A prototype of how ground combat should look like in the space game I'm working on.

Making mockups is so much easier than making actual games, I might move on to mockups exclusively!

^ All those are very valid points and I couldn't agree more.

_{(I certainly wasn't recommending anyone to accept sloppy undisciplined practices and I agree that anyone who codes like that should be fired out of a cannon and into the Sun. I just outlined what makes sense to me personally, and since I am a 1-man team I can get away with pretty much everything )}

Oh and I also OVERLOAD OPERATORS WITH NON-INTUITIVE CODE MWUAHAHAHAHAHAHA

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Same here, you know you'll spend more time debugging than actually writing code, and debugging often mean figuring out what the code you're reading was meant to be.

Someone needs to take this code bubbles thing to debugging c++. I would kill for an extension to any C++ IDE, which would expand the call stack HORIZONTALLY during step-by-step debug. So with each new call, a window opens to the RIGHT of its caller, listing that function only. When a function exits, the window closes. Thus enabling you to scroll horizontally to go in "depth"...

There should also be a changelog of when which variable was changed by which line (obviously only in step-by-step mode). And when you hover over the change info the line in question that caused the change is highlighted in the relevant code "bubble" .

Battle zeppelin (air, large)

This thread is relevant to my interests.
Since you already have mobile bases and combat zeppelins I assume realism is not of prime concern here. With that in mind, I don't see nearly enough ironclads in today's games. Also consider giant walking mechanical spiders. Other than that, there is much more to it than tanks. There are light tanks, self-propelled artillery, tracked infantry vehicles, wheeled infantry vehicles, etc. Of course, most of them boil down to different guns and rocket launchers mounted on different assortments of wheels or tracks. However, wheeled infantry vehicles and light tanks like V-300 Commando or the Saladinlook particularly cool and mobile in my opinion and might be good choice for a "lighter" version of a tank.

A tank should be a lumbering behemoth compared to these guys. If you're looking into it, World War I tanks had all sorts of wacky experimental designs that just beg to be incorporated in the game, such as the iconic British Mk V, or Sturmpanzerwagen A7V, or Char d'Assaut St Chamond.

Also, since the game will have sea-based stuff, you might want to have amphibious tanks as well, I rarely see those in games.

For some ideas, may I suggest playing Boogie Wings:

You, sir, are a gentleman and a scholar. Cheers.

I, um... 

wat?

^ Well, it's never explicitly stated that the ships DON'T have fusion reactors...

Epigenetics abide by a different set of rules and are poorly researched at the moment. In a game they would amplify the transmission of positive traits, which is a good thing. The genetic model will be more important, and I predict tweaking it empirically will be the hardest piece of work that will make or break any evolution game. Obviously who ever makes it WILL work with a simplified model, so the numbers (mutation rates, the relation of genes to skills, multifactor skills, environment effects, energy economy of carnivores and herbivores, etc.) will have to be made up at first, then tweaked and retweaked so that the system doesn't fold in upon itself within a few generations.

What about this take?

You are presented with an environment with a bunch of creatures in it. You need to set up some sort of target situation (Allow the Glorkians to reach the far east oasis). The way you do this is by influencing the environment then waiting for a couple thousand years. Basically, it would emulate the world for that many years, along with legitimate genetic reproduction. At this point you see how your targets changed, if they are still alive, and you can influence them for the next era.

So you are proposing steering the evolution process by giving the player a way to influence the environmental selection factors? An interesting approach, it would definitely depend on implementation.

I just realized that a in order to have a true evolution game you must not focus on a single species or group of cretures, but rather on an entire biome with multiple species, and neither of them should be the "main" one. It's not proper evolution if there aren't extinctions and dead end branches along the way, and opportunists filling the niche. Driving a single species to dominance is not what evolution is about (and it is a common misconception that humans are more "evolved" than other creatures on the Earth, which is simply not true). Evolution is a universal process affecting all living things and players should be made aware of it.

