[DGD] time travel

[Noah Gibbs]

--- On Sat, 2/21/09, bart at wotf.org <bart at wotf.org> wrote:

> From: bart at wotf.org <bart at wotf.org>
> Subject: Re: [DGD] time travel
> To: "All about Dworkin's Game Driver" <dgd at dworkin.nl>
> Date: Saturday, February 21, 2009, 4:27 PM
> On Sat, 21 Feb 2009 15:17:05 -0800, Shentino wrote
> > 
> > Most likely showstopper:  managing the "4th
> > dimension" in this 
> > manner would probably be prohibitively expensive in
> > resource usage, [...]
> 
> Not if you can get away with procedural generation of the
> data.

  Unfortunately, in the time dimension you mostly can't.  The problem isn't procedural generation -- it's that it's very, very hard to write a random number generator that looks enough like causation to fool a human.  Players want their actions to have consequences, and if you just RNG-generate all the content, their actions aren't allowed to have any consequences.

  You could represent changes to the gameworld with deltas, but then you'll either need a very static, very stable gameworld where changes don't ripple much (that's extremely different from the real world) or you'll wind up with deltas covering essentially your whole world, and the RNG won't do much anything useful.