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TIGSource ForumsCommunityJams & EventsCompetitionsOld CompetitionsCockpit CompetitionStar Crew Solo [CANCELLED/LATE]
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Author Topic: Star Crew Solo [CANCELLED/LATE]  (Read 17823 times)
Traveller
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« on: February 20, 2009, 12:59:21 PM »

You're the captain, alone on the bridge of your starship.  If only you had a gunner, an engineer, or a navigator, you could bark orders to them, and watch as they fiddle with consoles and do their job.  Unfortunately, you have to do it all yourself--which means switching frantically from console to console to perform the various ship's duties, while firing at your opponent who is trying to do the same.

The consoles are operated by minigames, much like what you'd expect from a certain perplexing piratical MMO.  One minigame to arm and fire the guns, one minigame to realign the shields and keep weak points on the side you're not getting shot at from.  A separate console to navigate.  The difference is that these puzzles are what your control panels really look like... Of course, not being psychic, you have to rely ENTIRELY on consoles and display panels to know your ship's status.  Good thing you can glance up from your station and look around whenever you like!



- Medium-paced online one-on-one combat!
- Your consoles are just another part of your 3D bridge!
- Create combos to devastate enemy sytems, or boost your shields!
- Look out the window, and see the enemy ship past your crackling shields!
- Get distracted by alarms, sparks, and fires in your bridge!
- Press the attack, circle around, or fall back to set up more combos!
- Coded in C# with XNA!
- Uses BSP map format for the ship's bridge!

Progress:
2/20/09:  Sketching classes out on paper.  So far, the engine has 34 classes for the core MVC stuff.  Most of the way there!  There's a mockup down the thread.  I have the latest C# and XNA installed and working.
2/21/09:  Oh, man, trying to work with Quake 3 maps is really painful.  It kind of renders but I have no idea if this will work any better as time passes, or if it'll work at all with the other stuff in my game.  Maybe I should change to using meshes and .scene files so I have a little more control...  Meh, need a good format where I can make walls easily, plus stick entities and lights and stuff.
2/22/09:  Game Start!  I can now load Quake 3 BSP maps!  Though I guess they're not quite Quake 3 maps when they have custom textures and custom entities.  I can now place entities like control panels in GTKRadiant and they'll show up in the engine.  Also, we have our first ship models and they are somewhat textured.  Graphics look good but it's time to do lights and stuff pretty soon, not sure how that will interact with the Quake 3 stuff.  Next up, more entity spawning stuff, and getting that engine infrastructure worked on.  Not sure if network or control consoles will be after that.
2/23/09:  Turns out model-view-controller is harder to implement than I thought.  I've got a kludge in place.  However my system DOES load entity type information from an XML file, then parse a Quake 3 file and get entities data from it, then render the map and then render the entities...  It -actually- does now instead of just having the framework like it did yesterday.
3/2/09:  Quake 3 maps with lighting!  Puzzle displays that render to surfaces, then draw them on control panels!



3/25/09: Aaaaand...I'm withdrawing this from the competition.  I'll keep working on it as a stand-alone.  Eventually.
« Last Edit: March 25, 2009, 09:42:07 AM by Traveller » Logged
Hempuliā€½
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« Reply #1 on: February 20, 2009, 01:15:36 PM »

Sounds very cool! I'm awaiting some screenshots Smiley
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« Reply #2 on: February 20, 2009, 01:27:51 PM »

That sounds like awesome!
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« Reply #3 on: February 20, 2009, 01:31:17 PM »

Really nice concept! I look forward to this.
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« Reply #4 on: February 20, 2009, 01:33:42 PM »

I have a HUGE problem with over-engineering stuff that I never get close to finishing, heck I've never finished a playable game in my life, so the idea I've posted here is hacked way down to the bare minimum.  If the gameplay sounds pretty simple that's why.  Depending on how fast it gets finished and polished, I've got plenty of other enhancements in mind.

Enhancements which I will not mention here, due to their very low chance of existing.  I WILL FINISH A GAME.  Durr...?
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« Reply #5 on: February 20, 2009, 04:12:36 PM »

34 classes sounds like a lot of work. Looking forward to this.
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« Reply #6 on: February 20, 2009, 04:28:11 PM »

It'll probably be twice that when I'm done sketching it out, but I don't expect the number to grow once I've started working on it!

Roughly 40-50 graphical assets...  About 20 sound ones.

Seriously, when you look at your project and say "I need 70 classes, 50 art thingys, and 20 sounds, and I have five weeks to do it", it puts things in perspective...and it doesn't look too bad.
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« Reply #7 on: February 21, 2009, 12:50:47 AM »

Here's a mockup of the bridge...well, that's pretty much all you're going to see.  Of course you can turn around to use your other panels and look out the other windows.  The only HUD is what you see on the panels and the walls.


