Some madness I came up with years ago

[Rednoahl]

A few years ago, around 12-13 I think, I came up with a game concept (like all gamers I know have.) At the time I was friendly with a games programmer, who shot me down with a LOT of my ideas as being impossible to code. Now primarily I've been a console gamer since the SNES came out, so I'm way behind with PC gaming. I recently inherited an unwanted PC, which I now have running X2 and I was pleasantly surprised to see that many of the features I had dreamt up in my concept, had already been implemented into the X universe. Now, since Egosoft has had the same ideas as I came up with when I dreamt up my concept, I'm going to have the audacity to share with you some of the backstory concept I had. If any of these ideas have already come up on the forum before please forgive me, I'm certainly not trying to steal anyone's thunder. I'm also quite aware that I may be up for some ridicule, especially since I'm something of a noob, it's just I'm stunned in how similar some of the backstory is in the X universe to my idea. I haven't as of yet done much of the story in X2, and I only found out what the X universe's back story was a few days ago (found when looking on argonopedia for the combat ranking system.)

In hindsight to writing this, it seems really self indulgent load of old rubbish. I hope this is on-topic enough to remain on the forum. I was actually thinking of not posting this at all but since it's taken me so long to write I'm going to risk it...and it might make a few people laugh!

First off:- "Pre-cursors" are my version of the X universe's "old ones". In my universe they were a lot more important since I felt (mainly through playing elite, once you had upgraded your ship there was little incentive to keep playing further) it was important to restrict the players progress, that is to say you could earn loads of money but you couldn't buy the good weapons/ships until you had a high enough rank with the pre-cursors. The x universe has similar ideas. In my universe you had to prove humanities' worth to the pre-cursors. In the x universe I get the feeling that it will pretty much be the same eventually (I justify saying this since the X universe's old ones didn't lift a finger to stop the Boron from almost getting wiped out, they just shifted the gates so the Argon could help out...or thats my interpretation of what happened)

The first difference in between the X universe and mine was the ability to go to pre-cursor sectors (old-ones.) This was because I'd designed my game for consoles, and I thought it'd be cool to have a windows-like interface (you were at a hub where most of the sectors were visible) where the galaxy map had sectors that were game only and the pre-cursor sectors were for utilities like the cd player. If your windows desktop is anything like mine it isn't too dissimilar from a galaxy map anyway; the idea was to have an animation of your ship docking at a station while the utility loaded up (virtual reality was big back then!). I also wanted this part of the game to run along-side the operating system, which my programmer friend was not impressed with at all. I don't see how having a "system name" (let's say Blue Profit) is that much different than having a folder for example, with stations having software inside them. When the original X-box came out I expanded on the idea (like playstation's Home but using system stations to launch programs in your own planetary system, and every player online has their own star system) but this isn't the place to go into that.

One of the biggest problems I had when dreaming my universe up was a reason for the "enemy" to attack. With space being so big I had to restrict it somehow, to make invasion more likely. The Khakk in the X universe (at least as far as I know) just seem to be invading for invading's sake, and at present I'm presuming that at least at some stage we'll find out why. I'll warn you right now that the reasons for invasion I invented are some of the most ridiculous convoluted crap you'll ever come across...but for me at least it works. Now my "actual" knowledge of physics is a c-grade from school, so what is possible and impossible in my mind is a fair bit different from conventional thinking. In my twisted mind I think what follows is just as likely as any current theory on the universe, even though its just a device for the story...and totally mad; for example, I actually DO think pulsars are Dyson spheres! You see! Mad. Anyway, this is what I came up with:- (when i was very drunk, sat at a bar doodling on the back of a cig packet)

[edit] please feel free to insert "this is of course impossible"

The Rednoahl galactic-sphere

The universe consists of one galaxy. Just one, everything that can be seen "outside" of the galaxy is just a distorted reflection, in fact much of what can be seen is a reflection; you see its a galactic dyson sphere. At the ends of each arm of the galaxy there is a black hole/worm hole, and there are four of them. At the center of the galaxy there are four white holes which chuck out matter into the galactic core, (which I called the "star forge," and was not happy when the name was used by lucas arts in one of their games.) So basically star systems are like blood cells in arteries, constantly being destroyed at one end though, then reborn at the other (I called this the "infinity loop"...crap name, really not imaginative enough.) Life can only exist in the arms of the galaxy since radiation is so strong towards the center of the galaxy, however the pre-cursors race have evolved into an energy being so the can go pretty much anywhere. The pre-cursors created the infinity loop to stop some cataclysmic event (I wasn't specific, but looking on argonopedia it looks like the old ones had a serious war when I was thinking along the lines of them just being fish-food when they tried to go up to a higher dimension! The event scared them so much they created the infinity loop to prevent any incursions by these higher beings)
In my universe there were gates but they were not the same as the X universe, gates were for the minions of the pre-cursors to get resources easily (they'd compress and grab gas giants to refuel their equivalent of dyson spheres.)....Reading this back to myself I can't stop thinking it's like Peter Griffin of Family Guy is writing this!!!

