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Achron — an RTS With Time Travel
An anonymous reader writes "As much as I'm looking forward to StarCraft 2, there's a new RTS gaming tech that has me even more enthused. The Escapist Magazine has posted interviews and footage of the upcoming 'meta-time strategy game' Achron, which was announced at GDC earlier this year. It's a multiplayer RTS where you can send things through time. The official site has some gameplay footage as well, and it looks like their tech is useful outside of gaming."
Of starcraft 2 with time travel. game starts, then "nuclear launch detected" with a blinking red light on your command center.
"Going to war without the French is like going deer hunting without your accordion." ~General Norman Schwarzkopf
It's easy to imagine pushing things into the future, but pushing things back is a little harder. If it were single player, then okay... the computer remembers were everything was at the time somehow, but you would have to travel with it to make the simulation work or, perhaps, be required to work with multiple time segments simultaneously. But to do it multiplayer? Really boggles the mind.
In novels, there are roughly two main ways time-travel might be used (with a lot of gray area and variations): as a simple plot device that changes the setting, or as a hard-sci-fi thought experiment about how the world might work, or what effects there might be, if time travel were possible, and particular laws governed it. There've been videogames using the first strategy, of course. And some have elements that start going towards the second, but still embedded in the game's plot rather than the actual game mechanics. Interesting to see time-travel and its effects as an actual playable element.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Who uses retarded terms like this? I mean, honestly.
Sending stuff to the future ain't a problem, you just forget about it for 10 years. :)
Sending stuff to the past would unbalance the game.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
This is the most original thing I've seen to come out of the RTS genre in a long time.
And to think, there's no reason Blizzard couldn't have done something just as innovative and different for SC2...they just don't want to take risk.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
This isn't revolutionary. Tanya's chronobelt in Red Alert 3 already had the feature of moving the character back to her previous location and state. Once you have that mechanic, sending something forward in the is trivial -- it's just an event that's triggered by a timer.
Having already played this game in the future, I can only say that things get really strange if you try to go back in time before the game was launched and try to prevent it from being installed on your opponents computers.
Also, if you see a player on the network named John Titor, don't play against him. He seems to know what's going to happen already. Fscking cheater!
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
And the reason I still don't own a console. PC games are just more fun if you like things like this.
I'm normally not a grammar nazi, but it looks like it's time to apply the grammarFunc. grammarFunc("An real time strategy...") --> "A real time strategy..." grammarFunc, for all your recursive grammar policing needs.
"Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad." [Ecclesiastes 7:3]
With Blizzard treating sc players as bad as it has been (delaying again and again the launch of SCII, monthly fee for battle.net, no LAN playing, hunting down PvPGN servers) this is a one-of-a-kind opportunity for someone else to take the lead. It's now or never - do or die kind of decisive moment. It may be that this back to future approach is the little extra that was needed to gather attention and, who knows, maybe Blizzard will suddenly start to listen to their SC players...
Pathfinder seems simply to be an extension to D&D 3.5- I am hard-pressed to see how it's 'pretty much shaking up the entire gaming community'.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
They've limited the number of possible states (fractures) in space time with a graph that only has a limited number of states.
Eventually they fall off the edge and you can not longer go back there so it's not arbitrary.
I just hope things like AI are smart enough to change the future although it will be complex: you send a unit on a waypoint from A to B. Your opponent sends a unit to run past you in this past. Do your units attack this unit automatically and then are in a different position in the future?
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
Isn't this "kill in the past so you are better in the future" what Terminator and The Sarah Connor Chronicles was all about?
"Spear men sapping my tanks!"
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
This new game doesn't interest me.. but I'm gonna hook up my old 5.25" disk drive and look for that copy of ArchonII I used to play on my XT.
Sure sounds like it would eventually become a series of one-ups, like grips up the bat or the barberpole. "My unit takes yours."; "No, my unit goes back 5 minutes and takes you". Rinse and repeat.
Blizzard revising Starcraft 2 is not really like most traditional sequels. The original has become so popular that it is like a sport in many ways, and sports fans and players don't generally want to see a wholesale revision of the game, at most they want small gradual improvements. Basketball might be really awesome with trampolines scattered around the floor, but that's not basketball anymore.
If Blizzard were to do something extreme like this, it would best to make it its own series, perhaps as a spinoff.
I looked at some demo footage of the game and it seemed like time travel really is just like literally adding another dimension to an RTS game. Where in a normal RTS you can be attacked in the West, East, North, South (and potentially on different levels, if the game has land and air units, in Achron you can also be being attacked at a physical location that's also "in the past" and "in the future". You can go to the past and future like you'd go to different places on a map.
To make it sane, the player exists in "meta time", a kind of overall time that ties together all the different positions in game time. The difference from a spacial dimension is:
a) the further away from the current moment you want to operate, the more time energy you use up. I think you can observe any time period for free, it's just if you want to send information or objects through time that it gets expensive.
b) effects take a while to propagate - stuff causally resulting from a battle in the past takes a certain amount of meta time (player time) to propagate to the present game time. Sounds weird but think of it like this: if your opponent goes back in time and blows up *all your stuff* you will not see anything change in the present have until the "time wave" propagates the results of these events forward to the present. At that point all your units are going to disappear. But in the meantime you have a (limited) window in which to go back with some units and "fix" the past.
This *sounds* complicated but it really is just like an extra dimension of movement with some odd properties added. It makes a lot more sense if you watch the videos, once it clicks, it clicks.
And yes, you can do grandfather paradoxes and travel to the future. Have fun!
