nordwindranger

hmm well for me I think it is more of the time factor than anything. A full game of Rebellion can take 24+ hours

hmm well the bar i go to in green bay (st brennans) has guiness on tap (out of a keg)! not sure If I've had "draught" or not. I had a bottle of Guiness extra stout before I went to the bar, its a little more bitter than regular guiness. I bought some Beamish once, it came in cans and was a bit thicker than guiness but tasted similar. good brew. Another good dark beer is Beck's Dark, which gets extra points in my book for being german. I had 4 guiness at the bar (and about 4 or so bottles before hand) , perhaps I get a salute? I must admit that I don't drink nearly as much as I used to. I think my personal best for Guiness is around 9 16 ounce cans. The bar I go to has 20 ounce glasses, so I have not done too bad. I'm sure we would have had more, but we all had to get up in the morning. Trying to get good grades and working a couple jobs are to blaim as usual.

i think Lucas miscalculated the core audience. Most people think of Vader as being pretty cool, but instead Lucas cast someone who could only portay an impatiend dumb teen. I think Lucas tried to hard. There were too many corn jokes in the new movies-- it was like he was trying to make a disney movie. I've always thought Star Wars should be more hard core, but he was clearly shooting for a younger generation. Even so, I still enjoyed the new movies. They were different, but they were still a lot of fun

hmm thought "the mask" was a past member who wasn't around anymore. silly me. well best of luck and all that. Don't worry though, we have waited years, we can wait a couple more weeks!

thanks a lot! I will try and post more, although progress has been slow because of the combined effect of college+ 2 jobs... I would try and release some kind of demo, but honestly I think people would be bored and dissapointed. There is almost nothing that the player can actually do at the moment, besides order the fleet to move to another planet. there is a "testing mode" so that players can set up custom fleets, but the firing is all screwed up at the moment, and ships rarely hit their targets.... also I'm drunk. Guiness+ german beerW+ being 21== good time

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3202654277053813907 i haven't posted anything here in awhile, so i recorded some of the testing that I was doing today. The combat at the end runs at around 110 frames per second on my computer (its only going at 50 in the video because of the "Fraps" video recording software). Combat movement is more or less non-existant at the moment, so the battles are fairly static. There are a whole bunch of problems with firing that I will be working on over the next couple weeks.

Luke pulls an Obi Wan, and disappears. perhaps he has become a pacifist

good stuff. perhaps the rebs are having second thoughts about helping the vong..

As far as the CSA, I really can't imagine the Empire tolerating them, unless if they have sworn their allegiance. A war against the vong might prove the diversion to start taking space back from the CSA. They really don't seem like a galaxy class military force anyways.

Hmm I think the Empire would definitely go public. I see the rebels as more likely to go for cover ups and smear campaigns, where as the Empire is very patriotic. They would definitely make it into a recruiting drive. "sign on for a tour of duty with the Imperial Army Reserve. Tour the galaxy and pay for college. Its your patriotic duty"

I'm waiting for the next post. I imagine it will go something like this.. "Palpatine transfers his mind to a clone on Byss, summons his eclipse battle group, and pounds the crud out of your sorry rebel fleet!" back on topic I haven't played rebellion in a while, as I've been spending most of my time on programming my own game. Perhaps I've forgotten how fun it is, I think I'll try to get a game started today. The thing that has always been screwing up my rebellion games lately has been my unchecked use of rebedit. It's always annoyed me that the rebel ships usually have much better stats then the imperial ships, but when i redo all of the stats, the Imps invariably are extremely powerful and the rebs don't have a chance. Hopefully this problem doesn't show up in my game as well, I haven't gave much thought to balance yet.

come to think of it, although my game is quasi-realtime, most events are only checked to see if it is the right day, so travel will really be in days no matter what. This will change if I change the way hyperspace exit/enter events are checked for. Hmm oddly enough, I never thought to hard about using a grid. I just knew that I needed a way to put a random amount of ships into a formation. The problem was that fleets have to be any size from one to infinite. Eventually a grid will run out of spaces (unless if you make it real big). In theory a grid made sense, but in actuallity it was kind of an odd concept. Because formations are three dimensional, you end up with a stacked series of grids, which ends up being no different than a cube. So you end up with the question, how to I arrange an undetermined amount of ships in a cube of space. I ended up using an interesting method that pushes ships that are colliding apart. This method runs before anything is rendered on the screen well i had originally posted the code for this method, but it was hard to read. Here's a link http://nordwindblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/gamedev-2.html to my blog post the day i wrote the code, it includes a picture of the code, which you can click on to blow up. edit: hmm for some reason the pic won't blow up for me. oh well, forget about the whole thing. it does produce some really cool looking formations though..

well it sounds like your doing pretty good then. sorry about the knee jerk reaction (do they have that phrase where your from? I think you mentioned that the design doc was written in czech). Although my own experience has been limited to c#, I will be glad to help you if you have any questions regarding.. well anything. I think you might run into a lot of the same logical problems that I've gone through with my game so far (like organization of units/hyperspace jumps).

