wesbruce
-
Posts
196 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Posts posted by wesbruce
-
-
Any plans to put in a concave tool? On the crafting video triangles were used to fill in the gaps at the front of the cockpit. Just wondering if you could achieve the same effect by chopping the base voxel with a concave tool.
http://www.ign.com/videos/2016/09/01/dual-universe-first-look-at-crafting-gameplay
Also near the start when the voxel was edited with the ball shape it left an obscure shaped piece near the core. Would that piece be movable/rotateable and able to join other pieces? Effectively letting us design our own elements I guess?
Sorry if it's a daft question I don't know the limitations or what's already in.
This is a key feature of the technology and it is where landmarks microvoxels started but there is a catch. If you create a lot of these odd shapes it must record more data per voxel: orientation, smooth level, centre of smooth, off set if you use that. It turns into a lot of data per voxel and too many such odd voxels will load slower. Landmark solved this, I believe, by turning the most common microvoxels into independent meshes.
For those that don't know how these non minecraft voxels work read these wikipedia pages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marching_cubes and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marching_tetrahedra
Someone has maliciously deleted a key paragraph and pictures from the Marching tetrahedra wikipage degrading it badly.
Many people use the Marching tetrahedra now because marching cubes has a hole but that hole should not be a problem in a 25 cm voxel system. The hole would be 12 cm, too small for a player or anything with a bounding box greater than 12 cm to fall or glitch though. It would be visible though. It is easily fixed if you are using the right lookup table. http://i.stack.imgur.com/i4Yyt.jpg
It is caused by the 3 to 6 ambiguity.
http://users.polytech.unice.fr/~lingrand/MarchingCubes/algo.html
Minecraft builds a mesh over the voxel but the mesh is centred on the voxel. For the smooth voxels we see in this game and a dozen others the voxels appear to be at the cubes corners.
So when you place a cube of material you are defining all 8 corners to be that voxel material when you place a wedge, two are defined as air (orientation says which two).
In the kind of complex shape fragments Majestic is talking about, only three or four voxels are set to polymer and the rest set to air. It can be simplified by referencing two materials and the cube configuration, one of 12 orientations and a smooth curvature +/-. If it's marching cubes you also need a test to look for the hole and add 6 more cube configurations to plug it.
What JC is doing looks simple but there are pages on code under the hood. In every game memory is always lacking and bandwidth always limiting.
-
OK math time.
The cryopod was built in 2536 AD. Earth destroyed in 2538 AD. 2 years to get clear of something that is able to obliterate whole solar systems. Ouch that's cutting it a bit fine! 9,854 in cryo so the date is 12390 AD.
In a few other SF's I've seen this kind of number recorded and 12k390 or M390 where precision is not needed. Ie above 10000 use a greek mu written M.
As for months and dates there is no data in the lore yet.Most cases it would be moot because if you have an AI plugged into your head it can make all the the date systems you want. Months since lading, European month, Hebrew calendar, Chinese calendar. All interchangeable from each other at a voice command. With real time language translation showing up this year then by 2536 there may be no real language barrier. They may all be speaking different languages and not know it.
Alain Damasio's character Sohan Decker is counting days, week month from landing. At worst that would put you 6 months out. The Gregorian and Jewish calendar already does that. Nobody cares. 12390 AD should work.
Alioth needs to be fleshed out a bit. How do you define north, south? Magnetic or planetary rotation? 50% chance they don't match Earth.How do you define longitude? What do you define as you Greenwich? On earth it's Greenwich England or Paris France. People still argue. The SF tradition is highest point or first landing point. Both can change to become nonviable.
Are those plants alien natives or has someone done some tricky terraforming. [i have a story planned on the lore page. ] Are they a mix of both? -
My guesses are the RCS adjusters are really only needed if your using some fancy lua script to side strafe, spin on the dime and the default engines or cockpit/ control unit do basic vector thrust. Note: we only really saw the cockpit fly in this one because he stayed in first person. If he added something forward of the cockpit it would be more convincing. I know enough of the voxel coding to know that he does not need to lie at all there. Several other games have flying voxel structures even vanilla minecraft (they're just really noisy and hard to steer. That will change soon. ).
