The Thread Of Randomness

[Drury]

Alive and well.

[Dave]

Hey Mr. X, great to see you! Don't worry, you're not the only old fart here.

We're in short supply these days, aren't we!

[Redirect Left]

The alarming rise in vehicles ramming pedestrians is continuing, with at least 13 now confirmed dead after a ram attack in Barcelona

BBC News.

[Redirect Left]

The veteran British TV entertainer and presenter, Sir Bruce Forsyth has today died.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-40978576

[DeletedUser21]

Hey Mr. X, great to see you! Don't worry, you're not the only old fart here.

We're in short supply these days, aren't we!

Oh drat, time ruined everything again and made people change and get older didn't it?
I'm going to have a word with it.

[orudge]

Age of Empires 4 has been announced! I wonder what time period (or periods) it'll be set in?

Additionally, "Definitive Editions" of Age of Empires 3 and, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, Age of Empires 2 (which already has a very popular HD Edition) have been announced too.

Only downside is that these games (plus the Definitive Edition of the original Age of Empires, due out in October) will only be available on the Windows Store, and not Steam, which Microsoft has otherwise released AoE2/3/AoM on.

[Redirect Left]

Eeeh. I'd rather there was a new version of Age of Mythology, that wasn't just a redo of the original like before.

Infact, they redid the original so nicely, it came complete with the same sync issues in multiplayer the original had!

[Pyoro]

Or there could be a remake of Transport Tycoon. With bigger maps and support for modern OS. Better signals. Some other stuff. And maybe mods. Or something. That'd be pretty cool.

Oh well.

[kamnet]

Or there could be a remake of Transport Tycoon. With bigger maps and support for modern OS. Better signals. Some other stuff. And maybe mods. Or something. That'd be pretty cool.

Oh well.

I have a huge, HUGE idea that would advance OpenTTD into the forefront of gaming... of course, it would pretty much stop being OpenTTD as we know it, but at its soul would be OpenTTD... and it's never going to get made because it's too big, too all-encompassing, would require too many developers and artists and I can't see how it would ever make money.

So, pray that I win a major lottery. If I do, I promise I'll finance it all 100% and waste at least 10% of my lottery winnings on this boondoggle.

[kamnet]

In other news, I've finally gotten registered on the OpenTTD forums on Naver (good grief, that's a nightmare for foreigners!) and I'm getting to see the goodies buried there! MUAHAHAHA!!!

[Drury]

Or there could be a remake of Transport Tycoon. With bigger maps and support for modern OS. Better signals. Some other stuff. And maybe mods. Or something. That'd be pretty cool.

Oh well.

I have a huge, HUGE idea that would advance OpenTTD into the forefront of gaming... of course, it would pretty much stop being OpenTTD as we know it, but at its soul would be OpenTTD... and it's never going to get made because it's too big, too all-encompassing, would require too many developers and artists and I can't see how it would ever make money.

So, pray that I win a major lottery. If I do, I promise I'll finance it all 100% and waste at least 10% of my lottery winnings on this boondoggle.

Lemme guess.

It's an "OpenTTD except with crazy complex micromanagement!" idea?

In other news, Half-Life 2: Episode 3 is finally out. Sorta.

[kamnet]

Or there could be a remake of Transport Tycoon. With bigger maps and support for modern OS. Better signals. Some other stuff. And maybe mods. Or something. That'd be pretty cool.

Oh well.

I have a huge, HUGE idea that would advance OpenTTD into the forefront of gaming... of course, it would pretty much stop being OpenTTD as we know it, but at its soul would be OpenTTD... and it's never going to get made because it's too big, too all-encompassing, would require too many developers and artists and I can't see how it would ever make money.

So, pray that I win a major lottery. If I do, I promise I'll finance it all 100% and waste at least 10% of my lottery winnings on this boondoggle.

Lemme guess.

It's an "OpenTTD except with crazy complex micromanagement!" idea?

No. And yes.

Basically we start out building a game that's a transport tycoon game. Pretty much the mechanics of TTD/OpenTTD.

But, what if you want to micromanage? Then we got a game for that. Let's say you really like shaping cities. We make another game for that, city management sim. And your city that you manage integrates into the transport game, and you get to interact with the players who want to manage transport networks.

