empty planets in mass effect

[Atrachasis]

the limiting factor for fully realized planets could have been the disc size.

Do you seriously believe that? The Elites had thousands of planets, hundreds inhabited, and fit on freaking floppies. By those numbers, MILLIONS of planets could have been in the game.

And thanks to the miracles of non-random procedural generation, NOCTIS has on the order of 100 billion planets with planetwide surfaces, some of which boast vegetation and animal life (and, as rumour has it, artificial structures as well, though I haven't come across any yet).

However, I would imagine it to be challenging (for the programmer) to allow the player to have any kind of impact on a procedurally generated world, let alone the choices and consequences that WalterKinde has envisioned. The moment the player alters such content, you'd have to explicitly log this change and the consequences stemming from it.

But for pure filler worlds, with minerals to mine and life forms to record, as in Starflight - yes, that would be nice to have. I loved that "second star from the right" feeling, not knowing whether there would be anything worthwhile turning up from random exploration, but always having that chance of stumbling across an ancient ruin... wonder if "Infinity - Quest for Earth" will have procedural planets worth exploring?

 

[Keldorn]

No one's ever heard of terra-forming in this game world, eh? What about arcologies and Oxygen production facilities? There's always a way around this no breathable atmosphere crap. Underground cities anyone? Might make people a bit claustrophobic, but fuck it.

Terra-Transformation could take many forms.

It would be cool if one could pilot a ship, or even send a drone, to hit or shoot the planet with trillions of condensed oxygen-hydrogen-nitrogen pellets.

Of course, there would be magnamonisian and zorkaniphrionian deleterious manifestations.



Global Blasting.




Then again, one could always just wear a space suit.

 

[Mantiis]

All the room on the disk was taken up by bloom.

There is a lot of bloom in the game - i especially like when the bloom is coming from a light source behind a character and the bloom is in front of the character. Awesome.

 

[OccupatedVoid]

the limiting factor for fully realized planets could have been the disc size.

Do you seriously believe that? The Elites had thousands of planets, hundreds inhabited, and fit on freaking floppies. By those numbers, MILLIONS of planets could have been in the game.

I went all the way to Beta Lyrae once in FFE(thargoid ship); the game crashed.

I remember seeing more starsystems around it. I think they go on forever.

 

[Zomg]

I need Toady One to make Star Control 4 ASAP.

 

[Imbecile]

Was it just me or had Bioware deliberately set out to make the planet where you have to save the settlers from the giant plant a bit fallouty? The music, crumbling buildings, and water supply fixing subquest makes me think yes.

 

[DraQ]

the limiting factor for fully realized planets could have been the disc size.

Do you seriously believe that? The Elites had thousands of planets, hundreds inhabited, and fit on freaking floppies. By those numbers, MILLIONS of planets could have been in the game.

Frontier and FFE had about 100,000,000,000 star systems. Significant percentage contained planets.

 

[doctor_kaz]

It's a nice and simple way to make the game bigger without really having to add additional content, I guess.

Ding Ding! This man gets a cookie.

 

[made]

Frontier and FFE had about 100,000,000,000 star systems. Significant percentage contained planets.

Which amounted to a few bytes of data because there was literally nothing to do on any of them. I'd take small number of planets with meaningful, hand-placed content over a mass of indistinguishable, random ones if I had to choose.

 

[Herbert West]

Frontier and FFE had about 100,000,000,000 star systems. Significant percentage contained planets.

Which amounted to a few bytes of data because there was literally nothing to do on any of them. I'd take small number of planets with meaningful, hand-placed content over a mass of indistinguishable, random ones if I had to choose.

I second that. I preffer shorter but better crafted and more meaningful games over streched and diluted experiences [0blivi0n].

 

[DraQ]

Frontier and FFE had about 100,000,000,000 star systems. Significant percentage contained planets.

Which amounted to a few bytes of data because there was literally nothing to do on any of them. I'd take small number of planets with meaningful, hand-placed content over a mass of indistinguishable, random ones if I had to choose.