Anyway, the whole point of all this is that the rings found round gas giants were the start of gates forming for the pre-cursors refueling program, kind of like a tag. The gas giant was compressed after the gate is formed, then the other gas giants are compressed and taken through the gate to a hub then forwarded on to a dyson-like sphere formed so it looks like a neutron star(...this is my poor explanation for pulsars in my universe! The pulse is the exhaust from when star inside is refueled) The Pre-cursors variant on the theme of the Dyson-sphere requires ridiculous amounts of energy to keep in place and to power the hubs, thats why the star needs more topping up with more juice.

When saturn suddenly started to get smaller and huge things started to appear orbiting the planet, Earth had to investigate; and when they did were pretty shocked to find a fleet of the pre-cursors minions busily constructing a gate to effectively steal saturn. First contact, blah blah blah. Earth shouldn't have life on it, Pre-cursors dropped one of Earths moons to eradicate life on the Earth when the dinosaurs were about but the pre-cursors minions dropped the wrong moon, so life came back. Everything peaceful though (even though saturn still gets taken.)

Fast forward a couple of hundred years and Earth has moved to the stars using the pre-cursors gates; although the pre-cursors themselves have little to do with humans, there are other races humanity deals with. Humanity learns and trades with these races, and everything's good for a few centuries. What is important here is that there are only two of the arms of the galaxy that humanity can get to; pre-cursor gates are locked to the other two arms, and humanity is warned away from these two arms-"you will not survive." This is because the other two arms of the galaxy belong to another old race, who use younger races as slaves and although old and powerful are not seen as a threat as far as the pre-cursors are concerned, and an agreement to keep two arms of the galaxy apiece had kept both races happy for eons. However, the "evil" aliens start to construct their own Dyson-spheres, but instead of using gas giants to power them they use gates directly next to suns connected to the inside of their Dyson-spheres directly (jokingly called dual cyclone dyson spheres!). Guess what kind of stars are most suitable for their technology...you guessed it, ones like our sun. The "evil" aliens don't want to kill off their own slave races by using their stars, oh no. They want ours, and since our solar system is fairly close to the end of an arm, they don't think the pre-cursors will mind very much if they shove a vacuum cleaner gate right next to our sun. Actually, the pre-cursors don't mind that much at all, oh dear. It's at this point where the game was to begin.

As the player in my universe it is up to you to either stop the "evil" aliens directly by forming alliances with other races and freeing the slave races with conventional weapons (medium method, mainly combat missions.) or by gaining the trust and respect of the pre-cursors to arm you with the tech to defend Earth's systems (easy method, mainly trading and odd jobs.)
The hard method, by the way was supposed to be a combination of the two above methods, using trading to build up your military, using your military to defend your outposts while you do jobs for the pre-cursors. If you were successful the idea was that the "evil" aliens would get so mad they would directly attack some of the pre-cursor's minions, thereby bringing the pre-cursors into the fray. Like I've said before, I dreamt up my idea with consoles in mind, thinking that most players would go down the pure military route but they wouldn't get the rewarding ending. The best ending was for the hard method, you were given some ridiculously high powered stuff in a hectic (though satisfyingly easy) defend, then counter-attack, defend, then counter attack culminating at the enemies' HQ...never did decide whether the enemies' HQ got destroyed, or you got them to sue for peace though.

I'm well aware of that scientifically, physically (and probably mentally) the above is about as dodgy as is possible. The thing is, I don't think anyone who really knows how the universe works could explain it to ME in any kind of language I'd understand. I've heard that 98% of the mass of the universe can't be accounted for therefore in my twisted mind 98% of the universe isn't there at all! I like the fact that my universe has a point (currently my universe is the fuel cell for God's i-pod.) Being honest the backstory to my universe didn't take long for me to think up; it wasn't the main thing I was thinking about. Gameplay is everything as far as I'm concerned. As you've probably gathered by now, writing isn't one of my strong points...I've always had trouble getting to any kind of point. I'm really sorry about that, I hope you folks can understand my warblings!

I don't think it takes too much imagination to see the similarities in the X universe and mine (I must stress that I havn't played any of the X3 games yet...in fact I've not finished the X2 storyline yet either, even though I've been playing it for near on two months) and although a reason for the gates in the X universe isn't really given (as far as I have been able to tell) I HAD to explain why gates and everything else existed. Its gratifying to me that while my idea never got a chance to be made (I was told it wouldn't sell enough to justify its development costs) someone elses idea did. I'm loving every minute of it; I havn't been as immersed in a game for many years. Thanks Egosoft!

If you're still reading now...erm thanks for bearing with me!