Stardock owns Star Control and is planning an "XCOM-like" reboot

Really? Around the time Stardock started bundling Star Control 1-3 with the pre-order of their new game?

I agree that there are two sides and both sides seem to be escalating. But I can’t agree at all with the narrative that F&R are the only ones escalating things or acting in what seems like bad faith to me.

I wish we had some sort of system where opposing sides could present evidence of their claims and then have a person knowledgeable of the law come to a decision on the matter.

Just to further add on, even Brad was in this very thread saying that Paul and Fred are “the ones who made Star Control 1 and 2 way back when”
e.g.:

I don’t think that’s what I was communicating.

Or if it was then I retract it, I guess?

Basically, the whole thing stinks.

Agree to agree then :)

I’m working on it.

I shall call it the beer chamber.

Everything is better with beer.

Err no.

That’s not how the Internet works.

Disconnect or I shall insult you a second time you son of a woman.

fight

swear

Call someone a nazi.

You’re not doing this right!

Although I enjoy (legal) drama as much as the next guy, I think we need a separate lawsuit thread.

And, when does Brad sleep? He seems to be posting/working/etc. non-stop.

Indeed it is.

It’s just when your hobby and job are the same thing.

Here’s a serious and embarrassing truth: I rarely watch movies. I literally go to the Movies section here and read what other people thought and I have certain people’s opinions who I trust and just live through them. :)

As I’m typing this message, I am trying to figure out what is using up non heap memory on my other machine next to me and reviewing the Stardock Software royalty results on the other monitor.

As always, I apologize for the TMI stuff. As someone else pointed out, I do enjoy discussing pretty much anything even when it is things that I probably shouldn’t discuss. I do, however, draw the line at violating NDAs or court orders. ;)

I am not. Is this it?

I’ll have to check it out.

That sounds really interesting!

While obviously not space Sci-Fi, I’ve drawn a lot of inspiration from the Westworld HBO series. I like the idea that a player is entering a world (ahem, universe) that feels alive and seems like it has endless depth.

I don’t know if I’ve discussed the State Machine quest engine that as in the game but in essence, there are no hard-coded variables. There’s no such thing as a ULONG ulReputation type thing in the engine itself, everything is defined through Adventure Studio and created and used on the fly.

The reason that matters is that different authors can write up their own adventures and end up making them fit together by looking at what new flags and statemachine variables they’ve created and use them.

Thus, if you happened to have done quest X it can affect quest Y.

The team at GDC is demoing some of this this week and it starts going into beta for our technical founders in about…I’d guess 2 weeks.

Not arguing for either party here (and I couldn’t for lack of proper research), but, sadly, we can’t have a system to decide who is ethical and who isn’t (and thus who we should and shouldn’t capitalistically support). Law findings help, but the standards are different, even assuming the courts never blunder.

On a positive note, the game is building up nicely.

Thanks for this link. The series of posts describing this campaign was awesome. I started to hope for an early retirement so I could run a game like this! Alas, it’s still a few decades away…

I’m supportive of the team making Origins and of Paul & Fred. I want both their games to come out and be successful. I find the legal battle interesting partly because of how wasteful it is. I don’t know exactly who is right and who is wrong, but I will say that when I read an explanation from Brad or from Stardock describing the situation, there often seems to be a twisting of the timeline or a fact unmentioned to suit their purposes. And I don’t mean some contentious claim of Paul & Fred’s, I mean plain facts that Stardock acknowledged in other contexts, but conveniently ignore when it comes to putting the whole picture together.

Out of respect for the team working hard on Origins, I’d like to leave this thread to be about the game itself. I’ll probably start a separate thread on the lawsuit, just because I find it interesting and figure others might, too, especially as it develops.

@Lantz – I don’t know what you think the title of the thread should be, but it still seems applicable to me.

A fully randomized hexcrawl style West Marches campaign through a dark, low fantasy world is one of my many dream campaigns. Someday. . .