All the core unit is doing is logging the XYZ coordinates and voxel type and perhaps orientation of the wedges, etc. Same with the elements. Everything moves with that core unit box.
I have a few quibbles. The core unit glow is too bright. We need some more realistic wings. Those look good and should remain but we will want a few other styles. Where do I submit meshes? A smaller sized core unit, visual only, would make some sleeker ships possible.
Do the antigrav speeders need a core unit or are they core units themselves? That one's to big for a speeder bike or skywalker speeder.Can you put the core unit in the air? Must it be on the ground? How do you work on the belly? Is the ship editable again if you fly it up ten metres? I assume yes. If so is it or editing mode lockable? I presume so. A scaffolding voxel possible if not? I presume so.
Good demo.
-
source where?
No source I'm doing lore on another page. Definitely not cannon! Yet! Just an idea. 10000 years allows for someone that headed for a star closer to Sol to catch up with you. It then begs a second question why are they sooo secretive and have no star gates littering the place.
I blame space whales. (or will)
I'm the kind of guy that comes up with five answers and leaves you guessing which is true. See my prospective lore posts. https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/topic/1360-ftl-greets-stl-conundrum/
If you read the pdf, Alain Damasio's back story, he left an easter egg that could translate both ways. The source of the final blue print. http://www.dualthegame.com/backstory
Emergent gameplay. In a player made world with no NPC's, how do you do aliens?
-
If you can put a resurrection node on a small ship have you created a planetside 2 Sunderer? Yay.
-
Hey you guys all sound like lemmings.
I'm the sneaky exarmy guy who has played H1Z1 king of the hill several times without getting shot.I keep getting run over! You can be a little too sneaky.
-
The resurrection node sounds a lot like sync mod in minecraft. Maybe we will need a pig on a thread mill to power it. When I played crash landing in minecraft I ended up with three full but unpowered sync clones and four graves at one point. Everything was going wrong.
There is a catch though if you are raiding an enemy base or doing a boarding action on a big ship and the nearest node is inside the enemies base or ship it would count as an exploit.
Clearly the node you make will be indexed to you, proxied to your organisation and locked as far as anyone else is concerned. Only the one at the Ark and an unlocked one in private market builds would be open to all.
I don't think everyone has gotten JC's idea yet. Ship combat does not end when you have shot up the ship successfully. You have to follow up with a boarding action on the disabled ship to shut down their Resurrection node and any hidden power system. Then you hunt down the last crew man and look for a hidden backup node somewhere. Being a pirate will be hard work. It will take time.
Meanwhile ten more ships roll through the gate angry as hell and a glance at the cargo tells you this one only hauling stone.
It would be really cute if the top level spy skill allowed them to use the nearest enemy Resurrection Node but you arrived in a jump suit with an empty inventory. -
In looking at the organisational plan it appears to me that we could do crowdfunding with little trouble and a little code.
It also appears we could do a viable insurance industry. In that case the legates would be the insurers and the members paying premiums. However how do you know what's insured? A market based system may also be possible. In this case the insurance is an crafted element and item with a template in the recipe. The ship, base, cargo, has the element attached. The item is then sold to the insurance org generating a policy number; as long as they own it you have a premium duty to them and they have a payout obligation to you. Destroy the ship the tag element dies and alerts the insurer that he has a pay out to make. The tag can't be removed once placed.
Yes this can be exploited but that only creates a new player role: detective, undercover insurance investigator, ship registry checker.
It allows Eve style ship insurance but is almost fully player based. Insurers suffering losses to pirates may find paying bounty hunters cheaper than paying out insurance to cover ship losses.It allows several libertarian orgs because they want to use (test) insurances to replace several law and taxation systems.
Server side it's just tracking a number linking an item and an element. -
Arguably one or two organisational schemes are doomed to fail but not disallowing them will be half the fun. But the dev's should expect some serious acrimony when the Red System Socialist Republic collapses in a screaming heap. Technically all org taxes would be club dues; not totally enforceable because you can leave the organisation. The same with some other ideas, minimum wage, etc.
