Jolt Country

I have not played WWRTIS!

But this message is more to say that I'll be on vacation for the next four days, and so checking in here will be difficult if not impossible.

But that is NO REASON for you fine folk to not continue God's work by designing this game, and by all means never putting finger to keyboard to write even an empty comment line of code towards creating it.

Just ask yourself... what would you want in a space trading game, knowing full well that there is no chance it will ever see the light of day?

BTW, I'll leave you with this:

I played the above "Space Trading" game for the last four-plus hours I was at "work" today, and here's what came to mind:

1. Though this goes a long way towards the "informational transparency" which I keep insisting is important in these games, clicking on dialogue boxes ("do you want to attack the ship or flee?") a thousand times a minute really is no substitute for a true real-time space sim game.

2. But god DAMN is it addicting.

1:45 PM: This is so stupid.

2:30 PM: This is so stupid.

3:25 PM: This is NOT what I want in a space trading game.

4:10 PM: Definitely not.

5:36 PM: I mean, really. How lame is this?

6:07 PM: Oh fuck, I had to leave seven minutes ago to go to Arclight Cinema to see "Clash of the Titans", which my girl is taking to me and I'm not sure whether it's for serious or its a joke, which I would later find out that it's both, depending on who you talk to.

Damn you, lame-ass, but still terribly addicting Space Trading!

I believe there's an option called something like "continuous attack or flight" where you click the button once and it continues to do that until you tell it to do something else. There is in the Palm version, at least. Don't know about Windows.

Heh, Space Trader and PalmFrotz were responsible for getting me through many a boring day in high school.

An idea to solve the death issue: don't make it "you" that dies if your ship explodes. To expound:

In an effort to cut costs on ship development and cut down on the risk of death in space, many spacegoing vehicles are now being manufactured without any life support systems to speak of. Instead, thanks to advances in interstellar communication via solar refractor arrays (technobabble) many space traders go from planet to planet in cargo ships controled entirely by remote.

The way i see this working is (and i have no idea how scientifically viable this is) that you would connect with some sort of mystical faster-than-light connection to various communication stations, ah, stationed throughout various solar systems--making the travel of data from those communication arrays to your home "bass" instantaneous, the mechanism for which I have no idea--pretend that we've found out a way to make wormholes large enough for data transmission, I dunno. anyway, so then the ship itself will have lightspeed wireless downloinks to the communication sattellites, which send that signal through the technobabble to you.

In the case of bountyhunter missions, I imagine it working out something like: once you find his drone ship, you make contact with it to figure out where his data is going and can either get the authorities to help track the guy (if he's wanted in that system) or have fun haX0ring the communication dealies. Then once you have found his planet and base you have, again, several options; you can have the locals take him into custody and receive your full reward; you can firebomb his house; you can see if that guy has illegal missions for you; you can pick him up with your ship and pull him into space, sell him to slavery, trow him out hte window and watch him decompress, let him out near a sun and watch him get sucked into the star... This would also help with the seemless interactivity issue: If you're not browsing your computer to see what the latest prices are in whatever system, you're using your computer to pilot your ship; then you browse over to an interstellar craigslist (or whatever) and find someone who's interested to buy your merchandise for the prices you set. These could be AI people, or real people playing the game. If it's some sort of MMORPG space trading game that would make it even cooler because, like, you the real person are logging onto a computer to play a game involving you logging onto a computer and doing basically the same things you do in "real" life... only in teh future, and it's all in space.

Oh, yeah. Forgot to mention Oh, yeah. Another idea i forgot to mention about the communication thing. This could, like any sort of technology in the world today, be something that only works perfectly if you're in a part of the domestic spacelanes; so if a person is on a more remote planet, the uplink to the spacedrone could experience something much akkin to lag on the internet, basically at random, although the farther away from civilization your planet is the more likely it would be to happen, logically. This can obviously be detrimental, but it could also help you out if, for example, you're chasing someone who's hiding out on a desolate planet and so he can't really defend himself adequately due to timelag from his inputted commands. This would also serve as another way for the player to "upgrade" by starting out on a remote planet and then migrating to one with better connections when he has the ca$ to move his bass of opperations. Anyway, so if a drone dies, that drone is dead, and whatever cargo might be on that ship is gone with it, so the player is out all of the resources that it took to put the ship into space and the cost of the ship itself. Thus, the player would make a choice of whether or not it is worth the risk FINANCIALLY; he will still be able to continue playing, even if a ship is destroyed; one the player reaches a certain amount of wealth he could conceivably eat the loss of just a cargo drone with relative impunity. Naturally, if he is on a seek and destroy sort of mission his ship would be outfitted with guns, missiles, better radar, and the like so the cost of losing such a mission would be higher, however the likelyness of doing so would also be lower with adequate armament.

