My Dream Of What Ns's Future Is To Become But
Maveric
Join Date: 2002-08-07 Member: 1101Members
Join Date: 2002-08-07 Member: 1101Members
<div class="IPBDescription">hey who said it was supposed to be bad?</div> [copied from wordpad and pasted here. yes i saved it as a file. <!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif'><!--endemo--> ]
<span style='color:tan'>Ok, first i'll start off by saying that this is not a post about moving NS to HL2. This post is about how I envision what NS is to become if it becomes highly popular and several radical occurances and upgrades happen in the computer-gaming industry, the communities that play the games, and the computers that run these games. Dont suggest ideas within this topic; discussion only (ideas in/about the discussion, not a idea by itself that deserves to be in S&I). This is not a suggestion; HL could never do what i envision here (maybe not even HL2! thus...) <b>Don't go off-topic with HL2 or porting NS or NS going commercial or similar, otherwise I will be severly .. Bah, too many naughty words ..</b> On with the vision and the telling!
|Know that this post is long. Are you sure you want to read it all?!|</span>
This is how i see the Kharaa team playing at a far .. FAR .. later date:
The atom. The molocule. The cell. The bacteria. The bacteria wages it's war against humanity throughout the universe. Vast and diverse is has the wisdom of a thousand battles and a thousand life forms. It shapes itself. A conciousness is awoken. The consiousness is transplanted into the empty shell formed for it. <i>It lives.</i> //corny intro
The player would start out like a normal skulk from inside the hive room, just like always, but there are no direct evolutionary paths... these paths lay barren and un-used by this player. The player shapes his path through his choices. He has a fighting style he would like to have, lets say assualt. After some battles he would gain various resources that he could spend and "transfer" one to the other. A bigger body, specialized cells and organs, hard carapace plates, a smaller body, and so many other options... different modes of transportation and locomotion ... maybe not even a limb to stand on but movement through a gasious sack, and the filling and pressure thereof changes the altitude and movement. the combinations are only limited by what is given to the player and the imaginations of the developers... and the community.
Story1:
As the player continues to game he begins to change. a larger body. a specialized carapace plate on the front of the skull. a detatchable jaw to swallow things bigger than the player's head. one horn. then two, then three... all of them long and strait, perfect for goring and impaling. stronger leg muscles for fast and rapid movement. he's become a <!--emo&::onos::--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/tiny.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tiny.gif'><!--endemo--> . but the evolution doesn't stop there. he had died from a grenade blast from the underside. knowing this the player increases the carapace densities on his under-side to compensate.
No more gut buster grenade lunches! but the heavy armors are comming. the detatchable jaw works to swallow a heavy armor marine whole, but he kicks inside for too long. the player then alters the strength of the stomach acids, but he needs a bigger stomach and thicker mucas lining to stop the acids from eating himself, too! the stomach plate is in the way. the player then settles on a compromise; have a stomach plate that can partially protect against grenades but rip him open if he's had lunch recently, and digest the heavilly armored marines faster but not as fast as he'd like. the heavy armors dissapear quickly, but the marines have more grenade launchers.
being desparate, the player puts all his evolutionary points that he's accumalated for fifty minutes into full-body carapace. he's slowed slightly, but no grenade exploding outside of him will hurt him. in fact, the bullets bounce right off him and kill the skulks under him! but the marines have a trick up their sleeve.. they lure the onos into their base on a hunch. grenade launchers loaded, and placed on a turret for better accuracy, as the onos lets a bellowing roar the turret fires. *Gulp* the onos ate the genade. timer ticking on the device, the onos's stomach tries to eat the explosive before it detonates but wait! the stomach's size and acids were sacrificed for the carapace plating. the timer reaches zero in the biological middle of the creature. Like the onos player started, he is just a empty shell. Death of such a advanced creature will set the hive's resources back dramatically while re-building the body.
The player starts to re-work his plans for the "ultimate evolution" ...
