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Re: Some kind of (interesting) New Game +

#21
Stellen wrote:If you only persist the character's ship location/etc and the seed, then wouldn't the universe reset to the state that it was in when the user first started the game, only with the user's ship in a new location? You'd need to persist everything which has changed since game creation, otherwise the ship which was 1 kilometre away from you when you saved would be gone when you reloaded, and your freighters might be flying off to dock at NPC stations which no longer existed. (Because they didn't when the seed was used to generate the world.)
Not everything. If some things can be deterministic then only the needed starting variables plus modifiers are required. But you are right in that quite a deal will need to be stored.
David -- Proud to be saving the world since 1984
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tutorial system?

#22
This idea is awesome.

Possibly related to what happens when you die? When you die, your avatar could die too, perhaps your second-in-command could take charge of your faction, and you would restart in the same universe with a new avatar with none of your former allegiances/enemies.

That's a point. When you spawn in the first place you've got to be given a ship and stuff, right? Perhaps you should spawn in a space station or something and have to work to earn enough credits to leave. Could be integrated with some sort of tutorial system whereby the owners of the station lend you a ship and tell you how to use it. It might be a repair ship, for example, and they might require you to repair the outside of the station or something. Then again, it might be a mining ship and they might require you to mine. Or take out the garbage. Or anything. Of course it would be procedurally generated to be slightly different each time.

Then when you respawn you would have to go through the same tedious malarkey all over again, except it would be quicker because 1) it would be less styled like a tutorial, ie. with hover-tips and stuff and more just that you have to work for your pay and 2) you would know how to do everything already. And also it would be interesting on account of being slightly different to last time. And having a disincentive for dying is no bad thing anyway.

Sorry, I just completely hijacked this thread and started talking about something totally different. Just where my mind went!
Last edited by Beetle on Sat Dec 08, 2012 12:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.
-- Beetle
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Re: Some kind of (interesting) New Game +

#23
@OP: Great idea!!

@Beetle: funny you talk about death, since I thought of something while reading the first page..
JoshParnell wrote: The biggest challenge I see is smoothly getting the AI to take over control of your assets in a sensible way. Probably won't be much of an issue. But you would want to make sure that the AI in charge of the faction kept playing in roughly the same way, i.e., you wouldn't want your hardcore pirate faction to suddenly sell all of its pirate ships and start recruiting pansy miners.

Anyway, cool idea!
Why not? If the AI taking over sensibly proves to be too much of a hassle your former self could just be killed (random accident/posion/whatever) and the second etc in command decides to hijack the hardcore pirate faction and transform it to a ragtag miner collective. Of course the miners are still the same faction so they should have the same enemies, and they will figure out they need protection, so that would still be cool (if anyone played X3: it would be like Duke's Transports ^^).
The fun would then be to wrest control back again and set the faction straight into doing what you like it to do again, probably going back to their roots.

In other scenarios you can just see the effect you had on the universe and how it all evolved without you.

So, in other words, this might not be a problem at all, but just a cool reminder of how invaluable your former self was :)
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Re: Some kind of (interesting) New Game +

#27
ThymineC wrote:I don't have much to add to this suggestion, I just want to point out that it's absolutely fantastic in the hope that it makes this feature just that little bit more likely to end up in the game (or a later expansion to it). :thumbup:
Epic necro :D

Yes, I am still very much on board with this idea :)

My current viewpoint is that in LT there is a distinction between creating a new universe and creating a new character. Part of the reason that I "need" this is that, thanks to the universe pre-generation phase, it is likely that the former will take longer than players are used to for starting a new game. Probably several minutes to build a new universe. So it makes sense to allow players to start a new character without having to go through that phase again (starting a new character in an existing universe would be virtually instant).

There are a lot of interesting questions about what happens to the other "yous" when you load a different character in the same universe, but certainly one of the options would be that the AI takes over control, meaning that you could actually meet your former self :shock:
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.” ~ Henry Ford
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Re: Some kind of (interesting) New Game +

#28
JoshParnell wrote:
ThymineC wrote:I don't have much to add to this suggestion, I just want to point out that it's absolutely fantastic in the hope that it makes this feature just that little bit more likely to end up in the game (or a later expansion to it). :thumbup:
There are a lot of interesting questions about what happens to the other "yous" when you load a different character in the same universe, but certainly one of the options would be that the AI takes over control, meaning that you could actually meet your former self :shock:
It would certainly be sweet if the game kept track of the player's behaviour in order to approximate the AI's personality traits to that of the player. Flatfingers posts some interesting stuff with regards to that (explorer, socialiser, achiever, killer) or it could be based on your AEGIS system. It's 6 am and I can't stop thinking about useless science and I have work in an hour. :(
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Re: Some kind of (interesting) New Game +

#29
Science is never useless. :)

These comments about the player as a character got me thinking, though... to what extent will we actually be able to play as a distinct person?

Will we have a name? A visible body? RPG-like character stats?

If I switch to a different character and meet "myself," how will I know?