What if you want to manage the industries instead of a city? Another game, industry management sim. And your industries that you master tie back into the transport network sim and the city management sim.

What if you just want to manage the feeder industries that feed into the primary and secondary industries? Then you get a farm management sim, mining mogul sim, etc. How about you don't want to manage businesses or cities at all, but you just want to live in one of these cities? Then we'll build a life simulator, and you live in those cities. What if you want to ride on the trains that you build the transport networks for? Train simulator. Or flight simulator. Streets of OpenTTD. And either you can sit in the seat of a generic world view on all of those, or artists and coders and build custom in-cabin experiences. What if you want to drive semi-trucks from one city to another working for the industry moguls and you haul cargo in competition against other players in order to achieve cargo goals for the industry moguls, and as you win contests and earn money you upgrade your truck with the latest paint schemes and technology? What if you don't want to be the mayor of a city, but you just want to shape it or design it? What if while you're waiting for your transport network to grow, you decide you want to get a side gig at McOpenTTD and see how fast you can flip burgers and churn out lunch orders? Maybe you go visit a local casino and gamble away some of your hard-earned McBucks after? What if the team chat function could expand into an instant messenger platform? What if you could build in a dating app?

A world of infinite styles of gameplay. All built on one universal platform. And all of it can be its own stand-alone game or work in any number of infinite worlds. Single player against AIs or head-to-head competition. Competitive game, cooperative game, or pure sandbox.

But, like I said, there's not enough money to be made in this. Nobody's going to sink a bunch of money into this.

Hm. What if we sold in-game ads? *ponders*

[Drury]

I have a huge, HUGE idea that would advance OpenTTD into the forefront of gaming... of course, it would pretty much stop being OpenTTD as we know it, but at its soul would be OpenTTD... and it's never going to get made because it's too big, too all-encompassing, would require too many developers and artists and I can't see how it would ever make money.

So, pray that I win a major lottery. If I do, I promise I'll finance it all 100% and waste at least 10% of my lottery winnings on this boondoggle.

Lemme guess.

It's an "OpenTTD except with crazy complex micromanagement!" idea?

No. And yes.

Basically we start out building a game that's a transport tycoon game. Pretty much the mechanics of TTD/OpenTTD.

But, what if you want to micromanage? Then we got a game for that. Let's say you really like shaping cities. We make another game for that, city management sim. And your city that you manage integrates into the transport game, and you get to interact with the players who want to manage transport networks.

What if you want to manage the industries instead of a city? Another game, industry management sim. And your industries that you master tie back into the transport network sim and the city management sim.

What if you just want to manage the feeder industries that feed into the primary and secondary industries? Then you get a farm management sim, mining mogul sim, etc. How about you don't want to manage businesses or cities at all, but you just want to live in one of these cities? Then we'll build a life simulator, and you live in those cities. What if you want to ride on the trains that you build the transport networks for? Train simulator. Or flight simulator. Streets of OpenTTD. And either you can sit in the seat of a generic world view on all of those, or artists and coders and build custom in-cabin experiences. What if you want to drive semi-trucks from one city to another working for the industry moguls and you haul cargo in competition against other players in order to achieve cargo goals for the industry moguls, and as you win contests and earn money you upgrade your truck with the latest paint schemes and technology? What if you don't want to be the mayor of a city, but you just want to shape it or design it? What if while you're waiting for your transport network to grow, you decide you want to get a side gig at McOpenTTD and see how fast you can flip burgers and churn out lunch orders? Maybe you go visit a local casino and gamble away some of your hard-earned McBucks after? What if the team chat function could expand into an instant messenger platform? What if you could build in a dating app?

A world of infinite styles of gameplay. All built on one universal platform. And all of it can be its own stand-alone game or work in any number of infinite worlds. Single player against AIs or head-to-head competition. Competitive game, cooperative game, or pure sandbox.

But, like I said, there's not enough money to be made in this. Nobody's going to sink a bunch of money into this.

Hm. What if we sold in-game ads? *ponders*

Well, yeah that's kinda what I meant by crazy micromanagement (okay maybe I wasn't expecting it to be nearly this complex). Which is not to say it's a bad idea, but then again my personal philosophy is that there's no such thing as bad ideas, just ones that are easier or harder to pull off. This one I'd rate "pretty damn near impossible" but hey, a man can dream.

