Boppin' Developer Tried to Make Equivalent of 'No Man's Sky' on Amiga

[Nanking]

You remember that weird game with the funky-looking triangle fuckers Ross reviewed? You probably didn't think much of it at the time, and neither did I, but Boppin' is just the tip of a MASSIVE FUCKING iceberg.

Jennifer Diane Reitz is the name of one of the developers of Boppin'. She's been making things for a long ass time and is still active to this day, albeit in the form of writing My Little Pony fan fiction. Anyways, she's made some pretty neat webcomics and stuff but the thing that you guys would probably find most interesting is her failed game "Multiverse".

As the thread title implies, Multiverse was the aborted brain-child of Jennifer. It was essentially No Man's Sky on the Amiga. It featured multiple near infinte randomly generated universes for the player to explore. There were multitudes of unique alien planets, capital ships, and even spaceship battles. The game was light years ahead of its time and, had it been released, it would have, no doubt, changed the face of gaming forever.

Unfortunately, it simply wasn't mean't to be. When Activision, who had been backing it up until this point, pulled out and the game never got finished. You can read more about it on Jennifer's website. It's probably the coolest thing I've seen in a long time.

 

Also I initially learned about this through this(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOn-gSTsD7k) video. It's an informal lecture about all of Jennifer's work over the years. It gets pretty heady and I reccomend it highly if you're into crazy theoretical scifi concepts.

Edited March 28, 2020 by Nanking (see edit history)

[BTGBullseye]

Neat!

[kerdios]

15 hours ago, Nanking said:

had it been released, it would have, no doubt, changed the face of gaming forever.

Nope. It would have been a giant flop.

There's no way the amiga would have been able to support an infinite amount of stars the way no man sky promised (and remember the position of each one of them, so you in theory could go back and even have other players visit them).

[BTGBullseye]

6 minutes ago, kerdios said:

Nope. It would have been a giant flop.

There's no way the amiga would have been able to support an infinite amount of stars the way no man sky promised (and remember the position of each one of them, so you in theory could go back and even have other players visit them).

If the seed was a stored string, and event progression was also stored as a string, then it easily could have using less than a kilobyte of "permanently" stored data.

[ekket]

12 minutes ago, kerdios said:

Nope. It would have been a giant flop.

There's no way the amiga would have been able to support an infinite amount of stars the way no man sky promised (and remember the position of each one of them, so you in theory could go back and even have other players visit them).

May I point you towards the original Elite from 1984? It had procedural generation based on a single seed (simple method for having it generate the same thing every time), which made it possible to explore 8 galaxies with 256 planets each (originally they intended to have 2^48 galaxies, but that would have become repetitive). Granted, that was for 8-bit computers, and so pretty limited, but every planet and star system was indeed unique.

Edited March 28, 2020 by ekket (see edit history)

[Nanking]

53 minutes ago, BTGBullseye said:

If the seed was a stored string, and event progression was also stored as a string, then it easily could have using less than a kilobyte of "permanently" stored data.

Unfortunately we'll never know for sure as there isn't much technical information about the game available. The best I've found on the website is this quote about universe generation. I've attached the image it's referencing.

 

Quote

Every universe had a name, and a map. This is the map of just one of countless universes. Everything was generated
by indexing a 10K block of random numbers, which told the program where to paste and print every image, or how to
generate any name or word or any other part of the game, using rules. This universe is like our own - galaxies and space. But
there were universes where this map would look like floating triangles or ribbons of land hanging in a colorful void.
There were eight different - very different - available universe types.

 

[kerdios]

9 hours ago, ekket said:

May I point you towards the original Elite from 1984? It had procedural generation based on a single seed (simple method for having it generate the same thing every time), which made it possible to explore 8 galaxies with 256 planets each (originally they intended to have 2^48 galaxies, but that would have become repetitive). Granted, that was for 8-bit computers, and so pretty limited, but every planet and star system was indeed unique.

 

That's a different thing, I'm talking about a no man sky equivalent that also tracks and saves everything you've done on every planet and space station in every galaxy AND allows other players to randomly visit it and view the changes you had made to it.
So what you are saying is that the title should have been "Boppin' Developer Tried to Make Equivalent of 'Elite' (1984) on Amiga"

[BTGBullseye]

11 hours ago, Nanking said:

The best I've found on the website is this quote about universe generation. I've attached the image it's referencing.

 

 

Neat! Too bad it wasn't finished... It could've been a big player.

[Icebox]

Quote

She's been making things for a long ass time and is still active to this day, albeit in the form of writing My Little Pony fan fiction. 

 

Sounds like the fimfiction user Chatoyance.

[Nanking]

55 minutes ago, Icebox said:

Sounds like the fimfiction user Chatoyance.

Yep, that's her.

[Icebox]

22 minutes ago, Nanking said:

Yep, that's her.

Watching the video now and now know that.

[Nanking]

10 minutes ago, Icebox said:

Watching the video now and now know that.

Oh ok lol. From the way you wrote that I though you just spent a lot of time on fimfiction and happened across her.