Spaceship pod age?

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Spaceship pod age?

Postby Dark Griffin » Mon Feb 22, 2010 4:08 pm

This is just pure rambling off the top of my head, so bear with me here.

My idea is for a Spaceship type age. Sort of like the pod ages in design, the players are in a pod-like ship(but bigger then the pods). Different controls work the "thrusters", viewing windows, ect. It would probably require teamwork to do much useful stuff in this age, as someone would have to man the thrust controls, someone would have to see out the windows to navigate, and there probably would be some sort of power generator system connected to the pods "battery".

The pod itself charges up much like the other pods, probably off of solar energy or something. Shutting it off, like the other pod ages, also obscures the outside view as well as killing all the controls(however, the pod itself still drifts in space in it's current path due to physics). So the crew would have to work with the understanding that their pod will run low on juice, and they need to recharge it sometimes. (this is probably why you would have the "energy manager", to watch the display for juice and make sure you don't run out, or that if you are going to run out, you have already planned for it.)

The pod would also have a few "lab" like chambers on it, long abandoned of course, but there for the sake of showing that the people who used it were in fact mapping out the solar system the pod is in. They might also have a room or display near navigation controls that lock onto the nearest other body, and display info about it(mostly in D'ni text and numbers, of course).

Now...I don't know how the linking itself works, but given that we are already linking to planets, that presumably orbit suns, I gather that if the linking book described the pod instead of the space location, the book would maintain it's "lock" on that 3d point in space.

From a technical standpoint, this age would probably require a lot of coding. I guess the way it technically would work is that everything outside the pod is "simulated" to move around the supposedly "moving" pod.

We could easily limit the age to just one small star and a few planet like bodies orbiting it. There would be no way to get out of the pod, and it could even have a "safety feature" to keep it from sailing too close to any bodies in the star system(thus removing the technical limitation that these bodies are probably not going to work like real planets you can land on at all from a coding perspective). This same saftey feature could also keep the players from sailing the pod into never-never land, restricting them to the one solar system designed for the age, while giving them the freedom to navigate anywhere they please in that "playground".

I guess the storyline for the age would be that it was designed by a small group of D'ni engineers and a writer who built it and wrote it, probably as a hobby or a test of their engineering/writing. They had a grand plan to create a way to visit and explore all the universes in the sky above all the ages. Most civilizations have some people who study the stars and wished for a way to get closer, why should the D'ni be any different? Of course, reality set in, and the group had to face the fact that when the D'ni could just write a new universe to get what they needed, there was no practical need for exploring any of them. So the age would have a sort of sad history, where the group of D'ni were mostly put off as crazy by the public, and then despite their best efforts, couldn't get anyone else interested or as passionate at studying the stars as they were.

The history actually could (but wouldn't say outright, for Cyan story purposes) be what eventually inspired the "spacestation" in Myst 5. Given that Myst 5 had that spaceship, I'd venture to guess that at some point in time, the D'ni as a whole or at least enough of them were interested in the stars to develop such technology, even if they could "cheat" by simply writing more ages.

There wouldn't be any real puzzle to the age, aside from piecing together the storyline from documents and analyzing the planetary bodies in the age. But figuring out how to work the ship as a group and then being able to navigate everywhere would be a reward and puzzle in itself, I believe. The age, gameplay wise, would be a great group activity to do.

It might even be able to have an asteroid belt somewhere, just to show off some physics with the windows and be mildly exciting to sail the ship through. (the asteroids could be generic enough so that the fact they are not the same and probably randomly made on the fly is never noticed.)

Well, that's it basically all I got on this so far. It's an idea that has been tumbling in my head since seeing the pod ages in the new Uru Live. Thoughts, comments, constructive ideas, all welcome.
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Re: Spaceship pod age?

Postby CrimsonMatt » Mon Feb 22, 2010 7:02 pm

I had an idea kinda like this when the pods were being released. Yeah, it's a good idea. I was thinking maybe you could link into a space station that had lots of ships ready, so that if one group was out exploring while a new group came in, they wouldn't be left without a ride.

The idea could probably work in other environments, too. Like a submarine. Or a big land rover in a desert or rocky area.

