I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

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I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

Post by Aggressor Prime »



Just saw this from PC Perspective, and watching this trailer sent chills down my spine. Sure makes me glad to be a PC gamer and a lover of the great space sims out there like Descent.
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Re: I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

Post by Tunnelcat »

I second that!
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Re: I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

Post by Aggressor Prime »

One of the aspects to the game:
"Our modding tools will allow players to design new ships for both submission to the persistent RSI ship dealer network or to build custom ships and items for the self-hosted multiplayer mode."
(http://starcitizen.robertsspaceindustries.com/)

Perhaps some Descenters will submit a Pyro-GX with the assorted weaponry, as long as Interplay or Volition don't have any problem with it.
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Re: I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

Post by roid »

looks nice.
PC only
wow who cares :|
grow up fanboys
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Re: I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

Post by woodchip »

Consoles are what you played on as a kid. PC's are for adults.
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Re: I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

Post by Aggressor Prime »

Funny, I only really played on a PC as a kid. I remember we got our NEC with a 75MHz Pentium in 1995. I was 7 when I played Descent on that thing. The only console I ever owned was a N64, and that was just an alternative gaming system since we only had 1 computer in the house at that time. By the time I built my own computer in high school, I didn't really touch the console anymore.

What makes me most excited about this though, apart from how much they will actually be utilizing the power of PCs, is the fact that this will fulfill my need for a Descent 4 somewhat. Not sure exactly if this is a true 6DOF FPS (because you probably are constantly projecting forward), but it sounds close to it with the amount of detail that goes into the side thrusters (4 on top, 4 on bottom) in controlling pitch, yaw, and roll.
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Re: I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

Post by Top Gun »

woodchip wrote:Consoles are what you played on as a kid. PC's are for adults.
Or you just play the games you like on the systems they're released on or that you prefer them on, and everyone stops with the silly fanboyism.
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Re: I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

Post by Krom »

You know what one great thing about a PC is? You can use any decent PC to emulate and run all your old favorite console games as long as you have a good USB gamepad. Saves clutter from hooking up old consoles to the TV, and also saves you if the old console broke down and doesn't work anymore.
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Re: I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

Post by Avder »

Damn. That looks like what Freespace 3 should have looked like.

I really wish someone competent would buy the Freespace series' rights and give us another installment. Just so many unanswered questions!
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Re: I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

Post by Alter-Fox »

Hello, I am a Mac game... and I'm a PC game...
And stuff. PC wins all despite microsoft. Especially over consoles.

Who was it who made that "Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated" quote? I know that I know, but it's just past the tip of my mind... I'd reach farther, but then I'd probably fall into the metaphorical abyss and go mad. I'm already having help from this cat-person who came out of nowhere and wanted to help me reach farther.
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Re: I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

Post by roid »

Krom wrote:You know what one great thing about a PC is? You can use any decent PC to emulate and run all your old favorite console games as long as you have a good USB gamepad. Saves clutter from hooking up old consoles to the TV, and also saves you if the old console broke down and doesn't work anymore.
But you know a console could do that too, i mean they are all computers, they're all Turing-Complete surely. The only thing stopping it is companies trying to implement their monopolies and keep the markets artificially separate and locked down. Could you imagine the lawyer swarms spewing from their nests if PS3 had an official XBOX emulator?
It could thus be said that the console companies are an integral part of The War on General Computing. They want their computers to be artificially locked down, they want them to be appliances capable of doing only what the company wants them to do. They hate computers and the open-ended freedom they represent, while at the same time they are literally selling computers (and pretending/demanding/enforcing that they're something else).

But there's nothing wrong with the concept of a console gaming machine.
I'd love to be gaming on a networked cluster of old mobile phones.
There's a very exciting trend atm of robots built around the computing, displaying, sensing, and communication capabilities of mobile phones. It's a perfect match, and it's cheap.
We have a continually increasing trend of ubiquitous computing, computers everywhere, everything, but companys still trying to pretend that their computer based products are dumb stand-alone appliances that are only capable of doing what the company wants. Nope. Hopefully this notion is going to be less and less singable as the ubiquitousness of computing grows further (wow that was a bad sentence sorry).

