RTS masters of the pandora community

[Dauric]

More of my wish-list:

Ship/Vehicle Design. Obviously the number of 3D modeled ship hulls is limited, but since I mentioned Full Thrust, I like the idea of being able to design ships (and ground vehicles if it has that). Not necessarily deep conduit-placing design, but 'trading a massive cannon array for a battery of salvo missile launchers' kind of design system. It makes the empire more personalized, and your enemies (multiplayer and AI alike) have to adapt to your individual setup.

With that kind of system you could have level-benefits that are an 'upgrade' to the ship's size/design allocation so with each new level they can either get a special ability, or forgo the ability and just mount more particle cannon batteries/missiles/railguns/fighter bays/shield generators....

Possibility: Link level abilities to a ship captain, if the capital ship is destroyed, have a mad dash to secure the captain/admiral. Friendly forces that get him to a starbase can rebuild that admiral's ship (He's out of the action until it's finished and it may not have all the design points that the previous ship had, but it's not a complete loss of exp.) while opposing forces that secure the captain get detailed intel and tech bonuses (If using the ship boarding rules I suggested earlier, make it +5% to completion for a technology in the victor's tech tree, 1% for any 'alien' technology outside the tech tree, where an actual ship grants +20% to completion inside, or +4% for 'alien' tech.)

 

[bzar]

i used to play quite a lot of Battlezone / BZ2, and the thing i loved about it was that, even though the game was an RTS, you were able to hop into a spare ship, control it in a first person view, set a few units as your wingmen, then take the fight to the enemy.

I wish there was a BZIII

Me too. BZ is one of my favorite game series'.

On topic: As I see this game, distances between planets etc are going to play a large role because there's going to be next to none natural obstacles. Firing range and movement speed should be considered a priority (how far does a laser travel in space before dissipating in power? How accurate are the ships? If a shot misses its target, can it hit another target?). Free zooming would be awesome if there are long-range units.

 

[Dauric]

keaft already has a dev team working on it, this is just wish-listing, and brainstorming. If you could wave a magic wand and make the RTS game you've always wanted. I'm sure the dev team is going to cover all the practical discussions of universe physics and game balance.

 

[Mithrildor]

Is the story already done? I just had an amazing idea:

"Its the very end of the universe. There hasnt been much sunlight , most stars died, only white dwarves are left (the ash of dead stars still glowing abit), but thats going to end soon. But there is hope, us humans found a technology able to create a new galaxy, a new hope using the quantum mechanics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation). But as always there are problems, when we arive, there will be no civilisation, the ancient god Kaos will rule once again. We need to fight off the rebels and scum who want to rule in the next age. In the end the waters of life will flow again and the nature will produce it's own light."

Like it?

 

[Dauric]

.... And apparently the floodgates have been opened once again ....

People, c'mon and get a grip, they've already got a development team together and they've already got concept art and a design document started. Keaft's original post shows that he's got the reigns on this project, which generally means any storyline is something he wants to say ("I will arbitrarily filter all the ideas and put them past my people...") The real work in happening in a private forum, not this open thread. This is about the kinds of -gameplay- that we want to have in a RTS, and none of these ideas are guaranteed to be adopted, they're going to look over this thread with a critical eye towards what is feasible in the scope and resources of the game, and what will add to the game experience and what isn't and won't.

If you're not part of the dev team, don't worry yourself with storyline or specific game balance issues. Sure I have a few numbers in my posts, but those are illustrative of the broader concept, not specific balance-tested numbers.

I've been a part of a few projects, and the armchair dev-work only frustrates the dev team, and disappoints and angers the people submitting unwanted ideas when they get rejected. Too much bad blood early on can kill a project.

Seriously people, read the OP's posts, these ideas are going to be deeply evaluated, and odds are the vast majority will be rejected for one reason or another. Don't burn masses of creative energy posting here with ideas, or really worrying about it at all beyond what Keaft asked for: Look over the ideas on the site he posted, then add or remove what you would from those to make the space-based RTS you've always wanted to play.

My own $0.02.

 

[may88]

Keaft - Get on with it. If you hurry you'll have an alpha ready by the time we have our Pandoras

Me - I still play TA (total annihilation). Never been able to get into any other RTS since being infected by this beauty. I'll make an exception in your case. Started retro but getting more in to home brew all the time.
Loads of ideas sprang to mind. Visited the wiki and it ticks the boxes.

Also hoping "Spring" makes it down to the pandora. Would be nice to have TWO killer apps.

 

[dflemstr]

Keaft - Get on with it. If you hurry you'll have an alpha ready by the time we have our Pandoras

Me - I still play TA (total annihilation). Never been able to get into any other RTS since being infected by this beauty. I'll make an exception in your case. Started retro but getting more in to home brew all the time.
Loads of ideas sprang to mind. Visited the wiki and it ticks the boxes.

Also hoping "Spring" makes it down to the pandora. Would be nice to have TWO killer apps.

