Quote:Original post by Icefox
This would be a fun tool in an RTS-type game
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your fabber-bots could wander around and squirt buildings into existance wherever you wanted, as long as you had the energy and metal to do so.
Actually, this is EXACTLY how Total Annihilation worked. Construction bots stood in one place spraying things into existence.
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In an RPG-ish game... hmm. It still depends heavily on resources; you could simply have it so that you don't use it to build a wall around each enemy because that would cost too much.
How about this: I see a cloud forming a lattice (the glowing outline of the shape); then the shape begins to fill in. What if there's a very simple rule that if the object you're building takes damage, the whole structure is destabelized? So you not only have to get the right stuff to build, you have to guard it.
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You could simply restrict access to how large and how fast you could make things
Agreed. Yes, the handheld units wouldn't even have the processing power to accomodate building-sized templates, so that should be an easy and natural restriction. If you're building buildings, you've got at least a tank-sized constructor and a half-dozen resource-goop trucks connecting to it.
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"Hey, I could use my fabber-gun to build a bridge across this chasm, but it would use 10 units of Fuel Goop and I only have 20 left, and I'm only half way through the dungeon; maybe I should look around for another way."
Okay, if you're given something like this, do you ever think the player should be allowed to paint themselves into a corner with it? That is, they cross a chasm with it, the bridge gets destroyed somehow, and now they're out of resources for it and stuck on the other side. (You can't die in this design, so at worst it would result in some loss scenario where you lose time or resources you care about.)
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1) Either everyone has fabbers and can use them to build more fabbers, or they're heavily restricted by some government/corperation/something else. If you have such a powerful tool, there's going to be people who don't want everyone to have them.
I think the fab technology isn't restricted, but the building plans technology is heavily regulated & licensed. So you either have illegal duplication, open-source duplication, or per-creation fee duplication.
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2) Physical resources would cease to be as much of a concern, except for certain rare and important things. You could build a nuclear reactor in your back yard, but you still can't fuel it without uranium.
Good point. It might be interesting to bring some of the "special resources for unit/building X" philosophy of RTS games into an RPG.
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3) Building things like this would probably take massive amounts of energy, which means massive amounts of infrastructure. Someone has to control that infrastructure. And in the chaotic world you seem to be thinking of, finding enough energy for large fabbers would be hard to do.
Exactly as I see it. Either you're in civilization where they have loads of power (fusion), but strong laws, or you're in either the wasteland or the frontier, which is always hurting for power/resources/etc.
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"Grey goo" may be another problem in the world: nano-disassemblers, that take everything apart and build more nano-disassemblers. Now, this is either a problem that can be solved trivially by nano-disassembler-disassemblers, or a major scourge that threatens humanity as a whole. It might be interesting to have battles fought with such tools, and to counter them you need to have the correct templates and combinations for your fabber...
Yes! What if the dangerous parts of the world were plagued by flying black storms of "deconstructors" that looked like this:
or this:
These would be post-war nanite clouds originally used by the US & China, now out of control.