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« Reply #8 on: February 21, 2009, 02:00:42 PM »

I love your ideas! I would love to join this competition but I can't program for crap.  Any chance you need any help with the art assets?  That's something I'm good at...  I'm not great at modeling, but (like everyone else in the world) I'm pretty good with photoshop and I know my way around textures.

Luke
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« Reply #9 on: February 21, 2009, 02:42:30 PM »

Still working out the collaborative aspect right now.

In other news, Blender is a real b*tch to learn to use, and XNA is not very fun to learn how to import models into.  But I think that's figured out in four hours' work.  The upside is that once it's all figured out, using XNA is a goddamn cakewalk. 
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« Reply #10 on: February 21, 2009, 07:33:44 PM »

Hmmm.  A video card that keeps crashing is going to make this rather difficult to work on.  Maybe it's time I upgraded my Radeon 8500 from eight or nine years ago.  It can't run Spore anyway...  On the upside, it'll run on most anyone's computer since it's designed for a nine year old one!
« Last Edit: February 23, 2009, 01:23:24 PM by Traveller » Logged
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« Reply #11 on: February 22, 2009, 08:04:22 PM »

This screenshot makes me sad, but what you're seeing is a Quake 3 map rendered for the bridge, and a mesh imported from Blender for the enemy ship which would normally have a better texture and be farther away.  And there's no stuff sitting on the bridge like control panels yet, or lighting, but rest assured...THERE WILL BE.

I'm just happy I managed to get XNA, Blender, and GTKRadiant all talking to each other on the first day.

EDIT:  Replaced by a more recent image from late late Monday!


Those control panels were placed as entities in a Quake 3 map!  I consider the concept proved.  Next stop, getting some touchable UIs on those consoles.  Then, some shaders and textures that don't look awful.
« Last Edit: February 24, 2009, 02:23:51 AM by Traveller » Logged
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« Reply #12 on: February 24, 2009, 09:28:33 AM »

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.   Roll Eyes

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.
« Last Edit: February 24, 2009, 09:35:25 AM by Traveller » Logged
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« Reply #13 on: February 24, 2009, 10:37:42 AM »

Maybe it's time I upgraded my Radeon 8500 from eight or nine years ago.  It can't run Spore anyway... 
That's a feature, not a bug.
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« Reply #14 on: February 24, 2009, 11:36:20 AM »

Maybe it's time I upgraded my Radeon 8500 from eight or nine years ago.  It can't run Spore anyway... 
That's a feature, not a bug.
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« Reply #15 on: February 26, 2009, 09:13:40 AM »

Looks like I'm upgrading sooner than I thought.  My second hard drive just died last night--and by second, I mean 'the one that didn't die three weeks ago".  Fortunately I had backed up my code offsite the previous evening, so I only lost three hours of work, tops!

(BACK UP YOUR CODE!  DON'T WAIT!)

Went out to get a couple new hard drives, got them home and said "Durh, what's this funny small connector?".  So now I need a new motherboard (because I don't want another controller card), and it might have been the power supply so I need a new one of those too, and they won't fit in my chassis, so "need a new hard drive" has turned into "need a new everything".  I'm getting a used minitower tomorrow.

Sounds like I won't be fully off the ground until the weekend.  All the same, I think I'll go underground until I have something that looks pretty.
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« Reply #16 on: March 02, 2009, 01:54:23 AM »

Well, that was unpleasant.  On an entirely new computer now.  Thankfully, hard drives were mostly salvagable, so no work was lost...just a precious, precious Friday and Saturday!



That puzzle should be playable as soon as I can get a full evening to work on it, which may not be until next weekend.  This is a very busy week but future ones may be less so.  More models and nicer textures are in the pipeline, as well as steady improvements to make the bridge map look nicer, and proper lighting on meshes like those control panels.

The code is probably about 60% sketched out in terms of classes even being created etc.  Graphical resources are just barely implemented, really, and sounds are still nonexistent.  Next Sunday is the first big risk assessment for what -really- fun features will go in or not.

I really don't want to sleep right now.  Oh well.
« Last Edit: March 02, 2009, 02:03:37 AM by Traveller » Logged
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« Reply #17 on: March 03, 2009, 02:37:20 PM »

Maybe it's time I upgraded my Radeon 8500 from eight or nine years ago.  It can't run Spore anyway... 
That's a feature, not a bug.
Zing!
Did I just read a World of Goo reference?
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« Reply #18 on: March 25, 2009, 09:41:05 AM »

This entry is CANCELLED/LATE.

Not many schedules can survive an engagement getting broken off.  Life has been very busy and complicated the last few weeks.

Frustrating, since I'd under-engineered this hard enough that it would have survived just about anything else getting in the way.  Well, I plan to finish this sometime.
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« Reply #19 on: March 25, 2009, 10:35:22 AM »

Huge sympathy for ya, man. Been there, done that. Know what it feels like. *manly hug*
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