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An Early Look at the NASA MMO
Big Download is running an article with details and screenshots from the MMO under development by NASA. The game makes use of Unreal Engine 3, and it's titled Astronaut: Moon, Mars and Beyond. A demo is planned for later this year, and in 2010 they expect "the first episodic installment of the game" to come out. Jerry Heneghan, founder and CEO of Virtual Heroes, described it thus: "This game is going to be a fresh look at the future circa about 2035. ... The core of the gameplay is going to be people building up their characters and as you move forward, you will have more options unlock with new places to go, new equipment to use and new things to do. We are not so much focused on interstellar flight and all that entails... the gameplay is actually about being in a habitat on a planetary surface and doing things like mining Helium-3 for fuel, operating a hydroponics facility to grow plants and create oxygen and operating robots and vehicles."
What's up with everybody using my money to make games these days. It's the latest fad in government agencies or what?
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Wwen I think of NASA, I think of Massively Multiplayer Online Games.
"His name was James Damore."
Astronaut: Moon, Mars and Beyond will be a 'first-person-exploration' game that will also include traditional role-playing game (RPG) elements for both single-player and team-based space exploration, but with a realistic twist.
By "traditional RPG elements" they must mean goblins and wizards and the most absurd J-Pop characters creatively possible...how they plan this with a realistic twist is beyond me.
Sounds to me like Final Fantasy in Space. Can't wait. Elder Scrolls Moon Landing perhaps?
Way to see our government dollars and manpower hard at work!!
Isn't the goal of a space agency to promote scientific advance for space travel? If they are tryng to get additional funding, they'd better team up with someone serious, like Blizzard, who knows the market, player's expectations and... how to make a successful game. ... really not such an innovative idea for a gameplay!
If the goal is to increase common Joe's awareness that you need to recycle etc, a boring game won't do this either.
Waste of taxpayer's money in a field where NASA has no history, no experience and
http://www.automatiq.se
Will it have realistic physics? And by realistic I don't mean video game realistic, but actual rocket science physics like Orbiter has.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
NASA needs some interest from the public, the whole country needs to inspire the young to think beyond the confines of their own assholes.
If this is one way to do it, then so be it.
To those of you who have no understanding of what NASA is worth, you really need to learn.
If you want to know what we can get from space exploration. Well, if we knew that, we wouldn't have to explore now would we...
So far NASA has given back a thousand fold to both the world and the USA.
Let's just list a few things NASA and space exploration have improved:
Electrical engineering, communications, weather forecasting, agriculture, navigation, metallurgy, synthetics, medicine, aeronautics.
Ok, I know that was a really really short list of the multitude of things that have benefited us that were heavily influenced by or came from the NASA research and experiments, but I only have a moment to post this and I have to go to an appointment.
I think of zero-g frolics, optionally involving aliens. If they make their MMO right, we can look forward to some interesting add-in modules...
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
If it's set circa 2035, why is there a space shuttle docked to the ISS in the screenshots? Shouldn't it be an Orion capsule?
...no one can hear you grind...
Trying to capitalize on the runaway success of all those exciting first-person mining/farming simulators, are they?
sudo ergo sum
"It says here you spent more on your game than you know. Exploring space." "In our defense, it's a pretty good game."
That is all.
What evidence do you have that this is your money?
The article gives a hint with the words "subscription based", three clicks and I managed to find the RFP, a quick skim gives the following quote: "Funding to design, develop, and deploy the MMO should be included in the proposer's business plan."
Apologies for interupting everyone's political flame fest, please continue...
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Is that something they're spend their slice of the stimulus on?
Really, how do people take Keynesian economics seriously today?
Send your spendthrift head of state this
This game is going to be a fresh look at the future circa about 2035
We're lucky if we get people beyond earth orbit again by then, let alone to Mars. The notion that we'll have Mars-based habitats (like those depicted in the game) is implausible. I think people just don't realize how ill-suited man is to space travel, how difficult and costly it is to keep people alive in space, and how costly it is to get mass up into orbit and beyond.
Manned interplanetary travel will happen eventually (if we don't kill ourselves first), but there's a lot of work to be done on propulsion, ecology, biology, material science, genetic engineering, and unmanned exploration first.
The first portion of the game will have you fighting Level 1 Obsolete Satellites, and it'll take about 70 of them to level the first few levels. You'll have missions to destroy tiny asteroids, maybe fix some GPS Satellites, or possibly collect a dozen 'Unique Space Debris' and bring them back to the Hubble Telescope.