Moribundus After reading your design document, my first reaction is that your project is extremely complicated. Do you have much previous game development experience? I am not trying to discourage you (and its certainly possible that you will be much better at it than I am), but this will take you an infinite amount of time to complete. Perhaps it wouldn't be a bad idea to look into using a free game engine (or are you already planning on doing this?). One of the biggest stumbling blocks in the development of my own game was getting the engine in shape to a point where I could render anything at all. I still don't have any sound support, and my interface is so ugly it kills babies. On one hand it is great that you have all of your goals written down, but on the other hand, have you thought about how they are all going to be implemented? Figuring out even the (seemingly) simplest of things, like putting fleets of ships into formations has so far proved to be rather time consuming to figure out. It generally takes me a day of researching and trying different ideas every time I add even a small feature. My game concept is rather simple, yet already I have written staggering amounts of code ( I don't remember the last time i counted, but there are at least 15 classes, each with pages and pages of code). I really don't mean to discourage you, and I'm sorry that this has taken such a negative turn, but it seems to me that it might be best to try something that is a little less complicated. Perhaps first work on 3d space combat, and then add in the economy, and factions, and all of the really complicated (but non-graphical) elements. If you are interested in a free 3d engine, http://www.thezbuffer.com is a good site for managed code. I'm sure there is some vanilla c/c++ stuff out there to. A good book is also a must. I've got a library of about 5 c# game programming books that I refer to occasionally, and I'm sure you could find some good ones on amazon. If you have any questions, http://www.gamedev.net is pretty much the best game development website in existence. They've helped me out a lot. In fact don't listen to me, this had started out as encouragement. Your plan is very interesting, and I especially liked the idea of a disease that is carried by survivors from Earth. best of luck and all that.

@ Defender yeah thats a pretty good idea. (the picture was pretty amusing as well. I bow to your superior "paint" skills") I was thinking about working a system like this into my game (IDOE), but it kind of got lost in the clutter of all my other ideas, and hasn't made it in yet. Currently Fleets are randomly assigned one of any number of pre-calculated entrance positions for a planet when they jump into the system. The fleet is then arranged in a random formation, to ensure that none of the ships are overlapping each other. @Moribundus I'm also using a "one day jump to anywhere" model, although this one day is multiplied by the slowest hyperdrive in the fleet to get the true travel time. Remember in Star Wars, a fast hyperdrive is something like .5, and a slower one is like .75 This seemed like an easy way of going about solving this problem. I will have to read that document that you were talking about, I'm getting rather interested in what your planning on doing with your game!

I'm in

best of luck! Please keep us informed, I like reading about game development. After getting used to this sites' black background, the sourceforge page blinded me. Aah too bright!

good stuff.

Lol at EaW! I still fire that up to watch the cinematic camera. so pretty, yet so boring to play. I am thinking about throwing in special ships like slave I. Once they are destroyed, they will be gone forever. As far as the time acceleration thing goes, I'm starting to think that it might be a must. They had that kind of thing in Microsoft's combat flight simulators. More than anything I'm worried about killing what little bit of immersion that I've managed to create.

whoops i think i misread that. As far as a "travel distance" for units, I guess the thought never really occured to me. Doesn't the star destroyer have a huge ionizing reactor or something (that big dome on its bottom)? I really have no idea where to begin on calculating how far a star destroyer could go. I guess its about infinite, as I've never heard of them refueling. I will probably just assume that fuel needs will be taken care of at a port, and the cost will be part of the total maintenance cost of the unit. It seems that most of the Empire's equipment is more fuel efficient, what with the solar panels and all. those pesky rebels are polluting up the galaxy with their suv Mon Cal cruisers and E-wings