Yeah, I'm not sure what an overall goal could be. Maybe you'd have checkpoints you need to reach so that, say, the ship's computer could calibrate itself or something, and once you got them all it would autopilot to a final area which is otherwise unreachable.

Lots of programming. :|
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Re: Spaceship pod age?

Postby ZURI » Mon Feb 22, 2010 9:39 pm

Good idea. The implications are riveting. If you can find someone to code it for you, there are lots you can do with this. Perhaps you could have 2 ships. The age could have something along the lines of an imager, with a timer that can be started from onboard the ships. You then have to "race" around the solar system, via defined routes, or "space buoys." It could even have floating grandstands amongst the planets. 8-)
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Re: Spaceship pod age?

Postby Dark Griffin » Tue Feb 23, 2010 2:47 pm

I think the checkpoint idea (find them to calibrate the ship for a last destination) might work best as a goal. It's already proven the D'ni use this type of system for the GZ, and that looks like it has been around for a good portion of the history of D'ni, so presumably they could apply it to space navigation as well. Of course, in this age, the position would have to be calculated from the spacestation(see below).

As fun as a race would be, it's not really something Uru does best. The age would probably also be private unless shared, like the pods, meaning having 2 or more spaceships would just make it really confusing(for single explorers new to the age).

I'm thinking it's best to stick with the pod design of making it as simple, yet interesting as possible.

The final destination could be a spacestation that the ship then "autopilots" to on command. The station recharges your "fuel" nearly instantly, and allows you to get off the ship. It's probably some big(in size, not stuff to do) observatory that gives a nice overview of the whole system from far off. I think after spending hours navigating that tin can around, being able to step out and hang out at the space station would be reward enough.

The linking books would have a second linking book page (probably through a small "other age", like what that secret on Teledahn does) that links to the spacestation instead of the spaceship, accessable once you get to the spacestation itself. So in a way, the age would reward the tedious calibration by changing the dynamic you use to explore it, since now you can station people at the spacestation to observe where the ship is relative to everything else.

Hmm, I think this is solid enough to do some concept art or maybe some ship interior layouts for.

I also have a technical question about how Uru works:

-How do things "move around" in the Uru engine? My impression after seeing ages like Ahnonay is that the engine can have areas that seem to "shift around" but really are all probably still rooms. The reason I bring up Ahnonay is because you can be outside the spheres and shift them around, but I'm pretty sure the spheres themselves are just different simulated sections of the age, dynamically connecting or disconnecting with the middle as needed. I've only seen the age in live however, so I don't know if my guesses are true or not(can't use flymode, ect to check it out from a technical standpoint).

However, if in fact the engine CAN do those spheres the physical way(all four sphere "levels" are literally spinning around), then the ship could be done the same way, with a huge space map filled with entities(planets, stars, ect), and the ship "level" physically moving around this space(bringing the linking point and avatars with it of course, don't want to drop anyone into the space itself or the illusion of the age will be broken).

Basically the answer to this question will have a direct impact on how to go about modeling this age, so I do need to know it before I get any further beyond sketching up spaceship interiors and controls.
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Re: Spaceship pod age?

Postby Shoggoth » Wed Feb 24, 2010 1:19 pm

As I recall, the Ahnonay spheres do not actually function the way they are supposed to in-game: the spheres that you see outside the window in Kadish's office are empty, and are in fact much too small to hold the worlds that the avatar visits anyway. I don't think Uru can support that much stuff being loaded at once. Aren't the Ahnonay spheres all separate pages (that's "pages" within the game's programming structure, not "pages" in the Ahnonay book)?
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Re: Spaceship pod age?

Postby Daniel K » Wed Feb 24, 2010 7:46 pm

I had an idea for something like that after reading journal five here. http://www.mystjourney.com/riven/writings/riven-online-journals.php
direct link http://www.mystjourney.com/misc/online-journals/journal5.htm
I know it apocryphal but perhaps it could give you a few ideas?
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Re: Spaceship pod age?

