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Author Topic: Include the following technology or have people stratch their heads.  (Read 1086 times)

ancientgamer

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I want to make a game set 20 to 30 years in the future and as we all know, technology should advance (barring any major natural disasters). I've included things from articles from popular science, popular mechanics and other magazines of that nature. What would you suggest adding to avoid people stratching their heads on why the author didn't include the following?
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Narf the Mouse

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Include the following technology or have people stratch their heads.
« Reply #1 on: June 02, 2009, 08:06:56 PM »
2 GHz * (2 ^ 25) = 67,108,864 GHz

That is all.
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ancientgamer

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« Reply #2 on: June 02, 2009, 08:43:25 PM »
That jives with what I read about computers having the processing power of the human brian and a relatively short jump to AI...unless the materials are not there to make the chips small enough to make device portable and practical.  Again, I try to keep up on technology but I am more of a "soft sciences" sort of guy. So feel free to correct anything I have said above:)

PS  Ghz would be a passe term by then:)
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Narf the Mouse

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Include the following technology or have people stratch their heads.
« Reply #3 on: June 02, 2009, 08:52:21 PM »
Yeah, but seven extra places makes it easy to see the increase. PHz? means some people will be looking it up. :)

Ars Technica is a good site - Generally explained well enough for the layman, with enough technical info to satisfy the more technical.
The main problem with government is the difficulty of pressing charges against its directors.

Given a choice of two out of three M&Ms, the human brain subconsciously tries to justify the two M&Ms chosen as being superior to the M&M not chosen.

Caesar Slaad

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« Reply #4 on: June 02, 2009, 08:57:27 PM »
Quote from: Narf the Mouse;305986
2 GHz * (2 ^ 25) = 67,108,864 GHz

Feh.

Applying Moore's law (which is really an observation, not a law) to GHz (which it wasn't an observation of) has already pretty much hit a brick wall.

However, one modern notion that will probably swept by the wayside by memristors will be the idea of having separate "RAM" and "hard drive". Computers most likely won't "boot".
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dindenver

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« Reply #5 on: June 02, 2009, 09:05:32 PM »
Hi!
  OK, so I think there is an idea you can maybe use:
If 30% to 50% of homes had 3-d printers, than EVERYTHING becomes software. Think about it, if there were that many 3-d printers, everyone could have a rolex, right?

  Also, I think genetic engineering as cosmetic procedures might be interesting.

  Nano tech (micro-engineering, not nano bots) might lead to some efficiencies in energy conservation.

  I think that the race between privacy technology and monitoring technology might yield interesting twist in your future history.

  Verbal interfaces for computers might be interesting too.
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Narf the Mouse

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« Reply #6 on: June 02, 2009, 10:18:29 PM »
Quote from: Caesar Slaad;306000
Feh.

Applying Moore's law (which is really an observation, not a law) to GHz (which it wasn't an observation of) has already pretty much hit a brick wall.

However, one modern notion that will probably swept by the wayside by memristors will be the idea of having separate "RAM" and "hard drive". Computers most likely won't "boot".

Moore's Law
What I posted was a quick summation. 'Number of transistors' loosely translates to 'processor capability', which has long (Correctly or incorrectly) been shown by processor speed.

I see no point in getting into an 'Internet discussion' over how fine we can cut that hair.
The main problem with government is the difficulty of pressing charges against its directors.

Given a choice of two out of three M&Ms, the human brain subconsciously tries to justify the two M&Ms chosen as being superior to the M&M not chosen.

Spinachcat

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Include the following technology or have people stratch their heads.
« Reply #7 on: June 03, 2009, 05:02:22 AM »
Quote from: ancientgamer;305559
What would you suggest adding to avoid people stratching their heads on why the author didn't include the following?


I find it difficult to play Shadowrun anymore, primarily because of the advances in satellite / surveillance / ID recognition technology.   Unless your runners are teleporting dopplegangers, I don't see how future crime isn't going to result in 24 hour careers.    

With cameras on every corner, all tied to facial recognition computers with international DNA recognition databases, where is a runner going to hide?

