Moribundus

Hey, it's not dead, it's alive and well I'm currently working on in-game GUIs and font rendering. I hope to achieve something similar to GUIs seen in Morrowind, HL2 or Quake 4. I have nice XML based skinning with the deafult skin based on Qt4 theme called Skulpture (this skin is intended to be used for various configurations menus, like in half life). Right now I'm trying to get font rendering to work (with unicode support, of course) and to write implement some simple pseudo HTML text formating (imagine game encyclopaedia with hyperlinks and cross-references). I'll post some screenshots when I have something more to show

If you're using DirectX helper classes for loading X files (or if that Dark Basic uses them), it shouldn't matter which format (binary or plain text) you decide to use, both formats are "official". X File Format Reference: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb173014(VS.85).aspx

I consider Republic Commando one of the best SW games I've ever played. It was probably the team "management" and the fast paced action that appealed to me the most and even though the SP campaign could really be longer, I found it quite satisfying (great ending, good levels, pacing, perfect difficulty curve, etc.) And did I mention the awesomeness of it's soundtrack? I've never tried the multiplayer though. But then my tastes are sometimes pretty weird However if you haven't played it yet, you should definitely give it a try.

No no, what I meant was interference of waves (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interference), although I couldn't remember the proper term. If two sound samples (waves) are played in very short sequence, the resulting sound very "distorted" by the interference (try playing two samples within few ms and hear what I mean ). Now that I think of it...perhaps one possible solution might be to use more than one sample of the same sound to add variability to the mix (or noise ) or keep track of each sample and simply skip it's playback if it's already started playing recently (in ms possibly).

Hmm, what about audio? How does it sound it when all the ships fire at once? Doesn't it distort he sound a bit? My guess is it does (and quite a lot)

No limits! No, no no. Or if you want to cap the gameplay somehow, do it so that it can be modified, eg. server can choose max. number of ships, depending on it's CPU power. The possible reason why commercial game have this sort of hardcoded stuff might be quality assurance. It's the easiest way to make sure user doesn't break his game and won't be disapointed. However you aren't developing a commercial game, so you don't have to answer to the market (and management), only to the players (and they say NO to limits ). It actually works a bit differently than you might think (If I understood your post correctly). Common data like textures and vertex data are copied to the graphics card and are referenced during rendering only indirectly. This minimizes memory and bandwidth requirements of your card (and system). Any reasonable 3D engine takes this into account and allows you to "share" hw resources across different models. Unfortunately I'm not familiar with Dark Basic, so I cannot help you there, but know that 1 GB RAM is enough For example my Terra with sample scene consisting of 350 ships (3K triangles each) eats only 1 MB RAM Bigger issue is how many triangles your card can actually draw per frame (in millions per sec ) and how efficient your engine is, but you should be safe, unless you're using fancy visual effects (which you can't with the basic Dark basic) or extremely high-poly models.

If you're more academically biased, I'd suggest checking out research opportunities at your university. Some unis (faculties) allow even undergrads to participate in research projects and give them access to some of the more expensive equipment. This probably won't count as much for your future employer, but it will give you some personal experience (and make the study less dull). Also go for the best quality and try to get as far from your parents as possible. I didn't and I'm slowly going crazy at home. My two cents

I'm no expert on law (especially US law), but I believe there are some flaws in your assertions. Does your project "represent, as a whole, [star Wars: Rebellion]", i.e., does your project create a program that is identical to Star Wars: Rebellion? Full definition of derivative work can be found here: 17 U.S.C. § 101 A “derivative work” is a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a “derivative work”. So this basically means that any remake, sequel, novelisation, etc. is derivative work of the original. Also "to represent" something does not necessarily mean "to be identical" to it, and Cool Hand has been merely granted the rights to pruduce derivative works by Lucasfilm, who still makes the big decisions. Software is an intelectual property as a whole, not only a partially (eg. only code). Besides software may consist of other parts as well - audio and visual art, script, overall design, etc. So copyrights actually apply to the idea of the game. No it can't Patents are related to inventions and software is not one (algorithms are). You cannot patent your program, but you can patent the way it works. So it's no wonder, there's no patent on SW: Rebellion And you cannot assume that something doesn't exist just because you weren't able to find it. Copyrights actually do not have to be registered to be valid (according to Berne Convention). More importantly Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker are both intellectual property of Lucasfilm and using them is an infringement. It's like writing a Harry Potter lexicon. Well, let's sum it up. My guess is that the only ones who can create a Rebellion sequel or remake is Cool Hand and Lucasfilm. The rest of us is just infringing upon GL's intellectual properties Just to make sure we know, where we stand

Grammer you say?

Nice to see you both having progress Pity you want to go the less portable way. If you feel graphics isn't you cup of coffee, you might want to check out Ogre engine or Crystal Space. They might give quite powerful renderer and in the case of Crystal Space even some more stuff (game related functionality). And both are free

I have just "released" a first preview of Terra's engine. It basically shows lots of models with large number of dynamic lights (81K triangles and 64 lights, per-pixel lighting with normal mapping) and demonstrates the capabilities of the scripting framework. Check out Terra's web for more info (and for the demo), the link is in my sig. Screenshots: http://www.fi.muni.cz/~xmoracek/terra/screens/snapshot17-thumb.jpg http://www.fi.muni.cz/~xmoracek/terra/screens/snapshot19-thumb.jpg http://www.fi.muni.cz/~xmoracek/terra/screens/snapshot21-thumb.jpg

This is what I had in mind with Terra from the beginning. Something like galaxy map in Ascendancy. What is taking me so long is not figuring out how to draw this map, but how (much) to generalise it and how much of it expose through scripting interface to the modder.

