Free Orion

[Impaler[WrG]]

Just incase their was anyone who haddent heard about us.

FreeOrion is an Opensource project to create a Moo style 4x Space Opera game to fill the gaping hole left by the failure of MooIII. We have a V0.2 out right now that has just a few basics like population growth/colonization/auto-resolved combat. Were currently working on V0.3 which will involve buildings and Production Meters a bit like thouse in SMAC.

Drop on by and check us out at www.freeorion.org were still brainstorming on many aspects of the game and would like your input.

[P-K]

Noone of u guys didnt wanted to listen some truth about real moo game. U kicked me out twice. Good luck on ur own ground!

PK

[siron]

IIRC they decided to pool the PPs of the empires....

(the idea sounds crazy for me...even crazier than the mob center idea...absolutely anti-moo...)

...so i lost interest in that project.....

[Croesus]

Maybe pooling together the system PP's to make ships, but empire sounds silly.

Sure modern days it takes a few cities to build a ship, so aren't planets your new cities?

[siron]

Yes. Pooling system PPs would make sense.

[Brutalisk]

What exactly happened PK?

[Straybow]

Interesting.

[Fusion Rifle]

I jumped with joy when I first heard about Free Orion, however two things made me disappointed. First, the game will use "starlanes", like in MOO III. I absolutely hate that idea. Since the intention was to make a MOO II like game, it also baffles me.
Secondly, it says in its concept statement that realism will play no role at all in designing the game, rather realism might be a reason not to include a given feature. "This is space opera". Well, no one demands perfect realism, or even near realism (depending on how you define it), but a game like this I think should be able to convey a basic sense or impression of scientific validity, all the same. As for MOO that also means packaging it in a lighthearted and witty way. MOO II largelly manages to do this, although it could be improved a lot, with absolutely no loss of gameplay, in my opinion.

That is why I lost interest in the project. I do wish the guys working on it good luck, though.

PS: This is my first post here. May I ask, what is "PP"?

Edit: Oh, never mind. Production points, right? Yeah, pooling that would be daft. Space is big.

[iamafrogok]

I have recently started on an orion project by my self. I'm aiming to generally stick to the original moo, whilst incorperating aditional features (NOT starlanes!!!! oh for the love of god no star lanes"").


Most onf the entire game will be written in LUA with c++/directx for the UI and fancy crap. Basically MOO in 3D goodness. It should be relatively easy to have super nice 3D model ships too, although I would be enforcing turn based combat.


I'll soon have basic star/planet generation up and running. Hopefully soon planet management


The game will be Closed source so I can have complete content mangement and control although a pleathora of scripts are available to edit even now, such as planetary names, universe size etc all from text files !!!! Hopefully I can extend this to the UI, so you can have message boxes where you want them (although this will be a muh later implementation)

[Zoetrope]

frog,

What's LUA?

Why narrow your target to ms-windows by using proprietary directx rather than portable OpenGL?

Have you seen Java MOO? If you've already surpassed its progress, congratulations.

#3 most wanted enhancement over moo1: no limit on number of ship types.

#2 most wanted: some years ago on a forgotten forum, a poster's comment about random seeding got me thinking: a starmap can be generated as it is explored. Its extent can grow, and its planetary systems can be detailed, dynamically. This appeals to me because one of the most interesting aspects of strategy games is the exploration phase, and i'd like that never to end.

#1 most wanted: enjoyable diplomacy! alliances must mean loyalty and wartime cooperation. MOO2 and MOO3 allies are hopeless, and the messages are worse. In SMAC/X the diplomatic exchanges give valuable feedback, and i've often had game-long alliances with an AI player. (Unfortunately, the Civ2/SMAC AI is pathetic at coordinating attacks: probably because the Civ games had no concept of collectives of units to correspond to MOO fleets.)

#4: place fleets anywhere on the map, not only at stars.

#5: "fog of war" that affects diplomacy as well as fleet operations, so that communications requires one of two methods:

(1) communication beacons (placed anywhere you can send them; planet-based colonies and outposts should have these automatically). Beacons would relay info over a range dependent on their technology; you'd need a chain of beacons to convey info over longer distances. Ideally beacons should be hard for enemies to find, so cloaking them would be a tech priority; as would encoding their transmissions.

(2) delayed information (such as outdated scans, and slow diplomatic ommunications) could be conveyed by ships. Once a ship got within range of a beacon, its communications would be relayed instantly.

[iamafrogok]

LUA is a scripting language so lets see how you like what I'm doing with it

firstly you know how young blue stars have hostile rich planets? you can change that by yourself from a text file.

want there to be more than 0-6 planets in a system? no problem with my program you can edit a file from notepad and make it 0-25 , or 3-6 whatever you fancy.

want to make the game arean HUGE, no problem edit it via a script, want to create a new race and add it to the game! no problem, open up race.lua and add in a race (as long as you follow the race constraints)

what to change the value of a pick no problem.