Story 2:
a new game begins. the map is dark but well-lit in afew areas. the player begins to grow out his hind legs. they form a double-reverse knee, with three leg bones. his body becomes [upright] with the adaption of a curved spine as he stands on his new hind legs. he continues to fight the marines all the while, and, finding that his arms are not long enough he grows them out, as well. he lengthens and strengthens the scythe-shaped bone on each of his arms. these are his weapons now, and thus he minimizes his jaw and teeth count, though they still exist they serve poor damage in battle. <!--emo&::fade::--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/fade.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='fade.gif'><!--endemo--> he can move on the walls as if he was a skulk, but he can only use his two scythes to do so; ramming them into the wall and pulling himself upwards, leaving holes all the while.
the room begins to depressurize due to the holes, and all existing in the room perish. the offence chambers wither and die; the defence chambers chug and grope at the thin air to try to collect oxygen but they fail eventually, as well. the section is locked-down, preventing a total failure of pressure. dead now, the hive rebuilds the player's body slowly. knowing that the marines will have some difficulty stopping him from moving <i>outside</i> the ship, he changes his blood chemistry to preserve oxygen and re-use carbondioxide, alters his skin to become similar to carapace and though it will still stop bullets it will also absorb radiation and seal himself from the world, and knowing that his only opening is his mouth he removes it entirely, along with his vocal cords and asophogus (spelling?) no longer needing speech or outside supplies of oxygen.
he will be able to walk outside the ship, but two things remain; his weapons, and his feet. long has his claws aided him, but if he is to succeed in exterior ship combat, he cannot use a melee weapon; or atleast two of them. he removes one claw, and degrades the other to nothing more than something similar to a long, solid needle; excelent for thrusting attacks. in place of his removed claw he developes a biological rocket launcher. something like a marine gun, except it uses movement similar to a asophogus (again, spelling?) to propell the projectile forwards; and with a super-lubricant the projectile is propelled enough to kill a marine at 50 feet if it were to hit his head, lodging half-way through on the other side of the skull.
but his feet! he is still bound to the laws of physics, thusly he will float off into the dead of space and those rules he cannot break; but can use to his advantage. knowing this, the player changes his feet to the bacterial cells the skulk uses to stay stuck to the wall, and then "domes" the inside of his feet. the effect? suction-cup feet with a adhesive seal! strong enough to let him stay stuck to the floor without gravity, though he can't walk on walls. the dome has a large surface area, and the adhesive is stronger the more surface area it has. it's time to put this evolution to the test! after avoiding some marine patrols, he finally reaches a airlock. the test begins! with his spike he jabs at the console. bacteria flood in and activate switches that control the airlock's sequencer. the highly modified fade pulls out the needle before the nanites eat at it, and he steps in. afew seconds later the player is outside, walking on the outside of the ship. he isn't losing health; the carapace is working wonderfully absorbing the radiation, and the blood chemistry is perfect. aiming into nothingness, the player fires a projectile. it too works, and does even better in space than inside the ship!
five minutes later the airlock in the marine's base flashes red, warning for all to stand back and evacuate; there's a breach in progress. just then, the door is hammered several times by spherical objects. solid, long spikes peirce the door riddling it with holes. the commander drops air tanks rapidly and succeeds in having everyone wear one; the better soldiers are given heavy armor. and then a massive depressurization occurs. the entire room is vacated of all oxygen. the airlock door is broken away in a fit of steam but cannot be heard; there is no air to transmit the sounds!
Nothing.
Nothing is there. Not even sound.
Nothing is here, and the marines wonder as the scan the area for cloaked aliens.
Few players on this server have played natural selection long enough to witness a space-fairing Kharaa as they are difficult to evolve into, but someone remembers. Someone knows. He, not the commander, gives the order to get behind cover but he is too late in his command. They come swift and viciously. Some shot their spiked arms like a lerk's spike attack, others sprayed them with acid-filled spheres, and yet more differed in every way from the last in even more drastic ways then the last. some were grey, some were pitch black, some were there but you couldn't see them easilly due to their adaptive skin cells (basis of cloaking upgrade)
the game ends after a hour and a half.
Kharaa - Victorious.
<span style='color:tan'>-=-=-</span>
If you read it all, you'll get a good jist of what i thing NS will eventually become, but if you're still confused or just lazy here's what im saying about the Kharaa in a possible, and far later version of Natural Selection: They <i>are</i> evolution. They change to fit any enviroment; even space as you read in the second story. They also change to fit any situation as you read in the first story. The reason im putting this in general is because im wondering: what kind of gameplay aspects would be needed to properly ballance so many evolutions and rapid changes. also, what kind of requirement would this sort of game be placed at? the models would have to be like lego, im thinking: you build your character model with different peices and parts but only some peices will fit with other parts (stomach acid gets stronger, you need thicker mucas lining (mucas is in your stomach preventing it from leaking hydrochloric (HCl) acid; right now!)) and those models could be scaleable in size and have alterable skins (color list comes up like black/dark red/navy blue/light blue/multicolor/etc). Also, know that im thinking of this future NS as a stand-alone game; not the modification that it is today (though it's popularity would be grand).
