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Re: The "Game" in LT

#61
Better to come back in a year. Beta is still quite a ways away. Things are just at the point of getting re-implemented so I would suspect it will take a few months until the game is back in the state it was during the time of the Road to Beta updates.

I do hope things progress more quickly now that Josh has Adam helping him out with the code. I would love to see a beta before the end of 2018.
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Re: The "Game" in LT

#63
The watched pot is finally boiling again, but dinner will still be a while, especially if you won't be getting beta.

However, I'm gonna be a little more optimistic than Bfett and say that beta will probably be out before the end of the year and official release will probably be 4-6 months after that.

Granted, timelines are always dubious, but FPLT has been solved and Adam seems to be nearly-on or on-par with Josh in terms of skill. Architectural work seems to be wrapping up, and I think a lot of gameplay and graphics code will start to be ported into Lua starting next month. There is definitely still some serious game aspects that need to be incorporated, but I imagine Lil'T will be more baby than fetus by the 5 year anniversary of the Kickstarter... Which sounds to me like a good round deadline for beta anyways ;)
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Re: The "Game" in LT

#64
I'd like to think you're right about "beta before end of 2017," Hyperion. That would be fantastic.

But if I had to pick a date for the pool, it would be Q3 2018 -- basically, a year from now.

This estimate rolls up from a number of factors (none of which are intended as criticisms):

  • still working on architecture
  • holidays/vacations/life stuff
  • port LTSL content
  • change LTSL content as it's being ported to improve it
  • add additional in-system content to satisfy Kickstarter promises
  • add new (unplanned) in-system content as inspiration strikes
  • tweak individual in-system content features
  • balance all in-system content
  • add procgen for new star systems/factions
  • add whole-game features
  • whole-game rebalancing after "is this fun to play for many hours?" playtesting
  • polish, polish, polish
  • modding (incl. LuaJIT interface reference guide) documentation
  • many hours of selected "friends and family" alpha testing
  • UX tweaks based on friends & family testing feedback
  • distribution and game-updating infrastructure
  • be unwilling to release, even as beta, anything that feels less than perfect

Every single one of these, in the moment, will feel entirely justifiable and right. And many of them will be exactly that, partly because it's integral to making any computer game of a meaningful size, and partly because of the particular requirements for Limit Theory.

But each one of these, unless it's policed with serious ruthlessness, takes time. Add them all up, and Q3 2018 is optimistic.

I prefer to be optimistic, though. And notice that I see no factors that would prevent LT from being released at some point -- the only question, to my mind, is "when."

Naturally this is just my take. Other opinions are welcome.
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Re: The "Game" in LT

#65
I've given this topic some more thought, less from an administrator's perspective, and more from an explorer's perspective.

LT needs to have things which can be discovered, and I don't just mean Beautiful Skybox #p94fpg3p9374-2de8h9273d or the arrangement of planets inside it. I mean actual Wonders, things that are rare, but give you a genuine sense of awe and curiousity when you happen to come across them.

These are wonders on the scale of artificial planetoids to dyson spheres, with complex geometries and functions. Monuments and Monoliths that give an explorer the sense that great or terrible things once happened here, or great powers may be contained within.

Imagine if you will, deep in wild space, flying into an unknown system, at first everything seems pretty ordinary, but then your sensors pick up a strange reading. you go to investigate and as you approach, poking out of a large dusty region is what looks to be... is that a giant pineapple? You come closer and find a long abandoned superstructure large enough that you could plop down a dozen colonies on it, covered in bas figures of what look like hindu gods, writing in a font bigger than your ship, symbols and shapes...This enormous station was once the...something or other

I don't have enough answers to those questions quite yet to place it in history generation as a real piece of history and not some object left by "the ancients". But I think you can see how coming across wonders and monoliths make exploration far more interesting. Especially if these objects came with their own internal gameplay, such as rewards locked behind puzzles, you could become Indiana Jones in SPAAAAAAACE!

Vaguely turning to some suggestions I've made earlier:

A rich, non-lethal competition space: Races around the system, turning a warprail into a jousting arena, 3D soccer/quidditch. If you add the ability to be a spectator and a sponsor to these areas, you could have sports, sports leagues and teams, gambling, performances, and spectacle. The player could witness or participate in any capacity.

Or the creation and balancing of artificial ecosystems in space, bringing in a food chain to a barren system, figuring out how the PCG herbivores and omnivores and whatnot interact with each other and their environment to develop an area, possibly to harvest a resource from it, possibly as a bioweapon, possibly just to make the space look pretty and call it your own little garden. Adding in artificial life adds enormous possibilities for gameplay.

Though those may, like what much of LT's gameplay will come from, be better suited as mods.




