Friday 19 September 2008

Pic of the day: "Friends, Ignomarii, countrymen, lend me your antennae! Today we shall conquer this island, tomorrow the world! And then... the stars in the sky, innumerable like grains of sand!"

Excessively massive games

I still haven't come to the space phase of Spore, and perhaps I never will. This final frontier is larger than the rest of the game taken together, and according to some reviews there are thousands of star system in the virtual galaxy where Spore takes place. Each such galaxy is made from scratch on the player's computer using basic content from Maxis, downloaded content from other players, and any content the player has made himself. Each such galaxy is unique, each of the thousands of star systems has a random number of planets, and each of these again is unique too. Some are just ready to colonize, some are already colonized by other races, and some have to be terraformed first. One single game of Spore could last for many, many years - possibly a lifetime. Not that I think anyone will do that... no, wait. It is on the Internet. Someone will do it. Probably.

Anyway, this is not the first time Will Wright's creations break the limits. In the previous hit from Maxis, Sims 2, you can have up to 999 different neighborhoods. (Or at least the file structure allows this, I have never had more than around 15 on any one computer.) Each neighborhood normally can have a few hundred sims if you play for a while. You'd think most people would be satisfied with a few hundred thousand little electronic people, but Maxis was not. With the first expansion pack, University, they allowed you to add up to 999 college campuses to EACH neighborhood. Not that any sane person would do that, I think. Then if you bought either the second expansion (NightLife) or the third (Open for Business), either of them allowed up to 999 sub-neighborhoods for each of the 999 neighborhoods.

Subhoods work this way: Each is the same size as a main neighborhood and allows the same types of buildings. So each of them can also have hundreds of little sims. But all subhoods connected to the same main also share their sims. For instance, a sim living downtown could take a trip to a mall in the business district and meet some random sim from the suburb. After they have met, they may call each other and become friends, visit each other and even move in together if you so desire. In effect, you have expanded the neighborhood to be 1000 times as large, although you can't see all of it at once. There is literally room for the entire population of the USA in the game, with room to spare, although only a few hundred thousand of them can meet each other ever. Real life still wins...

Of course, in real life nobody would live long enough to populate their hard disk with even a million unique sims. I assume the same holds true for Spore creatures.

***

Maxis is not the only company to make excessively massive games. Good old Daggerfall, while not unlimited, was said to cover a land area roughly the same size as Britain, which you could wander in first person perspective. Back whe I probably thought I had more time than now, I once ran around the Iliac Bay, the central feature of the map. It took me quite a few days, even though my character had a running skill I will never aspire to in real life. The land had literally hundreds of villages and dungeons, and dozens of towns in various sizes up to a few walled cities. After having played the game for five years before my last Daggerfall-able computer went poof, I still had not visited all the villages and probably not discovered all the dungeons. Oh, and dozens of graveyards too, forgot about those. And probably some other features.

But despite the enormous size of Daggerfall, it was finite. Every house and every dungeon was in the same place, only the monsters and the objects changed. I believe this is generally so with roleplaying games, even massively multiplayer online RPGs (although they may grow slowly over time as new zones are added by the developers.)

In contrast, many strategy games make a new map each time you start a new game. The whole Civilization series did this, and Railroad Tycoon and Colonization, all of them invented by the amazing Sid Meier. And of course Sim City, the first and groundbreaking hit by Will Wright. Yet even though there may be dozens of different maps on your hard disk eventually, they are all separate from each other.

One interesting case is Master of Magic, which looks like a clone of the original Civilization but with magic instead of technology. Unlike the others, it has TWO randomly generated maps, the two "planes" or parallel worlds, where one is magical and the other much more so and generally more challenging. The two worlds are linked through portal towers, and some magic also allows plane shifting. But because they are both random, dry land on one map could be ocean on the other, making it impossible to cross over until you find a better location. Unfortunately, you never got more than the two maps.

Sim City 4 had another approach. There was a huge - but not endless - map which consisted of many rectangular zones. Each of the zones was a single city map. If you had built up a town in one map, you could go to a neighboring map and connect it with roads, railroad, electricity and even garbage disposal. The newer map would then not need to build all of these things at the start. The citizens would drive to work in the neighboring map, and get their electricity from there etc. Over time, you could develop one map with mostly industry, one with mostly business, and one with mostly residential zoning. If they were connected, they would balance each other so all of them could grow (although they would only actually grow while you were playing each of them).

This was one of the first examples I saw of what I long ago named "detail on demand". (That phrase has later become common in video, but I cannot think of a better name.) Another example is in Master of Magic, where each dungeon or node is a single square on the main map, but opens up to a full battleground for your tactical combat. Back when Civilization was still fairly new, I imagined a future follow-up which I called "Colonization" (therefore, these ideas must have been before the actual Colonization game in 1994 but after Civilization in 1991). In my imaginary game, your task would be to colonize an alternate Earth. The computer would generate an Earth-like planet. Depending on how far back the timelines diverged, the map would be gradually more randomized. At the beginning, you would start with a small colony, and gradually expand to cover the planet. My idea was that all the planet would be a fairly simple simulation, except for the spot you surveyed at the moment. The closer you zoomed in, the game would generate more and more detail. In the end, you would be able to meet individual colonists and talk with them, but they did not exist until you came there. This detail would then be saved on the hard disk so you could come back and find it later. Basically, you could travel the world on foot if you had a large enough hard disk, but the rest of the planet - outside your field of view - would be merely an abstract simulation.

Obviously no such game was ever made. The closest we have come to date seems to be Spore with its hundreds or thousands of planets, although they are a lot smaller than the one I imagined. Being able to zoom out to see the whole galaxy, then zoom in to a particular planet and land there - it is a dream come true for me. But I don't know if I'll get that far. Because even though each of Will Wright's games could last for a lifetime, my dreams don't. They fade, and new ones take their place.