When Zaei gets his engine done he'll give the source to you and dennis. Then you make an OpenGL port, for now you guys are on a bit of a break.
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When Zaei gets his engine done he'll give the source to you and dennis. Then you make an OpenGL port, for now you guys are on a bit of a break.
Wahey, um also the web site never seems to have been changed when i look at it lol, this is the Tripod account yeah that u menna be changing ?
Guys, my scaner is broken, I dont know if its permanent yet but
but I it might be me and my brother are working on it, if anything
bad happens Ill buy a new one but it will take some time:(
I just haven't uploaded it yet, I'm cut & pasting all of the content and doing the HTML for it. (notepad forever)
I updated the links list above.
Here are my two suggestions for reading material:
Sun Tzu's The Art of War
http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/gthurs...sm/suntext.htm
and
Miyamoto Musashi's Go Rin No Sho (The Book of Five Rings)
http://www.samurai.com/5rings/
Read them over (I have only read Go Rin No Sho, myself, but I have heard that The Art of War is also good). I know that Go Rin No Sho is wonderful reading. We need to turn the ideas in those books into AI.
Z.
In response to Jorj's ideas:
Command: We dont need to make the game too hard to even play =)
Integrity: Same
Morale: I think that units should be assigned a "Home Base", which is an area around the Town Square Building thing that the unit was spawned, trained, born in, etc. The distance from this place a unit is, the more likely it is to disobey orders when it has a low moral. When it falls back to that place, it will NEVER run, and NEVER disobey orders, and will fight to the death to defend that place.
Logistics: Agreed.
Irregular Warfare: You bet!
Campaign Thinking: Never got to that area of the posts.
Land Production: Ok.
Territorial expansion: Ok.
Experience: This will be built into the engine, but we dont actually have to use it for anything. Although, instead of the standard "Upgrade" unit experiance could determine if it can do this this or the other thing.
Uber-units: Sure.
Unit-Creation: The engine has been deisgned with this in mind. Units will be able to be loaded from files.
Rush Stopping: Walls and such. 'nuff said =).
Individual Upgrades: See Experience.
Buildings as Tactical Objectives: YES.
One Big Map: I think it is possible, and will try to implement it.
Stoppping usual strategies: Part of the morale thing.
Fog of war: Agree.
Over Powered Ranged units: Ever played "Shogun"?
Seige Units: make another class of peasant, a "Siege Engineer"
Damage Types: Greate Idea.
Ammunition: Yeah. See Command.
Customizable Controls: No real point.
Z.
Sorry about my tardiness in preparing the newest AI file. I recently moved my files to another computer. It is presently unreachable.
I agree with all you said, Zaei.
Here's another idea for giving the game more depth. Holidays! And, as a test, I cooked up some fireworks =). Took me about 20 minutes, and here it is.
Z.
Bravo!
Is this on your old engine or new engine?
Old. The new engine is just a more efficient system of linking all of the parts together, with some new rewrites, such as the map, and the GUI. Most things will stay mostly the same, except they will be using Handles to objects, instead of pointers. This allows a central Object (the System =) to keep track of all objects in the game, and free memory accordingly, etc. And, because every object in the game derives from a central base object, this is really easy to implement. The System will have a pointer to the selected rendering method, and will take care of all rendering. Sound good?
On a side note, someone should go through all these posts, and cook up an Up-To-Date Design Doc for the game.
Z.
...Which I would do if I had more time.
Sorry mates, I'm going on a little vacation (till the 24th) so I'll be back after that. But I'm going to print it out and write it down while I'm there (no internet access though :()
So I'll have great ideas when I come back!
Put up the web page before you go... please? =).
Z.
Okay, explain how I can get my password?
I'm sorry to say this, but I don't believe I'll be available within the next few days due to the restructuring of my computer as mentioned above. Time away from the computer is time well spent thinking up ideas, though. Vos videbo mox.
Bye! Have a nuce time thinking! (waves)
KamiKazi, you can email me ( [email protected] ) for the password.
Z.
I have an idea, I think it's worth considering. Could we store all the dialogs and messages inside a file, do that the game can be made in multi languages? I speak spanish.
Hey! Zeai, your account rejected my email.
Then use [email protected]
I will (again) be away, starting Sunday. I shall return Wednesday, the same week. In the meantime, i have cooked up this engine design image for you all. Have a look, tell me what you think.
On a side note, the cjb.net email forwarding doesn't work. Your mail gets rejected (thanks KamiKazi).
Z.
Slow times for times of war
Indeed. I think I have figured out a way of getting unit movement to work correctly (cant go up a slop of blah degress or more, bridges, etc). I will try implementing it soon. Alog with everything else =).
Z.
I wonder, how are we going to distribute this once it's done?
sas - i would like a list of what everyone is doing. and how far along we r in the development. and i need to know fromt what view do u want the units and what file extention .jpg .bmp, etc...
norman_nomein - to help u with the drawings. i have a program that could speed that up but i need three drawings of each charictor. from the top, the side, and the front. i can do the rest. the program would generate a 3d picture and i can then create a duplicat of the charictor at any view point and use that to write it to a file.
Well, I'm home. dennis, Psy, do either of you know how to load textures in OGL? I should be able to get you guys to slowly convert the code I have to OGL. Right now, im doing texture loading, etc. Let me know, and ill send you some code to work with.
Z.
