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Messages - contingencyplan

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461
Precursors / Guilds, Corps, Player Goverments
« on: August 16, 2005, 09:15:32 am »
Agreed.  However, we should have some sort of compensation in place, preferably in-game stuff (instead of having to deal with money for submissions).  Maybe we could give them in-game credits, or a special item, or perhaps a free month's subscription for a good submission... or give them their choice. The special item sounds cool, though.

*sigh* Then we have to deal with people saying "I got this much for my submission, and this guy got so much more!  WTH?!"  and the like...  stupid planet envy... :-P

Still, having the ability for players to add new content would possibly be worth it.  But we'd have to try it on a small scale first, perhaps as a feature to be beta-tested AFTER we release the game.

462
Precursors / Races
« on: August 16, 2005, 09:13:18 am »
Quote from: "topher"
A little twist would be that their are a really greedy, warfaring nation and once in space they start an aggressive compain against other planets.


This is what I was talking about earlier - the storyline isn't linear. Players don't all follow the same quests and the like (kill monster A, get Sack 'o Crap B, take it to Shrubberer C (for fertilizer), and get gold for it).  Rather, one person's actions could drastically affect others in the game.

Because of this, I wouldn't say that only one player could effect this outcome.  Rather, you would have to have quite a few players - scientists, engineers, teachers, and the like - all there, trying to kick-start the Critters' space program.

Then, another group could come along, with the idea of enslaving the Critters. So now those two groups would be fighting against each other, one trying to enslave the Critters, the other trying to keep them free so they can join the space-faring races of the universe.

Perhaps once that race has entered space, it could become a player-selectable race even.  Naturally, we'd have to have that in place before people found the system, but still, that would be awesome - like a MMOG cheat code or special secret level or whatnot.

~Brian

463
Precursors / Guilds, Corps, Player Goverments
« on: August 16, 2005, 09:02:56 am »
Well, agreed, I don't think we should have players just be put in godlike charge of a specific area (i.e., they create the galaxy, system, planets, NPCs, buildings, etc.).  However, having players model a building or a planet or whatnot and submit it sounds like it might be a good idea.  Like I said, though, my support is tentative.  I fully expect we'd have every modder wannabe emailing us with their "OMG THIS IS SO KOOL!!!" yet sucky-ass alien critter, then getting all pissed off when we say "We appreciate the offer, but we're declining your work for now" (which they read as "WE THINK YOU SUCK!!!"), so they go complain on their blogs and send nasty emails to all their friends about us and write bad reviews on different gaming websites...  Sorry, was that sarcasm a touch bitter? :twisted:

Anyways.  That's why I say if we do this, we should have a full-blown submission system (in-game, mind you) in place that will check whether the modder has been approved to submit their work.  If they haven't, then they are (kindly) rejected. We then put a notice on the website that says "Any player-submitted content sent to any of our email addresses will be deleted unopened."  This will hopefully let the people who can both submit mature work and can accept our decision (whether we choose to accept it or not) maturely submit good work that we can use, while keeping the immature from overloading us with poor submissions and bad attitudes.

~Brian

464
Precursors / Guilds, Corps, Player Goverments
« on: August 15, 2005, 04:53:12 pm »
I do like the idea of player-submitted content, at least tentatively.  However, going into it with the mindset that it will save time and take some of the load off the devs is a foolish opinion.  We will almost certainly spend as much (if not more) time looking over others' proposals as we would working on our own content.  Also, don't forget that we WILL have to have our own content - we can't just shove everything off to the player community.  

Also, if we allow for players to expand, we should set up some rules (e.g., they have played for X number of months, and they have to sign up with us before they can submit stuff).

~Brian

465
Precursors / Space Flight Controls, and Realism
« on: August 15, 2005, 04:48:41 pm »
Quote from: "topher"
I would hate to buy the game and then have to have the carrot dangled in front of me.

Agreed.  