I second that. I preffer shorter but better crafted and more meaningful games over streched and diluted experiences [0blivi0n].

Proper comparison would be
Morrowind (small, handplaced) VS Daggerfall (large, random).
Oblivion combines Morrowind's size with Daggerfall's diversity, so it's autofail, regardless of your preferences.

Normally, I'm for handplaced content as well, but I make an exception for frontier. Maybe it's because you can actually see distant bodies, so the systems do differ.

 

[Nael]

the limiting factor for fully realized planets could have been the disc size.

Do you seriously believe that? The Elites had thousands of planets, hundreds inhabited, and fit on freaking floppies. By those numbers, MILLIONS of planets could have been in the game.

And thanks to the miracles of non-random procedural generation, NOCTIS has on the order of 100 billion planets with planetwide surfaces, some of which boast vegetation and animal life (and, as rumour has it, artificial structures as well, though I haven't come across any yet).

However, I would imagine it to be challenging (for the programmer) to allow the player to have any kind of impact on a procedurally generated world, let alone the choices and consequences that WalterKinde has envisioned. The moment the player alters such content, you'd have to explicitly log this change and the consequences stemming from it.

But for pure filler worlds, with minerals to mine and life forms to record, as in Starflight - yes, that would be nice to have. I loved that "second star from the right" feeling, not knowing whether there would be anything worthwhile turning up from random exploration, but always having that chance of stumbling across an ancient ruin... wonder if "Infinity - Quest for Earth" will have procedural planets worth exploring?

If you like NOCTIS you may wanna give Celestia a try. It's a freeware Milky Way simulator (there are addons that give you more galaxies). It's not exactly a 1MB procedural content DOS program though . With all the addons you're lookin at 15 GB, but it's incredibly realistic physics and it's attention to detail reminds me of Microsoft Space Simulator.

Now if they can do this as Freeware why can't we have these believably expansive universes in games like Freelancer or the X series? I loved Freelancer for it's single player game and multiplayer goodness but as a physicist (of a sort) and an amateur astronomer the fact that the planets were twice the size of the stars they surrounded was inexcusable. And don't get me started on the X series. Any space simulator that feels claustraphobic is doing something very wrong.

It just seems with spacesims it's an all or nothing situation. Either you have an unrealistically small sandbox with lots of action or immense space simulators replete with orbital mechanics and thousands of star systems and zero action. The only game that got close to perfectly blending the realism with action was I-War. The only problem with that game was that it was fairly short and not as open-ended as I'd like. I am not sure if it is abandonware at this point but if you have the opportunity to check it out, I highly recommend it.

 

[DraQ]

It just seems with spacesims it's an all or nothing situation. Either you have an unrealistically small sandbox with lots of action or immense space simulators replete with orbital mechanics and thousands of star systems and zero action. The only game that got close to perfectly blending the realism with action was I-War. The only problem with that game was that it was fairly short and not as open-ended as I'd like. I am not sure if it is abandonware at this point but if you have the opportunity to check it out, I highly recommend it.

Didn't FE2 and FFE blend realism and action rather well? The controls were rather simplistic, but action they had.

 

[Herbert West]

...Celestia...

Celestia is pure gold for someone even remotely interested in astronomy/astrophysics. I've got about 6 gigs of addons myself. However, the only thing in common it has with a game is that it uses a 3d engine.

Oh, and the X series [tried 1 and 3] I strongly disliked. Although it looked promising.

 

[Norfleet]

However, I would imagine it to be challenging (for the programmer) to allow the player to have any kind of impact on a procedurally generated world, let alone the choices and consequences that WalterKinde has envisioned. The moment the player alters such content, you'd have to explicitly log this change and the consequences stemming from it.

Yes, but that's local-space. Since the changes only occur locally in the player's game, you need only record this in a player's save files. As the player only has a rather limited, finite ability to impact the universe as bounded by his available free time, he can't make THAT many changes.

