nice
Good initiative 
I’m also working on a draft for a backstory, - I just need some quiet time from the kids to finish it I guess I’ll post it tonight or tomorrow, when it’s finished. If no one individual story comes out as perfect, we can probably takes bits and pieces from different ideas to make an interesting plot.
As there is not many people working on the RTS. I was hopying to develop the games in the same universe.
It would be really benificial to our project on the creative side of things, as Id rather not do the writing, and there are no other writers.
Therefore we will be developing a scifi RTS.
Do you guys think this is cool idea?
Definitely. If the RTS is going 3D, it would perhaps be useful to share some 3D models of ships and the like, as well
Cool. Maybe have the art side of things linked, Models/Sprites/Sounds. For story, after the space trade is decided and if no one has written one for the RTS, I was thinking Id just make a quick plug in plot, from the same universe (dramatic character based plot).
Thanks for the responses, guys. I see now that no one’s thinking of the project being a complete free-for-all in which anyone can add any class they like, which is what I’d originally (mis-)understood the idea to be.
Simon
Hi.
My opinion is that it should be possible to add “anything” to the game, as long as that “anything” adheres to a ruleset (which we need anyway), and the overall story/plot. I’d recommend some kind of peer review system for content creation anyhow, it’s ridiculous that everyone can just put anything into play without others reviewing it in a more (or less) formal way first. Again, my opinion.
It’s a habit of mine, but I find myself trying to form stories and plots as history or present
“documents” of sorts. Below is a brief and rough draft which could constitute as part 1 of
a chain of documents that could work as a plot and story builder.
If you don’t like it, please say so. My feelings won’t be hurt, and it’d just save me wasted
time and effort
At the galactic cruiser ‘Ceres’ 986.66 post-earth standard.
On May 20th in the year 2012 GR, the fate of mankind changed forever.
For 3 years, governments and astronomers around the world had watched MOAC-1,
as the comet continued to soar towards Earth. Its vector predicted a direct
impact with a 85,67% certainty.
As it approached the inner parts of the solar system, mathematicians were glad
to have miscalculated the effect of the solar heat on the comet. Its deviation
from its original course saved the human race. But only barely.
Although avoiding a direct collision, the comet still passed just within the
Rocher limit, and only its speed kept it from being torn apart from Earth’s
tidal forces.
And then it crashed into the moon.
A part of the moon tore apart from the impact, sending enormous chunks of rock
down to Earth with velocities of up to 25.000 kilometres per second.
Those who lived to witness the event fail to find words that describe it. But
as rocks turned into fireballs in the descent towards earth, exploding with plumes
of fire up to 500 kilometres high, unleashing energy equivalent to 40.000 megatons
(easily four times the world’s combined nuclear arsenal at the time), one can
understand the loss of words.
…
A little over three weeks later, the debris clouds parted and survivors woke up to
a dying world. Over 3 billion lives were lost in those first weeks. Poles melting,
ocean levels rising, plagues everywhere, volcanic activity out of control,
massive earthquakes, and crumbling continental plates followed.
It marked the end of mankinds first golden age.
– Transcript taken from ‘Human history’ Volume 42, recorded by Sabyon, historian.
I like
Good stuff Addictman! Believable and well written; enough of a global event to influence the need for space travel and colonization. Honestly, with all the resources available to us this day and age, space travel should of been accomplished already instead of building crappy cars that people don’t buy. Sorry America, I love to take that cheap shot =).
Now, question is will corporations be leading his charge into space for $$ or will governments lead the way like they did back in the 50’s?
Jack
Cool stuff everyone.
I have spent my 4 hours today working out how to compress libraries. We are gonna have to choose a renderer and other libs, and one selection criteria people have all ready mentioned is bloat. Anyway, I thought there should be a way of trimming libraries based on the subset of functionality you were actually using. I kinda expected that to be a pretty done deal, but as it turns out IBM’s JAX was the only real contender and that has been moved from alphaworks to websphere and you can’t download it anymore. I found this cool academic library http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/hosking/bloat/ and have been trying to work out if I can configure it to trim methods and classes that are unnecessary. To cut a long story short YES YOU CAN! I have successfully removed redundant methods from a program and ran the remaining mess to get the same output. Its far to early to say anything about the robustness or scalability of the methodology, but I think I should defiantly try and wrap up what I am trying to achieve in an ANT task. As such a tool has plenty of uses I’ll give it its own project on google code or something. That is unless anyone knows a (free) library that all ready does this functionality (please please speak up so I don’t waste time, I’ll cross post in Tools discussion).
Tom
I like as well, however I would like to push the date of the disaster to further in the future? that way technology is sufficently advanced to believe that mankind was able to escape the planet. This would also mean that “relics” of the “first golden age” can be found through out the universe… (e.g power ups, missions/quests, etc)
Perhaps I should have mentioned that all dates and flavour text were just “randomly” picked, and is bound to change. The future datetime format as well.