Unless an org is able to actually trap players in a system and enslave or tax them these governments can't exist in any game.It would be fun to watch some idiot try.
-
Lord_Sekmeth Is anyone else asking why their not throwing snow on that fire? What your life pod does not have a fire extinguisher but your belt pouches can hold tons of stuff? lol.
-
Would you ask a person on a wheelchair to stop making clinking sounds as he rolled his chair? Cause I'm colorblind and pink font is the only way I can keep track of people quoting me. If you have a problem with my arguement, don't focus on them.
Your arguements make ganking easy and seeing as you are part of a pirate organisation, I can see why. And being a pirate is impossible, when a trader ship can warp from one system to another, without any risk being taken. But you didn't think that through, did you?
Hahaha I guessed it. Good reason. I'm using green font some times for similar reason. Dyslexia.
-
The best compromise probe design I can think up given the debates is as follows.
- The probe micro gate is a big heavy element that can be built into a suitable ship design.
- Any Ship will do but it also needs a special deep space shield. This make it not attack-able or loot able as it leaves the system. It can be armed.
- It can't use a gate with this micro-gate installed. A gate can't go though a gate.
- It needs big rockets, power, etc: already available.
- The probe's micro gate is linked to one on a station that remains in system and needs a little maintenance. You use that to fuel the probe and cycle the crew. These can be re targeted to a new probe, sold or re purposed when the time comes.
- The micro gate is operational with a limit of 300 kg: ie player and some stuff, fuel canister or personal storage canister. So you can crew your ship and supply.
- Any added fuel, power or on board maintenance shaves some time off the journey time but not enough to make it trivial. You crew the ship as a day job. An org rotates people though that job.
- The gate is two way so you can go back to the departure station but it requires more power. Isolationists can simply not go home on their day off. A single player can travel relatively fast if they work hard.
- A gate can be sent to a non stellar target.
- You can send, build and deploy more than one probe and stargate into a system but only one can be activated at once per star link.
- On arrival in the target system you have the option of:
- Using the gate as a one man portal and build in the system using only it's resources. (somewhat anti-social)
- Salvaging most materials to build a slightly larger gate. Fighter sized ships and small miners can come though to pioneer the system.
- Or building a big miner and then a medium sized gate.
- Or A more mature system or org can build a major gate that allows any sized ship. Be ready to defend it.
Strategic considerations.
- Still takes time and effort to do.
- Still encourages most to concentrate and cooperate.
- Almost griefer proof. You can build and deploy more than one stargate in a system but only one can be activated at once per star link (maybe per size class).
- Back up gates are possible. Hide it well.
- Battle damage degrades a big gate to a smaller one but does not destroy it instantly.
- You can turn them on and off: Cycling them confuses ambushers and disrupts blockades as they need to find more than one target. Allows counter ambushes.
- Fleets coming though a gate can be broken up if you cycle the gate at the strategic time. They end up at two or more locations in system. They have to re group.
- It's a semi-free roam option. Fleets can go around a bottleneck if they are very organised. You can sneak spy's into a system but it's a little harder to slip in a fleet of dreadnoughts. Not impossible.
- Neutral cut off systems can bypass a battle zone if they have planned for it or teamed up to crew and supply that fast probe ship. The result is a slow growing net or web but a fluid self healing one.
-
To jump, you need a stargate. If you can jump to a seed, then stargates are useless, and there's no reason to build them. So they'll probably be build, and then carried by a probe. Or maybe it'll carry a factory unit scripted to automatically craft a stargate from a blueprint? who knows...
I suspect the seed is a tiny stargate that handles only data and a few hundred kilograms. IE only the tiniest ships can jump to it and maybe a few fuel cans. How small and light can you make your minimalist ship? Is it called the flying coffin! All of the ships that JC Bailie has shown off may be too big for the probe! That is my preferred option.
Once though the probe your starting of with just the stuff you can carry and something only on notch up from a jet pack and reentry shielding. Geronimo.