Keaft isn't a coder (or so he says) so he can't "get on with it" by himself. I've been trying to allocate time to help but have only been of limited use so far. This project won't go anywhere if people don't help.

 

[Mithrildor]

This project is going to fail, without a coder dedicated to the project.

 

[Dauric]

The curse of the 'Day Job'. Yeah, I've got a game project in the works (Don't know if it will run on Pandora ) that would be solved by having ready access to an office full of programmers... Now where's that magic wand...

 

[jacfalcon]

But he did miss out on Starcraft. The interface/controls is/are antiquated by modern standards but a damn fine game.

Exactly what I was going to say.

 

[cthulhu944]

Just some ideas for your economy.

Planets shouldn't be able to manufacture "gold"... All planets manufacture resources (duterium, titanium, biomatter, etc) which can be used to build infrastructure (ships or planet buildings) or sold on the open market. The game could model supply and demand to determine how much a particular resource is worth. This would be great incentive to attack/defend particular planets.

Some examples of how this figures into game play ... a planet that is rich in "dilithium" might be relatively worthless until a tech that can use it "mega warp" is invented. This way, the value of a planet would change over the course of a game.

A planet that can only produce biomatter shouldn't be defended until "bio ship tech" is developed and it becomes the ship production hub of your empire.

If few people are selling "adamantium" but many ships are being built out of it. It's open market price should be high relative to other resouces. If players begin to sell large quantities of "adamantium" or few ship designs are incorporating it in their tech, then the market price should be low relative to other resources.

I think a dynamic resource market would add some interesting dimensions to the whole grind of resources in the typical RTS game.

 

[CCmachined]

all the people that love RTS'.

No, I can't say I've played any space RTS games

Then why comment?
Back in 2000 i was playing Homeworld (1) for hours on end. I still do sometimes. Other space RTSes mentioned are awesome too. I always throught space RTS was the best videogame idea, it's so open ended as to what can happen. Faster than light drive? True 3D gameplay? How will technology / ship designs etc be researched, upgraded? Newtonian physics or "maximum speed" philosophy? How will the scifi weaponry work and develop? Goes on and on. So many game mechanics that could be explored.

 

[dflemstr]

OK, everyone: you all seem to have some pretty ambitious ideas.
Just think about a couple of things:
1. Is it possible to implement your idea with only a 2-man-team? No one else has joined so far (and I'm barely active in this project atm, so it's a 1.5-man team). Even "small details" like including ground-level battles can change the whole game structure and be a PITA to implement.
2. Is your idea really good enough that it should be included, or is it just "oh, and it would be cool if..."-ish?
3. Does your idea fit together with all the other billions of ideas that have been mentioned so far?
And VERY IMPORTANT: integrate your idea in the Wiki or something, otherwise it WILL get lost!

Now, on a more technical point (don't want to create a separate thread for this, but am just informing people that might want to *contribute* to the code instead of just throwing ideas out there):
I've thought on some time about how we would go about building this beast.
If you look at the repository right now, it's unstructured, with an attempt by victorsavu3 to create a basic "structure" to build on (that we'll probably have to scrap, sorry victor), and a simple Makefile by me that creates a PND file... It doesn't even use autotools, and is just very ...well, nothing much, really.
So, we'll have to create some structure in the repository.
My intention is to use either autotools or qmake/a qt project for the code (yep, please read on), OpenAL for sound, OGRE for rendering (and we'll use the OGRE scenenodes to build everything else on as to ease some pain) and then just go from there. To ease the addition of future ideas, I'd just like to take the various pages in the Wiki, translate them into C++ objects and build on them. OGRE will then handle resources for us etc.
My reason for considering qmake/QtCreator for the whole code base is that it's so damn easy for contributors to just jump into; QtCreator is a really newbiefriendly IDE (and the best C++ IDE I've seen so far) so it'd be cool if we'd use it.
Now Remember: nothing is set in stone yet, and if you have technical recommendations, feel free to utter them. And I'd really like to see some help from others on this project, as I'm the only dev, barely active, and as it is now, the project won't go anywhere when there's just me.

As a final note: Don't expect too much from this project. We'll never be able to match a professional dev team, so this project will not meet your expectations. It will not be Starcraft 2 or Sins of a Solar Empire. It is also very probable that this project will die, as I don't see any enthusiasm from others willing to help.

 

[lulzfish]

Well, the OP said 'all people who like RTS games' so I thought I should point out that I like RTS games, but not games that are set in space.

 

[rabidpoobear]

Hey guys. Hey dflemstr. Liked your work on fixing the PXML spec.

Just wanted to say hellollo to keaft and everyone else on this project. It looks really intriguing.

Anyway, keaft mentioned that the programming can't be started yet. Can you elaborate on that, keaft?

