JDH Here are some notes on what I think might make a good PAD (Post Apocalyptic Driving) game. Inspired by AutoDuel and then letting myself toss ideas around in my head for a while until they all spilled out and ended up here ...

• AD is a good abbreviation for Auto Duel - because we could play on it like 2150 A.D. But Auto Duel may be too restrictive a name (see bullet on streams of play below)
  
  
• Available streams of play:
  • Racing: Build and maintain a fast car and drive it around a track quicker than anybody else.
  • Dueling: Build and maintain a good battle car and drive it in duels to destroy the other competitors
  • Missions: Accept missions such as "deliver x to y", "do battle with z" or "defend q" - perhaps some missions will provide a vehicle for the duration of the mission (as a way to introduce newbies to different vehicles that we may want to make it hard to otherwise achieve). These missions will involve player skills honed by racing and duelling.
  • Trading/Economics: "deliver x to y" (you choose (just as in JG or Elite) e.g. you might hear that Edge City is short of gas and decide to deliver gas from the refineries on the other side of the island). "used goods" - trade your slightly used V8 for a more economic I4. "salvage" - run someone off the road and trash their car and retrieve the servicable bits (not sure this would work that well)
  • All modes of play are interchangeable and a player can choose to mix one or more mode of play
    
    
• Available vehicles:
  • A range of single driver chassis to which various mods can be fitted
  • A range of trucks for hauling stuff
  • A range of tank like vehicles
  • The ability to create multi-player vehicles e.g. "you drive I'll man the machine gun" (like Halo)
  • Hovercrafts would be cool (and I think should be a relatively easy addition to a car/truck based model)
  • Motorbikes (same deal as hovercrafts but might be significantly more difficult to make look realistic (rider movements (a) are much more apparent and (b) have much more of an affect on the control of the bike
  • A wide range of vehicles not only keeps interest up but allows us to cater to a wider range of players - e.g. certain vehicles will be easier to control than others (perhaps some will be suited to steering wheels, joysticks or keyboards)
  • Ownership of a whole garage of vehicles of course would just have to be possible ;-) - but it might not be necessary
    
    
• Game goals depend on what you want to achieve:
  • Game controlled regularly scheduled events - e.g. every Saturday night is a race - the track is anounced the week before and you get the week to practice and to prep the car appropriately (and perhaps take on missions to get cash to add new mods to the car)
    • Try and encourage the spectator aspect of the game controlled events (because not everyone will be able to enter every event and I think this might make the game have more of a community feel)
    • Encourage (simulated!) gambling on the events
    • Perhaps we could "broadcast" the event to a web browser interface (to allow someone to check in to see how so and so was doing)
  • Informal player events - a group gets together to race at a certain popular venue (we can "seed" that venue with interesting NPCs) - add spice by having to avoid the cops.
  • A long running (perhaps yearly or six monthly) competition to become the "best racer"
  • Same as above 3 points but for duelling rather than racing.
  • Getting rich, goofing off, driving to every damn place on the map (and collecting a fridge magnet) should also be viable goals. In other words hopefully we'll have some "fun stuff" for the less purely driving oriented members of the community.
    
    
• What to simulate:
  • realistic driving on a wide variety of terrains with a wide variety of vehicles.
  • possibly first person (see below)
  • possibly flight (see below)
  • economics
  • degradable equipment
  • NPC's AI (including the rap sheet concept)
  • Organizations (including police and sports "governing bodies" (just so we can have some semblance of rules for events))
    
    
• Realism issues:
  • How to bound the areas. Two alternatives spring to mind:
    • "Hard" boundaries based on geography (ravines, sea (island), dense forest etc.)
    • "Soft" boundaries - as you drive further away from the region center (e.g. a city) infrastructure such as roads and predetermined tracks get sparser. Eventually you're driving in an undefined post apocalyptic wilderness/desert. At some point you will transition into a new area which starts off with the same semi-random desert and then features such as tracks, roads and centers of population emerge.
  • How to handle game loads:
    • We ain't gonna be able to simulate NYC at rush hour with every player driving their own car!
    • Should we fall back to something that's in between MOG and MMOG? In essence MOG is say up to 8 people with no persistance and MMOG is unlimited. Is there benefit to looking at a simulation that could say handle tens of people and be persistent. We could have a fairly artificial way of moving people between communities?
  • This game screams for first person shooter / driving interaction but that may be too grand a goal. How would we restrict it? How would a person salvage a big block V8 after destroying another car? (They're hardly likely to leap out of the drivers seat, dismantle the wreck and throw the engine in the back of their own car!)
    • A story line to develop might be that the appocalyptic event was from the result of germ warfare - the resulting "civilization" never venture out of highly secure pods when out in the real world (what they do behind closed doors is left to the readers imagination!) [Note: there's a school of thought that says one has to suspend disbelief in order to play any of these games and so one or two weak points might be acceptable given that once you get over that initial hurdle everything else becomes consistent].
    • We might choose to disallow the automatic acquisition of the spoils of war out on the open road - restricting that to either NPC or player salvagers (if we have player salvagers then we have to work out how to resolve the competition between salvagers in a somewhat realistic fashion). I would suggest that part of the prize of winning a duel is the chance to salvage from the slain opponents vehicles.
  • What about other modes of transport such as planes (think of that micro-light thingy in the later Mad Max movies)? Either we have to say why aren't they allowed or include them (again that becomes a very grand goal - but wouldn't it be way cool? (dude!)).
  • Where's home? Is it possible to define a space in a city (or elsewhere) where you have your base/garage/house/whatever - would the dimensions get out of hand (in most space sims you just dock at an abstract space station end of story).
    
    
• How does this stack-up against a space sim?
  • Areas of overlap with former plans: possibly quite a lot aside from the physics and game story elements
  • If we stick with a space game (fine by me) then perhaps we would still be able to incorporate some of the ideas suggested here.
  • Some aspects of this game will be harder and some easier (now there's a wishy-washy statement!)
  • The PAD arena is certainly far less active than the space sim arena (but perhaps that's because they're not as popular with the game community!)
  • The space sim community seems willing to accept the absence of humanoid avatars - in the PAD game this might jar more
  • A PAD may have a more readily accessible personalization capability than a space sime - in real life there are already a lot of people who believe in the concept that the vehicle you drive reflects who you are (perhaps more important is the fact that there's a lot of advertising muscle behind the same concept). A PAD would be able to capatilize on this real world phenomenon (and it might be more manageable than space ship design). Furthermore we could allow players to model their own vehicles (see [Racer] for an example of how well this works today - there are some very cool and detailed models for this open source racing sim). Players can introduce them into the game and receive (in game) economic advantage by doing so. Less ambitious players can still paint their own cars or modify them in other ways. (By allowing players to define their own cars we might be able to forestall a problem with needing to obtain licenses to represent real world vehicles).