Let's keep the thread focused on the topic of discussion, please. I understand differences in communication style and the friction that may generate between participants, and generally speaking a little poke here and there isn't going to hurt anyone, but let's resolve these things to differences of personality and tread along on the original topic.

Thanks.

Ask your old friends from the "SFB Staff" for a job and maybe funding to get your games made? They're still around, from what I see...Surely *they* can realize how important your ideas are. Heck, Steve Cole regularly writes in his blog, his latest post is...yesterday. Why are you even talking to us and not them/him in the first place?

http://www.starfleetgames.com/

http://federationcommander.blogspot.cz/

Mike, I am of course aware that the SFU is still alive among the retirement sect. There are even occasionally younger people who still take it up, Federation Commander did much to bring even more younger people into it... but it is a very small audience. These people are a generation before computer games, I am one of only a very few my age who are at the level I am within that world. They have absolutely no interest at all in computer games. The games of mine that could be made as a board game would be a "Big Three" version of Axis & Allies. A game like this once actually existed among AH, SFB, and D&D, it was called MegaSupremacy and it was essentially the Rush of the hobbyist gaming industry, It had a rabidly loyal small group of fans that kept it alive, but barely made it even in that gaming world. Today... nobody is going to pay $800-$1000 for "Axis & Allies x20",,, even among the old hobbyist gaming crowd MegaSupremacy was considered "very little game for the money".

Axis & Allies quality games of this scale are not financially feasible to produce. If they were, I certainly would have made one of them through ADB a long time ago.

By the way, if anyone might be interested in taking up SFB those of us who are still around, of course, are always encouraging people to give it a try. There are plenty of very experienced people. Doctors, lawyers, military officers, engineers... anyone still hanging around the ADB website after all these years is genrally a 30+ year vet that knows the entire system inside and out. If you've got a question as a new player... they will LOVE you for being a new player, and ANYONE who answers your question is giving you a very, very good answer to your question. Makes it easier to learn than it would appear.

And, of course, if Babylon 5 is more your speed... well, the SFB Staff made a Babylon 5 game too!!! It's was "our little side hobby". Yeah... We've got just a little bit of experience with this whole space ship thing:-)

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3765/babylon-5-wars

Still doesn't hurt to pitch your idea to them and see what they've got to say. Of course, having a playable videogame prototype that shows the actual idea works would be nice.

Other than that, I don't know what to tell you...if you expect anyone to hand you a 100-man team and 100$ million without telling them what this awesome thing you got even is(btw, I have NO idea what you're even talking about, with the "matrix" and "god simulator" and "Rube" and such, but then again I'm not an expert in game design), it ain't gonna happen. I mean, I remember you are Pirate_Lord, and I remember the thread you made about sports games, and I remember me offering you my help as a programmer to whip out a prototype because I was interested in sports games at the time and was curious, but you dismissed it because you only want to work with a huge team on an AAA game and nothing less. So I went on my way :)

Btw, you really need to take note of what other people are telling you, that is, you are really bad at presenting your ideas. I honestly think that even if you had a team of programmers/artists in your disposal, they still wouldn't be able to understand what it is that you're describing, and you would end up talking down to them because of it. I'm not sure, but I don't think anybody here has any idea what this "special thing" you got even is, how would a game using it would look like. If there *is* something great inside your head man, it sure as hell has a very tough time getting out. :P

If I was talking about sports games it would have been Front Page Sports Football, IKNFL. There is an article on my blog about that. I don't remember what you are talking about, but I would imagine my response was more along the lines of not seeing that as an avenue that would wind up working out. I had tried things like that twice before I "retired" as Pirate Lord. It wasn't coming from the place you are interpreting it as.

In e-mail alert I saw that made me come back here before I go to sleep you had asked if I had any proof that I was actually a member of the staff... I am pretty well known. Almost any SFB player would at least recognize my name. I am in the credits for the game like any other staff member. I am also one of only 5 people given a "Silver Star" for the design phase of the Captain's Edition which is in the Z section of Advanced Missions. I might be most well known for a scenario I wrote in 1989 called "The Orb", which is widely considered to be the "most Star Trek like" scenario in the game. It is also the only "monster" that actually fights you, has an actual AI. Like I said, my "trademark"... "Board Game AI", making games that play themselves. SFB is very complex, The Orb's simple automated rules are, I think, 3 paragraphs... it's considered something of a miracle within SFB. Those 3 paragraphs. But I am probably most well known as "one of the 4 guys who actually worked at TFG". There have been several incarnations of TFG, I worked for former Games Workshop VP John Olsen when he owned TFG.

Just about any SFB player will recognize my name.

Yeah, it just took a bit more time and google-fu to find your name attached to SFB, but I found it, that's why I deleted my post. Apologies.