Also, I don't particularly like the idea of a "n00b ship" - all ships should be usable by anybody, regardless of play experience.  The control aspect should either be a switch within all ships, or a System / component that is inserted and removed at will, as was mentioned earlier:
Quote from: "whitelynx"
Even better, they could be saved _with_ a system. That way, if you buy a control system off someone, you need to reconfigure it to suit your control style unless you _want_ to use their controls.

The component should not be expensive at all; perhaps everyone should be given one with the purchase of a ship.

Further, I don't think that we should be thinking in terms of "n00b" vs "l337" controls - we should be thinking in terms of more flight-sim controls (e.g., automatically compensate), and the space-based ones like is already in there now.  Both have advantages to newbs and experienced players alike.  While the flight-sim style would be more useful to the new people intially, it almost certainly has advantages even for more experienced players.  Thus, both should be developed to be as intuitive as possible, rather than with the mindset of steering players in a particular direction.  We should allow them the freedom to choose what's best for them and work to make that option as effective as possible.  We may have a pet style ourselves, but others will want to make up their own mind without having to worry about "does this have an artificial disadvantage that I haven't heard about?"

~Brian

466
Precursors / The 3 Paths
« on: August 15, 2005, 04:38:50 pm »
The only problem I see with this is that people will become masters of all, something that does not translate to real life.  iirc, I mentioned something about this in another thread, that we should have skills degrade over time with non-use.  However, I do agree that we should keep the skills as wide-open as possible.

~Brian

467
Precursors / Law Enforcement in the Galaxy
« on: August 14, 2005, 09:56:16 pm »
Personally, I have my own "Legend Player" persona all picked out, so I'd definitely vote for that.

Quote from: "Raeka"
Also, what about people who want to make Lengendary characters? What's going to be done about that? Are you just going to let them, or is it going to be not allowed? ...and if not allowed, how are you going to go about that?


Well, I would say that players will become Legends, at least in terms of reputation, just through normal playing - they become well-known in certain circles as having accomplished a lot, or something of that nature.  If we provide special benefits to Legend characters, though, then we have have to set down a more rigid set of criteria - must have been playing for some length of time, or have accomplished a set number of tasks, or risen in some ranking system enough, or something like that.

Anyways, it's late, and I need sleep.
~Brian

468
Precursors / Game Music
« on: August 14, 2005, 09:29:03 pm »
Quote from: "whitelynx"
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.


I'm pretty sure I've made mention of Total Annihilation elsewhere in the forums, so allow me to make another reference to it:

TA has the ability to play music CDs.  MP3 wasn't popular when the game came out, so music CDs were as close as you could come.  However, it had the ability to control it via several means:

1. You could do random tracks off the CD
2. You could just do a straight play-through

Naturally, those two are standard on any CD player out there.  However, it also had #3:

3. The ability to assign tracks to certain events, and play them when those events occurred.  For instance, if you were just sitting around building, it would pay tracks that had been selected for "Building."  If you were fighting another player (shooting his units and such), then it would play tracks from "Combat."  If you were losing, or had lost a bunch of units and whatnot, you could select "Defeat."  There were a few others, but those are the ones I remember (and I'm in Linux, so I can't check it right now).  

I think we could have something along this line - get the best of both worlds. If the player wants to simply play tracks from the playlist, then they can.  However, we can also assign meaning to particular songs, having them play when certain things were happening in the game.

So in short: What whitelynx said. ;-)
~Brian

469
Precursors / Racing?
« on: August 14, 2005, 02:14:53 am »
Something I was thinking of was this: How about we have space racing circuits (yes, plural)? I don't think it would be too difficult to modify the space sim aspect to change how weapons are done and to add race-style controls and equipment.

I was thinking we'd have two arenas of racing: Space, and planetside.  In space, you have to fly your ship through a area of space (I remember one particular one that was done on Star Trek: Voyager in this manner). Naturally, you don't have to be concerned with gravity (in general, though that would make for a very interesting obstacle... :twisted:).

