Gameplay, factions, missions, blah blah blah

[Loki999]

[treblig]

So there are two ways to develop a design, top down and bottom up. In a top down way, you decide on a common back story for the world, and then explicate in detail as you get more information. In the bottom up way, you decide how the player needs to interact with each thing in the game, and what options he can do, and what more interesting things can be added as you go.It seems like people are asking for these two different things in various posts. Some people want to explicate the backstory, others want to know what in detail is important about each faction. A lot of game development is about making 'Concept Art', and other ideas that do not actually get put directly in the game, but help communicate to everyone working on the game exactly what direction would be a good one to go towards. That is what 'Top Down' design is for. At this point in the development of a well funded game, engineering should be concentrating on how to represent a wide variety of possible gameplays, and designers would be chatting about blue sky ideas and making pretty pictures to sell the game to the investors or management.So the best idea I have heard so far about how to do this on a low budget is the guy who was thinking of possible mods. Doing the mods FIRST would be the best way to get the game down. If you can do a Star Wars, BattleStar Galactica, Star Trek, and Babylon 5 universe with art changes and some minor scripting changes, then you will have a way to make universes that are more unique, (perhaps more hard science fiction, my personal preference), if only by combining elements of these different science fictional ideas together.***Another point:It seems people are thinking of factions owning planets... but a more detailed view, that a faction owns ships, bases, and other atomic structures, not planets. In this case each AI controlled ship or base has an 'owning faction' that helps determine it's behavior and perhaps look and design. Thus the actual design of a faction's data structures would depend a great deal on how the AI of that faction is supposed to behave, or for a store where things are traded, what things are available and at what price.And a faction need not be 'The Federation', or 'The Empire'. You might have 'Imperial Marine Core' or 'Federation Intelligence' as a faction, but also opens up the possibilities of 'Rigellian Trader Group' or 'Jabba Crime Family' even player controlled or invented factions. In an advanced game, a planet may have a city run by the federation, affecting how commerce works there, and then there might be a Rigellian Trader Group building in the city, that affects how commerce works too. In this way Federation planets could be different from each other. You could get very distinct planets with such an approach, especially if the physical nature of the planet was also represented in the trade and options.

[fluffyfreak]

'treblig' wrote:
It seems like people are asking for these two different things in various posts. Some people want to explicate the backstory, others want to know what in detail is important about each faction. A lot of game development is about making 'Concept Art', and other ideas that do not actually get put directly in the game, but help communicate to everyone working on the game exactly what direction would be a good one to go towards. That is what 'Top Down' design is for. At this point in the development of a well funded game, engineering should be concentrating on how to represent a wide variety of possible gameplays, and designers would be chatting about blue sky ideas and making pretty pictures to sell the game to the investors or management.
There's another way of looking at that, from the programmers point of view, it's called "being-the-shit-filter" <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//sad.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':(' />At this point in a games development the broad phase design is complete, you know what all of the big features are, and you're just implementing them. They should already have been scoped down to what everyone agrees is possible with the tech you have and the designers aren't pitching anything to management, definitely no "blue-sky" ideas, those were for the pitch document you made before planning would have reduced it to what was possible so that you could work towards what would actually be possible so that you could seek funding and get a publisher so that you could _begin_ the development which would then tell what was actually going to be done because you still tried to cram too many features in.Designers, sorry I mean _good_ designers, aren't there to just throw out random ideas and wishy washy dreams. Good ones work with the programmers and the artists to figure out what they can do with what they currently have in a engine or what they could have with extra work. They've worked hard to understand their own ideas, what it's limitations are, where there's things they don't know about it - or how players will find using it - then they will have worked with a programmer and artist to get their opinions. Artists & Programmers do more than sanity check the idea they feedback into it because, if they're equally good at their roles as the good designer, they have significant overlap with designers, they understand the same game from different aspects but should be working to the same goal or vision.Bad ones supply you with jpg images they made in photoshop/MSPaint and then demand you meet their "design", get annoyed when you can't because the laws of physics prevent it (this happened on an MMO I worked on) and blame things on you for your "failure".I've seen both, I do not tolerate the bad kind anymore. I don't mind helping them to become better designers, to communicate with programmers better, or eventually to go over their heads to their leads and get them to do the damned job.Now, the main problem I have with all of the story writing is that none of it so far has contained any gameplay elements. There's been no gameplay design. It's always stories about this race or that race or such-and-such incident in the dim and distant... but there's no description of what you're going to PLAY.The Factions stuff I wrote was just an attempt to add some bare structure, differences between areas, something for scripts to hook into where people can add missions and gameplay. Can add their races and species and allegiances etc.
'treblig' wrote:
[background=rgb(33, 47, 58)]It seems people are thinking of factions owning planets... but a more detailed view, that a faction owns ships, bases, and other atomic structures, not planets. In this case each AI controlled ship or base has an 'owning faction' that helps determine it's behavior and perhaps look and design. Thus the actual design of a faction's data structures would depend a great deal on how the AI of that faction is supposed to behave, or for a store where things are traded, what things are available and at what price.[/background]
There are limitations to consider. I needed the system to be procedural, so it has to generate things in a deterministic manner for any given point in space. Having reactive AI which changes the balance of things over time means storing on a per-instance basis that extra information and replaying it each time it's sampled to recreate the current state accurately. That's tough in a galaxy with hundreds of millions of stars <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//wink3.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=';)' />Sorry for the rant but bad games designers are my pet hate <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />

[fluffyfreak]

'walterar' wrote:
[background=rgb(33, 47, 58)]"You know very well that the tracker is where we track things, not here - we don't read this forum in detail. Perhaps you're still cut about the time you tried to spam the tracker and I wrote a script to auto-delete your posts? Do the right thing and there won't be a problem."[/background]This does nothing but talk to the detriment of its moral standing.I had forgotten that incident, but I have a copy of the entire event. If you want to publish it here and let people throw their opinion.You called, cheerfully, spam, to unfavorable reviews.
Enough of the off-topic stuff - Factions by the way - take it somewhere else please.

[NeuralKernel]

I've been laying low wit ha cracked rib lately, and so I've been lots of playing Pioneer! <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />I've got some gameplay suggestions, and a new mission type that hopefully could happen without TOO much work.I was wondering if we can directly dock with other ships... landing gear to landing gear would make sense, there's got to be clamps anyways for landing on low G worlds with thick atmospheres... <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//wink3.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=';)' />I also think that the concept of "Landing gear" should be expanded to include other forms of variable geometry...aerobrakes for example. Either part of the "landing gear" or a separate system (included with atmospheric shielding?) but toggled in the same kind of way.Being able to dock with other ships would open up a few mission concepts I think would be a lot of fun... the one that springs to mind first is "rescue missions"...Admit it, we've all run out of fuel while flyoing between distant worlds... zipping along at a few thousand kilometers per second and suddenly realizing we've only got enough fuel to slow back down to a few hundred kps...If you could dock ships together, you could fly out and save these unfortunate souls... clamp on, apply braking thrust, bring them to the nearest planet and release them in a stable orbit...If you can rig up a way to trade cargo between docked ships that would also be very handly for mission design.Finally, if you can dock with another ship you can treat one like a "trailer" to hold extra fuel, mining gear, contraband...A "fleet" wouldn't fit with the concept of Pioneer IMO, but a pair of ships would be just fine! One would be a bulky cumbersome thing where you keep your stuff, the other nice and quick that you use to scout planets and land in ports... like an extraterrestrial covered wagon and a horse! Wagon train to the stars... <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />Doable or just a bunch of crazy talk?ps. The other reason I'd like more flexibility with landing gear and "variable geometry" is that I've got the beginnings of a Gundam inspired (NOT a humanoid gundam, but mecha inspired...) spacecraft I'm working on in Blender, just because I think its cool, but if I COULD get something like it into Pioneer eventually it would make my day!pps? Would docking together multiple ships make sense to work for variable geometry, turrets, mining/fuel scoop positioning? Assembling a bigger ship out of several smaller ships (like a giant japanese super space robot!!! <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_biggrin.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':D' /> ) has actual precedent in a way with the ISS... and would allow a very flexible mixture of handcrafted alongside procedural design... just a thought... probably not even a new one here <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//wink3.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=';)' />

