zenbitz

What's interesting is that I had trouble swallowing the thought of the soviets (let alone NATO) nuking places like Oslo and Stockholm until I found this site: http://www.php.isn.ethz.ch/. Buried within are even studies / plans of a Soviet ground invasion of Sweden (not going to comment on the actual likelyhood.... but at least someone else thought it was possible) - and the early cold war games by the Warsaw Pact seem to indicate that they would liberally use strategic and nuclear weapons to further their ground invasion. But perhaps you have other thoughts on this? Touche'. So, in your estimation - seeing as you are an expert - what % of European population would this kind of scenario kill? For the game we have been using 90% as a default, and then consider modelling in the game roughly 1000:1 (so if 2008 nuked norway has 300,000 people, we would have 300 NPCs or so). Maybe more "brainless" ones with no dialog. It is actually precisely my philosophy.

Grognard, huh... what you play?

Since the game is still being researched the amount we have done to date is not totally relevant. How can you critique "how we will use the setting in a realistic way" - since the only thing you have to work with is "fallout like" which means "not a hell of a lot". I am EXTREMELY concerned about the realism of this game - and you are commenting on decisions of devleopment that haven't even been proposed let alone made. Did it ever occur to you that the size of the MARKET for a FREE game is not particularly a big concern for the developers? I mean OHNOES I sold only 200 copies for $0.00 rather than 2000. We are going to make a game we think is cool and would like to play. We think other people might find the game fun too. The number of people who appreciate art is not the sole metric of sucess! Yeah but those are COMMERCIAL games. They have to PAY PEOPLE to work on them, they have to MAKE MONEY for their parent corporations. Why would this apply at all? An actual issue - which you didn't even bring up - is that any game that's based in a real world location (be it California, DC, or Timbucktu) should have at least a couple "local cultural" experts... if not you get a "San Francisco" like in Fallout 2. I live in San Francisco, and the version in the game is wholly unlike my home town. So this could be a problem... but not an insurmountable one, or even a medium sized one, at this stage. We do have some contirbutors from Finland so far. I'm sure if we make a cool demo we will pick up a Norwegian, Dane, and Swede along the way. Those dudes have nothing better to do all winter than work on some indy OS game any how. That would be insulting if it didn't apply to oh, 99% of all FOSS games. Frankly *I* don't expect it make it out of demo state. I hope that it does, and I might even be a little disappointed if it crashes and burns, but what the hell... PRODUCT is not the only reason to do something.

Hi, I'm leader of the game mechanics design for "Par Pig" as we are calling it - the nuclear winter is sort of my idea. This is not specific to your comment - but others have said "why europe" - because actually we want to have late-cold-war era Soviet equipement lying around. I originally wanted to put the game in Germany (since mvBarracuda is German) - but he wants to avoid too much conflict with Zero Projekt. We also wanted the "feel" to be a snowy wasteland (in the sense that FO1/2 , Wasteland was Desert), but the game will not be ALL Arctic Tundra (i mean, it's an RPG... you want to talk to inuit all game?). I actually wrote up an alternate location that took place in Minnesota/Wisconsin/Michegan/North Illinois area but it didn't have much traction with the graphics dude who came up with the "Sweden" setting... Well, you are not the only one who can read a wikipedia article, you know. However, like most climatology - Nuclear Winter is a theory. So the _exact_ effects, dependent on actual tonnage of dirt and debris thrown in the atmosphere are not exactly known. There was a time when Nuclear Winter was totally "debunked" as a thoery, but it's made a comeback with people applying the latest and greatest climate simulation models (the ones that predict global warming). Here is my thought - and it doesn't have to be realistic to the point of "in congruence will all climatology to date" - but it does have to be plausable. There is a BIG nuclear war, following a conventional war in Europe ca. 1988. Nuclear Winter (as above 5-10 years tops) + starvation and disease and other secondary effects wipe out 90-99% (we haven't decided yet) of Western European population. The game starts in 2008 (20 years after) allowing us to have a mix of "war survivors" and "new world kids" as characters. What if the Nuclear Winter triggers another Ice Age? We know that there is a (excuse the pun) positive feedback effect of Snow/Ice on lowering global temperatures? Could the NW have pushed it over the edge? Ice Ages happen throughout history WITHOUT any sort of Nuke war - all we are doing is stopping civilization for 20 years... So that leaves the PC in a world on the cusp of a new ice age... and starting in the far north latitudes where the effects would be felt earliest. So - I am not asking if the above is "theoretically sound" - and we have an issue of "geological time scales" conflicting with game time scales on the order of a few years... but is the above plausible enough for a video game? Even a gritty, realistic one? I think it's substantially better than most.