Time-based Content Generation

2,020

Author

July 23, 2009 07:32 PM

Quote:Original post by Edtharan
However, using Wormholes would only allow you to travel between known entry and exit points. This allow for the possibility of new wormholes to be discovered that take you to new places, without having to increase the physical size of the space.

Hey, that's pretty cool!

I've already gone the warp route in the form of an "overmap" of interstellar space with your ship flying between stars. I want to keep this gameplay because it can help create an immense sense of scale and I can throw in some nifty forms of gameplay (like a "radar run" where you avoid enemies as you warp through their territory).

I was in the process of adding wormholes to this level, but if I blended your idea there's nothing really stopping me from making them terminate in interesting locations (solar systems, maybe even planets-- heck even pocket universes).

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If exploring new locations (star systems, planets, etc) is either (or both) risky or expensive (in money and/or time) then this makes for a realistic reason that not all places are explored, and that places unexplored are the more dangerous/hard to do.

At the moment wormhole navigation is skill dependent with possible damage to your ship. This would make a good reason why there could be pockets of unexplored space even as civilization advances. And I can control the appearance of the wormholes based on time or even other factors, like how peaceful (boring) the player has made the universe.

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As an aside: There is an interesting idea that NASA uses that they call the "Interplanetary Superhighway" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Network). Although are not Wormholes in the typical sense, what if you stretched science (like all good sci-fi :D ) so that only through these Interplanetary Superhighway links a ship can achieve superluminal speeds (these links would also exist outside out solar system between stars). In reality, they are just the most efficient path between gravitational bodies and nothing to do with real wormholes, but a very cool idea anyway.

Ah, that's interesting. Thanks for the reference.

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If you also allow known systems to take on a different characteristic (say low paying transport jobs), then it will give the player a sense of the receding frontier, and give them a subtle psychological push towards the unknown (you could even have the player meet grizzled old spaces lamenting the lost frontier and the encroaching strip malls).

[smile] That's cool. I'd thought about the idea that one of the downsides of the encroachment of civilization is the imposition of law. So maybe on the frontier you're used to tossing low-yeild nukes around, but when the rangers show up, followed by the marshalls and then the military, it might be time to move on.

--------------------Just waiting for the mothership...

Wavinator

2,020

Author

July 23, 2009 09:07 PM

Quote:Original post by TechnoGoth
Regions will allow you to achieve the same results as time based event generation without the time sink. And allow you to group similar content together, let the player move onto other places should they not like the content in one place, and make creation of a generated map of space and expanding known space easier.

I'm not opposed to the idea of regions, but I think I'm looking for a more surefire way of making sure that the player gets to the content. Of course it's easy to say "oh, just make lots of content" but that may not be possible.

In theory your idea could work with the timers if timers were region dependent.

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If you incorporated a Heechee type drive as the means of exploring the frontier in which you can swap coordinates with friends it would add community aspect of the game. Players could then exchange stories of adventure in the same regions even though they are playing solo. It could also be used if you wanted to host contests and events.

This sounds like a cool idea (I misread it at first as being multiplayer). I've been thinking that if I alter the random seeds for generating territory you could have your own unique territory, but the community aspect adds something if I don't go with timer-based content.

--------------------Just waiting for the mothership...

Edtharan

607

July 24, 2009 11:52 AM

Quote:Original post by Wavinator
[smile] That's cool. I'd thought about the idea that one of the downsides of the encroachment of civilization is the imposition of law. So maybe on the frontier you're used to tossing low-yeild nukes around, but when the rangers show up, followed by the marshalls and then the military, it might be time to move on.

I also thought about suggesting Laws of the place, but that really didn't use the psychology of the player to encourage them to seek the frontier. It felt more like the game would be forcing the player out of these systems.

My idea was to encourage the player to see the frontier and to avoid civilisation.

If you provide an adversary to the player and what they want to do (the law, cops, etc), then they are likely to fight back. You will be encouraging the player to stay in that location and fight back at the encroaching civilisation.

But, if you make the frontier more lucrative, then this encourages them to move out and not stay.

If you make the civilised system provide less well paying jobs, and make them boring (the old grind fests), then it achieves two goals:

1) Encourag4es the player to leave civilised areas
2) Provide a safe haven if they need to recover after a big set back

The frontier should be the exciting place, not the civilisation. Cop chases and such can drag attention away from the core aspect of your game, that of the excitement of the unknown regions and exploration of them (which is why you ahve an expanding frontier).

