Imperium design diary

gregorypierce · September 1, 2003, 5:38pm

Today marks the first entry for the game that I have been working on - Imperium (working title). This is the game that I’ve always wanted to make as I’m big into sci-fi and massive starship fleet engagements so here we go - the Design Abstract on page 1 of the design document.

Imperium is a turn-based single player strategy game with multiplayer capabilities. Imperium allows the player to play as the ruler of an interstellar empire as it grows from a single star system and tries to conquer the entire universe through espionage, research, diplomacy and mass fleet battles.

Gameplay is similar to other games in the genre in which players start with a core homeworld and begin exploring from that homeworld and colonizing planets as the player’s empire moves through space. Research plays a key roll in the game as it enables the player’s empire new capabilities, government choices, ship designs, weapons, etc. While players have the ability to research technologies, they can also be acquired through espionage - using spy networks and specialist agents to acquire alien technology, research scientists, and even entire working alien prototypes.

The player isn’t alone in the universe. Outside of the other computer ‘opponent’ empires - the player will be able to interact with other indigenous species on planets in the universe and for diplomatic relationships with them. Diplomacy serves as a conduit for an empire to acquire allies in the universe with which to form military, economic or even technological treaties. Since any planet that has inhabitants must be dealt with, the player will quickly discover that diplomacy is a key tool in growing the empire. As more races discover each other they will form a larger UN-style governmental body to police the empires and the clusters of independent systems. They player will have to interact with this governmental body later in the game as well.

The economics of an empire are very important as they determine what the player is actually able to do in the empire. From economic and educational programs to the development of shipyards and capital warships - everything in the game consumes or produces wealth and the player is the final voice for the empires balance sheet and must approve the budget.

The player is the leader of the military forces. He is responsible for determining what forces are built and where they are rallied. The player is also responsible for making sure enough raw materials are available to build and maintain the empires fleet, the raising of the imperial army, and the construction of battle plans that are used when fleets engage in combat. Since a fleet by its very nature is a complex structure and since combat occurs in a series or real time ‘turns’, it is important that the player have a set of battle plans that will be used when engaging in combat as moving or reassigning tasks to the fleet while in combat requires ‘command points’. Command points represent the available amount of command and control available to the fleet. A player can let a battle plan unfold on its own without the expenditure of any command points, but in order to actually take advantage of or adjust for battlefield situations requires the expenditure of command points.

Finally, the player is responsible for his/herself. In Imperium, the leader of the empire is an actual entity in the game and can be killed, assassinated, kidnapped, or otherwise incapacitated at which time control of the empire falls to one of the player’s heirs. If the player has no heirs, the game ends.

William · September 1, 2003, 7:07pm

[quote]From economic and educational programs to the development of shipyards and capital warships - everything in the game consumes or produces wealth and the player is the final voice for the empires balance sheet and must approve the budget.
[/quote]
Sounds nice, this is a bit unclear to me though. Is it the player or something else (like AI characters) that put items in the budget that the players has to approve?

I’m just wondering what level of micromanagement there will be, if units will start building things on their own or if the player has to initiate every project (like in many of these kinds of games).

[quote]In Imperium, the leader of the empire is an actual entity in the game and can be killed, assassinated, kidnapped, or otherwise incapacitated at which time control of the empire falls to one of the player’s heirs. If the player has no heirs, the game ends.
[/quote]
I especially like this part

gregorypierce · September 2, 2003, 12:43am

The player doesn’t have to initiate every project. Essentially there are a variety of ministries and you direct the empire through these ministries by giving them a ‘gameplan’ of sorts. I don’t know how many people here played the old stratamatic football games of old but basically you built up a ‘profile’ for that minister to follow and that minister will handle the more mundane low level things such as building starlanes, upgrading commerce stations and the like. High level things will be the responsibility of the player (but will many times be suggested by a minister). For example, a minister will not build a shipyard in orbit of every planet - they are extensive structures that take a long time to build so you as head of the military would order their contstruction. However the minster of defense would have in his/her budget upgrades to those facilities and might suggest building new or larger spaceports.

gregorypierce · September 2, 2003, 4:35pm

In preparing for the first ‘screen shot’ build an insane amount of design is being written and reviewed by the team to make sure that the core fundamentals of planets, stars, moons and solar systems is understood so that we can prep up for the ‘universe generation’ phase. While not going into immense detail, universe generation is going to follow more of the theory on how the universe actually came into being and hopefully we’ll get something more interesting in the universe in terms of the layout of the galaxy in question we’re targetting.

Much work is going into integrating with the server framework that’s being used as well as the multiplayer component is going in early.

gregorypierce · September 2, 2003, 7:40pm

To help me focus on developing the combat system I composed a piece of music that kinda felt the way I would like some of the combat music to be themed. Since it was just a mood building piece I didn’t really bother trying to complete it, but here it is. Who knows, it may make its way in some form into the game

http://www.gregorypierce.com/BattleMusic.mp3

endolf · September 2, 2003, 9:43pm

Hi
It took me aaaages to get a dns server to resolve that address, and now I do, I still can’t get a responce from the web server, you got another host you could try?

