Discussion.Design Goals
History and Current state of dev (this section serves as a faq, for newcomers) may as well complete it too..
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Effectively a private offline development effort (huge task) by Tomm and with the help of a a few others
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Tomm focused on engine design to avoid spending time considering tricky interface/art/story content
Frontier elite design decisions/art were used as 'place holders' (note there can be no copyrighted material)
Version 1.0 was to be released having as many features as frontier, so it could attract contributors, and version 2.0 would have art/story considered
Plans now are to have a more complete game, for example including, potentially, social entities playing their own fully fledged RTS game at the highest level and, potentially, a convoy mechanic among traders as well.
*Released online at SSC with help of DarkOne, not announced much in opensource circles.
Tomm took a semi-retirement while busy with other matters and handed dev to John
Because development had worked with contributors working independently and adding in features they deemed were safe (often frontier based), with Tomm acting as the hub, via email and voice on the forums things slowed down.
Rob joined dev and created an IRC channel, which others slowly joined including new contributors due to visibility on freenode.
Work continued on engine mechanics in a way that was very safe and likely to meet Tomms approval (more collaboratively than before).
Current state
Work on engine features, consistent with the procedural spirit
Project has largely crept up on the internet without much, if anything, in the way of formal announcement(SSC prominence aside).
There is no roadmap as yet.
The spirit of pioneer and it's inspiration by the procedural spirit of frontier
State of design planning in different art departments
Types of creative contributions possible currently in various areas
What it means to be an open source game
Tools of collaboration IRC
Github
Mailing list
A relevant consideration is that opensource lends itself to iteration, especially considering other projects in their 15-12th year. A refinable/extensible way of dealing with contributions so it does not preclude future contributors - of which only a fraction are aware of the project - would help. e.g. having a music system with compositionally relevant aspects(musical function(moods and a the roles they play), themes to derive variations, etc) for extension, and, refinement with different tones, as opposed to a couple of tracks by one composer.
Stimulus materials: (Interesting background material that demonstrates what is possible in future, but not relevant/applicable right now, with relevant paragraphs etc. quoted)
Braben:
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/126257/interviews/david-braben-the-outsider/ "With this new approach all the characters exist in the game from the start, and their future actions are not pre-determined - their involvement can be pre-empted by the player, making for some interesting gameplay mechanics second-guessing what is going on, and novel replay value." "but more importantly it radically enriches the player's experience by abandoning the traditional, prescriptive, mostly linear story of current generation games, and replaces it by simulating characters' motivations and aims. This gives the player genuine freedom to change the story outcomes in a way that has not been seen before - each player will get a truly unique, sophisticated, visceral experience rather than simply switching between 'good' or 'evil'." Note the modelling of characters motivations..
A lot of Braben interviews online.
Narratives (relevant for procedural missions/story arcs): By procedural narrative I mean allowing the player to have some persistent effect on the game world, so everything is absolutely not identical after completing a mission, except for personal stats like money/reputation This requires tracking of entities and simulation (of behaviour) Procedural mission arcs are missions that affect/create/lead to other missions (and not the scripted completely set-in-stone unreactive arcs with a few alternative path ways that get repetitive as they can be easily recognised). So there are alternatives to one action missions e.g. usual kill/steal/transport fare
Structure (not that straightforward to find good summaries on google, relevant for creating interesting(generating narrative empathy) missions/events): The basic formula used in sci-fi: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screenwriting#Syd_Field.27s_Paradigm Good bullet point summary: http://www.kennykemp.com/pdf/story%20structure.pdf Movie script writing overview, seemingly comprehensive enough to be a must at least glance through at some point. http://www.scottishscreen.com/images/documents/crashcourseinscreenwriting.pdf
Engine (mission direction, relevant for making things happen to entities, on a lower level than empire level rts which the player doesn't play - arcs, events, assembling of assets to give support for multiple pathways. e.g. a rescue mission chooses a character you have a good reputation with/or at random, and makes them go out on a journey and breaks down the engine part way..as opposed to generating a broken down ship with a character that just started existing..i.e. the mission assembles the assets. You could have talked to them as they were leaving and watched their ship leave, maybe even gifted them an engine repair kit, in which case the mission would have chosen another character.)
Ai structuralist storytelling for computer games: simplistic planner/social entity simulation http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.159.2238&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Huge amount of things written online, these are just two random ones
Ai Fuzzy logic (weighing up things)
High level goal oriented ai
What is the aim of v1.0? (in terms of recruitment of devs, artists reaching space/gaming audiences (and the mechanics by which v1.0 reaches them, e.g. getting reviewed in certain magazines), attracting a modding community and where it places on the overall roadmap)
(very minor point) to demonstrate the different potential directions in which pioneer could grow..as new comers would mostly be thinking of various permutations of what they've seen
Things that should be done/completed before we call v1.0 done - i.e. Pioneer would be considered lacking by a lot of the audience/us if released without (we need to be realistic here and not get too ahead of ourselves otherwise it will never happen): More populated systems More procedural content on planets - half the fun should be exploring and discovering new things. (mechanics could be used to facilitate this): new wormhole type arrangement to an outer region - access from early game systems in a certain arc could have had a barrier preventing exploration, which disappears mysteriously and plays no other part in game Usable joystick support Mining I liked Tom's original idea of allowing the player to place mining bases in order to smelt ore into usable metal and create products This requires some discussion.. How can we stop it from feeling like empire building or corporation building? I suppose I see it as having a basic mining machine of a static nature, like an MB4 but it can never be moved and is a little larger, then other components could perhaps be added to that base, but as it was mentioned it may feel far from the scope of Frontier... The larger the installation the larger the chance of pirates...
