Dreams, Games, And A Giant Blender

This idea came to me in a dream. Okay, it didn't, but I dreamt it did.

So, dreams in organism mode. It seems pointless, but maybe it isn't. In organism mode, you are at a bit of a disadvantage. In strategy mode, you can see what is happening in the world: migrations, wars, diplomacies, new developments, new species, new planets reached; but in organism mode, you can't see what's happening at that sort of scale without switching to strategy mode for a bit. It works, but it disrupts the experience. But if we displayed this information visually in dreams? Just the relevant information, so wars would be ones involving your nation, and new species nearby branching for your own.

For example, if a migration was beginning, then your dream would be a video clip the game constructs of a crowd of your species going somewhere together, with a landscape relevant to your biome, maybe top-down, blurred and darkened, and tadah! A dream! In a can! And when you wake up, you know that you need to follow your species on a migration to a warmer climate for the winter. So off you go, following the sun.

This isn't exactly top priority, it's not technically required, but it's certainly something to think about. Or dream about. It is informative, and could make sleeping in organism mode a little more eventful.

There aren't always going to be events happening, so we could have a nice little 'dream' filter in observer mode that lets you film your own dreams, to be played on those occasions. It'll make sleeping what it should be: A time to watch free entertainment you come up with yourself! With no adverts! Hooray for dreams!

No, you should just get a little notice when inportant events happen. Dreams I believe would overcomplicate the game and are unnescessary.

I think this is a great idea, but dreams should have a hidden meaning, you can't just see your species migrating to a warmer place, but you could see.. well... bees... flying towards the... sun? that would be great! having mysterious dreams!

What you could do instead (to know what major events are happening), 1st. letters (mail), 2nd. telegraph, 3rd. Radio, 4th. TV. If this game is supposed to be realalistic; I say remove the traditional RTS style, do things like control the Colonol on the battle field to command troops, then when you get satalites, command from an HQ (would give real time communique a purpose.

I know, nothing to do with dreams, but it does solve your "find out whats going on" problem (with my own OT idea).

I think we should keep this in mind.

Gorbachof wrote:

What you could do instead (to know what major events are happening), 1st. letters (mail), 2nd. telegraph, 3rd. Radio, 4th. TV. If this game is supposed to be realalistic; I say remove the traditional RTS style, do things like control the Colonol on the battle field to command troops, then when you get satalites, command from an HQ (would give real time communique a purpose.

I know, nothing to do with dreams, but it does solve your "find out whats going on" problem (with my own OT idea).

This game is supposed to be realistic, but realistic =/= unfun. Being a colonel and not being able to view the battlefield from the angle that players are used to, and allows the player to manage their troops with ease will just be annoying and tedious.

However, i agree that rather than dreams we should have media sources be the source of news. Even people talking about it could help. "Hey, did you hear about the war in Arebiangellagellag?".

There's two games I can think of that (kinda) did this; Arma 2: Strategic mode was used to control groups of units from a first person view point and you could open the battle field map to show specificly where you want units to go (Arma 2 for those that don't know, is an ultra realistc First\Third person shooter.

Then theres R.U.S.E., which was (as far as command goes) a traditional RTS, but when you zoom all the way out, the battle field turns into a war table.

Just ideas to be considerd, and actual examples...

US_of_Alaska wrote:

Gorbachof wrote:

What you could do instead (to know what major events are happening), 1st. letters (mail), 2nd. telegraph, 3rd. Radio, 4th. TV. If this game is supposed to be realalistic; I say remove the traditional RTS style, do things like control the Colonol on the battle field to command troops, then when you get satalites, command from an HQ (would give real time communique a purpose.

I know, nothing to do with dreams, but it does solve your "find out whats going on" problem (with my own OT idea).

This game is supposed to be realistic, but realistic =/= unfun. Being a colonel and not being able to view the battlefield from the angle that players are used to, and allows the player to manage their troops with ease will just be annoying and tedious.

