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Carl Sagan's idea for Contact video game (1983) [video]

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Re: Carl Sagan's idea for Contact video game (1983) [video]

#51

Post by EvanAnderson »

Mithaldu wrote: post #31
shostack wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slight correction but Elite: Dangerous has the capability to do better flight mechanics.[1] The game is often quite boring, but I joke with people that it makes an amazing space station docking simulator. I actually can't wait to try that with an Oculus. [1] http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/224726/does-elite-...

Only in the barest sense, sadly: "Each ship has a top speed, this can be increased with better thrusters and power distribution, but they still cap out whether you have flight assist on or off."

I was pretty disappointed about this. The predecessor games to Elite Dangerous, Frontier and Frontier First Encounters, had a Newtonian flight model (and an optional "time acceleration" feature to artificially shorten intra-system flight time).

Re: Carl Sagan's idea for Contact video game (1983) [video]

#52

Post by blevinstein »

xigency wrote: post #15

Carl Sagan was a very interesting man. I'm sure he would have loved this simple space game I made - http://brainplex.net/space It uses random points for stars, but tracking "the nearest few thousand stars" from Earth would be pretty simple. I actually want to make a scientifically educational game. I want to make a game that demonstrates the concepts of relativity with accurate space travel at near light speed.

I recently spent some time working on exactly this, in 2D:

https://github.com/blevinstein/SRAsteroids

To see what it looks like, you can check out this youtube video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hSCz7tRl1s

I wrote an engine that modeled object positions as "timelines", where position varies with time, and demonstrated the basic relativistic effects (length contraction, time dilation, and frequency shifting). Unfortunately, I never really figured out how to turn these into actual game mechanics.

Re: Carl Sagan's idea for Contact video game (1983) [video]

#53

Post by Mithaldu »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #51
Mithaldu wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only in the barest sense, sadly: "Each ship has a top speed, this can be increased with better thrusters and power distribution, but they still cap out whether you have flight assist on or off."

I was pretty disappointed about this. The predecessor games to Elite Dangerous, Frontier and Frontier First Encounters, had a Newtonian flight model (and an optional "time acceleration" feature to artificially shorten intra-system flight time).

Same, it's why i retracted my original backing. I do understand the issue they faced, since they wanted to make a multiplayer game. But they sacrificed their original fanbase on the throne of that.

Re: Carl Sagan's idea for Contact video game (1983) [video]

#54

Post by Mithaldu »

blevinstein wrote: post #52
xigency wrote: post #15

Carl Sagan was a very interesting man. I'm sure he would have loved this simple space game I made - http://brainplex.net/space It uses random points for stars, but tracking "the nearest few thousand stars" from Earth would be pretty simple. I actually want to make a scientifically educational game. I want to make a game that demonstrates the concepts of relativity with accurate space travel at near light speed.

I recently spent some time working on exactly this, in 2D: https://github.com/blevinstein/SRAsteroids To see what it looks like, you can check out this youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hSCz7tRl1s I wrote an engine that modeled object positions as "timelines", where position varies with time, and demonstrated the basic relativistic effects (length contraction, time dilation, and frequency shifting). Unf…

Read the Star Carrier series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_H._Keith,_Jr.#Bibliogr...

It has a number of situations and warfare considerations regarding that.

Re: Carl Sagan's idea for Contact video game (1983) [video]

#55

Post by IIAOPSW »

blevinstein wrote: post #52
xigency wrote: post #15

Carl Sagan was a very interesting man. I'm sure he would have loved this simple space game I made - http://brainplex.net/space It uses random points for stars, but tracking "the nearest few thousand stars" from Earth would be pretty simple. I actually want to make a scientifically educational game. I want to make a game that demonstrates the concepts of relativity with accurate space travel at near light speed.