So what happens when you send a unit back in time to kill itself?
Better be written by Stephen Hawking. I'm having trouble wrapping my mind around how exactly things will play out. If I destroy a unit production structure in the past - will that in turn destroy all of the units produced by said structure? Will it refund the credits used to create those units to the other player? It seems like they will have to limit consequences to only one or two steps - if I were to destroy a building in the past, removing its created units from the playing field, which in turn restores the units/buildings that they had destroyed, things would get way too complicated too quickly. Looking forward to this - hope they release a simplified version pre-Alpha so that people can play around with it and help tune many of these sorts of decisions.
My head asplode.
In the end the 3rd dimension did not add too much to the mechanic of the gameplay. I want to see the finished game and try it before it really add a dimension and it is also a dimension of fun.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Because I just came.
(before someone mods me as troll, note that I'm just stating how awesome this game is and you should RTFA)
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You can still go back in time and warn yourself not to watch the videos - the time wave has not yet rea...
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
You will need a little more than 1.21 jigowatts to complete all the trips, though.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
There was (and still is) a company called Flying Buffalo that ran play-by-mail, computer-mediated games. Their all-time favorite was called StarWeb, but they also had a game called Time Trap. In it, you placed units on a playing field, and they attempted to destroy each other. Units could move, shoot, or store energy; with enough stored energy, a unit could move backwards in game time. Moving N turns back took N^2 energy units, and the computer re-resolved the position from the earliest intervention.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
With the very wide open API that's being created for SC2, it is very likely that someone could create this variant in SC2 in very short order.
I give it a month after release. I mean before the release. I mean after the before release... you get the idea.
Is it going to do to Time what Portal did with Space?
And can we expect a cool song at the end by Johnathon Coulton?
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
I have thought about creating a game using time travel mechanics but my solution was not as elegant as the one Achron is using. Kudos to the developers and I really hope they can sell the technology to other game companies so we can have more time travel RTS.
Every now and then I return to the on-going board meeting being held in one of my Day Dream arenas where I'm planning out how to make a game like this one work. It's quite the mental exercise.
The fact that this game exists means that either the makers have overcome some rather huge programming barriers, or they have dodged around them by cheating. Either way, if it feels right, then they've been quite clever.
The version I've been planning in my head, (with no intention of ever actually making since I'm not a programmer or game designer), was more like one of those city-building sims with a war and/or adventure element with lots of specific missions. From what I've been able to work out, essentially, the key to such a game is having a very fast and powerful computer which is capable of generating and keeping track a complete time-line of events before the game even starts. Like mapping out a whole chess game in advance. The computer would map it out from start to finish and maintain the whole thing memory. Whenever the player would take an action, the computer would re-map all the changes forward right to the end of the game so that the player could jump ahead to see what had happened. This would require the AI to guess at what the player would do for future actions, and that would be one hurdle. (There are several ways to get around the clumsiness of this mechanic and make it fit the game). And it would allow for massive changes in the city scape, which is appropriate given the enormous power time travel implies.
On the whole, it seemed rather un-doable, but the more I consider it, the more viable it seems.
A semi-related watershed moment came when that new game, "Scribblenauts" was announced. --It seems that the impossible is becoming possible, and people are being asked to think in ways we never have done before. I think that's probably healthy.
--And the part of me which watches real reality (from another Day Dream board room), is thinking that perhaps these advances are significant for less obvious reasons. . .
-FL
I just watched the video where on "The Escapist" which covers the software developers behind Achron.
So cool! --It's one of those charming out of college start-ups in somebody's house with a handful of equipment and a couple of guys developing the game. That brings back some great memories of my own.
I pretty much avoid video games like the great time-plague, but I can see myself actually picking up a copy of Achron just to support these dudes and the development of such a cool idea.
I wish 'em the best of luck!
-FL
Playing through the whole game only took ten minutes.
Subjectively, anyway.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
So what if you create a unit, then send that unit back in time and kill the structure that created him?
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
Q. On what platform will Achron be available?
A. We are currently developing for the PC, but we did it with an eye toward porting to both OS X and Linux. We would like to be able to offer Achron for the Xbox 360, the PlayStation 3, and possibly even the Wii, and are currently evaluating them.
The last I checked, Windows, Linux, and (I believe) OS X all ran on the PC platform. Maybe they are developing the game to run from a bootable disk on the PC. Much like the PS3, which can (I believe) run Linux or the PS3 loader.
Request a Linux Shockwave player here: http://www.macromedia.com/support/email/wishform/
The concept seems great. However, the graphics in the videos look more like a tech demo, or RTSes from the year 1999.
> Also, if you see a player on the network named John Titor, don't play against him. He seems to know what's going to happen already. Fscking cheater!
So THAT'S why there's no civil war!
The time wave hasn't arrived yet...
When I first looked at the headline I thought it said "Archon". Then I wanted to go back in time so I could play it in my mom's basement again. Ah, those were the days.
Bibo Ergo Sum.
In the event that you actually manage to send enough units to beat your opponent in the past and the time wave moves forward and wipes out your opponent in the present you are still stuck with one problem.
What if the other player has started reversing time when they notice they are losing and is now back to the beggining creating his first unit again when you wipe out his base in the future?
"Hey I won!"
- "No, you didn't, I'm just starting."
"Well you're dead in the future."
- "The future is not written. I'm just starting."
"This is Bullshyt, man!"
- "Pardon? Why dont you create a unit and stop typing because i'm about to zerg rush you."
"aaaaahhhh!"