hate to say it, but thats a big negative on intercepting ships between planets. It kinda goes against the idea of hyperspace. well I suppose you could use an interdictor, but I can't even begin to imagine how I would program it. Currently planets are more of a "concept" than an actual thing. What I mean is that you can go to the space around the planet, see the planet (if i put in the artwork), and fly around in that space, but you couldn't fly to another planet w/o going into hyperspace. In this way the only thing that has to be rendered on the screen are the ships and objects that are in your immediate vicinity. hmm that might have been a little confusing, let me try again. If I have interdictors in between planets to catch ships, there will have to actually be a place in between planets, and there isn't currently. Think of each planet as a "level" or a "map", and when you enter hyperspace your destination is actually loaded. Actually this is exactly how the game is designed. The only difference is that ships move between levels when ever they want, and this constant reshifting of ships is occuring all of the time, every second that your in game. See the interdictor would have to go somewhere if it was going to stop ships inbetween planets. But there is no where to go, you are either at a planet or you are nowhere aka hyperspace. hmm this is a good point though, interdictors should be able to uh "interdict". Well in either case, coding support for interdictors isn't on the immediate horizon. If I do put them in soon, they will probably just be like interdictors in most star wars games, and simply prevent ships from entering hyperspace. I will have to think about how I could make them pull ships from hyperspace.

Yeah thats what I'm leaning towards myself. one of the biggest problems that might be addressed by a faster clock is the frequency of hyperspace entry/exit in the sector that your ship is in. Although entering/exiting systems is currently coded into the engine, the chances of seeing a fleet enter/ exit out of hyperspace near you are pretty small. The problem is of course that there are a bunch of planets (20ish atm, but there is really no limit to how many planets are in the game) and there are a lot of fleets but the ai has just as many planets to cover them with. If each ship stays at a new location for a day or so, and hyperspace travel takes several days, ships probably only arrive at a particular planet about once every day or so. This makes sense in the real world, but would obviously be boring in the game world. If fleet movement doesn't happen enough the game could end up looking like rebellion where there is a big seperation between the strategy and tactical layer. In my game, the player could decide to be a civilian, park his shuttle at a planet like Kuat, and watch the military traffic flow through the system. Currently this is possible, but you would have to deal with gaps of around 24 real hours in the action. not my idea of time well spent. (note: I haven't spent the time sitting in a system to verify this theory, however I believe the way that the Alliance's strategic ai is currently set up, a fleet should visit each system around once a day. maybe. I suppose I could have the fleets keep logs of their travels, and leave the game running for a week or so ) wow long post

Currently all events in my game occur in real time. I starting to think that this might be a problem, as building a star destroyer must take a month or so at least. Real time made sense, as 1. you are a fleet commander, and generally speaking will not be making galaxy level strategy decisions. 2. tactical battles should obviously be in real time 3. You can speed up time in hyperspace (because it takes days to get anywhere) However wouldn't battles be cooler if they were recorded as being hours long? Maybe 1 real hour should equal 1 game day.

sorry it has taken me so long to reply. real life keeps getting in the way of my internet time. Due to the nature of the engine, ships have to be part of a fleet, as missions are handled by the fleet, and movement between planets is always a mission. This is necessary because coordinating movement between ships that were not in a fleet would be tedious (due to different hyperspace speeds, different locations, levels of damage or whatever). When a fleet enters hyperspace, it moves at the speed of its slowest member, like in Rebellion. Although shipyards are not currently coded into the game, the process will probably be something like this: 1. The alliance AI builds a certain amount of ships based on its budget and needs. 2. When a ship is complete at the shipyard, it will be created in game and assigned a fleet. 3. the fleet will be given a priority order to visit the shipyard and pickup the ship. Although this will present the tactical problem of having a fleet leave the frontlines just to pick up another ship, it is quite a bit simpler than the alternative which would require a new ai behavior. As far as the "10 ships built at one planet" question goes, I think Kuat Drive Yards would be more than capable of that. The game is structured a bit different from Rebellion. You are not a supreme commander, you are just a fleet commander, or in some cases just a captain. The game takes place sometime around the Thrawn era, and unlike Rebellion where you could have as many shipyards as you want, each alliance will rely on only a couple shipyards. In fact it is doubtful that shipyards will even be buildable. This is probably not a bad thing as the game is currently fully real-time. Maybe I should switch to a 1/24 fast time clock. hmmm thats a good "forum question". I'll make another post

I've never heard of her, but.. Everyone's favorite shag rug turned action hero turned encyclopedia Wookieepedia has! http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Aayla apparently she was a clone wars jedi. She's not in rebellion as far as i know.