Chaos Earth gets away with it because the apocalpyse renders all the tech moot, but any near future game with a functional society is going to have to deal with the post 9/11 police state mentality of every first world country.

Spike

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« Reply #8 on: June 03, 2009, 07:01:49 PM »
I deal quite handily with that little problem, Spinachat, with the balkinazation of the world powers.

Sure there are 89 bazillion cameras looking at everything with umplex redundancy... but who owns that information, and who owns the information where you cross reference it to track your targets?

Then you have the notional idea of the hacker (nowadays...) 'scrubbing' your 'datatrail'... which essentially means he erased it all for ya, easy as pie. A detailed discussion of how that would work gets twisty, but I've got whole ESSAYS on the subject floating around the net...
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madunkieg

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« Reply #9 on: June 03, 2009, 11:58:51 PM »
Firearms, specifically rifles and pistols.

Maybe you think this is an area that will change drastically over the next 20-30 years. Maybe you've even got documentation to prove it. That's not the question. The question is, what do people expect to see in a futuristic game?

If doesn't matter if your game is set 20 years in the future or 38,000 years, people expect firearms to have similar shapes and effectiveness, even if their power comes from strange sources (e.g. lasers, superheated plasma, the name of the saviour, etc.). Heck, they can have the effective power and accuracy of a musket, and people will still believe it's the "latest in weapons technology" if you label it as such in your game. It's a cliche of rpgs, and sci-fi in general, that handheld weapons never really get any better.
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Spike

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Include the following technology or have people stratch their heads.
« Reply #10 on: June 06, 2009, 09:10:28 PM »
Aye.  One of the more irritating facets of trying to lay out a 'distant future' setting a few years back was, among other things, having to try and figure out how weapon and armors had changed...

... and realizing that I now hated star trek with a passion as a result.

God damn phazer gobbledy-gook, muckin' things up...


One of the few practical solutions for this sort of futurist behavior is to posit that the rapid expansion of technology over the last couple hundred years is analomous in the extreme, and nearing its end... thus all that remains is to solve a few more engineering problems and (maybe, if you want the stars to be yours.... a mulligan or two for good measure) and that things won't actually progress too far out on the sciency edge, but that things will mostly change culturally.

But that's BORING.  Then everything in your future-tech is 'modern stuff with fins on it'.
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Narf the Mouse

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« Reply #11 on: June 06, 2009, 09:28:10 PM »
Well, as the great Florence Ambrose says, 'Any technology, no matter how primitive, is magic to those who do not understand it'.

When writing Sufficiently Advanced technology, it is obvious that you will not understand it.

Therefore, treat it like magic that just happens to obey coherent, sciency laws. You don't actually have to know what they are; you just have to be consistant in your treatment of technology.
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The main problem with government is the difficulty of pressing charges against its directors.

Given a choice of two out of three M&Ms, the human brain subconsciously tries to justify the two M&Ms chosen as being superior to the M&M not chosen.

J Arcane

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Include the following technology or have people stratch their heads.
« Reply #12 on: June 08, 2009, 05:55:40 AM »
Gigahertz is a dead end.  There's a reason for the sudden interest in multi-core systems, it's because clock speed can only go so fast before the frequency starts generating some serious EMI.  3-4ghz is pretty much the top out for conventionally wired clock speeds.

Now, there's all this quantum and optical stuff, and maybe we'll see that happen, maybe not.  It would require a serious industrial shift, seeing as how both would entail entirely new hardware processes, aren't compatible with any other conventional computer technology, and just generally involve reinventing everything ever from the ground up.  So I wouldn't look at those occurring within a 30 year mark.  

Conventional chip technology continues to reduce die sizes, so likely a combination between that, and increasingly wider numbers of processing cores are most likely in terms of expanding processing power, though it is important to note that like clock speed, there's a practical physical limit on how small you can actually make a process before you actually start running into literal atomic, molecular, and quantum instabilities that will make your chip cease to function.  

