Our game…. And help needed.

It’s a 6 year old post <!– s:roll: –><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_rolleyes.gif" alt=":roll:" title="Rolling Eyes" /><!– s:roll: –>

Well this is a great place… Glad to be here! andnbsp;

We are developing a new game using 3DC for the Visionary Designs $5000 Compo.

Its called Simuloid…. Go take a look at it on our website and tell me what ya think.

[img:15nsktz3]http&#58;//www14&#46;brinkster&#46;com/delzata/index&#46;html[/img:15nsktz3]
<!– m –><a class="postlink" href="http://www14.brinkster.com/delzata/index.html">http://www14.brinkster.com/delzata/index.html</a>&lt;!– m –>

Also, we are looking for one extra modeler, and someone who can help with skinning (and maybe some 2D work for backdrops).

If anyone wants to join the team then email or send a private message.

(If we win the compo then all the team gets a share)

Well gotta go….

CU L8ER

Iceman

Very nice spacey scenes! I’d like to see bigger images if I click on one of the pics. Did you do this in 3dc? Excellent work!

I’ve seen that doublemint intro before. It’s great! Do you know what software was used to create it?

Thanks mate….

But those scenes were done in Bryce3D. andnbsp;It was started before I heared of 3dc…. But I may redo the models for ya in 3dc if you want them.

The doublemint intro……. Mmmmm…… Dont know what it was done in sorry. <!– s:( –><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_sad.gif" alt="" title="Sad" /><!– s:( –>

Anyway, if you would like to join us, let me know cos we still need people.

Iceman

You guys listed Dark Basic, Jmagic, DIV, and Blitz3d. andnbsp;Unfortunately those engines I dont have much experience in. andnbsp;How about the other 2 contenders : 3DRAD and 3DGS?

Neuro

Dont know about 3dRAD… Is it any good?

But 3D Game Studio is a good package…. So yep, if ya can use it then no probs. <!– s:) –><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_smile.gif" alt="" title="Smile" /><!– s:) –>

Send me your info and any demo you have done and I will take a look.

Iceman

I’m still messing around trying to get more experience at this stuff so its not really good. But since you wondered, here’s two game demos I made so far :

HyperSpace OverDrive Race Demo- 3DGS
[img:2pb91qrd]http&#58;//www&#46;3d-design&#46;0catch&#46;com/hyperspace&#46;exe[/img:2pb91qrd]
<!– m –><a class="postlink" href="http://www.3d-design.0catch.com/hyperspace.exe">http://www.3d-design.0catch.com/hyperspace.exe</a>&lt;!– m –>

Tank War Cel-Shade Demo – 3DRAD
[img:2pb91qrd]http&#58;//www&#46;3d-design&#46;0catch&#46;com/tankdemo&#46;exe[/img:2pb91qrd]
<!– m –><a class="postlink" href="http://www.3d-design.0catch.com/tankdemo.exe">http://www.3d-design.0catch.com/tankdemo.exe</a>&lt;!– m –>

BTW, I seriously think 3DRAD has the most potential for easily and speedily making games. The only problem is that its currently outdated by all these other engines. andnbsp;But there is a rumor I hear that the next version of 3DRAD will rival that of DBPRO…….of course it might not be true.

Right now I am planning on trying out another improve racer on 3DRAD…but I am having some 3DC trouble right now sooo…. Neuro

Hm….okay.

I think the storyline needs a little bit of work. There are a few details in it that don’t make very much sense. I’m not trying to be offensive here or anything, just giving you guys a heads-up.

I know, I know, a lot of game stories really don’t make very much sense in the end…but the trick is knowing what you can get away with. There’s a great deal of stuff in the storyline that I find just plain odd because they just aren’t possible by any stretch of the imagination.

No, I’m not talking about the science fiction concepts like time travel et al. Those haven’t been disproven yet, so they’re fair and entertaining game for storyline material.

I’m talking about the political climate and a certain few mathematical and philosophical issues that absolutely, positively cannot be reconciled with simple logic and common sense.

Regardless of my thoughts, I wish the best of luck to you and the team in the competition <!– s:) –><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_smile.gif" alt="" title="Smile" /><!– s:) –>

-Mel Ebbles

Neuro…

Nice games mate. <!– s:) –><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_smile.gif" alt="" title="Smile" /><!– s:) –>

Sure, we can use someone with your talent. andnbsp;If you want to do some level design, or model design then no probs.

Or if ya want, you could do a demo using RAD (or 3dgs) to showcase some projects and stuff.

But you tell me what you want to do and we will sort it out.

