Full Scale Real-Time Universe

Hey everyone,

I've been working on this project and am worried about the practicality of it, from a gameplay perspective. This has probably been discussed before somewhere, but I want to get 'new' opinions on the general idea of full scale real-time universes. Say, you have a full-scale planet, around the size of Earth - this is where the players begins their game. The player at this point can only walk around the surface (as far as transportation). The rotational period of this hypothetical planet is around the same as Earth's as well. So basically the player plays on a scale of full days on a full-scale planet and runs around, scavenging, surviving, etc. Perhaps they can also fast-forward through some actions such as sleep but everything is in real-time while the character is active.

Eventually the player will be able to develop better transportation, explore the planet faster, and eventually leave it (they can also fast-forward this type of travel). The primary purpose of a full-scale environment and real time gameplay is to preserve scientific accuracy (the planet can't be forced to rotate very fast, reducing day length significantly, without creating a centrifugal force nor can it be shrunken in volume, retain mass, and still produce the same amount of gravity, etc).

However I'm wondering if players would be up for playing a game where it takes several play sessions to complete one in-game day and travel across a world where it can take hours to reach the coast from inland (walking) or something similar. What are your opinions/predictions concerning if players would/could play a game like this?

 

You should check out the game "No Man's Sky," I think it's kind of similar to what you're proposing.

 

> massive planets
> fullscale environments that take days to walk on foot
>Building transportation ships to explore continents and even other planets
> scientific accuracy
> fast forwarding to rotate planets fast

There is a game with all of this already. It's called Kerbal Space Program (also made in Unity ironically) and it's a space game simulator. Maybe not what you had in mind but it sounds an awful lot like it. It's also extremely fun (one of my personal favorite games) and I doubt anything can ever come close to it now that it's so successful.

It IS a cartoon-ish style game with limitations, however. But if you are thinking of making a full "skyrim" world that is explorable, well, keep dreaming.

 

In my mind, that question has already been answered. I remember playing Daggerfall, the second Elder Scrolls game. The size of the game world was immense - almost the size of Great Britain. There were something like 15,000 towns. There was endless procedural content that all basically looked the same and got boring very quickly. It was cool in theory, but the coolness was just in the abstract idea of it, not in the "wow, I'm having fun" way.

There's a reason that the follow up games Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim took the opposite approach. Their game worlds are something like 10,000 times smaller than that, and those games are WAY more fun. One of my all-time favorite games was GTA: San Andreas. The game world FELT really big, but the scale wasn't anywhere near real world.

Now there will always be fans of extreme games like that, but those are kind of like the folks that like to simulate trans-Atlantic airline flights in realtime. They're on the edges of the bell curve.

 

Assuming you start on earth and preserve "scientific accuracy", it will take 4.3 YEARS traveling at the speed of light to reach the next nearest star proxima centuria. So for all intents and purposes its going to a game of our solar system.

I would get bored in about 5 minutes.....unless it's GTA with martians

 

There have been games which have been absolutely bonkers huge. I’m drooling about the resurrection of one such right now, the Elite/Frontier games. Frontier had the entire galaxy implemented already in 1995. The new offering, Elite Dangerous, will have 400 billion visitable stars.

So, if they could have practically infinite worlds in 1995 it’s not much of a technical problem. It’s more of a gameplay problem. Few people play games to recreate everyday life. That’s a simulation, and it’s something you do at school or at the office. It’s work.

For a game, you need to have content, excitement, and challenge. And you have to have it often enough for your demographic to keep playing. That said, don’t be afraid to make games for a niche.

If your game sells one million copies to people who enjoy building complex actions that will take a long time to finish, don’t be afraid of that. It’s still one million copies sold. It just won’t go after that holy grail ‘going viral’, but chasing that rabbit is idiocy anyway.

 

For me, it actually depends on what the player can do during the day. Days shouldn't end up being boring routines else I would just live in reality.

 

Definitely can feel that way though to be fair computers were also far weaker when Daggerfall was released compared to Morrowind. Dwarf Fortress, despite its graphics, does a much better job and is what I would look at concerning modern procedural worlds.

 

I'm a actually pretty big fan of KSP and the design of it was kind of what I was getting at. In the game, Kerbin is 600 km in radius yet it still produces the same amount of gravity as Earth (thus it must consist of some extremely dense stuff). In fact the entire solar system in KSP, and all of the celestial bodies in it, are reduced in size significantly (in comparison to known real-world star systems), according to the devs, for gameplay purposes. Despite all of this, players still perceive the environments to be huge (and they are, just not real-life sized) - perhaps a full-sized play space would be too much.