OK Wazup. I'll answer your question to the best of my knowledge. Zaei deals with the graphics, and Jorj and I are on AI. Sadly, I haven't been able to speak to Jorj. Also, I think he's having his computer fixed. Sastaxi the project leader and is on vacation till July 24th.
Psy, and i believe dennis are also doing some of the graphics.
While i was rummaging through the source code directory, I ran into an early shot of the engine. Enjoy!
Z
Need some more info on OGL. Could one of you guys who will be working on this post just a quick snippet of how rendering works in OGL? I am working on the API abstraction code for the engine.
Z.
Sorry guys for the delay in my post, i will be aay in France for a while (until the 30th of July), i have code to load textures in open gl (pcx, bmp and tga). rendering code:
There may by typos or it not correct (off the top of my head)Code:void RenderScene(void)
{
glClearColor(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT);
glLoadIdentity();
glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, texture[0]);
glBegin(GL_QUADS);
glTexCoord2f(0.0f, 0.0f);
glVertex3f(-1.0f, -1.0f, 0.0f);
glTexCoord2f(0.0f, 1.0f);
glVertex3f(-1.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f);
glTexCoord2f(1.0f, 1.0f);
glVertex3f( 1.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f);
glTexCoord2f(1.0f, 0.0f);
glVertex3f( 1.0f, -1.0f, 0.0f);
glEnd()
}
It basically clears the color buffer, loads the identity (open gl stuff). then it binds the texture (texture[]) is an array of unsigned int (assigned when loading texture), it then begins the quad, sets the texture coordinates for each point, along with the point of the quad (glVertex3f()).
check http://nehe.gamedev.net/
i dont now ***** about loading textures but i do know how to use arrays in OGL to set the coordinates. although i do all programming in vb.
Was messing around earlier, trying to benchmark rendering speeds. I realized that even in VB, i can push 3200 tris onto the screen with my crappy card, and maintain a decent framerate, using Tri-Fans. Currently, using Tri-Lists, i can do about 1250, max. Since I know this will work, this is how the MAP will be rendered. Map is definately the way to put it, as I am now convinced that we can do the "One Big Map" approach. The only minor problem with this is that all ground textures will have to merge correctly with the MapChunk next to it.
Z.
Happy birthday to Jorj!!
And also I am back, so I am alive and kicking after 9 days without internet access. So I've seen what you're doing, I'll post a while after this.
I'm sorry I couldn't get the site up, my bad. I tried to get up what I had but tripod messed it up. Anyways, we need good 3D modellers, and we need 'em fast. Also for distribution I believe one of us could get PC Gamer to put it on a PCG CD, as it was going to be free in the first place (as well as have it on shareware.com, download.com, zdnet.com, fileplanet.com, etc.), which would get a lot more customers. I'll have the site up tomorrow, I promise. ;)
And in OGL I don't think there are rotation matrices, but there is a world matrix that you can reset and stuff for billboarding purposes, etc. I never got what that meant, unfortunately :D. Also the one big map approach is good although I think there should be briefing screens in-between, but you keep what you had before, and new parts of the map are explorable, etc.
Also I think we should just do the engine and stuff and the basic game, and then incorporate a scripting language that most of the events are handled in (eg. a mouse is clicked, with right button, with this unit index selected over X,Y,Z. What do you do?) and that would let us have great mod support (even let mods change it into an RTS or whatever, maybe, I guess it's a long shot)
That was a nice ramble, eh? Also I made some sand-kinda-castle thingeys that I took pictures of, as prototypes for the building models. I've got towers, a keep, 4 houses (hut, cottage, house, manor), walls, and a well. I'll have 'em in by the end of July.
Thank you, Sastraxi for the timely greeting.
I have many things to say, but I will say only one:
I will translate the game into as many languages as I can speak. I'm not sure about the technical issues, but if you give me a phrase, I'll give it back in your desired language (French, Spanish, German, possibly Russian and Arabic, I can also do Latin or Scots Gaelic, but I doubt that the demand will be strong)
Whenever you're ready, I'll start translating!
By the way,
As long as we keep up our amazing efforts, we needn't fret of slow times. Continue the great work, everyone!
I wanna do the spanish translation please. It's my first language. Feliz cumpleaños Jorj.
Gracias, KamiKazeKiwi.
No quiero ser aguafiestas. You may translate the Spanish version. Your first language beats my fourth.
Welcome Back, Sas and Jorj, and Happy Birthday Jorj.
For different Missions, I was thinking like, some kind of messanger could ride into town or whatever, and have your orders with him, sorta thing. Then, it all flows really well.
I set up a test bed app to test out the new terrain code. I almost choked to death when i got it to render. I am now pushing 8000+ triangles at 50-100 FPS, on the worst 8 meg card in existance. At the moment, it isnt working well enough to be usable, but i though everyone would like to hear that. Oh, and that is a 1000x1000 map. Everyone break out the bitmap editors.
The only real problem with the code is that it is full of T-junctions in the actual terrain (so you can tell its just a bunch of squares, and not smooth terrain, but I am working on several solutions.
Here is a shot of it right now. I just quickly painted over the innermost T-junctions in Red dots, and then with the blue lines, showed the solution. That shot was taken 250 meters from the surface of the terrain.
Sorry it looks like it was drawn on paper... had to increase the compression so it would post.
Z.
And, another shot, taken from 25 meters up. You can see how none of the tiles atually meet, but that is by design =).
Z.