Forums » Suggestions

Making the world feel more alive

Nov 22, 2004 uraeus link
After trying Vendeta I figured out I should try and list my suggestions for making the world of vendeta feel more alive and 'real'. Some of these suggestions are based on what worked IMHO in Elite/FFE.

Newspapers: The newspaper feature of FFE gave you a way to feel something was happening in the world at large apart from you flying around doing your little thing. Maybe setting up newspapers for the various factions in the universe, the papers could be a mix of stories generated by player generated events, like 'attack on base xy) combined with editorial stories outlining more general political events etc. of the universe.

Make the space station interface more diverse: Instead of craming everything into one 'screen' with lot of tabs I think many of the items in the space stations should be split on into separate 'rooms'. So when you enter a bar for instance you get a drawing of a space station bar, and when you enter a shop you get a drawing of a shop. When you buy a ship an image of a shipyard. This graphics should at a minimum be different on a per culture basis, realisticly there could be 5-6 images per setting per culture, ideally one image per setting per space station.

More flavour text: Ships, space stations etc., should have more flavour text. The FFE printed guide with its often amusing stories outlining the history of each ship was a prime example of giving you a more in depth feeling of the ships of the universe.

Other ideas is letting guilds design/own space stations as their guildhouse, since vendetta lets you playback ogg's why not allow adding of ogg radio streams somewhere in the GUI, maybe long term set up some Vendetta radio stations.
Nov 22, 2004 grunadulater link
Actually, I do think a radio-type device would be slightly interesting. I doubt it's going to happen, because it would most likely require a lot of coding, but maybe some more ambiant sounds or something. I've always thought it'd be nice to be flying through nowhereland and getting static then recieving a faint signal of a derelict ship or something. I do agree that most empty sectors need to have some suprises in them.
Nov 22, 2004 johnhawl218 link
I've had a some station ideas that I had to make things feel more emersive. How about when you dock with the station, anything you have "unloaded" could be put up for sale, allowing the sale of the goods to go directly to the pilot. Kind of like the "bazaar" in eq. This could help in things like missions where you have to go out and get that "scrap metal" that everyone seems to run out of. Instead of hunting for it, you could check stations to see if anyone is selling. And if they implement crafting then you would be able to sell you goods yourself instead of selling to the station.

Installing CASINO's in stations would be a fun way to spend some of that extra cash thats just going to waist in everyones pockets.

Now I know this will never happen, but wouldn't it be cool to be able, once docked at a station, to actually get out and walk around IN the stations? If that were the case then you could implement all sorts of stuff inside the station. Deferent shops could then give out different jobs. For instance, you dock, enter the main shopping level of the station, you enter the clothing shop and the store manager asks you if you could help him with a delivery from a system on the other side of the "universe", some of that rare silk that only the Itani have, OR, you walk down a dark corridor near the entrance to the docking bay as your about to leave the station and a man who looks more like a pirate then a serco station dweller asks you if you could deliver this notepad to the Outpost in Odia, bla bla bla. It would be a way to make the quests more involved and interactive, and MUCH MORE RPG that a artificailally intellegent station computer arbitrarily giving out 4 different type of missions (combat/cargo/recon/prosepcting).
Nov 22, 2004 harvestmouse link
I like the "unloading cargo at station and putting it up for sale" idea.

walking around in stations sounds fun too, though it would require another game engine. I wonder if, in such a hypothetical situation, you would have gravity when you were in the station? could it be possible that you just glide around on little propelling engines strapped to your back? Would gliding around the station be like movement in a real space station, except you don't have to push off walls (yay backpack propelling engines!)? If movement "inside" a station is like movement with your ship in space, hey... why not...
(except then you'd have to worry about avatars. we can't all be clunky astronauts in bubble suits gliding stiffly around. I guess some of us could be bunchies in UFOs. hehehe)
Nov 22, 2004 johnhawl218 link
In the backstory the Itani or UIT descovered how to control and manipulate gravety, was first implemented in there ship that left Tera II. Since then all stations and ships I would imagine have artificial gravity in them. So movement through stations would just be normal.

As for avatars, this would allow us to see the differences between each other. The Serco are moderate to heavily modified human/machine symbiotes, the UIT are a bunch of space dwellers and the Itani have three seperate terraformed planets that could allow for simultanious evolution of many different varieties of humans. All in all it could be very interesting to see done, but as I said before NOT LIKELY =)
Nov 22, 2004 genka link
There's a bloody sticky up top regarding this sort of crap.
A sticky. How can you miss a sticky?
Nov 22, 2004 johnhawl218 link
don't bother to read stickies, they are usually way out of date :P