Messages

61

Bug Reports / Re: Alpha Testing: Suggestions - Bugs - Errors

« on: February 23, 2006, 11:47:35 pm »

[...]If you want any help working out the mathematics of the rotation . . . I AM a mathematics major after all . . . [...]

Well, the physics should all be there. I might want your help deciding on masses, and other appropriate numbers for them, and then making sure the simulation feels right. However,the current problem appears to be that they are not allowed to translate. Their center position is fixed, and all the impacts they recieve are simply moment, that cause the rotation.

Also, in response to one of ry_guy's suggestions, if you're gonna have a locked view like that, you need to have it IN cockpit, otherwise we might see about having a touch of camera buoyancy when you have a 3rd person view of the ship.

Currently, the camera simply isn't coded to support a 'springy' look. This isn't by design.. it's just the way it is. I'll see about getting 'springy' camera stuff put into it. There's a new camera system in CEL (or they're working on it) anyway, so we might want to wait for it to be finished, so we can use that isntead. I'll talk to whitelynx about it.

I'm also able to help out with any of the asteroid physics stuff as well. The math is easy to check, but sometimes the physics gets missed(or simplified incorrectly, or whatever).

62

General Discussion / Re: Descent: Freespace

« on: January 18, 2006, 04:30:40 am »

Wow, what a great game. I spent alot of time playing that game. Both versions. Although I still haven't gotten around to beating Silent Threat(oh well).

Anyway, features that should be included.

1). Robust mission editor with an easy to learn intuitive interface.
2). Capital ships are exceptionaly large and when they are in combat with one another
    you *really* don't want to get in the way.

I'll put up more later as I think of it.

63

Precursors / Re: # of Servers?

« on: December 18, 2005, 04:02:07 pm »

By shard what I mean is somethign akin to a "logical" server. Basically the world that the players play in. For instance, World of Warcraft has well over 100 shards (which people sometimes also call servers, hence the confusion), whereas Eve Online is a single shard. In Eve Online all the players of the game play in the same virtual world. Each shard is often made up of seperate nodes, which are then made up of several physical servers.

64

General Discussion / Re: New Game Ideas (Short Term Project)

« on: December 17, 2005, 10:12:27 am »

I think that an online fps game would take more than a year of development time.  The demise/nethack style games are probably easier to design but have far more content than you can shake a stick at. The problem is with only a year of development time how do you mix fun and original.

65

Precursors / Re: # of Servers?

« on: December 17, 2005, 09:55:39 am »

Shards or servers?

(Not that I can answer this question, but I think this is a valid question).

For reference I heard somewhere that a single shard of UO has around 10 servers.

66

General Discussion / Re: New Game Ideas (Short Term Project)

« on: December 16, 2005, 01:09:42 am »

Perhaps something similiar to the N64 game Pokemon Puzzle? It has other variants as well that are out there, but so far that has been the most fun flavor of the game I have seen. I believe that it is similiar to Tetris attack. The 3d mode in Pokemon Puzzle is alot of fun though.  ;D

67

General / Re: Corrupt a Wish...

« on: November 21, 2005, 11:27:06 pm »

The weather makes up its mind and desides that wherever you go it should be 130 degrees Farenheit, and 99% humidity. You try to drink enough water, but your stomach can not hold enough water to keep you from dehydrating and turning into a dried out husk.

I wish Caenus would not abuse Quantum Mechanics so flagrantly (specifically the uncertainty principle).

68

Suggestions / Re: Galaxy Size

« on: November 18, 2005, 08:07:38 pm »

I know this game is going to require some immense "computing" to get things done. My question is if your going to need some servers? maybe 3 to 4 to get started?. The size of the galaxy will have to be big in order to allow player capabilties of going out into deep space and maybe finding a new place to get minerals or something.

Just a thought.

A nice thought, although at the beginnning beginning I think that they'll just need a single server. Probably running about a solar systems worth of stuff or less. Beyond that it really depends on the number of players, AI programming, and all that jazz.

69

Suggestions / Re: Space Ship Velocity

« on: November 17, 2005, 06:50:29 am »

A thought.  Why not treat space as fluid instead of a vacuum?  Then velocity will simply be relative to the space you occupy.

Also by making space fluid, you can assign an extra vector field to any area of space.  Then assign curl and div values to various points which can in turn be used to affect certain "free floating" objects such as asteroids. 

As interesting as it would be to do this, I think that in the end it would be more beneficial to use a single object in the system as a point of reference, or make that point user configurable. Keeping track of an extra vector field on top of everything else that needs to be kept track of would bog down the server unneccesairly, imo.

70

Bug Reports / Re: Bug Reports For v0.3.1 alpha

« on: November 02, 2005, 10:15:37 pm »

Here are some Graphical Glitches I found.

1) The lens flare and main light source (aka star) show through the body of the ship when they probably shouldn't.
2) The lens flare should only occur at small angles between the forward camera axis and star ship axis. Currently if the star is visible on screen you get lens flare. Kind odd looking, not sure what the actual physical range of angles should be, but small seems ok.

