Programming Technique in IWAR

I was thinking, as I sometimes do, about “the ultimate game”…or atleast, one version of it. Now, this topic isn’t about that…I think most of us have seen enough of those 🙂 (i dont want anyone stealing my ideas! lol)

I was thinking along the lines of a FPS/space-sim hybrid. UT2004, Battlefield, Red Faction, Breed (has anyone actually played that? i’d like to hear about it), GTA, and some game I havent played yet called Mace Griffin: Bounty Hunter, are some titles I’ve heard of that do something close to this, but so far as I can tell, either havent done it well, or not to the extent that I have in mind. Most of those titles are somewhat recent, so to me it seems that the ability to do it is upon us.

Question is…how did they develop the “free-range” universe in IWAR(and in other games, like those listed above, or…Morrowind, for example)? I’ve read about some programming technique that I believe is the method, but I can’t remember what it was. Regardless, I didn’t really get the best idea of how it worked from what I had read, so if someone could explain it in simple terms also, that’d be great. The basics of how all the data is kept and saved, how it is implemented when the player approaches a different area, and how the whole ‘persistant’ thing can work (the player is off on island A playing around, but over on island B, the routines and lives of the NPCs continue on…I suspect this is basically just a trick, that there really is no simulation of the NPCs, but rather, when the player approaches the area, a set formula or something is run to determine the changes that virtually occured…perhaps this is how ‘living economies’ are achived in some titles?)

Basically, I’m thinking something along the lines of a GTA in space I guess, atleast in the basic idea of being able to go anywhere and use anything. But throw in some SystemShock/DeusEx interfacing, RPG elements (hacking!) for good measure (has anyone here played Breakdown, on the Xbox? crazy cool game…uses some cool ideas too, immersion/interface stuff); that way, youre flying around, you land on a station, you walk around the station, find yourself a cargo ship full of Ore you want…cant carry all that ore, so you just jack the ship…dont have the keys, so ya gotta hotwire/hack it, via a little minigame thing like in SS2 (that way skill and luck is involved)…and then maybe you have to hack or blow the airlock open, and then mebbe remote link back to the ship you flew in on and dock it to your new cargo ship…or autopilot the cargo and use the remote to defend yourself…etc. the usual dreaming 🙂