It's all in your head, Part 6

[wwarnick]

I also think it will be similar in theme to Uplink. I don't think it will be a general hacker sim like Uplink, but I do think you'll be assuming the role of somebody on a computer doing sneaky stuff. I think the stylized look of the city in the video is supposed to be exactly what it is, a 3D model of a city on a computer screen, not a real city with cars, birds, and people.

wwarnick

[xander]

"Hey! I know this! This is Unix!"

xander

[wwarnick]

Nope. No it's not.

wwarnick

[Bad Intel]

Tank : Operator.

Morpheus : Tank - Find a structural drawing of this building. Find it fast.

Tank : Got it.

Morpheus : I need the main wet wall.

[MaxPlank]

does anyone else have very fond memories of "Covert Action"?? I think subversion might have quite a bit in common with it...

[Taedal]

Looking very interesting. Gameplay wise like others i'm guessing maybe hacking different building from distance, moving and directing agents around the city like darwinia down to indoor layout, perhaps placing bugs to enable hacking a server..? and finally in keeping with defcon, the ability to launch missiles across the city

[xander]

I've got it!

Subversion is just a distraction. Chris has, on multiple occasions, stated that he is most proud of Darwinia. So, he is probably slaving away on Multiwinia (which is a codename, I might add) right now, working to get it out in 2008 (a year before Subversion is due, by the way). But he doesn't want any of us thinking about it, so he is distracting us with Subversion! Subversion is just a ploy, people! There is no Subversion, only Multiwinia!

xander

[Kadayi]

Not necessarily. It saves time over hand-crafting every single level, lovingly shaping every single building in the tens of square kilometres of city in each level or area of the game.

If they were intending to use fixed environments rather than floating ones, them they could have saved themselves a few months of development time and expenditure and wholesale lifted existing City footprints (New York, London, Tokyo, etc) with a bit of research and a little ingenuity. Given the time they've already invested in the generation process I'd have to favour favour my original assessment (of floating environments) over yours TBBH.

[KingAl]

Assuming existing city footprints would work as level designs and had no associated legal issues. Assuming that approach would in fact be easier. Assuming Chris knew exactly where he wanted to go with this all along. As I've said earlier:

Whatever approach IV decided to take, Chris would almost inevitably have made a city generator in order to create a cityscape because manually creating it is not practicable - which is why I was rejecting the way in which some have immediately assumed there would be randomly generated levels.

Also, this isn't 'my assessment' as such - I'm making no assumptions about the final product, I'm merely highlighting that there are other interpretations to the ones that people had automatically assumed were true.

[Kadayi]

Assuming existing city footprints would work as level designs and had no associated legal issues. Assuming that approach would in fact be easier.

You only need Google earth Pro and Google Sketchup pro and you have complete access to 3D models of all of the major American Cities, which you can legally access and import into other 3D applications. The data is all vector based. No biggie at all to do in a matter of hours.

[zach]

I was recently sat for two weeks without Internet access (changing ISP), so what did I do? Play through Uplink and Darwinia, obviously!

I noticed this funny folder called 'bonus' on my Uplink disk, though ... lo and behold, bonus material I hadn't seen/read before. It had some interesting stuff written by our very own Chris Delay (at least I believe Chris wrote it). I stumbled upon a sentence that made me smile, just a little ... Now, I don't want to ruin anything, or make any assumptions about what you're working with, and I do know this was written no later than 20th of December, 2001;

Programmers are engineers - which is why we see every games company making their own engine, every company spending 90% of their time writing engine code when they should be writing games.

It just struck me as funny, since that seems to be exactly what you're doing right now - making your own engine, that is.
I know the times have changed, people have changed, the industry has changed ... It was just ...

a thought

[KingAl]

It's my understanding that Uplink, Defcon, and Darwinia share a lot of resources, and I don't see why the same wouldn't be true in Subversion's case. Also, the city creator isn't a new engine - it's a means of generating content.

EDIT: Kadayi, you're still missing my point. Even if they can access existing city footprints and there were no legal issues, that's no guarantee that they'd actually be good levels, or levels that can fulfill the requirements of the game design. I don't dislike or doubt the idea of automatically generated levels, but there are reasonable alternative explanations for the approach that Chris has taken.

[NeoThermic]

It's my understanding that Uplink, Defcon, and Darwinia share a lot of resources, and I don't see why the same wouldn't be true in Subversion's case. Also, the city creator isn't a new engine - it's a means of generating content.

Bingo and bingo, although I'd not quite put Uplink in there. SystemIV, as it's noted in both Darwinia and Defcon, has undergone some major changes after Uplink.

NeoThermic

[Kadayi]

Kadayi, you're still missing my point. Even if they can access existing city footprints and there were no legal issues, that's no guarantee that they'd actually be good levels, or levels that can fulfill the requirements of the game design. I don't dislike or doubt the idea of automatically generated levels, but there are reasonable alternative explanations for the approach that Chris has taken.

Not from a business perspective, efficient time investment is everything, especially in game development. Investing a couple of months of R&D into creating a project that you purport is never going to see a use outside of the office is an extravagance by any standards, when it comes to weighing up gains made, Vs expenditure and time added to the overall development. Chris doesn't strike me as the sort of guy whose going to want to waste time on a project unless it's absolutely necessary.

[KingAl]

Not from a business perspective, efficient time investment is everything, especially in game development. Investing a couple of months of R&D into creating a project that you purport is never going to see a use outside of the office is an extravagance by any standards, when it comes to weighing up gains made, Vs expenditure and time added to the overall development. Chris doesn't strike me as the sort of guy whose going to want to waste time on a project unless it's absolutely necessary.

Heh. You might want to read up on the production of Darwinia
If real world cities would make poor levels for the game design, then hand-crafting levels would be a far greater extravagance than making a generator. Also, keep in mind that we're just seeing what Chris shows us - that doesn't mean it's all he's been doing for the past couple of months. I don't "purport that it is never going to see a use outside of the office" - making any assumption of any kind is exactly what I'm not doing. The simple fact is, Chris has, in the past, expressed a dislike for manually creating content. A generator is one way of avoiding this, and a generator for this sole purpose is not as ineffectual as you seem to be assuming when you consider the alternatives and their respective shortcomings.
I don't assume Subversion will use completely randomly generated levels, nor do I assume the opposite. I'm keeping an open mind - my argument is merely with those who assume there is only one explanation, when self-evidently this is not the case.