Since Star Trek, and it’s brand of sci-fi in general is almost as formulaic as generic fantasy, I can see the same sort of thing working here. You’ve got a lot of modular bits to work with (It’s a [Frozen, temperate, desert] planet with a [tribal, pre-industrial, space-age, developed] civilization, with [one, two, three] dominant nations which are at [peace, cooperation towards a mutual goal, recently at war, eternally at war]. The dominant system of government is [Theocracy, paganism, democracy, totalitarianism], the civilization tends to be [peaceful, warlike, nomadic, mercantile, monastic], and interestingly they seem to [practice slavery, need a specific resource to survive in the climate, have a prophecy that deals with outsiders,] etc etc etc.) Given these elements, a way of coming up with and assigning idiosyncrasies, and a procedural way of generating face-putty variations, you’ve got a pretty solid basis for procedurally generating plenty of planets that wouldn’t look out of place in the Star Trek setting.

All they have to do then is a) paint over the seems so it’s not painfully obvious how cobbled together it is (something DF’s never really been concerned with) and b) come up with some meaningful ways to interact with the civilization. The danger, of course, is that you’ll start repetitions of the same theme (Oh, it’s just another warlike desert tribe again), but that’s the design challenge, isn’t it?

Anyway, I hope they include a quick way to go back to the “known space” to repair, go shopping or whatever you need to do to keep trekking in space. Being 2 hundred light years away from the last gas station and run out of fuel (or whatever they use) doesn’t sound pretty. Space Leatherface would probably slaughter all the crew (non-virgins and weed smokers first, obviously).

My fear is that the task is just too mammoth, but I wish them good luck. The game they are planning sounds awesome.

While i understand your idea – and it’s not a bad one – reflected by the link to Tom Chick’s article:

Player vs. player combat will be a part of the game. Also, there will be some sort of “infinite exploration” to encourage gameplay beyond combat. The implication seems to be dynamically generated worlds and civilizations, which give players who discover them bonuses in the form or resources, technologies, and crew members.

I just don’t think it would work. If it were one or two people doing this exploration in a game (starting from scratch when you started a new character) then it would be fine. But the logistics of having possibly hundreds of thousands of players each ‘creating’ tens of solar systems a day seem to be unworkable to me.

If each solar system was ‘clearable’ and did not affect the game in a long term sense then i could understand this feature but if they are usable as resources then they must also be available to other players to be found and turned to their own uses or destroyed to reduce the influx of resources to a rival faction. Otherwise there’d be a neverending escalation of resources.

If there really was a system of dynamically generated content then the universe would spiral out of all sensible control and end up being un-navigable and be very confusing. Plotting these new systems on an ever expanding map would be impossible….. especially to be available to every other player on the server.

Thank you! I was trying to remember that name almost all the time I was writing that post, it never came to me so I couldn’t use it as an example. But Noctis is another fantastic example of an exploration-biased procedural game/experience.

@kenoxite

[quote] while I’d love to see all that procedurally implemented as much as you do I don’t think that’s what they mean with “open up new resources and equipment and make new alien recruits available to you”. It looks to me it’s just like Sid Meier’s Pirates taverns and ports. That’ll be all you’ll see from the planet “culture, people et al”. [end quote]

I never claimed anything of the sort. I was actually just talking about the overall appearance of the planets, the layout of the solar systems, the names of various things (perhaps even the names of resources).

The only other thing element I implied is that you may get the chance to do some dialogue bits with the aliens (woe betide Cryptic if they deny us that) and what the aliens say about their World and their culture might work on a similar algorithmic basis.

It would actually make perfect sense to have static options as to resource gathering (including sentient bipedal resources) and use, but that would be something entirely different to the exploration element I was talking about.

What I was trying to convey was that there would be a procedural element to the look of things as you explored a new area. I don’t think they’d have many fans if all they did was had different solar system configurations and called it done (which would tie into the ports/taverns element of what you said). I think they’ll go a little further than that with the visuals and the dialog.

But that’s just my opinion, I just wanted to make it absolutely clear as to what I was giving an opinion on.

@Esha: while I’d love to see all that procedurally implemented as much as you do I don’t think that’s what they mean with “open up new resources and equipment and make new alien recruits available to you”. It looks to me it’s just like Sid Meier’s Pirates taverns and ports. That’ll be all you’ll see from the planet “culture, people et al”. A preset place with preset options. You may have the procedural planet topography to fly by, as in Infinity, but that’ll be probably just all. I wouldn’t be too excited about this feature, TBH.