Planetside, on the other hand, has you running through a circuit on the ground.  We could either have floating (a la F-Zero) or ground-bound (read: wheeled) vehicles, but either way the drivers have to follow a set terrain-based circuit.

Additionally, I can see two styles of racing - stock ships and modded ships.  With stock ships, you simply take a ship straight out of a qualified vendor's lot and race with it - you can't change out a single component (except to replace a damaged one, and then only with the exact same component).  This emphasizes piloting skill, and leaves the mechanics largely out of it.

Modded ships, however, allow you to modify your ship with whatever components you want.  Want a larger engine?  Buy it and strap it in. Want to have better shields? Stick it in there.  This adds the extra mechanical aspect of it to the racing - you have to know what you're doing (both personally and stat / skill-wise), and you have to be able to get the better set of parts.  Naturally, there shouldn't be one set of end-all parts - different manufacturers have different specs for their parts, so it boils down to taste and particular skill leanings.

In either case, we should have brackets set up, likely based on skill (number of wins) and / or ship capabilities (price of components would likely be a good standard).  We could of course have free races, where anybody is welcome to compete, regardless of skill and ship price.  However, to ensure that newbies don't always get beat out, they should race against others with similar skills and capabilities, so the race is more fair.

We could also have a lot of fun with this, I think - have it be a spectator sport, where people can buy tickets to see the race in person.  Further, we could allow betting on different racers (though we would have to realize the potential for people losing on purpose... perhaps that could be part of racing on the outer edges of the galaxy).

Naturally, the racers themselves get compensated for their wins - either in cash (based on a purse or on the bets placed on them [ref to Star Wars; Knights of the Old Repubilc]), or in parts for their ship (only in modded races, of course).

As far as the circuits themselves, I envision several that could stretch throughout the galaxy, including several planets that are controlled by either the Terrans or the League; in fact, the circuit would likely have several stops from both sides.  If you have enough money, you could buy / build racing stadiums and get it on one of the circuits.  You could even outright start your own circuit with several other stadium owners.

Anyways, was thinking that over, and decided to get my ideas in a post.  What do y'all think?
~Brian

470
Precursors / Content
« on: August 11, 2005, 04:08:06 pm »
Check this one out as far as the missions, at least an initial idea.

http://gne.g33xnexus.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=62

Quote from: "topher"
In one game they have Agents where you go an get missions from. There is a general bucket of missions and one is selected randomly. They scale with the level of the Agent so they are usable by noobies and oldtimers a like.


Personally, I'm not a huge fan of this approach, at least not for this game.  While this is certainly better than the usual "everybody accomplishes the same missions in the same order" kind of deal (leading to lines waiting for a particular boss monster to respawn), it still suffers from the same ultimate shortcoming - the world is largely static.  Granted, it's more dynamic than the "everybody kill the Boss AssHat", but when you get down to it, everyone still has the same pool to choose from.

What I have in mind is more along the lines of the Total Annihiliation Boneyards, only done on a much larger scale (with some new ideas added).  In Boneyards, everybody logged into the server and was presented with a galaxy of planets.  Each of those planets corresponded to one of the multiplayer maps for the game.  Players were associated with either the Arm or the Core (the two sides in the game), and they engaged each other in 1v1 battles on those planets.  At the end of the day, the results for those battles were tallied, and the side with the most victories won control of the planet.  When a planet was won by a particular side, the nearby planets fell into contention, and the process repeated itself until one side finally controlled all the planets.  A very fun system... too bad 1) I had dialup, so I didn't play it much; 2) I sucked when compared to a lot of other players, so I usually lost when I played; and 3) Cavedog has since gone under, so the system is offline permanently, so I can't play anymore. :-(

But regrets aside... ;-)

Anyways, I gotta head out from work, so I'll finish this post later.
~Brian

471
Precursors / Space Flight Controls, and Realism
« on: August 11, 2005, 09:49:54 am »
Judging by the SVN, try precursors/config/keymaps/Default.cfg

~Brian

472
Precursors / Guilds, Corps, Player Goverments
« on: August 10, 2005, 10:15:31 am »
Well, right now, I think morgul's idea is that we have the League and the Terrans as the two major human forces within the game.  Players can align themselves with either faction, or be on their own.  If they're on their own, they can join up with other players in as loose- or tight-knit groups as they choose - e.g., just get together to party and pillage on weekends, or have regular meetings and missions and such with an overall agenda.  The game should allow for both.