Speaking of Kerbal Space Program, for interplanetary and interstellar space travel, I was considering implementing a fast-forwarding mechanic similar to the one in that game (or some sort of time skip). To clarify, only actual gameplay would be real-time, but this thread really isn't about my project, just the basic concept anyway.

 

P.S. Also, you can look for inspiration in Space Engine if you want.
Here is also trailer of this space simulation program.
It's pretty awesome *_*

 

Space Engine is pretty neat, messed around with it once a while back on my cousin's PC. Unfortunately I only have a Mac so haven't used it ever since. Really curious as to how the programmer of that simulator acquired all of the known astronomical data (or at least almost all of it).

 

Space Engine is created almost by one person, Vladimir Romaniuk.By education and profession he is an astronomer.
P.S. I have an article about Space Engine, there's a bit about the technical part of the program but it's not in English

 

The power of computers isn't really the issue though. The concept of infinite procedural content means that you're essentially turning the universe into one giant mathematical function that spits out a pattern that's your game content. The fact that the pattern can go on forever is actually irrelevant, because it'll feel familiar and old after a point all the same.

The issue isn't that a computer can't make new content. It can. That's actually pretty easy. The issue is that it's not very good at making content that's interesting to a human being without having a human being to offer input. And a human being can't offer infinite input.

 

If you want life size, there is a KSP mod for that. Not only do you require more delta V, it makes exploring and discovering things a lot harder and all around boring. I'm interested to see No Man's Sky and to play Elite: Dangerous.

 

Which is perfectly fine because Daggerfall, while being very large, was not infinite.

Keep in mind that Daggerfall was developed in an era where 486s were still very commonplace and 32MB of memory was considered normal. Due to space limitations it could not generate the entire world ahead of time and even if it tried it would have taken a long time. It therefore had to be very simplistic as it would need to run in realtime.

Dwarf Fortress, by comparison, generates the world ahead of time. It has a very in-depth world generation system. It generates an elevation map, a temperature map, rainfall and drainage data, etc and uses this information to create biomes. It even keeps track of weather patterns.

For civilizations, it simulates simulates an economy and resources, diplomacy and wars, etc. While it only shows the current year being simulated, it is actually doing so on a week-by-week basis and can take considerable time to simulate a large world.

All of this data can be learned by listening to the developer in various interviews and it is very fascinating to listen to all the steps it takes to generate a fantasy world in his game. As well as all the shortcuts in order to do so in a reasonable time frame.

 

It's still larger than is required for the familiarity of the pattern to be an issue and human input on the creative size to be a bottleneck.

The 32mb thing also isn't really an issue. What could be an issue is HDD size, but RAM... not so much. It's pretty rare for any game to keep all of its world loaded at once, so whether you're loading 32mb of 1990's era game art or 2gb of 2010's era game art is neither here nor there. The issue is creating a whole world's worth of interesting content - the content won't be interesting in and of itself without a significant degree of human input.

There's no practical difference between a map that's so large that a player doesn't bother to explore it all and a map that's infinitely large. I think that as a designer it's far more useful to measure how much of a world players care to explore than its raw physical size.

Dwarf Fortress doesn't get its interest so much from the fact that it has a procedural world as it does from the interplay between its many detailed mechanics. The procedurally generated map is just one of many factors that combine to make Dwarf Fortress cool and interesting, and I dare say that the map in and of itself would not be interesting alone. The procedural map is important in support of other mechanics, not the other way around, and it's only interesting because of how it impacts those mechanics.

For instance, (please correct my terminology if required, it's been a while since I talked Dward Fortress) an aquifer is an inherently interesting thing when discovered in Dwarf Fortress, not because water is cool but because of the choices it forces you to make for the development of your fortress. Take away the fortress and all of its various mechanics, now how much do you care about randomly finding an aquifer? Probably not much...


Anyway, all that boils down to: Cool games aren't about having an abundance of stuff. They're about having interesting stuff. And if you're going to task the computer with making your stuff then you need to give the computer some way to make it interesting, most likely in the form of game mechanics that have strong interplay with the kind of stuff you're getting the computer to make.

 

Well it does depend on what you consider to be interesting content. Which is, as you said, why Dwarf Fortress can get away with it so well. It shifts focus away from the world and more towards the mechanics. But it still helps that the methods it uses to generate the basic world prior to populating it are actually fairly realistic.