Iceman

Thanks man,
I also do music andnbsp;

[img:226ktm5o]http&#58;//www&#46;3d-design&#46;0catch&#46;com/illin&#46;mp3[/img:226ktm5o]
<!– m –><a class="postlink" href="http://www.3d-design.0catch.com/illin.mp3">http://www.3d-design.0catch.com/illin.mp3</a>&lt;!– m –>

[img:226ktm5o]http&#58;//www&#46;3d-design&#46;0catch&#46;com/hippin&#46;mp3[/img:226ktm5o]
<!– m –><a class="postlink" href="http://www.3d-design.0catch.com/hippin.mp3">http://www.3d-design.0catch.com/hippin.mp3</a>&lt;!– m –>

I kind of an all around guy..guess you can say. andnbsp;I’m not good with artwork but can come up with stuff if need be.

Here something that I been messing with last night (made with 3DC using the 3DRAD engine):
[img:226ktm5o]http&#58;//www&#46;3d-design&#46;0catch&#46;com/racer&#46;jpg[/img:226ktm5o]

Send me an email and see what kind of stuff that needs to be done.

Neuro
<!– e –><a href="mailto:rachid_usmc@hotmail.com">rachid_usmc@hotmail.com</a><!– e –>

Yeah…I didn’t know if it was appropriate to list the stuff in question though since I didn’t want to start a flame war. Some people are really sensitive and go to pieces when someone responds with anything less than unequivocal praise. I’m glad you’re the mature sort. So here goes…

The story itself’s not bad at all…it’s just basically some math that didn’t make sense. Such as the part where the simuloids in the damaged mining ship are described as being a small group, and it’s indirectly implied that they are pretty much the last ones.

I know you said that they were clones, but…exactly how would they expand their ranks, considering that the cloning vats are probably safely on Earth? And if those cloning vats/machines/whatever were moved to Homeworld during their emanicipation, then it’s safe to assume that they were destroyed by the asteroid along with everything else.

So from a logical standpoint, I have to assume that the initial batch was cloned, and that simuloids have at least some measure of reproductive ability.

Then in the space of only eight years, they’ve managed to reproduce in sufficient quantity to rebuild their world and develop an infrastructure supporting a galactic-scale conflict, and on top of that, without anyone else catching wind of it. This is no mean feat.

For starters, they have a tiny gene pool aboard that mining ship, and even if they reproduced like tribbles, the first of the new generations of simuloids would still only be around seven to eight years of age at the most at the time of the simuloid invasion. This isn’t old enough to build a navy large and skilled enough to wage war on a galactic scope, unless their DNA were sufficiently altered from the humanoid template.

Then if we assume their DNA was indeed drastically changed to that extent, and if we also considered an 8 year old simuloid to be a fully developed adult capable of building complicated engines of war, then the premise could make sense….but we run into some more logical inconsistencies.

For an organism to reach full maturity or the prime of their life at eight Earth years, the gestation period would have to be very short. Accordingly, they would not be intelligent or sentient in the way we understand the concept….unless the majority of their knowledge and abilities are instinct rather than acquired intelligence.

But this doesn’t fit with a civilization capable of creating galaxy-traveling constructs, which require no small amount of intelligence and a scientific framework established over the span of thousands of years.

So we must then assume that simuloids are capable of condensing decades’ worth of knowledge, skills, and experience into a few short years of life. Then in comparison to humans, they would actually be far more intelligent and developed….hardly the ideal profile for a docile and subservient race of manual laborers, is it?

If we were to then expand the 8 years to something on the order of 80 years and consider simuloids to be roughly equivalent or perhaps inferior to humans (considering their second-class status)…this would yield perhaps only one viable generation of fighting age. From such a small seed group, it’s highly unlikely that those few dozen simuloids would be capable of fighting a galactic-scale war, much less rebuilding their society to the point where they could support such an endeavor.

Worst of all, this assumes that there was a gender parity on the mining ship itself, and enough organization remained to enforce a disciplined program of partner rotation and reproductive controls to prevent the genetic deterioration caused by excessive inbreeding.

What if all the remaining simuloids on the mining ship were male? Oops. There wouldn’t be any more generations after that. Plus a couple hundred miners aren’t going to be a serious military threat to anyone other than themselves.

In order to solve that, let’s go out on a limb and say simuloids are hermaphroditic or perhaps asexual. In order to create an organism of this type, you’d need to do far more than changing one protein in a human DNA strand. In fact, you’d have to completely engineer a wholly new organism rather than splicing together Frankenclones out of assorted terrestrial creatures.

This isn’t impossible…eventually technology will advance to the point where you could literally program an organism at the DNA level just as if you were writing an app in C++. Oops, here comes another catch.

So simuloids would ideally be a completely new organism designed specifically for manual labor. In order to design such an organism, it would need to be inculcated with an overwhelming desire to serve. It would need to be inculcated with a powerful incentive to perform its tasks. These are psychological things that can be andquot;wiredandquot; into the personality of the organism.

