Where did all the good people go?

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StevieJ wrote: Ya, sure you have

Yep, I so agree Steve. I really find that hard to believe

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Carl wrote: Good question...... we have had naked pics of jffe, the ongoing joke of Ron's Angel Balls and now Angel Vaginas, Steve's Bazookas and pixel arousal......... I personnelly have been appalled Wink Big grin

Not to forget the infamous 'pink slider' thread...

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Beliria wrote: Not to forget the infamous 'pink slider' thread

Yep when I was new I read some of the threads, and thought well okay I should fit in okay here.. Although there's a few people that kinda ignore me still.

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Crapadilla wrote: Not to forget the infamous 'pink slider' thread

I got in trouble with Ahimsa for being crude with that I blame you Dilla

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Beliria wrote: Although there's a few people that kinda ignore me still.

I guess it's a mirror of real life in ff forum, and your not alone

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Kraellin wrote: takes a date and starts to eat it, then notices the dead monkey** bad dates!

Craig if you only new what Date is slang for here LMAO

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Carl wrote: I got in trouble with Ahimsa for being crude with that. I blame you Dilla.

Well, it is sort of a truism that there is no place for ruggedness, grungyness and crudeness when it comes to pink sliders, naturally.

lol, dilla. that dictionary could be useful.

no one got my indiana jones reference? 'bad dates'.

lol. e-harmony.

I'm a little slow.....still working on my "Original Image" filter..... .....

ok, i'm still playing TW a bit, but it's already gotten a bit stale. their universe is segmented and not contiguous like asheron's call was. so, you go to one area, do the quests and that's it. you leave and go home again. kinda stale. it's actually more like a giant character builder where everything is only designed to help advance your character. so, it gets pretty rote pretty quickly. they do have some interesting ideas, but within a character builder universe, those ideas get a bit lost.

so, i bought a different game, one that was recommended from a couple other online friends. the game is called Spore. this one is distributed by EA games and created by Maxis. Maxis is a big company and been around for quite a while. they've done some good games over the years and this recent one is really quite innovative. i dont want to lavish too much praise on this one, but it is a cut above. it's also of epic size and done with loving care. it shows.

explaining this game would take quite a while. in essence, it's a builder. you're building ... stuff. but, unlike other builders, you're actually building, well, just about everything important in the game, including not just your character stats, but the basic character itself, starting with one celled life and evolving your critter up to full sentience trekking out in the galaxy hunting for new planets to colonize. so, if you thought civ iv was adventurous in trying to simulate human history of several thousand years, try this one at several hundred million years!

the way they do this is pretty clever. you play the game in evolutionary stages, starting with the one celled critters and working up to going onto land and the critter stage. that one takes you up through more body evolution to becoming sentient and the tribal stage. then, you move from there to the civilization/city stage. and lastly, you move up to the space stage.

each of these stages plays differently. heck, they almost could have done five separate games from all this. in the cell stage you play in a two dimensional water world, swimming around eating and avoiding being eaten. yep, gotta watch out for those larger critters. you pick whether to evolve as a carnivore or herbivore and pretty much follow that pattern up into the space stage.

in each of these stages the game play changes a bit or a lot. the gui itself changes also in some of them. the last four stages are in 3d, where the first was in 2d.

oh, and i mentioned you build most everything. this is true. you create your vehicles, your buildings, your race, your clothing and other wearable gear and you create your colonies once you reach the space stage. i found it interesting that in different stages that that stage would remind me of a different game than the last one.

the space stage i'm finding the most fun. it's also, in many ways, the most impressive and certainly the largest. in fact, the scope of the last one is nothing less than a galaxy. but, it's not the simple, less than a 100 star systems of MOO or some other conquer the universe games; this one is HUGE! i cant even find the edges yet! i can see the galactic core, though, and it's quite far away, but there are literally thousands of stars to explore, as far as i can tell. so, someone put some time into this game.

now, sadly, it's not multiplayer. but, you can share your creations with other players through the Spore website: http://www.spore.com/ and, if you want to try the game out, you can get the free creature creator trial version here: http://www.spore.com/trial . that's how i got started. i took the test drive and this thing pretty worthwhile and went out and got it last friday. so, i pretty much played it all weekend i played it on normal setting and it wasnt too difficult to make it up to the space stage in a few days of playing an hour or two here and there. the space stage, however, is a different matter. this one looks like it could go on for years! now, that's my kind of game.

ok, that's enough for now. here's one of my early creations. if you shld happen to get the game and if you shld happen to connect up to the Spore website for sharing, look for any critters or items that begin with 'Krae'. all my stuff is 'Kraebull', 'Kraeshrimp', 'Krae-something'. so, it shldnt be too hard to find.

i'm not even going to try to explain or describe the various editors within the game. they are pretty much prefab, but flexible enough that even if you gave two differnt people the same pieces of prefab, they'd invariably come up with different items. it's actually a pretty clever way of doing things on a generic, anyone can do this level. yet, it remains versatile and creative. that's pretty clever, keep it simple, but make it powerful and creative and enjoyable. they did this remarkably well. and the possibility numbers rival those of FF with filters.