Instead of "Glorkians reaching an oasis", for example, I would prefer focus on plain and simple survival. The ultimate success of evolution is that it has enabled life to survive through mass extinctions, climate changes, etc. If a player is in control of an entire biome he doesn't favour any species because all of them have a place in the chain and any one of them might prove crucial in the case of an extinction. It would be a great tool to demonstrate ecological concepts such as symbiosis, parasitization, antagonism, commensal organisms, etc.

I would then make the game have extinction events, lots of them, and make these the milestones the player needs to survive through with at least one species. Maybe it's a newly formed planet bombarded by meteorites. Maybe it has a dramatically changing climate every 3000 years because it is in P-orbit around a binary star.

I was going to suggest that you keep the player character always looking the same as a means to provide some consistency, but seems you're already doing that, so I'd say go for it!

Funny, I was going to suggest the exact opposite. Not that the current approach doesn't have its advantages.

I like circular structure - i.e. a story that ends in a similar vein to its beginning. The main character is in the same locale as where the story started, or in the same situation, or he utters the same sentence, etc. The differences between "now" and "then" become pronounced that way, and we get to see how the protagonist grew, and all stories are about growth and progress.

Well, it's either that or kill off the protagonist in an awesome way preferably involving thermonuclear explosions.

I'm going to jump on the "start sloppy, refine later" bandwagon. The whole "absolute encapsulation" bit is only enforced because of large teams, basically you don't want someone who didn't write the class to have access to its guts. In case of the lone programmer, the only thing encapsulation can achieve is hide the code from the guy who wrote it, which doesn't sound like THAT good of an idea to me. I started my programming career in Visual Basic which used Public variables and was proud of it, and I still cant' shake that from my mindset. But I know my code and it works ok and debugging is easy. And that's all that matters. But I admit there is something beautiful in a compact, encapsulated class. Occasionally I get a craving to clean up the mess...

A trick I am using for my game entities is extensors. Almost everything in the game is an entity, and entity itself is a very light class. But it has a (growable) array of extensors. Extensor is a virtual class which has an update() and render() that are called when ever the entity's update and render are called. So every functionality that the entity needs (collision, target seeking, artificial intelligence, turrets, particle generators, player control processing) is derived from the base extensor class. An entity will have as many extensors as it needs, and can have multiple extensors of the same type. Indeed the majority of my game's functionality can be said to reside in these derived extensors classes.

Another thing that greatly eases the development for me is using what I believe is called property-based development. That is, I hardcode as little variables as I need into game classes (world, tile, entity etc.) and just provide them with a custom container of string-keyed integer PROPERTIES. I even put in a hash function to boost lookup times. This is insanely useful for fast game prototyping, as you can add new variables to any entity on the fly without changing the headers. Not to mention it eases game scripting tenfold. Another plus is that properties can always be replaced with in-code variables towards the end of the project if a speed boost is sorely needed (it usually isn't).

Stop it, Derek, you're making the rest of us look bad. 

but worthless for true 3D spriting or billboarding etc) and that it will output only equilateral quads. I never used it because while fast it imposed too many limitations.

Thanks for that! I got around the limitations, and am in fact quite happy with what I can do with them, so I guess that means I will continue using them instead of trying to roll my own sprite class which would probably not behave much faster.

I was bored last night

Is that for a particular game you're working on? 'cause I would like to know more details...

It seems you're currently looping over your entities and calling draw(mypos.x, mypos.y) (or whatever) for its image. Not very efficient. You could optimise this in two fundamental ways:

1) Sort all drawing by image so the underlying render context will not have to change texture. That is, first draw all entities using texture A, then all using texture B, etc.
2) Better still: if you're using the fixed pipeline, create a vertex buffer of quads, where one quad represents one entity. All the entities using the same image are placed adjacently in the buffer. Then render each strip (all quads using the same image) in one go, then change texture and render the next strip etc.

This will boost your geometry throughput significantly.

Quick question. Would you perchance know if this is what ID3DXSprite does internally? I *think* I read somewhere that it is as optimized as can be when batching sprites by texture, and I use ID3DXSprite extensively (even for particles in my 3d games...)

But if I knew I could squeeze additional frames per second by rewriting to use my own quads instead of D3DXSprite, I'd totally do it.

