In reply to your news spreading idea the easiest way to do this IMHO is to have each person remember a certain amount of news (do we hear linked list?) about stuff that happened in town and around, then whenever they contact another person they "chit chat" for a bit and for every minute or so (game time) they exchange one piece of news between each other etc, maybe longer, meybe shorter. that way news slowly spreads through town etc, although people can run screaming the message across town if the player did something ridiculous like kill a guard....
Also this way other news items, esp about the players current achievements will be noted, like I ahted in RPG''s where you did all this stuff (like get a legendary sword that noone else was able to get) and no one in town even cares? You''d think that your character would be in the history books eh? I mean it wouldn''t happen once you picked up the sword or weapon, but once you showed it in town the it would start spreading... that way there''d be new and interesting conversations occuring every time that the player went into town...
You could also beef this up somewhat by addin g idle chit chatter, gossip, and wild rumours from other towns etc.. Also by a local news paper and other things like etye witness accounts etc. This would add a wide array of depth to the game .... bit raving on there ... sorry
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And with respect to the evil-good dr. jeckyl hide thing with the pc you could make the human, ork, goblin whatever models similar then define a certain number of key points in the model, that are merged with respect to other models over time, depending on how many of that tpe of monster the player kills. or in other methods you could just sometimes in dream time exchange humans for monsters as was stated above.
Another thing that I was thinking is to blur the lines betweena dream and reality, i.e. the player does not know which one he is acting in, i.e. he starts playing, goes to sleep (to recover health no doubt) then when he wakes up, healed, somewhat different looking architecture / night time? esp good in the forrest the character could be playing their alternate "persona" or a dream? then net time the character falls asleep they could wakre up back to normal etc, this way when after a few random sleeps the character could not know if they are in a dream state or not, and hopefully they will be in a wierd paranoid sleepless state, aka (one dodgy sliders epidode with some wierd assed goggles?) where the ppl could not tell that they were in virtual reality / dream state or normal reality.
This would be good especially if the characters thought that they were going on with the rest of their quest only to realise that they are still asleep, or something, (damage would be real etc), and then when they try and go to sleep they do, but wake up still in the dream... there are plenty of ideas like this, and if done right I hope it will win game of the year (why halflife?).. well enough of my blathering speech...
Dæmin
(Dominik Grabiec)
sdgrab@eisa.net.au