Let's Make Our Own Game

[RonHiler]

Hi Quinns and all,

As far as the mailing list goes, I'm going to have to ask you to drop me from it as well. I get plenty enough mail dealing with my own project without putting another one on top of it!

You seem to have conscripted the programmers from all the other alt-civ games, heh. I don't know that they are going to drop their own projects, which keep them quite busy (I'm sure) to work on yours. Don't take it the wrong way. It's just after getting a year or two into a project, there is little chance they'd be willing to give up all the invested work to start all over again. For MD, which has three years of work behind it, and has just moved into a playable form, that would be just silly, if you see what I mean. Plus our players would kill me

But don't think that I, at least, won't be interested or offer advice (if asked). I especially have a bit of experience with spherical world programming, and I know some of the traps and pitfalls you are going to encounter with this task, having gone through it myself. We even tried the "bucky-ball" approach at one point (though with limited success. There are some complications to that method which you haven't considered yet, but you'll get there).

I can't do any programming for you (my programming time is completely tied up with MD), but I will try out demos and offer suggestions and such, as will all of the gang from alt-civ. It seems as though you have an interesting game concept. If you ever want to contact me, the best place to do it is on the Alt-Civ board, which is one I always check. I rarely come to "Other Games", and it is only by accident I saw this thread at all. That is really sort of where this thread ought to be anyway, since you are talking about an Alt-Civ kind of game. I always thought this board was more geared toward games in genres other than turn-based historical strategy games.

In any case, good luck with the new game! Keep us posted on how it progresses.

Ron

[Darkknight]

Thanks Ron I'll be sure to keep my most annoying questions for you

[quinns]

List of Members in Quinn Simulations, LLC:
(As of 14-MAR-2001)

Quinns ** (Programmer/Analyst/Developer/Organizer)
Roman ** (Science Adviser)
TheViceroy ** (Administrative Consultant)
Darkknight ** (Graphics Artist)
Wittlich ** (Political Analyst/Military Adviser)
KenHinds ** (Historian/Programmer)
K. Allen ** (Game Developer/Journalist/Writer)
Franses ** (Administrator/Programmer)
Keygen ** (Program Tester/Administrator)
Fraze ** (Programmer)
D. Christopher ** (Graphics Artist/Programmer)
I. Walkington ** (Mathematician)
Mobius ** (Designer)
TheBirdMan ** (Designer/Programmer)
King Thor ** (Programmer)

[This message has been edited by quinns (edited March 27, 2001).]

[Mark_Everson]

Hi quinns:

Could you remove me from your list? My dance card is already quite full getting Clash of Civilizations up and running!

Too bad our project was too Earth-bound for you . But in terms of you wanting things like societies less detailed, Clash will have that approach as an option, even though our Govt/Social model is vastly more complex than Civ2. That's since anything the player doesn't want to deal with, they can turn over to the AI. So IMO we've already got at least half of what you are looking for...

-Mark

[wittlich]

quote: Originally posted by quinns on 03-06-2001 09:55 AM Regarding this new gaming company. Does anyone have any suggestions about the best way to discuss these topics in private amongst us all? I have an ICQ address, and it seems pretty popular to have an ICQ number in this forum. Is this a good way to discuss things privately, with many people involved?? Mass e-mail seems so cumbersome, especially if I'm trying to record the data coming and going. Any better ideas welcome!

I used to use ICQ a few years back but stopped (every time I went on line a gang of people kept on interupting me)

I wish I remember my old ICQ number but I don't. I can easily get another and then just use it for our project.

[Roman]

quote: Originally posted by RonHiler on 03-06-2001 08:09 PM We even tried the "bucky-ball" approach at one point (though with limited success. There are some complications to that method which you haven't considered yet, but you'll get there). Ron

Oh I can think of some really bad ones already:

1) 52 regions make for a very innacurate map if they are made up of one terrain type only.

2)Considering the huge scale of the regions, new systems of economics and combat will have to be devised.

3) Etc.

And this fails to account for any programming problems, which not being a programmer, I cannot foresee.

[wittlich]

quote: Originally posted by Roman on 03-06-2001 05:24 PM Wittlich, since you were working with Pershing Missiles, did you by any chance happen to be stationed in Schwaebisch Gmuend in Germany? If so, I am currently living in your former base. This was a US army base for Pershing Missiles. It has now been converted to an overseas campus of the University of Maryland University College.

Well, it IS a small world after all! To answer your question, yes I was stationed in Schwaebisch Gmuend from 1985 - 1988. I worked in the G-2 (Intelligence) Staff of the 56th FA (Pershing) Command. Talk about a small post...and right in the middle of town! From 1980-1883 I was stationed in Neckarsulm (Heilbronn) at another Pershing unit - this one was at the Battalion level.

Well, it's nice to hear that the government put the installation in Sch. Gmd. to good use!

[wittlich]

Darkknight, I went ahead and added you to my ICQ

[This message has been edited by wittlich (edited March 07, 2001).]

[quinns]

Some answers:

Dark Knight -- Sorry no, I haven't received any of your emails ... please send to quinn2084@yahoo.com . (My Apolyton profile won't allow the yahoo.com address so I put "yaahoo.com" in it instead ... this might be the problem.)

And the bucky ball regions will definitely be flat, not bulged. I have a rough sketched Visio picture of the bucky ball laid flat if that helps anyone. Just let me know and I'll send you a copy.

