*!* Guide to current design status of Clash of Civilizations - comments anyone? *!*

[Mark_Everson]

Guide to the current design status of The Clash of Civilizations

Comments and criticism welcome

[Severely edited 5/13/00, since this had gotten Way out of date]


Welcome to the Clash of Civilizations project. For a Broad overview of Clash and the Clash Project see the Clash Web Page.

As of now, relatively little of the information for the project is in finalized form. However, we are quite far along in specifying high-level models in areas like: the Military; Economy; Government; Technology... We have also made some progress on the Main Interface; Map, Unit, and other Artwork; Culture; Customization; Diplomacy; and AI. Most of the better-developed areas have HTML documents on the web page that outline the main thrust in that. Some of these docs go down to a fairly detailed level. You'll find links to the threads that hold these docs, and the subsequent discussion about them, on the web page. In addition, the Apolyton forums have excellent search capability. If you'd like to know about some area that's not indicated on the web site, just click on the search link near the upper right of the main Clash forum page.


If you're a visitor, feel free to critique any area of interest you. We need Everyone's brainpower working here on evaluation of these models.  Are they too complicated?  Too hard to make an interface for?  Just plain Boring?  Great?...  Because we have already locked in the broad nature of the each game element, comments or criticisms are somewhat more valuable at the level of the details within these models. Note that many of the dukes (coordinators in charge of various areas) have had an increasing number of Real Life commitments over the last few months or so. Many of the discussions just stop at that point. However, your suggestions will still be of value when the final summaries are written up. Please put your suggestions for these areas In The Threads Themselves so that we keep some order in the discussion. So, let us have it .

Demos
What we're looking for out of the demos, is to allow people to test out many of the innovative features in Clash before development gets too far. This should allow us to identify "Turkey" aspects of our current design, and come up with something new to replace them. The latest demo, and a description of the feedback we're looking for on it, can always be found on the web page.


Tell us what you think... And as usual if there's something I need to put up here that I've missed, let me know.


-Mark


[This message has been edited by Mark_Everson (edited May 14, 2000).]

[Seeker]

What format (s) do you want possible artwork (s) to be in? Is there a prefered program?

[Mark_Everson]

Seeker:

Thanks for your interest. We are somewhat behind on things other than the map stuff which is in the post at top. 16-bit tiffs are probably a good choice for everything. I wrote Paul Crocker and asked him to start up a thread for this since I'm completely unqualified to decide such things. If you don't see the an answer you are happy with soon, bug me! We Really need graphical artists. If you have suggestions you'd like to make for the standards check in frequently, and we'll try to hammer them out asap. BTW what sort of thing were you thinking of contributing to?

BTW we also need art for a sexier web page...

Thanks for the query...

Mark

[Sten Sture]

Just wanted to post a "Good Luck" and hope everything is coming along as you (& Civ Fans) would like.

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Sten Sture:

Well, Its not coming along as Fast as we'd like, but I'm fairly satisfied that When it comes out Clash will be a lot of Fun. Not being a professional product has its advantages. We can take the time to back up and get things right, rather than always having the monster deadline looming.

[Yakopepper]

Hi Mark

I have both CivII and Civ CTP and I greatly enjoyed CivII, but I played Civ CTP twice and I'll get to the reasons later. And when I heard you wanted gammers input, I had to mention two very important areas that where greatly overlooked in CivII.

Ive read all the ideas on the civIII forums, and Id think these ideas will make a great game(I hope its will be clash!).

I play CivII much more because CTP animations made the game drag and the game atmosphere sucked and therefore I played twice and not since! It wasnt appealing. There was a poll on Apolyton (Im sure you've seen it) about buety or speed and ease and I think you got the idea of what the people want. What made CivII so great was the simplicity of the gameplay. I dont want a game that slows down in the later stages because of graphics and animations.

REVOLUTIONS AND CIVIL WARS!!! You've got to have these. And I dont mean revolutions to change governments. I mean like the American revolution where a group of cities wanted independence and (might, not always) have to fight for it. And a new civ should become of it. No barbarian cities! I realy dont know which category this would fit in so I just put it right here and maybe you could figure it out.

Thanks
Daniel

[Mark_Everson]

Hey Daniel:

We have both your items covered.

The graphics will be relatively simple, and look as great as we can manage.

