Game Realism - Should it Matter?

Something I've been battling with recently when contemplating the procedural universe generation for Galliventurer. How realistic should the properties of celestial objects be? In the real world/universe, star's are visible colours because of their size & temperature, which in turn is based on: their age, elemental composition, and the type of fusion happening within. But should the universe of Galliventurer be limited to these factors? There will already be the stretching of realism with faster than light travel, more attractive and habitable planets than you can shake a laser at, not to mention alien races that you'll be able to understand, communicate & trade with.

star forming nebula

When playing a game about flying through the great vast emptiness of space, the idea is there shouldn't actually be too much emptiness. Emptiness is boring. Nothing happens in the empty, nothing good anyway. The fine line will be in finding the balance between not too much stuff, but also not too much empty. Before I tackle those particular hurdles, we also need to think of a coordinate system to allow for the player to navigate where they are without a point of reference. All realistic models (that I can find and have any hope of understanding) use Earth as the reference.

But Earth is a long forgotten myth in Galliventurer, we've been out amongst the stars for eons. Long enough for degradation of knowledge and technical regression. But let's leave that for another post.

So the tl;dr of it all, to begin with at least, the procedural generation will be based on a few lists of properties and randomly matched together (see other post here about that). This will undoubtedly produce some things that probably won't be strictly realistic, but it will be a start at least. As for the co-ordinate system, I had an idea to have each new celestial object have a list of the closest systems, this will allow for a triangulation (of sorts) as to where the object or system fits into the universe. This co-ordinate system should also help for displaying a map of the discovered universe - soon to be displayed on the website!

Comments

Galliventurer - Dreaming of a Universe

n. Galliventurer - one who adventures whilst gallivanting. We have a name. A compound of the words gallivanter & adventurer it fits the game quite nicely. It will also be the name of the player's ship (though, you may be able to have many ships throughout the game). Also trying something a little different for this project, practicing what I preach as it were. I'm actually going to plan this out a little bit before I ever actually write any code. Oddly I feel that most of my hair brain schemes of previous years have had a fast paced "rush to market before someone else thinks of this" attitude. So obviously there was no time to stop and take a moment to put any thought in before code went into editor. None of those projects ever made it out of the proof of concept phase oddly enough, no prizes for working out why. In the spirit of all this, things are different this time around. Having given it even two minutes of thought there are several issues....

How to Think

Moving an arm and thinking about moving an arm are two vastly different things. Even thinking about thinking about moving an arm is a natural thing to do even if reading it is very odd. Now the hard part, how to you design thinking ? The deliberate process of simulating scenarios to either logical or illogical ends would seem like a great fit for computers that can do millions of calculations a second. The slow an deliberate winding down a thought path seems to be the missing link to truely intelligent machines. We are very good at making machines. Even more so machines that actually produce things and have purpose. Since the earliest primitive forms of man, our tools are defined by their use. Or more aptly by the end result they achieve. So what is the end result of smart machines? To drive our cars, build our structures, do the heavy lifting and manage our lives? To do all that the ability to compute and apply action is needed but not actual thought. Most business tools and modern ap...

The Worker Bee

Do what you're told, follow the rules, don't over step your bounds, stay in your lane. The true cornerstone of modern enslavement to work. "We can't all live our dreams", why is that? Because then we'd have to change, to collectively actually think and enact a way all people could realistically achieve a base standard of living & contentment. Allowing people's mind free reign on real questions rather than worrying where the next meal is coming from & keeping the lights on. Bee animation by Joe le Sale While I have no answers to life's great mysteries, I do know this about the meaning of life - it definitely isn't to toil & labour day in and day out to fill the wallet of our bosses or investors. So how is it that we find ourselves with that holding such a giant sway over our lives? This of course is rhetorical, we all know the answer, you don't bite the hand that feeds you. Which brings the problem in to sharp focus, we no longer ...

Inkie Beard

Search This Blog