Because simuloids are designed to work for humans, they need to be visually appealing to humans. I mean, do you really want your small child to be frightened of the garbageman because he looks like a giant komodo dragon? Do you want your wife to be frightened every time she walks past a construction site because the on-site labor looks like a zombie convention?

So they’d be designed to appear cosmetically and aesthetically acceptable to humans. In fact, they’d be designed to look like well-groomed, stereotypical servants of different andquot;classesandquot;, like miners, butlers, etc. Making them ugly is just asking for trouble by inviting hatred and racism.

Plus since they’d have been designed with a powerful desire to serve others AND also have an equally powerful self-rewarding mechanism for a job well done…perhaps by having the pleasure centers of their brain wired to function while they’re doing productive work, they have little or no incentive to feel wronged or betrayed. So long as they have a job and they are doing it to the best of their ability, they will be very content and happy.

This is hardly a good springboard for a spacefaring horde of ravening mutant clones with a taste for revenge.

Stepping back to the sudden appearance of marauding Solarian death fleets with uberships of doom…I have to confess that I am surprised that the oddity of this aspect was overlooked. In eight short years, a small handful of simuloids was able to build a fleet capable of waging a war of galactic scope? Amazing.

For starters, building capital ships is far from a trivial task, I assure you. It takes thousands of people many months to build just one modern-day aircraft carrier. And this is a *simple* ship in comparison to a space construct capable of traversing the galaxy. So there is just no way that the small group of mining simuloids could possibly have the manpower or the resources to design and build those massive constructs from scratch.

See, they’re miners. What would they know about building intergalactic warships? They know how to wield a pick/shovel, a laser cutter, or whatever mining tool they use. They know how to sort good ore from bad. They know how to transport it.

But why would they have backgrounds in the many and varied scientific and engineering fields necessary to conceive and realize something as ambitious as ONE capital battle spacecraft, let alone an entire fleet of them? Furthermore, exactly why would humans allow them to have such skills and the ability to utilize them for their own benefit?

Keep in mind that they also have to figure out a way to multiply to the point where there are enough simuloids in support and logistics roles to sustain the combat readiness of a battlefleet, and in less than 8 years to boot.

This is just really a tall order for any race facing the same unfortunate circumstances that the simuloids faced in the storyline you described.

I have no problems with the sci-fi elements like time travel and whatnot, like I said before. It’s just the common-sense and mathematical aspects of it that struck me as not having been thought out fully in advance.

Oh dear…I’ve rambled on and on. And I haven’t even discussed the political aspects yet!

I’ll end my post on this note. Almost everything mentioned above is not something that the average person will readily catch while reading your storyline. Only the more observant and analytical readers will see those nitpicks, so I hope you don’t feel like I’ve just thrashed the storyline to death.

-Mel Ebbles

Hi Mel….

[b:tkfuytfq]I hope you don’t feel like I’ve just thrashed the storyline to death.[/b:tkfuytfq]
Not at all…….. You have a right to your say. <!– s:) –><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_smile.gif" alt="" title="Smile" /><!– s:) –>

However, let me answer your points.

First of all, (apart from the point that it is our story and what we say goes <!– s;) –><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_wink.gif" alt="" title="Wink" /><!– s;) –>) you have rightly made some accurate assumptions…. But they are based on incomplete information.

You see, the full story unfolds during the game, and something’s (which I wont mention as it would spoil it for any here who play it) will come as a surprise and give a couple of twists (and of cause sub plots).

But….. To answer as best I can what you have said……

[b:tkfuytfq]The Gene Pool issue[/b:tkfuytfq]

The Simuloids are capable of reproduction, but not to any greater extent than normal Humans. They can have children and the only difference is that the gestation is 8 months not the 9 like Humans.

However, reproduction is not an issue for them as they were capable of cloning too.
Now, you say that the cloning ‘vats’ would have been on the home planet and would have been destroyed.
This is true.
But one of the main problems with your analysis of the storyline is that you relate too much to what you know to be from this time and in the real world. In this imaginary future things are very different.
Cloning does not require massive labs, 1000s of staff and years of process….. Far from it.
Because of leaps in Bio-Tec and new sciences cloning is extremely easy to do.
This is mentioned in the story, as one of the problems was that it was becoming too easy, and laws were enacted to limit it to government establishments only.
In fact, the word ‘cloning’ is not really correct. It is a throw back to our times terminology, as its not actually cloning as you know it.
I cant say anymore on this as it will involve a sub-plot.

Also the Simuloids were already establishing satellites, moon bases and terra-forming their systems worlds when their home world was destroyed, and the mining expeditions consisted of much more that mere workers who could, ‘wield a pick/shovel’. There were administrators, doctors, scientists, geologists, biologists, exo-biologists, a small attachment of solders etc etc etc. The entire unit, workers and all, were about 1,800 (both male and female).

