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Comment by cpeterso | Hacker News Reader

I was a developer for the ill-fated Perpetual Entertainment's Star Trek Online MMO (which was later sold and successfully launched by Cryptic Studios).

Star Trek Online's #1 most common feature request from beta testers was "ship interiors." Players didn't want to play "WoW in Spaaaace" game. They wanted to play "The Sims meet Star Trek" and relive their favorite Star Trek TV episodes. That sounds like a pretty cool game (for a small, but dedicated niche), but Perpetual's game designers scoffed and (having worked at Blizzard) proceeded to create "WoW in Space."

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This is the one thing stopping me from reaching 100% rabid-fanboy-mode about this news. We already have Quake in Space, WoW in Space, and Spreadsheets in Space: I hope this doesn't turn out to be "Assembly Programming in Space". This quote gave me hope:

> A cloaking field, for example, might require almost all the power from the generator, forcing you to turn off all computers and dim all lights in order to successfully cloak.

I'm hoping that "dim lights" means actually dimming the lights inside and being less able to see, and that the fact it's mentioned is a sign that this is their intended direction. I really hope Notch nails this. Give me a chilled-out space MMO that lets me have a friend ride shotgun and take over the controls to check out the awesome spaceship I just bought and then help fight off some attackers Millenium Falcon style. Please.

Out of curiosity what is classified as "Quake in Space" and "WoW in Space" ?

Quake in Space is maybe Shattered Horizon? "WoW in Space" is either Star Trek Online or Star Wars the Old Republic.

Shattered Horizon isn't nearly as fast moving as Quake. It's more BF2142 In Space than Quake In Space.

Vendetta Online and Star Trek Online.

I've played VO on and off a few times now. The combat and physics are really excellent, and the backstory and aesthetic are captivating as hell, but it falls short of that escapist 'real place' feeling for me because if it were real you would be playing some sort of slave-pilot lashed permanently to the controls of their spaceship.

Ah yes, Vendetta Online was an absolutely brilliant game. I wasted way too much time back in the day blowing up traders in Sedina B8. I might have to check it out again sometime soon, I'm under the impression it's still being actively developed isn't it?

It's still going. B8 is less populated around 10am GMT (Aussie evening) than it used to be, though.

> I'm hoping that "dim lights" means actually dimming the lights inside and being less able to see

What if "dim all lights" means that the player must dim the lights in their actual, real-world room and the game will use a webcam to sense that the lights have been adequately dimmed?! :)

A hundred HCI researchers are now excitedly writing NSF grant proposals and getting in touch with their PIs.

While thousands of gamers stock up on small blankets to drape over their web cams :)

I was under the impression that a typical gamer never switches the lights ON?

Screen = Sun If you own more than one screen your room is a Solarsystem with multiple Stars

Sounds like Notch has played some Star Fleet Battles, where Cloaking does indeed take almost all your power.

In fact the best thing about SFB was how power was a limited but very flexible resource -- should I go faster, overload weapons, reinforce shields, power special maneuvers, tractors, repairs, etc. I can see how you could build a great MMO around this.

Are there any games currently in existence that would allow someone to fly a ship ala space sim and also move around in their ship interior?

An RPG'ish space game that just let me tool around as if it was Han Solo inside the Millennium Falcon, exploring the universe would be really sweet. Doubly so if it let me and a buddy fly inside a tangible cockpit.

I'd love to know if such a game currently exists.

EVE is close- it's a fly-your-spaceship MMO and you get to move around the inside of space stations

Though http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Walking_in_stations was roundly criticized for soaking up so much effort yet going out in such an incomplete state (you literally can't leave your quarters and see another player yet). Me, I just hope http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_514 (the ground battle spinoff) doesn't remain limited to console gamers.

I have a 50m SP character in Eve Online, I'm desperate for something that has real cockpit interaction and exploration.

The station avatar stuff ended up being boring garbage with no real substance. It got multiple people fired at CCP.

Noctis does: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noctis

However, it's a bit... idiosyncratic?

That would be pretty awesome. To have different sizes of ships that require different amounts of crew members.

To have a big ship, you'll need lots of friends to perform all the jobs, and you can take shifts in flying the ship (or set it to autopilot) or cleaning the space showers.

I hope its not only possible to acutally explore the ships but to integrate the virtual CPU to the controls and environment. Like guns, stearing, doors...

The virtual CPU could then be used to control the ship guns. A better software would mean more accurate hits or perhaps improve the power / force / firing rate ratio by adjusting it automatically. People could even create their own auto pilots.

That remembers me of the SW:TOR games, where doing stuff inside your ship had a really cool and inmersive feeling.

I completely agree, except I would extend this to say that all genres beyond space games should consider more "in ship/plane/building" type of interaction.

For example, I've long wanted a submarine and/or battleship simulation that would provide a true feeling of being part of a huge ship, with players assuming various roles as necessary. Add a MMO element and it'd be just amazing.

Problem is, most things on a sub (et al) are boring. Clean this, cook that, monitor this, listen to that. You would have to constantly be under attack with only brief respite to repair your ship. Listening to whales, cooking with lard, and mopping the floors wouldn't make a compellin... actually, people pay to do menial tasks in MMOs all the time right now. How many chefs were there in Runescape, or dedicated crafters in WoW?