By something being "PC only" and making that a strong part of your marketing plan to appeal to fanboys, it's just retarded, it's going outof your way to divide things that don't need to be divided, it's no better than the console companies themselves with their lockdowns and ultimate control.
★■◆● brand loyalty.
It's just so sad how corporations encourage this sort of brand loyalty, encouraging kids to pick sides in unnecessary wars (it all gets rather antagonistic, bullying wtf). "Define yourself by the products you buy" they tell us.
They do this especially with genders. Boys only products, girls only products. It's great for business, watching these insecure macho-posturing "adults" fall over themselves to buy whatever products are necessary to not look like a fag.
(Halloween (atm for you guys in the northern hemisphere right?) is a perfect time to observe it, check out the stores how many sexualized (or just gendered) vs normal costumes there are for girls vs guys. Well, it's a more complicated topic than just defining yourself via capitalism though... mmnnnehh)


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Re: I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

Post by Capm »

I just realized... The choice of Squadron # that he chose.....

Its the answer to life, the universe and everything!


(you can google that phrase also)
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Re: I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

Post by Aggressor Prime »

Guys, this game already got $455,590 worth of pledges out of the $4 million needed within the first day despite the server crashing due to excessive flooding of visitors. I really think this game is going to be coming, and with it, the rise of Space Sim PC games. Maybe Interplay will get the hint and actually work on Descent 4?
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Re: I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

Post by Avder »

Aggressor Prime wrote:Guys, this game already got $455,590 worth of pledges out of the $4 million needed within the first day despite the server crashing due to excessive flooding of visitors. I really think this game is going to be coming, and with it, the rise of Space Sim PC games. Maybe Interplay will get the hint and actually work on Descent 4?
This game looks a lot more like Freespace than Descent.

I do not consider Descent to be a space sim. A space sim to me is something akin to the fighter battles and space combat associated with stuff such as the Battle of endor in Return of the Jedi, the Galactica vs Cylon battles in Battlestar Galactica, and stuff like that. Descent I consider to be a 6DOF FPS.
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Re: I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

Post by roid »

ooh it's a pledge funded game? neat, i didn't realise that.

TBH most "space sims" i've seen are just flight sims with no floor. Moving through space is different to air, i don't understand how dogfights as-we-know-them can be a thing in open space. ACCELERATION is everything, speed itself is ultimately near limitless. But game designers typically limit the speed while flinging* through space to something resembling a flight sim's speed because .... you're really just playing a flight sim.
soooo grrrrrr, just what's the point. i wanna learn the mechanics of a new environment and genre, not play someone else's favourite old genre (flight sim).

(* not a typo)
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Re: I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

Post by Avder »

I dunno, I always imagine the air-like speed limits are because of some kind of non-Newtonian method of propulsion that's been developed.
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Re: I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

Post by Sirius »

Interplay already wanted to do something with Descent, they're just in no position to right now.

Yes, consoles are Turing-complete (they use general purpose processors - usually PowerPC-based in the more recent generations, which used to power Macs until after about the G5 I think). So yeah, they are basically PCs of another kind - but usually with a locked-down OS and fancy electronic tricks to make it very hard to overwrite it. But after the likes of tablets, and the impact they've had on consoles, it's possible that they will eventually converge and consoles will just be ordinary PCs optimized for living-room/gaming use - e.g. if the next Playstation ran Android or something...
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Re: I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

Post by snoopy »

roid wrote:ooh it's a pledge funded game? neat, i didn't realise that.

TBH most "space sims" i've seen are just flight sims with no floor. Moving through space is different to air, i don't understand how dogfights as-we-know-them can be a thing in open space. ACCELERATION is everything, speed itself is ultimately near limitless. But game designers typically limit the speed while flinging* through space to something resembling a flight sim's speed because .... you're really just playing a flight sim.
soooo grrrrrr, just what's the point. i wanna learn the mechanics of a new environment and genre, not play someone else's favourite old genre (flight sim).

