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[RaikoRaufoss]

A flight simulator!

That could be part of what we're discussing, yes.  And welcome.

[cameni]

A flight simulator!

There's also a possibility that a flight simulator addon will be developed along with the development of the game. It may result in a specific release aimed at flight sim enthusiasts.

[zgredek]

I have two ideas. The first one is driver job simulator, so you can work as taxi / bus / truck driver. Or you can be a pilot. The another one is something like OpenTTD, but in 3d

[cameni]

Our idea was in certain respects similar to TTD and other transport-style games - you'd be connecting cities, mines and facilities by roads and railroads and planning aircraft routes etc.

I'm just unsure how to merge two concepts - that you can have your own private land where only you are allowed to build, acting as a county, and the need to build arterial roads/railways to transport rare stuff from distance.

[ZeosPantera]

Our idea was in certain respects similar to TTD and other transport-style games - you'd be connecting cities, mines and facilities by roads and railroads and planning aircraft routes etc.

I'm just unsure how to merge two concepts - that you can have your own private land where only you are allowed to build, acting as a county, and the need to build arterial roads/railways to transport rare stuff from distance.

I think the "having your own land" issue might be un-necessary. With the area we have to work with assigning the land would only force people apart (though there initially won't be other people). Now I am not looking to have all the players in groups like a ghetto. But certainly less then a mile from one player's base camp to another would not be so bad. Perhaps if you are not allowed to build your main structure if you are less then X distance from another player. That would ensure the land is used while not forcing everyone to be hours of travel apart. Frankly I would like to be able to mine and work next to my actual friends. Not sure how to accomplish this. Maybe we all just decide on an area before descending from the mothership. Think of the social experiment that would initiate! It would be like a large scale version of the movie "the warriors".

[C. Shawn Smith]

There are times when I just want to be "away from everything and everyone" in an MMO type environment.  Although I know multiplayer won't be added at first, and I'd still be more or less alone, I'd like to build a little cabin somewhere miles away from everything else so I can take in the beauty of the virgin world ... nature at its finest.

If there's some sort of rapid transit system (say, a "shuttle" that enters LEO), then distance won't be too much of a factor.  I imagine clans or guilds would end up forming to create cities in particular areas (and eventually entire nations).

For me, I think I'd like to stake out a claim around the Seattle area, or perhaps Colorado.

I think the hardest thing for this game is the sheer size of the world, and trying to get from one place to the next.  Imagine walking from LA to NYC in Outerra ... it would take just as long as it would in the real world .  If there's no rapid transit system, everyone will have a hard time finding one another once multiplayer shows up, if it does.

[cameni]

It will be affected by other design decisions. For example, to be able to effectively manage the world, the land will have to be pre-parceled into districts that will be assignable to a particular player. Consequently, with players claiming their allegiance and nationality, political maps can be rendered daily to be shown on the website. This could become a great attractor for people - seeing maps of current world order. If the borders were completely dynamic, such system would be much more complicated and error prone.

Another issue are the privileges. Two people on the same piece of land making roads = mess. If you join an alliance together with your comrades, effectively joining your lands that you will be managing together, there still has to be a single person responsible for designing stuff, assigning tasks and privileges. Or when someone begins, it will lock the design mode in that district for others.

Alliances and higher level hierarchies could be also used to make new features accessible, for example highways or just higher capacity upgrades and such. Hm, this could become sooo complicated

And for the socializing types .. you can be somewhere else in person, while occasionally managing your land, or delegating these rights to the alliance leader and just going FPS mode. These elements of gameplay can be separate. I can imagine sim guys just taking jobs to transport goods stuff around, not caring for strategic play at all. But they would rely on strategic players to build the world.

[ZeosPantera]

Well one of the vehicles we get from the start should be a jump jet so we can cover some long distances in a reasonably short time. 1000 miles in 30 minutes is the fastest I would ever want it to travel (concord did 1350mph so the future 2000mph should be doable). Then limit the single full fuel range to 1500 miles. Causing an exploration limit to 750 miles away from known fuel sources.

I will leave the political structure of OT up to the corrupt and terrible people.. Just like real life. You could even just have the game work its way into the Gundam Wing/firefly political crisis with the settlers/working class eventually wanting independence from the military controlled upper hierarchy. Since the groundwork is all we are really aiming to show off the plot itself is as fluid as the blood of the enemy which could be made up as you see fit.

