Quote

kberg wrote:
**Oh, you guys as plug developers... How would you like it if the game read in "compiled" plug-ins... That is, when you destribute your plug-in it's a binary file that people wouldn't be able to rip to pieces in order to see what's inside. This would allow those that want too, to keep their plug-in strategies secret, and if you want to release everything to the public then
you could just distribute the uncompiled sources to your plug with it... The reason I ask is, it's actually faster and smaller to store then dta in binary rather then in ascii form, and if it's not in Resource forks your plug will seem like random hex to someone who tries to edit it... This would discourage cheeting, and allow plug developers some protection for their intellectual properties... The downside is that it will be pretty hard for people to release plugs that "Patch" existing objects. Just something to chew on I guess...

**

Do you mean that a compiler would compile plugins in a format such as they are now? Also, I think you might want to add support for both types (compiled and not), but if that's too difficult, then only uncompiled.

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We come in peace, shoot to kill, shoot to kill, shoot to kill...

What if, not only could you be the pilot of the ship, but also work under other pilots. You could be part of the crew. Maybe it would work out in the following manner: I buy my new ship (a freighter of some sort) which allows me to have a crew unstead of a one man ship. I look through some planetary databases of people on things available. After possibly deciding on hiring a robot to control my weapons side of things, I come across a human (over the internet) who agrees to board with me. I go we go off into space and a propmtly go to a menu and transfer controls of the weaponry over to my new crew member. After several battles, he accumulates awards or credits to the point where he buys his own ship.

Of course, this would open up for another part of the game. The idea that someone could actually exist in the game without a space ship (of course, space combat has probably allways be the center of most of EV but...). I stay on a planet and sell parts or become manager of the planet (watching other ships come by, granting access to land and such), or also be able to just stay on the planet handing out missions as I please. You might end up meeting an admiral (bot) that once served on your ship as an ensign. This of course would allow for personal favors with them and such. That would probably also open up the possibility of being pulled into on faction or another as your freind (bot) goes off to war and asks you to join him. I think my mind is running away with me, but it's an idea.

kberg : Please keep the plug-in code binary. Whatever's fastest the better. Of course, it would be nice if you could make the plugs with resouces like today and then translate the file into binary somehow. Kind of like making a program that takes your simple thoughts and puts it into hard code. Just a thought.

-Zeta

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Manager: Someone who makes nonsense sound reasonable.

The only programming experience i have with programming is with RealBasic and
VisualBasic(on PC). But i have some ideas that might help.
1. to solve the problem for people chatting with other the main screen would be
divided into three. this would make it so that all resolutions on all player computers be the
same( 800600 would probably be the best or 640480). it would be like this :

| (1) |
||
||
| | |
| (2) | (3) |
| | |
| ||
|_______________|
(1)-bottom : this is where the player would type what he wanted to say.
(1)-top : this is where the messages the the player and others sayed(like a chat room)
but only the only time messages are recorded on the top chat screen is when
the messages was said within the view of the current player(these should be shown in
little cartoon like bubbles or something) or messages
transmitted by a ship that uses a special outfit for transmitting to the whole
galaxy(this device should be made very hard to get and would mostly be used for
people trying to sell something like a rare outfit or ship). but u would have to put in
an option to that would allow a player to ignore all long range transmitions(for people
that aren't looking for something special or don't have any money to buy anything
special).
(2) : the main screen. same is the single EV/EVO.
(3): same as single EV/EVO.

2. ii'm sure there are alot of people who will agree that EV/EVO's interface isn't great.

1. it would be better to enable the mouse for targeting and maybe moving(like waypoints).
   Since it's going to be a big multiplayer game i don't think anybodys going to want to cycle
   through 60~120 targetable ships to get the target that they want. this would make it difficult
   since when you're playing EV/EVO U usually have one hand for navigating and one for combat
   map, hyperspace, etc... but still, making targeting a little more like Ares would be alot easier
   ( or you could just make it an option)
2. for selecting the secondary outfit you want to use the user should be able to assign hot
   keys.

i had some more ideas but i can't remember them right now.....
what do you think??

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I like some of the ideas, especially the hot keys for secondary weapons... Maybe I'll assign function keys to them or something, I'll have to play around with it...

On a side note, I've got parallax scrolling implemented
It sure adds a lot of depth to the game. (well, not much of a game yet, no weapons ) I should have a lot more time to work on this soon .Finals start in a week, and I just finished handing in 80 pages of code for my data structures class yesterday! Right now I'm experimenting with variable brightness stars, seeing how it looks....