3) At large distances away from the star (definetly at around where the largest asteroid is about half the size of the disk of the star) if you turn far enough away from the star then the ship disappears. It looks like it's some lighting effects gone wonky. The angle that it disappears at is not set. If you get far enough away (a minute or two of just thrusting away) when the star leaves the screen the ship disappears).

71

Precursors / What do Characters do when Players go offline?

« on: October 05, 2005, 12:48:50 am »

I think that this is a really good idea. It allows the player to perform mundane actions without actually having to do them. One of the major things that turned me off of SWG was that I *had* to get on and deal with the upkeep on my harvesters. And I had to do that before a specific time, lest I lose my investment. Forcing a player to get on and play is not a good thing, but in some cases it may be unavoidable.

Also, this sort of thing has to be balanced so that you can't perform large complex actions while offline, or actions that would lead to significant advancement.

72

Precursors / Player Advancement

« on: October 04, 2005, 03:19:52 am »

Hmm. What's to prevent players from stacking up all these skills into thier character, and then not playing for a few weeks, and coming back, and having an uber character? (aka: What's to keep this from being abused?)

--Chris

Thats why I was saying limit the size of the queue, and possibly put in a pause between when a skill finishes and when the next one is taken from the queue.

73

Precursors / Player Advancement

« on: October 01, 2005, 03:34:44 am »

I think the time based skills idea is a good idea, especially if there is a queue for skills. Although I think you might want to keep the length of the queue small and possibly have a pause before a new skill is taken from the queue.

74

Precursors / The Seventh Game: Tech Brief

« on: August 31, 2005, 11:05:14 pm »

<snip>

It should be noted that hyperspace is curled into a very tiny ball. Because of that, the distance between any point, and any other point is so small, it approaches zero. So, even though there's an infinite number of possible points, there's almost no distance between any of them. (Yes, it's hard to imagine a ship almost 2 miles long entering a region of space that's smaller than the smallest part of an atom, but it *is* possible. The math is almost beyond me, and it involves waaaay to much quantum mechanics for me to follow... but it works. I've read enough books that explain the concepts I've just described.)

Plus, this is a game, and a sci-fi book. Trust the author, he's god, even if he's wrong.

--Chris

So, are you talking like on the order of the planck length, or more along the lines of for all points a and b in subspace, and for all epsilons(in the real numbers) greater than zero there exists a metric d [effectively distance b/w two points] such that d(a,b) < epsilon?

75

Bug Reports / Bug Reports For v0.3.1 alpha

« on: August 19, 2005, 09:55:04 pm »

Hmmm. Well the inaccuracy of the rotational dynamics could be a related the fixed center point problem. Anyway, if you want some examples of some of the reactions that I'm talking about start spinning some of the larger asteroids really fast. When they collide, they do so correctly, but occasionally do really weird things.

Side note: I just realized this also could be related to how the time sensitive the collision detection algorithm is. Which could cause some of these issues.

76

Bug Reports / Bug Reports For v0.3.1 alpha

« on: August 18, 2005, 12:44:24 am »

Possible bug: High energy interactions between the ship and the flying utility tool   seem to not conserve energy properly.

Things seem to work out at lower energies, and at higher energies when the tool is stationary. But if the tool is rotating and spinning then it seems to gain and lose energy in unexpected ways after interactions.

Idea: Add some sort of command that prints various energies to stderr or to a file. Total energy, linear and rotational energies about x. y, and z. Also, do that for both the players ship and the targeted ship.  In addition to those energies have a running net on each axis for what has been added by the user.

77

Precursors / What is important to the users?

« on: August 17, 2005, 01:38:42 am »

I think it should be something like this.

1) Stability. Fix bugs first

2) Networking. This is not from an end user standpoint, but rather from a development standpoint. Granted I have no idea what the internals are like so the client and server sides may already be differentiated enough in the current source that seperating them into executables and inserting network code may be relativly trivial. Anyway, if that is not the case then seperating them into two trunks can easily become a minor headache, and can become worse as you add more features.

3) Systems
4) Damage
5) Combat

And after those I don't really have any thoughts.

78

General Discussion / Introduction Thread: New users, please post here!

« on: August 16, 2005, 10:19:38 pm »

Hi! My name is Ryan and I ran across this game on the happypenguin.org site. It was rather fortuitous because I had been having ideas about developing something similar to this (i.e. a sci-fi setting with rts/fps and space flight components) but my main stopping point has been designing and programming graphics. I know a little bit of OpenGL, but not enough to do anything remotely fancy.  I'm mostly self taught in C and C++, although I've taken a couple classes to improve what I've already learned.  One of my main interests is in computational physics, so I find some of the stuff that you're trying to implement very interesting.  I've got a B.S. in Physics and a B.S. in Mathematics, and I'm currently employed as a datacenter technician for a hosting company.  I'll post more ideas as I have them.

79

Precursors / Gameplay... and Death

« on: July 28, 2005, 11:11:41 pm »

I think that in addition to penalizing murderers in "civilized space" there should be some way of enforcing some of those penalties outside of "civlized space". So that, the murderer is just not sitting outside of "civilized space" waiting for people to kill.

Perhaps bounties could be used this, or special exploratory law enforcement teams.