I love Eclipse Phase so much.
Spoilers for those who haven't played Mass Effect 2! (shame on you)
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Okay, you should be safe now.
It's amazing how well this 'species' fits into Eclipse Phase. You barely need to do any changes at all to how the rules work to port them in; hell, you can just throw them in by having one of their non-atmospheric station habitats be found in an Exosolar system beyond a Pandora Gate.
The Geth from Mass Effect are, of course, essentially a race of alien AIs that exist solely as Infomorphs and occasionalyl inhabit Synthmorphs. Each individual program is akin to, at most, a low level AI. Then they join together within a single cyberbrain or server hub in sufficient numbers, and they count as a collective AGI. They even have back-up insurance, farcaster technology, advanced mesh technology with which to communicate in a species-wide cyberdemocracy... the only technologies that stand out as blatant advanced by EP standards is their access to FTL travel and kinetic barriers.
Their main goal, uploading their entire collective of individual programs into a single massive hub, sort of like a Matrioshka Brain, is basically them seeking to join together in one massive consensual seed AI, from which they would recursively self improve into mechanical godhood.
Transhumanity meets them well in advanced of that plan being off the ground in any appreciable way.
Not sure why I made this post, but it's just an interesting realization I had soon after reading the EP books.
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Mass Effect: Porting Geth
Mon, 2010-10-11 14:41
#1
Unity
Mass Effect: Porting Geth
Thu, 2010-10-28 21:21
#2
Unity
Re: Mass Effect: Porting Geth
No commentary? Oh well. I guess it was just too obvious and not worth commenting on.
/self-necro
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Fri, 2010-10-29 23:41
#3
750
Re: Mass Effect: Porting Geth
heh, best part of the game. Gives me a new idea of how to play a swarmanoid or flexbot now that i think about it.
Sat, 2010-10-30 04:20
#4
GreyBrother
Re: Mass Effect: Porting Geth
Whoops. Wanted to comment on this thread and forgot.
Legion inspired one of my characters. I just love Mass Effects take on Wall-E :D (Don't tell me i'm the only one who thought this in Legions dialogues). Even hacked the savegame to get him early.
The character is basically an AGI in a Synth body of his own design with some rudimentary mimic. It was created by a Brinker hab of scientists in a hodgepodge work. It's just 8 years old and lacks many things a regular AGI would normally have. It's in between AI and AGI when it comes to personality, while there is one, it is more dictated by what it thinks his peers would prefer since the whole emotional subroutines are present but not really incorporated. It experiences fear but more on a logical level, a part of its mind saying "We should really run away now." It views itself as many different program parts, the muse is just his secondary processes and then there is the Multitasking implant which adds tertiary egos to the brink.
It's a math whiz in every respekt and a damn good engineer since synthmorph creation is something it found "desireable" and even joyful to do, same as the sensation of touching (it claims there is a difference to touching in a simulspace enviroment and the physical world). As of now, it had no encounter with "bubblewrap".
If created to be a whole race, a literal port, i'd forgo FTL travel and hmmm kinetic barriers... could be doable by physics? I dunno. Physicsgeeks?
Sat, 2010-10-30 05:25
#5
CodeBreaker
Re: Mass Effect: Porting Geth
If I was going to make the Geth in Eclipse Phase I would actually use the already existing gestalt mind example. The hypermesh use of the neo-synergists. With some very simple modification it works extremely well.
Instead of the straight +5 to COG bonus it would normally get just for being connected to the hypermesh it instead receives a +1 to COG for every other Geth Ego connected to its local network, up to a maximum of +25 to COG. However, whenever it is entirely seperate from a Geth hypermesh network it has a COG of 5 at all times. Due to the alien nature of Geth intelligence all examples of COG boosting technology (Gear, Implants) created by transhuman means is are useless when applied to a Geth Ego. Because no Psi active Geth have every been encountered scientists are unable to come to a collected conclusion on its effects.
Any Geth engineered technology is capable of hosting server like quantities of Geth Egos (And only Geth Egos, not transhuman) due to some strange quirk of their alien technology. Scientists believe they are making use of an exotic variety of computronium. Their technology is also always considered to be connected to any local Geth hypermesh networks.
For the sake of calculating a Geths COG bonus due to being a member of the hypermesh network it may make use of any active infomorph Geth Egos that are a part of the network. For example, if a Geth was running 15 seperate Geth Egos on its own hypermesh implants, or if those Egos were running on a nearby server, it would receive a +15 to its COG attribute (And each of those seperate Egos would also receive a +15 to COG.)
For some unknown reason researchers have found that the Geth are almost entirely unable to fork their own Egos in any form. They are unsure if this is caused by their extremely close bond created by the hypermesh inserts or some random quirk of their programming. The few attempts that have succeeded have resulted in an almost entirely corrupted Ego that is unable to perform any tasks other than cower in the corner of a simulspace and mutter random strings of what is believed to be computer code. Any attempts to create a fork of a Geth Ego is considered to be an Alpha Fork. To create this fork a psycho-surgery test must be made. This roll always suffers a -60 modifier, no matter the positive modifiers a player may be able to accumulate. If the test fails the resultant fork is useless. It it succeeds an entirely new Geth Ego is created, however it lacks the memories and personality of its parent Ego.
Due to the Geths entirely digital state they do not suffer any negative effects from sleeving into any morph with a cyberbrain installed. They have found to be capable of molding any current cyberbrain technology to their own uses. As such they do not need to roll integration or alienation tests when sleeving in cyberbrain installed morphs, or when sleeving into an infomorph. Geth Egos are incapable of sleeving into any morph lacking a cyberbrain.
I think that covers everything. Kinetic barriers are a bit more difficult. Extremely powerful ETI type energetic fields might be capable of performing the same role. Maybe Gatecrashers will have something we can fiddle with to do them. FTL travel on the other hand would probably be a bit much. I would instead give them CTL travel, much like the Factors seem to have. Or just make them capable of hauling Pandora Gates about on their ships, and make them capable of interacting with them to do their deads.
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