|
|
Post by bigbombr on Apr 13, 2019 7:17:11 GMT
Or, just have a very detailed Solar System with 'medium' range travel times. No in-system warping like we see in Call of Duty, maybe Antimatter jets. The Solar System, up to the Oort Cloud, is huge and a full Solar System has more than enough potential to have a myriad of factions, ideologies, and even new forms of life vying for their slice of the pie. You could push this even further: a game set in just the Jovian system would have plenty of different bodies and wouldn't even need torch drives. |
|
|
|
Post by AtomHeartDragon on Apr 13, 2019 13:10:50 GMT
My idea for space multiplayer without FTL is to allow the player to command more than one character, for instance. Imagine the player starts off on Earth, controls a character in a Star Citizen-like hub or can move around in orbit over realistic timespans, then wants to go experience the moon. Instead of sitting three days in front of the computer just staring at it, the player could recruit another character on the moon and shift control to that character immediately. So, the player could recruit one character on each planet, moon, or station, and have the characters move short distances on auto-pilot, but sending someone to Mars could literally take 6 months of real time, if you really wanted to do that. But the point is, while that's going on, the player could log out or control other characters. You could also have cargo ships and such either be drones that can accelerate to low relativistic speeds or maybe a system where you sell things on on planet and buy then again on the other with no actual transport taking place. Kind of like a space bank. Also, if it's a future setting, the player might simply beam his DNA over to another planet at lightspeed and have a clone made there (14 minutes to Mars?) and if it's even further future, if all players are AIs, they might simply beam over their code or consciousness or whatever. In such a world, perhaps all commodities that get transported from planet to planet are information, which moves at lightspeed, and maybe all worlds are fully self-sufficient in terms of raw materials (or there's an automatic, cheap logistics network that's worth far less than information transfers). The innovation is that you control more than one character, which is quite unorthodox for multiplayer games since it breaks the "rule of Half Life". But really, I'd be fine if there was a game where you had to do realistic manuovres, but then could time accelerate your own ship's motion along the trajectory. It would obviously cause some "funny stuff", but I think it's the simplest compromise. Either that or some kind of instant jump technology. But as I've mentioned before, when you accelerate to the speed of light, your mass increases towards infinity, along with your speed and energy, while time stops, and the entire universe flattens into a pancake, while colours explode around you. There are so many problems with it, compared to someone simply being one place place and then suddenly being in another place. The easiest kind of compromise is simply recognizing that real time MMO is incompatible with hard SciFi and picking EITHER one OR the other.
Having multiple characters or light speed consciousness transfer (sending genetic information would at best give you a baby twin at the destination, which isn't terribly useful) are not bad concepts in and of themselves (although the latter would lead to seriously consequences in gameplay mechanics - you couldn't take stuff with you on transfer OR there would be no meaningful notion of possessions you could strive to obtain), but they are not the problem here.
The problem is that space really is unimaginably vast. To illustrate:
I have just fired up Pioneer (a WIP FOSS Frontier remake/spiritual successor) and decided to lift off from Los Angeles and fly to a station that's still in LEO (just over 1100km orbital altitude) that happened to be on the opposite side of the planet. My ship was capable of 7.5G sustained acceleration with delta-v being non-issue (just shy of 10Mm/s), and could also handle the aerodynamics of pretty aggressive atmospheric flight. The propulsion technology, although slightly less out there than in Frontier already seems to be on the border of what is reasonable and allows you to pretty much ignore orbital mechanics most of the time - this is a game that has casual interstellar FTL and casual conventional interplanetary flight. The trip still took me half an hour, and that's among the shortest trips one could imagine that still counts as space travel.
Have fun even with your gas giant's moon system even though it's already very compact compared to an actual solar system.
Time compression is simply indispensable in any space game that doesn't take significant liberties with physics AND astronomy.
The only way I could see a hard SF real time MMO work would be limiting it to something like Sylvia, Kleopatra or one of the moonlets in Saturn's rings. At this point anything but wimpy chemical propulsion would be a significant overkill, and you could probably do without spaceships as well - just suits and jetpacks. Of course setting up a reasonable conflict on something this tiny (note - you could still have more than reasonable amount of worldspace by MMO standards) might be challenging.