Flashdevelop helps my productivity loads.

I demonstrated the brilliance of its code completion the other day by mashing my face into the keyboard and pressing Enter before a co-worker. And lo did Flashdevelop summon legible code from my flippancy.

We should harness this power to usher in a new era in game development.

I'm guessing the OP tried to express the view that what games call 'exploration' often isn't. And it is true that games often use open worlds or "sandbox" as an excuse to pad their games.

Exploration in games, IMO, is about one thing only: finding out about the UNKNOWN. If the world is huge but every piece of expanse looks like the next with a swapped pallette, that's not exploration, that's drudgery. It's not enough to have visual variety only, either. It is fundamental to have varied game atmospheres, varied entities (friends, foes, entities, etc.)  If every next step takes you to a new sort of location or a new game mechanic, or new enemies, or new sorts of inhabitants, then that IS exploration.

Even if the world is largely static but the player is introduced to new kinds of mechanics that's STILL exploration, exploration of all the different gameplay paths.

I would classify Chrono Trigger or The Spirit Engine 2 as a prime example of exploration, even if both these games are linear in the extreme the player unveils the story, the world, and new mechanics.

[which get to mate]

Evolution is broken in game because of it's passive nature, in games, you want the player to take an active role, even in Evo, a game supposedly about evolution, you are guiding the decisions of your creature and making him better based on a currency system...

As long as the player controls a single entity, that game will have absolutely nothing to do with evolution. God-games (Populous, Black and White) would be a better ground to incorporate evolution mechanically (OH, THE IRONY).  Also,  as long as the player has direct choice over what is "evolved" from a dropdown list, that's not evolution either.

However, if you gave the player control over a group with random genetic traits, then let him control them, in a way that determines which live and which die, and much more importantly, which get to mate, that could translate into a very good breeding and eugenics simulator. Not a proper evolution demonstration, but, baby steps, baby steps.

The weird part about evolution is people perceive individual species as a destination, like evolution is working toward a certain goal to for an area.

Precisely on of the many misconceptions that a good evolution-demonstrative game could tackle.

I agree, especially since for all intents and purposes, the debate isn't even relevant for games. All you need to do to portray evolution reasonably accurately in a game is to create a system with natural selection and random mutations. The code wouldn't be ideologically charged nor would it care about one side of the discussion vs. the other. It would just do its job.

Can we make a game about evolution that is not fun about intelligent design.
I believe in intelligent design, but the twist is that i consider the world a computer (universal cellular automate computer), therefore intelligent design is an emergent property of the world as information processing rather than just random chemical reaction.

I am unsure about what you have in mind. Although I don't believe that intelligent design has merit, I will admit that you CANNOT make a game that isn't connected to the theory of intelligent design in one way or the other, because every game games ever made had an intelligent designer behind it, namely the person(s) who made it. Any entity in any game, ever, will behave according to game code; therefore anything that goes on in a game can be said to have been governed by the rules outlined by the programmer(s) and therefore are ultimately DESIGNED by these same programmers. We are in a sense the Intelligent Creator of these tiny worlds. Huh. Interesting implication.

Until you eat the mushrooms, then it all makes sense. > > >
[/quote]Ideally, a theory shouldn't require mushrooms to make sense. Ideally.

If you're gonna stretch the meaning of 'intelligent' and 'design' that thin, you should probably make up your own words - both those words are confusing enough as it is.

With a thought experiment i can explain how in an universal automate cellular computer intelligence (as a high order order) can arise naturally. And how, in that condition, randomness produce order, order produce homeostasis and homeostasis produce emotion and emotion create 'intelligence' then intelligence consciousness. The fact we are here reasoning that prove that naturally.

Even if this were true, I don't see how proving that universe composed as cellular automata processor would give rise to intelligence or complexity corellates to what OUR universe is or isn't. Also, I don't see how homeostasis is a prerequisite or initiator of emotion or emotion of intelligence (technically, a bacterial organism can be in the state of homeostasis. As can a water pump. I don't see either as particularly emotional or intelligent).

I hope this thread isn't going where I think it's going.