.map file relation to EoC geography?

I agree that the sound is critical to conveying the mood in a normal environment, but I think once you're in space (and dealing with a station area)it ranks secondary next to station appearance.

EoC featured a large number of stations, but aside from Haven, I really couldn't tell the difference in the models. They all use a similar shape and color. Haven only stuck out because it was constucted differently. Truth be told, I didn't realize there were so many station models until GrandpaTrout released his file with all the pictures of the station types. There wasn't enough variation.

As an example: I off-and-on build on this station model. It's just a bunch of blocks put together. But it's different than the standard models (this one just screams 'resdential' to me), and that adds to the mood. Also, by using a more 'bulky' style, it appears more solid/permenant than the 'tube and tunnel' construction of the EoC station (which always seemed a little transient to me).

http://images.snapfish.com/3394664323232%7Ffp46%3Dot%3E2328%3D%3C2%3C%3D8%3A8%3DXROQDF%3E2323482468695ot1lsi

Something like this is easy to model and texture, and breaks the monotony.

<font size="1"><font face="Book Antiqua"><font color="black">"Never before in the history of the world had such a mass of human beings moved and suffered together. This was no disciplined march; it was a stampede-- without order and without a goal, six million people unarmed and unprovisioned, driving headlong. It was the beginning of the rout of Civilisation... of the massacre of Mankind."
--H. G. Wells The War Of The Worlds</font id="black"></font id="Book Antiqua"> </font id="size1">

True, differences in station appearance will go a long way to portraying distinct cultures and functions. The point I was trying to get at with sound is not that we should dismiss it because everything takes place in space, but we should get creative and look at some unique solutions that have worked elsewhere. The suggestions you made about the kinds of chatter heard over comms at different locales would be great, a nice blend of the radio stations from GTA:VC and the random incomprehensible radio garble you hear all the time in I-War orig (which I thought added alot).

We can also explore conventions that work in some areas and try to apply them to space. For example, a Marketplace is a busy, cluttered noisy, smelly place with crowded alleys of stalls. In space, all that could be contained inside a box invisible from space. But what if the outlying approach to a main STC station was littered with garish, neon covered smaller stations all hawking their wares to ships over comms as they went by...kind of the ridiculously oversized space-station equivalent of vendor stalls. It might not make sense, but it would be immediately recognizeable to the player based on the conventions we currently know. That's the kind of thing I'm getting at.

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Hot4Darmat

That's a good idea. What if buoys/beacons dictated the normal approaches to stations (complete with bright markings and flashing lights), and to each was attached a sound file null which, within a certain distance, reaches the player? That would transmit your radio noise and add a little color to the scene. In addition, the beacons could overlap somewhat, allowing the player to hear more than one broadcast. Neon holo-signs could be added to the beacons themselves.

This is the kind of stuff I was fooling about with when planning my Chaos And Order mod. Recording news bits and advertisements and randomly mixing them in with the mp3 tracks the player loads into the game (via the MP3 mod).

I can dig that stuff up if you're interested.

<font size="1"><font face="Book Antiqua"><font color="black">"Never before in the history of the world had such a mass of human beings moved and suffered together. This was no disciplined march; it was a stampede-- without order and without a goal, six million people unarmed and unprovisioned, driving headlong. It was the beginning of the rout of Civilisation... of the massacre of Mankind."
--H. G. Wells The War Of The Worlds</font id="black"></font id="Book Antiqua"> </font id="size1">

Had a long day today, so I'm just now able to respond.

I think we may be getting too deep into details already to do the theoretical side of this question justice.
Halflifes Black Mesa and System Shock were done at at time where there were a lot less resources and techniques/technology avaliable than we have with EOC.
The major point I've taken from the contributions in this thread and the referenced games is that we need a focused, homogenous, fully integrated total concept. Black mesa was only one location: Black Mesa. System Shock was only one ship. Deus Ex was at different locations but throughout it the maps were all dark and sinister so they could convey the essence of that games mood.

so I guess we could say: Maps are only a part of a game but they are (contain) the sensual elements that convey the games message(story / focus / concept)?
Could one say the maps are the paper the games story are written on?

We might be leading ourselves astray by confusing the issues: A space sim takes place in a whole universe, not just on one planet: so, we create a universe (the cluster map), which we can do. But, that doesn't necessarily mean we can create a universal game, just because we have a universe.
I.e it appears that neither the maps or the game play can exist alone. They have to compliment each other (that seems too obvious to even write it down but ok I'm doing it)

On the detail stuff:

Bouys/beacons with billboards is a cool idea. The contents and "class" of the signs would be a good indication to the player what kind of station he is nearing.