Quote from: "topher"
In another game i play you have Corporations and skills associated with running said corp. You can designate roles and responsibilietes to each member of your corp, from VP to research assistant, etc. Corps also have a wallet, shared banking, hangers and many other items that are rights protected.


I like this idea - business-centric organizations, rather than military / conquest / kill 'em all-centric. The shared purse is a must for any organization, no matter how big or small.

Something else I would like to see is the ability for player-started groups to rise in prominence, perhaps even [near] to the level of the League or Terrans, depending on how many members they get and how much money they have.  If nothing else, they could take over an entire sector of planets and place them under their control. This allows for a lot more variability in the game landscape, rather than saying that a sector is purely L, T, or Neutral.

~Brian

473
Precursors / Merc vs. Organized Governments
« on: August 10, 2005, 09:57:01 am »
Something I was thinking was that members of one of the established organizations (Terrans or League) wouldn't have to be concerned about clones - the government automatically manages this for them.  They do this at a set rate of 75% efficiency - when you are respawned, you are at 75% of your prior stats.  Perhaps we could institute either a "death tax" - when you die, a percentage of your assets are taxed to pay for your rebirth.  The more times you die, the higher the tax; the longer you live in your current body, the lower the tax.  Perhaps if you go a long time without dying, and have thus advanced pretty far in the game, you might be able to avoid these penalties altogether (though that would then reset your counter to 0, so you'd have to go a long time before dying again).

However, mercenaries and freelancers have a different system altogether. Rather than having the body and everything taken care of automatically, you have to make arrangements yourself. You can go somewhere and make a copy of yourself to put on record (a la a save point). Then, when you die, your body is remade with that information. It costs a pretty high amount of money to make an initial copy and a smaller amount to update the copy with your current (newer) stats. It also costs a fairly high amount of money to reserve a body - if you didn't reserve a body, then the system will automatically buy one for you, but at a higher price.

The main diff between the two is that if you're in an organized group, you will have that all taken care of automatically after your death. If you're in a small group (or on your own - about the smallest group you can get), then you have to make arrangements prior to your death.

What do y'all think?
~Brian

474
General Discussion / Introduction Thread: New users, please post here!
« on: August 10, 2005, 09:19:25 am »
Dangit, now we got Chris1 and Chris2...  Now how am I going to keep them straight? ;-)

Seriously, glad to meet you.  morgul forwarded us (whitelynx and myself) your email - your resume sounds impressive, to say the least.

Personally, I'd like to see some of the work you've done, especially code-wise (assuming you can do so legally - i.e., not under a NDA or something of that sort).  

Something that I think we'd find quite useful is your experience with networking, presumably with networking programming included in that.  We're looking at using RakNet for our networking, and we'd definitely appreciate someone who could do some work on that for us.  Personally, I know nothing about networking, so someone who works in that field for a living would certainly be useful.

Also, if I may ask - what education have you received? I'm just curious - we're all in college, so it'd be interesting to work with someone who's in the field already, to see the difference in outlook and such.  If that makes a lick of sense. :-P

Anyways, glad to meet you!
~Brian

475
General Discussion / Introduction Thread: New users, please post here!
« on: August 07, 2005, 02:21:14 am »
I'll follow up with a little bit about myself.

I'm Contingencyplan, or Brian for those who know me.  I'm a student at a college here in Texas, studying Computer Science.  I love the subject so much I'm planning to get my Bachelor's and Master's degrees in it.  I'm also toying with the idea of getting an MBA afterwards, though I haven't decided.

