Some ideas for the governments:

A highly bureaucratic government that is centered heavily on its homeworld, with all its "colonial territories" producing resources just for that homeworld. Think Trantor and the Galactic Empire from The Foundation. Internal strife is extremely high, barring other factors.

A Federalist empire where power is spread equally among all the planets, and no one planet has more power than the other. There is no "central" homeworld, as with Earth for the Federation or Aurora for the Aurorans in EVN, and as a side effect they rely heavily on trade to get what they want. (This also means there's no world where you can get all the outfits from the entire empire; you have to travel to get what you want.) Each planet has a representative, and they assembly at one of the planets on a regular basis. Depending on the nature of the representatives, the government could range from corrupt and slow reacting, to hamstrung by argument among planets, or to angelic and near-problemless due to the spotlessness of the representatives.

A warrior society where military tradition is ingrained into every aspect of a citizens' lifestyle. Everybody who can pilot a fighter, captain a battleship or shoot a rifle does, and will, fight. Their level of organization is nearly flawless, and they know better than to fight among themselves. Think about Rome on a galactic scale. Not to be confused with Aurora; they might tattoo themselves, for example, but to do so only shows their rank and/or affiliation with the military. They're relatively clean shaven and well dressed, but they have decades or even centuries of military experience under their belts, so watch out.

A small, scientifically based government who has brilliant leaders and whose every action is to advance science in any way possible. The technology they develop is used to make weapons, outfits, ships, you name it, and can show up in virtually every aspect of their society. They may not be the Jetsons, but they're pretty close. Their past is what forced them to become so ingenuous, whatever it was, and they use their technology as a bargaining device to keep other civilization from taking them over. Think the psycho historians from The Foundation.

A loose confederation of planets that argue among themselves and can never agree on anything, except on when it's time to band together and confront an invader. They cover a lot of space, and could even be "geographically" isolated from other parts of the confederation. This would make wars between this government and others interesting, since they make tempting targets when they are separate, but are a brutal force to be reckoned with when the ball's up.

Just a few things to get you started. I'll post that all into the drop box here in a second...

This post has been edited by JacaByte : 20 October 2008 - 10:37 PM

If we do the scientific storyline there, then I'll probably just make the equipment for that.

i like them all, and its even possible to combine some of the ideas,
*say, the federalist gov with deep rooted military tradition

Okay, an update from house cleaning; GSN, the file "random sounds," which I assume you uploaded because it's in your progress log, have a file size of 0 KB. Whoever uploaded "Points of Orgin Ships," I'm getting "file cannot be displayed" errors when I try to look at them. Any thoughts?

Are you sure you've got the most recent files? A lot of them were put up without extensions. I fixed that, and they all work fine for me. Are you sure you're trying to open them in Preview or some other appropriate image editor?

I think he means the file "Point of Origin Ships". Both that and Random Sounds are zero kilobyte files. Odds are, GSN uploaded them as uncompressed Mac-format plug-ins, which caused them to loose their resource forks and become unusable when uploaded. Hence why I've I uploaded the Seed as a .rez, which is immune to such issues.

Also, cleaned up a bit by giving the logs their own folder. I'm also going to add onto Jaca's Faction Concepts file here in a moment. Might be a bit before changes become visible, my campus network is refusing to stay connected at the moment.

Oh, I thought he meant the bunches of graphics. Those should be fine. I've added another weapon, which is nearly complete. The Phoenix Missile. All it needs is a rack graphic. I'll get that done tomorrow. I'm happy with how the graphics are turning out for this. I should do some ships at some point.

@joshtigerheart, on Oct 20 2008, 09:35 PM, said in Open Source TC:

I think he means the file "Point of Origin Ships". Both that and Random Sounds are zero kilobyte files. Odds are, GSN uploaded them as uncompressed Mac-format plug-ins, which caused them to loose their resource forks and become unusable when uploaded. Hence why I've I uploaded the Seed as a .rez, which is immune to such issues.