But again, I don't really know what it is that you're asking here. You claim to have a great thing, an awesome game mechanism that modern computer game designers can't even comprehend, except you can't even give us a half-clear idea of what it is, and asking...what can you do with it if you want to make a computer game? I'd say...probably nothing? You don't have any intention of trying to make a prototype yourself, you don't want to talk about your idea because other people might "run away with it", your connections in the game industry aren't interested in making computer games...no, I don't think anybody is going to come along and give you 100$ million. I mean, you could post your idea in the Classifieds forums and try to gather a hobbyist team to make your idea a reality...but I get the impression you don't *want* to talk about your idea unless someone gives you the keys to a 4-story building filled with professionals ready to do your bidding. I...don't think that's gonna happen. My guess is that this idea of yours, if it truly is great, will remain in your head until you either can learn how to communicate it properly, or someone else that can comes up with the same idea, or similar.

I know those things Mike, that's why I gave up 8 years ago. But now, as you see, I did get the answer I was looking for. I'm going to do what JBAdams suggested and make a prototype of the cold war game as a board game. Apparently that would be an acceptable prototype, he says it's even been done that way before. That works great for me, I know exactly how to do that. That is easy. I am probably 6 months away from having a complete version since I can't work on it 10 hours a day to do it in three months from where I already am, but I can definitely do that. So that is what I am going to do.

And I have communicated my ideas quite well in the 800 or so pages all of the documents related to the PDU so far represent. I am pretty good at this design document thing, I've been doing it for quite a while now and ours were, necessarily I would think everyone would understand, far more complete than yours.

"You won't be there when the gamer opens the box. Everything they need to work it all out by themselves has to be in the box." is an old mantra of our game industry that everyone had heard at least once.

And I have communicated my ideas quite well in the 800 or so pages all of the documents related to the PDU so far represent.

Here's a simple truth for you that you won't want to hear, Kavik Kang:

Ideas are the cheapest commodity in the entire games industry. They are almost worthless. They are the easy bit.

Getting ideas implemented is hard. You seem to me to lack even the interpersonal skills to make this happen, never mind the technical ability.

See, if I understand correctly, what he claims to have is a concrete mechanism that generates awesome game play, not just an "idea".

Say, a set of strict, well-defined, codified rules for space dogfights, where you feed it the positions and states of all the ships involved, and the actions the player initiates in one step, and this mechanism generates the next steps, and the next steps, and so on, which result in the most awesome space dogfight you've ever seen and makes every other computer game look super dumb. It doesn't just generate "realistic" responses from the other ships, it generates a whole world state which is *fun* to play at every step. Awesome, awesome stuff.

I mean, it's indeed true that's what game "AI" is supposed to be really, a set of rules that generate coherent, interesting and exciting world states based on player input. That's what every game that implements space dogfight has, Kavik just claims his mechanism makes all others obsolete.

If what he has indeed works, it would indeed be awesome. The problem is, he's the only one that vouches that it works. In practice, it wouldn't be too hard to demonstrate that this mechanism/ruleset he has is indeed able to generate awesome play. It's not necessary to build a whole AAA game to do that. Distill it to its most simple form. 4 triangle-shaped ships in a playfield, equipped with, say, shields, machineguns, rockets and homing missiles. One of them is player-controlled, the rest are bots. Have Kavik explain his mechanism to a coder, the coder puts it in the computer, and when played, the program gives you the most awesome dogfight experience you've ever seen in a computer game. That's what he says he has. Something you've never seen before. It's that simple. No bells and whistles required to show how awesome it is and how different from any other game. Get people hooked based on that prototype, and continue. It's dead simple, really. It would take an intermediate coder a week, tops, since Kavik has already codified the mechanism and all you need is to translate it to C++ or Python or another programming language.

The thing is, can anyone imagine Kavik Kang trying to describe this mechanism to a coder that would actually turn this mechanism into a computer game? :D

At this point, he might as well claim he's got a way to make a cold fusion reactor(or...perpetual motion machine), if he can't communicate the core of his mechanism clearly and keeps getting lost in irrelevant crap, like the history of his childhood and talking down to people for no reason, that mechanism is not going to get made. Unless he makes it himself. Or the "idea" isn't even good and there's nothing to make in the first place. Or it's already been made. Or who knows.

But anyway, Kavik Kang, if you want my advice, do exactly that. Hire a programmer for 2 weeks to whip out a dogfighting prototype in Unity(after having them sign an NDA), using your awesome mechanism, which will result in awesome dogfight game play never seen before, which will result in people seeing your idea works in practice and start taking you seriously because "hey, this guy might actually have something there after all". You've already codified the mechanism, I assume, so the coder's job is dead simple. You don't have to simulate the entire universe for starters, just a dogfight.