I have said it before, and I’ll say it again; Deus Ex: Human Revolution looks absolutely fantastic and it may very well trump Deus Ex. The potential immersion is phenomenal and I really can’t wait to play it. I’ve been clinging to the Eidos twitter feed like a crack addict waiting for more footage and yesterday they released this. :)
Possibilities, Ignition
One of the nicest things about having a project of the magnitude that Shadowrun: Corrosion has is that, if done right, ideas spawn and ignite new ideas. We always held the idea that Player vs Player (PvP) combat should be a large part of the game, not only in order to keep the game competitive, but also because we needed a reason to play Corrosion in a browser and being exposed to other players. If there was no PvP element, the game would be a single-player game with chat options, and that wasn’t good enough. The idea of PvP spawned the idea of organised PvP, which is what our end-game is going to be about. (That and resource management.) So we started on PvP, single combat first in order to set the stage for the multi-player combat and in order to give players something more to do to make money, to earn karma and to tweak their character.
We’ve got a rough outline for ranged PvP combat finished and it’s looking good and fast, which is good since the path-finding algorithms we’re using in missions leave a lot to be desired, unfortunately. Having use for pathfinding, it’s fast. Immediately, we came up with another idea; ambushing. Ambushing (or surprise) is already a part of the SR3 game system, where, before the combat starts, the ambusher and ambushee both roll a reaction roll, ambusher against target number (TN) 2 and the ambushee against TN 4, to determine if the ambushee could respond. If not, then the ambusher got a free combat pass to do his worst, which, when you’ve got enhanced reflexes, can be lethal.
Of course, this lethality of ambushing lead us to another idea; how about we drop the TN for the surprise rolls by one for a middle lifestyle, and two for a high lifestyles, and drop the ambush all together for a luxury lifestyle? That way, there are more reasons to aim for a higher lifestyle, which in turn demands a higher daily upkeep price, which in turn keeps the economy stable and flowing.
Right now, if you’re victorious, you get 1 karma if your opponent had a higher reputation than you, another karma if your opponent had a higher rank than you, your rank increases, and you get between 5-10% of the opponent’s nuyen. If you weren’t victorious, you get one karma if either the opponent’s reputation or rank was higher, but you lose 5-10% of your nuyen to your opponent. Also, your rank will most likely go down. This concept of earning karma and making nuyen through PvP introduces some new ideas; you could self sustain on PvP, never having to do one mission if you don’t want to. This means mission rewards need to be competitive in order to keep a steady influx of nuyen into the economy, otherwise players would constantly fight each other and the same nuyen would exchange hands over and over. Nuyen still needs to be spent on increasing skills, attributes and gear, so the need for missions will remain, but to keep the economy healthy we’ll need to keep an eye on things.
What if you want to safeguard your money? Couldn’t you put it in an offshore bank account instead of walking around with it in certified credsticks waiting for some other player to come along and rob you? Wouldn’t that be a great addition to customisable lifestyles? You start out with a small bank account where you can keep money stored for a lower level lifestyle and increase the size as the quality of your lifestyle increases? Perhaps you can buy expansions to a lifestyle, increasing your bank account, increasing your security or something to that effect.
Ideas aplenty, and more and more popping up as we go along. It’s a great feeling, creating something and being infused with ideas. It sure beats sitting around being lead along by someone else’s idea and never having any of your own. I like it!
Another Funeral
Unfortunately, since my own parents’ deaths, I’ve had the misfortune of attending a few funerals usually in support of others. There was a colleague’s father, my uncle whose funeral I had to arrange because there were no other next of kin capable or willing to take up the charge, and then yesterday a good friend’s father was laid to rest. In all three cases I was struck by a feeling, hard to recognise but easy to understand once you do, of selfishness. You see, while the reason that I came to the funeral was to support my friend, to show him that I care, and to silently let him know that I’m there for him should have need of anything, what I am doing there during the service is focussing on myself, mourning my own loss and indulging in my own grief.