so, bottom line, at least try out the free creature creator. it's fun all by itself and it's only a tiny, little tidbit of the full game

oh, absolutely, steve. in fact, i ran a MUD back in the early days of the internet. i designed and i had two coders working with me, both geniuses with code. one went on to teach microsoft employees how to code and the other, a boy genius, went on to Harvey Mudd University.

it was an extremely innovative MUD for the time. a MUD stands for multi universe dungeon or multi dimension universe or any other similar naming. these were usually text only type games. we added graphics, ascii graphics for mapping. thus, a [] was a wall segment and [][][] would be a longer segment of a wall. it was therefore a top down view. we even did 3d mapping where you could go down into caves or fly if you had that capability. i could make a grayscale image in psp and load it into our mapping system and it would change the terrain level by way of the gray value, black being low ground and white being high. we also had editors for just about everything. i could make new creatures with one and script them with another.

so, for this new internet thing, it was really quite clever. i also had it where the critters would seed themselves in a rather unique manner that kept things from getting too predictable. some were predictable and others were not. there was actual adventure, unlike a lot of these multiplayer games today. we had a storyline that was comprehensive and designed to not be solved for years. the storyline was scaled to keep things exciting as players grew in stats. i also scripted things to have the critters fighting each other if it was appropriate. so, a predator might actually hunt prey. and the evils might well hunt anything.

the world itself was massive for the day. it was something like 32k x 32k x 32k. this was also pretty innovative in that it would only load areas based on where players were at any given time, thus saving memory. we were renting space on some server somewhere and had a massive 64k of disk space and 2 megs of ram or some ridiculously small sizes like that. so, saving ram and disk space was extremely important.

so, yes, i was quite into game design for quite a while. the biggest problem is, i dont care much for coding. i'm a designer, not a coder. i've found the biggest problem with most games today is, coders are designing and coding. or, graphic artists are designing and doing the graphics. you can see it in the games. our game was fun. it was simple, but it was fun. it didnt rely on high res graphics or surround sound or any bells and whistles of that nature. it was a GAME! i've played a lot of games over the years. i own hundreds if not thousands if we go back to the old 8 bit days. i cut my teeth on computer games on mainframes back in the early 70's. and my first code was in basic designing a dungeon entrance on a TRS 80

oh, and just to finish this off, i had a character system that still blows the socks off anything out there. it was a totally interlinked character stat system that also tied into the game storyline. i've never heard anything like it in the industry before. so, it's really quite unique.

so, when i talk about something like Spore, i see the flaws in design but i also see the strengths. the two best stages are the cell stage and the space stage. the tribal stage wasnt bad and the pre-tribal was mostly about building your character still. the civilization stage was almost a complete rip-off of other builders except you were using your created creatures, vehicles and buildings, and a somewhat skewed 3d planet. so, i was starting to get fed up with the system by the time i hit the space stage and then it got interesting again and impressive with the size of their playing field.

and i do this with every game i play. i get tired of most game pretty quickly. poor design. great graphics, animation and sound are eye candy. they are not the game. i find way too many game devs missing this point. they keep thinking if they could just make better graphics, more graphic detail, better shaders.... blah! phooie! they've already lost. oh, they might make money; art does sell. but it doesnt necessarily mean it's a good game. i make good games. i leave the coding, sound, graphics and other things like that to those who are more qualified. i know exactly what was wrong with asheron's call, ultima online, morrowwind and others. i know why a game works or doesnt work. i can tell you quite quickly whether fantasy or reality is the real seller and what a player will tell you he wants versus what he'll actually play and they dont always match up

so, yeah, i like design

ah, WoW but in a mech universe. that could be fun. call it 'The Mech Holy Wars' i can see who large shops with welding and spare parts and foragers out salvaging burnt out mechs. i can see battle zones and large cities with damaged factories. scout mechs and large turreted cities keep the enemy from doing a full invasion, so most of the war is fought in smaller skirmishes outside the main cities.

yeah, could be cool

oh, i can get totally lost in making those type universes. great fun

i've been saying that for years, steve that's why i had two coders working with me on that game we made. i knew enough to know what a computer could do, but not enough to make it do it.

you shld look at that spore demo, steve. it's got a fluidity in the creatures that is really quite interesting. i'm intrigued as to how programmers made that work so smoothly. and i mention that with the mechs in mind. imagine mechs you build from the ground up rather than having to accept pre-made forms in which you fit only certain things. it would change the mech world quite a bit.

then, take it a bit further, again following the spore mold, and create your own mech shops, build them up, run them, etc. mech iv was quite good in that it created a much more versatile model of the mechs and the universe in which they operated but they still set too many limits. i kept finding myself frustrated that i couldnt build the mech I wanted and not just the best of their pre-made molds.

ok, i'll call george lucas and we'll get this thing moving.

george says he likes the idea but has several projects going already and to call him in 20 years

ok, so what is visual studio 2008? i'm guessing it's an extension of visual basic, but that's about as far as i guess.

so, mech v, steve? or maybe 'the online mech holy wars'?

well, maybe you shld start asking vlad if he'd like to loan/hire out his coders or maybe with all the $$$ he's making on FF, he'd be up to sponsor/produce something?

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StevieJ wrote: two-handed razor of Occam

Is that what he calls it?

well, the trick there, steve, is to hire dilla too

as i understand it, he'll work for virtual food, virt eggs, virt fruit, etc, etc, etc