Flatfingers wrote: ↑Mon Mar 30, 2020 9:12 am
1. Should this game be open-ended and ever-expanding as in Josh's original design? Or should every game build a fixed universe, so that every game has an ending?
I would put the game in a large "star cluster" with fixed boundaries. "No Endgame" sounds neat, but in practice you run into the same problems Josh faced in many of his systems, such as research and progression.
Handcrafted? Don't know. I could lean either way, I think. Star system procgen is incredibly simple compared to, for instance, ship procgen, but handcrafted universes often feel more "alive" - at least for the first playthrough. That said, I'm personally a fan of procgen'd maps and use them whenever they're offered (e.g. 7 days to die).
Flatfingers wrote: ↑Mon Mar 30, 2020 9:12 am
2. How committed are y'all to having multiple star systems, rather than a single very detailed star system? Are the gameplay features potentially enabled by implementing multiple star systems (e.g., RTS-style fleet management, exploration/discovery of new worlds/resources, strategic sim) worth the significant costs in design and programming (e.g., good procedural generation of multiple connected star systems, multi-system non-inflationary economic simulation, LOD decisions and coding, enjoyable fleet management gameplay and UI, enjoyable 4X gameplay/UI)?
I'm personally highly committed to having more than one star system. The economic simulation isn't that much more complex with a set of star systems rather than one detailed system. Also I don't think Limit Theory (or Freelancer) was ever meant to be 4X in any way. Let's bring it to a grinding halt at RTS gameplay and call it a day.
Flatfingers wrote: ↑Mon Mar 30, 2020 9:12 am
3. Josh expended an enormous amount of time and mental effort (
JOSH did) into making modding work efficiently. You'll remember he called it the FPLT -- the Fundamental Problem of Limit Theory. I don't mean to take anything away from the brainpower assembled here, but... is this a fight y'all want to have? Knowing that it's possible is half the battle, but that still leaves a
lot of battle. I agree that enabling modding has a lot of value, but it's also potentially a very high-cost programming challenge, and one that must be decided from the very start; you don't want to try to retrofit this.
Modding is more essential now than it was with Josh's LT, in my opinion. This is a crowdsourced project. The assembled "crowd" needs to be able to have tools to create the game efficiently. That means, more or less, that the guts of the machine be open to easy manipulation.
If we have to make "budget cuts" in other areas to make this happen, such as "fewer ships in one star system" or "less economic simulation", I would say it's 100% worth it. Why? Simple enough.
I want to see the game through to completion. Let's not fall into the same trap that Trillek (the fan project to complete Notch's 0x10c) did - it was so technical that only a tiny core of people could work on it. Eventually the whole programming group just split apart and it more or less died. We need to let as many people as possible work on the thing (within reason of course). As far as I can tell, modding capabilities are non-negotiable here.
RE: Ship hull sizes: random thoughts:
Fighter scale: 1
Cruiser scale: 10
Battleship scale: 100
Dreadnought scale: 1000 (for clarity purposes, I would liken the building of a ship of this scale to building a Wonder in Age of Empires. It's not a thing you do because you want a tactical or strategic advantage. It's a thing you do because you want to show off.)
RE: Research/Tech: YES. THANK YOU, FLATFINGERS. That's something I mentioned to Josh before (only makes sense if the game has an ending) but I think it bounced off.
Shadowrunner214 wrote: ↑Mon Mar 30, 2020 10:43 am
5. More than just system size and number, what kinds of actor numbers do we want to be able to support? This is AI for everything from strategic to fighter control and even missile/turret targeting. I'm thinking something on the order of a few million to be able to support a functioning economy of sufficient size, whilst supporting more advanced ship features. This is closely tied with the amount of resources that are available within the play area.
Forgive me, but - holy crap - that's a lot of actors. Missile targeting is incredibly lightweight (at least in my limited experience) and I wouldn't personally count it. In regards to AI entities (ships) perhaps a few hundred at the very most. We might have to do something Mount & Blade style and warp in "reinforcements" regularly for larger battles. It depends largely on whatever we decide to use and how smart we actually want the AI. If Player = AI, the AI will take up a lot of resources.
Shadowrunner214 wrote: ↑Mon Mar 30, 2020 10:43 am
6. How are we going to define success for this project? Is it just for the pleasure of playing a completed game or are we looking for more widespread success from outside of the LT community? A game like this is a complicated beast, and is going to require significant time investment from its contributors. Having some idea of what the light at the end of the tunnel is going to smell like may be useful to constrain or guide our decision making.
I personally define success in a venture like this as "when we're happy with it". Yes, making money with it sounds cool and all, but I think that would create so many problems it's just not worth it. My personal recommendation is therefore open source - unless someone manages to sway my mind in another direction, of course.