Cheers

Endolf

gregorypierce · September 2, 2003, 11:27pm

Not sure how to help with that one. The server is sitting in a network operations center co-located in Texas and is out on the public internet - not a cable modem or DSL line. Where is your connection originating from? I will contact the NOC and have them troubleshoot the problem.

endolf · September 3, 2003, 7:02am

Hi
Just checked again, and I still can’t get to it, interestingly enough, another box her in the uk I have access too can, but this has been going on for days, here are two tracroutes to compare

This one works

                            Matt's traceroute  [v0.51]
<hidden>                                    Wed Sep  3 09:55:59 2003
Keys:  D - Display mode    R - Restart statistics    Q - Quit
                                           Packets               Pings
Hostname                                %Loss  Rcv  Snt  Last Best  Avg  Worst
 1. redwoodF4-1.onyx.net                   0%    7    7     0    0    0      0
 2. willowS4-0.onyx.net                    0%    6    6    19   19   19     20
 3. ge9-0.mpr2.lhr1.uk.mfnx.net            0%    6    6    20   19   20     21
 4. pos0-0.mpr1.lhr1.uk.mfnx.net           0%    6    6    20   20   21     23
 5. so-4-1-0.cr1.lhr3.uk.above.net         0%    6    6    20   20   21     23
 6. so-7-0-0.cr1.dca2.us.above.net         0%    6    6    92   91   92     93
 7. so-6-2-0.cr1.atl2.us.mfnx.net          0%    6    6   102  102  104    106
 8. so-3-0-0.mpr1.iah1.us.above.net        0%    6    6   116  115  116    119
 9. 216.200.251.61.ev1.net                 0%    6    6   116  116  120    125
10. 39.ev1.net                             0%    6    6   127  125  125    127
11. 207.44.160.7                           0%    5    6   130  129  131    133

This is my one from home

                           Matt's traceroute  [v0.54]
<hidden>                        Wed Sep  3 09:57:07 2003
Keys:  D - Display mode    R - Restart statistics    Q - Quit
                                           Packets               Pings
Hostname                                %Loss  Rcv  Snt  Last Best  Avg  Worst
 1. <hidden>                                                0%   18   18     0    0    0      0
 2. 10.24.0.1                              0%   18   18     9    7   10     38
 3. gsr01-st.blueyonder.co.uk              0%   18   18     7    7   10     40
 4. 172.18.6.65                            0%   18   18    12   11   21    136
 5. tele1-azt-pos.telewest.net             0%   18   18    12   11   12     13
 6. 194.117.136.174                        0%   18   18    12   10   21    170
 7. ge-1.linx.londen03.uk.bb.verio.net     0%   18   18    13   11   16     60
 8. p4-1-0-0.r80.nycmny01.us.bb.verio.n    0%   18   18    90   85   88     97
 9. p16-0-1-3.r21.nycmny01.us.bb.verio.    0%   18   18    85   85   86     92
10. p16-1-0-1.r21.asbnva01.us.bb.verio.    0%   18   18    88   85   87     93
11. p16-3-0-0.r02.stngva01.us.bb.verio.erve0%   18   18    87   86   89    129
12. p16-0-1-1.r21.dllstx01.us.bb.verio.    0%   18   18   120  118  125    160
13. p16-6-0-0.r00.hstntx01.us.bb.verio.    0%   18   18   124  122  126    154
14. ge-1.ev1.hstntx01.us.bb.verio.net      0%   18   18   124  123  127    144
15. 39.ev1.net                             0%   18   18   126  123  126    136
16. ???

I’ll stick a report in to my ISP too, but it gets out of their network, so I suspect they will be uncooperative

HTH

Endolf

gregorypierce · September 3, 2003, 11:32pm

I’ve opened a ticket with te NOC and they are looking into it.

gregorypierce · September 5, 2003, 6:06pm

Finally got a build up as the Apple folks and the Sun folks have clearly been talking behind the scenes and got things working that previous crashed and burned - but right now the performance is just terrible - as soon as textures show up. Something very wrong is going on and I hate to stop and start looking through JOGL OSX source to find out what it is, so I’m going to wait for a bit and just deal with the performance while I integrate the JInput code.

gregorypierce · September 13, 2003, 1:22am

One of the major issues, as I approach M1, is making the framerate smooth. Even though there is no heap memory being allocated every traversal through the scene graph - there are still issues getting the framerate to remain 100% smooth. There are still some gc pauses and at best I’ve been able to minimize them - but not remove them altogether.

M1 is pretty much a planetarium with a single solar system.