(* not a typo)
Reminds of the lunar landing sim that's out there... it's a lot harder when you're trying to control accelerations rather than speeds. It really isn't nearly as intuitive in my experience. That's probably why you don't see games out there based on it.... if you consider that descent lost out on customers because the learning curve was too large, imagine how a full-production game would fare if it involved an even more difficult learning curve.

Also, I think that open 3-dimensional space has a difficulty and learning curve associated with itself, too. Because LOS distances have so much more variability and there are fewer frames of reference than, say, a ground-pounder, it's a lot harder to gauge distance which also lends to difficulty of play.

All that to say, I think people would wind up feeling like dogfights with time-of-travel projectiles are frustratingly difficult, and they'd either resort to camping in a small area and turning it into a sniper-fest, or they'd give up the game and move on to something else.
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Re: I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

Post by Duper »

Avder wrote:Damn. That looks like what Freespace 3 should have looked like.

I really wish someone competent would buy the Freespace series' rights and give us another installment. Just so many unanswered questions!

That is Quite possible.

A company by the name of Stompy Bot is trying to lay claim to the rights. ...or at least the trademark.

roid wrote:looks nice.
PC only
wow who cares :|
grow up fanboys

Nice trolling maneuver there Roid.
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Re: I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

Post by Top Gun »

roid wrote:TBH most "space sims" i've seen are just flight sims with no floor. Moving through space is different to air, i don't understand how dogfights as-we-know-them can be a thing in open space. ACCELERATION is everything, speed itself is ultimately near limitless. But game designers typically limit the speed while flinging* through space to something resembling a flight sim's speed because .... you're really just playing a flight sim.
soooo grrrrrr, just what's the point. i wanna learn the mechanics of a new environment and genre, not play someone else's favourite old genre (flight sim).
Space sims as a whole tend to fall somewhere along a spectrum of realism. On one end, you have the "arcadey" sims that owe most of their mechanics to the battles of Star Wars, which themselves followed what amounted to a "WWII in space" model. Wing Commander, FreeSpace, and the X-Wing/TIE Fighter series all fall into this category. On the other end, you have "full-Newtonian" sims, which operate close to what you'd expect a "realistic" space fighter to handle like. They generally implement sliding along axes and turn-in-place gliding, and your ship will maintain inertia even if you're not providing propulsion in a certain direction. There are also games that fall somewhere in the middle, which may enable gliding and a "looser" turning style while not going full-inertial; the BSG fan game Diaspora is one such example. Personally, I've tried demos of one or two Newtonian-style sims, and I wasn't much of a fan; it felt like I was spending more time fighting the game's mechanics than actually enjoying flying, and the combat seemed to mostly involve long high-speed jousting passes at each other. But to each their own.

And yeah, there's no way I would call Descent a "space sim," at least not in the traditional sense. It owed far more to the seminal FPS titles Wolfenstein and Doom than it ever did to the likes of Wing Commander.
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Re: I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

Post by Tunnelcat »

Yeah, that always bothered me about space sims, the way the ships handled as if they were in an atmosphere. I also love that they liked to put sound effects to ships and weapons, Star Wars comes to mind, like you can hear that going on in space too. :lol:

"In space, no one can hear you scream."

But this game actually used Newtonian Physics for space flight.

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Re: I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

Post by Top Gun »

Yeah, I forgot to throw I-War in there as probably the most prominent example of the "realistic" space sim type. Then there's all the more open-ended economy-based space sims like Freelancer and the X series, but I don't really know much about those myself.

