Dreams, Games, And A Giant Blender

NickTheNick wrote:

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.

Events such as Volcanoes and Asteroids don't come out of nowhere. If a very large and heavy asteroid is aimed to intercept a planet and is already very close, then there's a 99.9999etc% chance that asteroid will hit the same general area of the planet within the same 5 second space as a highly simplified simulation involving only 1000 tonne+ celestial bodies. The other, incredibly small chance is where either a very significant force of unsimulated objects hits the asteroid, such as a number of extremely fast meteorites or the flagship of a prosperous galactic empire charging full speed into the asteroid.

Okay so you are proposing dreams. Well for one thing, I don't think there would be an apocalypse to warn the player of every night, so most nights would still be empty.

Also, if you are playing the unrealism card, that works against your favour, since it is quite normal for sleep to be a transitory fade to black period, as opposed to visions of the future. It wouldn't be glitchy at all.

But on the topic of the dreams themselves, I don't think it adds enough playability to be worth the stab at realism. Although it is true that animals have proven effective at detecting incoming disasters, as with the 2004 tsunami, I don't think that could translate into the doomsday dreams that are being proposed, or any dream for that matter that warns the player of what will happen the next day. That's part of the whole fun, the unpredictability of what your next day will hold, and just struggling to survive.

Now, if you were really clever you would go quote me on what I said about supernovas on the Miscellaneous thread a couple days back. The difference is that supernovas destroy the whole planet, and are impossible to escape before sapience. Meteors and volcanoes CAN be escaped, and even if they aren't, they don't terminate your planet's existence and hence your save game like supernovas do. If you were talking about meteors that were planet-threatening, then there's no point in dreaming/warning you about it anyways, since either way you have no escape.

Building off Nick's point, most animals that are woken before a disaster are woken by things such as:

a) The first initial tremor before an earthquake or volcano. If you slept on the ground, you'd know a 0.1 on the Richter scale when it hit too. (After a few days, most creatures would head away from the tremors: earthquakes take a while to warm up.)

b) A change in barometric pressure, such as before a tornado/cyclone/hurricane, etc.

c) A new smell (such as the burning smell from a fire before it becomes a forest fire.)

The subconscious has nothing to do with alerting creatures to danger: they're woken up by their own senses, so dreams aren't required. If anything, we should just wake the player up with however we would normally note that particular sensory perception: whether it's a rumbling sound or a "what's that [awful] smell?" text cue. This gives the player a chance to get away, unless the cataclysm covers all the area they could conceivably reach, and would simply resume gameplay. That's at least acceptable for localized disasters - I'll have to cross reference the conclusion on the massive extinctions page, but I seem to remember a decision being made about the player being teleported to an organism of the correct species outside of the immediate danger zone, and resuming gameplay hoping to allow them to adapt and survive.

I suppose that renders warning dreams obsolete, and it should be reminded that lucid dreams almost never occur without deliberation (Also, LDs are annoying in the Minecraft mod that causes you to have them every time you sleep), leaving the only sensible sort of dream to be the standard abstract dream as a sort of loading screen for the simulation fast fowarding. Should we pause this discussion until we have sufficient knowledge of how long FF will take and what CPU, GPU, and HD usage it will have?

Probably. (Lucid dreams vary by brain chemistry, so between people and between periods of life, and there's not really a lot of good research on them, because they're equipment intensive to study in humans for feedback that has little to no application outside of the field of FOR SCIENCE!)

I wouldn't know about the Lucid Dreams Minecraft mod, I'm still running my game vanilla.

And, lastly, dreams are far more Boolean than integer in terms of lucidity, with the higher the lucidity, the less likely, from no memory being the most common, to remembering slightly being somewhat common, to occasional perfect memorizing, to being only half being guided by your subconscious, to performing all actions consciously.

You just said dreams are boolean about integrity (either completely or not at all), and then described how they are not. I dont understaund.

However, where do you want to get with this?

Daniferrito wrote:

You just said dreams are boolean about integrity (either completely or not at all), and then described how they are not. I dont understaund.

However, where do you want to get with this?

Just putting an extra layer of soil on top of the idea of fully controlled dreams in games.

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).

Sortof like mount and blade ?