Preserved Topic: Ozonia Ad Astra (arcade)

This thread is spun off from this one:

*ozonia* ad astra, home made

to deal with TP's ideas for a space game "like 'networked-asteroids'".

feel free to throw in any ideas, tips, etc.

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Emps

FAQs: Emperor

I should add that I have had a chat with TP via ICQ and he will post a more extensive proposal in here tomorrow.

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Emps

FAQs: Emperor

Thinking of the licensing issues.

I for one love the idea of GPL and OpenSource software. I base my online life blood and money on it. But as it goes for complex multi-player games I am very must in the camp that the source should be closed. If you open up the source to a game you are just inviting cheating at an extremly high level.

I think that if we are to make an actual go at this we would need to have contracts drawn up by all involved that stipulates that if you have access to the source code you agree to keep it safe on your own computer, and not to give it out to all others.

The pricing scheme is a bit harder to work with. I am all for providing a free game, but at the same time there are costs associated with running a server, and if it gets popular the costs could turn emense. If you are running only say 10 or 20 players the cost for the data exchange would be minimal, say the cost of a cable modem and a domain name, which would still be in the neighborhood of $500 or even $600 US a year. Which is all considering a bit costly.

There is always advertisement based marketting, which could be fun. Think cowboy bebop. When they shoot in through a gate they are assulted by advirtising ships. Random ships flying around with advertisements would be an interesting concept. You could even get players involved in the advertising, they run an advert ship, and get game credit for it, or something eqaully as silly.

There is also the option of charging a nominal fee for the game. Say $12 US for a years subscription to the server, or a $5 charge for the game. Or even offer a premium membership, with a free version. When money comes into the picture it makes it a bit difficult you lose a good portion of the fan base when this happens. You could open it up for free in the beginning beta stages with the stipulation that once the beta is done there will be fees, which could capture a largish fan base which, if we present a quality product would translate into a large percent who would actually pay for a subscription.

It is really hard to make decisions like this because it would be wonderful if we could make the game free to the public but someone in the end would bear a shit load of costs, which is just not fair.

Where the money would go is not as hard to figure out. The obvious first priority is to cover the costs of operating the game. The leftover after expenses is a bit difficult. I would like to see money go to the Ozone Network, being Doc and Pugzly for their hosting of the Asylum and the GurusNetwork. I would also like to see something along the lines of the Ozone Project Fund, which we would place money into in order to fund future products.

There are a whole lot of good ideas that flow through the asylum, and some great ones are realized, in the beginning I never throught that the GurusNetwork would actually work. I never imagined PSPong.com getting off the ground. I never expected RipperReport to go anywhere, but they do. This is an awsome place to be, because we are all contributing to some pretty cool developments.

I don't care if I never make a penny on any of the work I put into any of the projects here because it is just an amazing experience to see people who have most likely never met each other in person create great and useful tools and projects.


Me

Star Control 2 is open source these days. It's the most famous and most inventive inertia-based 2D space combat game; I highly recommend that everyone who'd not familiar with it take a look. Download it (it's big) and at least play the SuperMelee -- the ship-to-ship combat arena.

I may be a little off topic here, but I think that with all these threads that are forming.... We should probably make a seperate forum for this particular event going on...

Just a thought.


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Prying open my third eye.

You mean something like the MS forum?

quote:

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with all these threads that are forming

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All 4? Minus the one that was just closed, 3.
Seems like a waste to create an entire forum, just for whatever projects are going on (especially when some/most are in the MS forum already)... ::shrugs:: Or I could be missing the point entirely...

Back on topic: I'll poke my head around these threads and toss out any ideas I can a little later when I get some time.

Lets just leave the threads here.

As the others have said there really isn't a need for another forum. Once things get moving (if they do ) we can move things over to the MS forum (or not). They seem comfy here so lets not dwell on this issue any longer eh?

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Emps

FAQs: Emperor

I think we need to have a bit of a role call here. Who is interested in contributing. If you are interested please respond with what you are willing to do.

