Hi!  Tim Cook, professional non-game coder, long-time game writer, follower of Coyote...never finished a game in my life.

I'm 25 years old, went to the University of Washington, frequent addict of text-based and space colonizing games.  Some of my more ambitious failed unfinished projects include:

- A first-person Mandelbrot explorer in C++, where your avatar and perspective is scaled down as you get closer to the black sea in the center
- A browser-based Moonbase/SimCity/Alien Legacy game
- A text-based online space colony game, building hab domes, mining resources, researching, and trying not to run out of air--while scary critters watch from the dark.
- A mostly realtime hex-grid alien planet colonizing game, where you build a base, mine the souls of angry ghosts for incredible fuel, and then run like heck before you get overrun
- A final project in school where players shoot cannons at lego-block 3d buildings, trying to knock them down, and be the player with the most buildings of their color standing...well, that was playable anyway!
- X-Militia, a strategy/tactics game where you fight the aliens with large numbers of disorganized, poorly-trained "troops".  Drive to landing sites in pickup trucks.

Because I never finish anything I start, I'm in the Cockpit Competition right now, and I've vastly scaled down my wild ideas.  I'm working on Star Crew Solo, which is designed to be like Puzzle Pirates' combat game, except in space, realtime, one player per ship, with nice 3d graphics.  If I finish the game in time, I want to allow more players per ship--and start adding enormous amounts of engineering and scientific puzzles until the game starts resembling Popcap.  Pretty darn sure my core idea will get finished in time.  Woo!

First off:  My target is pixel shader v.1.4, so it's pretty old stuff here.

I'm working with the inside of a starship, mapped in a Quake 3 bsp file, but not rendered with that engine (using meshes from Blender and stuff).  It has lots of windows, well, some windows at least.  It also has rooms that are lit different from each other.  What I'm not sure about is, how do I make the best use of limited lights?  What should I keep, what should I drop?

I've looked up shadowmaps, and I think they would be very nice to use...but, well, I only have so many lights allowed.  When the sun is shining right into windows from Mercury's orbit, I'd like to see it cast glaring shadows from all the control panels and people in the ship onto the back wall.  I'm pretty sure I could pull that off...but nothing else would cast shadows, and I think that sounds kind of glaring.  Would it be bad if only the sun in the windows cast shadows, and nothing else did?  (Other lights would only do normal diffuse lighting, etc.)

Also...I -want- to give each room in my ship its own light properties, but they're pretty much connected by hallways and not doors.  I THINK I could get away with saying "each room has its own ambient light, plus one point light, and things are only lit by the room they are in", but...would that be too weird at the hallways?  As an object moved out of the room, it would just suddenly be lit by the next room.  Would that be too awful-looking, especially if you're watching another player walk out of the room you're in?  I'm also worried about, say, an exit from a well-lit room into a poorly-lit room.  Sudden shadows!

Heck, I'm assuming I can even pull this off at all, which isn't guaranteed--If there's ten lights on the screen, but any given object is only lit by one light at a time, will that work on my graphics card or will it cause problems?  I know my card can't fit ten lights at once (due to low shader version), but can it switch which lights it's using when it switches to a new mesh to render?

Looking for advice on "Would that look awful?", "Is it technically possible?", and "Is there a better way to do that?"

That sounds awesome!  (And while a very different genre, possibly very similar gameplay to my Star Crew.)  Looking forwards to seeing you pull it off!

Wups.  Got my threads crossed, but the shader one was directed at you.

NIIICE.  Looks playable and fun in just three days!

What's the video card requirement on that sucker?  Shader 2.0 or can you get away with earlier?

And is that really a FOUR DIGIT frame rate?   

 

 

 

YAAAAAAAAAY.  I'm going to blow a lot of time playing this.  :D

YAY.  Grew up on that RPG genre in part.

I just want to say for the record that developing a modern 3d game on 768 MB of RAM is a lot of fun.  It feels like the old days...having to close as many windows as possible just so your map compiler can malloc() successfully.  Given the fact that I actually can't run VC#2008, Blender, GtkRadiant, and Firefox all at the same time, my my project is MORE retro during development than most retro games out there.  

Anyway, by the time I go to sleep tonight, I hope to be rendering fancy-looking 3d control screens to those black textures on the control panels up there.

Still need a musician...I don't think anyone wants to hear me trying MIDI.

Hell yes.

Yep! Funny isn't it, how much depth in four variables?
You can even try to make the slowest succesful landing.

There's only so much space to experiment sadly.  To eventually stop, you need to expend 5 units of fuel per turn overall, plus 45 for a safe landing.  150 units of fuel means 21 seconds is the longest you can stay in the air.  Now I feel like a rocket scientist. 

Probably because A) it's hilarious, and B) it's done.

Sounds fun!

As awesome as that is, I misread the word in the very lower right.

The "P" didn't quite look like a "P".  More like an "F".

This just gets better and better!

I like it very much!

Yay!  I loved Crystal Pixels.  This sounds like fun!

I just want to throw my support behind the "slightly different music for each bot" thing.  Dynamic music is one of my most favorite things ever, even if it's just slight variations on a theme for each bot (see: your different advisors in Alien Legacy).  It's done best of all if you can switch from track to track in the middle.  Heck, that would practically be an automatic vote from me, because it improves the experience -so much- IMO.

Still keeping my eyes open for a mid-90s-game-style musician for Star Crew Solo...  I'm leaning more towards MIDI than chiptunes.  If anyone has played Sierra's game "Alien Legacy" (the original disk one, not the CD version with awful music) then they know the vague style I'm after, the nice contemplative stuff, for the title at least.

I still kinda have to figure out how put MIDI into XNA though I guess >.>  But it can't be that hard, right?

If any MIDI artist wants to take a shot at dynamic music (a la Tie Fighter), I'd love to give it a shot in a couple weeks.