Vivian on 12/8/2008 at 08:59
(
http://www.bethedinosaur.com/) Touring dinosaur simulator, now at Louisville, USA
Slightly lame title aside, this looks fucking ace. The idea is it's a scientifically accurate (my supervisor was one of the advisors, again) interactive simulation of the Late Cretaceous Hell Creek dinosaur fauna, which includes family favourites such as T rex, Triceratops horridus, various dromaeosaur-type things and duckbills. It's sort of an eco-deathmatch, I suppose: You take on the role of one individual of a particular species, with the other animals being piloted by other people or by AI, and you have to eat and avoid being eaten in order to survive. The thing is apparently balanced enough so that plausible hunting and herding strategies are required (sticking together in open spaces with overlapping lookouts for herbivores, ambushes and teamwork feints for predators), and there is also going to be included quasi-realistic resources (i.e. you eat a tree and it takes a while to grow back depending on that plant types estimated growth rate and how much of it you ate), which could encourage territoriality in the herbivores.
At the moment its only touring museums as a multiplayer arcade, but theres talk of a PC release!
vurt on 12/8/2008 at 09:50
They'll make it available for PC and consoles after it's been hyped for some time at the museums and from media, brilliant marketing.
Stitch on 12/8/2008 at 16:19
oh god the things I would do with this
catbarf on 12/8/2008 at 17:17
Massively Multiplayer Online Dinosaur Simulator?
Renzatic on 12/8/2008 at 17:29
I wanna be a Tyrannosaur flying an F-14! Oh the havoc I would raise.
BEAR on 12/8/2008 at 18:43
I want to be the fat nerd that hangs out there all day as the T-Rex butchering all the little kinds and ruining the fun for everyone. Now to get fat and get a shirt with butter stains......
vurt on 12/8/2008 at 19:00
I really hope you can poo in this game since its a simulator.
demagogue on 12/8/2008 at 19:09
I want to be a monolithic herbivore, like a diplodocus or seismosaurus or something.
And I hope there will be opportunities for group stampeding and for mating, the latter just to see how on earth a 50-meter-long creature weighing over 150 tons goes about mounting another one.
catbarf on 12/8/2008 at 19:19
I'd want a pterosaur of some kind, probably because I have a bizarre fixation with flight in an FPS.
keitheureka on 1/9/2008 at 17:35
I am the creative director for this project. You can poop. Not only because it is kinda entertaining - but because it is an integral part of nutrition and digestion and the ecosystem as a whole and the simulation strives to be as complete as possible given the constraints of technology and venue.
You can imagine that the 'poop' conversations during design and implementation were pretty entertaining as well. :)