I spend almost all of my time in front of a computer, either playing games or working on Precursors.  I joined onto the Precursors dev team as a programmer not too long ago, and have been enjoying myself ever since.

Personally, I'm more an ivory-tower theorist than a practician - I prefer to deal with things on an abstract level, and leave others to the details of how to actually make it work in the current system.  However, I also enjoy programming and turning my ideals into actual code.

I want to second morgul's welcome to the forums - everybody come and post your ideas about the game.  We want to hear from you!
~Brian

476
Precursors / Precursors on Happy Penguin! ~Brian
« on: July 31, 2005, 09:00:15 pm »
I don't know if anybody's noticed, but somebody posted Precursors to the HappyPenguin website - http://www.happypenguin.org/ .  Nath, whoever you are, I want to thank you on behalf of the team for putting it on there.  We've been meaning to do so, but just hadn't gotten to it yet. Your review of the game is very positive, which we certainly appreciate.

Thanks Nath!
~Brian

477
Precursors / Gameplay... and Death
« on: July 29, 2005, 07:12:34 am »
I'm all for having bounty hunters, that's for sure.  Though they certainly could be working for either side of the law - they don't particularly care, just so long as they get paid, and paid well.

But government-funded bounties on murderers and other transgressors would definitely be a good idea.
~Brian

478
Precursors / Soldier Types
« on: July 22, 2005, 04:04:40 pm »
I made reference to the three paths, one of which was a Soldier path.  In the process of thinking through the paths, I came up with some general Soldier types that we might think about using in the game, at least as a template.

  • Grunt - these are your standard soldiers.  They can wield a variety of weapons, including rifles, rocket launchers, grenades, etc.  We'll have to do more about weaponry in a later post, but essentially these are your basic infantry, though some may be more attuned to heavier or lighter weaponry.  A good portion of these will be AI and beginning Players, since their required logic is lower than other kinds of soldiers. We might require that beginning Players (at least Soldiers, if not all military Players) spend a certain amount of time in this situation before being promoted to other areas.

  • Special Ops - These are highly trained soldiers whose task is to surgically take out targets or accomplish tasks / missions with only a handful of troops. Their equipment is designed to be both tougher than the standard Grunt's, as well as allowing for hiding and silence when taking out targets.  Unlike Black Ops (below), their tasks full completely within the rules of war; however, those tasks are more difficult, and the Special Ops Soldiers accomplish those tasks with a much higher degree of skill and finesse than the average Grunt does, all while using fewer Soldiers to begin with.  Their tasks may be sniping enemy targets or taking out an enemy base or rescuing POWs.  Think Commandos in C&C.

  • Black Ops - These soldiers do not exist, on record anyways.  They accomplish missions which are "officially" against the rules of war (and thus [maybe] the game).  Perhaps we as the admins know they exist, but we can't do anything to stop them unless they get caught. They are given access to weaponry and equipment that the other soldiers do not have, likely experimental stuff or equipment that is more powerful than it should be (i.e., upsets a balance in the game).  While many will want to be part of these groups (for whatever side, of course including merc covert groups), they are clandestine organizations - the knowledge of these groups is severely limited, and membership is by invitation only.  They exist, but they don't exist.

  • Field Commander - One of the most important Soldiers.  They are a cross between the RTS-only Commanders and the standard Grunt.  They are higher ranked than the Grunts, and have access to a unique set of equipment that they use to lead their squad into battle.  Commanders will generally pass orders to the Field Commanders, who then take the initiative to order their troops to certain locations to accomplish that goal.  Further, Field Commanders may have certain traits or stats that enhance the traits of those under their command (e.g., better accuracy or stability in battle, etc.).  They have some interface (I was thinking either a wrist console or a brain implant) so they can switch from the FPS to the RTS interface and back - give their Soldiers orders, then go and carry out their assigned task in the Squad.  They are in the thick of battle, unlike standard Commanders.  For those born leaders who love the smell of napalm in the morning, this is the calling for you.
Any thoughts?
~Brian

479
Precursors / Character Creation, Races, and Professions.
« on: July 22, 2005, 03:49:31 pm »
Quote from: "morgul"
The first thing a user needs to do, is pick thier race. I've decided that we're goign to have more than Humans, but what ones we're going to have, I'm not sure of. However, let's assume that we have more than one option here.


