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[Kagus]

Why would a shooter game character need to eat?

To soak up the liquor.

[TBeholder]

Okay, that's pretty funny. xkcd on extreme real-time simulators. Can be done, too.

[Kagus]

I'm almost certain I saw that game on Steam at some point.

[Cruxador]

I recently read the story Lazy Dungeon Master, and I really want something a bit like it. Presumably a bit like a mix between Dungeon Keeper and Zoo Tycoon. So you dig out tunnels and new floors, and in each area you want to make a place where adventurers can come die, but you need to make it appealing to them without spending too much of your magic doing so. So that means you need to make places where monsters can live naturally and reproduce, and so each floor is an ecology project as well as a maze. And traps are composed of elements, even if as simple as a pressure plate for a pitfall, but then there can be riddles and puzzles and things like the greed based trap where if you take the treasure, the walls close. And topside, you can place inns and shops and things under a false (allegedly non-monstrous) identity to gouge adventurers and supplement the treasure of your dungeon. And maybe tie things together like emptying your sewers into a lightless labyrinth to give adventurers in it a chance of infection as they swim with gators and worse things and try to avoid sharp bladed traps hidden in the murk.

[HMetal2001]

The Elite:Dangerous galaxy with Stellaris would be amazing. Or at least multiple 3D galaxies.

[Dutrius]

I recently read the story Lazy Dungeon Master, and I really want something a bit like it. Presumably a bit like a mix between Dungeon Keeper and Zoo Tycoon. So you dig out tunnels and new floors, and in each area you want to make a place where adventurers can come die, but you need to make it appealing to them without spending too much of your magic doing so. So that means you need to make places where monsters can live naturally and reproduce, and so each floor is an ecology project as well as a maze. And traps are composed of elements, even if as simple as a pressure plate for a pitfall, but then there can be riddles and puzzles and things like the greed based trap where if you take the treasure, the walls close. And topside, you can place inns and shops and things under a false (allegedly non-monstrous) identity to gouge adventurers and supplement the treasure of your dungeon. And maybe tie things together like emptying your sewers into a lightless labyrinth to give adventurers in it a chance of infection as they swim with gators and worse things and try to avoid sharp bladed traps hidden in the murk.

That sounds fun. Add in chaining lots of traps together from Evil Genius and you're all set!

[Kagus]

The original Dungeons had a somewhat related concept, in that you'd build your lair in such a way that adventurers would chop up a few free-spawning mooks and grab a few fistfuls of treasure before getting brutally murdered, in order to build up their "spirit" which you'd then harvest from them.

It was an interesting concept, but the entire Dungeons series has been riddled with problems and poor implementations since the beginning, not to mention advertising their game as "the new Dungeon Keeper 2".

[TWO CATATA]

SS13 was actually an important part of my development.  I loved that game.  I remember helping Exadv1 with some math for the air system years ago, before it became ope source...  I don't think he even remembers me sadly. 

A long time ago, there was a story of how the code was stolen, whether by a collaborator on the original project, a rogue internet tatterdemalion, or a targeted operation by a team of Somethng Awful cultists, it's not sure, but this is the story of how the code was released unto the world to be relentlessly changed by a million changers.

Later on, Exadv1 looked upon all that had been grown in infinite variations, saw what they saw, and saw that it was good, and then said "Ok keep going."

This is why even on the established servers they are reluctant to have a history of space station 13 story on their sites. Everything is stolen, and it creates a strange but wonderful situation where absolutely no one can put copyright on anything and anyone has the right to use or modify anything, as the internet fascists of the Aliens: colonial marines server eventually found out.

[Egan_BW]

Everything is stolen, especially the stuff you made yourself.

[AzyWng]

the internet fascists of the Aliens: colonial marines server

The what now?

[TWO CATATA]

They're known for being... Well, just Duckduckgo/ixquick/Startpage "colonial marines" ss13 admin OR staff, the owner tended to make himself an almost unkillable 'predator' character (at the time closed to players) and go "hunt" his players, and on the offchance he ever got caught and frustrated, choosing to explode himself in a thermonuclear detonation (like the predator film, taking anyone nearby out of the game for quite a while)no matter how hurt or well, unconscious. After other admins got him to stop he eventually moved onto roleplaying as various "Weyland Yutani official" characters... and then using the admin gib button on his characters if he got nested (captured by the aliens and unable to move hands or limbs).

