As far as music, typically less "ordered" societies have a more personal level of music. In modern society, most performed music is done by professionals, and basically all distributed music (aside from a few videos on YouTube and the like) is professionally-done. When you take away those distribution channels, though, more people will play music just for themselves and their friends. This means more evident casual players, a proliferation of small, portable instruments (flutes, banjos, and the like), much less recorded music, and so on.

As for when to set the game, one possibility is that your ship is the first operational one that one of the more outlying planets has managed to get going. Thus, in a kind of Fallout concept, your job is to go out there, find out what in blazes happened to everyone else, and help get your planet back on its feet.

A few other thoughts:

• Communication lines should be few and unstable. News should not be even remotely instantaneous.
• Murk and radar noise would probably be more common, as gear decays.
• Any operational carrier ships would probably be repurposed as ad-hoc space stations.
• Destroying ships would be wasteful even for pirates. Pretty much everyone should have the "disable and board" AI.
• Fuel will be a problem. Maybe slap a bunch of solar panels onto the ships? It'd be neat if you could work that into the ship models, but I know what kinds of art problems you have.
• Petty warlords would replace the pirate lords of yesteryear. A small fleet of battle-capable Vipers with a Valkyrie "command craft" would be able to effectively terrorize a system for a not insignificant amount of time, if I'm reading your tech levels properly.

There is always the movie Logan's Run but put it on a Galactic scale.

Side note: The Polaris are humans, not Aliens. I read the documentation and the Polaris were referenced as humans during their civil war.

But back to my thoughts on your original idea. I THINK Logan's Run started off as a book but Earth was totally populated then at some point you have these domes. Something goes wrong, and Logan (and scantily clad babe) explore a dead world. Expand that A LOT

The Nova Universe is populated and happy. Something goes wrong and some people retreat to domes or structures or Walled Cities. You start the game with something going wrong at your location. You get out and find a ship and decide to go exploring. What you find are dead worlds. Perhaps there are automated stations with trade goods that still work (available trade goods that you can take back to your city)

Automated Gunbot instead of Pirates that may defend a planet

Imagine that these ships were built by the Polaris. They might be living ships and might heal themselves Or there might be a space station that they go back to

That's a really cool concept, and it's suited to the engine. I always felt a bit alone in the universe when i played anyways, so this would add atmosphere. Good luck.

And you should check out a book called Earth Abides.

This concept reminds me of the Future era in Chrono Trigger. I'd love to see a bleak plug-in or TC, and would love to help write it as well. If you've any interest in getting this off the ground, or maybe collaborating on working out a plot, I would participate in this.

@derakon, on Feb 5 2008, 12:58 AM, said in After Nova:

<snip>

Also good ideas.

On that communication's note, the way things look, Fed space, being the last area to be hit with the disease and also the place that created both the vaccine and later cure (though neither are 100% effective), would be the safest and most populous. By those statements, that means you aren't likely to get attacked and, mainly due to the layout of jump routes, you can usually reach another inhabited world without recharging. Hence, the Fed's hyperspace system works again to someone's advantage. When you get to Auroran space, things get less and less pretty the closer you get to Polaris space. I'm thinking that the Feds will have deleted the jump lanes from the hyperspace maps to quaratine the Polaris and later Aurorans from themselves, to prevent people from going those ways. It's still like that, so to get to Auroran space, you'd have to find an obscure lane somewhere and then travel through it to reach Polaris space, which is completely cut-off.

@vast-deathmaster, on Feb 5 2008, 01:04 AM, said in After Nova:

There is always the movie Logan's Run but put it on a Galactic scale.

Side note: The Polaris are humans, not Aliens. I read the documentation and the Polaris were referenced as humans during their civil war.

Imagine that these ships were built by the Polaris. They might be living ships and might heal themselves Or there might be a space station that they go back to

I know they're not aliens, but some Polaris ships are sentient, the Manta as smart as a dog. Without anyone to control them, I feel that they'd try to survive on their own, slowly becoming a new kind of space creature. So in Polaris space, you'd have these wild organic ships living there, acting on their own.

@razzle-storm, on Feb 5 2008, 03:11 AM, said in After Nova:

This concept reminds me of the Future era in Chrono Trigger. I'd love to see a bleak plug-in or TC, and would love to help write it as well. If you've any interest in getting this off the ground, or maybe collaborating on working out a plot, I would participate in this.