And as my freshman-year physics professor said, "Yeah, there isn't any sound in space, but who would want to watch that? Explosions and lasers are cool." :P
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Re: I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

Post by Aggressor Prime »

I just mentioned Descent as a space sim because that is how I always saw it. Of course you never fight in space, except on that one custom made map for Descent 3 (which had both a MP and SP aspect to it), but you are flying around in a spaceship with space grade weapons. Sure, most levels have you descend into mines, but some levels from the classics had you fight in space stations, of course which have the standard cubed mine structure. And in Descent 3, in addition to fighting on planet surfaces, there is that level where you are fighting in a space station with space clearly visible. And your ship floats just like zero-G space, although not according to Newtonian physics of course. Let us not forget all the images/videos in which we see the Material Defender flying in space to go from destination to destination. I always saw Descent 4 as incorporating the seamless transition between planetary battles and space battles as Descent 3 incorporated the seamless transition between mine battles and planetary battles.
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Re: I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

Post by Alter-Fox »

Which levels in D1 and D2 were on space stations?
Or do you just mean 13 and 14 of D3?
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Re: I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

Post by Krom »

This looks really impressive, and the persistent universe sounds pretty impressive, but it doesn't sound like anything that a next generation console with an internet connection wouldn't be able to do. If they want to make a PC game, that can only be a PC game, they should push the engine in fundamentally different ways that simply wouldn't be possible with consoles. Abuse that a modern gaming machine has a hell of a lot more memory, storage capacity and general purpose compute power than consoles will have for quite a while. Keep the graphics relatively simple and use the extra GPU power to make the physics awesome, use the general purpose CPU which is much more powerful than its console counterpart for distributed computing to refine the universe (the more people play, the more CPU time you have to throw at making the environment stupidly granular down to the last asteroid). And actually limit it to a single solar system to improve the focus (a single system is more than big enough to last for centuries of exploring).

The big factors holding it back would be:
The data center(s) you'd have to run to keep the master universe alive and in sync for everyone.
The internet connection all the players would need to be able to manipulate such gargantuan amounts of data.
And just assembling the original data in the first place (making even a single solar system down to a sufficiently fine granularity for it to be really interesting is not humanly possible).
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Re: I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

Post by Aggressor Prime »

Well, I'm pretty sure in the Vertigo Series, you were on space stations for some levels, in addition to the secret levels. I would have to start up Descent 1+2 again to give you the exact levels though.
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Re: I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

Post by Alter-Fox »

There were some levels in D1 where the briefings mentioned space stations but I thought those were the "refueling, re-arming" space stations mentioned in the intro briefing; not the levels themselves. And all the levels in D1, D2 + Vertigo seem to be made of a pretty high proportion of rock... albiet wierdly-coloured rock.
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Re: I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

Post by roid »

Krom wrote:...
And just assembling the original data in the first place (making even a single solar system down to a sufficiently fine granularity for it to be really interesting is not humanly possible).
hmm... maybe relativity can be used to an advantage here, to excuse lag in updates. Updates to the universe's map only need to propagate through the simulated space at the simulated speed of light, if a user is 1 light hour away from an event, there is no way that they could observe or be effected in any way by the event within that 1 hour. ie: if the map wasn't updated within 1 hour, it wouldn't matter. Users could be separated logically into groups running on pseudo-servers (what) depending purely on how close they are in virtual-space to eachother at the time, and map updates (incl peer to peer) could thus be given appropriate priority (when bandwidth is limited, which it always is) based on these things. TBH these relativistic time horizons and their subsequent shenanigans are something that i wish i could understand better.

I'd really like to watch an overaching visual model of how relativity effects the flow of information and ... everything really... in a universe.
You know how in an overhead RTS game you can see everything happening at once. Well once you get to large enough distances, this can't be the case, things that happen a long way away would not be instantly seen, and when you do see them you've got to know that they actually happened in the past and it just took a while for the light/information/whatever to arrive (But then how does that effect your orders?)
Now, i'm not just talking about communication lag, that IS an easy way for us to grasp the concept. No, i'm talking more about the philosophical questions regarding synchronicity of events, and how the universe's limits (in regards to relativity) should effect that.
I'm still trying to grasp my head around how it should be handled...
For example: in a top-down RTS game, should all events be treated as if they happen at the same time? ie: should we try to compensate for relativity, trying to erase it? or should it be incorporated, can we model in the gradually (if you consider the speed of light as "gradual", hehe.) increasing spheres of influence of every event that happens. An overhead model of the universe may end up looking more like the surface of a pond during rain, a mess of radiating waves each signifying an event (well... ALL events).