Ignoring that (let's be square, you'd need to win a lot of lotteries and contract a dozen game companies to do this right), I'm not sure it would really elevate the game to a large audience. You're essentially stringing together a lot of niche games and expect people are going to be interested. Let's not forget Call of Duty is still the biggest franchise in the history of gaming, bigger than Grand Theft Auto, and all you do in those games is point and shoot. You don't exactly run transport companies in those games either. You can drive trains in some GTAs, but people who play those games don't care for that part at large.

But hey, when it comes to games that are in the spirit of OpenTTD except more feature-rich, what's wrong with Factorio...? I mean if anything the devs of that game struck gold with simple game mechanics that work on the general populace. What makes Factorio so addictive is the fact that at its core it is an incremental game, same as Cow Clicker. OpenTTD has that element to it as well, but the game doesn't really wave the carrot too much, it just it gives to you very early on and becomes pure sandbox which isn't that addictive. I'd look in that sort of direction if I were to make a super popular TT clone. Might actually also be possible to do, which is a nice little benefit of this idea.

[kamnet]

Lemme guess.

It's an "OpenTTD except with crazy complex micromanagement!" idea?

No. And yes.

Basically we start out building a game that's a transport tycoon game. Pretty much the mechanics of TTD/OpenTTD.

But, what if you want to micromanage? Then we got a game for that. Let's say you really like shaping cities. We make another game for that, city management sim. And your city that you manage integrates into the transport game, and you get to interact with the players who want to manage transport networks.

What if you want to manage the industries instead of a city? Another game, industry management sim. And your industries that you master tie back into the transport network sim and the city management sim.

What if you just want to manage the feeder industries that feed into the primary and secondary industries? Then you get a farm management sim, mining mogul sim, etc. How about you don't want to manage businesses or cities at all, but you just want to live in one of these cities? Then we'll build a life simulator, and you live in those cities. What if you want to ride on the trains that you build the transport networks for? Train simulator. Or flight simulator. Streets of OpenTTD. And either you can sit in the seat of a generic world view on all of those, or artists and coders and build custom in-cabin experiences. What if you want to drive semi-trucks from one city to another working for the industry moguls and you haul cargo in competition against other players in order to achieve cargo goals for the industry moguls, and as you win contests and earn money you upgrade your truck with the latest paint schemes and technology? What if you don't want to be the mayor of a city, but you just want to shape it or design it? What if while you're waiting for your transport network to grow, you decide you want to get a side gig at McOpenTTD and see how fast you can flip burgers and churn out lunch orders? Maybe you go visit a local casino and gamble away some of your hard-earned McBucks after? What if the team chat function could expand into an instant messenger platform? What if you could build in a dating app?

A world of infinite styles of gameplay. All built on one universal platform. And all of it can be its own stand-alone game or work in any number of infinite worlds. Single player against AIs or head-to-head competition. Competitive game, cooperative game, or pure sandbox.

But, like I said, there's not enough money to be made in this. Nobody's going to sink a bunch of money into this.

Hm. What if we sold in-game ads? *ponders*

Well, yeah that's kinda what I meant by crazy micromanagement (okay maybe I wasn't expecting it to be nearly this complex). Which is not to say it's a bad idea, but then again my personal philosophy is that there's no such thing as bad ideas, just ones that are easier or harder to pull off. This one I'd rate "pretty damn near impossible" but hey, a man can dream. Ignoring that (let's be square, you'd need to win a lot of lotteries and contract a dozen game companies to do this right), I'm not sure it would really elevate the game to a large audience. You're essentially stringing together a lot of niche games and expect people are going to be interested.

Well I'm not talking about cramming them all together into one game. Each part would be its own game, but the draw would be that all of these games interconnect in the same virtual world.

For example, Player Bob is playing transport sim. He wants to set up a bus route in Big City. Somewhere else, somebody is playing the city sim game and is the mayor of Big City, and Mayor Big City makes a deal with Player Bob to build and manage the bus routes. Meanwhile, elsewhere there's Average Joe playing the life sim game, and Joe spends all day living in Big City and riding on the Player Bob's buses. They can play with each other, they can compete against each other, or they can choose to not play in any network at all. The idea is that whatever type of game you want to play, there's an all-encompassing network of networks in which you can choose to play it.