Also, all numerical values need to be represented with Nixie tubes. The mediocre Russian FPS You Are EMPTY did that, and it was the coolest part of the game (except for the name).

I've certainly got the bug again for SELLING SPACE IN SHIT, so this threads needs to be bumped.

I did enjoy the message from the Evochron Alliance guy.

Guys, I hate to break it to you, but the *exact* game you're describing, which meets *all* your criteria exactly, already exists. It's called "Eve Online".

Ben's requests, for example:

1) The number of things to cart around is staggering. Thousands and thousands. Also, you can buy (or mine) raw material and manufacture your own stuff to sell. You can also set up automated mining facilities and refineries on planets.

2) The universe has thousands of systems and something like 40,000-60,000 people playing simultaneously in those systems (not "realms" like most MMORPGs).

3) Admittedly, there are jump gates. If you had to travel interstellar distances in real time it would be pretty boring.

4) As for market range - when you start, you can see all prices at all stations in a solar system while you're in it. As you train your skills, you can see into other systems. You can never see into ALL systems, but at max skill you can see prices across humongous regions. The same is true for the range at which you can place orders, trades, and purchases.

4) As for "flow of play", it follows he classic game flow of the best space trading games: "Do whatever you want, go wherever you want, whenever you want."

5) The economy is so complex they hired a real life economist who issues reports. Also, the economy is affected in realtime by in-game happenings? War in one region? Make a killing as a war profiteer selling shit to the combatants. New region discovered with lots of one kind of resource? Prices drop. Etc. In terms of market interface, EVERYTHING is available with charts and graphs and numbers. Want to see he price history of an item and what it was selling for in various systems recently? No problemo. Right click and get a nice chart. Want to see what things are selling for in systems along your route? easy to check. Inflate demand. Corner markets. Find the biggest price differentials and exploit them.

6) The "increased depth and difficulty in actually getting where you're going" is what Eve is all about. How much risk you take is completely up to you. If you don't want to fight other people and just want to trade peacefully, you can do that if you stay in lawful space. Wantto make more? Try some of the more dangerous areas. Risk == reward. It's as dangerous as you want it to be. face as many or as few bad guys (players and NPCs) as you like. And the complexity and variety of ship systems is amazing. People can (and do) spend hours upon hours equipping their ships (but you can do fine without doing that, too). "Understanding your ship and its limits before deciding whether or not the trip is worth it" is pretty much the basis of the whole game. getting where you're going safely (assuming your destination is dangerous) is a real art and skill. And if most of your route is safe but you have to cross some dangerous space, you have to decide if it's worth it or if you should choose a longer, safer route (yes, you can choose any route you want with awesome mapping and waypoint tools that show how dangerous each system is, etc). It's as far from "push a button and you're there" as it gets.

ICJ's "bounty" feature is in there. It's easy to place bounties, and tons of people have them on their heads. Collecting them takes a lot of skill, though. and, yes - if you provoke them! - things do indeed "get very personal with the various Bad Guys in the universe". grudges go on for years between players, corporations, etc.

Death is handled exceedingly well. It's a great balance between "death wipes out out of the game" and "death means nothing". Like this: You have a clone. If you die, your clone is activated, and you are back at a base. If your clone is not up to date or you don't have one, you lose skill points. Also, clones cost money - the more skill points you have, the more they cost. The worst part is, of course, even if you die with a clone, the ship you were flying is lost with everything aboard (you can get insurance, but it ain't cheap). This can get very expensive if you were in a high end ship with lots of cargo and equipment. There are escape pods which can save you if you're quick enough, but they can also be shot down, and even if you live, your ship is still gone. As Ben requested, it can hurt a LOT - depending on the risk you were taking.