Yeah, WestWorld is actually a great example of this sort of thing, albeit of a heavily pre-planned variety, rather than a randomized one: this vast world, increasingly wild and dangerous the further out from civilization you go, with this bewildering array of interlocking plotlines (and even non-interlocked plotlines can be brought together by sufficient “player” effort). Only difference is that WestWorld resets itself on some sort of automated timer, whereas a pure West Marches game would simply continuously build on itself until reaching the conclusion (whatever that might be).

Your state engine is a great way of doing a version of this kind of thing on PC. Like I said, there’s not a living mind (AI or otherwise) at the core of the StarCon simulation that can take any crazy player suggestion and run with it to generate new content from existing materials in the game-world (at least not yet), but with sufficient pre-planned branches and paths, you can replicate most of the feel of it. Mind, actually coding a state engine that can accurately track dozens of interweaving plot threads each of which might have half a dozen or more states on three to four different progress tracks apiece would probably be an engineering miracle. . .but the mind does salivate a bit, does it not? :-D

Sorry for the weird tangent, but like I said above, some parts of how you guys are designing this–large amounts of open, explorable, progressable content spread across a vast and unexplored region that’s highly player-responsive and largely “non-necessary” (from the perspective of a main plot track)–remind me of a West Marches style campaign, which is super impressive. If y’all pull off something in that vein, I’m gonna feel like I ripped you off with the $100 buy-in!

The conflict has been going on for several months, according to F&R, in private. Or, do you object to not being told about it before?

I think he means now as opposed to 2013.

Oh, thats a neat little planet.

So you drop the landers to gather resources/stuff in an area around them or do they drive around (animated) on the little planet finding stuff of their own volition?

Been wondering the same but better suited for ‘new thread’.

I’m not real interested in discussing the ongoing litigation here as I am interested in talking about the game.

If you want to see my thoughts you can read them here:
https://forums.starcontrol.com/487690/page/7/#3708169

Gotcha. I would say between the two Star Control is a bit more like Westworld.

Let me walk you through the beginning (I equally exasperate our legal folks and marketing folks for posting insider stuff on Tom’s site):

You start out at Earth. And Sol is the “Sweet Water” here. It’s safe. Well, semi safe.

The planets and moons in our solar system are pretty well understood:

Even the first couple of species you encounter are fairly friendly, approachable.

But as you get further and further from home, things get increasingly dangerous and alien. The missions become less black and white. Are you the good guy or the bad guy here?

Star Control doesn’t demand you be “the good guy”. You are free to wear the white hat or the black hat or somewhere in between based on your interactions and deeds. There’s no “reputation” meter here.

Every action you take will make some slight change in the universe. It might be tiny or it might be very noticeable.

Bucholz, the lead writer, keeps shocking me as I say “Why did this happen?!” and he said “Well, did you do X on Y?” and I say…“Well…yea, I was just testing…but that was totally unrelated…”

You really have to break modern game habits where every “quest” is silo’d. The game is designed to appeal to modern audiences visually and in terms of enjoyable gameplay. But at its heart is the classic DOS game style experience where that house you robbed earlier has some consequences many hours later. (That said, we do ensure that nothing you do blocks off your ability to finish the main story – but it can make it harder).

Indeed. And that gets to the heart of why Adventure Studio, the application, is such a big deal. Many writers being able to layer their own stories with each other will make the world feel richer and ensure we have many voices for the player to experience.

Right now, I’m waiting for AS to be friendly enough to hand over to…well, writers. Not techies. Authors. Chris will let me know when it’s reached that point. I think it’s almost there.

My basic run through tells me that the main plot, if you b-line it will take between 15 and 20 hours. But most of the fun of the game are the subtleties of the rest of the universe.

We’ve been working on this for 4 years and after Elemental, I wanted to make sure we didn’t talk about our plans until this was actually working, in-game so that people wouldn’t be let down by the final result.