Postby ZURI » Wed Feb 24, 2010 10:18 pm

Dark Griffin wrote:As fun as a race would be, it's not really something Uru does best. The age would probably also be private unless shared, like the pods, meaning having 2 or more spaceships would just make it really confusing(for single explorers new to the age).
.


Yes, I have to agree on the controls. The users would have to have real-time feedback on a display or something to do something like this. As it is, the interface would probably be too clunky. I still like the idea though, especially in URU. 8-)
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Re: Spaceship pod age?

Postby Dark Griffin » Wed Feb 24, 2010 10:38 pm

Shoggoth wrote:As I recall, the Ahnonay spheres do not actually function the way they are supposed to in-game: the spheres that you see outside the window in Kadish's office are empty, and are in fact much too small to hold the worlds that the avatar visits anyway. I don't think Uru can support that much stuff being loaded at once. Aren't the Ahnonay spheres all separate pages (that's "pages" within the game's programming structure, not "pages" in the Ahnonay book)?


Ah. I'm guessing these "pages" are basically like chunks of level the game dynamically streams in and out of memory on the fly then? So like, inside a sphere is one page, the passage between the spheres and the middle is another, the ride chair passage is a third, and they only load the parts before and after as needed?

That's going to be both problematic and helpful for this Spaceship age. Problematic, because of the coding involved, but if the Uru engine can dynamically connect content like that, it might be easy(ish) to just model all the possible exterior rooms as different "pages", and have the spaceship "page" pull up the different exteriors as needed(positioning them as needed around the ship, which more then likely is actually stationary in space for game design purposes). So I could do one exterior for the asteroids, one for being in range of each planet(with the planet in high detail and the others billboarded in the distance), and I guess one for the space station(which would actually be walkable between, like when the sphere passage is lined up to let you into the center).

The only problem I see is that I don't know if Uru can actually move these "pages" around. Even the spheres don't actually need to physically move the level, as the doors are probably just simulated through code. But with a 3d spaceship free moving around, I would need a way to "move" through each "page" area of space.

In principle then, the space age would be like a massive version of games like Oblivion, dynamically streaming in terrain on the fly as you "wander" the world by "moving" the ship around. In reality, I have no idea how these "page" areas can be connected, so I don't know if there are technical issues that might arise from such a design. For example, say we slide the ship through a direct corner between 4 space "pages". Does Uru know to load all three into memory, or will this cause "flickering" as objects swap between billboarded pages and pages where they are solid objects? :shock:

Hmm, suddenly building this age isn't sounding very simple at all anymore. :( On the other hand, if "pages" areas work this way, it would also make this age one of the most expandable once the main code for navigating the space "pages" exists. Essentially this age would become a massively moddable expansive "map" of "pages", each connected to the next. We would just have to make sure that all the visible bodies in the distance have a billboard reference object in the other space pages, and no one would notice the transitions. 8-)

ZURI wrote:
Dark Griffin wrote:As fun as a race would be, it's not really something Uru does best. The age would probably also be private unless shared, like the pods, meaning having 2 or more spaceships would just make it really confusing(for single explorers new to the age).
.


Yes, I have to agree on the controls. The users would have to have real-time feedback on a display or something to do something like this. As it is, the interface would probably be too clunky. I still like the idea though, especially in URU. 8-)


Clunky controls, pretty much sums it up. This age's challenge would come from the clunky, almost randomly pieced together(IC, OOC we would obveously plan it out on paper and such) feel of the controls, and the lack of feedback for what the ship is doing(aside from engine noise, and the slow motion through space).

I think if one were to make a racing age, it would be best to do so with a vehicle that has very simple controls. It is a very good idea for an age, but not really one that can be applied to this space pod age. :)

What could work is if to "finish" the racing age, you simply had to drive to the checkpoints, but you are timed. Sort of like how the current GZ works, where you are rewarded just for finishing the "race", but you are also timed and can optionally challenge yourself to better your times. Only, on the racing age, you'd have multiple vehicles to race with for multiplayer fun. Could prove very fun if it was carefully designed to be both a bit challenging and fair for all start positions(like if it had a reset button that called all the cars to start locations the same distance from the first checkpoint). I'd love to see what a D'ni dune/offroad buggy would look and feel like, personally. :D
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