PeterDragon Posted October 8, 2002 Report Share Posted October 8, 2002 Ok, you wonder how could we make it so that multiplayer would work?I have a few thoughts, but most likely I'll forget some. Well, one thing is allow for the geoscape to still advance at some speed while people are on the ground, including the one on the ground. This would force people to more quickly try and finish the missions. (Possible 5 sec, or 1... ) Allow for multiple people to land at mission sites, crash sites would last a certain time unless there was someone on the ground after the time expired. This would allow for someone landing then taking off intentionally to destroy the ufo with out the other person getting a chance. ... and like I said, I forget the rest. So I am sure there are other ideas. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gangsta Posted October 8, 2002 Report Share Posted October 8, 2002 Well the geoscope probably will have to go at real time instead of having options to make time go by fast. UFOs might come out more frequently to address this. Players probably would spend more time fighting each other. Not a very united earth front more like each government out for it's own good. like a mentioned in a previous post there should be ops to kick off sleeping players during combat. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest stewart Posted October 8, 2002 Report Share Posted October 8, 2002 It's not a problem. Once a ground battle has started, time stops. Non-participating soldiers (say, guys on a different skyranger) can watch the "hot" battle; picking up the telemetry from the active soldiers helmet cams. In the "real" world this would likely be the case anyway. And this solves a lot of programming problems. For game balance purposes I would only allow one alien and one earthling squad in a battle at a time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gangsta Posted October 9, 2002 Report Share Posted October 9, 2002 I disagree that is a problem. X-Com battles can seem to take an hour sometimes. I think it would be too boring to watch other people play for any long periods of time. In fact, I have played several games in the past that annoyed me because after I got killed I was forced to watch a battle that never seems to end. I'm not much for twiddling my thumbs and being forced to watch something. I think whenever a skyranger lands at a crash site or the like the server should spawn a new thread. hopefully the game will run on a dedicated server like MUDs are. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest stewart Posted October 9, 2002 Report Share Posted October 9, 2002 It's gonna be a lot more headaches and work because people don't want to just get up and go to the fridge. XCOM battles take long now because one actual person is controlling tons of guys on battlescapes any where from 16 to 36 squares in size. Long battles are pretty rare and with many actual people on the teams they won't take that long at all. How long would a battle in XCOM now take if you had one guy facing one alien on a map two squares in size, what?, five turns, maybe. It would be easier to do it this way. We can for now and then improved versions can get fancy. If we go nuts with ideas here this thing is just not going to happen. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gangsta Posted October 9, 2002 Report Share Posted October 9, 2002 Well it won't be that big of a deal if we design this thing right from the start. What's most important in the X-Com game? The battle part. So obviously this should be made first before geo thing and all that other stuff is then. If designed right the geoscope can launch the battle code in a thread whenever the skyrangers land. Dunno if the player should only be able to play one character because there can be times when there is one player online and all other's are idle. Either way if you design it so that the geoscope disapears and a battle happens on everyone screen as soon as some player lands it will be harder to change it later on. Whereas if you write the battle code first and then write the geoscope server that spawns battles on the appropriate players screen things should run alot smother. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Timil Posted October 9, 2002 Report Share Posted October 9, 2002 The only good multiplayer strategy and tactical game I know are turn based.. and why not? Make a game with 2 tick per RL day of 1 hour ingame. So a full day will take 12 RL days to finish. People would give order to a game client, and before each tick, the game server would collect the data and process them. If you have a battle to do, you will connect to the server and play it. So nobody will wait for the other player who are playing a battle. I know it's not what XCOM is like, but it will help! Personnaly I found battle to be the lease interesting part of the game.. I love to research and develop my bases! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest stewart Posted October 9, 2002 Report Share Posted October 9, 2002 Dismissing issues by saying "well just doit right from the start" is easier said than done. If we pile on the problems, the thing will get harder and harder to do and take more and more work. No of us is being paid to do this, so the likelyhood of people just saying "ah screw it" goes up. Let's try to get normal XCOM working first then deal with fancy stuff later. Our first goal is NOT multiplayer, our first goal is to get a set of source-code that builds into a core game (on one platform is an easier goal than that). