Do You Like This Sort Of Wargame? (Turn Based..)


I'm still a ways off, but ..

Anyone interested in testing on a Linux box? (possibly could set up a vmware-player image for it, so windows/osx folks could join in without mucking about.) IT'll ultimately work on windows, osx, linux and pandora, but I'd rather not embroil myself in Windows-dll-nightmares while amid early development :) (for linux, its an easy 'apt-get install' 3-4 packages, and then using a zip of my app.)

jeff
 
It'll be a few weeks I think; Client is nearly there in a 'read only' mode (show your map, ship list, ship designs, messages and diplomacy, turn orders, etc and so on), but doesn't really let you do much beyond poke around. Once I get it a bit more stable and the way I want it, maybe I'll let a few of you guys poke around with a default empire, while I add the order-adding stuff.. see if you like how the client 'feels'.

I'll show you some screenies soon, once I get a few more bits in.

I'm pretty excited about this one :)

jeff

I'm using stylesheets (css just like html essentially) and keeping them external to the client; should let folks tweak colours and layouts and such a little, should be interesting.
 
skeezix said:
I'm still a ways off, but ..

Anyone interested in testing on a Linux box? (possibly could set up a vmware-player image for it, so windows/osx folks could join in without mucking about.) IT'll ultimately work on windows, osx, linux and pandora, but I'd rather not embroil myself in Windows-dll-nightmares while amid early development :) (for linux, its an easy 'apt-get install' 3-4 packages, and then using a zip of my app.)

jeff

Yeah, I'd love to give this a shot too, I'm running ubuntu 10.04 atm.
 
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One workflow problem I'm wondering about is ..

Near the beginning you usually only have a few units to worry about, but you could have a big pile of 'probe' units made up to explore nearby areas; later in the game you might be pumping out units for massive combats of thousands of ships.

I've been working towards a 'click to pick a unit and see his detail screen, then click Move order button, pick destination and confirm' type workflow; that wouln'd to well for large numbers of units.

An issue to worry about later is 'automation'; I'm not going to sweat it day one, but I figure once your empire has expanded to the point you've got dozens of worlds, probably in a blobby or circular expansion, your center-worlds and home-world are less a worry 'at any given instant', but your fronts are where the action is (ie: it takes awhile for someone to sneak into your middle unassaulted, so you'll likely be aware of it so can defend yourself.) So I might add a 'road' concept down the way -- mark a world as a 'production shipyard' and give it a destination, and all mustered units get sent on their way; likwise, an intermediate staging world could have a road to point any arriving units onto another destination without taking player input. Other games do it, so sounds good; but I odn't need to worry about it day one. Day one is 'does logging in work, and does it crash after 30s' :)

Anyway, for workflow, that I do need to address dya one .. your first order theres a good chance you'll 1) rename your homeworld, 2) design some ships, and 3) start building a pile of tiny mosquito sized ships that will be done by turn 2. As such, right off te top, you'll have a stack of units to move.

I'm thinking that..

When I show a planet (say), on the strategy overview map (just circles with strategic icons on it, think google maps), that I'll show a single icon per 'unit type', with some indicator on it to suggest how many in the stack; so if you have 20 of one ship type, and 5 of another, show 2 unit icons. (on the right, and if other players have units in same system, show them on the left, say.)

To move, you click on the stack-icon, and get a pic and stats of the ships, and order buttons such as Move (and Disband and so on.)

If you hit an Order (such as Move), then pop up a minimap with 'pick a destination' type purpose (rather than flip you back to the main map, since could be disorienting to do that.. but same features in the minimap, just smaller), and a count. Defalut the 'count' to be the size of the stack.

So pick the size 20 probe-stack, hit Move, and pick a destinatoin and it'll send all 20 there. But if you hit Move, and type a '1' into the dialog, you can split off 1 and leave 19 behind

Strikes me we can treat 'like unit' stacks as a single unit for ease of control, and letr you split off groups for firing them off to different destinations.

TRheres a related concept of maybe letting the player group random units into a 'fleet' and ordering the fleet around; but thats a separate thing.. like 'roads'; definately useful, but I can worry about it later; its a handy to have, but not 'essential' to have, day one thing.

What do you think?

jeff
 
How's this project going?

Seeing as we have some hope again about maybe seeing some more Pandora's out in the open soon(ish) I had to think of this.

First looked in the developers section and then had to go through a bunch of pages to find it here. :ph34r:
 
Still on the go.. Thinking of restarting the client again or going back to last incarnation.. Ie - cut down my v1 goals a lot so i can ship and then improve, rather than doing ideal first.

On phone now, but project is still on.. Server stilm done, just client work. Its the sort of game that could work as super minimal old school client or ultra fancy modern full 3d without changing server, so Im forever second guessing how I want client to go.. UI design is hard ;)

Jeffphone
 
skeezix said:
Still on the go.. Thinking of restarting the client again or going back to last incarnation.. Ie - cut down my v1 goals a lot so i can ship and then improve, rather than doing ideal first.

On phone now, but project is still on.. Server stilm done, just client work. Its the sort of game that could work as super minimal old school client or ultra fancy modern full 3d without changing server, so Im forever second guessing how I want client to go.. UI design is hard ;)

Jeffphone

Yay! :)
 
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In my experience it's definitely a good idea to release early and get feedback before nailing everything down if you can.

EDIT: clarified
 
Oh I'm well aware of how to build and release ;) the trick here is I can do very radically different clients, but if you make it too primitive no one will touch it at all. Make it a gui dialog box based thing (native), or build a limited web based client, or a fancier full opengl thing. Can release early and often for any of them, but which which which is killing me :)

A turn based wargame really wants to be webbased these days, but webgl isnt here yet and things like canvas and svgs still suck on most mobile browsers; going native means porting to many devi es or multiple clients for multiple devices, and even GL and GLES both. I've started the client 3 or 4 times with very different tech goals..

Latest is shipping a nativebrowser modded to handle gles so I can do 3d stuff while doing most of the client as a webapp so its more futureproof, but thats taking the hard road on multiple fronts. Maybe I should just make a QT dialog box based client easy and go... Or maybe the hybrid seb/native browser is ideal... Aaargh :)

Jeffphone
 
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