Graphics

Graphics(intermediate) Coding(ignorant) Documentation(rookie)

There are two more skills that are absolutely essential for any medium-to-large project: design and management. Since nobody's paying anyone else, let's call management "coordination."

Design: in the context of a game, the designer is the person who decides exactly how game elements should work together. Not at the level of "ooh, it would be neat to have a ship with a double homing missile launcher," but at the level of "the missiles have a refire rate of X, travel at X scale meters per second, have a turning rate of X, travel X scale meters before running out of fuel, and deal X damage at the point of impact -- and all those Xs are balanced with every other variable in the game."

A real designer, or a design team, is essential, because without one, the game might not be fun to play, no matter how well it runs and how pretty it is.

Coordination: once you get more than three people working on something, it's essential to have one person that knows what everyone is working on, how they're doing, and how their project interfaces with the efforts of others. Without this specific person to serve as a point of contact, you'll eventually run into a situation where "the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing" -- someone will design a code module that ends up not getting used, or an artist will make a bunch of ship sprites that don't match the project requirements.

If the project is to succeed, it must have at least one designer and one coordinator; and these positions should be formally assigned. It's all well and good for general ideas to be tossed around in Asylum threads, but the actual creation of design documents and project requirements is a different and more important matter.

edit: Oh, and you'd also want sound design, which is a discipline in itself. As for pricing, why not make it 100% free to play, but increasing your ship's abilities requires money? The people who end up caring about the game would chip in, so that they could buy the super-mega-laser or the point-defense KKVs or whatever.

[This message has been edited by Perfect Thunder (edited 03-23-2003).]

I don't think issues like the ones you mentioned can be thought of before the creating process begins. You need to test, over and over and over again before you can reach balance, it?s not something that comes from planning all aspects before. We do need a good plan, but issues involving speeds, damages, life have to be looked at *after* implementation, not before.

[Edit] I'm definitely in for graphics -sprites, animations. Maybe backgrounds.

[This message has been edited by Dan (edited 03-23-2003).]

Of course, the exact numbers aren't as important at the beginning; but a fairly solid design process will reveal project requirements that weren't evident at first. No sense coding something that has to be reworked when the design process requires a different solution. Anything that can easily be stored in a variable for later change isn't so important; but things like "hey, it would be great to have (insert feature that existing code makes nearly impossible)" should be kept to a minimum.

True "game balance" is definitely for the later stages of the project. I was thinking about coming up with core mechanics and a fairly complete set of recommended features.

[This message has been edited by Perfect Thunder (edited 03-23-2003).]

TP: Graphics(nah. don't try. I can, if I must, though) Coding(advanced) Documentation(intermediate) Audio(non existant) Coordination (willing)

I agree with the need for coordination and a initial design document (which I'll pull out of my paper brain just after this post)...
otherwise, we'll do this a bit extreme programming style which should keep the feature set pretty flexible.

Warmage:
Cheating - You bet I ain't gonna tell the client anything it doesn't need to know ;-). Worst thing you could probably do was to code a bot... and that would be still pretty limited.

As for the costs: I don't think there should be one 'main-ueber' server hosted by us. I suppose a solution like most of the FPS employ, ie. allowing anyone to run it's own server would be more appropriate, although we'll need to set one up for our testing... but it can run on one of our machines.
Remaining is the webhosting... well I got about 20 gigs of traffic a month to spare. that should be enough for a start.

Let's not make this to big... we can always append later on.

Completly different question: Has any one a cvs server, or even better a subversion server handy? That would help coding a bit.

well, I'm off to the design document now,

Tyberius Prime

RE: The money issue.
I play an online RPG and the server costs are supported by various levels of 'Donation'.

The more you donate to server costs, the more powers you are granted for free, which saves you loads of time getting cash and buying them.

Just a thought.



The vampire Dufty!

please regard this preliminary design document

so long,

Tyberius Prime

As it was TP's idea and he has a good grasp of what is needed and the skills to get a big chunk done quite quickly - I nominate him project leader.

