I wanted to be a bit more specific with a topic I brought up in the Generic thread: Consider the Star Wars or Star Trek universe. Here's an environment with an immense amount of territory. If these two milieu's were to be put into a CRPG, what are your thoughts in terms of how much freedom and interactivity you could have? Could you have the same freedom of movement that you have in Baldur's Gate or Diablo? If not, how would you stay true to the universe you're representing (i.e., it's vastness and grandeur)? -------------------- Just waiting for the mothership... Edited by - Wavinator on 9/8/00 4:16:13 AM

Wavinator : those universe are gigantic, and the variety you could discover is POTENTIALLY vast. The fact is, as vast as the galay is, count the number of planets that you visit in the whole Star Wars saga. Not that much, which allowed to create extremely varied environments (ice planet, death star, tatooine, naboo, the forest planet with the ewoks, the marsh planet with Luke and yoda, etc).
the keyword is POTENTIAL. If you really create a enormous amount of randomly generated worlds, what you are doing is adding fluff to make it look bigger, but your stuff would still be quite empty.

In Darklands, each town had a varying number of buildings, all with different names, etc. But really, it''s all the same shit, and some places have unique things. Same with a ROguelike like ADOM (as much as I love it).
Personally, I would rather have very good algoruthm to generate each world when I discover it, and do it in depth, and store those info. Rather than having thousands of worlds already created and stored, that aree all generic, and that I won''t even bother to visit as soon as I''ll see a pattern in the random generation...

(I think I am just backing up Paul, here)

2 problems. Lucasarts is a liscencing nightmare. Star Trek is a continuity nightmare.

quote: Original post by Landfish

2 problems. Lucasarts is a liscencing nightmare. Star Trek is a continuity nightmare.

Yup, I know. I used these for illustration purposes only. My CRPG design is "Master or Orion" meets "Fallout 2" and it implies an expanding, changing sector of space that can be explored at the character level (buildings, ship interiors, etc).

If I estimate that there are an underwhelming 10 cities per planet, and you can explore cities, then when the empires expand to colonize 10 planets... well, maybe you can see my problem. God forbid they expand to colonize 100 planets, yeesh!

So Star Wars and Star Trek are excellent test cases, because any designer who''d be paid to tackle these universes would have to deal with their scale.

It seems there are 3 choices: Limit the player''s movement, and thus betray the vision of the universe; keep the scale, but accept that there will be repetition; or spend a few decades crafting unique content for hundreds or even thousands of locations (guess which one isn''t an option... )


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Just waiting for the mothership...

Verant (creators of EverQuest, now part of Sony) has been liscensed by LucasArts to create a MMORPG based on Star Wars.


Pax

quote: Original post by pax

Verant (creators of EverQuest, now part of Sony) has been liscensed by LucasArts to create a MMORPG based on Star Wars.

Thx, Pax. As far as I know they''re going to limit you to something like 4 worlds/locations, though. So much for a galaxy, far, far away...



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Just waiting for the mothership...

quote: Original post by ahw

Wavinator : those universe are gigantic, and the variety you could discover is POTENTIALLY vast. The fact is, as vast as the galay is, count the number of planets that you visit in the whole Star Wars saga.

Yeah, this is a good point. The difference here is a major one, though, because of linearity. You can reference and name tons of worlds you will never visit (The Spice Mines of Kessel, Dantooine, etc.) and never fear having to create content for them because they''ll never be visited.

quote:
In Darklands, each town had a varying number of buildings, all with different names, etc. But really, it''s all the same shit, and some places have unique things. Same with a ROguelike like ADOM (as much as I love it).

So the individual naming did nothing for you. Well, there goes part of one idea...

quote:
Personally, I would rather have very good algoruthm to generate each world when I discover it, and do it in depth, and store those info. Rather than having thousands of worlds already created and stored, that aree all generic, and that I won''t even bother to visit as soon as I''ll see a pattern in the random generation...

There may be something to this. What happens, though, if you go on a grand tour and visit every place? Won''t the same thing happen?

I''m attached to the idea of giving the player lots of freedom, but it''s interesting to note that freedom itself can be an interactivity limitiation...



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Just waiting for the mothership...

quote: Original post by Paul Cunningham

Isn''t Star Trek one big random encounter table. And each random encounter is just added to the universe? :p

For some things, I guess. But there are established cultures with named places (Kitimur, Utopia Planitia, etc.)

If you were to say that everything''s a random encounter, you''d stil need to map out the locations upon which those encounters occurred, wouldn''t you?

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Just waiting for the mothership...

I''d like to remake my statement : don''t create all the planets with their details from the beginning. Just create, I dunno, basic things, names, the general idea of the planet (Hoth, planet of ice, Tattooine planet of sands), but don''t go any further. To compensate, do a much better random generation algorithm for each planet as they get to be visited. Or maybe add details to planets as the player hear more about them as well. The idea being that you would make the universe grow as the playe discover it, adding more specific details along. Before that, the planets are just a name, a vague thing far away in the galaxy.

To further Paul''s idea, make the planets be created as they are discovered.

The reason the "make the names change" thingie didn''t work for me, is that they were only a little portion of what could have been changed to create a personality, a feel of uniqueness to the location I visited. They could have created background gfx specific to the location, they could have had a more interesting way of denoting differences than just "this town doesn''t have a cathedral, but it has a University", the variations were jut way too much visible, which kind of pissed me off. Other than that the game is excellent