Ok, now I AM answering a few threads ;-)...
Hi Simon, btw :-).
You mention the clock. This is kinda im****tant. With most games the event
sthat occur are within the timescale of the particular instant experience,
or scheduled sequentually in such a way that they will be in the proper
stage when you next visit - this is fine for singular game story threads.
With K we had to allow for players to be anywhere, anywhen and still
witness/interact with what was appropriate for that time. Imagine somthing
that takes a lot of time - an 'apollo' mission going to the local moon -
takes days, the player won't watch for days, may not even see the start,
but
MUST be able to witness it, go away and come back later and see the
mission
at the appropriate later stage. Imagine a 'voyager' mission, takes years,
the player must be able to witness it, go away for potentially years and
come back and fine the craft exactly where it should be after those 'real'
years have ellapsed - else the reality is broken, the illusion lost. This
is
what we did.
So in efect, for such long missions of such primitive civilisations (
there
were a handful ;-)), you could decide to follow an 'apollo' type mission
from launch to splashdown with no break, or go away and comback and
witness
snippets and the craft(s) would still be in the same position(s) as if you
had never gone away. For this you firstly needed the clock - and secondly
you needed the 'catch-up' cycle, where all current missions were rapidly
run
from start to there current positions before you entered the game, but up
to
the clock time of your entry - thus a 10 year mission craft would be right
where it should be.
Of course the 'catch-up' cycle pressed early processors a lot and caused a
variable but often quite long delay before you entered space ( depending
where you were and what was going on of course ), but this would be
ridiculously rapid with todays hardware. So the concept is still very
sound.
The 'commuting' thing hides a whole other story, for a different post ;-).
Ian.
--
Ian Robinson
Karma
"Simon Challands" <simon_usenet@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:d337bd414f.SimonC@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> In message <4b6a41414f.Andrew@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> newpostcentral@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
>
>> In message <1c552a3f4f.SimonC@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>> Simon Challands <simon_usenet@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
>>> In message <4733bded$1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>>> "Ian Robinson" <ianr@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Ian here, him of Karma fame ;-). Still fire up my acorns, mostly for
>>>> code
>>>> dev as StrongEd is still such a good editor.
>>>
>>> Good to hear that you're still keeping a slight eye on us, and still
>>> using RISC OS a bit. Karma was a hugely interesting project (you may
>>> recall me plotting an HR diagram from some of its stars), and nothing
>>> has remotely approached it's ambitiousness in the intervening time.
>>>
>> Can you remind me how people were told about Karma's ambitions? I
>> think I still have the review of the Flight Trainer in a Micro User at
>> home and possibly there was a preview article in the same issue or
>> surrounding issues but that was all AFAIK. It's so long ago, I only
>> vaguely remember reading about other civilisations etc.
>
> I seem to recall reading a fair bit about it in one or two magazines
> years ago. I'm sure the first contact Ian mentioned was in there, and
> there were others about seeing ****ps commuting to work, and the whole
> thing linked to the computer's clock.
>
> --
> Simon Challands
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