I like the additional race idea.  As I've said before, I'd still like to see >2 major human factions, but that's up to you - it's your story.  :-D

Quote from: "morgul"
After a user picks thier race, they needs to pick thier appearance. [...] and the option to choose to be missing certain body parts... (like no left hand, no left eye, no right leg... w/e.)


The ability to choose appearance is a given - I like the ability to choose missing limbs.  Tossing back to our discussions on cyborgs a while back, I'd also say that in addition to missing parts, why not have the ability to choose cyborg parts to replace those?  Perhaps we should save that for in-game, and let the Player buy certain replacement parts (** thinking of the arm cannon on the T-X in Terminator 3...  oooh **).

Quote from: "morgul"
After they've done that, and picked out a basic outfit, they need to pick a profession.


Personally, I'd rather leave that up to the Player to decide once they are in the game. This would be influenced by a number of different aspects - if you are living on a planet that is under League control, you likely will sign up with the League, rather than the Terrans.  Further, you shouldn't be stuck in one particular group for the entire play period - you should be able to defect from one group to another (though not without difficulty).  That's not to say you can just bounce around, but you can at least leave a particular group and join a different one.  You might can leave the Pirates of the Caribbean Nebula (** tips hat to Johnny Depp and Jerry Bruckheimer **), but don't do so flippantly - they have a nasty habit of... erm, getting even.

Furthermore, I don't think we should have the Player commit to one particular area of the military they join when they create their character. As I described in another post, I'd rather have the Player join in general, and receive training towards one area or another.  I've been working on a post about Soldier types, and I'll post that in a minute.

~Brian

480
Precursors / The 3 Paths
« on: July 22, 2005, 12:11:13 pm »
I figure it'd be a good idea to informally formalize the paths the Player can take throughout the game.  I'll post some about each area in additional posts, to break the line of thought up a little bit.  In my view, there are 3 paths the Player can follow:

[list=1]
  • Soldier (FPS aspect) - The Players on the ground, in the trenches, fighting using guns and rockets and grenades and whatever weps they have in the future.  They advance by successfully completing tasks (individually) and their missions (overall).  As discussed previously, as a Soldier increases in skill and rank, they gain access to better equipment - the big guns, the better armor, etc.  Further, they also pilot ground vehicles (more on those in a later post).

  • Pilot (Flightsim aspect) - The Players in charge of running the ships in the game.  As with Soldiers, as they perform well and win missions, they gain access to better ships and weaponry. The major difference between Soldiers and Pilots (other than the obvious change in venue) is the Pilot spends most of his/her time in the ship, while Soldiers only spend part of their time in vehicles. For the Soldier, the vehicle is more a minor thing, while the lives of the Pilots revolves around their ships.

  • Commander (RTS aspect) - The Players concerned with commanding the other troops in battle.  In theory, the Commander is in some physical structure of some sort, like a destroyer or carrier or battleship or whatnot.  Thus, the foremost priority for the Commander is protection of that ship - if it dies, he dies.  Past that, there's a chain of command - one Commander is given the order to take the planet, so he orders his sub-Commanders accordingly.  One sub-Commander is tasked with taking the continent, so she orders her sub-Commanders to destroy certain bases and take strategic points.  If the whole system works, then the planet is taken over, and that particular side wins.
    [/list:o]

    Naturally, the FPS side is going to be the ubiquitous one of the three - everyone is going to be in FPS mode at one time or another.  However, if their character's stats + their natural ability moves them towards one direction or the other, then they can choose to go down each path.  Furthermore, every Player can do any of these, but going along with the experience system tossed around, Soldiers who have not spent a lot of time in a spaceship won't be able to pilot it as well as those who have followed a more Pilot-centric path.

    ~Brian

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