Of cause it could handle more that one coffin so your mates can come and if it's not secured at the sending side everyone and his dog may be coming though with all sorts of funny shaped coffins.
Someone is going to try for the group orbital paratroop world record.
Meanwhile Bob parked his probe near an asteroid in another system and is building the space bug, while thinking planets are for noobs.
-
There is another question. Will the stargates have ship size limits? This could be useful because it allows the big boys to fight it out in the big systems while smaller newbie players and small corps can play away in the pioneer without fear of a griefercorp dreadnought showing up to steal their whole hard won system. It adds layers of progression to the star system as you grow the gate capacity.
-
I know I'm setting myself up for some vitriol here, but I just have to say that I hate the idea of SG Probes being the "preferred" method of interstellar exploration and travel.
Hear me out, because I love the idea of Stargate Probes in general, it's just that one little word that gets under my skin.
Preferred.
Seems benign, I know, but it's actually a pretty significant word that we will come back to shortly.
To start with, let's look at what SG Probes are, because they're pretty dang cool.
A Stargate Probe is a freaking automated factory attached to a powerful FTL drive that travels through deep space before entering a distant star system and building a giant stargate that will (presumably?) connect back to the stargate that had previously been built in the home system. Some sort of mechanic wherein we build a Stargate somewhere, and then build a probe and launch it, and then wait for the first Stargate to turn on.
Which is really cool, no matter how you slice it. Especially when you add in the fact that they're probably going to make us LUA script the whole thing, all on our own. This will be an epic player achievement, make no mistake.
...now let's get back to that word, preferred. Especially in the context of a subscription-based sandbox MMO.
I have to say that I am disappointed to hear that the developers of a subscription-based sandbox have a "preferred" method of travel for players that includes months-long waiting periods. And, yes, the devs have stated that these probe might take months to reach their destination.
I know that it's a bit gauche to bring up something like this, but I've always had a fascination for elephants that are just sitting in the middle of the room, doing nothing in particular.
Let's say this game costs $11.99USD per month, for argument's sake. Let's say, also for argument's sake, that you took on the challenge of a crewed interstellar ship. You've done the calculations on fuel and energy, and spent some time building the appropriate ship. You know the journey will take months (2 months=$23.98USD, 4 months=$47.96USD, 8 months=$95.92USD!), but the devs said it was possible, so you had to try. You point your ship at the star you want, and......what?
Seriously though, what comes next? Do we just log off, pay our subscription for a few months, and hope we don't get the message that our characters have died and re-spawned back at the Arkship?
Why does interstellar travel have to take months? Is it punishment for not playing the way the devs want?
Every moment that I'm paying for a subscription to something, I'm asking myself why I'm paying for a subscription to something. And when it comes to subscription-based video games, that answer had better be "It's really fun and entertaining."
There is nothing fun and/or entertaining about traveling through deep space for months.
Also, what happens when one of these gates is destroyed? Everyone gets cut off from that star system for the next year of subscription time while new probes are constructed and sent? Talk about a divided player base.
If this game was a one-time purchase, I wouldn't feel this way about such a mechanic.
I think you have misunderstood the Stargate Probe mechanic. It's a robot with a tiny stargate that flys to the system. The Weeks or month depend on server allocation and how ready the dev's are with Easter eggs etc. It buys them time to build the system properly. Procedualism makes that fast and easy as No Mans Sky, Vladimir Romanyuk's Space Engine and Space Engineers, etc indicate but if you want story and lore you need to buy a tiny bit of time. (Someone should tell Sean Murrey.)
No one spends time riding that probe ship. On arrival a tiny ship is sent though the tiny gate with you, your nanofab gadgets and just enough stuff to build a bigger ship. Mine, build bigger stargate bring in bigger ships. Now you have a new system, trade and all that fun.
The only question is that once built can it be cut off? This is promised by the dev's and is a key uniting plot tool, but it could really be inconvenient for those not in the fight if its a tree not a network. Does the stargate link to the nearest neighbour? Does it skip a dead link if close? Can it link to the system that launched the probe only or any gate in range on the network? Can a branch of gates be cut off the trunk without the twigs at the end somehow quickly reconnecting to the trunk, Atioth?