You might be on to something.

Exactly! I think in a weird way the mundane elements of the game could even be fun, provided there was a strong MMO backbone to it with guilds, clubs, etc...

After reading Niven and Pournelle's 'Mote in God's Eye' I thought a simulation of the MacArthur (a space-going battle cruiser) would make for a keen game. Captain types 'prepare the ship for spin, 1/4 g', screens flash, animated guys all over the ship jump into action. Twenty minutes later the ship is spinning, providing 1/4 g on the outside decks.

I have odd notions of 'exciting' I guess.

Adding the MMO element ... a warship depends on top-down control. The captain gives orders, and a lot of which involve turning valves, pushing buttons, watching screens. Hours pass ...

Okay - make the job exciting so players stick around. So when the captain says 'fire torpedo' there is a player there to load it up.

Sure it can be done, but how? A small fortune to the fellow who figures it out, I guess.

Puzzle Pirates made jobs on the boat interesting - granted it was far from realistic. Each job was just a different puzzle game, and depending on the efficiency of the player at their "job", the better it would be for the voyage.

http://yppedia.puzzlepirates.com/Puzzle#Duty_Puzzles

Would this work in an environment that was attempting to be more realistic - probably not - but I am sure a similar dynamic could be used to make a task interesting. This is after all intended to be on star-ships well in the future.

I know this was a week ago, but I had this saved for later and just got around to reading it. It seems that you will be getting what you want.

One of the screenshots off the website is this: http://0x10c.com/screenshots/006.png

I once had the opportunity to consider licensing Star Trek to do a game around.

Figuring I couldn't possibly do anything but fuck it up, I passed.

Since you already brought it up and probably piqued the curiosity of more than one reader (including mine), could you elaborate?

There really isn't any more detail; it was a brief conversation.

Perpetual Entertainment somehow acquired an exclusive Star Trek MMO license for (just?) $22M. Curiously, the company then backburnered the Star Trek game and proceeded to build Gods & Heroes, an unrelated game that was the president's pet project.

The thinking, I was told, was that Gods & Heroes's subscription revenue would fund Star Trek Online's development. Gods & Heroes's development was funded by investors who thought they were getting a Star Trek MMO.

This is the core problem with MMO design in general. Everyone basically wants to make WoW (or EQ, or Diku MUD...) reskinned (or not) when there are a variety of other game designs that might not be billion dollar games, but could be very strong niches. A real Star Trek MMO (not WoW in space, or EVE even) is one of those niches.

This really sounds like a game for hardcore programmers (16-bit emulation, "assembly in space" as h2s called it.) Minecraft is far more accessible: will this really gain nearly as much traction?

I feel like this will be a game where those of us that know assembly will end up writing our weird assembly programs for playing text based adventures or spinning our ships in spirals or whatever, whereas everything that is actually necessary will (hopefully) be able to be bought/created in game.

Also, there's probably going to be a lot of community sharing of ideas and programs (just like there is with Minecraft) so non-programmers will be able to steal code from other people if they really want something.

Obviously I have no idea, but he says "_can_ be used to control your entire ship" not "must be programmed to do anything."

Yeah I see it as a "Well you got a bunch of gyros last pit stop. Pity they don't all link up to your guidance stuff" so you write a program to grab data from your gyros and headings from your heading input. You could still fly just fine using the default stuff but if you want say...constant attitude adjustment or the ability to have your ship not pick up unwanted spin you're going to have to deal with that yourself or trade with somebody who has already dealt with it.

Looks fun, I want to make a program that does orbit translations and stuff for you with minimum delta-v.

Would be fun to have a market for functions (literally programming functions)

Let the original author keep the insides secret, maybe the protection decays over time (say a year)

Sounds a lot like copyright but sensible and the false constraint is only to make the game fun : P

Will be fun once someone makes a slaver/infector virus.

This is kinda difficult - even if you manage to infect (via some kind of program trade, possibly), you probably won't have a way of directly interacting with the infected computer, so you would have to send instructions using the infected ships sensors... By moving your ship in his vision range for example, and decoding the movement with the virus for the instructions. That could take forever for any kind of direct control.

Heh, that's interesting, but I think the simpler vector will be the more common one - Think like a griefer, if you will.

People will just infect useful scripts and let consumers copy/distribute them.

Thats it.

I know griefers - and they will find a way to abuse the crap out of this.

Honestly I'm not saying anything, but this entire mmo idea is just plain bad. If anyone other than notch had come up with it, it would have been shot down at t(-1).

it will probably work something like electrical engineering you can do in minecraft: you never need to do it at all for the game to be fun, but if you want, you can steal a plan for an automated monster-trap from youtube, spend a few hours figuring out a simple one yourself, or go crazy and spend two years building a working cpu.

Did you ever play XCom? I want an MMO version of that.

Absolutely.

When you can build your own ships in this game with a changing interior i am sold. We are talking about the creator of Minecraft here, maybe he is the one who really get's this freedom stuff.

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