Then the usual internet admin drama stuff that happens EVERYWHERE on the internet when you don't have any kind of oversight/internal affairs/jury of the people over admin conduct, lesser admins tending to ignore the rules with their own characters but ruthlessly enforce them to the letter against anyone else (or twist them to suit against people they don't like) and when the top's rotten there's no one able to step in and stop them fucking with the rest of people.

Over time colonial marines got known for creating an incredibly controlled forum and discord chat where you had to register your BYOND name to access it, and the owners worked with Lummox the owner of BYOND on a first name basis who helped them develop new ways to keep dissenters out and banned in a similar kind of way to Cisco helping Iran, building a custom back end that more closely looks at and logs the hardware (this is where the help from the BYOND owner came in, as byond.exe has a lot of rootkit-like functionality to analyze computers and 'sticky' ban even when aspects of it are changed) of the computers and IP addresses used by players in an attempt to personally identify people that spoke up and got "disappeared" from the server and community, using vast block lists and more admin-side monitoring and notifications, as well as use of illegal hacking by the owners pretty routinely used to keep track of people they had disagreements with as well as to try identify the sources of the leaks, boasting about how they have "gestapo" lurking in other chatrooms.

(Discord of course is suited much better than IRC chat for people that want to keep top-down control and power over people as one can vanish everything anyone ever said with a touch of a button like the memory hole from Orwell's 1984, since it's very tricky to log the chat on your own client without custom made scripts that Discord continually breaks from working, people can say stuff and get removed and you'd never know it was even there - this is one of the reasons TGstation uses IRC chat instead - I'm very aware that the same is true for forums in general too, but you can very easily fix that by visiting archive.is or freezepage.com or webrecorder.io or web.archive.org/save/http://addresshere.com/whatever though the latter tends to have stuff get removed quite often, sometimes even by spammers who buy domain names and then ask for all previous history to be removed)

Staff that left the server and wanted to make their own one got harassed with threats of legal action (no basis of course but relying on most people not knowing that versus intimidating flowery legal threats), eventually someone found that one of the owners who liked to brag about how he used to work in military intelligence was actually in a sort of crazy egotistical way making up the whole thing to try keep power over people, stolen valour kind of person... and worse terrible things that make the power trips as a 'predator' character kind of ironically horrific.

Eventually that code got leaked too like Exadv1's original space station 13:
https://github.com/ColonialMarines-Mirror
After they DMCA'd it and fraudulently told github that space station 13 and tgstation code belonged to them, the people actually running Tgstation bravely took legal action back, and encouraged people to make a new game based on it:
https://github.com/tgstation/TerraGov-Marine-Corps

[Kagus]

Warning: Don't get involved in Colonial Marines drama. That is a dark road and it leads only into madness.

[George_Chickens]

They're known for being... Well, just Duckduckgo/ixquick/Startpage "colonial marines" ss13 admin OR staff, the owner tended to make himself an almost unkillable 'predator'

He also made himself into a much scarier type of unkillable predator. Pretty fucked up, when you consider that the dude works with kids.

[TWO CATATA]

I figured if I said that it'd probably get deleted because it's such an explosive thing to say (it's horrible when you really think about it that that to name such things more often than not usually gets the person saying it gets labelled as the troublemaker, the same kind of thing is what enables stuff to happen in children's homes etc) but yeah that is really what happened in the end and led to him pretending to quietly step down while keeping ownership of the domain name, website, Discord chat server, the secret "Host chat" he founded on Skype for all space station 13 server owners to "deal with troublemakers" and all the backdoor authority that comes with that (probably in hopes no one tells the school or parents of the children he was teaching if it's really true he was literally working in a school at the time), ridiculously abusive admins are so common on the internet people just shrug and carry on usually, but that was what finally made people actually unite in the end and make it untenable, he'll probably just come back with a different name and get appointed again if he hasn't already, as well as THAT, he's a sociopath with an obsession of enjoying manipulating and having power over people and his hacking ability and people enabling him by giving him access to peoples' IP addresses from logging onto the forum or server helps him fuck with people.