So ... discuss how this sort of game would play out, how it could work, learning curve, learning curve solutions (something other than "dont make it complicated"), etc etc. I belive the name "<span style='color:red'>Natural Selection: </span><span style='color:yellow'>Evolutionary Perfection</span>" fits this dream-NS quite nicely.
I think that to properly ballance this sort of thing the marines have to be equally adaptive; if a Kharaa evolves like the onos in the first story, the marines have to be able to pull off some sort of trick like they did with the grenade launcher on the turret, and making the turret programable to aim for the mouth of the onos to have the grenade blow up inside the beast. or even different types of ammunition, to even types of ammo that are radioactive and super-dense and such. though no laser guns/akimbo weapons solutions and keeping those solutions within the NS gritty feel... though not within the S&I FAQ! (a mounted gun, a bunker, hand grenades could all be viable solutions to various Kharaa life forms)
<span style='color:tan'>Ok, first i'll start off by saying that this is not a post about moving NS to HL2. This post is about how I envision what NS is to become if it becomes highly popular and several radical occurances and upgrades happen in the computer-gaming industry, the communities that play the games, and the computers that run these games. Dont suggest ideas within this topic; discussion only (ideas in/about the discussion, not a idea by itself that deserves to be in S&I). This is not a suggestion; HL could never do what i envision here (maybe not even HL2! thus...) <b>Don't go off-topic with HL2 or porting NS or NS going commercial or similar, otherwise I will be severly .. Bah, too many naughty words ..</b> On with the vision and the telling!
|Know that this post is long. Are you sure you want to read it all?!|</span>
This is how i see the Kharaa team playing at a far .. FAR .. later date:
The atom. The molocule. The cell. The bacteria. The bacteria wages it's war against humanity throughout the universe. Vast and diverse is has the wisdom of a thousand battles and a thousand life forms. It shapes itself. A conciousness is awoken. The consiousness is transplanted into the empty shell formed for it. <i>It lives.</i> //corny intro
The player would start out like a normal skulk from inside the hive room, just like always, but there are no direct evolutionary paths... these paths lay barren and un-used by this player. The player shapes his path through his choices. He has a fighting style he would like to have, lets say assualt. After some battles he would gain various resources that he could spend and "transfer" one to the other. A bigger body, specialized cells and organs, hard carapace plates, a smaller body, and so many other options... different modes of transportation and locomotion ... maybe not even a limb to stand on but movement through a gasious sack, and the filling and pressure thereof changes the altitude and movement. the combinations are only limited by what is given to the player and the imaginations of the developers... and the community.
Story1:
As the player continues to game he begins to change. a larger body. a specialized carapace plate on the front of the skull. a detatchable jaw to swallow things bigger than the player's head. one horn. then two, then three... all of them long and strait, perfect for goring and impaling. stronger leg muscles for fast and rapid movement. he's become a <!--emo&::onos::--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/tiny.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tiny.gif'><!--endemo--> . but the evolution doesn't stop there. he had died from a grenade blast from the underside. knowing this the player increases the carapace densities on his under-side to compensate.
No more gut buster grenade lunches! but the heavy armors are comming. the detatchable jaw works to swallow a heavy armor marine whole, but he kicks inside for too long. the player then alters the strength of the stomach acids, but he needs a bigger stomach and thicker mucas lining to stop the acids from eating himself, too! the stomach plate is in the way. the player then settles on a compromise; have a stomach plate that can partially protect against grenades but rip him open if he's had lunch recently, and digest the heavilly armored marines faster but not as fast as he'd like. the heavy armors dissapear quickly, but the marines have more grenade launchers.
being desparate, the player puts all his evolutionary points that he's accumalated for fifty minutes into full-body carapace. he's slowed slightly, but no grenade exploding outside of him will hurt him. in fact, the bullets bounce right off him and kill the skulks under him! but the marines have a trick up their sleeve.. they lure the onos into their base on a hunch. grenade launchers loaded, and placed on a turret for better accuracy, as the onos lets a bellowing roar the turret fires. *Gulp* the onos ate the genade. timer ticking on the device, the onos's stomach tries to eat the explosive before it detonates but wait! the stomach's size and acids were sacrificed for the carapace plating. the timer reaches zero in the biological middle of the creature. Like the onos player started, he is just a empty shell. Death of such a advanced creature will set the hive's resources back dramatically while re-building the body.
The player starts to re-work his plans for the "ultimate evolution" ...
