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I think it would be extremely confusing for the player if you''re allowed to move between different parallell time-lines. It would be difficult to remember what has happened,
Umm, let''s see, did I manage to kill the super-goblin in this timeline or.....?
But it''s definitely a cool idea, I''m sure that it could be implemented with a little (read ''quite alot of'') planning and with some restrictions on the time-travels...
Even if the plot is linear it would provide a cool twist to it. And as said in another thread; Linear plots aren''t a bad thing.
Just watch the ''Back to the Future'' films a couple of times and you should get the hang of the implications of time-travel
This thing''s a cool idea but probably can not work realisticly because no one has done time traveling to really tell us, WHAT Effects it could have and so forth. One thing that''s close to time travel is "effect before cause". That would mean, that the result comes out first and the cause comes after. Meaning The ball hits first and gets thrown later.
Also other things where you go in time and change past or whatever. But that wouldn''t really work, Because it''ll put you in a messed up loop. For example, say that you go back in time, and you ACCEDENTLY kill your grandfather and GrandMother in a car accident. Now if your grandpa and ma don''t exist anymore, then your dad can''t exist because his ma and pa don''t exist, if your dad doesn''t exist then you don''t exist. If you don''t exist then how did you go back in time and kill your grandfather? If You don''t exist to go back in time and kill your grandpa then your grandpa''s alive and your grand ma''s alive meaning your dad''s alive and you''re alive. But we just said that you don''t exist.
Do you guys get it? So really you can''t get a vision from future seeing your self dead in 4 hours. BECAUSE you don''t know how you died. If say you died battleing the monsters then you go and kill them one by one, in 4 hours.. BUT may be That''s how you died, you faught the last monster, and he killed you. When you thought all the monsters killed you..
SO it''s not nessecerily possible to make a game that Effectively reflects the time, because we really don''t have a ''working'' formula for time travel. It''s almost close to impossible to do it, UNLESS you spend 10 hours trying to code every aspect of what could happen in the game to try not make it linear, because otherwise it will be linear.
There was a movie, I don''t quite remember its name, something w/ The United America, in the future, the whole world w/ just one president, who unfortunately was an alien. one year after the alliance between the world was made, the aliens attacked. A space sattelite''s(something like MIR) commnader, John Raynor, who gets transported, together w/ his escape ship, into the past. there he meets a female scientist(alien, too; some kind of a scout), who pretends to be on his side. Also, the most-negative character is one(also alien) working for a government agency. Anyway, that''s not the point. The point is, that a consequence of the time-travelling is that he sees flashes, some kind of warps from the future, showing him where he will be, and a POSSIBLE FUTURE, mostly when someone in his vecinity dies. That''s how he knows where he must go next, and what he must do. in most cases, he manages to change history every time, and to save the person he saw dying. The goal was to stop the aliens from attacking, but in the same time to keep the aliens from killing his mom while she is carrying him in her woum, from killing him when he is born, or him the grown-up. Anyway, the flashes (very, very nice VF/X) that represent a possible, but NOT definite future may be like you want them.
"Everything is relative." -- Even in the world of computers.
everything is relative. -- even in the world of computers... so PUSH BEYOND THE LIMITS OF SANITY!
One way of peventing infinate (or close to it) time-lines is to allow the player to only exist in the earliest version, but can inherite stuff from latter versions. Also you should allow the player the exist in the same time frame as him self but in a different area. If the player gets too close to their formor self then the 2 copies of the player should mearge or have some drastic effect take place.
This simplifies it as you only have to save the data for ONE time line but this time line can be changed at any time. I''m agree with OberonZ as this allows some neat paradozes to be solved. Frackly who cares if you pop out of now-were with no history at all? This happens all the time any way in games. Time travel should be restricted as it can get very confusing if the player is constantly bouncing through the time-lines drastacly changing things.
One way to cut down on the number of possible timelines is to say that only a major change can cause a split. John Barnes did that in his Timeline Wars series. Let''s say your Super-Goblin is actually a hermit and doesn''t ever bother anyone. If you go back in time and kill him as a baby, it doesn''t really change anything significant, so the timelines flow back together. However, if the Super-Goblin is a rampaging menace and annihilates somebody''s army, killing him will have a drastic effect, so the timelines stay apart.
Also, what if changing the past didn''t affect the person who changed it? That way, you could go back in time and kill your grandfather, and your past would disappear up to the point where you actually kill him, but you would continue to exist.
-Sirius
Confucius say: Do not disturb sleeping dragon, for you are crunchyand will taste good with ketchup.