As for the other components, Slaad is probably right in some respects in that solid state storage across the board is probably the future here for the most part, although for sheer size of storage mechanical hard drives may live on, ultimately once ironed out, the practical benefits of pure solid state in terms of speed and reliability are potentially astronomical.  RAM and HDD sizes will likely follow Moore's Law more or less on point, as programmers are a predictably lazy lot, and so the programs that use them will similarly balloon in size, often for no good reason.  

I hope to see optical discs, at least in the form now present, dead.  Mechanical based devices are still woefully inefficient and much more prone to mundane mechanical failures, however, unless solid state storage devices spiral downwards in cost to the extent of making them equally disposable and cheap, it seems unlikely for them to go away.  Instead I suspect they'll probably be replaced by new advances in holographic storage, and probably still in bloody disc form even though it isn't necessary, simply due to industry hideboundness and the ability to at least continue to utilize some of the existing industrial structures for constructing them.

Flat panel displays will have finally and clinchingly sealed the fate of the CRT in every respect, with wider and cheaper availability of things like high grade OLEDs and the like that finally remove the last major disadvantages vs. CRTs like black level and color quality.  LCDs are already pretty much standard though, so no big controversy there really, except that I think 1080p is probably going to remain the standard broadcast for a good long time, simply because again, hideboundness will keep it that way.  The US is only finally being dragged kicking and screaming by force into the digital broadcast age, don't look for another big change any time soon.  Computer panels though, will probably continue to slowly increase in resolution, 2560x1600 panels are already on the market now, and with advances in panel dot pitch those resolutions will get steadily sharper until they start bumping against physical barriers against nanotechnology as mentioned above.  

Input wise, well, probably just a mouse and keyboard on a lot of desks really.  You can argue AIs and voice and facial and motion recognition all you want, but the truth is most of that stuff is already here and no one's using it anyway, and I just don't see 30 years being enough to bring us into crazy sci-fi territory yet, when most of this stuff is already here and has yet to manage it already.  Neural interfaces are still in a level of infancy that resembles that of AI technology in the 70s, so don't expect that to really gain practicality yet either.

Honestly, computers will in all likely hood bear a fairly decent enough similarity in 30 years to the ones we have now.  The basic principles of the modern computer are at this point mostly rehashing and refining of basic principles we've already known for 30 years anyway.

Mind you, we could still see some more creative surprises of course.  I think tablet PCs are finally approaching true practicality, especially with the advances mentioned above making battery limitations less of an issue.  I'm already seeing the things in wider and wider use in business applications, and there's also the rising sales and popularity of so called "netbooks", micro laptops basically.  The TV game console will continue to expand in sophistication, and while likely to remain behind the desktop computer in terms of pure performance thanks to the realities of their respective markets, they will increasingly become a practical replacement for many of the every day tasks one currently uses a home computer for, though this shift will be fought tooth and nail even by some portions of the console market itself, a battle that is actually being fought as we speak.

Overall, there will be a spreading out of computing ability that enables the usage of computers to develop a more natural flow with the rest of our lives, rather than leaving the user tied down to a desk or a power cord or poor range or battery life.  

The wireless worlds in particular will become more and more ubiquitous, and continue to expand to ensure everyone everywhere has some way to get online without a cable.  This is perhaps obvious, given the state of things, but some changes will have to occur, most importantly a major shake up in the way current wireless and telecommunications companies operate, bringing them more in line with something that is practical for the consumer, perhaps in the form of a powerful new competitor.  

Game graphics will get more and more realistic, game budgets will get bigger and bigger, but much of the games will continue to be played in traditional manners, after the motion and accessory based gaming bubbles burst in the next few years.  Motion, like VR before it, will be dismissed despite it's potential on the basis of some bad examples, and looked at with scorn and bemusement.  Not to mention that no one's yet come up with a truly practical way of implementing comfortable and natural 1:1 movement that doens't involve running in place a lot.  

I think overall the main thing is that the more things change, the more things stay the same.  Technology rarely develops in leaps, it is more often in gradual refinement.  A big new thing only comes along every so often, and we've just had one with the cellular network, and really we still haven't even got that one ironed out yet really.
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