Again, "realtime" is being used in the sense as in "RTS" games, where a whole map of gameplay events in an RTS game are occurring in synchronized realtime.
Management and Participation are a Timeshare
In contrast to past RTS games, or RPG games, these mixed games can be very different in that players can be managing things instantly over the entire game, but also participating in RPG style activities in first person.
Plans and processes can be started and left in multiple locations.
How game creators divide up the time and ways people use these features can vary widely, and greatly impact gameplay variation.
In my specific ideas, I imagine a player would spend a significant amount of time in first person initially.
Increased Distance and Timespans Create New Gameplay
This realtime means that events and choices can have rippling and continual consequences over the game's entire time-span, and across the game's entire geography.
- Players make more decisions about short-term consequences and long-term consquences.
- Bringing NPCs, materials, etc. together requires transporation methods to bring them together, such as shipping, rails, roads, flying, or carting across multple locations
- Build, protect, and maintain infrastructure across multiple locations
- Distant NPCs can travel to combine efforts in new locations for work or fighting or colonizing
- Formerly disparate resources can be mined, refined, and shipped before they can be brought together to create new objects and machines.
- (Instead of 2 or 3 resources, there are many more, and separated by distant biomes)
- Friends or foes can be intercepted, interrupted, joined
- Messages and packages can be timed well or unwell
- Rumors and information can spread according to location and proximity.
What is the Feasibility?
What is the technical threshold of such a realtime voxel engine? . . . What if it is not beyond grasp? . . . Maybe it is time to start thinking about it seriously, even if only smaller games can be created.
Assessing this question would require some sense for the most optimal voxel processing requirements and demands under different expectations of hardware combinations.
Has it been attempted in consideration of upcoming hardware?
Is there a limited form in which the idea can exist right now, albeit insufficient to meet real playable requirements?
Is there a significant jump in pertinent performance coming on the horizon - or the right kind of performance - which is newly able to meet this task?
Is the prospect of the idea enough to be interested in pursuing it, even if the game would only be usable a more limited number of machines?
How long will it stay that limited?
New Literal Hardware Categories
In very recent years, new CPU chips have come out for desktop machines that have server level thread numbers: between 20 and 100 or so threads, or even more.
Dedicated AI chips have begun showing up in personal computers. Laptops have included these chips, and there are a few dedicated PCI AI cards.
It should be noted that thread count has not gotten significantly cheaper very quickly. This has perhaps shown some signs of changing recently.
Big Voxel Game = Big AI Chip?
The thing about voxel processing is that it is NOT graphical processing. However it also benefits from something faster than CPU processing without robbing the GPU of being dedicated to its tasks.
Intuitively a GPU is bigger for the sake of a larger number of pixels on a monitor - not for larger calculations of voxels.
It is possible that you would only want to run a huge voxel game if you had a dedicated AI chip. This is not necessarily because processing voxels is AI, but because AI chips have a lot of parallel cores that might perhaps be very well suited for voxels.
Games Too Powerful for the Steam Deck?
Until the Steam Deck, this had already generally been the case. Maybe some games can reach further into more powerful types.
This particular type of realtime voxel game might come to be understood to not be for devices like the Steam Deck, but for much more powerful machines with the right power supply, heat syncs, multiple dedicated chips, and high CPU core count.
Being able to run this game could be like a very special perk of having one of these very powerful machines. (Rather than creating it under the auspices that many many people would buy a machine just for the game.)
