Interface: Space (Undo's recent work)

[A51Watcher]

the lore is partly the brainchild of history, myth and the rest is made up by amaterasu, ellirium and myself.

That is what I enjoyed about my favorite game of all time - Drowned God - Conspiracy of the Ages

Unlock 4000 years of Lies







http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drowned_God:_Conspiracy_of_the_Ages


As you can see, that is what they did with DG, and sold a BUNCH!

There were many interactive puzzles to be solved in order to move on, interactive machines to be operated, as well as the workshops of Einstien and Da Vinci to be browsed, Morgana makes an appearance, UFO's zip through the sky on occasion, you discover and use stargates to travel various locations and times, all while tracking down the mystery of the Drowned God Alien.

Music was eerie and haunting on most occasions.

Very enjoyable and lots of fun for weeks.

The cover got my attention in the store, I picked it up and read the back cover and was sold on the idea.

The game delivered as advertised and I recommended to my friends.


Here are a few screen shots that don't really do it justice, but were all I could find.

[undo11]

when i read the title of it, i thought, "oh it's about osiris."   
figured that out, only because of the shabaka stone text, which
held a variation of the story i hadn't seen before but which told more details about what happened at abydos, specifically.   he "entered the portals of the lords of eternity" after he was rescued from drowning by isis, it said, "to the north of the land to which he came." the land to which he came was abydos (he was nimrod, enmerkar, narmer).  so i was looking for something in the north of abydos, which i figured out was the osirieon, which meant the concept that a portal of the lords of eternity (et.al stargate) was in the osirieon at some point.

long convulted theory behind the portal in question was that it was unearthed from the buried remains of enlil's temple city of nibru (nippur) in sumer and sailed via river barge and ocean going vessel, to egypt, where it made land fall after being tugged across the desert sands to the location that would come to be known as abydos. 

then the osirieon was built to house it and a pyramid to osiris was constructed over it, on the spot.  that pyramid is what is "dissected" by
"set", in the dismemberment of osiris story, it's pieces strewn around egypt where they are later fashioned into a few noteworthy obelisks by isis, whereever she found a piece of his "body", which i read to be a chunk of the stone that was originally his pyramid.  this also doubles for her fashioning of an artificial phallus (obelisk) for him. 

oh boy ya got me started lol

[A51Watcher]

Awesome, don't stop now!

I am still slowly digesting that last post! lol

[undo11]

Awesome, don't stop now!

I am still slowly digesting that last post! lol

i added the bit about the artificial phallus isis made for osiris, being an obelisk made from some of the stones of his then dissected abydos pyramid.

[undo11]

big question:  if she reconstructed osiris' "body" (pyramid) from his former pyramid stones, where is it?  giza maybe?  doesn't make sense.  i thought giza was older. 

hmm. 

[undo11]

wait, it does make some sense, since the stones in both the osirieon proper (not the end chambers or tunnel added by seti I) , were  undecorated and of the same composition and dressing as the stones for the giza temple.

[A51Watcher]

wait, it does make some sense, since the stones in both the osirieon proper (not the end chambers or tunnel added by seti I) , were  undecorated and of the same composition and dressing as the stones for the giza temple.

[undo11]

it would be fairly easy to make a mist style video game in the browser window, but the problem with that is, that's not the style of game we're conceptualizing here.  mmo means many people playing at the same time, in the same game environment, and they can see and interact with each other's "digital characters"

[undo11]

here's an example of a group of players in a dungeon in wow, which is a mmo. 

[undo11]

    Heh just remember those outside environments aren't very friendly to little fishy type creatures that are so tasty. There will be creatures big enough to attack cities on every planet. We haven't determined what form that will be in an under water environment but needless to say you will feel like prey once you leave the comforts of the cities on any planet. Ship travel might be the exception to this.

oh wait.  you're confus-ed

the RTS portion of the game, doesn't attack the players on the ground, just does armor type damage to the buildings.   that decision was made so the people who prefer to play without violence, who are playing the simulation portion, don't have to engage in any violence.   so neptunians would still be safe from physical threat on their homeworlds.

  the homeworld planets of the inner and outer worlds, have planetary shields that don't allow damage to organic tissues, so living matter is not hurt by the invaders. only types of weapons sold for hurting planets with organic shields, is non organic weaponry that can only hurt non organic things.  all they can hope to do is damage non-organic structures such as mining facilities, factories and support structures (like houses and storage facilities) to the point where their competition for planet resources is lowered.  homeworlds are giant sanctuaries.   