Some background: I'm currently working on my M.S. in Computer Science. I really love RTSes. Age of Kings was one of my first games on PC; I still get together with a group of friends and play AoK:Conquerors tournaments every now and then. I haven't played any space RTSes (unless you count Starcraft or Alpha Centauri (which isn't technically RTS since it's turn-based)) except for a bit of Homeworld. I've picked up a copy of Sins and I'm going to give it a whirl later this week.

I'd really like to help y'all out. I'm finishing up a project later this evening and then I'll be done with this semester of classes. I'm taking some courses in Summer School, but that doesn't start until June 5th.

So I have a few weeks now, and I'll have time throughout the Summer (though probably less), to work on some sort of Pandora development. If you guys don't need a programmer right now, or something else I might be able to assist with, I'll find something else to do. Looking at maybe porting NavIt or something....

That being said, I could maybe write some music as well. What sort of songs are you looking for? Really epic Anthem type songs, battle songs, or just some light background music?

Dflemstr, I hope this project doesn't die so soon! it sounds like it can be really cool. Let me know if I can help with anything, guys!

 

[dflemstr]

(Note: I might repeat myself in this post, since I don't remember what I've said in this thread already and am too lazy to look )

Hey,
it's really good to hear from more people interested in this project! Every bit of help is appreciated since this project is going to require a HUGE code base.

Basically we haven't begun the planning of code really, since Keaft still adds ideas every now and then to the wiki (and we're still very much in the planning stage) that have the potential of radically changing the whole structure of the game every time (well, not so much any more, but who knows what people might come up with still).

So, we've had some very basic discussion happening in the GitHub source tree and with GitHub PMs (The repository is at http://github.com/Keaft/spacerts/tree/master btw, so knowing how to use GIT is a necessity before even considering to help coding ) about which libraries to use and things like that. The result so far has been that we're going to sacrifice some performance to make the beast easier to program, since we want to make it possible for novices to contribute as well, so we're using OGRE for rendering (OGRE is the only thing besides Irrlicht, OGLES and SDL that are known to work on the Pandora), and preferred frameworks in combination with the OGRE nodesystem for input, sound, scripting (to some extent) etc, maybe with the aid of Qt for extensions, and basing the whole thing on qmake for compilation and project management, to make it possible for users to use Qt Creator as their IDE (excellent code completion, refactoring, intuitive interface, GIT integration), further straightening the learning curve to join the project.
However, nothing is set in stone yet; I even reflected upon using Java for the whole code so as to make the project even more accessible, but this probably wouldn't be a good idea since we're going to need all the processing power we can get as it is (however, the option is still there if enough other devs want it), and also considered using Autotools for the code since this is the established UNIX standard (but not so modern/efficient)

So yeah, we're probably going to wait for Keafts signal and then we'll start making UML diagrams, which should be pretty easy considering how well-structured the Wiki is.
Then, we'll just implement the UMLs and go!

 

[rabidpoobear]

Sounds good to me! I've always used SVN for source control; I'll look into GIT as soon as I get done with this project (later tonight). Do I need to be authorized to get access or anything?

 

[dflemstr]

Sounds good to me! I've always used SVN for source control; I'll look into GIT as soon as I get done with this project (later tonight). Do I need to be authorized to get access or anything?

Everyone can pull so that shouldn't be a problem, and you can make forks (by pulling and then pushing your changes to a forked repository) and give Keaft pull requests (you'll know what I mean after you understand what a distributed versioning system is). Keaft can also give people direct push access to the repository, and if you produce a lot of code this will probably be the preferred modus operandi.

Also, you'll need a public RSA SSH key to bind your account to your computer (otherwise there's no way that GitHub can make sure that it's actually you pushing to a repository, so you need a RSA cryptographic certificate to prove your identity). You can read about all this in the GitHub documentation.

BTW, if you're using Windows® at the moment, you might hit some problems down the road (for instance, it can be difficult to get access to various development libraries on Windows® and get them to compile correctly, SSH isn't really well-integrated so that might become a problem as well, and MinGW can be complicated to use before getting used to it, compared to integrated GCC compilers on Linux), so you should really consider getting a Linux-based development environment such as Fedora or Ubuntu.

 

[javaJake]

If I may suggest alternatives, I particularly like Bazaar as a version control system. It uses a single design to support branches, patches, and multiple work-flows, which you can switch between.

 

[dflemstr]

If I may suggest alternatives, I particularly like Bazaar as a version control system. It uses a single design to support branches, patches, and multiple work-flows, which you can switch between.

So far, we've been working on GitHub so switching could prove difficult
And Bazaar... well, it behaves almost exactly like Git when it comes to commands, syntax and most other things. I see no advantage of using bzr.
I find GIT extremely easy to use; it's not like that would be a problem. And it's speed and failsafeness is unmatched.
One problem might be that there aren't many GUI tools for GIT on Windows but that's easily fixed if we use QtCreator, which has a GUI built-in, and I don't even know if there are GUI tools at all for Bazaar on Windows.

BTW, let's all move back to gp32x, this forum is going to be left again.