I suspect we will see a few fanatical PvE players get to a new system build a Resurrection node and then blow up the probe or never build the gate.
If a gate is destroyed by war can those dependant on it go around the barrier in a reasonable time? Have you created zones? Can a distant corp on the edge of the network stockpile something in the Alioth system allowing a gates quick creation without sending a slow probe?
I presume the main stargate at Alioth once built will be effectively indestructible.
Will Banking system synchronise even though the gate is a shattered ruin. Perhaps the interstellar financial system uses pinholes sized gates to maintain communications. A 1 atom at a time signal system. Cargo would be cut but not communication and some brokering.
-
Silly voxel question. Are you using marching squares, marching squares with the hole fixed or marching tetrahedrons? Are there any unallocated values in the mesh list? Can your voxels have normal maps?
If there are unallocated values we could do a few shapes like chair legs, thin struts, Shelves and small bumps and lumps but the procedural automesh function would have to skip these to avoid errors but it would give captaintwerkmotor those mosaics, etc. No fuss microvoxels. -
Hi I'm Wesley Bruce, wesbruce in may games.
That heading was not quite serious, Much.
I am a geographer and would be game designer but not a programmer. I don't even have a computer that can run the game though I am planning to buy a new PC.
Dyslexia makes reading code hard hence my interest in non code based solutions: Second Life, Voxels, Blenders little boxes, minecraft. Played many MMO's. I have abandoned avatars everywhere.
I know Geography, some astronomy and planetology, human ecology, some economics and chemistry. Degree Australian National University.
I've out lived my membership in the National Space Society twice! (A Sad story and a funny story there.) I know all the old L5 society stuff. Also I have blog posts on para-terraforming, sea steading, space stuff. Two NASA submission, not winning but considered useful.I have some skill in blender, wings 3D, sculptris, etc. Enough to be useful in a team but not on my own.
I've studied game design informally including game economics, quest/ tutorial design, map pitfalls, voxel theory, minecraft modding. I checked out the jobs on offer at NQ and know I could help but I'm not that good. Total lack of formal qualifications matters! And I know my limitations.
I'm also in Australia. A long way from Paris which may be an issue. I have Skype. PM me for it if you need it.
My current job is as a carer, disability support but that is diminishing as the guy I look after gets better at doing things. He has Cerebral Palsy and more university qualifications than me.
I'm a crazy ideas man with an idea of what JC baillie is wanting to do, how it's working and some of the things needed. I can also see the pit falls ahead; that may make me useful.
I'm a bit of a lore master with many ideas.
I hope to see you in-game some day. -
seriously save me from trouble?https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTEUiRdVoIll0a987QhO-mfop6N47it0AyT4_nhh65DMIl09djIYg
If you're worried about your ship building skills we should have a dozen player made stock designs before the end of the Alpha testing phase. And we will need to test the sales tools for those designs so I guess you just volunteered. lol.
PS I'm not a dev or alpha tester, I need to update my computer before that sort of shenanigans.
-
OK the basics are voxel ships that are fully editable by the owner with so far mat black grey and metallic, but not shiny, white. JC attached copper to those ships in the demo. Attach the elements to the voxel matrix to define flight, propulsion, sensors, crew seating or cockpit. I suspect the cockpit does no define flight direction. On finalisation everything is defined as the one thing for movement purposes.
The resulting ship has a big bounding box as indicated by the collision in the game-play video. Yet that does not effect players. They are dealing with a smaller bounding box of the elements.The voxel engine supports fixed direction gravity, on the station and spherical, to the centre gravity on planets.
[it would be very interesting if it could do radial, out from an element defined axis. That would give us a semblance of centrifugal artificial gravity: Stanford Torus, O'Neill Cylinders, etc, every National Space Society member would buy the game and that is most of NASA and almost every astronaut. It would not actually be rotating but an animated texture on the out side would appear to fix that. ]
Ship flight is as a unit so there is no tracking of loose bits like in space engineers. That's their main source of lag. Battle damage DU will probably not blow stacks of stuff off to create tons of lag. Combat is tab targeting, logically the player and the elements or the bounding box not the voxels them selves. No bullet physics to mess about with.