As for user interface, it *looks* complex, but you don't have to use everything or even know what it all does - not right off the bat. Many people are scared off from Eve by the learning curve - it looks complex and intimidating, but the important thing to remember is that you learn organically. It's not as if you have to know how everything works before you start. Once you know how to fly around and buy/sell stuff, that's all you need to know to be a trader. The rest will come organically as you need it know it.

And the graphics are gorgeous beyond belief.

Eve is like real life - big, complex, and open ended. It is what you make of it. It doesn't even have to be an MMOG. If you want to play it like a single-player game filled with NPCs, you can do that. Be a solo trader, don't talk to anyone else, don't join a corp, just fly around and trade. It's like a single player game with really good AI. If you want to form a corporation and have a lot more collective power, do that. Do as much or as little of each thing as you want and as your interests and goals change.

If anyone is interested, I can get you a trial code and I'll spare you the newbie grind by staking you enough cash to get a decent ship with decent equipment and some left over to start trading with.

Seriously, guys - it's right there. If you're willing to spend 4 hours trying out some new game that you don't even like that much, spend the same time trying out something that already *has* all the stuff you say you want.

I have been thinking about this ever since a guy wrote an on-line version of what he said was Traveller, written in Fortran for the IBM 3090 mainframe that ran MUSIC/SP terminal system.

It reminds me of the new version of Trade Wars, which has been rewritten to run in PHP instead of being a Pascal-based BBS door for WWIV.

I decide to do something like that, but I wanted what that Traveler clone had: a reproducible universe - one not using a random number generator, but a calculated universe - that produced different planet levels for technology but always did so consistently. I don't have the math to do the calculation so I put up a request for bids on Rent-A-Coder (now vworker.com) I got the formula, written in PHP, that I could understand, for $80.

I might put up a demo if someone is interested; I had to set it aside because I got a couple of programming jobs in the interim.

Here is my addition.

There was an old board game called Shadow Lord which existed long before MMORPGs. It was I guess similar to Risk and Monopoly in a way. The board consisted of a map of planets and each player built armies and weapons and moved from planet to planet.

The game came with a deck of cards and each card represented a person -- I don't remember how many there were, 40 or 50 it seems. But anyway the people belonged to one of four classes: Diplomats (0), Builders (3), Fighters (6), and then the four elemental lords (the players). I don't remember exactly, but there were a set of rules, like you couldn't attack a planet that had a diplomat for example, but ... oh, I don't remember.

But ANYWAY, what this made me think of is, I would like an MMORPG where you could be a diplomat. I remember some multi-player first-person shooters that would allow you to walk around after you were dead and watch the action.

So in this new Space MMORPG we're (not) building, I would like some sort of diplomat character -- something that allows me to walk/fly around, interact with people, but not concern myself at all with the mechanics of the game. I will not need to worry about money or food or fuel or whatever else this game hinges on. I will just be free to fly around and visit people and I cannot be attacked.

Sorry, usually Fin just saves that exact same rant for me twice a year. I'm sorry you had to see that.

Well, the fact that they force you into a third person view is what kills me for it. It's for ....... um... it's for people who need things spelled out for them. There's also so much isk inflation since I started playing. Meh.

Anyway, with the lag and broken features, I have to give EVE a pass. Maybe next year.

Not that APB was any better. That only lasted three months! Gotta give EVE credit for being alive for three years now.

Scott wrote:Well, the fact that they force you into a third person view is what kills me for it. It's for ....... um... it's for people who need things spelled out for them.

As for third person, that's changing soon - you will have avatars and be able to walk around stations and do stuff. They are *constantly* improving it. Later on you will be able to walk on planets, there will be planetary combat, etc. They are also integrating it with a first-person shooter - separate game, but the people in Eve interact with the people in the game. For the upcoming game DUST 514, the players in Eve will use DUST514 players to attack and defend planetary installations. Now THAT is cool.

As for "people needing things spelled out for them" - I don't get it. It's the most free-form, open-ended game to ever exist.

Scott wrote:There's also so much isk inflation since I started playing. Meh. Anyway, with the lag and broken features, I have to give EVE a pass. Maybe next year.

