08-26-2015, 03:26 AM
(08-25-2015, 11:03 PM)Ryuujin Wrote: Sharp, you do have some good points which I'm taking into consideration for future wiki/lore updates (Trimming a lot of superfluous and dodgey science fluff, particularly in the field of biology which is an area as I've said before, was tacked on due to people constantly asking questions about it). However you really need to dial back the aggression a bit, lot of criticizing people and lore but not a lot of usable feedback to work on.Have you decided yet then? Whether you want some thing fantastical or grounded is actually a pretty big problem. You want to lay down a very big bed of science and over-define everything, but unless you are willing to research like crazy and over-plan everything, it's not going to work out. When someone starts looking at your concept with a great big magnifying glass, you are going to eventually have to answer "it's a mystery " when they start getting to the specifics of your science. A large portion of my criticism intentionally avoids going into detail as to what you can improve for one reason only: I don't want to edit the direction of the lore. I wanted you to reconsider it from the very beginning. At most I can give hints here or there to avoid causing massive problems, but any story specifics are something I want to have no part in.
Anyway with that in mind if you were to take biology related stuff right back to the roots, what's your thoughts on depth, speaking as someone who is actually more open to criticise things.
It's established they're a iceball world species and I do like the idea of a burst metabolism, these are aspects that are important to the species. With that said. People inevitably ask "What do they breathe?", "Are they carbon based?", "Are they water based?", which seem fair enough questions, compared to "Do they utilise ATP?", "What is the exact metabolic process behind why they breathe X", which is far more specific and easily disprovable, how far down do you think answers should reasonably go within the lore. And do you have any thoughts on the correct answer for those, considering the criteria they must meet (ie. they can't be water based or they'd freeze to death), answers that don't go too far but will satisfy anyone summarily poking at them.
On the tech side of things I intend to keep them relatively confined to "Tommorow's tech", ie. no anti-gravity, no energy shields, no FTL-sensors, in fact the only major break from reality is a means to create einstein-rosen bridges (Gotta have some FTL option there, as much as I'd love to play with colony ships and colonies separated by time as well as space, it would close off too many options). Again this is a defining element of the race's design. This was a deliberate decision since the intention was to drill down into potential uses and pitfalls of tommorow's technology (Networking, robotics, augmentation). Far too many sci-fi stories instead look way out into a future filled with phlebotinium for convenience, without exploring the consequences, and ignoring that often the problem they face could be solved with technology they presumably stopped using 300 years earlier (Star Trek being the absolute worst offender in this regard while Schlock mercenary does a wonderful job of toeing a line between science, fiction, explanation and exploration of consequeces)
I also plan to chop out some of the background lore, since some of that is straight up deceptive or wrong anyway and I think yields more confusion than anything. I have a 'problem' in this regard that in the course of exploring the story through an in-game medium would reveal some important, unspoken aspects of their culture and society which'd be spoilers to simply post up front, but again people want answers to questions now and thus have been fed the "official" line that is actually covering up the full story.
Again, I havn't actually been responsible for a great deal of the wiki's maintenance for a long time and it's long overdue an official editorial, often being assembled and re-assembled by people reading lore snippets on forums or from Skype chats.
"It's established they're a iceball world species and I do like the idea of a burst metabolism, these are aspects that are important to the species"
Having a species be based on an icy planet is actually viable if you know how to plan out their ecology. That being said, clinging hard to those ideas could be your undoing. For example, having them be outside the Goldilocks's zone would cause massive problems on how the planetary energy would be replenished. So if you were to base energy collection on both solar and geothermal activity, it would make a great deal of relative sense, but it would have to be weighted towards solar, to provide an excuse as to why life left the ocean. You can have them based on water without too much of a hassle, actually. There are species that remain active in extremely low temperatures, some that can be entirely frozen and thawed out after a big freeze and organic variants of antifreeze do exist. You just have to find a way to lower their freezing point after all. You could even use the danger of them actually freezing to death, you know, to establish why they have such tight social structures, (I actually advise you to look into how trips into dangerously cold areas work out, as the amount of teamwork needed is incredible, and the specific reasons for building special shelters are woven right into it). If you aren't somehow able to plan out an exclusively water based biology, consider a hybrid solvent solution, as it would easily sidestep the chemical burns caused by water, both due to ammonium (although ammonium only arises when water is added to ammonia and not the other way around) and the fact that water is a much stronger polar force. I do advise you to reconsider the burst metabolism, though, with one simple question. If they have to store amounts of energy to be able to do anything strenuous, what is the point of sentience? Sentience requires a fantastically large energy input just to remain viable, and any versions of their species that would not adapt to sentience would easily out-compete them since they would have considerably more energy to "hunt". Intelligence emerges due to a runaway positive feedback loop from both excess energy and improved senses. In fact, improved senses always are going to evolve before intelligence emerges, as what lead to mankind's incredible ascension to the top of the food-chain was our unparalleled sense of touch (we can literally feel things down to the nanoscale!) and fantastic amounts of co-ordination (both physical and social). That being said, you can do a pseudo-burst metabolism, similar to some terrestrial creatures. You just have to work on that baseline energy level.
This entire time, I was only ever made angry by one thing alone. Most of the posts here were born of confusion due to some misunderstandings of my intent, albeit with some of my usual abrasiveness. But your statement that you do not control the direction of your lore was something that genuinely infuriated me: it was a massive excuse. I have edited worse things and have had authors own up to their mistakes much quicker without resorting to deflection. If you honestly want to make something coherent, then take responsibility for the direction of your lore, even if you don't feel you are responsible for all the details. You alone get to decide the direction of your lore (but there will always be people ready to shit on it on a moments notice), and you must decide what goes in and what gets cut out.
Also, the very first critique was something I didn't even post here. I had several files saved that I was endlessly reworking, and she chose the oldest and most reply-baiting version. Argh.
Also, don't be afraid to make your tech fantastical. We are beginning to experiment with amazing amounts of metamaterials, so planning science without going too deep into specifics won't actually be that hard if you know what you are doing. Unless you are going for a similar effect for 'zeerust', planning too closely to tomorrow causes some problems, after all, if this tech was truly on the cusp of tomorrow, why wouldn't we be tossing money at it? The answer is that it isn't. There still is plenty to learn about the universe. As of right now, we are experimenting with exotic particles in an unparalleled manner compared to twenty, no, ten years ago! We even are beginning to learn how to control gravity to a mild degree, and each and every step takes us closer to a future that is more bizarre than anything we could imagine. Don't be afraid to make the future crazy, because it sure as hell is going to be much different around here in less than a hundred years.
Harshest critic of the Avali. An idea that never changes is a truly dead one.