Ah. Whoopsies. Time to break out Plug-in Archiver. Is .rez going to be the upload standard?

This post has been edited by gray_shirt_ninja : 21 October 2008 - 12:11 AM

re: planning and organising an open source TC

i keep thinking of mind mapping as the best way to organise a project like this. especially since the 'universe' and missions within, can be plotted in a way similar to the in-game map. tweaking the mission start/middle/end points, ship locations, resources, etc would be very easy this way.

here's a free one, though i haven't used it yet:
http://freemind.sour...x.php/Main_Page

obligatory wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_map

@0101181920, on Oct 20 2008, 10:01 PM, said in Open Source TC:

Are you sure you've got the most recent files? A lot of them were put up without extensions. I fixed that, and they all work fine for me. Are you sure you're trying to open them in Preview or some other appropriate image editor?

I have to view and upload files on the dropbox via a web browser because I've already got my own dropbox and switching between them would be very difficult. I am currently boycotting dropbox to make it possible to use multiple accounts from one computer, however.

Edit: @JTH: Let's not decide what size our governments are going to be right now. Once we figure out the who, then we can work on the where based on the traits of the governments. (A militarily focused gov will be larger than a scientifically focused one, for example) We shouldn't use Nova as a meter stick to base the sizes of our civilizations on; we should find the numbers that work right for us. For example, in Nova I felt that boundaries were very sharp, especially between the Federation and Aurora, while we might want to dump the player into a galaxy where boundaries thin out and there's a "no man's zone" of independent planets between some of the civilizations, or where government influence isn't as great and there are less government ships flying around.

This post has been edited by JacaByte : 21 October 2008 - 05:05 PM

Eh, I'm not determining how many systems it should have and whatnot, the comparisons are just to give a rough idea of how large they'd be proportionally. For example, if the average size for the main nations were ten systems, then one I marked as "equivalent to the Feds" would probably be about that size. Tweaks can always be made, however.

On a partly unrelated note, warrior society =/= high population and scientific society =/= low population. There's some general trends, but it's not a perfect correlation. For example, Sparta was actually smaller than its neighbors, like Thebes, who had better technology than its neighbors.

@jacabyte, on Oct 20 2008, 06:56 PM, said in Open Source TC:

A Federalist empire where power is spread equally among all the planets, and no one planet has more power than the other. There is no "central" homeworld, as with Earth for the Federation or Aurora for the Aurorans in EVN, and as a side effect they rely heavily on trade to get what they want. (This also means there's no world where you can get all the outfits from the entire empire; you have to travel to get what you want.) Each planet has a representative, and they assembly at one of the planets on a regular basis. Depending on the nature of the representatives, the government could range from corrupt and slow reacting, to hamstrung by argument among planets, or to angelic and near-problemless due to the spotlessness of the representatives.

Doesn't that describe what one calls, a "Confederacy"?

So far, this open source TC seems to come along pretty well, but you have to remember that it's important to build a TC from the ground up. Creating a universe, a stellar civilization also needs a historic background, not to mention what factions and governments in the past existed or no longer exists and how they interacted with one another that has come to make the universe as it is today, and how it may potentially affect them (in other words, an open to start off a major string or substrings).

Just my 2˘ here.

@coraxus, on Oct 22 2008, 12:15 PM, said in Open Source TC:

Doesn't that describe what one calls, a "Confederacy"?

Yup. That's what I'd call it.

I posted a third TC idea at the drop box. A shorter read, as I've only been sitting on it for a short time. The quick story is that you play as an AI or hacker, with the 'universe' being a network of servers. Doesn't have a plot right now, but realistically could be set in time only a few years from now. Think Uplink done as a plug-in for EVN.