Yes we do need more models for stations and habitats, I find it hard to believe that the tube and tunnel stations could have a football stadium somewheres in them, while in the other hand, sports are sure to go to space too. I'll be happy to test out any station made avaliable.

I agree that space itself is silent and find it annoying, for example, to hear cargo pods screeching when they collide. I also agree that sounds are necessary. It's just a question of using a creative approach to get the sounds where they need to/should be, to convey a realistic space environment. we have what we need to do that.

Scripted events are truely important. It's great to be able to dock at any station (and save), but to be realistic, shouldn't you have to get clearence first? That means a scripted event for some docking procedure (or several types of procedures).
When the player is at a station near a ship graveyard: Perhaps a News Net report of yet another ship reported to have disappeared under mysterious conditions. Or, he could (just barely) recieve a distress call depicting some wierd happening just before it's cut off. Lots of possibilities there all involving "sound" (and could also involve visual effects too). I think we could we could place handlers/triggers to activate those scripts without loading the engine down too much.

The ideas are good, [8D] keep them coming






Have Gun, Will Travel

Major Tom, you're too right. We may be bogging down in specifics before essences have been fully discussed, but ultimately things need to be implementable (is that even a word?).

My point about the older games and their maps (no matter how restricted or contained) wasn't about size...or the whole scalability issue. It was about creating 'feel' which is ultimately about manipulating emotions. Yes space is way huger than a room. But whether its a bunch of rooms and tunnels on a spaceship, or inside an underground science complex, or a city block, or an entire solar system, the map of concernis that which is accessible to the the player's sensorium at a given moment. The challenge is to bring that area within the player's field of vision, audition (and taction, so to speak) some sense of reality, tone and character. In an FPS, it's usually the local map (level or set of rooms) he or she is in at that moment. Any of these environments are just empty maps, corridors, roads, or city blocks, with nothing of interest in terms of atmosphere until it is put there by the designers (interesting visual details, sounds, scripted events). The look of the features in a given map is a big part of it, agreed, but not the whole story. In a space sim, it's everything that appears within sensor range that matters, not the cluster, or even the system you're in. The challenge is how to make that local region (regardless of scale issue) feel more real to the player. The tricks that work may not be all that different from the other games mentioned after all. Sure there are many more constraints in a space sim than most other games, but that doesn't mean it can't be done.

Here's a little example to play around with: Spooky Graveyards

In space you can't convey spookiness by having some leaves blow across the road, or a flock of crows burst into the air at once.
Graveyards are portrayed conventionally as spooky places on Earth because there are dead people buried there, its usually dark, there's usually a twisted, gnarled leafless tree, some mist, a moon, and something hooting or whispering in the dark. This is a convention that tells us all kinds of things about how to feel in a given situation. How is a graveyard in space spooky without those conventions? The basic conventions aren't available, but we can play around a little. You can have some very eerie music, and carefully crafted background colours and nebulae to convey the same message as 'moon, mist, gnarled tree'. You can add whispering voices in a static-ridden repeating long-dead distress call to help freak the player out a little. They could perhaps warn, from beyond the grave in their recorded message, of something mysterious and ominous, like to '...beware the rings!'. What the heck does that mean? Who cares, leave the player with a bit of mystery and something to worry about. Provide evidence of bad things happening in the dead ships to enhance the effect of our species-wide fear of death and the unknown, like the information written on a gravestone...how did this situation come to pass? Then add a nice little startle for effect, like a cat jumping out from behind a gravestone that screeches and runs across your path, you can bump up the emotions in the player in space with the macabre effect of frozen corpse suddenly appearing, bumping into, kind of getting stuck for a second, and then sliding off the windscreen of your ship.

All this could happen just by visiting a ship graveyard in space, if lots of time effort and care was given to craft that effect, like a stroll through a earthly graveyard at night. Just an example of the myriad possibilities that borrow from existing conventions.


--
Hot4Darmat

I think mood is developed by environment. Environment is defined as "The circumstances or conditions that surround one."

Without a restructuring of gameplay (environment), mood cannot be effectively communicated... and even if a means is found to communicate mood, then it is nothing more than false signals.

This unseen stumbling block we keep running into is the mechanics of the game itself. It is this which hamstrings any attempt to inject emotion into the player's environment.

For instance; Hot4Darmat's ideas to create mood are dead on target. This is how you create mood; in stories, in books ... in everything. However, here it cannot succeed. Not because the method is unsound... but because the gameplay mechanics are in contrast to the mood.