If I decide to do this, I'll probably be looking for people to at least bounce ideas off of. I'll keep you in mind.

Heh, this kind of reminds me of something my older brother and I were discussing the other day. You see, he wants to write this novel (a series of short stories, actually) set in an ev-esque universe, and he half-jokingly refers to it as 'EV5'.

Anyway, he wanted me to come up with some sort of pan-galactic pandemic that could wipe out at least ten heavily populated worlds. His best idea was the use of rampant, time-delayed nano-machines, but for some odd reason he doesn't seem to think thats quite malicious enough.

Even so, you might find some use of the idea.

A few more ideas... (As I said earlier, I'd help, if you would accept it, JTH. I would just need it for experience.)

If the Federation is still there but in very bad shape, perhaps some missions would include a general saying "Ok, <PN>, we need you to check <system name> and see if the people on the planets are still alive."

Then there could be a new storyline: a detective one, like Aftermath! You would be asked to find the cause of the epidemic (which, if it is still there, claims much less lives but still lives on) and help Federation scientists to devise a cure for it.

Also, some ships would have to be pretty old school. For example, since we use stealth fighters, why not have those as a ship?

Plus, notably, for raging wars in this time period we'd probably have to use assault rifles, handguns, machine guns, the like... Those could be weapons for ships, like "A47 Machine Gun" as a primary weapon, or "M-45 Rocket Launcher" as a secondary.

Just ideas. Hope they could help.

This post has been edited by king_of_manticores : 05 February 2008 - 07:18 PM

@king_of_manticores, on Feb 5 2008, 06:17 PM, said in After Nova:

A few more ideas... (As I said earlier, I'd help, if you would accept it, JTH. I would just need it for experience.)

If the Federation is still there but in very bad shape, perhaps some missions would include a general saying "Ok, <PN>, we need you to check <system name> and see if the people on the planets are still alive."

Then there could be a new storyline: a detective one, like Aftermath! You would be asked to find the cause of the epidemic (which, if it is still there, claims much less lives but still lives on) and help Federation scientists to devise a cure for it.

Also, some ships would have to be pretty old school. For example, since we use stealth fighters, why not have those as a ship?

Plus, notably, for raging wars in this time period we'd probably have to use assault rifles, handguns, machine guns, the like... Those could be weapons for ships, like "A47 Machine Gun" as a primary weapon, or "M-45 Rocket Launcher" as a secondary.

Just ideas. Hope they could help.

I like the first idea, as well as the idea of a ship that looks like a stealth fighter, but for the last one, I'd think that by nova's time, the only archaic weapons that you'd find would be in museums, they wouldn't be that widespread unless they're something really easy to produce and/or and design that has been reinvented due to necessity.

@extremespeed, on Feb 5 2008, 04:29 PM, said in After Nova:

I'd think that by nova's time, the only archaic weapons that you'd find would be in museums, they wouldn't be that widespread unless they're something really easy to produce and/or and design that has been reinvented due to necessity.

That would be the point. Because there are way less people, the scientists and/or engineers will have to take much longer to develop weapons. In order to protect yourself in space from marauders looking for food, money, and such, you would need any weapon you could get your hands on. These 'archaic weapons', as you put it, would have to be put on sale in order for the person to be protected and the seller to make money for food and whatnot.

And, another idea: some ships would have to have very small jump ranges (ie: 1-4 jumps).

This post has been edited by king_of_manticores : 05 February 2008 - 07:53 PM

The Federation no longer exists, or any of the governments from Nova. Every planet or station that is habited has gone with their own government and their ships' IFF tags read said spob, so ships from Misfire are part of the "Misfire" government. Most ships and weapons available are some of Nova's smaller ships and arms. I mean, Light Blasters were in use 300 years prior to Nova, so those wouldn't be too hard to make anymore. Plus a large number would have been salvaged over the years from disabled ships and, later, from suspension in military store houses. However, even the Medium Blaster would be quite rare (not sure if those should be for sell), so you'd be hard pressed to obtain some of Nova's more powerful items, or even moderately powered ones.

Some good ideas though.

I think I'm going to wind up commiting to this project. Ideas still keep popping into my head for it. Things like forcing a player to go against a... FULLY FUNCTIONAL MANTICORE! And other things as well.

How far into the future are you thinking this will take place, again? Because the Federation and other governments will develop their own weapons and such between the time this game takes place in and the time in which this occurs. They might create new versions of light blasters, or weapons meant to replace light blasters that become and mainstream as light blasters.

