Messages

121

Bug Reports / Re: New Forums (To Do List)

« on: November 05, 2005, 03:42:46 pm »

Another thing: When people register, automatically send them an email or PM welcoming them and asking them to post in the introduction thread.

SMF already has an option for this, and it is already enabled... however, we have no control over the message that is sent at this time. It looks like there should be an SMF mod to be able to control that; we just have to find it.

Dave

122

Precursors / What do Characters do when Players go offline?

« on: October 05, 2005, 08:31:45 am »

Well, what would be the problem with that? If there's a lot of people who just script their AI's well and leave them doing complex actions, what difference does it make? Ideally, you won't be able to tell the difference between an NPC and a real player, so why should it matter whether the player character is being controlled by the player or by an AI? The characters will still have the same restrictions as any other PC, so they really shouldn't be able to "cheat"...

Dave

123

Precursors / Races

« on: August 15, 2005, 08:07:46 pm »

I think we're guilty of intelligence discrimination here. :-P Think about it... not every new race is going to have the same or even comparable intelligence compared to humans.  Look at the myriad of different life forms on earth... some planets will have more. (and some decidedly less... vacuum is hard to live in.)

Not to say that all other races have to be the same or less intelligent than humans... there should definitely be some (the overseers maybe) who are far more intelligent than humans could ever be... but intelligence isn't the end-all... Even humans, as "smart" as we are, sometimes lack wisdom or strength compared to other lifeforms on this earth. (bear attacks) The Overseers may be insanely smart, but that doesn't mean they are invincible.

I think it's going to be important to diversify all the stats of the different races... not just intelligence, but everything else about them... and keep an open mind about things. ;-)

Dave

124

Precursors / Game Music

« on: August 14, 2005, 01:56:57 pm »

Reaka mentioned that a lot of game music sounds the same... If you look at movie music, the same could be said. Basically, music for games and movies isn't supposed to stand out, because it's not the focus of the game/movie. It's meant to provide mood and background for a scene. I still do think there is a lot that can be done on that front, as far as making the music more integrated into the game environment and making it respond more to the current state of the game.

One issue that we need to decide first... Do we want our music to enhance the feeling and setting of the game, or do we want it to be user-controllable? (the mp3 player idea) The problem is that you only get one of these at a time... As far as programming it, we'd have to do a completely different system for the integrated music than we would for the mp3 player. We can still have both in the game, but the user has to choose which they want.

I don't have a problem with including the user-controllable music player, but I definitely lean toward trying to integrate things into the gameplay more. With the previous game project I worked on, I had also started to do some work on "interactive music". We can still provide some user-configurability depending on what music style they choose.

The first thing to do would be to break up gameplay into a number of different "states" that would correspond to different music tracks. For instance, if the player is getting shot at, then fight music should probably be playing.

Dave

125

Precursors / Coding Question

« on: August 12, 2005, 07:28:56 pm »

iPcCommandInput... I did some dev work on it that allowed it to take advantage of multiple axes and correctly do mouse and keyboard binding. All the changes I made are in CEL itself. Check the CEL API docs for info on how to use it.

Dave

126

Precursors / Game Music

« on: August 12, 2005, 03:56:51 pm »

Dan: You're going to be at fredonia this coming year, so just make sure you visit the house a lot... as soon as i get a chance to go down to visit my cousin in NYC, i'm getting an old Mac recording computer. I already have a good amount of stuff for recording, so we can do a good amount of music that way. If we want to do generated stuff on the computer as well, i have some ideas on programs to try... but it's probably easier to talk about that in person. (don't have the equipment here in Baltimore to try out any of the programs)

I'll probably see you in a week or two.

Dave

127

Precursors / Space Flight Controls, and Realism

« on: August 11, 2005, 07:45:31 pm »

topher: Also, the default key bindings are in the readme. (which is available on the website, on the downloads page.)

Dave

128

Suggestions / Space Ship Velocity

« on: July 31, 2005, 02:59:08 am »

That makes a lot of sense... and once we get the next iteration of the HUD working, it should be possible... but that will take a while. For now, absolute velocity is all we have. (simply because it's easy to do ;-))

Of course, we could also cheat and say that the "absolute velocity" was relative to the galactic core. ;-)

Dave

129

Bug Reports / Bug Reports For v0.3.1 alpha

« on: July 26, 2005, 07:24:57 pm »

The only problem with that is if i hold down the up or down, it can go to values that are insane, if i try to bring it back to "neutral" this becomes a problem timing it right, and the direction of the speed is not defined which is irriating.. perhaps color would help, or instead of speed, we could have thrust, which determines the speed... Just my 2 cents on that

1. Bringing the ship to "neutral" is as easy as releasing all the keys, since then there will be 0 thrust. If you want to stop the ship, try holding C. (read the README... it has the controls)
2. thrust instead of speed - When using the keys, the thrust would either be full or nothing. Thrust doesn't directly determine speed, it determines acceleration... so if you showed thrust, you could be moving at 324235 m/s, and if you released the keys, you'd still have 0 thrust. That's why we put numbers on the displays... since speed can go over the max of the display, that allows you to still see it. (although we probably should raise the max of the display.)

my gfx card is nvidia geforce 2 32mb, and i'm using nvidia's offical drivers just a version behind because they dropped support for my card in the newer versions

Yeah, the other card we saw this behaviour on was also an older nvidia... I'm not too sure what to say about how to fix it, unless you want to try hacking CS a bit...