Story 2:
a new game begins. the map is dark but well-lit in afew areas. the player begins to grow out his hind legs. they form a double-reverse knee, with three leg bones. his body becomes [upright] with the adaption of a curved spine as he stands on his new hind legs. he continues to fight the marines all the while, and, finding that his arms are not long enough he grows them out, as well. he lengthens and strengthens the scythe-shaped bone on each of his arms. these are his weapons now, and thus he minimizes his jaw and teeth count, though they still exist they serve poor damage in battle. <!--emo&::fade::--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/fade.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='fade.gif'><!--endemo--> he can move on the walls as if he was a skulk, but he can only use his two scythes to do so; ramming them into the wall and pulling himself upwards, leaving holes all the while.
the room begins to depressurize due to the holes, and all existing in the room perish. the offence chambers wither and die; the defence chambers chug and grope at the thin air to try to collect oxygen but they fail eventually, as well. the section is locked-down, preventing a total failure of pressure. dead now, the hive rebuilds the player's body slowly. knowing that the marines will have some difficulty stopping him from moving <i>outside</i> the ship, he changes his blood chemistry to preserve oxygen and re-use carbondioxide, alters his skin to become similar to carapace and though it will still stop bullets it will also absorb radiation and seal himself from the world, and knowing that his only opening is his mouth he removes it entirely, along with his vocal cords and asophogus (spelling?) no longer needing speech or outside supplies of oxygen.
he will be able to walk outside the ship, but two things remain; his weapons, and his feet. long has his claws aided him, but if he is to succeed in exterior ship combat, he cannot use a melee weapon; or atleast two of them. he removes one claw, and degrades the other to nothing more than something similar to a long, solid needle; excelent for thrusting attacks. in place of his removed claw he developes a biological rocket launcher. something like a marine gun, except it uses movement similar to a asophogus (again, spelling?) to propell the projectile forwards; and with a super-lubricant the projectile is propelled enough to kill a marine at 50 feet if it were to hit his head, lodging half-way through on the other side of the skull.
but his feet! he is still bound to the laws of physics, thusly he will float off into the dead of space and those rules he cannot break; but can use to his advantage. knowing this, the player changes his feet to the bacterial cells the skulk uses to stay stuck to the wall, and then "domes" the inside of his feet. the effect? suction-cup feet with a adhesive seal! strong enough to let him stay stuck to the floor without gravity, though he can't walk on walls. the dome has a large surface area, and the adhesive is stronger the more surface area it has. it's time to put this evolution to the test! after avoiding some marine patrols, he finally reaches a airlock. the test begins! with his spike he jabs at the console. bacteria flood in and activate switches that control the airlock's sequencer. the highly modified fade pulls out the needle before the nanites eat at it, and he steps in. afew seconds later the player is outside, walking on the outside of the ship. he isn't losing health; the carapace is working wonderfully absorbing the radiation, and the blood chemistry is perfect. aiming into nothingness, the player fires a projectile. it too works, and does even better in space than inside the ship!
five minutes later the airlock in the marine's base flashes red, warning for all to stand back and evacuate; there's a breach in progress. just then, the door is hammered several times by spherical objects. solid, long spikes peirce the door riddling it with holes. the commander drops air tanks rapidly and succeeds in having everyone wear one; the better soldiers are given heavy armor. and then a massive depressurization occurs. the entire room is vacated of all oxygen. the airlock door is broken away in a fit of steam but cannot be heard; there is no air to transmit the sounds!
Nothing.
Nothing is there. Not even sound.
Nothing is here, and the marines wonder as the scan the area for cloaked aliens.
Few players on this server have played natural selection long enough to witness a space-fairing Kharaa as they are difficult to evolve into, but someone remembers. Someone knows. He, not the commander, gives the order to get behind cover but he is too late in his command. They come swift and viciously. Some shot their spiked arms like a lerk's spike attack, others sprayed them with acid-filled spheres, and yet more differed in every way from the last in even more drastic ways then the last. some were grey, some were pitch black, some were there but you couldn't see them easilly due to their adaptive skin cells (basis of cloaking upgrade)
the game ends after a hour and a half.
Kharaa - Victorious.
<span style='color:tan'>-=-=-</span>
If you read it all, you'll get a good jist of what i thing NS will eventually become, but if you're still confused or just lazy here's what im saying about the Kharaa in a possible, and far later version of Natural Selection: They <i>are</i> evolution. They change to fit any enviroment; even space as you read in the second story. They also change to fit any situation as you read in the first story. The reason im putting this in general is because im wondering: what kind of gameplay aspects would be needed to properly ballance so many evolutions and rapid changes. also, what kind of requirement would this sort of game be placed at? the models would have to be like lego, im thinking: you build your character model with different peices and parts but only some peices will fit with other parts (stomach acid gets stronger, you need thicker mucas lining (mucas is in your stomach preventing it from leaking hydrochloric (HCl) acid; right now!)) and those models could be scaleable in size and have alterable skins (color list comes up like black/dark red/navy blue/light blue/multicolor/etc). Also, know that im thinking of this future NS as a stand-alone game; not the modification that it is today (though it's popularity would be grand).
