From: Bullard, Claude L (Len) (clbullar_at_ingr.com)
Date: 15 June 1998
-----Original Message-----
From: Jed Hartman [SMTP:jed_at_sgi.com]
Yet another thing that IrishSpace did right: there was no
attempt to build one giant all-inclusive world that maintained
spatial
relationships between locations and forced the interactor to
experience
those spatial relationships. Having some way of saying "Three
months
later..." in a story is immensely useful; there's no need to make
the
interactor actually experience three months of boredom while a
spaceship
makes its trip.
No attempt???? Just so you know, we sure as hell tried to. ;-)
We were well into designing a one-world solar system when I sat down one night with some figures a list member sent (rob st john, i think) of the conversions to orbits at scale. I did a quick mockup and got the O' DUH of the project: space be very very large and very very empty. In other words, what you can see from planet to planet is nada and even the sun is nada from beyond mars. That killed the idea of using the great nav controls being designed to let the kid fly amongst the stars. Even with time compression and all of that, it just wasn't worthy. That was when we started thinking about scene loading and unloading and came up with the itinerary idea. Where we cheated was on the flyby of Venus (not physically correct but it was an excuse to go there and we had to hit all the planets since that was our only requirement).
Later on, this decision to abandon a one-world indirectly saved us as we found out just how buggy java-handling was at the time. There but for the grace of God...
> (Crawford's story engine doesn't *have* spatial relationships between what
> he calls "stages" -- the characters depart one stage and arrive at
> another,
> with time (optionally?) elapsing between departure and arrival but no
> events during transit. At first I was put off by this idea, but I'm
> beginning to think it's pretty elegant -- if you need events to happen in
> transit, I assume you just create an "inside the car" stage, or a "grassy
> plain" stage.)
>
[Bullard, Claude L (Len)] Yep. That was why we had the JJ scenes at certain points either in the cockpit or outside: transitions in scenes and plot. The movies are a pretty good model for this but Sixties TV is good too because faced with budgets and time constraints, sets were minimal and reusable. The Brits are the Masters of the craft of getting rid of non-essentials and using the dialog to cover their tracks. Also note the recent comments from the StarGate producers that second season production costs go way down because you get to reuse objects from the first season. It will pay teams who build long-form to hang together and to also provide in their agreements for reuse should a web show become successful or sequelized (SELECT object WHERE CASHFLOW > 0). len
This archive was generated by hypermail pre-2.1.8 : 28 November 2004 CST