TP: That otline sounds great - I can't think of anything much to add yet. I presume one can swap weapons on their ship to make them more powerful.

We also probably want some samples graphics along the line you describe "gloomy, yet shiny and bright at spots, dark, sometimes brushed, metal" - any takers?

And a little backstory to help set the scene might be nice.

Anyway its looking good - I'll be following this with interest.

There 2 identical FAQs on this should we vote one down?

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Emps

FAQs: Emperor

Seconded the vote for TP.


Me

Count me in for the graphics department. Planets, ships, backgrounds, interface, whatever you want. TP's okay by me. Any ideas yet how big the ships will be?



[This message has been edited by mahjqa (edited 03-23-2003).]

Thirded the vote for TP.

Graphics (non existing)

I invision 3 different size groups.

Small

TP sounds good for project leader, and while I am hopeless when it comes to graphics (and mostly hopeless when it comes to coding), I do like sitting around and thinking up stuff (like what types of ships we need, gameplay, etc.). In other words, I'd like to contribute what I can to the planning/documentation/design part.

cool cool,
Those sizes seem fine with me, I suppose the fit 800x600 reasonably well (if we were to do this in python/sdl, I would not go higher than that.)

as for documentation and stuff, WarMage and I have been discussing a bit in the preliminary design document (here).
Once consensus has been reached, it would be nice if it could be reformulated into a design document.
And any 'dark-gloomy but yet bright in spots' graphic samples would be appriceated. We also need an intro screen, a menu screen, all that stuff ;-)

so long,


Tyberius Prime

if you guys want server space let me know .. I'll put the game on my server and run it though my RPG site so it gets more players other then Asylum players


.::. cEll .::. 513

Didn't know where to add my reply, so I added it to the preliminary design document...

_________________________
"There are 10 kinds of people; those who know binary, those who don't and those who start counting at zero"

Some questions about the graphics department...
The sizes warmage suggested may be a little big, but what I wanted to ask is this; for the rotation of the ships, should all the rotation frames be pre-made, or are they to be calculated on the fly? Premade takes a lot of frames and work, but I don't know if realtime rotation is easy to program.

edit: I just thought of something.. one *could* make it in gta (grand theft auto) style, where the camera zooms out when the car (in this case; the ship) is going faster. makes it easier for precise maneuvers (like docking or picking up loot) and gives the player more view when travelling faster.

Once again, this is limited by the amount of programming one wishes or is able to spend on it, but I think it's a nifty idea.



[This message has been edited by mahjqa (edited 03-25-2003).]

real time rotation is easy when you only do 90 degrees... but it get's horribly complicated (and run-time-consuming) when you want, for example 45 degrees.
We could however have two frames, one 45 degrees from the other, and interplolate from that... I'll think about it.

just to keep you all informed:
The basic server is, pending the usual multitude of bugs, implemented, and I've started experimenting with the client part a bit (directX, networking),
so expect a very (very!) basic version this weekend. Then we can start simulating something more than a ship and a single sun, and think about the possibilities...

so long,

Tyberius Prime

So far things are looking pretty good. I'll try to keep abreast of things as much as I can and my statsheet goes:
Graphics(intermediate to advanced)

well, things are progressing on the code front.

First Screenshot - Yes, I know those graphics suck... but I just whipped up something to test with.
These objects are being transfered from the game server to the game client, who then displays them... no moving parts yet, though.
So, next (obvious) code step is for moving objects to enter the scene (linear, circular, whatever). Then come the basic controls, letting you fly around... then menues. Then we'll see.
All along, we'll need to add graphics, gamedesign and so on, so get off your buts, and design something nicer for us to use than my ugly duckling of a ship ;-).

so long,



Tyberius Prime

Come along nicely, TP. I'll just sit back and think up more stuff for you to use--by the time you get to that point, I should have plenty of material.

just what I fear, master Suho