Dave

130

Bug Reports / Bug Reports For v0.3.1 alpha

« on: July 26, 2005, 07:18:32 am »

- fullscreen: we noticed this too... It was noticed at the same time as the video-mode bug. (not sure why morgul didn't include it)
- speed: Actually, it _is_ linear, and there shouldn't be any limiting... In space, there's no limits to how fast you can go except the speed of light. :-P (and that will be passable in this game as well, using subspace) The controls are only "loose" because you're doing everything with reactionary thrust... you're only pushing against your own weight, since there's no air or ground to push on.
- lighting: This seems to be video card-dependent. I've run into this before on morgul's laptop, but it seems to work fine on both of our desktops. What video card/driver version are you using?

Dave

PS - If/when we move to the new forum system, I'm going to see if we can add some fields to the user profiles so people can put in information about their system.

131

General Announcements / Precursors v0.3.1 alpha Released

« on: July 23, 2005, 04:27:27 pm »

The windows version isn't necessarily corrupt, it just didn't finish uploading. It's tough doing anything when your connection drops every few seconds and the FTP server doesn't support resume. I'm currently in the process of attempting to upload it again. Once it can be verified that the version on the site is good, I'll post again here.

Dave

132

Precursors / Precursors Icon

« on: July 16, 2005, 11:09:52 pm »

/me agrees with fehknt

133

Precursors / Experience system

« on: July 13, 2005, 06:34:53 pm »

/me votes for logarithms.

134

Precursors / RTS / FPS aspect, with comments on AI

« on: July 12, 2005, 06:22:55 pm »

I'm not sure we should differentiate between player and non-player characters that much... It also shouldn't be common practice for a commander to send all his NPC units in a suicide rush while is PCs stay back and snipe with artillery... it should take into account the number of his _soldiers_ killed, not how many were player and how many weren't.

A side note: vehicles aren't created with pilots in them. You buy or build the vehicle, and then have an existing character pilot it.

Dave

135

Precursors / New HUD in Development

« on: July 12, 2005, 06:10:53 pm »

I love the XML HUD def idea... not necessarily use entities for it, but simply write a parsing class that would put up the HUD for the player. It may even make sense to make the class a CEL property class so you attach it to the player's ship or vehicle, or the player himself. Basically it would be the same idea as per-ship keymaps... different vehicles will have different methods of control, and a good number of them in the game's time will be configurable... You may even be able to store interface definitions on your player's datapad, and transfer them to other ships with the same type of controls... oooh.

Dave

136

Precursors / Happy 4th of July people!

« on: July 04, 2005, 09:23:11 am »

lounge around and work on the game.

:-P

137

Precursors / Races

« on: June 28, 2005, 08:06:19 pm »

morgul: Think of this, though... today, we already have machines capable of recognizing voice commands and synthesizing speech. There are also algorithms that have been developed to mimic sentence structure and meaning in English and other languages. In 700 years, don't you think we'd be able to think of a way to put those together with a good dose of logic (think of the AI code that goes into games... only 700 years from now) and come up with a machine that could converse with a human and follow orders?

contingencyplan: The only other problem I see with your suggestions is something that Chris has told me before about the general structure of the League and the Terrans. (Chris: correct me if I'm wrong) The Terrans tend to shun the use of AI or computerized hardware in general, preferring to have large crews, since then mechanical or electrical faliure can't incapacitate a ship easily. This helps give the Terrans their strong military, as well as their reputation for being quite hardy. The League, on the other hand, tend to make use of technology, especially robotics and AI, to the fullest extent possible as a way to help offset the obscene advantage in numbers that the Terrans hold.

Dave

138

Precursors / Player Creation

« on: June 18, 2005, 02:33:22 pm »

I personally don't think that intuition should decrease. However, what contingencyplan mentioned about "time" could also be called "experience". The more experience you have in a given skill, the faster you can perform it and the more likely you are to be successful. However, if you neglect to use a certain skill for a while, your experience should probably be the stat that drops. Also, knowledge about a certain skill could drop over time with lack of use, but over a much longer time span than experience.

Dave

139

Precursors / Player Creation

« on: June 17, 2005, 12:32:40 am »

Thinking more about this, I have come up with the following rough idea for the method of character creation:

1. Player ranks their character's stats into different slots. The stats here could include wealth/assets, physical attributes (constitution, dexterity, strength), mental attributes (intelligence, wisdom, charisma), skills (this may actually be determined by their intelligence), or knowledge (ditto).

2. Player chooses a distribution for the slots. This limits how many points they can put into each slot. The distribution would basically be the spread from the highest slot to the lowest.

3. Player distributes a fixed number of points between the different slots.

4. Player chooses edges and flaws. (this may be integrated with 3 if we decide to share points between the two... edges and flaws could even be in a slot.)

5. Choose skills.

6. Choose knowledge.

Much of this is again ripped from Shadowrun, as Chris was saying. The split between skills and knowledge is one thing that I really admire about Shadowrun. Integrating knowledge into an MMORPG may prove challenging, however...

Dave

140

Precursors / Player Creation

« on: June 17, 2005, 12:10:30 am »

I definitely agree that edges and flaws should be done on a point-based system, but I'm undecided whether we should do edges and flaws with the same points as skills. There are some very good reasons to keep these separate, mostly ease of balance.

As far as the stats system in general, I envision more than just different settings for your point spread. Thinking in an interface sense, I envision a slider that can go from a very flat spread (about 5 points worth of spread from min to max) to a very steep slope. (about 50 points spread) That way people can set it any way they want, and there's more variance just from where they happened to have clicked it. In this case, user error could be enough randomness. ;-)

I definitely think it's still a good idea to add some randomness to the _outcomes_ of the points, but not necessarily to the points themselves. Taking the example Chris was giving of a very Shadowrun-like assets system, a certain number of points put into assets would give you a certain range of outcomes. This way people could make minor adjustments however they felt appropriate, but within the bounds of the spread they chose earlier. I almost think that there should be minimums as well as maximums for each slot to further enforce the point spread idea. (it would be easier to show this on a whiteboard, but oh well...)

Dave