So ... discuss how this sort of game would play out, how it could work, learning curve, learning curve solutions (something other than "dont make it complicated"), etc etc. I belive the name "<span style='color:red'>Natural Selection: </span><span style='color:yellow'>Evolutionary Perfection</span>" fits this dream-NS quite nicely.
I think that to properly ballance this sort of thing the marines have to be equally adaptive; if a Kharaa evolves like the onos in the first story, the marines have to be able to pull off some sort of trick like they did with the grenade launcher on the turret, and making the turret programable to aim for the mouth of the onos to have the grenade blow up inside the beast. or even different types of ammunition, to even types of ammo that are radioactive and super-dense and such. though no laser guns/akimbo weapons solutions and keeping those solutions within the NS gritty feel... though not within the S&I FAQ! (a mounted gun, a bunker, hand grenades could all be viable solutions to various Kharaa life forms)
Comments
in fact if there are two conflicting traits you can have a slider-bar thing to dictate how much of what gets done. (the stomach and the stomach plate in story 1) the point is that there would be so many things that you could choose to evolve with that it'd be impossible to use all of them in one game.
[edit: yes, ruts for players are inevitable and there will always <i>seem</i> to be a optimal path, but a tenative marine team will counter anything the Kharaa throw at them (explosive armor peircing rouns for dense Carapace; a mounted/heavy machine gun turret for killing off bigger aliens)]
<!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif'><!--endemo-->
Once you kill someone or slowly gain res, you can choose to increase or decrease aspects of your little skulky body.
You could choose to increase increase size and mainly front armour, adding horns. This would be the best way to become an onos like creature.
Or you could choose to decrease your size, and your armour to the point where you are like one of those cockroaches in HL (eg. even being stepped on is death). Because of this tiny size you can run extremely fast and climb any surface with ease. Your attack is deadly - after a quick evolve, you are now equipped with delayed reaction poison glands allowing you to bite and run away, leaving the rine to die a few seconds later. Of course the marines could research infa-red and spot you crawling towards them from miles away.
Or you could evolve the ability to build, sacrificing the ability to evolve decent weapons but being a valuable asset to the team.
Problem - you die and bye bye choices. Essentially, this mode of slow modular evolution is much more suited to a MMORPG. However, if when you die you return as your same character, then it would be much better as you could spend a whole game honing your character.
Of course, that's not exactly on topic but <!--emo&:0--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/wow.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='wow.gif'><!--endemo-->
*COUGH*
K, enough off-topicness... <!--emo&:D--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif'><!--endemo--> (but yes, the Kharaa <i>could</i> have been made as a weapon that went out of control... we may never know)
I agree that it would be abit much for a short multiplayer game and more suited to a MMORPG, but if you could "save n' load" the evolutions you configure through the peices you could easilly re-evolve back into the evolution you were before you died; though you couldn't do it all at once. Teir 1 evolutions could evolve into a higher evolution, but only "The next level" of evolution could go into the next; carapace and bigger teeth (Minor/Simple upgrades) is say teir one, and then specialized carapace skin cells and larger size (moderate/important branch upgrades, highly visible upgrades) are second, and so on until teir 3 (highly prominent changes, reaching "final" evolutionary form) and 4 (highly advanced; perfecting evolutionary form begins) which is where you can only change your abilities. So you could upgrade all teir 1 upgrades at once a sum cost and upgrade time, but you couldn't upgrade teir 1 and 2 at one time.
that would be for if you died and had to re-evolve. the second way is, like you said complex, just have the hive re-build your body at it's best state and perhaps for ballance a lesser state if you dont have enough resources to pay for "Major body overhaul." <!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif'><!--endemo-->
You have good imagination, but what's with the fade and his suction-cup feet? You need air to use suction-cups and as we know, the room is depressurized and deprived of any air.
haha was gonna say Xel'naga made em right before i saw the post that sed it was the xel'naga that made em! wanted to show off that im a SC fanboi! anyway, the protoss started the attacks first I think, maybe because they were screwing with the zerg. donnu for sure.
Mav, very interesting read. I enjoyed reading your thread very much and would really like to see this in the future as NS evolves! each patch NS evolves into something better. I'm still looking forward to NS evolving into HL2 engine.
like i said the possibilities are endless for what the Kharaa could evolve with...