Werhner

Nope, it's not a confederacy; in a confederacy, nations or states assemble themselves into an allegiance for one purpose or another, but usually its to ward off an invader. In the federation I described, the planets are all part of one and the same government state, and send representatives to the assemblies to make decisions that effect the affairs of all the planets; the planets cannot act on their own accord, as they could in a confederacy. They have to have the permission of the assembly in order to make any action that would effect all the planets, such as preemptively declaring war on another government.

I just put together a spreadsheet function to make system plotting look more natural. Input system's XY coordinates, a standard deviation for each, and get out randomly moved coordinates.
Thanks to Wikipediia for showing me how to create randomly distributed values from linearly distributed ones: I'm not sure exactly how this works, but I've done tests on large data sets.

E2
=ROUND(SQRT(-2*LN(RAND()))*COS(2*PI()*RAND())*C2+A2)

where A2 is the initial X coordinate and C2 is the standard deviation in the X direction; drag over for Y.
Note: the above formula is in OpenOffice format, some minor conversion may be necessary for use with Microsoft Excel.

I'd like to remind everyone that today is the last day for submitting general scenario concepts. Ideas for stories and what not are still open and likely will be for quite awhile, but the core concepts (or big picture if you prefer) will soon be decided so we can start getting to work.

I support the idea that we have three factions stemming from Earth colonization attempts fighting with each other, as per the Strand Wars from EVO.

In the way of new scenario ideas, we could have space separated into areas by phenomena that haven't been discovered yet, so we could have natural barriers between factions, the way we have oceans between modern day countries.

This post has been edited by JacaByte : 24 October 2008 - 07:00 PM

Hmmm, somewhat random idea. If we were to go with the three-way war and they're all human groups, I think it'd be neat if Earth itself was one of the things they were fighting over.

We could have a situation where Earth had been lost to star charts and explorers, due to the fact that our sun isn't a very bright star and/or other problems (I.E. there was something on Earth that we became afraid of) and its not included in any of the governments. Could make an interesting storyline, searching for Earth...

Oh, great, not Palestine again...
This does give me an idea that affects my earlier suggestion:
If we assume a separation between the history of the galaxy and that of the player, where better to start the player than on Earth? There are a couple of parameters that might be; choose one from each group: (I have marked my preferences with asterisks)
Group A:
1. *The first exodus away from Earth occurred far in the past, and in the near-future comes the story.
2. The first exodus occurs in the near-future, and the story occurs in the far-future.
Group B:
1. Technology on Earth becomes sufficiently advanced that the player leaves under his own control.
2. *Somebody rediscovers Earth and player somehow gets a hold on that to leave Earth (possible subsplit: how? Stealing, imprisonment, gift...)
3. Some long-lost technology from the time of the first exodus is rediscovered, and that allows the player to leave Earth.
Group
1. The player leaves Earth as an independent explorer (realistically, unlikely)
2. The player leaves Earth on an official exploration mission of some Earth government.
3. *The player leaves Earth as a representative of some other group (that has philosophical differences with the current rulers of the planet)
Group affected by Group B
1. Earth is rediscovered briefly at the start of the game and then lost again for a while
2. *Earth is rediscovered by one group (taken over?) but the others (including the one the player joins? or that could be a choice, join the conquerors or flee...) have no knowledge
3. Earth is rediscovered at the beginning of the game and kept discovered throughout (boring story? it would just be constant fighting)
4. Earth is not rediscovered, and only the player holds direct knowledge of it

Edit: oh, and a note about myself: I have ideas, for this stage, and if I have a plan to follow I can work with efficiency*, but I am somewhat lacking in conventional creativity, i.e. the ability to create something out of nothing, as I see it. I'm glad I'm not in charge of this project.

• I will be slowed, but still efficient, when encountering any "undocumented features" with which I'm not familiar; this is where the "nonconventional" part comes in usefully (and yes, I know that the word is unconventional, but linguistically "non-" is more appropriate to my intended meaning than "un-")

This post has been edited by Nonconventionally Creative : 24 October 2008 - 08:50 PM