[fluffyfreak]

@NeuralKernelYou should be able to do landing legs/feet instead of wheels, it's really just an animation between two states, some of the ships already have simple legs. Mostly the restrictions have been how bloody hard it is to animate everything with LMR/Lua. Luomu's new model system should make that sort of thing much easier to do.We can't dock with other ships yet, but it's frequently ask for so is probably moving slowly up peoples mental list.Best bet is to hijack or start a requests thread, go for hijack first then start your own if it's not getting answers after a week or so <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//wink3.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=';)' />Off to Germany now... brb!

[NeuralKernel]

Nice, well I'll keep playing around at being a 3d modeller and see if I can get some "realistic" Mechs built <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_razz.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':P' />I was already leaning towards a biologicaly inspired aesthetic anyways, so it isn't a big leap for me to nudge my style towards Mecha. For some neat Gaming Science Fiction to draw some ideas from check out the company Dream Pod 9 from Montreal. They do Heavy Gear, and a cool space setting called Jovian Chronicles that's basically Gundam done Canadian style <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />[url]http://www.dp9.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=65&Itemid=108[/url] and what's the easiest way for me to put a Canadian city on Earth? I may technically still be a subject of Her Majesty (Go Liz!! You rock!! <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_biggrin.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':D' /> ) and don't really have a PROBLEM with working out of London... but I would much rather use Ottawa, Montreal, Vancouver...hell, even Toronto (bleh...) as a home base!! <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />

[Marcel]

Adding a spaceport is quite easy. All you need is the coordinates. Check out this thread.[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/topic/2065-just-for-fun-your-hometown/[/url] the link to the mod.[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/files/file/944-hometowns-alpha27-modzip/[/url] can put in your hometown for your personal use, and/or if you want I can put it in the next version.Now about those factions. Are they exposed to lua yet? I'm putting together a mod that will place different station types and building sets in the different factions. This will probably be my last scripted mod for Pioneer. I'm mostly using the models that are currently available with some tweaks and such. Currently the player would have to manually swap out mods based on the color of the system in the star map. There will be a red_faction.zip, green_faction.zip, etc. Is there a way for this to happen automatically?

[walterar]

"[background=rgb(33, 47, 58)]Is there a way for this to happen automatically?"[/background]local faction = Game.system.factionif faction.name == "Federation" then blah blah blahelseif faction.name == "Red" then blah blah blahelseif faction.name == "Confederation of Independent Systems" then blah blah blahelseif faction.name == "Independent" then blah blah blahend
local faction = Game.system.factionif faction.name == "Federation" thenblah blah blahelseif faction.name == "Red" thenblah blah blahelseif faction.name == "Confederation of Independent Systems" thenblah blah blahelseif faction.name == "Independent" thenblah blah blahend

[Marcel]

That's the clue I needed to get started. Thanks!

[walterar]

The name of such factions are those that come by default, can be changed. The problem is that you accompany your work with the new names.This is /data/factions/01_federation.lua etc, etc.It would be nice if someone make further announcements regarding factions. In this way we can change the ads according to the faction.

[walterar]

Example...

[NeuralKernel]

I've been mining a lot lately and I think things are working well enough to start thinking about expanding how gathering and crafting interact with the game economy. Right now you can make a decent enough living prospecting precious metals from asteroids but there needs to be a way to justify gathering the metal ores and alloys if you've got the right ship, and I think a Factory Ship is the way to handle it. A large ship with an on board factory to convert raw materials into more valuable goods.I think that production speed should be dependant on solar exposure... load the hold in the outer system and then fly to close orbit around the local star to power up the factory before jumping back to the Agricultural World to sell off a fresh batch of Farm Machinery.Burning hydrogen like in a hyperdrive would also make sense, I just figure that you should need more than just the raw materials to craft something...