Dadalos wrote:

rickisen wrote:I love this Idea, Sure the saves might get huge, But getting to create a questline or story for someone else to play trough really exites me. But that would of course require some way of creating quests for your self in a normal game I quess.
Maybe there could be some sort of "creator-mode" in LT.

at some point i remember reading about save files and formats and size and josh basicly said that save file size would be a non issue. even for as much information is actual being stored you have to remember that its all being 'unpacked' from a seed all a save file needs to realy track would be seed # + player variables which even after several hundred hours of game play would fit on the cheapest of flash drives and have room to spare 100X over I would imagine.

Ah, so save files simply store the alterations made to the universe? That seems like the only sensible way to handle it, to be honest, saving the entire universe to disk would be completely infeasible.

AyeGill wrote:

Dadalos wrote:

rickisen wrote:I love this Idea, Sure the saves might get huge, But getting to create a questline or story for someone else to play trough really exites me. But that would of course require some way of creating quests for your self in a normal game I quess.
Maybe there could be some sort of "creator-mode" in LT.

at some point i remember reading about save files and formats and size and josh basicly said that save file size would be a non issue. even for as much information is actual being stored you have to remember that its all being 'unpacked' from a seed all a save file needs to realy track would be seed # + player variables which even after several hundred hours of game play would fit on the cheapest of flash drives and have room to spare 100X over I would imagine.

Ah, so save files simply store the alterations made to the universe? That seems like the only sensible way to handle it, to be honest, saving the entire universe to disk would be completely infeasible.

Theoretically you should be able to just track every action that the user has performed (that could influence the universe), and along with the starting seed you would then be able to regenerate the exact state by playing through the actions. In practice that would be a bad way to do things, and would fall apart over time as it would take longer and longer to play through all the actions / reactions etc.

In practice it would probably be best to keep some level of state about each entity in the universe (that has been created thus far, and hasn't fallen outside sensible level of detail constraints), maybe not the most recent state though as doing a limited play forward of events may be worthwhile (but I would suggest that would be a later optimisation).

It seems best also to have save points at transition points, e.g. travel between systems, landing on planets, docking with space stations. The save game would then not need to worry about pesky details like exact location of ships, their direction, velocity, etc.

My view is that you need not worry about the universe because that is built from the seed. The only thing you need to persist is the asset(s) (and their individual settings/configurations) belonging to the player's characters.

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.)

Thing is, Josh mentioned that changes done to the game will be stored so destroying one asteroid in the game will ensure it is destroyed when you load the game again.

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.

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!

@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

Looks like someone had this idea before me:
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=28

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).

This is one of the coolest ideas I've seen in a while.

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).

Epic necro

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

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).

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

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.

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)?

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.