It's all in your head, Part 6

[The GoldFish]

Now if only it were 100 times bigger and full of giant ants...

Seriously, there are at least a dozen minigames you could come up with on the spot with just that city generator. And I want to play them all!

[Nutter]

mmmm jumping on stuff.... endless fun

[Lowkay]

You cannot forget that procedure generation is not without its flaws, there's an inherent difficulty in trying to get a generator to generate based solely on coded knowledge of an envionment. It has no measure of whether a city actually looks like a city, and taking it down into the lower, more detailed levels, there are even more problems.
It has been hinted that the generator can be run entirely automatically, needless to say that the demonstration involved human tweaking, the problems associated with how something looks is very much open. There just isn't a sure-fire way of creating content on-the-fly that is guaranteed to look realistic (in this case city-like). It does however save extreme amounts of time, getting you 3/4 of the way towards your goal...

[Lowkay]

Still, whatever it is used for will be spectacular and original -- you can pretty much bet on that, it is Introversion after all

[desktopsimmer]

One thing that a couple of friends of mine had a very drunken conversation about was city generation, not with computers but with humans. Given that same geographical location, e.g. London, in the early 1800 to now, if you hit the "life reset button" which resets the population, year, and memory back, would the city reform again the same way or would 'randon factors of life' create another completely different city?

Now taking this in to the world of Introversion's 4th game, if I had two PC (almost identical), but with identical geophical features, would it generate the same city?

[KingAl]

Now taking this in to the world of Introversion's 4th game, if I had two PC (almost identical), but with identical geophical features, would it generate the same city?

Assuming the algorithm was the same and they were seeded identically, then yes - disregarding potential hardware malfunction.

[martin]

Just because they've made a generator does not mean any generating will be done on the end-user's machine.

True, but if you could make the campaign scripting dynamic enough it would offer a different campaign for every user, and an infinite amount of slightly varied campaigns for every user. Somewhat like the LANs in uplink.
And of course it's far more efficient to store a generator seed than an entire map.

My main objection was to suggestions that people would be able to make their own maps using the generator, which seems highly unlikely.
The fact that Chris specifically designed the generator to allow intervention at any point suggests against your former suggestion, in that it makes it more likely to be an aid to creation rather than a self-creating mechanism, and while procedurally generated content is certainly more efficient in terms of space used, unless it loads on the fly it can be prohibitive in terms of time and processing power used - Uplink's LANs are considerably simpler in this respect as they do not have to generate a 3D representation, nor are they of a comparable scale. This is not to say that IV is not going to take this route - I'm just irritated by the way people have jumped to conclusions regarding the nature of Subversion's content.

well of course it all depends on the gameplay, it may be a darwinia like thing with set maps etc or a more uplink style thing with most things being dynamic.

And of course you can intervene atm, it may be that he'll make it generate rivers etc later too.

And ave you ever played .kkrieger, it's an entire fps in about 100k because all the content is loaded when the game loads, it has about a 10 second loading bar on my computer, which is fairly good for all the model textures etc.

[KingAl]

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, one would hope Subversion is less repetitive and more fun than .kkrieger

EDIT: martin - I'd like to make it clear that I don't pretend to know what IV is going to do, and I wasn't so much trying to refute your suggestion as to highlight an alternative interpretation that most seem to have been ignoring simply because they've assumed the only reason one would want a generator is to randomly generate a map at execution time.

[desktopsimmer]

Assuming the algorithm was the same and they were seeded identically, then yes - disregarding potential hardware malfunction.

@KingAl
Ah, I should of made self clearer, are IV going to make it so that regardless of the geographical features being the same, is going to be a 'random seed code' that give each enviroment a little something different

@martin / KingAL
It would be good if you could have both 'fixed' and edititable environments. I think we would have to see more of what subversion is going to be, remember the conditions are subject to change

[martin]

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, one would hope Subversion is less repetitive and more fun than .kkrieger

EDIT: martin - I'd like to make it clear that I don't pretend to know what IV is going to do, and I wasn't so much trying to refute your suggestion as to highlight an alternative interpretation that most seem to have been ignoring simply because they've assumed the only reason one would want a generator is to randomly generate a map at execution time.

well actually I must admit I've never played .kkrieger >< -> it wouldn't run on my system
Anyway, that's true I suppose, but I don't see why he'd spend all this time making a generator that everyone is really excited about and then not include it, at least not as a level maker. I mean I'd buy it as a separate game

And I realise that, and I was just enjoying the opportunity for a good argument

[wwarnick]

My prediction is that the levels will be generated at random on the player's computer. That would add to the replayability tremendously. They may also have a campaign with fixed levels, but I doubt it; you heard what they said about Darwinia. My guess is that there will be a multiplayer option of some kind like a free-for-all and maybe even procedurally generated campaigns that can be done solo or with other players alongside you.

About the premise, we must remember that Chris implied that it would follow the standard of the last three. He even said that it should be easy to guess what the next one would be (I have some ideas, but there's no telling if I'm right). Thus, I think we can assume that, like the past three, the player plays as himself at a computer with a mouse and a crazy piece of software. In Uplink, you're a Hacker, accessing your gateway from your home computer or laptop. In Darwinia, you're accessing the Darwin Research Associates server and viewing the artificial world with the software created by Dr Sepulveda. Due to Dr. Sepulveda's surprise when you show up in the first scenario, I personally think you are playing a hacker in that game as well. In Defcon, you're either a general at his mainframe in some bunker somewhere or you're some guy in his bedroom with a laptop, having hacked into a private government server like Matthew Broderick in War Games. Also, both Darwinia and Defcon were based off of servers in Uplink. If Chris meant Subversion would follow suit this tightly, then Subversion would:

* Pretend the player is a hacker
* Be based off an Uplink server

Whether or not you're an Uplink hacker is another deal. Do these games take place in the same universe, or are they separate but with big references to each other? We've already debunked the idea that the Darwinia virus is Revelation (darn it) due to time differences and a few other things (including a statement by Chris himself), but there's no telling whether or not Uplink was around during Darwinia's time (unless there's something I don't know). However, we know you couldn't be the same Uplink hacker as in Uplink because in Uplink, you are initiated in 2010(?), which means you couldn't have been a hacker during Darwinia.

Also, if these games do take place in the same universe, then Defcon adds a very interesting element, as there must be a nuclear war somewhere on the timeline. Personally, I don't think they take place in the same universe, but I do believe in the two assumptions stated above.

Any thoughts?

wwarnick

[Ace Rimmer]

Cube.

[xander]

Cube.

Cube? Hypercube? or Cube Zero?

xander

[shinygerbil]

Cube.

Cube? Hypercube? or Cube Zero?

xander

I still prefer unbranded Equilateral Rhombus.

[Ace Rimmer]

Cube.

Cube? Hypercube? or Cube Zero?

xander

Strange, I thought for sure that I had answered this previously but guess not.

My first thought would be the original Cube. Definitely not Hypercube due to the whole time shifting tesseract portion of the story. My second thought would be perhaps you're a technician of sorts as in Cube Zero.

Who knows.