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Planetary “High Ways”

#1
I got this idea from playing Sins of a Solar Empire. If anyone here has played the game you know of what I speak of, for the rest let me explain. Sins is a strategy game, etc…, No point in going into details. What I liked about that game was the planetary High Ways, each planet that was inhabited by an interstellar civilization had highways through which transport ships transported goods all over the planet. These would form lanes crisscrossing the planet and on these lanes hundreds or perhaps thousands of ships could be seen crossing from one part of the planet to another.
I don’t know who came up with this visual effect but I do know that it gave inhabited planets a real sense of being… well inhabited what else.
I was hoping that Josh could implement such visual effects for planets, in much the same way as it was in Sins, that is to say the greater the population on a given planet the more lanes crisscrossed the planet and the busier they seemed.

I’d like to hear everyone else’s opinion on this. Mind you this would just be a visual effect it would not bear any consequence on the LT universe.
Last edited by Hadrianus on Fri Apr 25, 2014 3:21 am, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: Planetary “High Ways”

#5
I like this idea too.

It's these little effects that make the universe feel alive. Yeah, we may have actors piloting ships, but being able to tell "That's a heavily populated planet" at a glance is cool too. That was something that Freelancer didn't have and now that the idea is brought up, I don't know why I'm living without it.

This actually brings up another good point; what other ways could the game be brought alive by little effects like this (I call it little, because in the grand scheme of things, it is pretty simple).
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Early Spring - 1055: Well, I made it to Boatmurdered, and my initial impressions can be set forth in three words: What. The. F*ck.
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Re: Planetary “High Ways”

#7
He really is... :|

Now, as for little details that can bring things to life...besides the obvious of "lot of ships flying around" Maybe having the sector patrols fly to you to scan your ship like they always did in X3? Making sure you aren't causing trouble. Less populated sectors might not be able to do that.
Image "Everyone needs to have their avatar's edited to have afros." -Charley Deallus
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Re: Planetary “High Ways”

#8
ThymineC wrote:
DWMagus wrote:This actually brings up another good point; what other ways could the game be brought alive by little effects like this (I call it little, because in the grand scheme of things, it is pretty simple).
Advertisements and spam in your mail folder.

...I'm serious. :shifty:
That too. That sounds pretty awesome. Maybe make it innuendo-ish. "Not satisfied with your mining potential? Don't have enough energy to last an entire mining session? Get this new larger Mining Laser!"
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Early Spring - 1055: Well, I made it to Boatmurdered, and my initial impressions can be set forth in three words: What. The. F*ck.
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Re: Planetary “High Ways”

#9
DWMagus wrote:
ThymineC wrote:
DWMagus wrote:This actually brings up another good point; what other ways could the game be brought alive by little effects like this (I call it little, because in the grand scheme of things, it is pretty simple).
Advertisements and spam in your mail folder.

...I'm serious. :shifty:
That too. That sounds pretty awesome. Maybe make it innuendo-ish. "Not satisfied with your mining potential? Don't have enough energy to last an entire mining session? Get this new larger Mining Laser!"
I see it having actual gameplay value as well, depending on whether the thoughts I have on business management end up in the game or not. Advertisements would need to be procedurally generated, though, so I'd imagine they'd be more serious/informative in tone. As funny as some of the stuff I've seen in the Helpful Computer thread and elsewhere are, procedurally generated wit is hard and I'm imagining that LT would have a fairly serious feel to it in any case.
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Re: Planetary “High Ways”

#11
*Incoming News Mail*
OH EM GEE MININ TECH WOO!
"New mining technology developed!" says government official on -planetnamehere-

"We are very happy with the new developments. The results of our research are already starting to pay off," added the official.
Image "Everyone needs to have their avatar's edited to have afros." -Charley Deallus
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Re: Planetary “High Ways”

#12
ThymineC wrote:
DWMagus wrote:This actually brings up another good point; what other ways could the game be brought alive by little effects like this (I call it little, because in the grand scheme of things, it is pretty simple).
Advertisements and spam in your mail folder.

...I'm serious. :shifty:
That's got the potential to be a really good feature if the AIs can handle things like marketing. Or a really annoying and crappy one if they can't.

Personally I'd love to see it done well. Wait and see on that one...
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Re: Planetary “High Ways”

#14
The cities would probably be a better visual effect than the criss-crossing planetary trade lanes. The huge trade ships were tacky and unrealistic, which is OK in a game that shows some ships nearly as big as planets and uses a lot of strategy-game abstractions. But for LT, that would probably be immersion-breaking.

Cities would be most visible on the night side of planets, where they'd light up like you see on satellite photos of Earth cities. That'd be gorgeous.
Spacecredentials: looks at stars sometimes, cheated at X-Wing vs TIE Fighter, killed a titan once.
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Re: Planetary “High Ways”

#15
McDuff wrote:That's got the potential to be a really good feature if the AIs can handle things like marketing. Or a really annoying and crappy one if they can't.

Personally I'd love to see it done well. Wait and see on that one...
The idea ties in with my thoughts on an infinite-variety crafting system; with such a system in place, different corporations would (hopefully) naturally tend towards specialising their products towards being good in a particular area where their competitors' products aren't so that they have a unique selling proposition. Think of the different weapon manufacturers in Borderlands, for instance; all of them have a distinct feel and set of strengths and weaknesses to them.

If that is the case, I would hope that NPCs would be intelligent enough to not only specialise their products in a particular way but to recognise that they're specialising their products in that particular way and to factor that into their marketing.

How could you design the system so that NPCs would naturally design products that address market needs? I suggest that corporations developing products for a particular market will hire or subcontract the task of R&D to research-proficient NPCs. These NPCs would design different blueprints, and the corporation's engineering department would produce products based on these blueprints. The NPC would receive royalties on every product sold that used one of its blueprints, and it would be kept aware of which of its blueprints were generating the most money for it. Then, by using genetic algorithms where each blueprint counts as a "solution", the set of all blueprints it has developed counts as the "population", and the money generated by each blueprint is factored into the fitness function, the NPC will develop more blueprints. This means that it will base future blueprints on the most successful blueprints it has developed so far.

In a market where consumers favour low-AD, high-ROF plasma cannons over high-AD, low-ROF variants, NPCs developing blueprints for plasma cannons that have a high rate of fire at the expense of alpha damage will find that those blueprints earn it a lot of money and gear future research in that direction. Since the products based on those blueprints would be in high demand, the corporation hiring or cooperating with them would likely continue to do so in the spirit of mutual self-interest, which over time would lend that corporation a distinctive feel for its products: "We don't hit 'em hard, but we hit 'em fast".

Other competing manufacturers would eventually get the message and start gearing their products that way as well, but if we model "brand loyalty" (and I really think we should, since it would be a natural extension of a "reputation" mechanic that I and many others would like to see in Limit Theory), then that would act as a market barrier that would limit the amount of homogeneous products. On a smaller scale, we'd see other firms that might sell high-AD, low-ROF plasma cannons to meet the smaller, niche demand for those kind of weapons in the system.

This is all a small part of the thoughts I've had on business management, but didn't get around to posting yet.

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