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I've got a very unstable conceptual build of the engine posted to my site (www.sfu.ca/~kberg) Please don't re-distribute this... I don't want any trouble over it, because I haven't added any sprite layer yet. This seems to cause spriteworld to choke sometimes causing system freezes, etc.

I've got finals starting next week, but now that people can see I've actually got code, maybe I can gather SOME support ...

Anyways, you guys like the star field??? Oh!, try and run this in 832x624... I forgot to add resolution independance (as in the velocity vector will draw centered only in 832x624).. I'll try and fix this by tonight.

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All i know is a bit of pascal, delphi and basic (very small amount of C) but any game play, missions, and any of that s***. Main problem, can't do anything in mac code (like resources). Anything else, fine

Give us a week and i'll learn C++

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"Where the F*** have the bunnies gone?"
- Unknown

(snicker)

Hey um, kberg... any ideas when this will be finished?

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tear it down

It seems like a large project to take on as your first game, but I wish you much luck. I'm impressed with what you have so far. I offer any manual, untrained help you need, but I don't have any clue how to program. I can write, and do busy work. But I can't think how else I might be able to help.

By the way, I think the openness with which you've approached this project is excellent. Asking for comments from the boards is a good idea, I'm just not sure if many people here have the knowledge to help you, or the generosity to give their time. If people will give you help, this game has a much higher probability of getting finished than if you kept it close to your chest. It would be nice to see this become a community effort.

good luck,

Bubbles

Quote

Soviet mikee wrote:
**(snicker)

Hey um, kberg... any ideas when this will be finished?

**

Hmmmm.....

Anyways, for those of you who are offering help, many of the components don't require a lot of programming expertise. Writting out the hundreds of accessors for things like missions, pers, outfits, etc...

I've done games before (on the mac, but in pascal) just nothing to this scale. I'm working on the sprite engine right now, and am fixing up the input routines, so I should have an update relatively soon.

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I am currently learning C++ (AP CompSci, actually ;), so I can probably help with anything that doesn't require very much expertise. Besides, I'll see if I can get my myriad of mac programmer-friends interested in this... you might have some help coming up, kberg.

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Analysis, Mr. Spock?

AIM: obormot345

Posted build 2, same place: downloads link here (url="http://"http://www.sfu.ca/~kberg")www.sfu.ca/~kberg(/url)

Rewrote the input code for this, no more autokey... Really fast now too. Fixed a really stupid afterburner bug. Also included a secondary build with the VBL syncing turned off to let some of you see how many FPS are really possible. Fixed resolution dependancy, velocity vector is now drawn centered at any resolution. Oh yah, I think I up'd the total number of stars to 500 or so.

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How about this. Start with the Sprite stuff. Have the 'maps' be just randomly generated systems that call from a small group of planets. System name randomly generated?

Then, work on ships, ect. Each person starts with, say, 2 mill and a default ship. They have 10 minutes to upgrade, if they get done before then, they can fly around.

Once both people are done, they fight. THe networking, for now, could just be IP to IP, then maybe add gameranger support.

Once you have that, I'll warship you. UNtill then, keep it up.

~S~

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Small animal kamikaze attack on power supplies

Could I have an order of Discboard with that?

For some programming help try going to this newsgroup
microsoft.public.vc.language.macintosh
(sorry but its on a microsoft server)

How long have you gotten the build 2 to work before
crashing. I almost always crash after 3 seconds of flight and
almost immediatly after using the afterburner or side thrusts

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Hrm, well, I sorta-know Mac C (I read the universal headers and looked at some examples =).

As for networking, try NetSprocket, simple, fast, easy to use.

As an idea, look at the GameSprokets, they're quite good, InputSprocket allows you to use any control device in your game smoothly easily, SoundSprocket produces 3D sound and DrawSprocket has some cool effects, but it isnt that good.

As another idea, look at spriteworld (http://www.spriteworld.org/) to handle sprite animation. This is as recomended by Matt Burch himself! Also, I am using it to write my own game, it's quite easy to use.

As for what compiler to use, MPW is free and fast, but CodeWarrior has the users. I prefer MPW but that's just my preference, and also MrC and MrCpp produce the fastest executing code on the mac. =P

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--blackhole

(url="http://"http://www.damnsw.net/~triplet/links/")EV/O Links Directory(/url)

(url="http://"mailto:blackhole@mac.com")mailto:blackhole@mac.com(/url)blackhole@mac.com

What about creating the background (stars, etc) as on GIGANTIC scrolling graphic? It would allow the game to expand by replacing the background with an Earth-like terrain, and play on the ground. It's just a thought that might expand the universe, but I am coming up with this at 6 AM, so if you don't want to implement it, don't.

