Istvan's Update:
The View from DEEP Space
Implementation is well under way for
the core portions of the faction conflict system. Since I've been giving attention to
descriptions of those systems in my recent columns, as well as in the official forums, I
want to offer a taste of future items on the development agenda. As always, I'm in no
position to make representations about when things will be implemented. Numerous concerns,
incidents, and other needs of the project can detract from the time available for getting
new features into the game, making it nearly impossible to estimate a timeline for any new
material. However, new material is the one tool available to me as developer for improving
the chances of the game's continued survival, so that's where I try to focus my time.
Remaining warfare items: Territorial Contests and Privateering are key parts of the
complete conflict system design, and will be my top priority after patch 1.0109 is
released. Territorial Contests will be a "game-within-the-game" to focus fleet
battles on border areas and add objectives to the faction struggles. Privateering will be
a system to allow pilots to fly for other factions in "foreign service", a vital capability to
prevent boredom when your own faction is at peace, or just at peace with the people you
want to shoot.
Economy: When all the warfare work is complete, I will have spent
many months having set aside other very important parts of the game. There are many
economic enhancements I'd like to make, up to and including a massive revision of the
commodity lists. Such a revision would have extensive effects throughout the game code,
but could go a long way to solve the problem of bottlenecks in the mining and
manufacturing processes. The Jumpgate economy has been made player-dependent, but
operationally it's still not player-centered enough. I expect that reconstructing the
economy to become more player-driven will improve gameplay for everyone, not just the
haulers and miners. Furthermore, another of my long-term objectives is to try to make the
Jumpgate economy business-friendly. I think it should be possible for players to operate
in-game businesses of several sorts, with reasonable expectation of profit. The logical
focus for this kind of operation would be the POS, which almost certainly means revisions
and upgrades to the existing POS code, as well as a number of major bugfixes. I probably
won't start with massive changes, but I'll welcome any chance to spend more time trying to
make the Jumpgate economy more dynamic, and player-centric.
Conflux: Plans for improvements to the conflux AI have been in the
works for more than a year, and I admit personal frustration that they weren't further
along when I decided I had to switch focus to the warfare material. The conflux have
always been a pretty simplistic AI enemy, but the means exist to make the conflux more
sophisticated and more of a challenge on both an individual and a collective basis. Some
proof-of-concept work has already been tried for a number of planned conflux changes, and
I urgently need to carry those tasks to completion. One interesting project on the
mid-term agenda sits right on the border between economy work and conflux work, being a
new option for resource-gathering in conflux space. This project might prove to be the
best solution to one of our economic problems while simultaneously adding a new, fun type
of gameplay, so I hope to have time to explore it as soon as possible.
Squads: Jumpgate's squad system was something of a novelty in
2000, but it has long been surpassed by many other games' full-featured guild systems. Due
to past problems with our website infrastructure, we've even lost some basic capabilities
we once had. A massive revision to the Jumpgate squad system, involving bringing all
squad-related functions into the game code instead of relying on a web-based interface, is
vitally necessary. I would prefer not to let the game limp along much longer without
tackling this important, but onerous task.
Graphics: Nearly everyone would agree that Jumpgate requires updated
graphics to survive. A few minor steps have been taken in the past, and as a distraction
from all my other work I've been intermittently researching what's needed to make Jumpgate
capable of using more modern methods and better effects. I hope to have time to try some
improvements later this year. Aside from modernizing the engine itself, there are items in
my to-do list specifically about adding eye candy to improve the look of the game, to draw
more players. This can generally be done just by adding assets, but that requires
corralling an idle NetDevil artist. With the extremely demanding workload from Auto
Assault still facing the rest of the company, chances to do that are very rare. However,
work on the engine will pay long-term dividends even if I can't arrange art time in the
near term.
Bigger Objectives: Yet another area of the game I badly want to address is
the concept of the Reconstruction itself. The backstory of the game has moved away from
TRI being like a "United Nations of the factions" and toward TRI being a major
corporation among many. However, the idea of the Reconstruction itself continues, and
aside from faction missions to build buildings, there hasn't ever been much tangible
evidence of the Reconstruction in the game. Given the time and opportunity, I mean to
change that, even to the point of putting critical Reconstruction activities directly in
the hands of the players, as much as possible. When was the last time somebody built a
gate to a new sector, for example? Creating ways for players to alter the game environment
through their actions is the theme that links nearly all my gameplay goals together, and
it's perhaps the loftiest goal I aspire to as a designer. A game where the players can't
affect the environment isn't really worth playing, in my opinion. Why be a witness to
change when you should be able to participate? I think this is the direction all future
online games need to go, and even though Jumpgate released long ago, there's absolutely no
reason it can't be a place where these tantalizing possibilities are tested.
We all wish progress on Jumpgate were happening at a faster rate. I probably want faster
progress more than anyone else, if only because the more stuff we need that I can get out
of the way now, the more of the difficult, long-term projects I can try out. Given enough
time, everything I've outlined above can be accomplished, along with many more, smaller
projects. The combined result should take Jumpgate to a very interesting place.
There have been times since release when plans for future development on Jumpgate were
pretty aimless. This is not one of those times.
|
