Originally by: Synex

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Edited by: Synex on 13/12/2003 10:44:18
Edited by: Synex on 13/12/2003 10:42:37
So games right... How far have they come since their start (mainstream) in the 80's / 90's?

Well... graphics are obviously a lot better... Sound too... Gameplay is often a lot more fluid, and there is obviously a lot more of them around...

But have they actually got any more advanced?

Game design now is a hugely complicated process, and often designing a game is far more difficult than designing an ordinary application because of the far-reaching demands of it. Think about EVE, you'd have to design networking routines, security systems, a quasiWindows-esq 'window' system, graphics engine, sound engine... And that's before you put any content in it.

However, what would be good to see in a game... what would make it ground-breaking?

A few years ago I was involved in a little progrmaming team called The Elite Project. (TEP) Our aim was to recreate a game in the likes of Frontier Elite / First Encounters, but using modern technology and cutting-edge ideas. My role in this was to create a s, so that every time you played the game... It turned out COMPLETELY different, thus adding 10-fold to the replayability.

I ended up doing this by creating the Dynamic Story System, which was essentially a game-sized AI, not particularly advanced AI, but enough to make the game-world 'alive'. What this DSS did was basically assign a strength to each of the solar systems each empire owned, and then the empires would 'attack' each other and therefore gain/lose systems. Depending on the nature of each empire, they'd either build defensive ships, more production facility etc. etc. thus altering the outcome of the battles etc.

This worked better than I could have imagined... The universe was constantly changing as the two sides fought and the borders between them moved. As systems came under attack, trade routes were altered, generating a great supply for weapons and lots of people wanting to leave the system. The player could enter systems that were currently battling, and see faction ships blowing themselves up, and join the battle and often swing the balance in favor of one side. News storys, missions etc. could all be generated easily from this DSS and it kept the game interesting. You felt like you were making a difference. Surprisingly, when I decided to test out and throw a third race into the mix, the first two races joined forces to attack the third I was quite impressed with that...

So anyway, onto the point of this thread...

EVE, along with any MMORPG would be the perfect environment to implement something like the DSS. A system that finally get's these empires to come alive, rather than the shallow backdrop they currently are.

Minmatar hate the Amarr right? So why have I NEVER seen even tiny skirmishes between them?
Why do CONCORD sit at a gate, while crappy NPC pirates plug away at your hull?

With a DSS, you could get it to dynamically alter the sec status of systems, allowing rifts to appear between the different empires... Maybe 2 empires might ally and go after a 3rd? Agent missions etc. could easily be auto-generated from such a system, and the players could actually make a difference to the story line!

This is the sort of thing I'd expect from a MMORPG today, let alone a single player game. Game companies seem to be focusing too much on graphics, and flashy things.

How far have games come since the start? Maybe not as far as we think...

Synex
EVE-DB Programming Guru[/quot