Openciv3 - design philosophy

[RonHiler]

quote: Ron: Thanks for your advice. OC3 has been object-oriented straight from the beginning; we are C++ guys after all! Plus, we have (or have had) several professional programmers, who have given us mostly the same advice you did, and more; this means that you have learned from your experience just the right things!

Ah, cool. I'm glad to hear y'all are using OOP for the game. Makes me feel much better. Sorry to spout off about a bunch of stuff you already knew, heh. I'll just go hide back in my corner again

Ron

[korn469]

ok i will get started on the desing doc...had a hectic (but fun) weekend and today i'm going hiking with my gf...but probably around 2am EST you'll see a post from me

and i agree that we can't have a completed design doc until we have a completed design...but you can use this as a master organizational tool...

two other questions, one is what kind of computer does everybody have?

mine is a gateway 400mgHz pII with windows 98, 64MBs of ram, 10gig hard drive, 8MB Ati Rage Pro graphics card, directx 7.0

my other question is what should the minimum system requirements be for our game?

also if we are using directx does everybody have 7.0?

korn469

[amjayee]

Hi everyone, nice conversation here! Ron, don't be so shy! Elmo, welcome back!

Korn: That is something we definitely need. Programming style text is already made, actually that was one of the first things we did. As should be the case with every programming project. About the design doc, Joker is right about that we can't do it properly before we have made some more design, but we can construct it gradually over time. We could start right away. Though I would appreciate if someone else could do that, since I'd like to devote more time for programming.

Dig up the old thread I started labeled Basic Openciv3 Agenda or something; there I proposed a division to sections that make most sense in my opinion. Also the text for each section might serve as a starting point for the basic framework for the design doc. The texts of course need to be refined, as we have made much progress since those days.

So what we need for the design doc?

1) division to section, and short description of each section and its main goals.

2) for each section we need a list of the basic features with only one sentence description

3) more detailed description for each feature, and its sub-features

4) very detailed implementation description; how that feature works in game terms, including mathematical formulae and such. We are in no hurry with those, since they have only very little effect to other features. We can tweak and play-test them later, and change them.

Finally we need a game architecture documentation, describing the game components and their interaction; that work we have already started. That is the programmer's job, designers don't need to care about it; designers just need to think about the mathematics behind the features, basically the underlying program structure doesn't affect much those.

I will go bump the old thread I mentioned; check it out. Perhaps Elmo could make a suggestion about how to include the design doc to the web page; it will definitely need to be an html document, so we could as well make it consistent with the webpage.

[The Joker]

I agree that the design doc could be a great way to organize the design process. That way we would simply start from the top by deciding what features we want in the game, and then work downwards to how we want to implement those features.

------------------
"It is only when we have lost everything
that we are free to do anything."
- Fight Club

[amjayee]

Ok, Korn, good. About the computer, I have a PIII 700 MHz, which I have constructed myself from parts. It has Windows 2000 (which is incredibly stable, by the way - I have my computer on all the times, and it hasn't crashed a single time, unlike Win95 and 98. If some program crashes, that usually doesn't crash Windows). Then, I have 256 MB memory, 10GB hard drive and Elsa Gloria Synergy graphics (openGL and DirectX, 8MB) and 17" 1024x768 true color display.

About requirements, I can't say much yet, but at least display resolution has to be 800x600, preferably 1024x768. I'm quite sure an average machine will be appropriate - even more so, since we can expect that in two years my computer will be about the average...

[heardie]

Korn, if you get something i could make a html tree document using javascript

[korn469]

i have started work on the design document but i have been really busy this week (more so than what i thought i'd be) so the work has been slow going, however i expect that things should start to slow down this weekend so i can get at fairly good prototype up

[ElmoTheElk]

Something like http://javascript.internet.com/foldertree/

This is a free JavaScript so we could use that...

About the prerequest for the game: Within 2 years, the average computer will be a 1GHz with 128mb ram I think. So don't worry about the slow computers at this time, yours will be even slower then.
[This message has been edited by ElmoTheElk (edited September 07, 2000).]

[heardie]

Actually elmo, I found an even nicer one. It works the same in effet, but is quicker loading, not sot so jerky, but best of all uses cookies so if you return the structure will be the same.
and you can changfe the images.

[ElmoTheElk]

Right then. Where are we going to publish it on the website? A whole new topic? Or in the models topic?

[amjayee]

I think models could be replaced by it. Perhaps named to Design Documentation? Or something?

[amjayee]

It seems that I wasn't the only one who couldn't send to forums for some days. What is wrong with the apolyton? It seems to be down every once in a while.