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Author Topic: Games you wish existed  (Read 967739 times)

Pakhawaj

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Re: Games you wish existed
« Reply #135 on: August 06, 2011, 08:19:30 am »

I'd quite like a more in-depth SimEarth, a game where you can just sit back and watch things develop or watch how your interference in things plays out.
There would be a speed guage somewhere on screen, so one could progress (or regress) the time from up to billions of years per second down to single years per second. If one were to reverse the time, the future timeline would be erased leaving you at the point at which you stopped the reversal.
The game would begin at the creation of the planet from other large space rocks and it would end at the unlikely event of the total destruction of the planet either through sentient beings living on the planet or an external source.
Opportunities to change the atmosphere would be vast and unlimited and if any lifeforms appear, they'd evolve or die out according to the hardships in which they face. There would be no "Earth" species available for placing à la the original game because each species would be entirely procedurally generated according to the environment. There could be a tab to view the current life on the planet separated into simple groups such as "plant", "animal", "bacteria" etc. then split into further groups such as "algae", "fish", "positive cocci" etc., one could then click on one of the procedurally generated named for one of these living creatures (and rename it if so wished) and view a description of it with its length depending on how complex the organism is, so an "animal" would almost inevitably have more lines of text than a "bacteria".
In the event of intelligent life appearing, one could now click on a "sociological" tab, which (depending on how advanced this life is) would show the linguistic and cultural histories of the intelligent life perhaps an interfering player might be able to introduce new ideas to members of the populice with broad names such as "violence" or "egalitarianism", these could have broad affects depending upon the climate in which these ideas are introduced and the type of species they are introduced to. So for example, an intelligent species with scarce resources when introduced to violence might interpret that idea as being one of internal violence rather than external (each species would do their best to survive in any given situation and according to what they are able to do) in order to retain what little they had, perhaps they would become quite nihilistic, though I don't know how such a thing could be visually recorded.
I don't know if the player should have the ability to alter the shape of the planet manually or whether it should entirely be done through the introduction or addition of elements and chemicals and things.
Hopefully, this game would be just as interesting to a botanist as it would be to a geologist, physicist, sociologist, economist, chemist, zoologist... 

I can't think this game will ever exist, but it is a nice thought. :)
Sorry for rambling a little!
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Starver

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Re: Games you wish existed
« Reply #136 on: August 06, 2011, 09:38:54 am »

There could be a tab to view the current life on the planet separated into simple groups such as "plant", "animal", "bacteria" etc. then split into further groups such as "algae", "fish", "positive cocci" etc.,[...]

The thing that's largely stopped my previous attempts to codify such a system is that...  well... if you're willing to go so far as to eschew all classic terran species, and certainly encompass a completely non-anthropomorphic attitude to the term "higher life-forms", then you're not even guaranteed to be able to use quite the same descriptions of the word "fish" unless you're talking about "bony[1], water-inhabiting creatures" in the most generic term.

You can probably analogue the difference between single- and multi-cellular creatures, probably hash something out that differentiates plants from animals.  Although note the all-too-Real-World example of fungi being neither and lichen technically being symbiotically a combination of fungus and bacteria.  But who knows what a (potentially all-encompassing) simulation would come up with in regards to organisms not plainly classifiable as animal, plant, fungus ore bacterium.  Ignoring symbiosis and whatever parasitic combinations may create significantly abundant "sum greater than the parts" creations to warrant independant classification.

But I waffle.  All I'm trying to say is that if you're going to improve on SimEarth (which held me for a while, back when I last played with it, but had a number of intellectual failings, on top of interface issues, part of which you've mentioned and I agree with) you'll find someone even more pedantic.  And that's probably one of the reasons why I've messed around with any number of sim-like programs and never gotten around to completing any to any degree that I thought would be acceptable for an audience.  (Albeit that some never even escaped the confines of my cranium, however detailed they were conceptualised during whatever idle moments I applied to the problem.)


[1] Even that's a debatable word, especially if you want to include cartilaginous 'fish' in there as well, but let's say that this description encompasses any sort of creature with a distinct endoskeletal scaffolding, whatever its ultimate chemical nature and layout and tell the remaining pedants to "go bony-aquatic-creature harvest". :)
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Pakhawaj

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Re: Games you wish existed
« Reply #137 on: August 06, 2011, 10:45:57 am »

Haha, that's funny. I completely agree. I thought about this, but even within my unfeasible fantasies it seems, I make concessions to feasability. :P
It becomes difficult to categorise things that may exist out of a gargantuan number of possibilities. Since we have no good evidence of life living on other planets, unfortunately the only life we can compare things to is the life which sprang from our own planet. I think, once the moon turns purple and this game gets released the creators will probably have to use simple categories such as "plant" even if that limits what is possible within game to something similar to what occurred on Earth, otherwise we'd be either have to make up new terms for these new creatures (that's a blarg, member of blump family), or have terribly long and convoluted terms like "boneless, methane-breathing, stationary thing family". It's still a better categorisation system than in SimEarth though!
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Niveras

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Re: Games you wish existed
« Reply #138 on: August 06, 2011, 11:48:39 am »

Dungeon Keeper underground fortress building + overland conquering with an Overlord control scheme. I've actually given it a lot of thought but I don't want to bore you with the details.