But by the end of the game, there will be large 40-man Raids scouring the Martian valleys, fighting Dust Golems and Communist Colonists, the final boss of which will be the long-missing rogue Mutated Mars Rover.
"The game makes us of Unreal Engine 3..."
I think you accidentally the whole verb.
This sounds like some sort of a advertisement, and unfortunately, the game sounds pretty gay. People see this game, and they will immediately shut NASA down. Nothing turned me off to climate science more than the Science channel pseudo drama about the guys in a space station inventing some new energy source. IT was a TV show bad, that I was rooting for humanity to just end.
This is my sig.
How else are we supposed to keep the moon clear of moondust farmers?
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
Will they allow bots? Just once i wish someone would make a MMO, which allowed all sorts of bots and autoplaying. How far will people take this? Could some of these become part of a mars rover or such? Just a thought...
The core of the gameplay is going to be people building up their characters and as you move forward, you will have more options unlock with new places to go, new equipment to use and new things to do.
Wow, that doesn't sound generic at all. What exactly are people building their characters up towards? What are they moving forward to?
Please don't make this a generic grinding game that tries to solve Global Warming...
One of the story arcs that will take place over the course of the game's first year is the very real threat of global warming.
Oh crap...
"What do you do when someone is injured in space out on the surface of the moon?" asked Shariff. "One answer is a rover that can be used as an ambulance..."
One option, and this may sound callous, is to leave them. I'm fairly sure that the astronauts would sign waivers that acknowledge the risks of space travel and the costs of rescue missions are generally not feasible. Then again, that wouldn't work well for a plot in a game.
It won't take long for the Chinese Helium-3 farmers to ruin the economy.
Does someone need to look up the term 'circa' ?
And 2035... Unless we get a SERIOUS move on, 2035 will be very, very little different than today: No manned spacecraft to the Moon or Mars at all.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
"This game is going to be a fresh look at the future circa about 2035"
So it will be a game about massive unemployment, widespread abject poverty, debt slavery and inescapable bleakness as the dreams of a thousand nerds are drowned forever in the Ocean of Feces, without even their precious interweb to keep them company since it will have long since ceased to exist due to economic depression forcing people out of it (can't justify paying ISP bills when you don't even have the money to put food on the table) and ISPs shutting down.
Yeah, it's going to be a simple game after all: flip burgers, all day, the only job available to geeks with no marketable skills in the new world.
Geeks are so full of shit that "beating the crap out of them" takes a whole new meaning.
Could be an interesting social experiment. With all the "human factors" involved in both success and failure of a long term Mars mission,this could be an excellent playground to find the situations that provoke irrational behaviour and which are particularly hard to simulate.
'nuff said?
. . . someone figures out how to gank noobs by dropping asteroids onto their facilities. . . . And imagine the PVP options. . .
Jesus the broken English is just ridiculous! I stopped reading after the first two sentences for fear it would make me stupid to continue. I'm glad you're keeping Slashdot traditions, such as not reading the article, alive but could you at *least* read the submission?!
am i the only one who read ender's game? obviously, the next step is remote-control astronauts run by 9th graders... "oops! restart..."
i hope they have gnomes in it... i mean come on, mccain isn't busy anymore...
My other sig is a knife wound.
So it's a fantasy MMO then?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
...I suppose there'll be a lot of people with ressurection-sickness running around. Imagine doing a corpse-run when your ship got hit halfway between Earth and Mars.
If you quote this signature there'll be 72 copies of Windows ME waiting for you in Heaven.
OK, .gov. Money comes from the private sectors. SO NO YOU ARE NOT PAYING FOR THIS.
Let me point this out to you all, there are no $$ attached to this from
This is like the Vatican giving you blessing to make an MMO about Jesus using the Church's archives and theologists.
P.S. I know some of the project people and have seen / read the presentations
Didn't you read the article? This is "The Sims: Space Edition"
Theres no place for PVP
The core of the gameplay is going to be people building up their characters...the gameplay is actually about being in a habitat on a planetary surface and doing things like mining...
As soon as we establish another wormhole to New Eden, we'll bring plenty of motherships back through to help with colonization efforts. Honest. Pay no attention to the Titans with the doomsday weapons. I wonder if there will be the chance to invent new tech, considering none of the stuff they have now is any good for long-term colonization.
One of the 187.
Don't worry-- the NASA MMO deal is that the developer has to spend their own money. All NASA provides is basically licensing rights to use NASA images, the name, etc (in return for some oversight on the project). In fact, that was the big controversy last year during the NASA MMO pitches, that NASA wasn't pitching in money but expected the developers to fund it under NASA term's but with the developer's dime. That's why they ended up getting far fewer pitches then originally attended their big meeting.