However, this WAS considered a small band as far as a mining operation was concerned, so sorry if you got the idea that there was 20 or 30 Sims. <!– s:) –><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_smile.gif" alt="" title="Smile" /><!– s:) –>

[b:tkfuytfq]The Intelligence issue[/b:tkfuytfq]

[i:tkfuytfq]….they would not be intelligent or sentient in the way we understand the concept….unless the majority of their knowledge and abilities are instinct rather than acquired intelligence.[/i:tkfuytfq]

Well, in our future world, learning does not take on the form of going to school for 14 years. Instead, you do go to school (mainly for social interaction skills and some basic ‘schooling’) for about 3 years, BUT a technology exists called, ‘Patterning’ which allows anyone to learn anything in a very short period of time.
This is also helped by the more in depth understanding of how the brain works and how it interacts with the body.
Patterning consists of creating a matrix of information filtered so that the brain can absorb it and relate to it like memories. Huge computer systems exist on Earth which hold (so some say) the total acquired knowledge of the race and all this can be accessed and put together for any function. A person (or Sim in this case) merely has to undergo a brief overlay of the selected information to become sufficiently adept at a skill/job. Deeper implants can make someone a great neurosurgeon for instance, but there are risks involved in the process and it is generally accepted that while the process is a great way to learn, it is not the be-all-and-end-all.

As a side note, in the future world we made, unless you are from a privileged class, or are gifted in some way that makes you special, your ‘schooling’ and your national aptitude test tends to drive you in to the forms of jobs you will be doing. Tho this is not a problem as most people are happy in this.

The Simuloids have access to this technology, and they of cause used it.

[b:tkfuytfq]The building of the War Machines issue[/b:tkfuytfq]

Remember the Germans?

They got dropkicked in WW1….. Yet it no time at all they had rebuilt and created what could arguably be said as the greatest war machine the 20 century had seen.

It is amazing what a race can achieve when motivated and when the leadership drives them in a certain direction. Why do you think it would be any different for the Sims?

They always had a tentative relationship with Earth anyway, and now they were driven by a powerful emotion…. You bet they could rebuild quickly. <!– s:) –><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_smile.gif" alt="" title="Smile" /><!– s:) –>

Also, machines, craft, weapons etc can be prefab as such, and the power system for travel employed in the future, while based on current theories, is not hard to create.
Plus some weapons were very destructive, so you don’t need many to flatten things. LOL

You also forget one other important point in this…. There are other races (not all friendly).
But I cant really say much more on this, as you will find out in the game.

The ‘cosmetically and aesthetically acceptable to humans’ bit is an interesting point, but (again!) as you will see, the Sims were not the first design.
There are reasons as to why the Sims were deformed a bit, (not too much tho, not enough to scare you), but again that is something you will pick up on in the game.
(And logistics are generally handled by computer AI)

This game is gonna rock (trust me on that) and I guarantee its going to be as good as it can be. Hell, we may even develop it in to a commercial game… Ya never know! <!– s:) –><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_smile.gif" alt="" title="Smile" /><!– s:) –>

And all the models we are using are in 3dc (apart from the weapons that is) and we are going to put them on this forum for every member to use (in non-commercial games of cause).

Hope this answers some of your points.

Iceman

Thanks for the feedback.

If you had have said what the problems were, I could have answered ya. <!– s:) –><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_smile.gif" alt="" title="Smile" /><!– s:) –>

However, thanks for posting, and the game is andnbsp;going well. andnbsp;I will be posting some model shots from our main mod maker Jer soon on the forum.

Iceman

Neuro…..

Sure thing…. I will email ya soon.
(Nice screen shot by the way)

Iceman,

Yeah, I agree that it’s your story and what you say goes. I wouldn’t have it any other way <!– s:) –><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_smile.gif" alt="" title="Smile" /><!– s:) –>

The counterpoints you made are good, and I’m glad that the andquot;box copyandquot; on the site is actually a gross oversimplification of the game context. You have no idea how many times I’ve seen questionable stories proudly showcased by people who are a little more enthusiastic than talented.

It’s refreshing to see that you’ve considered almost everything, and that you were capable of successfully clarifying every point of curiosity that I raised. I don’t have any significant problems with your counterpoints.

One of my hobbies (my wife and friends call it a talent, but I choose to differ) is being an armchair futurist. So you’re correct when you say that the assumptions and points that I made were based almost exclusively on a firm grounding in reality and a small amount of technological extrapolation.

You’ve got some interesting ideas. I hope it works out well <!– s:) –><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_smile.gif" alt="" title="Smile" /><!– s:) –>

-Mel Ebbles