storage unit.
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2) You can post messages. Players should be able to post messages to each other, transfer money for services, refuse to pay for jobs not well done etc. etc.- this is quite a hard bit, each station will need its own message board, the message should indicate if the player is in the station or not (more likely not), the message should have a life span (set by the player?), there should be some payment transfer method or equipment transfer method- and the players need to be able to talk to each other directly.
An idea I had for my game was that each ''empire'' could have a different currency. If you go into enemy territory, then it''s unlikely that you could use a certain currency.
I also though about allowing the player to open accounts with different banks. Some banks might be the equivalent of the now legendary Swiss banks: if police seize your assets for some illegal activity, your Swiss account might be safe.
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Also, another problem - if you make your universe too big and people it with NPCs, then how likely is it that more than 2 players will ever be in the same place at the same time!
We can expect most player interaction to take place around planets. To limit the planets that players can visit, we might want to invent a catastrophy that occured just before the game begins, which limited the planets you could go to.
The jumpgate network might have been sent offline in the time of the last Collision, say, and we''re waiting for activiation messages (which had to be sent at lightspeed because the jumpgate network is the backbone of ftl travel) to reach each gate.
That allows us to select a few systems that are available at the beginning of the game, and gradually open up other systems as the game progresses (and, hopefully, more players join).
All your bases belong to us (I know. It''s irony.)
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