I recently spent some time working on exactly this, in 2D: https://github.com/blevinstein/SRAsteroids To see what it looks like, you can check out this youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hSCz7tRl1s I wrote an engine that modeled object positions as "timelines", where position varies with time, and demonstrated the basic relativistic effects (length contraction, time dilation, and frequency shifting). Unf…

I too did something like this for a school project. My version was just asteroids with a speed of light delay. I included instantaneous "wormholes" which created some nice apparent causality violations. Eg Asteroids could exit wormholes before entering them.

Re: Carl Sagan's idea for Contact video game (1983) [video]

#56

Post by IIAOPSW »

blevinstein wrote: post #52
xigency wrote: post #15

Carl Sagan was a very interesting man. I'm sure he would have loved this simple space game I made - http://brainplex.net/space It uses random points for stars, but tracking "the nearest few thousand stars" from Earth would be pretty simple. I actually want to make a scientifically educational game. I want to make a game that demonstrates the concepts of relativity with accurate space travel at near light speed.

I recently spent some time working on exactly this, in 2D: https://github.com/blevinstein/SRAsteroids To see what it looks like, you can check out this youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hSCz7tRl1s I wrote an engine that modeled object positions as "timelines", where position varies with time, and demonstrated the basic relativistic effects (length contraction, time dilation, and frequency shifting). Unf…

I too did something like this for a school project. My version was just asteroids with a speed of light delay. I included instantaneous "wormholes" which created some nice apparent causality violations. Eg Asteroids could exit wormholes before entering them.

Re: Carl Sagan's idea for Contact video game (1983) [video]

#57

Post by technomancy »

Splines wrote: post #38
Mithaldu wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can't. In order: Eve is a murder/capitalism simulator and has almost no physics in the first place. (There's 3-dimensional positioning, but you can fly through planets and shoot through other ships as much as you like; also the entire world is static.) No Man's Sky is 90% an art piece with some added murder simulation. Elite: Dangerous, also a murder/capitalism simulator, only unlike Eve it's more about the imme…

I think it wouldn't hurt to use actual stars and such in these games, if only to give people a sense of our astral "neighborhood". I don't know if it would make for good gameplay though.

In my game (https://technomancy.itch.io/bussard) I consulted star maps of nearby regions of the galaxy (http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/starmaps/mapindex.php) and placed systems accurately.

However, I felt that using their astronomical names/numbers would be unrealistic--if these stars ever ended up being colonized, they would be given colloquial names, so I made up my own names for most of them.

Re: Carl Sagan's idea for Contact video game (1983) [video]

#58

Post by themodelplumber »

commanderkeen08 wrote: post #45

"The question is how to design a home video game which would teach a great deal of astronomy in a context as exciting as most violent video games." I'm curious as to what "most violent video games" he might be referring to? Asteroids?

I got lectured a bit by dad when I showed him a cool "violent" video game in 1987 or so. I think it was a C64 game, maybe Commando. He told me it was neat but he'd much rather see my brother and me creating things and learning. We would later leverage that little fact into our its-an-education-system arguments when we asked for an upgrade to a Commodore Amiga.

Re: Carl Sagan's idea for Contact video game (1983) [video]

#59

Post by tlarkworthy »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #51
Mithaldu wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only in the barest sense, sadly: "Each ship has a top speed, this can be increased with better thrusters and power distribution, but they still cap out whether you have flight assist on or off."

I was pretty disappointed about this. The predecessor games to Elite Dangerous, Frontier and Frontier First Encounters, had a Newtonian flight model (and an optional "time acceleration" feature to artificially shorten intra-system flight time).

realistic physics is mega boring in space games. The first elite was much more fun with arcade physics. Frontier combat was rubbish, you just yoyo'ed past each other with 5 seconds of shooting between oscillations. That's with a human pilot driving.

Realistically a space battle would be, does the evader want to evade and has more thrust? => they evade, else, the attacker approaches and both get to shoot until one is dead. There would be no real combat other than weapon size and armour plating. I don't think there would be space dogfights as the onboard computers would just be able to track each other too accurately / apply optimal game theoretic evasions given the constraints. Boring ... might as well play spreadsheets.

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