I suppose it is a case of the carrot and the stick. You can beat them with the stick (punish them by using cops), or you can use the carrot (reward them for following the frontier).

It would also give your world a dynamic feeling (even though it is just scripted) and give the player a sense that they have an influence on the world (but again, it is mainly an illusion as it is pre-determined before they start playing). But it would be a good illusion :D .

Wavinator

2,020

Author

July 26, 2009 12:15 AM

Quote:Original post by Edtharan
If you provide an adversary to the player and what they want to do (the law, cops, etc), then they are likely to fight back. You will be encouraging the player to stay in that location and fight back at the encroaching civilisation.

I see what you mean about psychology, but this one bugs me. Why can't civilization be an overwhelming, rising force? Even if there is a possible adversarial aspect, is there any reason why, given two distinctly different areas (civilized and wild) that the game has to be fair versus just being life-like.

If you have a frontier the player can escape into I don't think you have the same problem as, say a crime-based open-ended game where the law has to be beatable in order for the player to progress. The law could get tougher and tougher and yes, you might feel forced out, but that's actually not an unrealistic sentiment amongst frontier types.

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If you make the civilised system provide less well paying jobs, and make them boring (the old grind fests), then it achieves two goals:

1) Encourag4es the player to leave civilised areas
2) Provide a safe haven if they need to recover after a big set back

This might work, although I'm not a big fan of putting anything into a game that's intentionally boring. It's like badly designed save systems-- players have a way of blaming the game for whatever's there, even if they technically could have avoided it.

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The frontier should be the exciting place, not the civilisation. Cop chases and such can drag attention away from the core aspect of your game, that of the excitement of the unknown regions and exploration of them (which is why you ahve an expanding frontier).

Well this one will keep me up late at night. Crap. You make a good point about what should the core focus be. If civilization is actually as interesting as the wilderness and you have no extra incentive to go into the unknown, will players do it?

I guess it will depend on how adventurous they are.

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It would also give your world a dynamic feeling (even though it is just scripted) and give the player a sense that they have an influence on the world (but again, it is mainly an illusion as it is pre-determined before they start playing). But it would be a good illusion :D .

Thanks for the really good points (even those that are disturbing[smile]).

--------------------Just waiting for the mothership...

electricdragon

127

July 26, 2009 02:13 AM

I just read this whole thread, which is a lot to digest! So I'm not going to address any particular points brought up and instead just bring up a couple things I thought about while reading....

There seems to be a lot of emphasis here that one reason to leave the civilized areas is to escape the civilization and go explore the frontier. Yet the original post states the 'plan is to divide the game universe into a slowly expanding "Known Space" and a slowly shrinking unexplored frontier.' It's also mentioned that the known areas will have missions and random encounters.

Then everyone ran off with the idea of how to get the player out of the Known Area and into exploring the unknown stuff. Why exactly? Are the missions not going to be as cool or something in the Known Areas? I bring this up to say that simply forcing the player to leave and explore after a certain amount of time could lead to its own kind of grind, where there is no reason to stay in any area for a extended length of time because the entire game is biased towards making it unpleasurable after a certain amount of time simply to get the player out of that area and into the Unknown. I guess I am saying to be wary of creating a game based on Escaping instead of Exploring!

Since the aim (I'm gathering from the few different threads I've read about this game so far) is to create a huge game where the content is generated procedurally, I wonder if the spirit of exploration is necessarily diminished when a player decides that they really like some particular area they found and wants to stick around. What about the idea of claiming planets and creating towns, cities, states and eventually civilizations? Exploration might be a whole different ballgame when it's your interplanetary armada being sent out to find places to expand the Empire into....

Getting back to the actual topic of generating events based on time, I think it's a sound idea if we assume the player is somehow missing out on what the game has to offer. Say they DO want to go exploring, but for some reason keep missing out on the actual areas that have the new content they're looking for. Then it would make sense for the game to offer quests or missions to the player in a more direct manner, and a timer could be the mechanism for determining if this should occur or not.

Edtharan

607

July 26, 2009 11:34 PM

Quote:Original post by Wavinator
I see what you mean about psychology, but this one bugs me. Why can't civilization be an overwhelming, rising force? Even if there is a possible adversarial aspect, is there any reason why, given two distinctly different areas (civilized and wild) that the game has to be fair versus just being life-like.

If you have a frontier the player can escape into I don't think you have the same problem as, say a crime-based open-ended game where the law has to be beatable in order for the player to progress. The law could get tougher and tougher and yes, you might feel forced out, but that's actually not an unrealistic sentiment amongst frontier types.

