I''ve been thinking of doing something in this genre also I just discovered gamedev.net and i''ve been posting like crazy

Besides just trading/upgrading, you might want to encourage team play.

You could introduce some NPC aliens "ala borg" that make players cooperate.

The borg computer player is ALWAYS playing, so it has the upperhand over us humans that need sleep.

In order for players to keep playing, the world needs to keep evolving. This is why MUDs are so popular. The wiz''s keep adding levels and items and creatures and things.

It would be cool if I was playing this space sim for a month, then there was wan upgrade that let me higher engineers. Or maybe I could fly a freighter that could hold other players, and we could launch a massive assault on other players... etc.

-Gelf

quote: Original post by borkman

Cool! I''ve never heard of actually building planets and
starting colonies. That would allow the game
universe to expand dynamically.
To what extent were you involved in developing the colonies?

No involvement - Colonists basically run colony themselves.
Some involvement - You protect them / bring supplies
Total involvement - You govern them / design building layout.

Did you collect taxes from them?


Steven Borkman
Home Page: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu
Video Game Page: http://www-student.cse.buffalo.edu/~borkman/projects/game/index.php

Some Involvment

You bring colonists to the planet by filling up your cargo holds at Earth and drop them off at the planet. The colony is represented by a Citidal which you can upgrade. The colony produces rescources and credits(money) for depending on which type of planet it is.

My favorite game of this genre (I haven''t played many) was Starflight, made by EA around 1986. This game had exploration, trade, research, RPG elements as you built your ship and crew, and an overall plot to save your homeworld. There are numerous hidden suprises as well. I think the genre is called "space adventure", but that is pretty general.

Here''s a link to it:

http://www.theunderdogs.org/game.php?name=StarFlight

I would call it "Adventure"

-Maarten Leeuwrik
"Some people when faced with the end of a journey simply decide to begin anew I guess."

quote: Imagine performing collision detection/response
and AI/3D pathfinding in all these game worlds
simultaneously. Is this possible?

I found an article in the ACM library which describes some distributed methods for solving this problem.
Processor allocation in parallel battlefield simulation


Steven Borkman
Home Page: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~borkman/
Video Game Page: http://www-student.cse.buffalo.edu/~borkman/projects/game/index.php

Edited by - borkman on December 28, 2001 2:39:35 AM