the rts portion also rids the game of the problems Star Wars Galaxies had in their housing simulations, et.al, people building houses and structures and abandoning them, thereby taking up valuable real estate active players could otherwise utilize.  so the idea was that the out of system invaders would do damage to facilities not located under the city dome.   and if not repaired by the player, would eventually decay and disappear entirely, over the course of like 3 months.   give the buildings "armor" stats and have it take damage like player armor does so by the time it reaches 0% armor, it's now no longer useable, and in this case, disappears from the real estate, making that spot available for purchase as well.

so it's a built in system for keeping real estate useable by purging abandoned facilities from the game by just the normal wear and tear of invasion damage on the structures "armor." 

city structures don't have that problem because they are under the dome.  however, their active payment of maintenance,  keeps their buildings from being sold to another player. 

the system would be designed to keep a copy of the person's property and its contents on file for a year, so that if they returned to actively playing and caring for property, they would still get back their stuff, but not their chunk of real estate where they originally built it. if the lot(s) were still for sale, they could just retake possession of it, unpack their furnishings and decorations and put them back in their structure(s) and resume their normal play. <-- (this last part is a bit iffy, since it could be abused and that's what we're trying to avoid here). also only the game engine could sell houses already built on real estate,  that way avoiding people buying houses already built on property and then reselling them for such exorbitant prices that no one could buy them, resulting in the same problem of a field of empty houses.

this was a huge issue in star wars galaxies because houses were also often shops and stores where people sold their goods. but if they abandoned their property new stores could not be built on the existing abandoned ones,  and the buyer could spend literally hours going from abandoned store to abandoned store, never finding what they were looking for.  in our game, the longest a property with building(s) would be vacant/abandoned/non-maintenanced, before being removed or put up for sale, would be 3 months and any store, would have access to the same planetary auction house so shop hopping would not be a necessity.   even while the 3 month period was transpiring, access to the planetary auction interface would be still be accessible and  available, there, thus removing the issue of abandoned merchant shops causing more and more useless travel.

the point of having individual shops was to provide showcases of life size replicas of the goods that merchant creates and puts on the market.   so there would be no "preview" of the item you wanted to buy. you'd either have to know what it looked like, or travel to a shop that has it for sale and view their showcase.  the ship showcase would be a trip.  (<---these showcases would obviously be copied on player websites so you could access them instead of having to travel to the individual shops, so it would be necessary to make travel between merchant shops, easy and faster than normal travel. most likely a special merchant portal that drops you right in the showcase but doesn't allow you to exit into the main part of the shop. that way keeping people from using merchant showcase portals for super fast travel between planets).  would be best to have it be decoratable by the shop owner but otherwise be an instance that is generated on demand by the buyer wanting to view the showcase items. 

items not created by the simulation people on homeworlds would be sold on the hub auction houses, which provide auction house previews, so no travel to a showcase is necessary but also no life size replicas to see either. 

[undo11]

p.s. i was also thinking that once a city was founded and named, that certain structures would auto build by the game engine, at the city's creation and those structures would never vanish, regardless of player population in the city, after that.   probably some type of civic buildings not buildable by simulation.  a space port would be an useful thing to keep available even in low pop cities but since our players have their own ships and hangars for their craft, it would have to be something else. not sure what though. will have to think on it a bit.

[undo11]

travel back and forth between  the hub and a homeworld of your faction, would require using your personal ship.  fighter ships would be isolated to the hub hangars and other forms of travel.  fighter ships can't pass thru the planetary shields of homeworlds.

accessing any shop on any homeworld, would result in a listing of the items available by homeworld simulation currently listed on the  planetary auction house.  so having your own shop on your property is actually handy, encouraging pvpers and pvers to do enough simulation to have their own shop and therefore, access to the planetary auction house interface from their own housing lots.  this also keeps the economy moving since resources for building simulation will be in demand by more than just people who engage in full time simulation while ingame.

[petrus4]

where where?

The Unreal Engine.

There's this, for starters, undo.  License is free for educational or non-commercial use; and the best part is, they seem to have massively brought the prices down even for some commercial licenses as well.  It used to just be a single flat fee of half a million dollars, from memory, but they've apparently introduced a lot of different plans now; they probably noticed that virtually no one could afford it, otherwise.

If you did decide to use this, I could possibly help, as well.  I messed around in probably the earliest released version of UnrealED (the one that came with UT99) for around six years, on and off; 1999-2005 or so.  I don't know Java, but I did learn how to use the pathnoding system for the AI.  Steven Polge developed it from his knowledge of linked state routing protocol; I've had a bit more experience with that again recently, in Minecraft.

[undo11]

The Unreal Engine.

There's this, for starters, undo.  License is free for educational or non-commercial use; and the best part is, they seem to have massively brought the prices down even for some commercial licenses as well.  It used to just be a single flat fee of half a million dollars, from memory, but they've apparently introduced a lot of different plans now; they probably noticed that virtually no one could afford it, otherwise.

