At any point down the line..

Would Uber ever go the route of the Unreal Engine and start licensing the UBER ENGINE out, perhaps even for free to extend the life of PA? Obviously I'm reaching quite far in to the future here but for the people with the know how and the drive to do it I think the community might be able to help keep it up while keeping ubers costs down.

I don't understand

Do you mean servers?

I think this is what you meant.

unreal...... pffff... BLASPHEMY!

I mean how you can get your hands on the entirety of the Unreal engine through licensing. As in one step away from completely open source.
Think community patches.

Well the entire plan from the beginning has been 'PA as a platform' so I'm certain that Uber are open to this kind of thing You never know, perhaps Chris Taylor will licence the PA engine to create TA 2 (after he went to all that trouble to get the IP)...?

For christ sake !! you're doing this to tick me off aren't you??

Ureal .... Uber ....... UNREAL ..... UBER

NOT the same thing!

The 'Uber engine' has a nice ring to it tho, doesn't it?

You are reading it wrong. Close your eyes, take a deep breath, open your eyes and read again. He is not calling PA engine Unreal engine. He says what if PA engine could be licensed just like UE.

They have tossed around the idea of doing this in livestreams.

Maybe? Maybe not.

Would be cool if they did. Could give a new lease on life for the RTS genre.

Basically this.

and I mod with it, its a pretty straightforward engine, could use some hooks before that, but I'm sure they are considering it because they consider the engine a platform.

its webscript based and it uses a coherent overlay, when more technology catches up to it then it will be very flexible and desireable.

As a child I fantasised about the things that would be possible in computer games as technology progressed. Things that have by and large been surpassed in modern games (Grand Theft Auto covering most of them on its own to be fair ), but one thing that is still to be done is a game world so massive that multiple players can be playing entirely different games and still interact with each other.

Fighter pilots playing something like X-Wing would dogfight between the stars, soldiers playing an FPS would attempt to infiltrate bases on planets, every conceivable pilot or active character could be played as a separate game, each with its own goals and progression. And then some players would act as generals, giving orders to specific groups of people, giving them mission objectives and limiting their range of movement to ensure that the orders were actually carried out.

The PA engine could be the first step towards making that a reality.

You were almost there bud.

oh.

They've talked about it before, I hope they do, I'd buy it so I could work further on the PA mods in working on. o3o

I'd probably make a star wars rts too... @Geers

why should they? the engine of PA is entirely homemade and has nothing to do with the unrealengine as far as i know ... unreal has only been used for mnc and smnc to my knowledge

as for licencing it in order so others can make their games i could see that working ...
but extending PA´s life with that? i dont think that would work this way .. but through modding PA as we already do and will more so when offline capabilities are available ..

Why is everybody misreading what he said? Seems pretty obvious what he meant.

I edited the OP to hopefully eliminate that from happening again.

Well there is star citizen

Would be cool if it could do that in the future...

A couple of scenarios that come to mind in this hypothetical game-of-games of the future:

In Elite 2 (and possibly the original) there were some star systems you could travel to that made one or other commodity illegal. Typically these commodities would be Slaves or Nuclear Weapons, but some systems had no restrictions and some had more idiosyncratic restrictions, like Robots or Meat. Illegal commodities were therefore more valuable in those systems but you risked a hefty fine for trading in them.

Imagine a system where any weapons past handguns are illegal, as are robots. Say somebody's playing a Fallout-style game on one of these planets. Any smuggler risking importing energy weapons could command a very high price, but of course there would have to be a very high probability of any shipment being busted to ensure that these weapons maintain their rarity.

Standard shops would operate on the same principle as Skyrim shops, except the prices would be dictated by an economy of supply and demand. Illegal goods could be bought in hidden shops that the player would have to complete a series of tasks to gain access to.

----------

Another planet could be isolated from the outer universe at large, and be restricted to medieval technology and perhaps some sort of magic that is driven be a peculiar property of that planet itself, i.e. a traditional western RPG. From the point of view of the residents of that planet, there would be a magical field encompassing the planet stopping any contact with the universe outside. However there would be a prophecy that when the planets aligned in a certain way, the Rapture would happen, the heavens would open and fire would rain down from the sky.

From the point of view of the science-fiction pilots flying around outside the planet, there would be some sort of electro-magnetic field over the planet stopping anything getting through. Until the rare occasion when planetary alignments shifted the gravitational field enough that a small opening in the field would allow a small number of space fighters through.

On the planet, any players that had completed the Rapture puzzle would be able to stand at the monolith under the opening to space, and would be invulnerable to the space fighters. They could then choose to join one of the pilots and escape out into the world. The people remaining on the planet would have to hide in the underground caves as the space fighters raptured the hell out of their planet. Any pilot trying to get out of his fighter and run amok on the surface would be prevented by some mechanism or other, e.g. warriors' mirrored armour makes his laser weapons useless, or some other clever feat of balancing that would mean he was unable to go head to head with one of the RPG warriors (that also allows a small number of the RPG warriors out into the sci-fi world without them being unstoppably powerful).

To avoid it being horribly anachronistic, the crossover between the types of world would have to be very strictly limited in number of players, but nonetheless possible for somebody very determined to be a space-faring battlemage.

----------