In Hot4's example, a fear-based reaction (spookiness) is being sought as a goal of the (area) simulation. This is a feeling which is based on fear-of-unknown/danger/harm/death. But what has the player really to fear? A quick save diffuses the mood you've worked so hard to create. The player has no need to fear any danger in the entire game. Nothing can be lost that cannot be restored in an instant.

A quick story to illustrate my point. Here's someting I learned years ago which changed my life.

Back in high school, I managed to get a job as an arcade attendent (back when the newest game was Defender:Stargate). I waited in anticipation for my first night running the place by myself, because I knew I could clean up quickly enough to have about an hour to play the machines for free. And I now had all the cheat-codes at my disposal. My vengance upon the quarter-gobbling aliens was at hand.

My first target was Galaxian. I set the dip-switches to player invulnerable and began to play. Wrecked a fearful toll on the Galaxian race for all of four screens. Then I shut it down. And went home in a melancholy fuzz.

It was not fun.

If there is nothing to lose, then nothing can be won. If nothing can be lost or won, the exercise has no meaning. Of course, the standard arcade game does not take the teenager's life if his ship explodes. But he loses his quarter. A quarter is not very much money, but the loss made the game mean something. There was a real-life element at risk, and this made the game more enjoyable.

This was an epiphany. It changed the nature of how I perceived reality. When I work on a project, I understand that the more work I place into it, the more value the project has to me. I went to two funerals last year, and on both occasions I remembered that Galaxian game. And considered that without death, life would have little meaning.

The save-game features of EoC (and upcoming mods) make the player invulnerable. He cannot lose... there is no danger of loss or failure. So any attempt at inspiring a fear-based reaction is doomed from the start.

I know. There will be no rush to restrict the save functions. A game which does not allow the player the ease of saving and restoring at any point (the player wishes) is considered a no-no. Hell, even multiplayer allows you to respawn. This is analogous to a paint-ball game where players, once hit, still run about shooting.

But consider the new wave in space-depiction which seems to be becoming popular. In both Firefly and Battlestar Galactica pure-space scenes were made silent; something the tv/movie industry said was a definate no-no. Firefly featured people who occasionally switched to a different langauge unknown by the majority of it's audience... another no-no. Engines muffle the main character's conversation to the point where the viewer has to listen very carefully to understand what is being said. Another video no-no which any instructor of a film class would go into hysterics over.

Yet it works. The industry said for years that 'this was bad... don't do this.' But someone broke the mold, and the fans loved it.

If you want to inject meaning into the game, restrict the save options.

I've been going on and on (and on and on and on sorry) about save functions and how they affect the mood of the game. But what about setting/environment?

The scope of space in EoC is truly grand. No game I've ever heard of rivals the EoC clusters. Yet it does not seem very large, does it? This is because of the speeds the player travels at. It has the effect of making space seem smaller.

But, again, there's one of those 'no-no' rules at work here; Don't make the player wait. The player shouldn't have to sit idle while traveling somewhere. That might bore the player into quitting the game.

Are we so fearful of losing the player? In today's market where space sims are so infrequent? I don't think the player is going anywhere if the game has meaning... what's he going to do? Play Freelancer? For how long?

The very act of trying to give the player everything he wants is what's knocking the holes in our hull.

While at an amusement park, an unknown-to-us concert started and the park emptied. No more waiting in line. You could ride any ride in the park, and didn't even have to get off the ride if you wanted to go again. My wife and I were estatic... until we realized that a large portion of the enjoyment of the ride was in the anticipation.

In a similar manner, letting the player zip all over space in the wink of an eye takes away the anticipation. Currently, a station means nothing to the player other than a place to pirate or do business. But slow him down and he'll be glad to see other human beings... civilization... repair facilities.

We keep trying to make station areas more interesting, but they only assume interest when compared to the void they're placed in. Since we ignore the void, how can the stations take any characteristics (other than 'this station seems different than that one')?

I know I go on about this stuff at the drop of a hat (any hat ) And I don't pretend to have all the answers to why these games seem a little pointless. Nor have I yet made one better. But I feel these game mechanics are a step in the wrong direction, and undermine any attempt to make settings and/or mood important.








<font size="1"><font face="Book Antiqua"><font color="black">"Never before in the history of the world had such a mass of human beings moved and suffered together. This was no disciplined march; it was a stampede-- without order and without a goal, six million people unarmed and unprovisioned, driving headlong. It was the beginning of the rout of Civilisation... of the massacre of Mankind."
--H. G. Wells The War Of The Worlds</font id="black"></font id="Book Antiqua"> </font id="size1">