Also, what about mass purchasing ammo, when that is in the game. I have been working on plugs recently that had every weapon running off of some sort of ammo. Blaze cannons need blaze ammo, etc. It adds new strategy, but its a pain in the a$$ to buy lots of shots (even 10 at a time). Just think about it.

Then you should by them 50 at a time.......sorry, little off topic----I tried out your build as well-very cool, shows much potential. Really enjoy that parallaxing effect. Another question off topic, in your opinions, what's the best way to learn the mac toolbox. I know basic C/C++, but I learned on PC's (damn school labs). I've taken a look at a few of the free online sources, but they're usually beyond my grasp; i feel like i'm just cutting and pasting, not coding on my own. And also what's MPW? I know of Codewarrior, but haven't heard of that one. Thanks y'all.

Heh, well I learned c++ under winNT at first, then started playing around with gcc and Solaris, and yup, what they say is true... Learning the 4000+ or so mac API's is much worse then learning plain Ansi c/c++ by itself. :frown:

I used MPW for about a week. It's a free download from apple, it has a c/c++ compiler, plus support for a bunch of other stuff. It's pretty cool, but when I found that apple's own example source wouldn't compile under it, I quickly moved to Codewarrior.

I'm actually using SpriteWorld right now. I'm not sure whether I'll keep it around or not. I'm definately going to use either NetSprocket or OpenPlay though. Input sprocket is a pain in the butt, I think, and SoundSprocket... hmmm, well I'm definately going to wait on that one. It seems to carry a lot of overhead.

Soooo, mburch has used SpriteWorld I wonder if he'd be interested in helping out... I've sort of given up trying to figure out what was wrong with my code, since it's actually the SpriteWorld code that crashes. I've got a feeling that I've not accounted for all the cases involving arc trig functions, I've just not had time to go over all my algorithms yet. (One week till finals are finished!!!!!)

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Quote

kberg wrote:
**
I used MPW for about a week. It's a free download from apple, it has a c/c++ compiler, plus support for a bunch of other stuff. It's pretty cool, but when I found that apple's own example source wouldn't compile under it, I quickly moved to Codewarrior.
**

blah, Apple's examples do compile under MPW, you just have to know how (couple of sec's in commando then debug from the MrC + PPCLink errors )

Anyway, my game is going to use spriteworld for the animation etc, DrawSprocket for some cool effects, SoundSprocket for the sounds (well, duh =P), InputSprocket for control, and it is quite easy, and NetSprocket for the net games when I implement them. It's also going to have plugins, I just have to read the bit in the MPW manual on how to load external code resources

First though I have to get it working, and I am about to get started on the spriteworld coding, kinda good for one day's work huh?

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--blackhole

(url="http://"http://www.damnsw.net/~triplet/links/")EV/O Links Directory(/url)

(url="http://"mailto:blackhole@mac.com")mailto:blackhole@mac.com(/url)blackhole@mac.com

Heh, sounds like there IS someone else out there... Soo, U interested in doing an EVMP?

Sorry about my MPW bashing, sounds like it's your primary compiler. I didn't have time to fool around with it, since I had a HUGE data structures assignment due pretty quick. All my built-up libraries wouldn't compile without some massive rewritting, and I didn't want to have to fool around with commando at the same time as learning the mac toolbox.

Since it sounds like you're familiar with SpriteWorld and Apples DSp you'd be perfect to work with. Just let me know if you want to help out and I'll email you the source.

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Quote

kberg wrote:
**Heh, sounds like there IS someone else out there...:) Soo, U interested in doing an EVMP?

Sorry about my MPW bashing, sounds like it's your primary compiler. I didn't have time to fool around with it, since I had a HUGE data structures assignment due pretty quick. All my built-up libraries wouldn't compile without some massive rewritting, and I didn't want to have to fool around with commando at the same time as learning the mac toolbox.

Since it sounds like you're familiar with SpriteWorld and Apples DSp you'd be perfect to work with. Just let me know if you want to help out and I'll email you the source.
**

heh, I'll help if you like, send the source to the address email in my profile. I dont really know that much, but I do know bits about the game sprokets, and quit a bit about spriteworld.

If I contribute code, it will be in C, as I dont know C++ and I'm not going to learn very soon. I was working on my own program, but I only jsut started and I havent actually got any functionality yet, so it's safe to leave for a while

I look forward to hearing from you.

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--blackhole

(url="http://"http://www.damnsw.net/~triplet/links/")EV/O Links Directory(/url)

(url="http://"mailto:blackhole@mac.com")mailto:blackhole@mac.com(/url)blackhole@mac.com