Hi charles.
A person looking into outer space would see blackness intersperced with a
lot of very small lights, that is stars, ---- accept that for me owing to
the badness of my remaining vision I've only ever seen stars a couple of
times because it has to be very clear, (indeed once was up in the alps),
though that did make it quite a profound experience.
Portraying the emptiness of space in audio is a good question.
What occurs to me is that playing a game like smugglers 5 or core exiless,
if your playing with sound you don't really see the background of the game,
just the various places in your star system which you can travel to, thus
you don't particularly get an idea of how empty space is.
the best way that occurs to me would be a full scanning system ala something
like lone wolf which emphasizes the fact that there is literally nothing in
your immediate area, indeed you could have it scan for distant stars and be
told the precise distance in game terms.
So imagine a space game similar to lone wolf where you had a mission to fly
from earth to alpha centori, a comparatvely short distance in steller terms
only 5 light years, but one which would take considderable time, and then
other stars even further distant.
imagine for instance that your ship flue at a real time speed, a quarter of
a light year a minute. Well it'd be 20 minutes to alpha centori, but if you
selected other distant targits with your scanners you would be told a
really! long journey time, for instance trying to travel to andromeda would
take close to 20 hours!
this could be further expanded by having jump gates around the system which
would obviously cut your journey times, and also introducing some objects
and stars so distant that you would take literally years to get there.
Of course, even this isn't perfect sinse any sort of real simulation of even
light speed travel would make the game ridiculous in it's travel time, but
given the massive distances of space that is what occurs to me.
another method, and one which is a little more viseral, might be to include
some very, very very! faint blips on an audio scanner, perhaps just at the
edge of hearing to represent stars, though whether you could get a scanning
blip faint enough to still be audible and yet be so background I'm not sure.
Beware the grue!
Dark.
---
Gamers mailing list __ [email protected]
If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [email protected].
You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at
http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org.
All messages are archived and can be searched and read at
http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected].
If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list,
please send E-mail to [email protected].
