Oolite Bulletins

I just heard about Spore yesterday. Not entirely off from what I'd like to see Oolite become (in however many decades it would take). My crazier ideas for the future include:

Stations explorable with a 1st person shooter engine (but pilots can still choose to conduct their business without leaving the cabin). Layout generated a bit like in UFO: Enemy Unknown, but with the seeded randomness of Oolite making sure that individual stations have the same layout when revisited.

The ability to buy up land/water on planets and have a small empire going (producing space fleets for conquests). All of it naturally running as a massive on-line game in a Frontier style galaxy, where some are Civilization style emperors and others are hired minions doing space battles or independent traders and explorers and others still are SWAT team members etc.

Everybody might at times have to deal with the game as an avatar in a 1st person view, but some will mostly be looking at the controls of their spaceship or a nation building screen or even galactic war charts. Your ship might be boarded and you'll have to pick up a gun, or the emperor might decide to pilot his own ship to take his avatar somewhere and boost morale among his troops.

Coming soon: A 6-Gigabyte game!

So........ if you could combine Oolite, Hardwars, and Doom, with PS/xbox graphics.......are we getting near?

Where do I send my money??? (Although, a six gig game may be around what $550)

TGHC wrote:

So........ if you could combine Oolite, Hardwars, and Doom, with PS/xbox graphics.......are we getting near?

Probably yes

I was thinking Civilization, Elite and Quake.

Hopefully it wouldn't be 6GB due to the use of pseudo random numbers to convolute the information.

Frontier did come on a single DD 3.5" disk and had the giant galaxy and Elite had the 2000 systems on systems that counted their memory in Kilobytes.

And 6GB might not be that much for a game, before we would see this happen.

Dr. Nil wrote:

And 6GB might not be that much for a game, before we would see this happen.

Storage just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger, what comes after gigabytes?

TGHC wrote:

Dr. Nil wrote:

And 6GB might not be that much for a game, before we would see this happen.

Storage just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger, what comes after gigabytes?

Terabytes

6gb is nowt - look at the back of Flight Simulator X, it needs 15 - FIFTEEN - gig of hdd space...

telling comment was in an interview w/ Braben. he was on about all Elite fitting in 22k or such and pointed out that that's less than an Elite desktop *icon* would be now!!

@KW - I know scary isn't!

When Andrew Braybrook (Paradroid/Uridium fame) wrote AlleyKat on the C64 the game was too big for the memory available (not all the 64K was actually available - only 38911bytes for us basic programmers and about 55K if you were writing Assembler the rest was snaffled by the system pushing slow ROM registers into faster RAM at power on) - so he had to learn how to steal it back - in the end he stole it from the RAM assigned to be the buffer for when a cartridge was plugged in - so people who had things like the GameKiller cartridge plugged in found the game wouldn't load - not why AB did it - but a pleasant anti-copy bonus all the same!

Now those days are long gone - PC game writers just make the minimum spec "RAM: Stupid amount because your OS will eat everything it can, CPU: As fast as possible because that way we don't have to spend anytime being clever and optimising our code, GFX: Really high spec - that way you wont notice that we've spent more time making it look pretty than actually playable"

Dr. Nil wrote:

Stations explorable with a 1st person shooter engine (but pilots can still choose to conduct their business without leaving the cabin). Layout generated a bit like in UFO: Enemy Unknown, but with the seeded randomness of Oolite making sure that individual stations have the same layout when revisited.

Dammit! This is what I have been wanting since Frontier was conceived!!!

I even started writing one before discovering that I can't program that well.

To be honest, the concept isn't that hard nowadays, what with the availability of OpenGL development tools that use a standard 3D environment. All that needs to change between a flight or space sim and an FPS is the control method and the style of movement (also known as Camera Mode).

The big size problem is textures. 3D objects take up very little space in comparison to the textures that cover them. The more detailed and realistic the textures then the bigger the files. Flight Sim is huge and bloated because it contains detailed texture files for the WHOLE PLANET, including the cities that are on it, plus the planes and cockpits.

An FPS Elite game would probably be substantially smaller than that, because stations could use standard interior textures or tiles. If planets were to be explorable, it might be possible to use the same idea. It all depends on how realistic or detailed one wants to be. Intricately mapping all 2000 planets would be unfeasably large. However, having a standard texture for each landscape type would be easier. These could be procedurally mapped onto the planet using some sort of pseudo-random model like the Fibonacci sequence.

Totally agree, DaddyHoggy - although I'm no programmer, having grown up with 8-bit computing it's really annoying to see just how wasteful and inefficient so much coding is these days.

With the likes of Spore it does look as if procedural content generation could be making a bit of a comeback though - it may not satisfy the console crowd who simply want to play through a movie for half an hour, but it's definitely the way forward when it comes to things like strategy games. Introversion have got some interesting things on the go in this area (http://www.introversion.co.uk/blog/index.php) - both Spore and Frontier get a namecheck.

Thanks Ramirez.

If you want to see something incredibly pretty, very procedural and very Elite like check out the WIP at: http://www.fl-tw.com/Infinity/infinity_media.php

@Dr Nil - exactly what I'd like to see too! *Imagines owning a moon, orbital station and ship-manufacturing plant…*

@Roberto

If you want to see something incredibly pretty, very procedural and very Elite like check out the WIP at: http://www.fl-tw.com/Infinity/infinity_media.php

The guy claims you'll be able to buy stations, buildings in cities, cities and if you get rich enough whole planets...

I had a look - does look v cool. But the "Macintosh port is unlikely" bit's a killer