Just something to consider.

Roughly 300 years, over 7 trillion less people.

Another idea I had with this was having a mission sometime where the player would get disabled and boarded by a pirate, but instead of having credits stolen, the player would take over the pirate's ship (using a gun or something similar). I was thinking this would be going on when the player still only had their first ship, which would maybe be weaponless?

I already wrote a plug that does the first half pretty well (onFail changes the player's ship to the pirates ship). The only thing I'm still wondering how to do is get the pirate ship to change to another ship. Any ideas?

If all the people landing on planets run the risk of infection or re-infection from the deadly virus, it seems that there'd be a large population that lived permanently in space, and would probably resist or at least be very cautious around anyone they didn't know. In my attempt at a degenerating universe TC, I had quite a few stations created from the floating remnants of derelict ships fastened together to form makeshift deep-space habitats. The look would be similar to the spacestation I saw once in a movie called Titan A.E. - very chaotic/organic growth, with lots of people living in relatively poor conditions. These stations could be spobs in a system, or even ships themselves, albeit very slow-moving and jump-disabled. I had some ships especially set up for farming in space, and they were just given a top speed of 0 and a neglible turn radius. It effectively kept them from jumping out, but they still were treated as ships, including the boarding actions. Couple stations like that with the ability to scavenge from disabled ships like I sort of went into on an earlier topic, and you might have given the player a great way to be that pirate/marauder archetype.

Actually, I even thought that the player should have the option to destroy stations by ruining their solar power collectors. Using OnDeath and ncb's, I was able to have stations die when their support spob's were killed. By doing this, you can give some missions of "destroy enemy factions habitats" and have the player either struggle to destroy a well-armored main station or to be clever and go after the solar collector floating off by itself, achieving the same result in either case.

The gov'ts that would arise in such a universe would be nearly all "warlord-like" with lots of hoarding and little cooperation. I imagine some groups that might try to unite in hopes of a better universe/return to greatness/cooperate to figure out what happened, but think that, for the most part, everybody is pretty much out for themselves, and that factions are not going to span very many systems. Consequently, expect lots of territorial raiding between, say, the asteroid-rich system and its heavily-populated-but-little-resources neighbor two jumps away.

Here's another possible idea to throw into the burner. Some Polaris scientists may have found away to avoid the plague, or at least find an alternative to "live" beyond the plague, and that would be to somehow infuse themselves into starships themselves one or another making themselves somewhat or completely immune to the diseases.

You people are making me think about this too much! On the other hand, there seems to be way too much interest in this concept to not do it. So, unless something beyond my control happens, I'm most likely going to undertake this. However, I'm going to back away from it until Colosseum is in everyone's hands and I've figured out what direction I'd want to take the plug-in. Tons of ideas in this thread, but I couldn't possibly use them all!

This all sounds pretty neat. It sounds pretty hard, but it also sounds pretty neat.

Actually, come to think of it, it reminds me of Metroid Fusion, near the end; by that time

Spoiler

the SA-X

is running about all over the place. The thing is, since it can

Spoiler

kill Samus with just a few shots

, the game gets really creepy, as you constantly fear about what just might be beyond the next corner.

Can I take a moment to mention my sponsor Redchigh's TC-in-progress, 3000?

This post has been edited by SoItBegins : 06 February 2008 - 11:54 AM

I wonder what you'd get if you tried to combine this idea with the theme of Colosseum. You might have to drop some features of one or both milieus and create some unusual bridging rationale, but the total effect could be eerie and cool.

As to that "bridging rationale," perhaps the civilizations of Nova were rapidly destroyed (via bioweapons, among other things) by some much greater outside civilization that saw the Polaris as a possible future threat. They judged knocking back the Polaris' weaker relatives to be prudent, but perfect eradication wasn't essential because the Feds and Aurorans were so far behind. The outside civilization has almost no further interest in the planets and peoples they wrecked (perhaps they aren't even oxygen breathers?), but there are those among them who enjoy a good gladiatorial matchup....

Hm. Shades of The Gamesters of Triskelion.

@joshtigerheart, on Feb 5 2008, 06:09 PM, said in After Nova:

The Federation no longer exists, or any of the governments from Nova. Every planet or station that is habited has gone with their own government and their ships' IFF tags read said spob, so ships from Misfire are part of the "Misfire" government.

I don't suppose this would make getting into storylines hard, along with making them...

