Centration - DeadZ Space

[Monokr0me]

What is Centration?
Centration is at heart a survival sandbox game.

Players join dozens of others from all over the world to crew a space station in orbit of a far-flung solar system, on one of the most important missions of all time – to ensure the survival of the human race.

Sandbox Gameplay - The game is yours, gameplay will flow from you and the people you play with. One of the core aims of Centration is to provide a sandbox for you to create the situations and the gameplay for yourself; the opportunity for true role-play, or simple fun!
Survive or Die - Survival is key. It’s one of the most important mechanics with Centration. You’ll be on board a space station, with equipment that could (and will) malfunction, with people that could turn on you any minute, with the harsh cold of space surrounding you, and so many other unknowns that you’ll have to learn for yourself… can you survive Centration?
Multiplayer Round-Based - Centration is predominately multiplayer, played in rounds that could last from 5 minutes to 5 hours. You’ll be playing with dozens of other players from all over the world, and their motives may be slightly different from your own… Maybe they’re assigned to kill you? Maybe they’ll do it anyway. You never know… but one thing is for certain; you will need to watch your back.
Diverse Combat - Brutal, visceral, and most of all… dangerous. Centration isn’t about fast-paced in-your-face combat, running and gunning. It’s not an FPS. It’s a battle for survival. Your weapon? Whatever you can reach before you come to an untimely end. What will you get? Are you lucky enough to be armed with a gun? Maybe a scalpel smuggled out of the med-lab? Or are you unlucky enough to have been rudely interrupted on the loo, forced to use your own shoe in defence of your life…
Feature-packed Medical Systems - But of course, when everything goes pear-shaped during combat, there’s the diverse medical system , which can save (or curse…) you. You can be bruised, factured, broken, cut, strangled and poisoned. Internal bleeding, ruptured organs? Brain damage? The doctor will be your best friend… or worst enemy.
Airflow – Centration includes a dynamic airflow simulation. The station has a limited supply of air, and the tools to recycle and process the Co2 back into O2. A single hull breach is all that stands between you and the vacuum of space. In the event of explosive decompression, you will find yourself (and everything that isn’t bolted down nearby) being sucked through the breach into the cold dark of space.
Electricity – The space station uses generators to produce electricity and wires to transport it. Every bundle of wire leads to a necessary device, and every device consumes energy from the power grid. If something should go wrong, you will quickly find yourself in the dark with no life support. The power grid is dynamic, and thus, will require work and rerouting every time a section of the ship is cut off.
SCIENCE! - Why are we even here? What are we doing? Why is everyone dying? Who cares!! You can do SCIENCE! Lock yourself away in a science lab while the station rips themselves apart, and discover all the secrets that await you, or team up with the crew to uncover new and cruel ways of inflicting pain and death.
Fully interactive Environment - Where’s the fun if you can’t blow shit up? The entire station is interactive and destructible. You never wanted that corridor anyway. Might as well, you know, blow it up?

www.centration.co/

[Monokr0me]

Sign up on the forums for a chance to get a beta key

[QwertyuiopThePie]

Airflow: A fancy way to say "We monitor numbers that are affected by things" and "We have an animation if you shoot the wall". Ultimately not very impressed, but it could be interesting. I'll probably get it upon release.

[Monokr0me]

Here's some info about the damage system from the head programmer:

We mostly are handling damage by hitbox. Where the bullet impacts, the player will calculate the volume of stuff in the way based on where they get hit. When it enters the hitbox, the player's damage model knows the location of the spine, the pancreas, etc. etc. At first, we're really only going to create hitboxes for major muscle groups, tissues, and bones, and eventually move down to the finer details like non-respiratory internal organs.

The organs within the path of the bullet will be calculated, their densities, and the bullet will attempt to pass through each. If the bullet strikes enough tissue, or strikes hard enough systems or clothing, the bullet will stop.

Now, I detailed earlier how syndromes work, you might want to take a look at that. But a gunshot wound is considered a syndrome that is added to the player's vitals simulation. Since we can assume that the body works perfectly without any syndromes at work, we don't have to simulate anything BUT syndromes. Meaning we cut out a lot of the useless processing, and it's all very efficient.

Organs and individual syndromes define their own behaviors. When a gunshot syndrome is added to an organ, it degrades the function of that organ by a certain amount (based on the severity of the wound), and depending on the type of syndrome, can come attached with a bleeding syndrome, rupture syndromes, etc. etc. So if the bullet tears through the gut, the rupture syndrome tracks what is happening to the player's body while his innards seep into his abdominal cavity.

If he gets hit in the brain, some parts of the brain are essential, which will cause syndromes that result in rapid or very near instantaneous death.

If the bullet gets stuck in a wound, the wound cannot be completely healed until the bullet is removed. This is another type of syndrome, which is more or less a "shrapnel" effect, keeping wounds open, or slowing the healing rate.

So yes, as someone earlier said, it depends on where you get hit. You don't have a "HP" variable in this game. You have a set of systems that are constantly keeping you alive. Once those systems stop functioning, you start dying. So if you lose lung function, you slowly suffocate. If you bleed too much, you slowly suffocate. If you break your spine --you won't die, but you sure won't be able to use the limbs below the break. It all depends on what's damaged, and what syndromes the devteam (or modders) have implemented.

Since we don't have to define these behaviors outright with the wounding system in mind, we can merely dictate wounding effects per wounding type after designing our system. This makes the entire system really easy to work with, and very extensible. --Even opening the door to sever modification by the host.

[QwertyuiopThePie]

Souns like an incredibly overcomplicated system that will lag horribly to very little positive effect but realism.

[Monokr0me]

Aug 22, 2012 14:06:25 GMT -5 QwertyuiopThePie said:

Souns like an incredibly overcomplicated system that will lag horribly to very little positive effect but realism.

As opposed to optimized games like minecraft, which updates millions of blocks every tick and saves the game every 3 seconds? Don't underestimate your computer (minecraft doesnt even use multithreading)

[Listwich]

To be candid, minecraft doesn't really update millions of blocks every tick. It only bothers to check up on the blocks that could possibly be affected. And the 3 second save gives my game serious FPS issues occasionally and requires optifine to fix.

But yes, don't underestimate the computer.

[nm]

way to revive the forum idiot

[Listwich]

thank you

[QwertyuiopThePie]

Do you realize how long it takes to run computer simulations on the galactic scale? And how much memory they take up? And that's supercomputers. Plus, we're talking mere terrabytes of storage max for singleplayer, although having people connect to a server and only load the areas around them would be more reasonable. That said, it could be doable if the server itself is quite powerful, but a galaxy is too large for an MMO anyway.

[Listwich]

Solution: Quantum Computers