However, i agree that rather than dreams we should have media sources be the source of news. Even people talking about it could help. "Hey, did you hear about the war in Arebiangellagellag?".

i strongly agree . to be honsest what i realy like about this is the rts mode

Going via symbolism would be rather complicated. RTS modes are decided and good for RTS, but as a pre-sentient org, you wouldn't have media.

Mysterious_Calligrapher wrote:

Going via symbolism would be rather complicated. RTS modes are decided and good for RTS, but as a pre-sentient org, you wouldn't have media.

Well just how much news would be happening pre-sapience? Other than migrations, i don't see any events that would have a more than immediate effect.

US_of_Alaska wrote:

Mysterious_Calligrapher wrote:

Going via symbolism would be rather complicated. RTS modes are decided and good for RTS, but as a pre-sentient org, you wouldn't have media.

Well just how much news would be happening pre-sapience? Other than migrations, i don't see any events that would have a more than immediate effect.

Other than migrations, there's volcanoes erupting, tornadoes on their way to your location, imminent tsunamis, creatures threatening your niches, approach of droughts, all of which can occur presapience when you have no media to warn you. There are probably more. Maybe there are aliens planning to terraform your planet?

Of course I have thought about media, and I still thought that this was a good idea, because media is only available post-sapience, and we aren't even certain we are giving buildings interiors yet! Never mind having working radios and tellies! And even if we do that, what if the player decides they want to be homeless? Or live in a tribe?
A big point of this game is that there are no goals, no stages, no fixed way of progressing, so we can't even say the player will even want to become sapient in the first place.

Dreams are the easier and more reliable solution. The player will inevitably sleep, and so that would be the ideal time to inform them of important events, as nothing else can actually happen while they sleep, and dreams can be conveyed through any form, visual, audial, or both.

Media will require building interiors, then televisions, then making a news program, then getting around the fact the things on the show don't speak your language, then overcome the fact that no-one plays a game to watch the news programs...
Dreams are consistent throughout the game, and can be conveyed in whatever form you like.
So which option sounds the better one?

Sorry Uteen, but I really wouldn't like my controlled creatures to become oracles. I say, if the player gets the information, it's only by seeing it or getting told by someone.

Also Gorbachof, something similar to ARMA commanding is already planned for tactical scale (up to 20 or so subordinates). You simply have to research Military Training, create and deploy a squad and then control it's leader through Org. mode.

@Uteen; in real life there's really no way for pre-sapient life to know whats going on, its unrealistic. And as far as understanding the TV\Radio, use text in the chosen language (personaly I think thats how all the language should be handled, but I get why not), or don't it isn't really a big deal.

So UTeen, do you really think the player doesn't have enough of an advantage already? I mean, their character will be controlled by someone who is already sapient and has clear goals (most of the time), and they have the ability to save their progress. Letting them be able to see the future as well is not just technically difficult (how would the game know that there will be a random occurence soon???), it's a massive advantage to the player. I'd see it as cheating, really.

US_of_Alaska wrote:

So UTeen, do you really think the player doesn't have enough of an advantage already? I mean, their character will be controlled by someone who is already sapient and has clear goals (most of the time), and they have the ability to save their progress. Letting them be able to see the future as well is not just technically difficult (how would the game know that there will be a random occurence soon???), it's a massive advantage to the player. I'd see it as cheating, really.

I don't mean seeing the future, I mean seeing the present. For example, the tornado would have to actually exist in-game and be approaching the player's spot to appear in a dream, and the eruption process of a volcano must have already be triggered before it's dreamable.

But maybe warnings of danger are a bit too helpful. The basic idea is you know what important events are going on in the large scale. (ie RTS mode scale, because in there's nothing stopping you zooming in to see what each individual is doing on the org mode scale)

Of course it's unrealistic, dreams don't really have information of any importance in them, but it's for the sake of informing the player of important things, and giving the game some time to fast forward the goings on in your surroundings, so it's better than FTL travel just to save a few years of gameplay. But not vital. But sleep is. And at the moment it's boring, if anyone has any better ideas for what to do to make sleep a more player-friendly gameplay element, then go ahead and say them. Just having a sudden change in time and surroundings is completely disorientating, simulating what's happening over a long period of time almost instantly is hanging from the cliff of impossible, and I don't want to be left looking at a blank screen for five minutes, either.
Would you suggest some better ideas, please? Surely my idea's better than a black screen with [Loading... Please wait.] in animated letters, mocking you with 'Hey, your computer's ancient! Spend money! You've spent five days of your life staring at loading screens! Sue someone! Eat fish fingers and custard! We put mind control parasites in your brain while you were coughing...'? Anything's better than that.