Uhh, this is pretty disturbing thread... *goes to buy a bug spray*

1) Bat files don't work on systems other than Windows, so I had to run the game manually (java -cp blahblah) 2) Clicking the login button with Standalone mode selected throws a null pointer exception and all subsequent login attempts repeat this behaviour, even if the login mode is changed (in other words every other login attempt fails).

Btw. are you considering utilizing some scripting in your game? It is quite common these days for moddable games. Since you are using Java, I believe you might find Jython interesting.

No password is required for checkout. It is probably asking for your sourceforge.net username/password, but it really shouldn't (only commits are password protected). I assume TortoiseSVN I asking for it. Have you tried ignoring it or giving it an empty name/pass? I have tweaked the CSS a bit to make the sections more distinctive (in case you missed something ) and updated the build guide. Btw. major part of the renderer is finished, I'll try to hunt down as many bugs as possible and then make a smal demo

First, what if I don't have a C drive at all (runing Linux as my primary OS)? Did you consider using relative paths instead of absolute ones? Eg. "soundfiles/sound clips/001.wav". Also why don't you put them into another CSV file, so that your project is completely data driven (let's say NO to hardcoded limits ) Second, the way you treat resources (creating object when you need it and then releasing it when it goes out of scope) is unsuitable for a resource-heavy application like computer game (profiler will confirm it ) It is better to pre-load all required resources at the start of the program (or specific section like tactical simulator) and then just reuse them. This was probably slowing you down, when you were using CSV files. I also noticed that you're storing whole lines from the CSV file in memory and parse them each time character's name/skill/etc. is requested, which is also a bit ineffective. If you extracted those data when loading the file for the first time and then store it in some more machine readable structure (special class), it woud be faster. And make sure you don't abuse Swing too much, it's not exactly fast GUI library (quite on the contrary ) Hmm, another option worth exploring (if you really don't want to use CSV) might be to use database to store you resources in (perhaps SQLite, nothing big). And finally, have you considered putitng you code to some publicly available SVN (or GIT) repository? Well this was my criticism, hope it helps. And happy revamping

It's because Win32API doesn't support anything better . It seems that creators of Rebellion were quite an adventurous sort and decided to use WinAPI to it's "full" potential, probably to save them some work (resource loading and management for free). However had they decided to use some in-house tools for this task, modding woud have been probably even more difficult. Btw. jpegs aren't much better since you always lose image information due to the compression.

There are other things that make a game aside from graphics. Take networking for example, it is the next most important thing to be done (it makes game testing and balancing possible without having to write AI routines). Or an audio module. I have some ideas for both, but unfortunately I don't have the time to flesh them out (graphics come first). So if graphics programming isn't your cup of coffee, you can look at one of these instead (I was thinking about using boost::asio for networking and OpenAL for sound) Hmm, that reminds me that I should probably write some roadmap and post it somewhere on the web

Me being the coder I am... I cannot help but offer a solution. Please forgive me, this is a bad habit Each ship has a speed attached to it as a variable. To decide how long a fleet will take, upon moving the fleet, you run an loop that checks the speed variable of each ship and finds the slowest speed. Then the speed of the fleet is set to that speed. And organization? You can't put them inside of an array? o.o I'm sorry but Nordwind has stopped working on his SW project some time ago (AFAIK he now works on WW2 RTS/RPG). As far as Terra is concerned, I'm still working on the renderer (how to combine deferred renderer with undeferred bits and picture-in-picture effect) and things like fleet management will have to wait for now And did I mention that Terra got website revamped (in case someone missed the edit to my last post)?

Hey, thanks Hmm, did you check sourceforge.net project page? If you click on the "Project" link on the main page, it will take you to sourceforge page, where you can access all the source code (Code->SVN Browse) and the right part of that page contains technical details (operating systems, languages, etc.) A brief overview: Terra's core (Reconstructor engine) is written entirely in C++ and contains embedded Lua interpreter, which will be used nearly for all game logic. Given the nature of both languages, Terra is IDE independent (I'm currently coding in KDevelop and Visual Studio 2008 Professional). Also CMake is used to manage and generate both unix makefiles and VS solutions. More detailed info on building Terra is on forums in the Technical problems section. But it still needs to be more visible if no one was able to found it so far I will see what I can do. Edit: Terra's website just got a revamped! I also created a "how to help" info block on the main page. Let me know if it's still missing something.

AFAIK there is no useable DirectX wrapper in Java (besides what's the point of binding Java to one specific platform). Also Java doesn't actually have anything other mainstream languages lack. besides most of the game development librares available in Java are just wrappers over their C++ couterparts.

I do not lack faith, I'm merely saddened that instead of working on one big community project together, everyone's trying to make their own dream game. I created my project in the hopes that more people will join, but I wasn't so lucky (I admit my PR skills are also to blame). I can't be wowed so easily The main flaw in your method is in using the "while(onMission)" construct, which would effectively block the whole game until the mission is completed. Using some kind of event scheduling is more desirable, although more complicated (just a detail ). Also you mustn't forget about network synchronisation and cheating prevention...and when you're done with that you'll probably realize that your dipomacy method is a considerable mess However don't let me turn you down, if you have the right skills ad determination, you can make it. And open source is a good way to go

Hmm, that's the fourth Rebellion 2 project so far Wouldn't it be better to team up with someone, eg. Slocket if you don't want to change the game core (or me, if you're more ambitious )? Well if you really want to work solo, I wish you the best of luck (and lots of patience and determination).

I'm afraid there's no such thing. Both "games" are hardcoded in the REBEXE.EXE file, hence both are probably communicating directly within their own hardcoded limits