Re: Engine
 

I suppose the only 2 problems i see with Torque, are that its closed source (So the open source idea goes out the window), and it looks like it costs a fortune, i dunno about the rest of you, but maybe it might be best to find an alternative. If Torque was more viable, i would certain choose it ;)

[EDIT] When it comes to a 'leader' i think someone should be chosen who wont have a lot to do with project development, as i know (from personal experiance) its hard to ballance the two. I dont doubt any abilities of anyone, but handing out assignments, answering questions and queries as WELL as doing your own development part CAN be a handful, and can lead to general disorganisation, which at the end of the day, is BAD for a project of this size.

Insert $0.02 to continue [/EDIT]

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Torque is NOT that expensive, for a fully featured game engine. But in spite of all this, and especially for the open-source issue, I still stand by the Ogre side.

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kicked in the nuts in under an hour ;)

I think i was looking at this in my current financial view (Professional web designer, Programmer, Network Administrator, earing £0 a month), $100 is about £60.. so its not really too bad :p

But i stand by your decision to use Ogre (Open source = good ;))

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i found the site of that game i was mapping for:
and me joining it was the third to the last news update they made in 2002 looool
have a look:

http://www.modernwarfare.net/

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When the idea for building a game first came up, the thinking was for it to be released as a free game, and to make the game open sourced (although perhaps portions will be restricted to prevent cheats as discussed). A free os game ought to attract a lot of talent from the os community. Afterall, we have limited funds, so volunteers are needed.

My guess is that there will be some very good commercial spin off opportunities surrounding the game should it be successfull. Members of the core team can cash in on the spin offs as a well earned reward for their efforts should they be in a position to do so.

We have to first want to do this to build a great game and have fun doing it. If we're successfull at it, then the opportunities will follow - we just have to keep a sharp eye out for them.

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All i can say to that.. is:

HERE HERE! :)

Seriously now, Basically, as botmeister says, our aim is to create something that people will enjoy playing as much as we will enjoy coding it (well, if me coding is anything to compare with.. EVERYONE will love it :p), I doubt there will be 'rigerous' coding by anyone, unless they feel up to it, no deadlines or forcing of abilities, we just do bits and pieces as and when we can :p

Granted, this attitude may indeed 'slow' development, but you all gotta remember, WE AINT BEING PAID FOR OUR TALENTS! But will come out with (judging from the peliminary (sorry for spelling) discussions) a very high quality product :)

(btw, i expect a full working version ready for release by the time E3 comes around again :P :P :P j/k :P)

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well....ive been mapping for little ol me for free in CS for 4 years with no real incentive.......

i will do it some more for this team:D

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maybe i can help out doing moddels in the future..

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Serious Sam used a custom engine.

Do yall have a theme picked out? Is the idea for a tactical Counterstrike-like game, or a non-realistic but fun stuff like TF, or something else original?

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play as a bot maker.. choose between killer stefan.. tactical tree camper PMB.. or and so on.. :D

to be little serious.. fps is what ppl do here.. and we got ai makers.. what can be done? what do we want? who killed president bush?..

killin and death in the white house the game? ;)
destroy white house demons, save or kill bush as the final boss.. maybe killin him would not be so good idea.. even though i wouldnt wanne save bush..

save earth from president bush.. maybe a cloned bush.. the real bush is inprisoned in the basement..

its just to early for me today..

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we were more centered around around a real world topic involving things that are happening in our time right now.....world conflicts. this was up for discussion for a while and it settled mostly on this so........Iraq, Jugoslavia, Isreal, Afghanistan. something to that effect. we would like to have it tactical to some extent because non tactical games like UT are "boring" after a while.
(that was my 2 cents on that last comment btw)

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like bf2 and desertcombat like then,,. can i be a suicide bomber? ;)

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there will be suicide bombers :)

I encourage everybody asking to read the previous posts in this thread as well as the other threads in this forum to learn what has been decided.

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mmmm.. car bombs..

I can see something like GTA cropping up here.. "Drive Your car here. Bomb Planted, dont crash into shit, hit button, get out car.. RUUUUUUN"

Anyway, there are seperate threads which discuss 'Gameplay' we are soley attempting to determine which engine would be best to create this game around here :)

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How about sound? FMOD?

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I've used fmod, its rediculously easy to use. We will be using OpenAL for our current project because fmod is only free for non-commercial use. Sound & input is about the easiest aspects of a game by far.