I see what you mean.
Could dreams be a mini-game, or a cloudy limited God Mode, so much so as to not feel real (like a dream...)?

I don't really see the need to inform players at all costs. If they want to know what's happenning in the world, they should have to see it, or ask someone (NPC). Knowledge is a huge gameplay element too.

I don't see the need to make sleep more interesting either. Usually when you wake up, you only remember a fraction of your dreams, and those are soon forgetted too. What gameplay improvement would it bring? Would it be so great to throw sense away just to have that feature?

And don't forget waking up actually is disorienting

Uh, UTeen? Can i ask how long you're sleeping for? Because the way you're complaining about loading screens, it sounds like you and the kingdom have been asleep for a hundred thousand years. That's how long it would take for the environment to change around you. We're talking about one night. Compared to the billions of years of evolution that the game will be used to loading when the player approaches new planets, this will be nothing.

@ Everyone: Pretty sure my dog spends his dreams chasing squirrels.
Perhaps an easier "dream" element would be to replay a "highlights" reel (or have the option to do so) of whatever your creature did that was epic. Of course, that would require video storage, so maybe it could be an easter egg - you'd have to have stored a video, then you could dream that video. I'm pretty much certain video/picture storage was greenlighted way back, sometime during january.
I see the advantages of seeing the present, but as we're not going to be rendering what's happening elsewhere, just running some maths for it, doing all that animation to make a dream sequence seems a little counterproductive. Sleep also seems like a great time to do some number crunching that could cause slight lag if done while awake, so a low-maitenance sleep cycle seems like a good idea.
Also, if the tornado, volcano, tsunami were going to affect you, you would either a) wake up or b) be killed, and if it's too far away to worry about, then we're just running the "disturbance" maths to find out what area it has affected.

That's actually a pretty good idea, miss Calli. We would just do it slightly different in the technical way.

Instead of storing a video, we'll just store a "log" of what happened and the game will use the log to graphically reconstruct what happened without simulating anything. I doubt any of you played that game, but Il-2 Sturmovik can record perfectly accurate replays of hours long missions in relatively small files. We would need just ten or twenty seconds for these epic moments, so that would be okay.

Maybe those epic scenes could be even accessible from main menu, sort of like older games allow you to replay all the mission cutscenes you have seen.

^ Because cutscenes are so much fun the second time you play, when you're not waiting anxiously for the next part of the game.

The menu thing is more for that "Ah, I remember that, that was epic! Look Nameofarandomfriend, could you do that?"

Also, it's much easier to convert the scene to video when the computer doesn't have to simulate everything.

Just a reminder, since there is some discussion about loading screens, that sleep exists. If it turns out that we do need any loading screens, during sleep is the least intrusive time to bring one up.

Stop regarding dreams as an unecessary cutscene. This game uses huge amounts of simulation, and it will probably require more than half a second to fast forward 8 hours unless simulation does not occur during sleep, which would make the game appear glitchy and unrealistic.

Dreams would also sort out one major problem about mass extinction events: Having Chicxulub landing right on top of you with about a minute of warning, or having a merry picnic on top of Yellowstone then being ash floating around in the stratosphere five minutes later.

Seeing a massive asteroid hitting a familiar area means that flying creatures can migrate while others can go to a cave.

I don't understand what you're trying to say. Are you proposing to have dreams included?

Also, how would your organism have dreams about events that haven't even been determined to happen yet? There would have to be a preset destiny for your species to be able to have visions of the future in your dreaming sequences. There is little hard-coding in what events your creature experiences during their lifetime.