The date 20th May 2012 was simply picked because 2012 is prophecized to be when armageddon comes, according to nostradamus, the mayans, etc.
The 20th May is the annual Eclipse of this year
I don’t mind pushing this date into infinity though.
OK. Proguard does all the compacting I reinvented .
What model format? Content authors will need to be able to define the visuals. define the stats of ship/stations (inc. weapon points, engine locations). Oh I suppose if this framework is really reflection heavy then it can all be done procedurally in the concrete ship subclasses… in which case we just need to decide what the engine makes an effort to support. Still, choice of renderer is a massive open decision.
Tom
Galactic map.
How are players planets and stations gonna get on the map with the relevant info? Does the player know the relevant info at the beginning.
Does the player know all locations in the galaxy at the beginning? Is the galactic map fixed, or can events change it? Can the player annotate it?
(Personal opinion: let loaded code modify the map. Use this functionality to open and close parts of the galaxy as part of questing. We need to ensure querying high level stats of space stations and ships does not force us to load the graphics. StationFactory and ShipFactory are what contributors actually write and are the entry points for dynamic loading. I would prefer it if the player got all useful information onto the galactic map as they learn it. e.g. trade information gets added for a space station as soon as the player lands on the station or scans it with a trade scanner, but this could be too fidly).
Could we use the player plotting a hyperspace destination as a cue for loading graphics?
Warpdrive Vs. warp tunnels. (Personal opinion: warp dirves! those tunnels are annoying time consumers)
Cool ideas! Keep them coming…
Nervous thoughts on implementation;
The data should be simple enough (x,y,z dx,dy,dz) if the game is zoned (ie not too much data per zone), the critical bit here is rendering!
JPCT is a brilliant engine but I suspect it’s too generalised for what’s required here, it’s not good at rapidly changing data and not very well geared up for procedural textures (argue with me Egon! You know I want to use it!). I think the join between the Renderer and the Physics needs to be pretty tight. In an ideal scenario the phys could avoid a lot of duplicated calculation by feeding render with ‘easy’ data.
Train of thought: Objects are in an octree. The Phys moves all objects, checks collisions and feeds ‘ticked’ objects with proximity lists for the AI. It also feeds the renderer with a culled list, maybe not as tight as individual polys (but the phys will need these for collision checks anyway) but pretty tight. The renderer would then need to call the relevant objects with a getColour(textureID, u, v) call if procedural textures are used. Certainly with software rendering there won’t be CPU enough to feed both phys & render with raw data.
Speculative question: Can we build a Physrenderer? Code which can take raw model data, move it and render it in one fell swoop?
We could say that the player ships are outfittet with some kind of communication device that could pick up on short range broadcasts.
There’s bound to be individual requirements here, but lets take a zone that’s a “public / open / well known”. Upon the player’s first time arrival in a zone,
the “capital” planet could for instance broadcast information about the zone, which will pop up in player’s ship hud to read, and will afterwards store itself
in the galactic map.
The same galactic map could perhaps allow personal notes as well, so that more “explore for treasure” zones that do not broadcast this “Welcome to our zone, this is our menu …” remains forgotten until the player makes his own note about it in the map.
I like the short case broad cast of maps etc. perhaps you can buy and sell maps. thus you could have a profession of navigator/cartographer.
How about something more original, for example:
On 19 January 2038 there were still some legacy 32-bit UNIX systems in use. One of these was a chemical research plant on Earth’s orbit. The administrators had though, that since nothing too bad happened on year 2000, the year 2038 would neither cause problems. But that day, at 03:14:07 UTC, the engines of the plant’s rocket engines went haywire. As the plant fell into Earth’s atmosphere, the chemicals were burning and forming dangerous compounds. The fumes spread over the clouds and eventually fell on earth with rain. The chemicals disturbed the function of chloroplasts so that the photosynthesis of Earth’s vegetation worked at only 20% efficiency. There came to be too much CO2 and living things began to die away. Those people living in rich countries were able to use devices producing oxygen artificially, but even then it was clear that they would need to leave the planet within 30-50 years, because the fumes in the air were preventing human reproduction. It would take some over 300 years for Earth’s ecosystem to fix itself, so the human population would need to find a way to survive the next couple of hundred years away from their home planet.
how about they finally turn on the large hadron collider and promptly cause 7 parallel universes and earths to share the same space/time. The earth now with 42 billion people to feed, let alone 7 versions of everyone getting fed up with each other, lead to the exodus from earth to eventually found separate civilizations and only now has contact of been re-established between 6 of these civilizations.
Sure i am not a good story writer, but some interesting concepts can be made from this idea. e.g. each parallel universe is slightly different ( space steam punk , N.A.Z.Is IN SPACE, buddist ruled… you get the idea.
Edit: wow i the swear filter does not like word n.a.z.i. nazi!