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Draco18s

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Re: Games you wish existed
« Reply #139 on: August 06, 2011, 11:50:07 am »

Dungeon Keeper underground fortress building + overland conquering with an Overlord control scheme. I've actually given it a lot of thought but I don't want to bore you with the details.

So, like Dungeons, but not shitty.
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drkpaladin

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Re: Games you wish existed
« Reply #140 on: August 09, 2011, 12:09:07 pm »

I'm glad I'm not the only one who liked the ROTK games, I always felt a little silly looking forward to the relatively minor changes in between the games.  If I hadn't lost my copies of 9 and 13, I would have a reason to keep my ps2 plugged in.  I'm not even a otaku about the Three Kingdoms, I just enjoyed the styles of the games.
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Jay

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Re: Games you wish existed
« Reply #141 on: August 09, 2011, 12:50:51 pm »

Re: Games you wish existed
Dwarf Fortress 1.0

:V
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Draco18s

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Re: Games you wish existed
« Reply #142 on: August 09, 2011, 01:03:34 pm »

You're not the only one:

Dwarf Fortress 1.00?
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Mephansteras

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Re: Games you wish existed
« Reply #143 on: August 09, 2011, 02:36:46 pm »

You're not the only one:

Dwarf Fortress 1.00?

At this one has a decent chance of getting completed. Maybe not for another few decades, but...
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Roboboy33

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Re: Games you wish existed
« Reply #144 on: August 09, 2011, 07:14:17 pm »

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TheBronzePickle

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Re: Games you wish existed
« Reply #145 on: August 09, 2011, 07:56:10 pm »

Sounds like what Spore should have been. Hell, the game would be fun even if the entire premise was making a non-sentient animal population that survived the best without worrying about a civilization or space.
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Fniff

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Re: Games you wish existed
« Reply #146 on: August 09, 2011, 08:10:37 pm »

I'd personally love a complete disaster simulation.

You get to choose what place you wanna use as a disaster zone, then go mad. Vampires and werewolves attack the city in eternal night? You got it. Wanna make Uzumaki in a city? Go ahead. Want a volcano to go off in the center of a city? Easy as pie. Wanna have all three occur at the exact same time? That's okay too! There would be hundreds of disasters, ranging from the realistic (Hurricane, epidemic, nuclear attack, riots) to the strange and unrealistic (Black hole, random sudden volcano for no reason, zombie outbreak (Romero or Left 4 Dead style), mutation)  to the downright absurd (Vampire, Werewolf and/or Demon attack, 100 foot monster, intrusion from another reality, spiral infection, the horsemen of the apocalypse), all in a fully living city filled with people who go to work, sleep and have fun. It'd be perfect just watching a town or a city go about it's daily business when you are about to drop a horrific mind-bending creature in the center. The best part would be combining disasters.

TheBronzePickle

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Re: Games you wish existed
« Reply #147 on: August 09, 2011, 08:46:23 pm »

There are games where you can sort of do that (screwing around on SimCity, where you can usually start disaters for the heck of it, comes to mind) but something modelling individual peoples' reactions to the chaos around them would be interesting. I could imagine braver citizens working alongside emergency services while the majority of people just run away. Maybe suicidal or psychotic people would welcome the chaos with open arms. The question is if it would be worth it to add physics. A nuke over a detailed city would be nightmarishly intensive on processing, as would having city-sized populations fighting the national guard MPs sent to suppress the city-wide riots.
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Fniff

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Re: Games you wish existed
« Reply #148 on: August 09, 2011, 08:52:35 pm »

Snip

Sim City can only go so far. I have caused damn near apocalyptic situations yet the sims don't react. Even the sim I put in just complains about it, like everything else bad.

Anyway, those problems could be solved by having the play area be smaller, but not so much it ruins your fun completely. As with the nuke, you could make it play a cutscene then show the devastated city with the unaffected civilians put into a full-on panic mode.

TheBronzePickle

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Re: Games you wish existed
« Reply #149 on: August 09, 2011, 09:06:00 pm »

The main issue with a nuke is the amount of physics objects moving and interacting. If the physics objects were limited to large, simple pieces, it would minimize lag.
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