nordwindranger

excellent stuff Def. a sight better than most of the SW books for that matter

hmm this topic has been inexplicably successful. I think its been on the front page for 4 days or so now! I always let the droid handle most of the economy, and I will just reassign manufacturing when needed. The droid is horribly inefficient at handling troop manangement. It tends to build the coolest and most expensive units, and I usually end up with systems full of (cost ineffective) war droids, even when they are in the middle of no where. My solution is to hold off on troop research until most of my part of the galaxy is very strongly defended. If you don't do any troop research, the computer usually builds all stormies, which are (in my opinion) an excellent buy for your money (not to mention their creepy 6,6,6 stats! ).

You can make 5 types for one faction and 3 for the other, you just can't increase the total count of fighter types in the game. As far as historical accuracy goes, I usually give the Tie Defenders the ion cannons that they are supposed to have, although you might want to remove the ships all together and replace them with z-95's other note: I always make nebulon B frigates available to both sides, because they were originally built by the Empire. and welcome to the forums

I've always been a fan of Thrawn.. He's one of the few Grand Admirals who seemed like they really deserved the title

thats what I originally planned on doing, however as I was fleshing out the fleet coding it became practical to have fleets handle hyperspace travel and the transitions to and from hyperspace. the break down of responsibilities is as follows: alliance: handles economy (not yet coded), assigns missions to fleets and creates galaxy-strategy, creates fleets fleet: travels to and from the location of each mission it is assigned, decides when a mission is finished, assigns targets to each member of the fleet for space combat. It is necessary for the fleet to handle target designation so that every ship in the fleet doesnt attack the same ship at once. ship: handles sublight movement. chases and fires at enemy as necessary. launches shuttles (not yet coded), handles military behavior like scanning for smugglers (not yet coded). The interesting thing about the game engine is that the alliance AI creates the fleets. Therefore it seems unlikely that fleets with only one individual will even exist, as they would be reinforced by the AI

sounds pretty cool

I've been spending a lot of time lately writing code to implement "fleets" into my project. Previously each alliance just had a general list of ships that were in the alliance, and each ship was pretty much independent. Now ships are organized into groups that move and fight together (==fleets). The problem: As fleets get more and more woven into the framework of the game, I'm starting to realize that it will be more trouble than its worth to also allow ships to act as individuals (ie: not be part of a fleet). I could make a one ship fleet, but as this still counts as a fleet, it would screw with the overall balance of fleets in the alliance (explanation: alliances maintain a preset percentage of "attack", "defence" and "patrol" fleets. for instance the empire might have 50% attack, 40% defence, and 10% patrol out of its total number of fleets) I'm guessing that most of you guys prefer to move your ships around in fleets anyways, so this is probably a non-issue. seeing as how i don't exactly have a question, i guess you can call this an update.

hmm yes there does seem to be a bit of an underground linux community. I just downloaded an open source version of Worms (the team combat game). It was horrible, but thats besides the point

I love Rome Total War! but i must admit that i always ended up auto-deciding the battles because i was pretty bad at it! the city management by itself was pretty fun. the only thing i couldn't stand was how all of my "allies" always betrayed me. there was no such thing as loyalty in that game.

hmm perhaps we should start a new topic.. I vote c# and managed direct x. C# is a very easy language to learn, and the syntax is similar enough to visual basic and the other .net languages that it should be easy to convert to. Direct X is an industry standard, and there is an absolutely insane amount of documentation for it. XNA would probably be the way to go, although I must admit that I haven't played around with it myself. XNA isn't necessary, it might make things easier however. as far as using a .net language like c#, speed is not a problem! heres a video of some of my latest work http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2702795200532525433 that runs at an average of 170 frames per second. I believe that 30 fps is considered to be the standard acceptable frame rate, so for what were doing, we won't have any problems. as far as a development environment goes.. I'm using visual studio express edition, its free and it works great. just my 2 cents

lol @ not being able to get the model importer working. the last time i tangled with that beast was when i decided it would be easier to make my own game. heh (although i'll admit i didnt really spend a lot of time fooling around with the importer)

hmm noghri eh? cool. I like the (empires throne room?) scene. The new menu's look really good. As far as the blue goes, I'm happy that the sight got lightened up a bit.