More to say, but not enough time at the moment, so I'll leave it here.
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Challenging your assumptions is good for your health, good for your business, and good for your future. Stay skeptical but never undervalue the importance of a new and unfamiliar perspective.
Imagination Fertilizer
Beauty may not save the world, but it's the only thing that can
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Re: The "Game" in LT

#66
This is why I hope historical generation becomes a reality in LT. I want ancient structures and wonders, I want the equivalent of the pyramids (Mayan and Egyptian), geo-glifs, and pieces of irreplaceable art which awe the modern man. I want them all to have real histories behind each of them which show how people before your time used to live.

I want to see ancient battle sites, to hear tales of the clone wars, and the old order which were the protectors of peace and justice before the dark times. I want believe-able depth which awes the player and encourages deep space exploration.

I want the history of Star Wars and the exploration of Star Trek meshed together in a universe where the limit theory has taken root and ingrained itself within the diverse cultures of the present and past.
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Re: The "Game" in LT

#67
AI and its contribution to a the living and breathing universe

I'm just wondering if the kind of AI we are getting will have some flaws in terms of fun for the player. Lets assume the whole universe would be a theme park which is open 24 hour a day but each theme / event has its own opening hours and they are changing opening hours all the time. Whould it be more fun for you taking part in a battle when two faction fight it out who will be controlling a sector or would it be more fun to just read about it on some black board at a space station?
So you the player wanders around in the theme park and there is that theme where two faction have a huge battle but when you arive there it is not open and you don't know when it opens and the opening hours change all the time. Next theme e.g. distress call from a ship that is been attacked by pirates. How can you pick such a mission from a mission board and how is the pirate going to wait for you to arrive before he tries to kill the trader.. I'm just wondering about that, how is this going to work?

Versus:
A more scripted "AI" where every theme in the theme park you are interested in just opens when you as player arrive there and are interested in taking part.
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Re: The "Game" in LT

#68
Number 1: Use the Hard drive space!! This is 2018 NOT 1980. Terra byte hard drive are cheap..Space is cheap. Should have millions of folders/structure for the game...Let the LT A.I. act like malware.

(Do programmers/game designers still think it's cool to leave a small footprint?! Need to change this attitude. I'll buy a extra hard drive for a space game...already bought a SSD just for Star Citizen.....I'LL gladly buy a 10 terra byte HD for LT.)

AND I'd love LT(or any space game) to actually USE the space on my Hard drive. Fill it up with giga bytes of living structures(colonies/spacestations/humans/aliens).

Have a Limit Theory Operating System(LTOS) continually running ...updating structures/entities while your computer is running. When you want to view the contents of a solarsystem/folder...just open LT.(just a MMO....always living)

Limit Theory *game* should be used like Windows Explorer. A way to view the structure of the LT universe...much like Windows explorer does for your photos/data/crap.
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Re: The "Game" in LT

#69
Lemar wrote:
Wed Apr 18, 2018 4:53 am
AI and its contribution to a the living and breathing universe

I'm just wondering if the kind of AI we are getting will have some flaws in terms of fun for the player. Lets assume the whole universe would be a theme park which is open 24 hour a day but each theme / event has its own opening hours and they are changing opening hours all the time. Whould it be more fun for you taking part in a battle when two faction fight it out who will be controlling a sector or would it be more fun to just read about it on some black board at a space station?
So you the player wanders around in the theme park and there is that theme where two faction have a huge battle but when you arive there it is not open and you don't know when it opens and the opening hours change all the time. Next theme e.g. distress call from a ship that is been attacked by pirates. How can you pick such a mission from a mission board and how is the pirate going to wait for you to arrive before he tries to kill the trader.. I'm just wondering about that, how is this going to work?

Versus:
A more scripted "AI" where every theme in the theme park you are interested in just opens when you as player arrive there and are interested in taking part.
I have to disagree with the idea of LT as a theme park for the player, one of the most appealing features of LT for me is player-npc parity. Turning into a theme park, it might as well be a typical game. Perhaps as a mod after release.
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Challenging your assumptions is good for your health, good for your business, and good for your future. Stay skeptical but never undervalue the importance of a new and unfamiliar perspective.
Imagination Fertilizer
Beauty may not save the world, but it's the only thing that can
Post

Re: The "Game" in LT

#70
RedDwarfMining wrote:
Wed Apr 18, 2018 9:43 am
Number 1: Use the Hard drive space!! This is 2018 NOT 1980. Terra byte hard drive are cheap..Space is cheap. Should have millions of folders/structure for the game...Let the LT A.I. act like malware.

(Do programmers/game designers still think it's cool to leave a small footprint?! Need to change this attitude. I'll buy a extra hard drive for a space game...already bought a SSD just for Star Citizen.....I'LL gladly buy a 10 terra byte HD for LT.)

AND I'd love LT(or any space game) to actually USE the space on my Hard drive. Fill it up with giga bytes of living structures(colonies/spacestations/humans/aliens).