[cameni]

Yeah, the political structure would be left on the people themselves, we just need to implement the mechanisms so they can express it freely in-game. In turn we can use it to make a bit of propaganda to attract new players - showing the political map will surely p*ss off some to log in and try to change the balance. It's more suited for the military extension though.

The bad thing is that it will greatly attract DDOS attacks too, but that's something every online game has to count with nowadays.

[RaikoRaufoss]

DDOS attacks!?!?  I didn't know that.

[Jagerbomber]

Oh yes, they seem to be everywhere now.

How would you pull this off exactly?  I mean, to shape the world yada yada and take over other people's land, the land couldn't be protected by the program itself to have it so only certain people can shape it because then taking over lands wouldn't work.  Also, how would somebody protect their land, especially if it's really big?

If it was a complete free build, it would take a lot shorter time (especially in a virtual world) to destroy things than it would to create them how the creator wanted it.  I just fear that it's inevitable that there will be somebody who's gonna be a jackass and go around wrecking everybody's stuff.  :/ *Cough*MINECRAFT*Cough*

[cameni]

There are some possibilities. First is that taking over would simply not work, at least not initially, the game being about building and transporting (apart from exploring and enjoying the driving and flying). On the strategic level it would be thus an economic competition, much like all the transportation games.

If there was a military layer later on it, the takeover could be economic as well - certain % of income would go to the usurper, but the lands will still be yours. The same % will go to your alliance/state even if you are not conquered, so it won't be such a loss other than loss of pride

There can still be conflicts, for example when the ruler decides to build an arterial road through his empire, necessarily taking some land of the conquered or joined players. But this could be solved as in real life .. compensations, and voting if the subject files a protest .. will bring a real life unhappiness to some

(thread split from here)

[C. Shawn Smith]

The Lumion thread got me to thinking about buildings, housing, etc.

I'm wondering how difficult it would be to construct some sort of structure-design interface within the engine.  Basically, think of The Sims where you could literally build a house to your own specifications, selecting areas for walls, doors, windows, ceilings, stairs, etc.  The customization options would be practically endless.  When you "build" the structure virtually, it tells you the amount of resources etc needed.  Then you have the option to scrap it or save it to a blueprint.  When all the resources are gathered, the "construction pod" comes down from the mother ship and begins building the building according to the blueprint.

This would be in addition to using prefabricated structures (for ease of the engine and for those who don't get into that kind of thing, "stock" buildings/homes/warehouses would be available for construction, as already discussed.

[cameni]

The difficulty would be proportional to the required level of customizability and mess avoidance
Yeah we were pondering about it too, but thus far we didn't find an elegant and reasonably doable solution  :/

[C. Shawn Smith]

The difficulty would be proportional to the required level of customizability and mess avoidance

Couldn't you do something similar to your road/pad tool?  I don't know how it works on the inside (programming level), but it seems to me it could work.

I'm thinking in the following terms:

1. "Foundation Tool"  Click an area to create the foundation in the shape desired.
2. "Wall Tool" Click a starting point for a wall, and then click the end point.  Continue until you have all your walls defined. (Walls would have a slider adjustment for height and thickness)
3. "Floor Tool" Not sure about this one, but could be very similar to the Foundation Tool, but allows you to also click on the "tops" of the walls to secure the flooring to that height.
4. "Windows/Doors Tool"  Click the spot you want a window or door, and it intersects/cuts through the existing wall (perhaps inserting a pre-defined static mesh).
5. Stairs, furniture, decorations, etc, could all be actual static meshes contained in a library, which could be added to by 3rd party developers/modding ... could even have some way of allowing websites to create links for use within the engine to allow instant download of a library from the web.  Select the desired mesh, and click the spot where you would like it to rest.
6. Textures could also come from pre-defined tiling textures.  Once your object is created, clicking on various "surfaces" (or doing so during the time of construction), would secure that texture to the piece.

Once you have the "blueprint" built, the engine spits out the necessary resource requirements (say, X amount of wood, stone, metal per square meter of wall/floor/etc), and allow you to save it as a blueprint to be fed into the construction pod when it arrives.