...And that's one of the reasons I was severely pissed off by Elite:Dangerous (which BTW does seem to have accelerated orbital physics drive for in-system travel) going MMO.
|
|
|
|
Post by airc777 on Apr 13, 2019 18:47:55 GMT
The problem is that space really is unimaginably vast.
What if instead of a traditional mmo with one player controlling one character in a world with other player controlled characters and the core mechanics being about player progression and character interaction, instead:
The game was built with long form factor, multiple controller, drop in drop out play sessions. (Think Twitch plays pokemon or Twitch plays Dark Souls) The 'characters' being controlled aren't individuals, but whole factions in a grand strategy style game. (Think Sid Meier's Civ) Players are voting about which decisions for their faction to make within faction-chat and politicing between factions in a global-chat. Integrate a system for players to be able to vote to accelerate game time. (so the lulls between major events can take minutes or hours instead of months or years, but combat can happen in real time)
I think a system similar to what is described above would be particularly good at simulating drone warfare with 30 minutes of light lag and hoping the drone did the thing you intended it to.
Alternatively if you wanted direct player influence over battles the overarching game system and the combat game system could be separate. (Like a Total War game and the Total War map and battles being separate systems) So then the game would function largely as described above but then whenever a battle occurred the factions present would have a set number ships of set design and a set number of personnel based on what the faction deployed and players would be given direct control of personnel.
|
|
|
|
Post by AtomHeartDragon on Apr 15, 2019 19:05:27 GMT
The problem is that space really is unimaginably vast.
What if instead of a traditional mmo with one player controlling one character in a world with other player controlled characters and the core mechanics being about player progression and character interaction, instead:
The game was built with long form factor, multiple controller, drop in drop out play sessions. (Think Twitch plays pokemon or Twitch plays Dark Souls) The 'characters' being controlled aren't individuals, but whole factions in a grand strategy style game. (Think Sid Meier's Civ) Players are voting about which decisions for their faction to make within faction-chat and politicing between factions in a global-chat. Integrate a system for players to be able to vote to accelerate game time. (so the lulls between major events can take minutes or hours instead of months or years, but combat can happen in real time)
I think a system similar to what is described above would be particularly good at simulating drone warfare with 30 minutes of light lag and hoping the drone did the thing you intended it to.
Alternatively if you wanted direct player influence over battles the overarching game system and the combat game system could be separate. (Like a Total War game and the Total War map and battles being separate systems) So then the game would function largely as described above but then whenever a battle occurred the factions present would have a set number ships of set design and a set number of personnel based on what the faction deployed and players would be given direct control of personnel.
Fixed time compression MMO could absolutely work, though of course not with hands-on action.
Vote for time compression system doesn't really seem workable for an MMO - hoping for the best you will still get a bunch of griefers blocking time compression for the lulz. It could work pretty nicely for a normal MP game, though.
|
|
|
|
Post by Apotheon on Apr 16, 2019 12:18:03 GMT
So, anyone played Helium Rain, Rogue System, Stable Orbit, or Shattered Horizon?
|
|
|
|
Post by thorneel on Apr 16, 2019 20:32:18 GMT
sigh
Shattered Horizon, too brief was your time with us
Have anyone heard about another game based on the same principles of Shattered Horizon, in fact? I'm surprised no-one has touched the formula since.
|
|
|
|
Post by EshaNas on Dec 31, 2019 20:24:02 GMT
How would Terra Invicta fare?
|
|
|
|
Post by gedzilla on Jan 1, 2020 8:12:41 GMT
sigh
Shattered Horizon, too brief was your time with us Have anyone heard about another game based on the same principles of Shattered Horizon, in fact? I'm surprised no-one has touched the formula since. Whats shattered horizon ? |
|
|
|
Post by EshaNas on Jan 2, 2020 4:54:09 GMT
sigh
Shattered Horizon, too brief was your time with us Have anyone heard about another game based on the same principles of Shattered Horizon, in fact? I'm surprised no-one has touched the formula since. Whats shattered horizon ? A shooter? The moon exploded, I think, causing it to become a huge battlefield for earth. |
|