If you did decide to use this, I could possibly help, as well.  I messed around in probably the earliest released version of UnrealED (the one that came with UT99) for around six years, on and off; 1999-2005 or so.  I don't know Java, but I did learn how to use the pathnoding system for the AI.  Steven Polge developed it from his knowledge of linked state routing protocol; I've had a bit more experience with that again recently, in Minecraft.

well i liked their video on browser based first person shooter tech they are coming out with.  it was real nice.  but i've messed around with browser based 3d games and this is what i found:

1.  the browser hates 3d.   no matter what browser.  it doesn't like generating all those faces and keeping it in browser memory.  the result is this really irritating low level flicker rate that hurts my eyes.  if it hurts my eyes, it will probably hurt somebody else's eyes as well.  and i am really concerned about the effect it might have on epileptics. 

2.  we need something that people with direct x 9 can play, because this economy has bottlenecked alot of computer upgrades  (including my own).  sure replacing the computer maybe cheap but there's also the graphics card.   i can guarantee you unreal is currently running direct x 10 and higher and probably requires a 200+ dollar graphics card upgrade to build/play games with it.  it's pretty though, real pretty.

3.  i wanted something low brow, that's still 3d and may not be as pretty graphically, but which will allow large amounts of people to play the game in vicinity of each other.  this is particularly necessary with planetary engines, where we're asking the game engine to not only generate players and their ships, pets, houses, armor, weapons, structures, pvp, pve, rts, and dungeoneering, but also doing it together in the same spaces of the game environment, while also rendering planet textures, loading and rendering clods of planets surfaces with their flora and fauna, and etc.

this is one of the reasons that there are currently no planetary game engines in which you can go down to the surface and get out and walk around, build houses and so on, because every nerd wants his planet engine to be so gorgeous that when it comes time to put people on the surface, no one can move.

so i want an old planet engine that has been tweaked.  preferably direct x 9 but willing to go with direct x 8, if necessary or something equal in open gl or what have you.   

[undo11]

i found a fantastic one, that almost meets every one of my criteria (it needs some tweaking though), but the problem was the guy created it back in 2003 and during the creation of it, employed a GPL algorithim, meaning that it is freely distributed, with its source code, but you can't sell anything you make with it, and you can't make money from the use of it either.  for example, even if the game is free, if you maintain a shop to support it from which you generate income or a monthly subscription in order to play it, you are violating the GPL license. 

i spoke with him at length about it, and he told me that it was cutting edge for its time and he was annoyed no one had managed to make a usable game out of the technology. one way that would be possible was writing it in another language. it is currently C++, so writing it in java or C# would work and bypass the GPL issue. problem was, he didn't personally have the time to do so because he is not only a professor of computer science at some university overseas,  but also teaches a class outside of normal school hours for making games for hand held devices.  the planet engine itself he created for his graduating thesis and the university hired him on the spot. it was real cutting edge and still is pretty freakin' amazing.  just needs some attention to make a fantastic game with it.  all the ground work is already there. 

let me tell you about it.  it's our solar system. exactly what we need for our game.   it keeps accurate time.  the planets and moons and sun and stars move in accurate time.  clouds move over head on earth.  the planets that have obvious atmospheres (earth, venus, mars) have atmospheres in the engine.    saturn has a huge set of rings.  you can move around in first person or 3d person camera views.  you can fly down to the surfaces, but not land on them nor get out and walk around. i think it has simple ogre collision (you can't fly thru the ground).  it needs real collision (you can fly thru the buildings and other things.   he has procedural cities on various places on earth, programmed in.  procedural flora, programmed in.  you can fly down under the water surface on earth, although the surface is just a snapshot of water from nasa's blue planet, and doesn't move like water.  but the underwater is murky and pretty much what you'd expect under water to look like (not any light refraction, however).  it has a simple biosphere map, where cacti grow in high desert, pines on mountains, palm trees in subtropical/tropical locations, etc, on earth  (he has tree distribution for big open spaces, laid out in a grid.  they need to be randomized. a simple tweak to the algorithm).  this biosphere concept can be reused with different parameters and graphics for the other planets.

it's missing quite a few things but also, already has quite a few things.  just needs a programmer who is willing and capable of converting it to something like C# or java and give it some tweaks and attention.   only problem there is, i'm not sure on java for a mmo, and pretty sure C# has not been around long enough to be as tweakable as C++ but i could be wrong.  it has no fauna.  no skeletal rigging animation. no editor interface.

if you're interested in seeing it,  i can provide the link, you can download it and fly around in it, and see what i mean.   the trees are all billboarded and ugly, but those are tweaks that can be made to it.  i'm currently trying to convince him to make small changes to it, like one every few months cause the other planet engines are just getting more and more graphically complicated and ignoring each other's failures.