quote:Original post by Nomax5 Once you find your target and make the hit then perhaps you could become someone elses target, that would be interesting.
I''m working on something similar to that. You kill someone and their friends and family are after you. How they get you depends on their character. Maybe they''ll look you up in the phone book and invite you to a wide open space beneath a clock tower. Gee, I hadn''t thought of that before! =D HAHAHAHAHA
- Jay
"Strictly speaking, there is no need to teach the student, because the student himself is Buddha, even though he may not be aware of it." - Shunryu Suzuki
Another cool idea that would help this is that certain NPCs would have a trust factor towards the main character. For example, you want to make a hit on a big ringleader of a gang. He is well protected, and the only way you''re gonna do it is to get inside the gang HQ. So you talk to a low-level guard of the place and eventually become friends with him (this would take maybe 20-30 mins to do certain things to get his trust) and then he tells you that the boss needs information on something. So you have a choice on how to proceed:
a. Give the guard the info and convince him to let you inside. b. Give the guard false info (this is risky, and use it only when necessary) in order to lure the boss into a trap. This would work only if the trust level is very high. c. Just tell the guard that you couldn''t get the info; it was too difficult, and your trust level would stay the same, but it would take awhile to get another offer. d. Blow the guard off (because you said you would get the info and didn''t) and never see him again, and he would likely tell all of the other guards to watch out, and then you would have a much tougher time.
I like the idea of factions (maybe about 12), in which in the beginning of the game you pick one, and all of the factions randomly get allied/opposed so that if you make a hit against a faction, all of that factions allies will like you less, but factions opposed to that faction would praise you. Of course, not all the hits would be faction related, it would just add some intrigue.
One thing I''m curious about would be the combat system. How exactly would you kill a target? A sniper scope view in 1st person?
a few things to keep in mind: 1. someone mentioned the use of a 3d accelerator as a way to update the npc state map quickly. this is fool hardy and cant be done. it would be slower then leaving it in sysmtem ram simply because the accelerator offers no per pixel advantage and is slower to read from compared to normal system memory.
2. a nice idea, but like proven with gta and gta2, there needs to be a story component for things to be successful. gta3 had this component and is the reason its much more popular then the previous incarnations. nothign wrong with random missions, but a story that helps link some missions together (ie a campagin) is quite helpful to keep the player playing.
3. since you have to handle not only the cityscape, but the inside of structures, you will run into some problems with storage. ff XI uses 4.9 gig of storage for its world, i am not sure how detailed things are, but it gives you a rough estimate of how much data you may need to store.
4. creating the actual inside of the structures might be complex, but some sort of replicator system could be used. since most rooms in apartments look the same, with only different furniture, wall colorings, items, etc. you could create entire buildings by only modeling a few rooms, then smartly randomly placing furnitire/items in rooms. important places like bars, hideouts, your home, target homes, etc could be done by hand allowing that artistic touch required in those instances.
5. unlike gta3, all npc actions become important. if you tail a particular npc, they woudl need to do something during the day otherwise the player may feel a sense of "cheepness" in the game. combating this will be tough since to actual handle the ai for an entire city is very impratical on todays hardware. dont cite gta3 as an example since i am going to use it, heh. in gta3 only npcs and cars on the screen were cared about. if they moved far enough away fomr the player (sometimes just a block or less behind them or around the corner) they were no longer card about thus earsed from existence. if you followed a car, you would notice it a random route. get too far behind the car or miss a turn it makes, and you would lose it forever (you dont know how frusterating it was to get carjacked then chase after the npc to find out it made a single turn and disappeared). important cars did not have this limitation (to a point, since sometimes if they strayed to far, they would go to limbo and you would lose the mission), thus allowing missions to be possible to complete.
6. the size of the city. you say a sprawling city the size of the one shown in eps2 would be ideal. in reality, this is WAY too large. consider that you will have to walk through the city. you will also be exploring bulidings as well. while you could have car dealers or even stealing of cars (i would be careful with having stealing, players may lose focus), the player will still ahve to deal with going through buildings (unless you plan on limiting building access to only certain important locations). the size of one section in gta3 is quite large. add being able to explore each of the buildings, shops, etc present in the game and the size of the play area increase exponetial. keep that in mind when designing your play area.
you should not mention the phrase "if done correctly" in a design forum. its obvious to everyone that if its done correctly that it would be cool. thats true of nearly anything. the whole point of the discussion is to find that way of doing things correctly.
also dont ever forget real world limitations (especially in something this vast), because it leads to dreaming and not creating. we all want to actual play the things that get thought up, so ideas of restrictions that would be acceptable to the player should be brought up as well (i mentioned a few).