If the player has the tools to attempt to fight back, then they will try to. If you then make it so that they can't then they will feel that you are forcing them to play in a way they don't want to.

If, instead, you play on the psychological need for reward and novelty seeking, then you can direct the player much more easily and not have them rebel against your control (yes, my second job is an evil overlord :D )

It is not trying to be being fair or even life like, what it is trying to do is to direct the player to where you want them to be and do what you want them to in a subtle way.

Quote:Original post by Wavinator
This might work, although I'm not a big fan of putting anything into a game that's intentionally boring. It's like badly designed save systems-- players have a way of blaming the game for whatever's there, even if they technically could have avoided it.

The idea is not to be obvious about it. If you do it subtly, then the player might not even be aware that they have been manipulated into going into the frontier. All you do is start dropping the rewards slowly for performing missions, and giving them less interesting missions as the civilisation encroaches. You don't make it boring, you just make it more interesting and rewarding to be elsewhere. You can then give them missions that take them to these more interesting locations, so as to let them know about the opportunities there.

Making it boring is not the aim. The civilised areas need to be interesting, just not as interesting and rewarding as the frontier.

Quote:Original post by Wavinator
Well this one will keep me up late at night. Crap. You make a good point about what should the core focus be. If civilization is actually as interesting as the wilderness and you have no extra incentive to go into the unknown, will players do it?

I guess it will depend on how adventurous they are.

Actually, what you could do is analyse the play style the player is doing and adjust the structure accordingly. SO if they are doing more cargo runs, then you could make the cargo runs in the frontier more rewarding and interesting.

If they are avoiding combat, have combat situations (rebellion against the encroaching civilised empire, pirates, etc) increase where they are, as they would try to avoid this, you create incentive for them to leave. Then give them a mission towards where you want to have them go and reduce the combat situations there.

But in everything: Be subtle.

Quote:Original post by Wavinator
Quote:
It would also give your world a dynamic feeling (even though it is just scripted) and give the player a sense that they have an influence on the world (but again, it is mainly an illusion as it is pre-determined before they start playing). But it would be a good illusion :D .

Thanks for the really good points (even those that are disturbing[smile]).

(Evil overlord laugh) The core part of my concept is that players will do what they want to do, and if you change the location where this take place, then they will naturally migrate towards there (if they know about it).

electricdragon has a point. We have been talking about the "Frontier" and "Civilisation", but the process I am describing could actually be used in any way. You could in fact, direct them towards civilisation rather than away from it, but making civilisation more interesting/rewarding and the frontier less interesting/rewarding.

You don't eve have to have it as a Civilisation/Frontier dichotomy. You could use this to make them move from one part of the frontier to another (or civilisation).

the basic idea is in 3 steps:

1) Reduce the rewards and interest in the current area.
2) Use missions to reveal the location you want them to go.
3) Increase the reward and interest in this new area.

It won't work every time, and it is unlikely to be able to direct them to a specific point in that location, but as a broad brush method to get the player to move on, this is probably the best way to so with the player's consent. It will take some time to work as well (depending on how subtle you are).

TechnoGoth

2,939

July 27, 2009 06:55 AM

When it comes to the differences between frontier and civilized I would have thought their very nature would influence the activities, and missions and missions available. The risk reward structure for different types of actions would be different between the two and as long as the game reflects the players should be able gravitate to which ever play style suits them the most.

The frontier would be:
- Undeveloped
- Little in the way of infrastructure and law
- Ships tend to be small to medium in size.
- Generally poor, with the occasional well funded expeditions

- Unexplored
- New planets, strange signals, and large areas of space to explore
- Mysterious and dangerous
- Easy to run and ride.

So naturally, activities like the following would be the most common because of the risk reward structure.
- Piracy
- Exploration
- Smuggling
- Illegal Experiments
- Colony Founding/ Building
- Big scores (ie finding a large one of deposit of valuable ore)

While the Civilized world would be
- Developed
- Plenty of infrastructure (too much in some places?)
- Ships of all classes and sizes.
- The whole gambit of wealth from the super rich with their own private star systems to poorest of the poor.
- Explored
- Little in the way of new discoveries to be made.
- Plenty of support for any task you want to attempt.

So naturally, activities like the following would be the most common because of the risk reward structure.
- Missions of mercy
- Cargo runs
- Political intrigue.
- Setting up mining bases, and other such enhancements.
- High risk high reward acts of piracy. (Such raiding a super transport vessel)
- Government and guild related missions/contracts

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Time-based Content Generation

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Time-based Content Generation

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