What happens if I kill my earlier self (and don't reload)?
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Re: Some kind of (interesting) New Game +

#30
Flatfingers wrote:Science is never useless. :)

These comments about the player as a character got me thinking, though... to what extent will we actually be able to play as a distinct person?

Will we have a name? A visible body? RPG-like character stats?

If I switch to a different character and meet "myself," how will I know?

What happens if I kill my earlier self (and don't reload)?
Name, yes. Visible body, no.

Character stats? Probably not your typical STR DEX CON INT WIS CHA, no. Your stats will probably be reflective of what you do in-game, such as reputation levels with different factions, net worth, maybe the types of missions you do most often. I don't think you'll be seeing a whole lot of stats you can put points into, unless by stats you mean the research system.
Shameless Self-Promotion 0/ magenta 0/ Forum Rules & Game FAQ
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Re: Some kind of (interesting) New Game +

#31
Flatfingers wrote:What happens if I kill my earlier self (and don't reload)?
You meet Ghost of Flatfingers.

Just write Elbereth in the dust real quick.


Actually, what does happen to assets when the owner dies?
In most games an object equals the owner. But what if the player (or just an AI actor) owns several factories. Who owns them then?
There is no "I" in Tea. That would be gross.
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Re: Some kind of (interesting) New Game +

#33
Gazz wrote:Actually, what does happen to assets when the owner dies?
In most games an object equals the owner. But what if the player (or just an AI actor) owns several factories. Who owns them then?
Exactly what I was wondering.

One possibility for handling this is simple incorporation as a side-effect of creating a faction. On the death of the player character, ownership and control of all factional assets passes to one of the next-level NPCs in that faction.

One complicating factor would be if players can create/own/manage multiple factions, and if subordinate NPCs can belong to more than one of those player-created factions. In that case, the logic for divvying up the assets gets more complex. Not insurmountably so, though, I would guess.

Another solution (which I've proposed for other games with factional hierarchies) is that as soon as you create a faction with more than one member, you're required to identify one NPC as your successor. NPC-led factions would all have that requirement as well. That way the transition is simple, since you've previously determined who it'll be. This could get a bit hairy if everybody at the top of a faction is on one ship or in one fleet that gets seriously damaged -- factional control could ping-pong to multiple characters very quickly. That's probably an edge case, though. Probably.

The other nice thing about the "succession planning" approach is that it lets those so inclined play cruel games with their subordinates about who's going to inherit the faction. :twisted: Would an NPC lieutenant passed over for the successorship be so upset as to try to sabotage it, or steal assets and join a rival faction (as in EVE Online)?
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Re: Some kind of (interesting) New Game +

#34
I don't think it should be required for you to declare your successor, just very highly recommended. If you don't, your faction probably won't survive long after your death. Of course, if for some reason no one agrees with your choice of succession, presumably your former followers would tear your faction apart anyway.

Which raises the question: will the AI be smart enough to do things like this? Will high-level politics be a part of their programming? It would be fun to see the AI engaged in political intrigue.
Live long and prosper.
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Re: Some kind of (interesting) New Game +

#35
ThymineC wrote:It would certainly be sweet if the game kept track of the player's behaviour in order to approximate the AI's personality traits to that of the player. Flatfingers posts some interesting stuff with regards to that (explorer, socialiser, achiever, killer) or it could be based on your AEGIS system.
JoshParnell wrote:But, allow me to go one step further with something beautiful that I realized about this system: it offers an incredibly-simple way of estimating the player's own personality! Now that I said it, you can probably already see it :D If "personality" is defined as the desire to increase certain personal statistics, then personality can be estimated by simply taking a weighted, normalized vector of the personal statistics! Almost too obvious, right?
So did you get your idea from what I wrote or were you planning to do that anyway? :ghost:
JoshParnell wrote:The question of how the player's personality could be assessed was naturally a problem. But not anymore! So it makes total sense that if, for example, you've done a lot of trading and acquired a lot of wealth but never been in battle, a war-inclined faction will probably infer a pacifist personality just by looking at your personal record (stats), and say "sorry kid, try joining the Buttercup Pansygirl League across the street, we're only looking for real men.
"I think you'd be more comfortable over in that faction"

So will NPC's automatically know your personal stats? If I met someone on the street, I wouldn't automatically know how many people they've killed in their lifetime, or how much money they've earned from trading. Perhaps it will be better to base faction admittance off of something like reputation, which could be related to personal stats but take into account other factors as well.
JoshParnell wrote:Anyway, that pretty much shows me that I need to implement some concept of morality / lawfulness ASAP, otherwise this universe may be lighting up with fireworks a bit too quickly
If you have time, it may also be nice to implement an NPC policing faction, like a law enforcement agency. Unlike EVE Online where you just have arbitrary cookie-cutter ships that constitute its policing agency (CONCORD), I reckon that you could make a more "real" law enforcement agency that is composed of NPCs that actively join it based on their predilections. If there's a trait or set of traits that encourage an NPC to promote lawfulness, morality or justice, that should encourage them to join the police faction and hunt down lawbreakers. Then you can have this interesting dynamic between law enforcement NPCs and law breaker NPCs.

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