Have a Limit Theory Operating System(LTOS) continually running ...updating structures/entities while your computer is running. When you want to view the contents of a solarsystem/folder...just open LT.(just a MMO....always living)

Limit Theory *game* should be used like Windows Explorer. A way to view the structure of the LT universe...much like Windows explorer does for your photos/data/crap.
This is an interesting perspective. The problem with doing this is that it raises the minimum requirements, and it's generally a good plan to keep those as low as is reasonable. Additionally, I don't expect LT to ship with a boatload of assets, considering the procedural focus. However, caching generated assets might be a good plan, and there will probably be a lot of those, so maybe it all works out.
The other interesting point is that making your datastructures as small as possible means you can fit more of them on the processor's cache and transmit them faster between RAM and processor. And, once you've made your datastructure small, there's no reason to make it bigger when you put it on disk. Also, disk I/O is slow and the more you can reduce it the better. This further incentivises small saved data.

As for the other part: That sounds like a standard server/client model. The server component could even run on a different computer, and clients of many different kinds (e.g. standard game, explorer as above, and so on) could connect to it. However, I don't think an always-running server should be the default; I like to know exactly what's running on my machine and I want programs to close when I close them. Making it an option sounds like a great idea, though.
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Re: The "Game" in LT

#71
0111narwhalz wrote:
Wed Apr 18, 2018 10:45 am
RedDwarfMining wrote:
Wed Apr 18, 2018 9:43 am
Number 1: Use the Hard drive space!! This is 2018 NOT 1980. Terra byte hard drive are cheap..Space is cheap. Should have millions of folders/structure for the game...Let the LT A.I. act like malware.

(Do programmers/game designers still think it's cool to leave a small footprint?! Need to change this attitude. I'll buy a extra hard drive for a space game...already bought a SSD just for Star Citizen.....I'LL gladly buy a 10 terra byte HD for LT.)

AND I'd love LT(or any space game) to actually USE the space on my Hard drive. Fill it up with giga bytes of living structures(colonies/spacestations/humans/aliens).

Have a Limit Theory Operating System(LTOS) continually running ...updating structures/entities while your computer is running. When you want to view the contents of a solarsystem/folder...just open LT.(just a MMO....always living)

Limit Theory *game* should be used like Windows Explorer. A way to view the structure of the LT universe...much like Windows explorer does for your photos/data/crap.
I can not disagree more. LT should imho be as small and efficient as possible. Sure, it should be able to use huge amounts of space (I bought a 250GB SSD just to house my games) but the footprint of each save and configuration and mod should still be as small as possible; just because there's plenty of room doesn't mean you should be intentionally inefficient. Smaller Files = More Files.

That sounds like a standard server/client model. The server component could even run on a different computer, and clients of many different kinds (e.g. standard game, explorer as above, and so on) could connect to it. However, I don't think an always-running server should be the default; I like to know exactly what's running on my machine and I want programs to close when I close them. Making it an option sounds like a great idea, though.
I really like the idea of Server/Client or LT in the Cloud. If you could have a server farm processing huge amounts of historical simulation, AI fleets and empires, Economies, etc. and a person only had to log into a truly vast and living universe full of both AI and other people? That would be absolutely amazing! And of course private servers for friends would be an option too :geek:
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Challenging your assumptions is good for your health, good for your business, and good for your future. Stay skeptical but never undervalue the importance of a new and unfamiliar perspective.
Imagination Fertilizer
Beauty may not save the world, but it's the only thing that can
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Re: The "Game" in LT

#72
The idea of what needing massive storage implies is awesome. I don't think the basic game should be that big, but... what if NPCs were capable of learning? Depending on how ambitious the AI developer gets, that could be pretty data-intensive.

That said, I won't install any game or mod that requires storage to any cloud.
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Re: The "Game" in LT

#73
Hyperion wrote:
Wed Apr 18, 2018 2:14 pm
I really like the idea of Server/Client or LT in the Cloud. If you could have a server farm processing huge amounts of historical simulation, AI fleets and empires, Economies, etc. and a person only had to log into a truly vast and living universe full of both AI and other people? That would be absolutely amazing! And of course private servers for friends would be an option too :geek:
and who is going to pay for the vanilla servers?
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Re: The "Game" in LT

#74
Cornflakes_91 wrote:
Thu Apr 19, 2018 2:02 pm
Hyperion wrote:
Wed Apr 18, 2018 2:14 pm
I really like the idea of Server/Client or LT in the Cloud. If you could have a server farm processing huge amounts of historical simulation, AI fleets and empires, Economies, etc. and a person only had to log into a truly vast and living universe full of both AI and other people? That would be absolutely amazing! And of course private servers for friends would be an option too :geek:
and who is going to pay for the vanilla servers?
I presume the people who want to use them...Unless you're offering to do so?
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Challenging your assumptions is good for your health, good for your business, and good for your future. Stay skeptical but never undervalue the importance of a new and unfamiliar perspective.
Imagination Fertilizer
Beauty may not save the world, but it's the only thing that can
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Re: The "Game" in LT

