Excellent post Mucka. Exactly my thoughts, but in a well written form.
One question though: Are you new to the elite franchise or did you play the originals? The reason I ask is that I can't determine how much of my current interest /dis-interest is due to "rose-coloured glasses"
Hi and thanks, yes I played the original (kind of, played the Spectrum version).
Had a lot of fun with the game but by I couldn't enjoy it now because times have moved on. Technology allows for much richer experiences now and graphics and sound are but one small part of that.
Yes I understand Elite is not a story driven game and therefore it is more complex because you don't have the luxury of building rich linear interactions but I have enough programming knowledge and making games for my own pleasure that I know it is entirely possible to have dynamic yet persistent NPC's and story lines that are database driven, just like a dynamic website is database driven.
The only limitations really are your database storage, technically it can be done without impacting performance at all.
I will give a very basic example of what I mean.
Now when I visit a system NPC's randomly spawn regardless of my previous actions (though maybe I will have a bounty and a bounty hunter will spawn?) in a very limited way that is okay, smoke and mirrors to represent some kind of persistence and "life" because we don't need all the little NPC people doing complex things while we are not there to see it - complete waste of resources.
But what if we have local variables that change because of our interactions with NPC's and they are uploaded or downloaded from the database as we arrive, leave the system? We don't want to create something too complex and have data being written constantly - that would affect performance so it makes more sense to load it in and out with instancing though we can have some data being written "live" too and of course this happens.
So I visit a system, eg "System1" and the data gets called for that system (as with the planet data and such now) but other than just having a random chance of a bounty hunter spawning etc we also have NPC data for "system1" which is loaded from a pool of NPC's.
They can have data sets such as #previous interaction with player (PIWP)=0/1; and subsets that are accessed depending on that database query such as if ~PIWP=0 (no previous interaction, access no previous interaction subset) if PIWP=1 access previous interaction subset.
Then a previous interactions is true subset would be #status = 0 neutral -1 enemy, 1 friendly. Then if friendly=true we access another subset and so on.
Some of this already happens on a very limited scale but it can be as complex and as deep as you like.
What ultimately counts is that the NPC's are persistent and that the data that defines their relationship with us is manifested through gameplay.
So based on all the variables (you can go as complex as giving the NPC's their own character traits and basing some data on that as well) you would then generate game world content that was specific to each players experience.
Eg, I was in #System 1 and shot up #NPC A for pirating but he lived - My #PIWP for #NPC A in #System 1 was set to 1 (we interacted) that interaction was viewed as unfriendly so #status for #NPC A in #system 1 is set to -1 (hostile/enemy)
I leave #system 1 and that data is stored to database for my player.
I revisit #system 1 the data is loaded and #NPC A spawned but now he "remembers me" and maybe the game logic says hey this guy was a rich trader, he decided to get wing men for protection and spawns them too.
Next thing I know I have contacts and I am messaged by #NCP A, "Hey remember me you dog! You Stole my goods and left me for dead." and all hell breaks lose!
All this based on some very simple database driven narrative making characters persistent and the gameworld dynamic.
So why isn't it in the game but in a much more elegant and complex form?
