New Jumpgate Evolution Details 37
Hermann Peterscheck, lead producer for Jumpgate Evolution, sat down with IncGames for a lengthy interview they've split into three parts. In the first, he talks about the scope and feel of the game, and how they broke the vastness of space down into usable, "logical chunks." He goes on to confirm that there are no classes, and he provides some basic information about the game's economy and how Jumpgate Evolution compares to other MMOs. In the last segment, Peterscheck discusses the lore and some of the thought process behind developing the story, noting how happy they were to own the IP from the original Jumpgate.
Unboring "space" (Score:1, Flamebait)
So many of these games now are turning the elegant compromise of Elite into submarine physics.. eventually someone is going to make a SeaQuest DSV MMO and close the loop.
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What I hate about all the spacefaring games I've seen so far is the way they divide space into "rooms". At the boundaries of each one you have to go through a magical door to get to another one, not actually fly really fast across vast distances like I always imagined.
Jumpgate has jumpgates, the X series has gates, EVE has stargates and so on. In fact EVE is a good example. In a game with such prevalent PvP what this philosophy translates into is all the pirates just camping the gates so they are bound to g
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Well, Eve has ships that can open their own jump holes.. so in a way it is more like Babylon 5.
But still, if you're going to start complaining about "realism" in space sims, it's a case of be careful what you wish for. Space is big and boring. These games (especially Eve) are already too big and too boring. And as much as I like to think I would enjoy a game where you have to take orbital mechanics into account, I bet it would get tiresome real quick :)
And it's not just games that have this "bunch of sys
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Orbital mechanics could be the bee's knees, if it was done right, like for example in Sins of a Solar Empire, where it's basically taken care of by the ship's computers and you can just move faster toward the sun than you can away from it. It would add "terrain" tactics to the mix, which is always a good thing... provided it's done right, of course.
Re:Unboring "space" (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, to be fair, within a solar system EVE actually simulates proper space, even during "warp" travel. If you and another ship warp at the same time, in the same direction, you'll see them flying next to you even though you're both traveling millions (? can't be bothered to do the math) of times faster than normal in-game travel. When you run a scan probe, if someone's in warp you catch them where they are between the two points, not at one point or the other. There's no blinking between places except when you go from one solar system to the other. Given that even in warp travel you're only going up to about 200 AU max, and that the length of your jumps is limited by your ship's capacitor, simulating the multi-light-year distances between solar systems would be pretty pointless.
Really, how fun of a game would it be if you could just pick a random 0.001 degree aberration from your course and be basically guaranteed that you won't run into trouble? The bottlenecks are a source of fun, not a detraction from it.
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You direct your thoughts at mine in such a way I feel I need to respond directly.
I'm assuming, from the way you view this matter, that you are a long-time EVE player. I think you might currently be a tad too stuck with the EVE model to objectively comment on the model I described above.
Let me expand on my original post: in my mind, flying from A to B doesn't have to be boring. It doesn't have to be waiting like it is in EVE. Neither has it to be uninterrupted travel. There could be any number of things to d
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Thing is, space is big. It's so fucking big it doesn't fit into the human mind. Without forcing people to travel along certain lines there is no fucking way you'll ever meet someone. There are points of interest that would gather people (like space stations) but e.g. a planet alone is already so damn huge you wouldn't meet anyone randomly just by going into orbit.
Even just "warping" from one planet's orbit to another can already happen through so many possible routes that intercepting them is impossible unl
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That's exactly what the previous poster was talking about when he said that space was "so fucking big it doesn't fit into the human mind". You might be able to set up a minefield around a planet (you could use half a million mines to set up a 200,000 km barrier around a planet, giving each mine a 1000 km x 1000 km area to defend).
But even going to solar system levels, things get totally ridiculous. A minefield of the same density as above in a sphere roughly encompassing Neptune's orbit would require more
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"The bottlenecks are a source of fun, not a detraction from it."
Which reminds me about the problem of all MMO's: Too much time is wasted travelling, in every MMO almost, almost all waste an enormous amount of time making you travel at slow spaces and limiting things like warping, etc, which causes the game and action to drag. In space this problem is MUCH worse and anyone suggesting the idea of "infinite space" is asking for enormous gameplay problems with herding players in the right direction. If you pl
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I've thought about this problem quite a bit. Unfortunately, a completely realistic space sim on a large scale simply doesn't work. If you are at Earth and you want to go to the Moon, you don't want your entry level ion engine to actually tak
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Why not have "real" physics and "unreal" propulsion technology?
Make warp engines and other "power signatures" detectable and you've got a real for people to go sub-light-speed.
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uhh.. how's that? If you try to fly off the map you hit an invisible wall and your ship turns around.
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Vegastrike is working on it. At the moment it uses the standard jump-point mechanism, but there is an in system FTL drive as well, and they plan to eventually allow for intersystem travel using it. All the systems already have 3d coordinates that are used to generate starfields.
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When I played Jumpgate in the beta (oh, so long ago now...) while there were Jumpgate between sectors, you still had to cross each sector to get to the next gate in the line: There were no short cut gates.
Many sectors took 45+ mins at max speed of a very upgraded ship to cross. 45 mins of going in a single straight line pointed at the next jumpgate. And often you'd have to cross a dozen of such sectors (no joke) to get where you needed to go. That's double digit hours of real world "game" time, all while
Finally (Score:1)
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Have you played Freelancer? Not an MMO, but dog fighting fun.
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Agreed, freelancer is a heck of a lot of fun!
Independence War 2 and Freelancer's prequel Starlancer are great games too! Although they are single player...
Have yet to find a game that can match those two.
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Got me there, Freespace 2 was excellent, forgot about it.
Wing Commander I could never get myself into as much as I tried. The only WC I managed to fully play was Prophecy which was fairly different than the older Wing Commander games.
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Your describing it as an MMORPG clarifies how little you must actually know about it. Its quite substantial, and some interesting progress has been made already.
Please go troll somewhere else, like the stargate mmo forums...
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Oh man, I remember someone linking me to that website YEARS ago. If Infinity hasn't came out by now, it's most likely never coming out. And tons of MMOs promise the moon (rimshot) and don't deliver on their stated initial features.
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I was just about to suggest Allegiance myself. It's a fun game with fairly realistic physics (for a game), lots of 0-Gee dogfighting, and a substantial strategic element if you want to play as the team commander (alternatively, you can just how in a fighter or the turret of a capital ship, and blow stuff up).
The learning curve is a little steep but there's some great tutorials and even human-guided training, and the community in general is very accepting of newbies so long as they make the effort to learn (
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You missed out then, way before Everquest, and the other current games there was the Genie network and Air Warrior http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Warrior [wikipedia.org], Cyberstrike (which was fantastic fun), and Multiplayer Battletech. Don't you wish you could walk on my lawn?
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hope they don'r shaft their Euro users this time (Score:2)
With Jumpgate 1, they apruptly closed the European servers, leaving all of us out in the cold (playing the us server wasn't really an option - too much lag).
I never really understood the reasoning. Comparted to programmin g and maintenance, server and traffic is really neglibible in a MMO budget, and they had several thousand paying customers over here. Ther was an issue with their local parrtner, but I think with some good will that could have been solved - especially since the European server als was quit
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They probably weren't programming or maintaining those servers much either, as the dev and deployment work would have been mainly targetted at the US operations. Chances are the number of subscribers fell, they needed to concentrate the remaining players on fewer servers, and they saw European servers as the least busy, and most disposable.
Can't wait! (Score:1)