[xaritscin]

i just had an epiphany the other day, a game heavily influenced by SPORE but with the following changes:

1. Adaptations over time and based on certain actions: of course a good part of the game was about creativity and building whatever cool alien you wanted to make but in terms of progression you never felt like it was proper evolution, in this case instead of unlocking parts and things like that by doing random shit you would have some kind of "Adaptations Tree" from which you would choose which things to evolve on your creature. these adaptations would be obtained by doing certain actions like for example jumping and climbing may lead to gliding adaptations then maybe later lead to flying adaptations. by the time the player gets to the Society Stage this adaptation system transforms into a technology tree from which you advance the civilization and so on. kinda like Tech Trees in any RTS game.

2. Actual Niches: the Herbivore/Carnivore/Omnivore triad was cool as a testing ground but i think there were some other things that could have been added as alternatives. Detritivores that fed on decayed matter, scavengers that fed on rotten carcasses, parasites, chemovores and perhaps photosynthetic creatures could have been easily added into the game. Niches would also mean different sources of nourishment for the player so this would tie with Adaptations in order to ensure the player has to put actual thinking on how it wants to evolve its creature, you wouldnt just swap from Carnivore to Herbivore by just changing the mouth on the first hatch, perhaps these adaptations would be inversely proportional so if you wanted your carnivore to convert into a herbivore to survive during a random event you would have to slowly decrease your progress in carnivore adaptations until you could jump into omnivore then keep going with the vegetation diet until herbivore adaptations started to be unlocked.

3. Better spacing between stages: the original game was fine as it was, i would have liked it to be like in the 2003-2005 demos but the final product was just as good and could have been even better if properly handled via DLC and stuff like that. the time between stages was one of many issues with the game, your species was supposed to reach space eventually but somethings it felt very rushed, changing the difficulty would have done nothing to alleviate this because from the start there wasnt enough time sink added to the stages. in this game the stages would follow the same pattern as in SPORE but with more defining transitions that could also unlock extra functionalities for the next one.

-Microbe Stage -> longer than Cell, it starts with the player microbe surviving and adapting after arriving into the planet, the first milestone comes from attaching yourself to other microbes to form a colony, the second milestone comes when your microbial colony has grown big enough and obtains enough genetical material to unlock multicellularity. this stage features a different set of adaptations compared to SPORE with things like chemosynthetis, photosynthesis, photoreceptors (as replacement for the googly eyes), etc..

-Creature Stage -> this one includes the acuatic stage which is the starting part, the first milestone is getting into land, the second is unlocking advanced intelligence. the progression wouldnt be forced so for example your creature could return to the ocean over a few million years, albeit aquatic civilization would be tricky to develop.

-Civilization Stage -> this one makes a transition between Tribal and Civilization stage in the original SPORE, the first milestone is passing from a simple tribe into constructing the first city states in the planet, the second milestone consists into producing the first steam engine and thus enablign the construction of mechanical vehicles as replacement to mounted gatherers. the final milestone is taking over the whole planet. the adaptations obtained during creature would have had an impact on what resources you need the most to survive as a society, but in this stage is where the technology tree comes up and you have to flesh out the social aspects of your species which have some ties to some creature adaptations like "pack hunting", "herding", etc...

-Space Stage -> so, your civilization was able to cover the whole planet (and exterminate or include any other sentient race that arose in the world) the Space stage starts with the player sending its first spaceship to explore the star system, the first milestone consists into developing the technology to travel and colonize in other stars, the second milestone consists into developing warp travel for exploring more distant parts of the galaxy, the final milestone ends in ascending the race to a superior state (achieving godhood). all of this while dealing with 4X style elements like other empires harassing you or seeking aid, managing your colonies, the different alien races you have under your fold. kinda like Stellaris, but you still have some sort of "heroe" or "captain" unit to go around and get extra missions from the aliens.

4. Different Starts and Endings: i think the game could have felt more interesting if you could decide on which conditions to start the game. things like harsher environments or events rapidly obliguing the player to adapt in order to survivea. this would extend in all stages probably, and could include different ends to the player species like nuclear war, an asteroid impact, being swallowed by a cosmic entity, etc...


after finishing the last milestone you would unlock everything in the editors, including extra stuff like flora and planets. to be honest, if your think about it we're on an age where we could replicate how did this game worked in an engine like Unity, there's still probably some things that only the people at Maxis could do but everything from planet generation to dynamic meshes for the creatures and vehicles could be done in the most recent engines avaliable. and there would probably be space to improve on what the game couldnt, the only hard part to implement i think is doing something similar to the Sporepedia.