Hunting

We say we're going hunting.

But what we're actually doing is going out to this place where these cartoon animals all stand around.

And we cut them down and collect stuff off their bodies.

And then we wait around for them to grow back.

Which is actually a lot more like farming, and not so much like hunting.

I think the hunting simulation could be a little better.

I think that if the excuse is that a virtual world isn't big enough, and that's its too crowded to do anything like that, that's a dumb excuse.

And I also think that the Real World, where we can't just magically make more room or travel into personal pocket dimensions via instancing, is in some serious trouble, and its not just because we're running out of room, and that's its getting too crowded, but its also because people are so stupid.

If the excuse is that a more realistic hunting simulation would be too hard to do, because being able to identify and follow the passage of a wiley animal through the wilderness is just impossible to simulate, or that it'd take too much processing power to simulate realistic animal intelligence, I think that's a lot like not realizing that you can make as much room as you want in a virtual world.

You can cheat, y'know?

The only thing that matters is how it appears to the player, you don't actually have to do anything behind the curtain that the player can't see, at the cheapest level, the only thing you have to do is give him a clue that tells him something about which way to go to start looking for the next clue, you can just skip everything else, y'know, the animal he's hunting doesn't even have to exist, let alone randomly drink water and "act natural" and stuff, all that has to exist is a clue that leads to the next clue, until he finally gets within visual range of it because he finally beat the non-existent creature at a surprise roll or a "hearing check" 'cause he was downwind or something cheesy like that.

Its not like any of that shit is actually new, y'know?

I didn't make any of that stuff up.

And its not like that a guy wandering around in a woods looking for the next randomly generated clue takes a million calcuations per second or anything.

Now that I got that far, you can turn it around and make stuff hunt the player, too.

No, it doesn't actually need to exist and follow clues just like a player, goddammit, you can just cheat on that shit, if the player detects the guys hunting him first, show 'em somewhere in the distance or have 'em make a noise, so that he knows which way he needs to go to make a run for it, or how he should set a trap for 'em and ambush 'em or something.

You'd think you guys coulda stole a little more from Dungeons and Dragons with the sorta-randomly generated encounters and stuff, its not like it was rocket science or anything.

Anamorphic Terrain and shit like that is rocket science.