So for good or bad, it's the developer's dime and the developer's dough. The developer, by playing by NASA's rules, gets access to neat NASA images and docs, but that's the only cost to you, the taxpayer. If it works, the developer gets lots of revenue and NASA gets good PR. If it fails, the taxpayer doesn't lose anything. I hope the game works out!
A.
Actually, I remember reading here http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/21/1744251 that NASA was putting up $3 million at first and then backed off and tried to get people to do it for free. What ever happened to that?
How many /. users are operating a hydroponics facility to grow "plants" already?
Plants = Tomatoes
Owen Money
You're over 15 years too late! See Final Fantasy IV.
I'm not interested unless the game will let me stage a lunar revolution with the aid of a sentient computer, and throw large rocks at my oppressors on Earth.
I would like to see LOTS of games that aren't based on killing stuff. I've played a lot of WoW but I am tired of all the slaughtering and am concerned about my karma. (Not my /. karma).
How about a game where NASA stays focused on establishing a permanent colony on the Moon? Using 2009 technology, and with real launch vehicles and people? This idea may even be better, put a rat maze on the moon, with living rats, and resupply it. Watch what happens to the rats. Put results on 7/24 Streaming Media, and clips of unusual stuff on Youtube.
Well, maybe, but exactly what idea or notion are they trying to get the people interested in? They can basically,
1. Actually show what life in such a colony would be like. Which is probably going to be as boring as paint dry.
It won't even be some kind of a wild-west lone-frontierman scenario. It won't even be a WoW-crafting-only scenario. Most likely you'll just be an employee doing a job there. Maybe an employee of NASA or maybe an employee of whichever corporation thinks they can make a fortune mining that Helium 3, but an employee nevertheless.
You're not going to make a living swinging a pickaxe by yourself, and/or filtering nuggets in a sieve like the wild-west gold-rushers. That wouldn't even pay for the cost of the rocket trip there. It'll going to be some large scale mining operation to make any economic sense. Someone will have to pay for all the machinery and surveying there, and that will be something worth millions or even billions of dollars. It'll be either some major corporation or NASA itself, and if you want to take any part in it, you'll be their employee. You'll work 8 hours a day operating some machinery, then go to your dorm and watch TV and hope you get paid at the month's end.
And I just don't think a work simulator will get many people interested in the MMO or the idea it sells. I know normal MMOs were called "work simulators" before, but this is the real thing, and orders of magnitude less interesting.
2. Let's say they give it some gameplay twists, like, say, make it a sorta WoW crafting and social scenario, but without the rest of WoW. So you go there on your trusty mount (maybe a rover?) look on the minimap for He3 ore veins, then go hit them with a pickaxe and rush to the auction house with the results. You know, more immediate gratification.
The first problem is that it's already deviating from the truth. It's selling an idealized frontierman colonist idea that just won't happen that way. As selling itself goes, selling based on false and deliberately misleading falsehoods and mis-representations has a name: fraud. Oh, they'll probably avoid liability in the court someway or another, but at the heart of it it remains fraud.
The second problem is that one-trick MMOs tend to still be really unpopular. Even ones which let you completely avoid most of the game (e.g., mining in safe locations in EQ2 and then spending the rest of the day in the crafting "instance") essentially just let people shoot themselves in the foot and get bored faster. You get to do the same thing over and over again, it gets boring, you leave.
The runaway success of WoW is at least partially due to there always being more than one thing to do.
Plus the rest of the game gives a meaning and purpose to that crafting exercise. You bother with it because you can make something better for yourself, or for someone else who'll then go and beat up some NPCs with it. Or if you just mine/skin and sell, you do it because someone else wants to do that. It's an activity which isn't there for itself, but because it fits the bigger picture. Cutting one activity out of context is like taking just the fingers out of the Sistine Chapel and thinking it still should make a good painting.
Basically the verdict is: it'll probably be as popular as The Sims Online, which unfortunately flopped. It won't get that many more people sold on the idea of colonization than version #1.
3. Go the full monte and make it a full MMO with lots of combat (space _and_ ground combat), hunting alien spiders for epic world drops, PvP (maybe one faction gets to play the aliens), and tiered endgame grind.
Well, I for one would welcome _that_ overlord, because there's a severe lack of good traditional (character-based as opposed to ship-based) SF-themed MMOs.
But at that point you just give up any pretense of getting people interested in what NASA actually does and in what moon colonization will be like, and sell them just a game. And any interest "buying" NASA's space-programmes based f
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Wow, those screen shots are so life-like :(
Where are the weapons?? Who gives a crap about space anyway??
