Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Cadabra]

I sometimes fancy of a long, meditative sort of game where you drive along the road gazing at surrounding landscape, passing by vehicles, people, through cities, through fields, around lakes and mountains. You have an ultimate goal at the end of the road and multiple encounters along the way that make you fight or flee or pursue or search for a bypass or escort someone or hunt someone down or deliver a message (all the typical stuff). Completing these missions you collect reward and upgrade your vehicle or buy (steal) a different one.

Planetary scale allows us not to be bound to a single city (like GTA4, for example), but travel across vast spaces crossing time and climate zones, borders of countries.

I prefer land vehicles to aircrafts because the proximity to the surface gives better sense of speed.

[Dunlop]

I play a "game" like that everyday, I call it "Google street view". lol
Seriously I like the idea, but again the world is BIG. We have to see how the developers of Outerra will fill the empty spots first. The game maker would also have a huge job filling the void with living things.

[cameni]

Yes the world is big. It's quite cool to go through the world with synced Google maps window, seeing the world as if before civilization, at the locations where now are the cities.
The forests helped much to make the world interesting, but there's much left to do in this regard. But I think we'll have the natural world rich and fully interesting one day, and then it will be on the game maker to make it also alive.

I'm most attracted to the game idea where there players will be reconstructing the civilization, and slowly interconnecting and joining with each other in such real world. There would be place for different player types - builder types could be creating the cities, building roads between them and the mines. Explorer types could be searching for artifacts from the lost civilization or searching for mineral deposits. Leader types could be managing alliances and newly created states politically. I'm not much of a socializer myself so I'm not sure what specifics should be there for those, but maybe it's the visiting the other people's cities or engaging in alliance's work?

But the large distances and slowly advancing technology could make it for an interesting and novel game play. At least for me

[Abc94]

I'm most attracted to the game idea where there players will be reconstructing the civilization, and slowly interconnecting and joining with each other in such real world. There would be place for different player types - builder types could be creating the cities, building roads between them and the mines. Explorer types could be searching for artifacts from the lost civilization or searching for mineral deposits. Leader types could be managing alliances and newly created states politically. I'm not much of a socializer myself so I'm not sure what specifics should be there for those, but maybe it's the visiting the other people's cities or engaging in alliance's work?

But the large distances and slowly advancing technology could make it for an interesting and novel game play. At least for me

That sounds like an epic MMORTS (or ATS)...

Even an FPS/RTS game like Operation Flashpoint where two sides struggle to capture towns in order to recieve supplies which can be used to buy more infantry/vehicles would work amazing with Outerra.  Maybe a game where two or more sides start in their own orbitial station and can drop down to the surface in order to construct a base and collect resources used for research and contruction.  Eventually the sides would meet each other and would fight for control over areas.  And maybe the battles would eventually escallate to space and sides would also fight for control of other planets.

These games would take a long time to complete and I don't even know if this would be possible yet, since there would be alot of players (or AI) and I don't know if it would be able to handle that many players and objects.

[cameni]

Yep but there's too much space there, finding the other player on a real-sized planet will be quite problematic. You'd have to track him down by listening to radio signals or something. That can be interesting game too but it will take a lot of time as well. I think that in order to employ the whole planet the game has to be either a singleplayer one that can be played over a long time, or it has to be a massively multiplayer and persistent one, where you can encounter others more easily and build up the ties.

The number of players and objects would be high, but they will be also spread over a very large area. If the game events were also paced in something more close to the actual time, the load on servers doesn't have to be very high.
What I have in mind is combining a single player city-building game with resource mining and FPS elements with a persistent online world, then adding more features like the ability to trade and interconnect with other players, forming alliances and so on.

This could be the terraforming game others wanted to see too, only in a persistent online world. Even if the world didn't allow for real-time interactions between the players initially, i.e. the server would just synchronize what players are building on their allocated land, it could be quite fun, don't you think?
There could be also a simple resource management involved from the start determining what can be build, later extended by adding the trade so one can send trucks or trains for some materials to the neighbors .. and so on

[Abc94]

Yeah it's definitely to big for a few players, but I guess it would have to be closer to an MMO like you suggested or have AI with players.

Do you think you could make a video for the next update of the camera slowly moving out into space?  I think there is only one other video that shows space and it's from last August.

[cameni]

Yes we will make another intercontinental video when we stabilize the current build, rising to space at one place and descending half the world away.

[Beolex]

... Leader types could be managing alliances and newly created states politically ...

Excellent idea! With this, we can make our own architecture style (European, American, Asian) so each country would have its unique features. It would also be nice to have a certain password/permission to enter each region, but if too complicated, you can just make it a fenced-off area with some openings. It's not like anybody will ruin it. Also, we can make our own flags, cities, and objects for the game. I really like this idea, and once all of the bugs are sorted out, this should definitely be put on the to-do list!

... and to be more creative, call the whole thing one country, then each person can designate their own region/municipality. That would be pretty cool.

[cameni]

Yea, my thoughts exactly. A kind of game where from a primordial anarchy will naturally arise countries or kingdoms, joining into hierarchies by force or by agreement, with economical and other ties and so on.
Maybe we'll get there one day.

[3dracer01]

i was just thinking about a game like that since i was 7 (im 14 now)

my idea would be:
1) Having cars you can build from the bare minimum like street legal redline racing  
2) a fully customizable character
3) a gta type concept only its not centerd around being just gang bangin
with the whole getting a job buy a car house clothes from different buildings
the game in my mind would have it be exactly like real life only you can do whatever you wanted to do

and maybe call it "YourLife"
this is my ideas

[cameni]

Well that type of game rather needs the world being already built and populated. I don't believe there will be a game that will be fully populated and interesting at the same time, not at its beginning.
That's why I think the game that uses whole Earth should be about players building or rebuilding it actively in parallel, effectively producing the content themselves. But this is also hard to make, on that scale.

[David F]

This would be a good idea, especially if you add Vehicle Damage to it, then it would be fun

[Beolex]

No offense, but many of these ideas are a bit much, like "jumping to conclusions". You must remember that the developers haven't even got a fully working character/city built yet, so they can't implement stuff like "GTA-Style gangs". I think this game will be fine as a simple cruising simulator with the exception of small towns and villages. Also, a simple character wouldn't hurt, but this is a simulator, not a knock-off of Second Life.

[Sano]

Give an example like this game called Rigs of rods, the graphics is a bit bad but the damaged effect is realistic.

[Beolex]

Give an example like this game called Rigs of rods, the graphics is a bit bad but the damaged effect is realistic.

I beg to differ, Rigs of Rods has excellent graphics. Just take a look at this screenshot.



It's just a power-hungry game, that requires an Intel i7 and a GTX295 to get excellent framerate whilst getting good graphics at the same time (though it's more hungry on the CPU). With that being said, you can't run it on your grandmother's Windows 98 with an integrated video card. Also, Outerra differs from this game in many ways, from vehicle structure, to terrainmaking, and other key factors. As I said before, this would be unique to be an open-source or freeware project.