Im super pumped for this so.. does a MC80b beat a Star Destroyer mark 1, or the other way around?

sorry it took me so long to reply, Ive been distracted by college, a new girlfriend, and getting plastered out of my skull at the bar. hmmm am I making Rebellion 2? Maybe? I guess the best I can say is that my game is a Rebellion inspired tactical space combat game. My original idea was to make it at the individual ship level. In other words you are the captain of a ship, instead of being a galaxy level controller like in Rebellion. I am planning on releasing a public beta eventually, but I've got massive amounts of work to do yet. As I'm writing the game engine from scratch, I've got a lot of work to do before it even closely resembles a game. If you've got some time to waste, I would like to direct you to my website, its got some pictures and the video I posted here, as well as some text explaining the idea behind the game http://nordwindranger.com/midoe.aspx

thats a pretty good way of going about it, but its quite a bit more complicated than Im ready to try right now. as far as progress goes.... I completely rewrote the entire engine over winter break, and in doing so I incorporated an updated firing mechanism. Both ion cannons and turbolasers are now implemented. ioncannons do more damage to shields and turbolasers do more damage to the hull. shields recharge slowly, but recharge is stopped once the hull is brought down to 20% of its original hit points. The hull can only be damaged when the shield is at 0. in a test that I just ran: an ISD mark I took aproximately 2 minutes to destroy a MC80 In the process of which, the ISD fired 342 turbolaser shots and 342 ion cannon shots. the MC80 fired 282 turbolaser shots, and 120 ion cannon shots before being completely disabled. Ships are capable of targeting multiple targets (although this will obviously dilute the amount of fire that they are able to pour on each)

hmm seems like a pretty clever idea to me. perhaps I will incorporate it into my game

Interesting stuff gents, always nice to see people trying some new ideas. physically combining two games would be hard, and rather impractical (the loading times would be horrendous)

If I ever release this thing, it would be really cool to include models like your's Krytos. I'm going to keep using mine for the moment, just because they have extremely low polygon counts (they're pretty crappy models). I'm not really sure what kind of frame rates I would get if I used quality models, but as I'm currently rewriting the whole engine, this kind of testing isn't necessary for awhile. My engine uses models in the .x (direct x) format. If I release a beta, it would be a simple matter of deleting my .x files and replacing them with similarily named .x models of your own to add the models to the game. There aren't any special steps needed (unlike rebellion).

sorry about the wait on the reply guys, Im staying with my parents for the whole 3 week break, and they don't have the internet, so i have to go to the library. anyways thanks for the comments. The models usually take about 3-4 hours to make. Interestingly enough, the moncal was the easiest one to make, as it didn't really require crafting anyshapes. All I really had to do was warp and elongate some tubes, fuse them together and find a texture for it. I plan on redoing the star destroyer, but ive recently decided to rewrite the engine from the ground up, so ive got a bit of work to do. Expect a big update in about three weeks when i get back to green bay (and high speed internet!)

I made a nice little movie showing my progress thus far. enjoy http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1311881105491800280

thanks taco, glad you liked it! I'm gonna make a longer one, and give it its own post so that it makes the forum summary on the front page of the website (apparently only new topics get on there?)

alright I just threw together a little video of what firing looks like at the moment. unfortunately its rather low resolution.. for a clearer picture i reccomend watching it at the origional size http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7516872604068091966 oh yeah, hit testing was turned off for the video (in case you were wondering why the shots pass right through ships)

Currently ships are organized into fleets. Each fleet has a designated leader that the rest of the ships will (theoretically) position themselves around. Although ships do tend to move towards ships they are attacking, when they are done attacking a target, they are supposed to move back into position with their fleet. I've decided to change weapon reload times so that each laser has an individual reload time. I have the feeling that this will vastly change around the whole problem, if not completely eliminate it all together. this will mean that each laser will start recharging after it fires, not after every laser fires. In other words, a ship like the executor would have a virtually undistrupted stream of fire, because it has so many lasers that there will always be some recharged ones to fire. I'll have to work on this over break, and then maybe get a video up. that would be pretty cool.

I forgot to mention that I use visual studio express (for c#). the best thing is its free!! you can download it from microsoft. You will also need the direct x sdk (software development kit) which you can get free from microsoft as well the book that got me started was tom millers "beginning 3d game programming", however this book is now rather out of date, and the code requires changes to even get it to run. you might want to give this book a try: http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Game-Programming-Direct-9-0c/dp/1598220160/sr=8-3/qid=1166716571/ref=sr_1_3/104-0280694-8916751?ie=UTF8&s=books Im planning on getting it myself. I bought microsofts step by step guide to c#, and it was just about all i needed to get going in the language.

I plunked down 300 dollars for caligari's gamespace a couple years ago. there brilliant idea was to replace easy to read text menus with little buttons. its frickin horrible, because i can never remember what little button does what (cries and wishes he spent 300 dollars on a better program or a hooker! hehe j/k)