 

[gromit]

Or, since we're already talking procedural in this theoretical game, and can therefore presume some level of uniformity in the passes applied to the planet upon "loading," you can just hire a GOOD programmer and get them to put in a nice flexible family of update funcs / heuristics and save it a dozen god damn kilobytes. Dynamically created ~= easy to fuck with, depending on your scripts and variables... great way to make those elevators twice as long, though!

 

[Nael]

It just seems with spacesims it's an all or nothing situation. Either you have an unrealistically small sandbox with lots of action or immense space simulators replete with orbital mechanics and thousands of star systems and zero action. The only game that got close to perfectly blending the realism with action was I-War. The only problem with that game was that it was fairly short and not as open-ended as I'd like. I am not sure if it is abandonware at this point but if you have the opportunity to check it out, I highly recommend it.

Didn't FE2 and FFE blend realism and action rather well? The controls were rather simplistic, but action they had.

Oh yeah, definite classics and great games. I just prefer I-War for the applied newtonian physics, and the game just seemed more "complete" in the criteria I like. The only thing missing from I-War in comparison to the Elite games is the open-endedness. But what it is I am inquiring about is, *today* why can't we get good spacesims like these? FE2, FFE, and I-War alike. With the hard drive space, graphics, and big budgets these days why doesn't anyone try and do something like those games? Infinity: Quest for Earth which Atrachasis mentioned looks promising, but the MMO aspect and the pay-per-month scheme is something that rubs me the wrong way. We'll see I suppose, and thank you for that heads up Atrachasis

 

[WalterKinde]

I have always believed the reason The Elite series succeeded was because the graphics were not that important to its well being.
To be sure at the time of it and its sequels release the graphics were cutting edge but they were not the driving force behind the game.
Fast Forward to today and what do you have?
Bloom and realistic directx/OpenGL 3d model renderings.
Which is why i said there may not have been enough room, 360 Mass Effect is being run directly off the disc hence the long loading times.The eye candy may have been what caused the lack of depth (for the planet exploration bit) for Mass Effect, i understand not EVERY planet you come across will be inhabited or have life forms on it or be even able to support life but surely if the Xbox harddrive had been in use they could have added at least 6 or 8 of them that had some local quests or decisions you could make on them, maybe be responsible for setting up a new colony just by finding a planet or have a standbye planet or system to which humanity could escape to encase your quest/main mission went wrong.

 

[DraQ]

Oh yeah, definite classics and great games. I just prefer I-War for the applied newtonian physics, and the game just seemed more "complete" in the criteria I like. The only thing missing from I-War in comparison to the Elite games is the open-endedness.

I haven't played I-War (and regret this), but while it probably did better in general realism aspect, did it account for gravity and planetary systems' dynamics as well? Frontier did and even despite it's rather simplistic controls and lack of complex navigation functions, you could put ship in orbit around some mass in Frontier.

 

[Topher]

The "uncharted worlds" in Mass Effect would have been less of an issue if there had been more main story content or at least more do do on the main story worlds. I didn't mind them being so empty because they were "uncharted worlds" after all.

Also, you couldn't put you ship into orbit in Independence Wars, I assume that's what I-war stands for?

BTW, this is my first post on these forums... after six years at Gamefaq's I finally gave up on that place. It's full of jackasses who treat everyone like dirt and have nothing to contribute to the topics. Granted this place has a poor reputation but I like what I have seen during my lurking. So hello...

 

[DraQ]

Also, you couldn't put you ship into orbit in Independence Wars, I assume that's what I-war stands for?

I haven''t played, so I don't know. So, could you?

 

[Riso]

I have I-war2. It's vastly easier to use, and it does have open ended gameplay.

 

[Herbert West]

If it's realism you're seeking in Space Combat games, try Terminus.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminus_% ... er_game%29
Physics implementation is superb.

edit: Here's the homepage. They even boast of some RPG elements, hehe http://vvisions.logical.net/terminus/story_frame.htm