Revolutions and civil wars will be handled in detail. Check out the Government and Social models. We'd like to hear what you think about our approaches to this issue.

If everyone would just comment about our approaches to the few things that are of most importance to them we'll get a lot of good constructive feedback to improve our models, and maybe some great new ideas too...

[Yakopepper]

First I did a little reading on the progress of the game and so far it looks to be great. I have to say, the way things are shaping up I may be getting Clash instead of CivIII because CivIII(I have a feeling) wont venture too far from its base(a la civ2.5)I was wondering if you could answer a question for me about the game. CivII was approx. 400 turns, about how many turns does clash intend to be? Or am I asking a question prematurly(If so sorry)? I hated the fact that I would fly through antiquity in 10-15minutes and not do much interaction with another civ.

Thanks
Daniel

[Mark_Everson]

Well, number of turns is TBD, but right now I start at 1000BC and go at 1 turn/yr! The reason I can do that is that the AI is pretty good (for what it has to do so far), and you can just turn your civ over to it for moderate periods of time. Say I have an enemy crushed but its not quite done. Then I turn it over to the AI for the mopping-up operation. Of course things ain't perfect yet and the version we have now is Very simple, so you can fly thru at 1 sec/turn when not doing anything. It will probably be more like 10-20s for a minimum turn in the release version.

In the final release I imagine we could leave the player in charge of the years-per-turn profile as the game progresses. So someone who wants to get to modern stuff asap would compress the ancient and medieval stuff, and someone like you could leave it as is, or even lengthen the turns for the ancient period.

[Yakopepper]

Ohhh, great!
The games gettting better by the minute!

Daniel
[This message has been edited by Yakopepper (edited October 10, 1999).]
[This message has been edited by Yakopepper (edited October 10, 1999).]

[Richard Bruns]

I think we should revive and update this old thread for the following purposes:

1) Provide a place for people to post updates on the status of their models.

2) Provide a place for people to ask general questions and make general comments about Clash.

I'll start:

Technology:
The equations for turning RP into tech levels have been finalized and the tech tree generation utility is currently being coded. I have a rough draft of the technologies themselves and will put them into the tech tree generator when it is finished. This will take a couple weeks, at least, and I can't start until the utility is coded. Interface issues and the exact process of RP generation have not yet been decided upon. Also, we have to work on a system of tags that will allow the AI to deal with technology.

Ecology: This is still in the planning stage. I have a rough draft, and would like to get more input on it.

[Mark_Everson]

I have been mostly working on technical details for the economics model. My focus for the near-term is to get the new economics coder, Laurent, set up with the model details he needs to do the demo 5 implementation. I'll post some of the technical issues I've been working on as soon as possible, since some of them enter into gameplay and interface issues, and I would like to hear people's thoughts about them.

Coincidentally, I contacted a couple of the model leads yesterday asking what was going on in their areas. Rodrigo hoped to have something soon on the government model. He is also doing the social model now since TK didn't expect to have the time to work on it in the near future. (And also there is a lot of interaction between the government and social models). I also bugged Harli on the status of the military model, but haven't heard back yet. Darren is going to be focusing on interface coding as soon as he gets the diplomacy package neatened up enough to pass on to the new diplomacy coder, Leandro. Hopefully everyone I have mentioned will check in at this thread and give you their own more detailed version on what they are doing.

My focus for the near and intermediate term is on demo 5. So if an issue doesn't have much to do with the main demo 5 areas (Military, Economics, Technology, Diplomacy, and Interfaces) I'm going to try to stay out of it... My apologies to those working in the other areas, but I think I have to push the demo above everything else.

[Lord God Jinnai]

Technologies:

Basically as rich said, were waiting for the tech insetion program to be finished, once its done we'll be putting our current techs we have down in there.

Characters:

At pretty much a standstill and will probably be that way till most other models are done.

Wonders and Achievements:

Currently at a standstill. Don't know what Chris has to say since I haven't heard from him in a while, well since I posted the current model.

[LOGO]

How long would puting the techs in the utility take? If it's a very tedius yet simple operation then I'd be happy to help out, although I'm no coder

[Richard Bruns]

LOGO: Thanks for the offer. Unfortunately, you probably won't be able to do the initial entry work because e-mailing the stuff to you in a format you could work with would take as much effort as entering the stuff myself. You could still proofread the final work and make suggestions, however.