As for fleet sizes there will ALWAYS be a limit it's the nature of computers but a long unsigned integer will provide a stupid number of ships



As for the random seeding and growing. well it will be random but dynamically growing that's not really going to happen. I mean it CAN happen but I would consider it a big fat last on my list.,


diplomacy and alliances are finiky in all honestly I'm not sure on how it will work really, possible based upon a civilizaton black mark system? I haven't even looked at this yet


Placing fleets anywhere ... why? No I feel that that's too unrestrictive and would upset the gameplay balance, I can't see any need.


Fog of war... well I have considered something that I can hopefully implement, I'd call it fog of time. YOur empire size distanse from central government and tech level + infrastructure will dictate how long it takes to see an event.


For example some attacks your homeworld you have full control of your fleet .

another, you've created a colony a long distance away your technology is low and you have made a colony uplink, if the colony is attacked it may take several turns for you to recieve any information.

The last example tries to restrict expansion to an extent and stop mega fleets

also why directx well it's not as bad as it sounds

DIrectx will mainly be responcible for the graphics nice 3d models and such. THe entire game itself will be in LUA a scripting language cross compatible so an opengl graphical interface can be made.


Also I'm learning directx and lua to get a job in the games industry.


As of yet tehre are NO graphics at all, I have just gotten the planet/star/universe creation working, I now need to add in growth product research for planets and planetary infrastructure.

[Zoetrope]

Your design approach is appealing. Editable scripts are the way to go if they are executed quickly enough: every game needs modifiability, if only to balance it before release.

Fog of Time is how our Einsteinian universe operates, though it seems most games designers prefer the Newtonian model of instantaneity for simplicity, and I suppose most players are used to seeing and acting immediately and may at first be discomfited by the sense of helplessness when they realise that remote fleets are not where they see them and remote colonies are not in the state they perceive.

You've explained that Fog of Time means delays on the downlinks (incoming information); what about delays on the uplinks (commands)? If so, how will players who've just discovered that a colony was attacked some time ago, then cope with having to wait before their commands reach the colony? (Even with instantaneous commands, there will be a delay before they learn the effect of their commands, so I suppose it will matter little to them whether the delay is on the uplink, downlink or both; what matters is how long the round-trip delay is.)

Since an empire won't know it's been attacked until an enemy fleet has left for other destinations, I think this will _encourage_ devastating sneak attacks. For, if empire A is, for whatever reason (geographic, technological, natural, informational, or temperamental), in an advantageous position, where it can strike many of empire B's colonies, but B cannot retaliate as extensively, then A can build a huge fleet to strike B at arbitrarily chosen colonies most of which must be lightly defended no matter how B's forces are distributed. How will B know where to defend? Or how will B strike back in time to redress the developing material imbalance?

So I can see that Fog of Time would inhibit expansion, as a forward base would easily fall into enemy hands unless one concentrated all one's forces there. FoT would inhibit already cautious players from building big fleets, as they'd to defend everywhere at all times, but that would probably be futile as the more aggressive players will build Mega Fleets to crush all opposition at one or several unsuspecting colonies each time.


If Mega Fleets are to be discouraged, then sneak attacks must be made harder, the more powerful the fleet is.

MOO2 detects larger ships at greater ranges, but what's needed is to detect fleets at ranges proportional to total fleet mass.

Technologically advanced weapons are more powerful, but that often means their energy sources are greater. It's justifiable therefore to make these visible at greater ranges. Likewise faster engines would be "brighter".

Thus a small, low-tech fleet could raid an advanced power. Mighty "slap-down" fleets should be spotted a hundred parsecs away: if big enough, you should be able to see it in the drydock at the shipyards of the enemy's homeworld from across the galaxy! All its movements would be "open misere", as opposed to the "poker hand" of smaller forces.

The effect of Cloaking techs should be to increase detection ranges by some factor, but smaller ships should be much easier to cloak than large ones. For example, a Doom Star loaded with Stellar Converters, whether cloaked or not, should be detectable at great ranges by its gravitational effects alone.

Whereas a tiny probe vessel, the size of Sputnik 1 or perhaps even microscopic, should be hard to spot at interstellar range even uncloaked ("which speck of galactic dust is it?"), and easy to conceal at very short (perhaps even tactical) ranges with primitive cloak tech.


On another topic: in MOO2, ship ranges are measured from colonies and outposts. But how do the colonies keep in touch? The player-emperor has no known address, and complete knowledge of all his/her colonies everywhere. I think empires get in contact when the regions their military ships can reach either touch or overlap.

Surely the capitol world is the logical residence of the ruler. When the empire is far-flung, its further colonies will be far more than a ship range from the homeworld. When an enemy captures or destroys colonies in between, the empire will be split into regions, each of which is out of range of the others.

It's logical then that the emperor should not be able to communicate with the colonies that are out of his/her reach. In such circumstances, an AI should administer those colonies. When contact is resumed, the emperor can resume control.

If contact is lost for a long time, there will be a chance that the Provincial Governor AI may become the accustomed ruler of an independent empire, and the lost province may take some persuading (diplomatic, or if that fails, military) to return to the fold.