[Drury]

No. And yes.

Basically we start out building a game that's a transport tycoon game. Pretty much the mechanics of TTD/OpenTTD.

But, what if you want to micromanage? Then we got a game for that. Let's say you really like shaping cities. We make another game for that, city management sim. And your city that you manage integrates into the transport game, and you get to interact with the players who want to manage transport networks.

What if you want to manage the industries instead of a city? Another game, industry management sim. And your industries that you master tie back into the transport network sim and the city management sim.

What if you just want to manage the feeder industries that feed into the primary and secondary industries? Then you get a farm management sim, mining mogul sim, etc. How about you don't want to manage businesses or cities at all, but you just want to live in one of these cities? Then we'll build a life simulator, and you live in those cities. What if you want to ride on the trains that you build the transport networks for? Train simulator. Or flight simulator. Streets of OpenTTD. And either you can sit in the seat of a generic world view on all of those, or artists and coders and build custom in-cabin experiences. What if you want to drive semi-trucks from one city to another working for the industry moguls and you haul cargo in competition against other players in order to achieve cargo goals for the industry moguls, and as you win contests and earn money you upgrade your truck with the latest paint schemes and technology? What if you don't want to be the mayor of a city, but you just want to shape it or design it? What if while you're waiting for your transport network to grow, you decide you want to get a side gig at McOpenTTD and see how fast you can flip burgers and churn out lunch orders? Maybe you go visit a local casino and gamble away some of your hard-earned McBucks after? What if the team chat function could expand into an instant messenger platform? What if you could build in a dating app?

A world of infinite styles of gameplay. All built on one universal platform. And all of it can be its own stand-alone game or work in any number of infinite worlds. Single player against AIs or head-to-head competition. Competitive game, cooperative game, or pure sandbox.

But, like I said, there's not enough money to be made in this. Nobody's going to sink a bunch of money into this.

Hm. What if we sold in-game ads? *ponders*

Well, yeah that's kinda what I meant by crazy micromanagement (okay maybe I wasn't expecting it to be nearly this complex). Which is not to say it's a bad idea, but then again my personal philosophy is that there's no such thing as bad ideas, just ones that are easier or harder to pull off. This one I'd rate "pretty damn near impossible" but hey, a man can dream. Ignoring that (let's be square, you'd need to win a lot of lotteries and contract a dozen game companies to do this right), I'm not sure it would really elevate the game to a large audience. You're essentially stringing together a lot of niche games and expect people are going to be interested.

Well I'm not talking about cramming them all together into one game. Each part would be its own game, but the draw would be that all of these games interconnect in the same virtual world.

I must be dumb cause I don't get how that's different from cramming them all together into one game.

[kamnet]

Well, yeah that's kinda what I meant by crazy micromanagement (okay maybe I wasn't expecting it to be nearly this complex). Which is not to say it's a bad idea, but then again my personal philosophy is that there's no such thing as bad ideas, just ones that are easier or harder to pull off. This one I'd rate "pretty damn near impossible" but hey, a man can dream. Ignoring that (let's be square, you'd need to win a lot of lotteries and contract a dozen game companies to do this right), I'm not sure it would really elevate the game to a large audience. You're essentially stringing together a lot of niche games and expect people are going to be interested.

Well I'm not talking about cramming them all together into one game. Each part would be its own game, but the draw would be that all of these games interconnect in the same virtual world.

I must be dumb cause I don't get how that's different from cramming them all together into one game.

Maybe I'm just explaining badly.

Imagine you have the following game titles: TTD, Trainz, SimCity 2000, RCT, The Sims. All individual titles that you play on your own, or you can play online with others. Now imagine you build a passenger rail line in TTD, but that line connects from a city inside SC2K to a theme park from RCT. The trains you buy in RCT are models that are featured in Trainz. And players from The Sims can live in the SC2K city, and they step onto your rail line (which you can ride via Trainz) and travel to the theme park in RCT, and show up as park visitors inside RCT.

The player of the Sim counts as population of the city in SC2K, and counts as part of your passenger count in TTD, and counts as a park visitor in RCT. The Sim is paying various taxes in SC2K, and fares in TTD and ticket/food/stuff prices in RCT.