Cutting a ship in half may be possible with "weapon mining" of the voxels, assuming you are left with only two bits for the game to track (and a rage quitting newbie or two). Calculating the new bounding box will be fun particularly if the rear gunner surprises you by having a backup control seat handy. You just turned one angry ship into two!The server demo shows that the large number of players or stuff in a fixed space problem has been solved by JC baillie by decoupling the servers from specific in-game locations and tying it to population density and by making the update rates inversely dependant on distance. A sniper sight may over ride this for seamless long distance engagements. Size affects this distance update effect.
Arkzone crowding can be solved with a few player built newbie busses dropping people off out side town and an in game emulation of Uber.
So from what's shown it does look like you can build the ship of your dreams and fight each other with it, with minimum lag issues. Cloud computing for the win!
-
Without having the lore in my blood right now, figuratively spoken, I wonder why they went so far or long when habitable planets are relatively close. Then again not sure what range a star like that can cover without looking it up right now. Probably plot reasons or range reasons, possibly making close areas unsafe or not viable for other reasons.
If there is more than one Arkship then this is the one that drew the short straw and scored the most distant know terrestrial world. Some one else scored Proxima centari b.
This assumes that the swathe the neutron star cuts is not 30 to 80 light years across. I think the assumption is not just radiation or planetary collision. The doom star is moving at high relativistic speeds giving it a mass great enough to tear planets from their mother sun and scatter them into the deep dark space to freeze. While also sucking some planets and stars in to it's mass. A giant cue ball 10000 times the mass of the sun sending stars scattering like billiards on a table. A gravitational sling shot disruptions measured in terms of 10's of light years if not hundreds. That would make an awesome animation.
There are some stars out there that have been clocked at 0.3 to 0.8 c! There are some that seem to be moving at 20c !?! If that's not an error burn your physics books.
-
A 70 km radius planet has 61000 square km to mine. A solar system will be bigger. Sensor ranges will not be infinite unless its a really big ship. You should be able to go out and mine if your sneaky. Don't pick the closest, easiest, most obvious place to mine.
Ship stealth should be a major part of PvE game play. Be the asteroids not a big target near it.
In the videos the main dev seems to have a focus on teaming up but talked about solo play. Hiding in a hole or having a fast sneaky ship with rear firing turrets. Let the pirates fly into a hailstorm of exploding rounds while chasing you. Solo is not his first option but it is a option. In some eve systems I spot mine, don't loiter long enough for them to track you down. Grab and run. Fast mining will matter in DU space.
-
Gameplay effects. Essentially not much work. The game makes available artefacts, technology blueprints and special voxel materials that can be integrated into a virtual reality build. In this case it's a lore build not a ship or saved structure for sale.
The player takes on the persona of an ancient working in the distant past [or a secret child of the ship in the present] building something as a preparation for the coming sleepers.
Once finished it is checked by the dev's or a player jury, to eliminate illegal and pornographic content or completely incompatible lore.
We can be a little flexible on incompatible lore if some of the builders are playing god; trying to manipulate the sleepers to worshiping them or fighting their enemies.
Then it is randomly deployed into the world to be found. On finding and reporting, it become news. I.E. the discovery is reported on an in game media system.The creating player can seek it out if he or she wants but the idea is to create player lore to compliment the dev's work to be found by others.
The key themes are that someone from Earth got out of cryogenics earlier, or used another technology. They have sought out your target worlds, got there many centuries before and made a few things to help you. However a lot can happen in the thousands of years you slept and the ancient relatives have either:- Finished and moved on,
- lost track of why they are doing what they're doing,
- have gone extinct locally perhaps in war, Leaving AI in ruins, swamp, etc,
- have hidden among you not wanting to reveal their presence for some deep and complex reason,
- become high technology barbarians dominated by myth and superstition,
- Built hidden cryogenic facilities and are sleeping somewhere to be found,
(The catch is the last 2 would require NPC's or player alts)
Perhaps direct and explicit contact with another Arkship somewhere went badly wrong. So their interactions are more mysterious. Perhaps they have changed so much that your are as much a mystery to them as they are to you.