ISK inflation isn't such a big deal. Stuff costs more, but it's easier to make ISK. Lag continues to improve and now you almost never see it unless either 1) your internet connection is very flaky, or 20 you're in a massive fleet battle with 600 ships or something. For normal people? Gone. I hear there are some broken features, but I've never encountered one. They sure aren't common.

CCP is the best game company EVER because they truly *listen* to the players and make changes the players want. There is player representation and input at all levels of development. The pace of improvements is astonishing. Usually twice a year they introduce major (free) upgrades with amazing new features. Every area sees major improvements, from minor UI bugs to major subsystem overhauls (the new fleet/grouping system is fantastic).

Scott wrote:Gotta give EVE credit for being alive for three years now.

Make thet 7 years. It was released in 2003.

pinback wrote:Sorry, usually Fin just saves that exact same rant for me twice a year. I'm sorry you had to see that.

That's because you don't listen. You tried it once for about two hours, decided it was too hard for you, made up your mind, and refuse to ever reconsider. So instead you spend ten times that much time playing sucky games that suck and then writing extensive reviews about the things you don't like about them.

I know *you* never listen to anyone else, but theoretically other people here might. I understand the enjoyment of blue-skying a "perfect" theoretical game that will never exist (I do it myself all the time). All I was doing was pointing out that the game you guys have descried does, in fact, already exist, so if you ever get tired of just talking about it and want to actually play it, no one has to write anything.

I guess the thing with isk inflation is....... if there is inflation in REAL life then I havea a basis for comparison. 'Oh this banana is now a dolalr a piece, but I can compare it when other things I buy." It is difficult in a game to do that for a new player. You go in after not playing for a while abd suddenly battleships are More Expensive. But you don't see it on a dayto day basis with groceries. It is surprising. I think that is my point.

Admittedly, APB made me hate blacks.

I didn't know about how they fixed lag!! For some reason I thought it was a newer game. I like Eve. The people who make it are GOOD PEOPLE.

Scott wrote:I guess the thing with isk inflation is....... if there is inflation in REAL life then I havea a basis for comparison.

Heh - good point.

Scott wrote:I didn't know about how they fixed lag!! For some reason I thought it was a newer game. I like Eve. The people who make it are GOOD PEOPLE.

Well, it's impossible in any online game to "fix lag" completely - network conditions are always a variable, and no matter how fast, stuff does take some nonzero time to compute. But the optimizations in network and game code have made it so that - assuming the net itself isn't having a problem, and assuming you aren't constantly in giant fleets - lag is pretty much not an issue any more. Not for the average player, not enough to really notice or be a bother.

You know, in just about every space trading game, the actual trading aspect is pretty much exactly the same from game to game. Go to one place, get a price list, buy shit, go to another place, get a price list, sell shit. What if the trading was more hands-on? Some shady character places an order for a spare part for an obscure piece of obsolete equipment, and after poking around for a while you discover that the only merchant within twenty parsecs that has one is some yokel who's set up shop in the middle of a slum in Space Bangkok. You have to go down to the surface of the planet and try to find the guy you're looking for, but hardly anyone speaks any of the languages you do so you have to figure out how to effectively communicate with them to get what you want. I don't know how feasible or fun this specific situation would be, but you get the idea; something to add some flavor and variety to an otherwise mundane mechanic.

hygraed wrote:You know, in just about every space trading game, the actual trading aspect is pretty much exactly the same from game to game. Go to one place, get a price list, buy shit, go to another place, get a price list, sell shit. What if the trading was more hands-on? Some shady character places an order for a spare part for an obscure piece of obsolete equipment, and after poking around for a while you discover that the only merchant within twenty parsecs that has one is some yokel who's set up shop in the middle of a slum in Space Bangkok. You have to go down to the surface of the planet and try to find the guy you're looking for, but hardly anyone speaks any of the languages you do so you have to figure out how to effectively communicate with them to get what you want. I don't know how feasible or fun this specific situation would be, but you get the idea; something to add some flavor and variety to an otherwise mundane mechanic.

This was an excellent contribution to the thread, and I wanted to say I agreed with you 100%. That would be awesome.

Space Bangkok -- hahaha! :)

What are the 20 best Elite clones of all time?

Flatspace is on the list, and it's terrible. So, what does that tell you.