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agreed, playing sounds wont take long to code.. the recording of sounds thou, i can imagine will take a loooong time (unless someone has a large stock of guns we can record handy). Recording 'Radio Message' would be easy, i volenteer to do a british dude, tally ho chaps! (I think i just blew my chances) :P

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i suggest english only.. different accents.. but all english..
desert combat mod for bf42 annoys me alittle when they used languages atleast i dont understand.. and since no one understand they dont really respond to it.. you have to read the message when you are in one team,..

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DC has the option to translate radio commands to english, although afaik, people neglect to notice it :p

And i dont even know if it works in DC :)

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Don't forget IED's stuffed into dead dogs on the side or the road.

There should also be "civilian contractors" (mercenaries) who can use whatever weapons they want during combat instead of being forced ot use standard military issued weapons. That'll allow for the shotgun, pepper spray, exploding bullets, or whatever our demented minds can come up with :)

Of course, being a merc will have some disadvantages, such as you'll have to pay for your weapons and armor etc, and you may not get what you want or expect as there's a lot of shady weapons dealers out there.

One thing I'd love to see, but I don't know if it's too complex, is for people to get wounded in a more or less realistic fashion. I'd rather not see health points go down, but instead see mobility reduced, movement restricted and slowed, and so on, depending on where the body was hit and the severity of the wounds. I've seen something like this before, so I know it can be done.

Keep in mind, we have to balance realism with fun. If it's too tactical, it'll get boring, if it's too simplistic, it'll be fun at first, then get boring quickly.

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YES! :)
That's what I'd love to see too. I think that was mentioned already, but a long time ago.
This either needs ragdoll physics, or an impressive number of player animations. Anyway, I believe ragdoll physics are the way to go.

I'd want to see the wounds on the players' bodies too. Especially when they are alive ; to be able to see where they have been hurt by seeing blood on their right arm, for example.

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keep in mind that realism mostly kills playability. When i am hit in my leg, and i cant move fast. I dont think i want to play my game for long sinc ei move like a freaking turtle waiting to die...

either it should be very well balanced, or it will flop like hell.

Re: Engine
 

In order to get something structured of our this you will need to start up several topics concerning different topics of the development.

I really like the idea you have for the game with a good bunch of tactics, but not something which kills gameplay. We had a bunch of good discussions regarding this on the Sands-of-War forum, unfortunately the forum seems lost at the moment:(

I think its possible to make a tactical and action-packed fps, its hard, but possible.

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i agree, there would have to be a way to heal yourself quickly, or maybe reward 'medics' that respond quickly (The whole teamplay thing again).

Although i think this is the wrong place to be discussing this ;)

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I played a game called "mechwarriors" a looooong time ago, and it had viewable wounding where players could see each others missing parts that were blown away. You could see severity when smoke came out of the "mech" (mechs are like a tank but with legs), also the mech slowed down and lost weapons systems depending on where it was hit and how much damage it took. You could repair your mech only after the round ended by carefully spending money on replacement parts.

I liked the game play even though as you got damaged you slowned down and lost capabilities, you could still fight back, and a lot of skill came into play dealing with damaged systems. There was lots of fun watching other players get blown up, with parts flying off and smoke comming out. You could decide which target was your best bet to shoot at, and you could aim for certain parts to maximize the damage, eg shoot at the legs, and the target would slow down or become crippled, but it could still shoot back at you, shoot the weapons systems out and the thing could still run away from you and escape.

I agree that we'd have to balance realism against fun. One concept is to allow an adjustable realism level at the server side (I'd make this limited to only a few things to keep it simple), that way people can decide for themselves what they want. If we try and create too much of a compromise, we'll end up with a mediocre game.

Re: Engine
 

http://www.cubeengine.com/


Found this on Source Forge..thought you guys might be interested.

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Interesting, thanks Bill :)

I'm not quite sure what they mean by:

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They're just trying to sound "1337".

If I had to say what they meant...maybe they did things a little more abstract than they could have?

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lol, reminds me of the good ol' days of Quake1..

Anyway, the engine, it does some nice stuff, its small, and robust and cross platform, the map editor is easy to use.. but perhaps too easy.. The maps look poor, (so do the graphics in general to be honest), when it comes to physics, they are lacking (if not non existant)..

I crashed it within 20seconds of oppening it (i'm chuffed with that).

For a fast pased Deathmatch type game, this would be the perfect engine, but for what we (Speaking personally anyway), i dont feel this is quite what we need.

Nice suggestion thou :)

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This brings me on to 'suicides', most games allow you to instantly kill yourself, i feel ours should be a little different, each player should be equipped with a 'suicide pill', but no normal pill, it slowly kills off pain and such, so if you have a bullet in your leg, it wont effect performance, you will slowly start running faster, jumping higher, shrugging off bullets to non vital organs.. for about 20secs.. then you just die :p

This means if you do have a broken leg, and want to make a difference before you end it all, you can :)

It also means people cant just suicide to get back to an objective to help protect it :p

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Have you guys considered a sci-fi cyberpunk style/realistic type game concept, rather than the dime a dozen terrorist vs counter terrorist or WWII game types?