I guess what i'm saying is that trying to issue commands to a space battle that is light years away would be odd. Yet this is likely the distances and scales that space battles will be fought on, radiation weapons (ie: lasers) would travel incredible distances (yet still be limited by speed C), there'd be fewer reasons to risk getting close.
It's almost entirely like the battle HAPPENED years ago, because it takes everything (incl information, incl light) years to arrive to you. Should we perhaps be just treating it like it literally did happen years ago? But we know it didn't, we know it happened synchronised with us, but without a way of verifying that directly... was it really synchronised? The limits of relativity are a hard thing, we can't sidestep them, they are solid.

My whole mental concept of the synchronicity of time breaks down, i'm not sure what to replace it with. i need to experiment visually.
I dunno even what to google for to help me understand what i'm trying to say, "The Relativistic Fog of War" ?

i guess it's romantic notions of psychic phenomenon and how it relates to synchronised events. (disclaimer: no i don't really believe this stuff, but deep down in my intuition i quite likely do)
ie: if one person dies, their lover can feel it even though being in another town. Extend that to relativistic distances and we have to accept that such psychic phenomenon would themselves need to kowtow to relativity. If your lover was 1 light year away, and they died, it would take at least 1 year for that feeling to arrive at you. And if this were the case, if even such esoteric magical things are not universally synchronised... then it makes me start to wonder if the reality itself is that these things literally happened 1 year in the past - they didn't happen in the present. Who are we to define what the present is?
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Re: I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

Post by Top Gun »

Aggressor Prime wrote:I just mentioned Descent as a space sim because that is how I always saw it. Of course you never fight in space, except on that one custom made map for Descent 3 (which had both a MP and SP aspect to it), but you are flying around in a spaceship with space grade weapons. Sure, most levels have you descend into mines, but some levels from the classics had you fight in space stations, of course which have the standard cubed mine structure. And in Descent 3, in addition to fighting on planet surfaces, there is that level where you are fighting in a space station with space clearly visible. And your ship floats just like zero-G space, although not according to Newtonian physics of course. Let us not forget all the images/videos in which we see the Material Defender flying in space to go from destination to destination. I always saw Descent 4 as incorporating the seamless transition between planetary battles and space battles as Descent 3 incorporated the seamless transition between mine battles and planetary battles.
The thing is, the term "space sim" doesn't simply equate to "a game where you shoot stuff in space." Space sims as a genre have certain common elements and design philosophies that simply don't appear in the Descent series. The most prominent example that comes to my mind is that of a targeting system: in every space sim I'm aware of, targeting enemies and getting detailed info about their status is a core element of combat, and has a good portion of the HUD dedicated to it. Despite how they might break the laws of physics, most space systems have some sort of "realistic" standards of combat: your ship can only carry a couple of weapons at once, and you need to go through some sort of rearming process to replenish your stocks. There are also the added possibilities of command-able wingmen, energy management, subsystems, and so on that lead to a more complex gameplay experience.

When you think about it, Descent really is an FPS that happens to feature 6DOF instead of the usual 4. A minimalist HUD, health/ammo pick-ups, lack of targeting, core gameplay that's fairly simple at heart yet has a long learning curve...these are all hallmarks of your standard FPS, and they all differ from the space sim genre.
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Re: I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

Post by Firewheel »

This looks extremely cool. Makes me wish I had a nice PC to run it.

You know, ever since I got D3 in 1999 at age eleven, I've been complaining about my crummy computers. I've got a full time job, my own place to live, a car, lots of nice clothes, and yet I've still never bought myself a nice PC. I don't play very many games these days, and don't know of a whole lot of (new) PC games I'd want to play, though.