Realistic stars - general background galactic glow (non blocky pixel stars), so it actually looks like a night sky otherwise it looks out of place with photo realistic planets At least a few extremely basic examples in each of the procedural departments, e.g. basic 2 part modular ships with a optional randomly varied module, to demonstrate potential of hardpointed/procedural ships - procedural city building code could be reused
Things that would be nice to have for v1.0 but whose absence might not be as glaring: One level depth for accessing features - there's enough space on monitors to show all icons/icon trays could materialise when cursor is near a screen boundary etc.
Some Ideas for the future:
Player should be able to change the game world through his or her actions An example of this could be through exploration, the player could take a contract to explore unknown space, once a suitable system has been found and reported there could be a chance that the company/faction would set up a mining base or colony there. Player shouldn't be important. Not without a heck of a lot of work. Owning a colony, for example, should be something beyond that of which the player is normally capable. Climbing within the ranks of an organisation, sure. Running it? Seems unreal.
The galaxy should change based on global events These could be man-made faction events such as war or peace and battles for resource rich systems or the changing of planetary values to show changes in environment due to war, nuclear winter ect. Or natural events which would be rare but should happen, such as changing planetary conditions due to asteroid/comet impacts or other factors.
Player behaviour should be rewarded appropriately, in terms of general reputation. Gaining reputation should be much, much more difficult than losing it. Acting like a pillock should harm your reputation everywhere. Nobody likes a dick. Climbing the ranks of one polit faction should harm your ranks with their antagonists. Unilateral attacks on one polit faction shouldn't necessarily impress their antagonists or enemies. If they didn't ask you to do it, they can't tell you apart from a pillock. See above. They have no reason to trust you; you seem to be the sort of person who attacks without warning. Becoming a fugitive from the law should be really, really annoying. Opportunities should dry up; no trade, no missions, few safe harbours. Paying off a fine shouldn't necessarily write off your bad reputation; becoming welcome should take acts of contrition. Acts of contrition should be possible. Perhaps working for those wronged factions through BBS missions they might have placed in allied factions' space, or in independant locations. We need to get away from the pervasive space-sim mentality that murdering the right people will get you into somebody's good books. Infamy that creates on sight recognition should fade with time, minor elements of reputation might fade much quickly, as well.
Other galaxies and a method of travelling between them.
I'd look at it in terms of narrative empathy.. it helps to have the player's actions and those of a similar profession have a large impact on the world around him, and on the psychological well being of others.
Concretely:
(example) Something affects hyperspace rendering large vehicles very slow
(example) A hyperspace accident isolates groups of systems for about a 1000 years, causing very different divided and interesting societies when hyperspace travel becomes possible
Persistent characters:
n characters encountered are stored
characters are removed according to memorability multiple levels of detail in order to facilitate low memory usage e.g. lowest character id and positive/negative impression highest would have a history of encounters what ever
Design considerations:
History/major entities It helps to weave strong motives, philosophical issues about which you wish the player to make decisions about directly into the major entities/world background stories. Shiny, happy, space entities/empires don't lend themselves towards compelling/dramatic narrative flow. Example, star trek ds9 as was discussed a while ago. The cast included, a shape shifter with unknown origins, a klingon raised by humans, former freedom fighter with issues, a symbiont who changed hosts recently etc. You can essentially see that there will be 'interesting times' from a description of the entities with good , driving, background/world fiction. It's more acceptable to add in extraodinary happenings/effects in the history, which play no part in the course of the actual game, in order to manipulate history for the sake of setting up the world/motivations..e.g. isolation caused by hyperspace accident, alien barrier stopping explorationwithin an arc until now etc.
Strengths of procedural games over normal ones (It does no harm to
Humans only vs Aliens This would largely depend on the availability of make human http://sites.google.com/site/makehumandocs/road-map Has ability to linearly combine/scale facial/body features allowing photo realistic faces and movie quality meshes/races/inherited features. Once it supports non-human base meshes, entire species can be modeled easily (due in an year or so) Eventual replacement for facegen As for having aliens, it would allow, in terms of narratology (as well as graphically), to get far more extreme diversity trivially (to drive home points about philosophical themes, technological disparity,socio-economic issues, visual etc.), and make creating motivations easier. This is still possible with humans by introducing a 1000 year isolation of groups of systems.
Realism vs fiction The game is set far in the future, so similarly to how books even mid 20th century tv shows depicted present day (using exaggerated combinations of tech in their time) in the actual future will be different.
Conversely people can relate to and reason with things-concepts they know (why mechanically moving/reconfiguring parts on ships look cool, spaceships have windows instead of 3d displays, why people speak face to face often instead of rely on borg-like tech etc.)
Realism vs fun The free orion people have written down gaming philosophy wrt. realism. http://www.freeorion.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=9652#p9652 I would argue, given the type of people in dev team/SSC, that recognition of simulated aspects of reality play a large part in enjoyment.
Overall: I want a space game that's more realistic than average. I want a consistent and sensible world. I want a realistic approach to visuals.
The general direction: You are one person, you own a spaceship, you travel around. Exploring, trading and performing hopefully even more varied missions. This is what we have been doing so far so it's good - let's just make it better. I am not interested in empire building, commanding armies or otherwise running the game world. I do not see the game having a progressing story with beginning and end at this point. Having a small crew on your ship and interacting with them somewhat would be nice.
Approach to storytelling: Don't try to tell a story! Leave that for movies and books. It is good to build a detailed setting so it can show though every now and then and support design, but let narratives build inside player's heads.
Individual features I would really like:
- player statistics
- player inventory - not just cargo
- better hud with more information: better sense of direction and velocity, directions to targets, radar contact list...
- great starmap that's a joy to navigate
- some level of ship subsystem modelling with damage control
- more factions than just a couple of giant ones
- more life in the universe - more ambient traffic
- log of where I have been and what I have done