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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."
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.
It remains to be seen if this wildly experimental game is actually fun though. Obviously there has to be some way to make something permanent (maybe unit death?) given that otherwise the game devolves into each player just pulling repeated time tricks on each other forever (see: Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure).
I read the internet for the articles.
The chrono belt probably just logs the character's X,Y every 5 seconds. This does not actually imitate time travel or solve time paradoxes. That chronobelt does not undo what you just did 5 seconds before!
When you go back in time and change something or forward, you have to solve a paradox of something happening.
Achron does this by running both possibilities simultaneously. It's definitely novel and fresh.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
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.