Also, I never want to see any of these gray-skinned horned guys ever. again.
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Re: I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

Post by Alter-Fox »

You mean Judoon? :P

I enjoyed Freespace 1 and 2 now that I've finally played them, and Miner Wars (though not strictly a space sim, but it has some elements) now that it's in beta, but I haven't finished any of them and I'd like to do that before I even think about another one. Especially one that would require me to buy a better computer that I don't have the money for and won't for a while.
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Re: I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

Post by Glowhyena »

The video looks so awesome and beautiful! It looks like FreeSpace to me, not Descent. I'm a PC gamer either, I play consoles as well. But I prefer computer games more than console games. So, I can enjoy playing both PC and consoles games with my friends, I like to make their day.

It's not mature and smart if you say consoles are for kids, and etc.
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Re: I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

Post by Aggressor Prime »

There is only one good game I really found for the console and that is Heavy Rain. Although Beyond: Two Souls should be just as amazing. And I say they are good console games only because you can't play them on the PC and their value of story outmatches the loss of having to use a console to play them. But given the choice between playing on a console and playing on a PC for the same game, I will choose the PC every time. Consoles are just way behind the PC I currently use.
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Re: I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

Post by Alter-Fox »

I use PC for preference but I play consoles as well for games that that I can't get for PC or that my PC can't run properly (it's a laptop so I haven't exactly upgraded it since I got it in 2010 -- but the advantages of a laptop outweigh that downside for me). But there is one word that explains why I love PC games so much more than console games. Modding.
If a PC game isn't moddable I'd probably buy it for console instead, just so I can enjoy it... sitting on a shelf and collecting dust while I mod my PC games.
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Re: I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

Post by SirWinner »

Nice video.

Reminds me of Freespace 2.

Thank you for sharing!

:)
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Re: I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

Post by Mobius »

Sorry, but this is NOT a Space Sim.

If you can fly a ship like an aeroplane, then it is nothing even remotely like a simulator, because a real space sim shows that individual fighters can't possibly ever exist in a space environment: even if you have unlimited Delta-V. And that will never be the case.

Protip: No air means Newton wins. And no dogfights are possible in space. Or at least not in the way we traditionally think of them.

No: future space battles will be fought exclusively by capital ships at ranges of hundreds of thousands of kilometres distance from their targets.
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Re: I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

Post by Alter-Fox »

Yeah people can be nitpicky about that -- I know how much I want to be nitpicky about that -- but it's really an issue of semantics. Are you going to interpret the phrase "space-simulation" literally? Or are you going to take it as it is intended, as the name for a genre of games that are only ever as close to a simulation as Star Wars, a genre that's had that name since its inception a long time ago no matter how literally innacurate the name is. You sound like my brother, who refuses to play any game that takes place on Mars (or any other extraterrestrial planet, for that matter) if the gravity is the same as Earth.
And yeah I want to be nitpicky but I'm not because I have this understanding that even if a game has huge breaks from the laws of physics it can still be a great, fun game -- and the same goes for other media too. Look at Descent and then look at what you're complaining about :P.
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Re: I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

Post by Top Gun »

ITT Mobius didn't read the earlier conversation about that same exact topic. :P
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Re: I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

Post by Aggressor Prime »

I guess it ultimately depends on how strict you like to be with your language. I see space sim as any game that uses space ships. I see flight sim as any game that uses aircraft. I see mech sim as any game that uses mechs. Perhaps these could just be called space games, flight games, mech games, etc.; but w/e, I'm loose with my language.

As such, that is why I drew the connection to Descent.
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Re: I am a PC Game...And I am a Space Sim...

Post by Alter-Fox »

But is Descent decent? :lol:
Does that game have any sense of modesty at all? Or has it survived this long by constantly surprising us with an ever new and deeper lack of inhibition?
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Beware my original music, at http://soundcloud.com/snowfoxden.
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