Yes, the economic, military, and mapping models will be quite different than any of the existing games that I have ever seen. Much simpler. I believe that we should keep the first game as simple, clear, yet true to reality, as possible. We'll let the players come up with the complex strategies on their own, (rather than allowing "strategy" to be defined as: "whoever knows the best secrets of the game", which happens in many modern computer games.)

Roman -- As far as the "scale" and map being inaccurate. All of the Civ games already have gross inaccuracies regarding reality. Look at the "city radius" on all the games. On the average, most civ games are about 100 squares around the world. That means each square is about 250 miles across. So a "city radius" is about 1250 miles in diameter (or 1.2 million square miles). That's about the size of the entire southwest region of the United States, including California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico! That's a big city!! And what terrain type should each of the square tiles have in that case? A 250 mile square tile represents 62000 square miles of land. There can be lots of mountains, forests, rivers, deserts, and grasslands in 62000 square miles!

My point, is that I think we should move away from exact terrain types in our new game, (even though the Civilization games sure look pretty with all those nice terrain features!). Our representation is even more grand than Civilization. Our Earth has about 200,000,000 square miles on it's surface. Divide that by 52 gives us about 3 to 4 million square miles per bucky ball region. We definitely need to represent this huge discrete region more generally than with mountains, forests, rivers, etc.

Comments welcome of course!

(And we are still looking for more recruits for this new game company -- even it only means you can contribute one hour per YEAR, we would still like to have you on board! We already have about 7 team members so far. Please post here if you are interested in becoming part of this team.)


[This message has been edited by quinns (edited March 07, 2001).]

[Darkknight]

And there was me thinking i could make some nice 3D hills and mountains
If your not going to have much terrain graphics in it what will you be concentrating on? Just want to know.Got your mail wittlich

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" Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few "

[quinns]

Well Dark Knight, sorry to disappoint you. But the Earth, itself, is a beautiful graphics subject! Even though the terrain won't be used "directly" for game play, we can still draw the 3-D version of each of the 52 regions of the Earth. Imagine a 1800 mile (or 3000 kilometer) wide stretch of land covering a section of your favorite area of the Earth. Now picture it in exagerated 3-D but placed inside of a flat hexagon or pentagon. (Two-thirds of the the Earth tiles will be just pure ocean with a few islands dotted into some of them.)

If you don't want to use Earth as your pilot model, but would rather use your pure imagination, that's fine. We will try to incorporate about 50 to 100 of our nearest star systems into the first game. Visually make up a world in your mind that is orbiting one of these distant stars, (it's what they did in Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri!). There's no one that can say that you are inaccurate about it! (Not in our lifetime anyway )

[Ribannah]

Wouldn't it be possible to use only hexagons - by approximation?
There is no effect on gameplay if there is some distortion (slightly different angles etc), because all that is relevant for gameplay is
[1] what's on my hexagon
[2] which hexagons are my neighbours
which can for all regions be represented with a standardized, perfect group of 7 hexagons.
The distortion is only relevant for the 3D-representation of the world.

Allowing for approximations, the total number of regions could also be much larger than 52.

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If you have no feet, don't walk on fire

[quinns]

Yes Ribannah, we could do that. There are already some pretty good models out there that use a strict hexagon represention. (I remember that the role playing game series Traveler used to do this hexagonal representation of worlds, back in the early 1980's.) But for some reason, I just don't like it. I wish I could say exactly why. Too many years in programming probably. Every time I didn't use EXACT rules to model something, it came back to bite me in the long run. The geometry of the bucky ball is perfect. I know that the programmers are going to have a real rough time with this 3D depiction of the sphere, so the more exact and discrete we can make it, the better.

Thanks for your input Ribannah!

[This message has been edited by quinns (edited March 07, 2001).]

[Ken Hinds]

quote: Originally posted by quinns on 03-02-2001 01:00 PM -- Time Span: From the First Appearance of Mankind on Earth to About the 25th Century A.D [This message has been edited by quinns (edited March 02, 2001).]

Quinns, I've been slowly, very slowly, working on a CIV II scenario along a similar time frame; however, mine would end just about the time that Kulls "Seeds of Greatness" begins. Most of my programming experience is on machines much larger than PC's and with older languages such as COBOL. PASCAL and FORTH are about the newest languages that I've used. I probably couldn't be much coding help, but could probably do historical background research, if you're interested.

Ken

[This message has been edited by Ken Hinds (edited March 07, 2001).]

[quinns]

Hello Ken!

We sure could use your programming skills here, even though you might think they are out of date. (I don't think that's true, by the way. Good programming skills are similar in all languages. I know COBOL, PASCAL, RPG, JAVASCRIPT, PERL, BASIC, FORTRAN, PL/SQL, and I'm trying to learn JAVA now... and they are all really pretty similar once you learn the syntax and calling routine formats. My experience is also with the big machines, and not with the gaming world, unfortunately.) Even if you opt not to join in the programming, we could still use your historical expertise. Read the above section on compensation. If you agree with how we divide up the royalties once the game releases... you are welcome to join us!

I'm really leaning towards writing this entire game in JAVA. I like the browser based design concept, rather than writing a separate version of the game for each specific platform. How do the rest of you feel about this? Especially you Dark Knight... Can your graphics be incorporated well with JAVA?