Individual games with their own game play, mechanics, etc. that can all interact with other titles in various ways.

[Redirect Left]

That'd all need a lot of co-operation from multiple companies, or a company starting it's own little set of games that do that. Which is a neat idea...

[Drury]

Oh.

So the idea really is to just make some figurative glue between existing titles?

That's slightly less than impossible, but I can still see a few issues. For one, it's still an ungodly amount of work. You'd have to rewrite huge, huge portions of existing games to make them actually "fit" each other, due to them being made by different studios on different engines using different tools and being different genres... Some completely lacking any sort of online capability, meaning the whole game is and almost certainly always will be perfectly unfit for this kind of thing, like you'd literally have better luck starting a new game from scratch. And making them from scratch is, well, just like said before, not too different from making one big super complex game. As in, many times bigger than any MMO in history-big. As I said, you'd need a dozen companies for that, which would be a bit harder than just giving them a lot of money and telling them to somehow learn to cooperate efficiently and try to make something that makes sense as a whole. Managing single projects in single gamedev studios is enough of a mess as is. I can't actually think of any instances where two or more AAA studios collaborated on the same project in parallel like that. Really the best way to force this kind of cooperation is be an evil publisher like EA and buy a bunch of studios, close some of them down and move the people to some kind of singular megastudio, then either go bankrupt before or after its done and flops as it inevitably fails to fully realize its scope. Kinda like Spore and similar overly ambitious projects.

Not saying this to be a downer, just... I don't know, saying stuff. It'd be cool if someone attempted it, but I'd remain super skeptical. There are ways for it to happen and actually work, but for each one there's a thousand ways it can't happen. Maybe under working luxury space communism or something, I don't know.

[kamnet]

Oh. So the idea really is to just make some figurative glue between existing titles?

No, I just used them for illustrative purposes.

... or a company starting it's own little set of games that do that. Which is a neat idea...

Redirect Left hit it right on the button. A new set of games which have a common framework in order to interact with each other.

"That's slightly less than impossible, but I can still see a few issues. For one, it's still an ungodly amount of work.

Yep, it is. And that's your first challenge in getting something like this even funded. It's so much work you're going to pour a lot of money just into development.

"Not saying this to be a downer, just... I don't know, saying stuff. It'd be cool if someone attempted it, but I'd remain super skeptical. There are ways for it to happen and actually work, but for each one there's a thousand ways it can't happen. Maybe under working luxury space communism or something, I don't know."


You'd have to start with building the framework and build one game at a time. And then adjust the framework and update each previous game as you go along. If you could put out new game a year, and one update a year for each game in the family, it's just a huge hunk of work. And that's just for them to keep up with compatibility, not even talking about expansions, etc.

Although one idea that came to me in thinking this over more is that you could license access to the framework to independent developers, who could create their own add-ons for the games and then charge for them either as external add-on or in-game content.

For example, one independent developer could create a pack of trains to use in the train simulator, and then also sell those vehicles for usage in the transport simulator. Or say somebody develops a virtual economy that can be used within the city and life simulators, and create a currency that can be freely exchanged and used in the other games. Or creating custom music for the games. Geez... I just did the math, counting the number of downloads via BaNaNaS of all the music sets I created, if I had been able to charge just $0.25 a download for it I'd be sitting on a quarter of a million dollars right now. That's life-changing money. One small add-on from some kid on his summer break could fund his entire college career. It could support a developer in-between gigs. Who knows?

And in-game advertising isn't a bad idea either. What if in some of the games you ran billboards that were basically just banner ads fed by Google AdSense? Get branding and licensing agreements to present paid product placement? Or even tie in outside product placement? What if one of the perks of being an American Express card holder is that you get to take exclusive virtual trips within the game that come with a bunch of bonus content?

You could do a lot of crazy things if you build it right. But, it ain't gonna be me. Maybe somebody reading this has the guts and the resources to get it done.

[Redirect Left]

It's the sort of thing where, you'd need to do the work needed to get some proof of concept, that it can work cross game, and actually is entirely seperate games that would qualify as seperate entities, then take it to a funding place and use the amount of pledges to gauge the interest, before going headfirst into it.