Quote:Original post by Xtlk
Why is there a war going on though? Is it a need for the scarce land, which would make sense. I remember something about religion which would also make a good war (halo comes to mind).

Ultimately I figure the reason is (like most wars) competition over resources... though
I do plan to come up with some back story and add a bit more depth to things.

Quote:Original post by Xtlk
Anyways I would love to see some screenshots or even a demo.
Good luck.

I've been busy with work and family obligations, so it took me a bit longer than expected, but here are those promised screenshots.

http://www.gridslammer.org/blig/screenshots.html

Enjoy!

Thad

Quote:Original post by Tesseract
Looks like you are off to a really good start.

Actually, those screenshots don't do it justice. I think I've got an error in my in-game snapshot routine... it looks like it is trying to capture at a different resolution than the screen is drawing at, resulting in rather grainy images. I compared it to some snaps I took using an external program and those came out much sharper. I'll probably generate some new screenshots tonight.

Later,

Thad

Quote:Original post by wpdesign
A few ideas for you:

1. Have the Maelstorm be where the minerals are. Larger ships may not be able to transport down there without being damaged, but maybe smaller, more armored ships can. That also could save any resource gatherers by allowing them to fly into the area for safety.

Interesting idea. I might do something like that for certain specific resources. I think the lifting mineral, however, would inevitably be mined from higher areas. The higher the island, the richer the mineral content after all.

Quote:2. The idea of the complete customization is a good one, but you seem to be going back and forth between it being an RTS where it is fleet-based, and and action game where it is person-based. The idea of ship customization reminds me of Battlezone, a game from the 90's that allowed customization like this. Unique things like that allow for people to design and create their own custom ships. With that in mind, you should add ALOT of parts that can be customized or changed...this will make it so people can truly get the respective feel of having their own creations.

I actually played Battlezone a bunch (got it free with a video card... bought a second copy to net play with a friend). I really liked the mix of combat and strat, and I suspect that has shaped some of my thinking about how this game will work.

Quote:3. Custom Textures may not be the best idea. Maybe the ability to put a custom design on the side of it, allowing for that final touch of personalization. Massive ammounts of personal textures will just end up eating more and more on the game, and would require alot of work with transfering them when used in multiplayer situations.

I've actually put some thought into this aspect of the game, and have some ideas on how to strike a balance between performance and customization. Players will have the ability to create custom models and textures, but they must also select some system defaults so other players can fall back to those if their video card has less onboard RAM and so forth. At a minimum, players will be able to decal the sides of their airships and pick some basic color schemes, so it should be easy to tell competing forces apart. I've done tests with each airship having its own custom display lists and textures, and have sustained over 300 airships rendering at one time and maintained decent framerates. Thats on a card with 128MB of on-board video RAM. I've also thought about how player data would be served to clients and cached locally in ways that should minimize the performance hit.

Quote:4. Will this game be more MMO style where it is always online and expanding, like EVE online, or more situation style, where the game would be started and created with a group of people starting from scratch? This could completely change the way the game can, and should, be.

I'm leaning toward MMO, but have not completely made up my mind, which is why I decided to bounce ideas around this forum. It would be simple enough to make it a shorter term game with very finite objectives like Battlezone, Starcraft, etc, in which a fixed number of initial players battle for a short amount of time until there is a clear victor. I really like Battlezone and Starcraft (still play that with the girlfriend occasionally) but I think its been done to death. An MMO/MMRTS is more challenging to pull off well, but that is what I think would make it fun. I've a colo server sitting on a 10Mbps Internet connection that is really underutilized as just a web server right now, so I'm better situated to do the big multiplayer game thing than most. One nice thing is that these airships can be expected to move a bit slower and with a bit more lag in their response time than say, an F16 simulator game, so the network demands of this game should be relatively low. People on slow connections will still be able to play, and the server should be able to support a larger number of players.

One nice thing about any massively multiplayer game is that the real value to the player is in the server resources and the original content served. This means I can make the game client open source and don't have to worry about copy protection and so forth. I've some fuzzy ideas how multiple player supplied game servers can be networked together into a single universe of Realms connected by portals, including some ideas on how to address the inevitable cheating problems that will arise when you give up exclusive control of the servers. It not an easy problem to solve and would likely entail both technical and in game social structures to combat it. We could no doubt start a whole new thread on the topic.

My nephew has been playing EVE Online lately, and that game seems to wrestle with some of the same issues. I should take some time to look at it.

Later,

Thad