What they should do is use the massive ability of MMO players to do hard labor. Think about all the information that could be parsed by NASA MMO players. Parts of the game should be looking at Hubble Images for specific items, or comparing red shifts. It has been fully shown that MMO players will "grind" up against a work load to get to the next whatever, so that should be something that NASA exploits.
If so, I wonder how many fans a cooperative building strategy game will have. MMORPGs tend to need significant subscriber numbers to pay the costs, and AFAIK similar games like "A Tale In The Desert" have pretty low subscriber numbers.
So while I like the idea, it seems quite possible that the game won't get far without NASA funding.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Heh. Whatever kind of confusion of mind gave you the idea that anyone _cares_ whether your highness has read or not read a particular message? Did I ask you to read it in the first place?
What was the exact information and insight that you were trying to impart there? That you don't have the attention span to read, but are here to skip directly to the trolling? Or what? Should I send you some ADHD medicine? Should I care at all? Give me one good reason why. I'm curious.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I can imagine people who find crafting items in MMOs to have a lot of fun with this game.
... but peer reviewed science. Read this and learn something. From the peer reviewed science journal, Science:
"Others agree. The American Meteorological Society (6), the American Geophysical Union (7), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) all have issued statements in recent years concluding that the evidence for human modification of climate is compelling (8).
The drafting of such reports and statements involves many opportunities for comment, criticism, and revision, and it is not likely that they would diverge greatly from the opinions of the societies' members. Nevertheless, they might downplay legitimate dissenting opinions. That hypothesis was tested by analyzing 928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords "climate change" (9).
The 928 papers were divided into six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. Of all the papers, 75% fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.
Admittedly, authors evaluating impacts, developing methods, or studying paleoclimatic change might believe that current climate change is natural. However, none of these papers argued that point.
This analysis shows that scientists publishing in the peer-reviewed literature agree with IPCC, the National Academy of Sciences, and the public statements of their professional societies. Politicians, economists, journalists, and others may have the impression of confusion, disagreement, or discord among climate scientists, but that impression is incorrect."
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
No PVP at this time, however NASA will be announcing at NasaCon 2010 the much anticipated Moonbase Arena Season 1 where astronauts fight for fame, glory, and moondust.
Can you really call a game that puts 30-50 players together a MMO? How about just a NASA MO game? Didn't they already collaborate with Activision on a shuttle sim for C-64 years ago? If I remember right, it was terrible.
"Blue sky on Mars. That's a new one."
> NASA MMORPG: Astronaut: Moon, Mars and Beyond
"Ok, if you wait outside the door, the head engineer'll try to follow you. If you jimmy a little bit when he sees you through the window, sometimes he'll come out without the space suit. Let him suffocate to death, then just as his hp disappears, tag him for light damage. You should be able to now loot him without getting a violence flag above your head. Take his engineer card, and a whole world of unavailable items comes up for you on the request machine back in your node."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
In other news, ESA (http://www.esa.int) choose CryEngine2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CryENGINE2) in an attempt to outbid the graphic splendor war recently ignited by NASA.
"We feel it is safe to rely on The Old World (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_world), when you want to depict The Unknown World".
Some time later, the Russian Space Agency informed the world that they have had talks with the old friends in Ukraine about deploying the Xray Engine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.T.A.L.K.E.R.#X-ray_graphics_engine).
"We don't want to be left behind. This may be something big, a Russian informant said"
There are still no official signs of a Chinese countermeasure to this stepping up, even if both Wii and PS3 developers who requested anonymity have told reporters about regular talks with Chinese investors "about a major future project".
India, Sweden, Belize, Uganda, and the UK have all denied any projects or research in this field.
It was my first exposure to (rudimentary) scripting; I ended up modifying it for my own needs later.
Plus screw the elowan and thrynn, bunch of "separate but equal" racist mofos.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
WORST... RAID BOSS... EVER...
How else are we supposed to keep the moon clear of moondust farmers?
PVP got less exciting and lost it's glamor when people worked out the quickest way to win was to flip the clip on the other person's helmet...
Psssffft. The sound you hear as your helmet opens up. The last thing you hear.
Then it's time for another spirit rez at the nearest faction graveyard...
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
"When you factor in our short-term trillion dollar deficit and the long-term budgetary crisis that will happen in the next couple decades", even quibbling about money spent on a space MMO is retarded, since it will save approximately 0% of the money you need to come up with to solve that problem.
It's like saying, given how behind we are on our mortgage payments, we really need to use less salt in our cooking, because maybe that $0.92 could go towards the mortgage instead.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10