#75
So in coming across Jason VandenBerghe's 2018 followup to the video I posted in the OP, he brings up an aspect of game design which has been somewhat neglected, namely the fundamental psychological drives of Tend and Befriend. Put forward as the corollaries to Fight or Flight, he notes that a significant portion of people don't want to play games based on adrenaline and action, that many people want to take a Stardew Valley or Sim City approach to fun where they can tend to virtual "crops" and develop and nurture relationships with the imaginary friends the game provides without having to worry about being attacked in any way.

Now while I don't expect to see this in 1.0, it got me wondering if there are ways that LT could explore this Stardew Valley approach to fun. Given the extensive moddability, I would say DUH, of course it can. But the question is how. Narrative focused mods are an obvious route, but we've discussed the possibilities of procedural narrative elsewhere, so instead I want to focus on mechanics for caring and tending. Though I’m using the term “crops”, I’m referring to any entity or system that requires tending to to gain a benefit from.

Some initial questions:
1. What objects/systems/NPC entities should we create for the player to care about? What are the "crops" they can tend to and how do those function? What existing systems can we repurpose for this sort of play, and what new ones will have to be implemented?

2. How do we show the player that their tending to these crops are having an impact on their well being? What should be the results of negligence or of poor planning/time management?

3. How could we achieve player-npc parity so that regular NPCs would engage in these caring activities, and at least give the impression of genuinely caring about their "crops"?

Perhaps the most obvious “crops” are space life. Unlike Stardew valley, LT is a dynamic and living universe, so an actual ecosystem & food chain are probably more appropriate than SV’s simple scheduling. However a thought that’s been rattling about in my head is nested content generation, in that there is a basal self-contained ecosystem unit. For example, say there is an ecosystem unit called a “Tree”, which provides potential food and shelter for primary and secondary consumers while said “Tree” exists in a self contained “Grove”. This grove is a higher level self-contained unit, where the trees and any animals within its boundaries are aware of each other and can compete/cooperate for the food and shelter resources each Tree provides, for individual/group safety, and for mating. The “Grove” itself exists within a “Forest” of multiple self-contained Groves, which can serve as territories for Forest-wide predators, while the Groves are also aware of the other Groves within the Forest and can coordinate their own breeding according to the resources available within the Forest. I Imagine that this wouldn’t be too hard on LOD either, as the details of the Trees and Groves can be simplified into general stats for the Forest… just a thought, I’d like to get some feedback on this.

If those Forests are the Wildlife, then players could tend to and be stewards of the Forest, clearing out unwanted predators, bringing in resources such as asteroids and ice for the Forest to grow, harvesting the Trees and Animals it produces. And while this could come to involve a fair bit of infrastructure by itself, there’s also the possibility for fully controlled greenhouses/gardens. Perhaps large glass spheres, where the player can establish a custom ecosystem, to grow and harvest different crops, be they plant or animal. And like SV, space life could produce its own resources which could then be refined/processed into secondary goods.

If being a simple space farmer doesn’t have enough appeal, you could incorporate husbandry, or even better, genetic engineering via a parallel to the tech tree (making transgenic space life might be very interesting to play with :geek: )

Extending past the Space Farm metaphor, you could take advantage of other systems already in place such as trade and manufacturing, turning your little “farm” into an estate which not only produces crops but imports other goods and materials to fuel a collection of small stations and factories, somewhat similar to Josh’s trailer park idea.

If you were to extend this type of play even further, into perhaps being akin to Animal Crossing, you could hire workers, attract residents, or utilize slaves for this Space Farm/Plantation/Town to do much of the work for you. These residents would have their own demands and emotions such as providing personal residences, particular structures & systems in your zone of control (eg. security perimeters, trade hub of a certain size, beautification, energy independence, etc.), demands for having good relations with their fellow residents, demands for you having good relations with particular factions. You could incorporate systems for these residents to “socialize” with one another, such as gift exchanges, inviting each other over for game night, regular gatherings at the Estate lounge and bar, and so on.

There really is a lot of room for adding non-combat gameplay, especially in this Stardew Valley/Animal Crossing-esque form. And there are a lot of ways these functions could be incorporated with the larger game, such as your estate being a fortified homestead on the frontiers that could grow to become the heart of a new imperial region, or be less fortified in a much safer region of space where you have to pay taxes for protection and access to trade infrastructure.

So, thoughts? Additional ideas for non-combat Tend & Befriend gameplay?
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Challenging your assumptions is good for your health, good for your business, and good for your future. Stay skeptical but never undervalue the importance of a new and unfamiliar perspective.
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