The children of the ship idea is a little different since they are essentially faking all the artefacts and structures to hide their presence. And the contact gone wrong occurred on the ship when they pulled someone from cryo for some reason. Some may be trying to get the sleepers to worship them or serve them by deception.If it's a player built world why not player built mystery's and ruins. After all we have all that stone. We're never going to make a spaceship or skyscraper from it.
-
OK this will be where I have the most fun.
I have already proposed several overlapping compatible bits of lore. Here I list and integrate them.
This has several assumptions: they could not just go to mars or alpha centuri or tau ceti because the neutron star is huge and is cutting a swathe though space 40 to 100 light years across. Secondly the Arkship in the games back story is not going to the nearest target safe system others scored that one. Thirdly some of the starting game play technology: Safe star gates, probes, some force fields technology, Is unknown to the people coming off the Arkship; some of it may have not been invented when the left Sol. Hence the need for training and discovery.- Someone tried to leave early, jumping the gun with prototype FTL technology. It went wrong but they survived, damaged genetically but survived long enough, before dying out, to leave artefacts, technology, some enigmatic AI or strange uploaded version of themselves. Something with a memory of man and a desire to help but little understanding of the Arkship's occupants. They have 9000 years head start but this means they have 9000 years to fall into ruin and your as hard to understand as a Neanderthal.
- Many stayed and worked on projects to help the travellers. Doing vital research that could not be done on a ship and was not finished before departure. Some of their results were beamed to the arkships so they have technology that was not known when the pioneers went into cryo. These are long dead hero's who stayed and died so others would succeed.
- Some of the solutions could not be sent to the cryoships in time, they were out of range, so they sent smaller faster relays to deliver the new solutions. The result is basically the same as 1 and 4 but with more AI in play.
- One of the ships sent to the closest safe system to Sol arived hundreds of years ago and survived long enough to buy time, a few hundred years before the neutron star caught them. They have FTL, gates and much better technology. They either used option 2 and 3 themselves before building a new faster arkship and heading off or
- They set out again by probes and gates to catch the Arkships. Because of the quirks of relativity they can not contact the Arkships directly or match velocity, but they can place things on various worlds to help and welcome them. Their chain of stargates have been destroyed behind them lest strange effects from the neutron star can propagate though them. 9000 years has distorted their mission a little or on some worlds shattered it in war and disaster. They are now space nomads leaving advanced tributes to their sleeping gods.
- Not everyone slept on the Ark ships some continued working, living, dying, on the ship, but their children survived. Hence all the corridors. Some are helpful AI some are still human. When the ship landed they slipped away or slipped into the embarking crowds. They have the same technology etc but have a few new technologies developed in transit. However these children of the ship see the earth as a distant legend. There is also a language gap for them, they have no word for tree. They are secretive, seeing the sleepers as alien and fragile. They have been warned not to reveal themselves for that may destroy the sleepers moral and sense of destiny. In this context the children are just Dev's and hand picked players not NPC's but are never really seen. They conspire to help. Some may plot to hinder.
This in SF parlance is the FTL greets STL conundrum. It is as old as the Traveller RPG way back in the 1970's but no one has developed it fully.
The universe of SF has enough ancient aliens and extra terrestrial gods. Lets make the humanity both sides of the first contact equation. 9000 is a long time.
And yes I know it's not technically an STL ship just a slow FTL one.
-
Read Alain Damasio pdf book http://www.dualthegame.com/backstory it is brilliant. Now that's one heck of a way to land a spaceship. Nailed the landing but the seat belts work better on star trek. lol.
The back story has some technological incongruities, I think that's intentional.
What kind of elements (props) would you like to see in game?
in General Discussions
Posted
That's a very steam punk list Kiklix.
I would add.
This should give some dev a nervous breakdown.