Perhaps it's just my facination with the "cyberpunk" concept but IMO it would be fun as hell to play a game set in the future a bit, where cybernetics are main stream and where firearms are a generation or two ahead. That's not to say it couldn't sport the typical favorite weapons, just that there could be more variety and more room for some creativity. Just as a comparison, instead of equipping your character with your weapons like most games, suppose you could outfit your guy with various cybernetic enhancements. Maybe cybernetic legs would allow you to move faster/jump higher, cybernetic arms would decrease crosshair wobble and increase carry capacity, cyberobtics could open up various view modes(IR,lowlight..) cyberaudio, enhance your hearing range, filter noise. Lots of room for creativity on the designer side of things while still having the fun factor of more realistic weapons and such. I'm not suggesting the sort of sci-fi that the unreal series does, more along the lines of CS + 50ish years. Not too far to be totally devoid of the familiar firearms of today, but far enough in the future for some futuristic creativity.

Regarding the realistic reactions to being shot, for gameplay purposes I personally would hate if the game kept me slow as hell for the rest of the round if I was shot, temporary speed drops are acceptable, just need to remember that not everything about reality is fun in a game.

Just some ideas...

Re: Engine
 

i (personally) am not a massive fan of games set 'in the future', i dont know why, but they just dont appeal to me (except maybe UT.. nut that just owns).

Futuristic games are great for deathmatch, but i cant really see a productive use in a highly team based tactical game..

Re: Engine
 

But then people would suicide pill spam! I mean repedively commit suicide just to be a jackass.

The problem with Cube is that it is a terrain engine. It has a floor and roof terrain. But the biggest problem is that it uses cubes (hence the name) instead of triangles to represent the world. This is not a good choice for outdoor scenery.

Also, Cube has no way to kill people if they touch a certain spot, like a trigger_hurt, so people can walk off of open maps and stand there. Another limitation is that you cannot have floors over floors. Probably the best bet would be to combine a couple renderers, like portals and terrain, so you can have indoor and outdoor scenery.

By the way, I think I posted this before, but http://cal3d.sourceforge.net/ is a free skeletal animation library. It could be possible to use it to implement ragdoll physics if used in conjunction with OpenDE. I think it is under GPL, though, so no problem if you are going to GPL your engine.

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The theme of a game has little to do with that. Simply making a CS clone doesn't give you a highly team based tactical game, that's all in the design. Any theme can be made highly team based with the proper design.

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Your concept can, to some extent, be applied to modern firefights.

Morphin or steroids to give boosts to wounded players
Improve on the "night vision" concept
Unidirectional amplified hearing headphones
Heat sensors
Optional rifle stabilizers
Optional flashlights
Optional scopes or lens to all rifles
Optional laser beams
...

they do this already in The Specialists. Although it's a deathmatch. But I *LOVE* the fast-paced tactical side of this game.

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agreed, loads of interesting things can be done to weapons nowadays.. what could be interesting, is if you let guns 'overheat', they blow up in your face.. help reduce spammy play :D

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someone mentioned having to go slow all round if you get shot. Solution: "MEDIC!"
Give the players some reason for being a medic, eg 2 'frags' for an enemy kill, 1 for helping a teammate. Another, similar option would be to have a 'hospital' area injured players can go to to be treated. It could be an objective - capture the hospital in thwe centre of the map, and you can use it. Hmm, should make a gameplay thread for this, but that's gonna be in the future.

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I think medics should get a point after they have been healing players for X ammount of seconds, healing doesnt happen immediatly (unrealisitic, ("hi, your gonna die in the next 2 seconds, take this pill, and you'll be right as rain again in 1")), and instead of giving points for healing a single player, do it based on the number of seconds they spend healing people, for example, 10secs is 1 point. Certainly makes more sence to me :/

Re: Engine
 

true.. also.. if you do something else.. and if you check my beloved game battlefield 1942 it shouild be the same if you fix tanks..

another thing.. if you heal yourself.. same points?
can you check if you only fix your tank that you use,,, maybe.. destroy it.. just to fix it and get points..

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I dont think we have decided fully on what sort of vehical support we are including yet (and yes, Battlefield 1942 OWNS! *strokes CD case* my precious! (yeah, LOTR rocks too ;P)), healing yourself probably shouldnt get you points, as it kinda defeats the point. Giving points for healing teammates gives you incentive to do so, makes you go and do your job :p