I was dealing rather well with it all, but tears started to well up when people started to give a last salute at the end of the service. It reminded me of something Moulsari had done during that same last goodbye that stayed with me. She had knelt at the foot end of of my father coffin, touched it briefly and ran her hand over her head. It’s a sign of respect in India, one that I always liked and one that I think my father deserved more in life than he got so I was glad to see that this woman, who barely knew him and only knew how important he was to me, showed him such respect. Call me silly but that really struck me to the point that remembering it, ever so briefly, yesterday, made me very emotional.
Internet Movie Firearms Database
The Internet Movie Firearms Database is, like Al Pacino’s character Lefty says in Donnie Brasko, a “beautiful thing.” It doesn’t particularly make our lives any better, nor doesn’t enrich the Internet in the same way that iMDB has, but you still have to admire the perseverance in setting up, maintaining and contributing to a website like this. Take the 1997 John Woo opus Face/Off, for instance, starring John Travolta and Nicholas Cage. There are more guns in that film than are being smuggled from neglected munition depots in the former Soviet Union, and here’s a guy who’s been cataloging them all! An excerpt:
Castor Troy’s (Nicolas Cage) weapons of choice are two gold titanium nitride plated Springfield Armory M1911-A1 V-10s fitted with custom gold inlaid grips, that he keeps in two small-of-the-back holsters. Among the obvious modifications to the guns include skeletonized hammers, beavertail grip safeties, ambidextrous slide stop safeties, target sites, moderately bevelled magazine wells, and V-10 ported slides/barrels. He uses them both during the first major gunfight of the movie, putting a hole in the windshield of the helicopter Sean Archer (John Travolta) is in and later gunning down several agents in the airport hangar. Later in the movie, when Archer has assumed Troy’s identity and face, he is given these weapons by Dietrich (Nick Cassavettes). He then uses them for the proceeding gunfight as the police raid the building.
Rising Sun
A long time ago, I saw Rising Sun, a rather good film with Wesley Snipes, Sean Connery, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa and Harvey Keitel. It’s an early 90’s film based on an early 90’s book by Michael Crichton, whom I’ve grown to appreciate more and more over the years. He’s proved to be a suspense fiction writer who bases his work on pretty solid research (or defined assumptions) and manages to tell a technically compelling story while at the same time managing to write a very compelling story. He can be deep without losing his ability to write stories that read easily. Anyway, he’s my one of my go-to fiction writers when I’m in the mood for something that doesn’t require me to feel bad about my own intellect.
The book deals with the Japana-fear that was sweeping the world late eighties and early nineties, based mostly on the economic powerhouse Japan had become, especially with their trade-surplus at the time. Basically, Japan was the China of the early nineties. I’ve only read the first chapter so far, but it’s very sharply written, painting a clear picture without getting lost in detail. It’s a very sleek and minimalistic book in the way that it doesn’t use more words than necessary. It comes across as very Japanese, where the emptiness in a story is almost as important as the parts that are filled in.
So I liked the film a lot, and had always been curious about the book especially considering my fascination with Cyberpunk, in which corporate controlled dystopia usually has a strong hint of Japanese dominance. (Mostly because at birth of Cyberpunk it looked as if Japan was going to take over the world, economically and then culturally.) I wanted to read some easy fiction, after having read a ton of non-fiction lately. I also wanted an easy read, as the last fiction I read was Nick Harkaway’s Gone-Away World, which is great, but meanders so much that it’s hard to stay focussed on the main storyline which is hardly even there.
My last thought on the book and the film; having seen the film first, I have preconceived notions of the characters and the casting of the characters, and I find myself agreeing with many choices, especially Sean Connery and Harvey Keitel. I’m not sure of Snipes’ casting yet, but it might be a little early to tell.
Thanks Eva for this wonderful birthday gift. :)