Making a quake 3, tribes or half-life mod of this would be alot easier. Starting from scratch would be a waste of effort. It would probably be more successful as a MOD too. As for a full feature game it sounds kinda shallow.





Edited by - Caffeine on July 13, 2000 2:02:47 PM

When I realized that it has to be 1st person it also crossed my mind that making a mod would be easier. But then again, it wouldn''t be as fun.

Physics is always fun. Don''t you all just love to solve Schroedinger equations...

-Ratsia

Even if you could use shooting recoil as movement method there would still be those walls to push from and you would move much faster by pushing yourshelf from wall or some large object. So there wouldn''t be any need to advance backfacing.

Unless the whole game was played in empty space. Distances to other players could then become pretty huge. Hmm... If there were some kind of energy fields working as walls. You could see through them but could not push from them or shoot trough them...

We''re getting quite away from Ender''s Game and Battleroom but it doesn''t matter.

-Ratsia

quote:Original post by Nazrix

If you shot a gun in zero gravity, would you be propelled backward?

well, I guess not a laser gun, but a shotgun or something...

Actually.. go visit Laser propulsion research projects homepage lasers CAN and ARE being used as a propellant through space. Believe it or not.. if you had 12 thousand dollars to spend.. you could buy a laser lamp. You see, the theory behind it is to shoot a laser up at a probe or whatever, the prob captures the laser and spreads the beam outwards. The "ship" looks about like a lamp shade.. or satilite dish pointed down. The laser energy is held in by the skin, and it''s actually redirected downwards. So you get propulsion from the laser hitting the craft and the laser being pushed downwards by the craft. My roomie said he saw a program with a 12 thousand dollar lamp shade looking thing that floated over the top of this laser. And because laser is light.. it could be designed so that it produces light. I think if you could stabilize it so that shade part sits a certain distance up from the laser base, then you could refocus the laser back towards the base, which could collect and refocus the laser back up towards the ship, in effect.. recycling the laser That way it draws as little power as possible.

As for the design of the game.. think about it like this:
In ender''s game, when they pushed off the walls too fast, you''d go flying into someone else or something else and risk injury. You can''t stop in the air, you simply get creamed by whatever you hit. Too much speed, and bye bye neck!

here''s what i was thinking: You have the players push off of something to get momentum. They can then rotate in the air. But to rotate in the air should take some kinda work, cause it''s NOT easy in reality. if it was as simple as using the num pad to rotate around, then yeah.. i''d say go for it. but the game will be quite a bit dumbed-down for that to happen. And if you''re going to do that, you might as well make it men in space suits.. or combat suits or something

J

Cool, I''ve always entertained the idea of making the exact game that the original poster was talking about. I actually came up with some good ideas with my physic friend. I see the three main problems as adaquate collision detection and reaction control, orientation of viewport vs. direction of movement, and interface. Many of you previously described the same things. I came up with a few solutions to these problems. They may not be the best but I''ll tell them to you anyway since I don''t plan on making that game in the near future.

I''ll try to start with the interface issue. What needs to be realized right away, and think it already has, is that the current interface in FPS is inadequate because of the viewport vs. direction of movement arguement. What is basically going to have to happen is that the player will have to keep track of two sets of conditions at once. Those that are involved with where he/she is heading (speed, direction, obstacles, distances ) and those involved with what he/she sees. As far as an interface is concerned there needs to be an external controller (outside of the 3-D viewport ) that signifies direction of movement as well as direction of view. It has to be a control that is very intuitive and one must be able to derive location/direction information from it in a matter of milliseconds (a glance to the controller.)

At first this may seem daunting and impossible, and to some of us gamers it just might be, but to young gamers like my little brother, who has the born in twitch, this is just another factor for their brains to handle. I see this control as something that sits in the upper right hand corner of the screen and represents the playing area in red outline. It will not actually be a solid, just a wire frame of the playing area. Now a player will be a small dot in this field and lines will extend from the player''s dot to the wall in the direction of the player''s movement. This line will be blue and where it intersects the wall a small solid surface will be shown so that an angle of incidence can be derived.

Now another line will also extend from the player dot. This line represents the player''s view and it extends to that is directly in front of the player''s face in the viewport. This idea could definitely use some work but I think that in a limited environment like a cubic room this system for orientation finding might work.

Another aspect of the user interface is hotkeying the viewport. It would be essential that there be controls that would allow the viewport to automatically snap toward the direction of travel and then another one that would resnap to the direction of viewing before the snap to direction. You would need to have ones that would allow you to snap in any spherical coordinate direction that you choose. These could be set up by the user before hand. Sort off topic in this section but maybe the whole thing could be done in spherical coordinates. Keep in mind that the player would only be able to look so far in one direction before the limits of their physical position would hinder any further movement, but we humans do have the ability (whilst moving our heads) to see almost all the way around ourselves.

Here is an interesting function. There is always a targeted enemy (focused by a pink box.) There could be a hot key that snaps the viewport to this enemy. This is not auto aim, but rather a viewport control. All this "snapping to" would actually be quick panning. This could be quite disorienting for many people but I feel that it would be essential for the real feel. You would of course all the player to hit a hot key to select the next enemy. Like I said earlier, just because the program will be handling viewport control a little bit doesn''t mean that the program will auto-aim. This snapping will only provide general direction control.

While I''m on the topic of viewports being controlled by the computer maybe I can segway into the player character control. My first idea in this respect addresses the question involving how to change body position. Now we can obviously see that there could be WAY to many hotkeys required so what I suggest here might solve this problem. Underneath the direction control on the right side of the screen is an 3-D representation of the player''s body as the other players see it. Its orientation would be tied to some cardinal direction or maybe always based upon the direction of travel. Now what you can do is have scripts that modify how the player''s body moves into different positions ( a la pulling one''s knees up to one chest and freezing them.) Now the tricky part is pulling off these moves without using hotkeys. I think it could be done by using one hotkey (maybe a mouse key) as what we''ll call viewport lock.

Once the viewport is locked mouse movements will no longer move the viewport until it is unlocked. This will allow the player to use the mouse to manipulate the little figure on the right hand side of the screen. By pulling it to the right the player may spin around. By hitting a button the player may pull up his knees, or possibly let them down. As stated before the buttons could be bound to scripts. Along this same lines we have hot keys that we will call anticipatory commands.

Anticipatory commands are those commands that will be executed upon the event that a pre-scripted event takes place. So lets say we are heading toward a wall and we are looking behind ourselves. We quickly snap to the wall with the viewport, hit a hotkey that is set to rebound us 30 degrees up ( it''d have to be in spherical coords.) and accelerate us by 20 % then we snap back to our previous view and continue shooting. Now there is a window of opportunity for each anticipatory command. It could only be executed within lets say 10 feet of the wall.

Wow, lots of writing here. I''ll stop for now but if people are interested in more ideas I''ll continue later. Now it needs to be realized that these ideas will require insane interaction speeds. The gameplay will be lightening fast and many people wouldn''t be able to handle the "twitch" requirement. it could be incredibly fun though and very rewarding physically. You''d get that adrenaline rush when you just pulled off an insane move.

More later,

Random Task

To allow people to keep their orientation as they float across this room you could have some sort of cloud/dust like when your playing elite and your going north but facing left all the space crap flies past you (although it is you flying past the crap).

thats about as best as I can explain it but it would take lots of complex information out of your map if you did it this way.