@joshtigerheart, on Feb 5 2008, 06:09 PM, said in After Nova:

Most ships and weapons available are some of Nova's smaller ships and arms. I mean, Light Blasters were in use 300 years prior to Nova, so those wouldn't be too hard to make anymore. Plus a large number would have been salvaged over the years from disabled ships and, later, from suspension in military store houses. However, even the Medium Blaster would be quite rare (not sure if those should be for sale ), so you'd be hard pressed to obtain some of Nova's more powerful items, or even moderately powered ones.

Well, you could make it so that even the most simple items would have a high tech level. You could have the Medium Blaster for sale, except that you should change the tech level of it from, what, tech level 3-20, to a very high tech level of 100-225. Then make like three planets or so have it for sale.

About the Medium Blaster being rare... I would say it would be nearly impossible to get an Ion Particle Cannon or a Heavy Blaster Turret, or even a Hellhound Missile Launcher and some missiles.

For salvaging, maybe have certain pers ships carry weapons, like a Medium Blaster, and when you board them, it would probably say, "You find a weapon attached to the ship, and some mechanism. Do you <insert actions here> or <insert even more actions here>?" And if you do complete it correctly, you get the weapon.

There's probably going to be no illegal weapons for sale. And by the way, I just had to fix your mistake. Sorry.

@joshtigerheart, on Feb 5 2008, 06:09 PM, said in After Nova:

I think I'm going to wind up commiting to this project. Ideas still keep popping into my head for it. Things like forcing a player to go against a... FULLY FUNCTIONAL MANTICORE! And other things as well.

Notably, the Manticore should either have 1-2 Ion Cannons OR it should be a Light Weapons Version (you know, the one which has 8 Medium Blasters in place of the 8 Ion Cannons).

@dr--trowel, on Feb 6 2008, 11:46 AM, said in After Nova:

I wonder what you'd get if you tried to combine this idea with the theme of Colosseum. You might have to drop some features of one or both milieus and create some unusual bridging rationale, but the total effect could be eerie and cool.

This idea wouldn't mesh very well with Colosseum. CTC combat and gameplay intensive. There's a decent storyline to go with it, but it isn't the focus. There's also very little background information on the CTC universe beyond the Colosseum sector, something that'd have to be developed a great deal before it could work with what appears to be an atmosphere and story intensive concept. Not to mention the technology of the Colosseum universe is significantly below that of the Aurorans, or at least what's allowed to be used in the matches.

@king_of_manticores, on Feb 6 2008, 06:43 PM, said in After Nova:

I don't suppose this would make getting into storylines hard, along with making them...

Not really, just needs some creativity and a different approach.

Quote

Well, you could make it so that even the most simple items would have a high tech level. You could have the Medium Blaster for sale, except that you should change the tech level of it from, what, tech level 3-20, to a very high tech level of 100-225. Then make like three planets or so have it for sale.

About the Medium Blaster being rare... I would say it would be nearly impossible to get an Ion Particle Cannon or a Heavy Blaster Turret, or even a Hellhound Missile Launcher and some missiles.

For salvaging, maybe have certain pers ships carry weapons, like a Medium Blaster, and when you board them, it would probably say, "You find a weapon attached to the ship, and some mechanism. Do you <insert actions here> or <insert even more actions here>?" And if you do complete it correctly, you get the weapon.

There's probably going to be no illegal weapons for sale. And by the way, I just had to fix your mistake. Sorry.

You're pretty much right on my ball there, except when you salvage an outfit, you have to take it somewhere to be repaired so its usable. And then the engineers abuse their monopoly and charge you to install it onto your ship, though mostly to prevent the player from getting overstuffed with outfits, like a Shuttle who got REALLY lucky and salvaged seven HBTs (good luck on doing that).

Quote

Notably, the Manticore should either have 1-2 Ion Cannons OR it should be a Light Weapons Version (you know, the one which has 8 Medium Blasters in place of the 8 Ion Cannons).

Too early to say what it'd have, if said Manticore even appears. Though being forced to fight one with a full Crown of Thorns would be seriously difficult.

I recently envisioned some places spending years and years reconstructing a single capital ship for offensive or defensive purposes, with them armed with whatever they could find. Like a Fed Carrier with Medium Blaster Turrets, Storm Chainguns, IR Missiles, a Rebel Viper Bay, and a Civvie Lightning Bay (I made up that selection of weapons as I went).