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Timil Posted October 9, 2002 Report Share Posted October 9, 2002 It's now easier with object based language to change a program than it was before with previous language.. so why not cloning the game like you want, next step will be to create an improved version. To create a game need a lot of analysis.. and not many people love to take the time to write stuff down before doing the real thing! So lets do the clone first, it's far easier to clone than to create (but not necessary a really easy task) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest stewart Posted October 9, 2002 Report Share Posted October 9, 2002 Yeah exactly. Simple easy steps. I would really like to get XCOM 1 and 2 decompiled and translated into human readable form. Then combined taking the best of each. Then decide how to proceed from there. Besides by going in small steps goals are more easily reached and reachable. It's the meeting of these goals, I think, that will keep people interested. But if we pile on a bunch of hard goal right away at the start. Sure we'll all start banging away at it, at first. But even game companies who are paying people, and making them do tons of overtime, take a long time to meet the goals. In this case the multiple "big" goals won't be met in a satisfying amount of time so soon you'll hear people saying things like "gee guys I can't work on this right now, my grades have been dropping"; and then soon it all falls apart. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Timil Posted October 9, 2002 Report Share Posted October 9, 2002 I experienced it ... I think that's easier to build a skeletton of the game from our experience of it than to decompile the game (into Assembly, what else?) and try to understand it: It's less chalenging than to re-create something already existing. This is my personal view and I will not try to change anything in your project, I just want to be part of it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest stewart Posted October 9, 2002 Report Share Posted October 9, 2002 You maybe right, but it might be worth it to at least try the decompiled approach for a little while. With a bunch of eyes on it. The code might yield quicker than expected. Certainly if we had a translated decompiled version that builds correctly and had one say even within as long as six months. I think we'd be in good shape. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gangsta Posted October 9, 2002 Report Share Posted October 9, 2002 decompiling the source could cause the project unwanted legal problems. The combat portion of X-Com seems pretty straight forward and really isn't X-Com specific either. Heck the creators probably spent years buying paper and pencil stratagy and RPG games and playing them. I mean that what xcom really is modified for the computer with a gescope added. It's not really an original idea. As for the multiplayer thing that shouldn't be to hard to do since the game is turn based and not real time. The server could behave just like the original code just changing players at the right turns. Fact it would be easier to first make the multiplayer part of the game. We already have a pretty good idea on how to do everything combat wise (at least I do). Then we can add the aliens with the AI. After that it will be pretty easy to make the geoscope with the bases and all. Either way only the geoscope portion of the game really is X-Com specific. everything else is just a matter of changing weapons, characters and forth to make a diffrent game. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest stewart Posted October 10, 2002 Report Share Posted October 10, 2002 I'm not overly concerned about legalities for a few reasons.* If only the few people working on this end up with a copy (we don't actively promote or distribute the thing) then the owners aren't likely to care.* Assuming decompiling will work, and I realize this is a big IF, that would only be a starting point. The code would evolve into "origninal" code. The thing is only legally "bad" once it's done and actively being distributed (assuming mostly copied code and use of the name XCOM). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gangsta Posted October 10, 2002 Report Share Posted October 10, 2002 Well I have a question. Are we going to just use the original X-Com tiles like UFO2000 does or are we going to do X-Com in 3D. 3rd person 3D seems like a logical step of evolution. like how GTA moved from 2D to 3rd person 3D Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest stewart Posted October 11, 2002 Report Share Posted October 11, 2002 I think to start and certainly while it's in-house we'll probably be using borrowed artwork. It would be a cute option to walk around in the original XCOM evirons (cheesy graphics and all) as seen in first person. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gangsta Posted October 11, 2002 Report Share Posted October 11, 2002 I'll do that if that is what everybody else wants to do. I still prefer the idea of working on a 3D engine. Seems alot easier doing a 3D game with a real 3D interface rather than converting 3D to 2D like X-Com does. I really like the idea now that I've seen the Crystal Space 3D engine. Have you looked at the screenshot of it for the isometric engine part? maybe we could use tiles from the game with it. I might be able to do something with gimp. Crystal Space really looks interesting. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gangsta Posted October 11, 2002 Report Share Posted October 11, 2002 Oh btw if you want to do a 2D tile game like UFO2000 the source code for that is on sourceforge. just do a search for it. I remeber looking at the source about a year ago or two. It was C++ but I really didn't like the OOD the author chose. For the shooting part it was really incomplete with a comment about how it should be fixed. I think if we design a game we should have the OOD be a bit more logical. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest stewart Posted October 11, 2002 Report Share Posted October 11, 2002 Hey I don't know if you realize but you can use the edit button to add to your last post. It makes things cleaner that way. Anywhodle, I guess in this case we'd be converting 2D graphics to 3D though, wouldn't you say. I just think it would be fun to have the option to run around in the familiar XCOM battlescapes as seen in first person. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gangsta Posted October 11, 2002 Report Share Posted October 11, 2002 If you do a 3d engine would always be easy to change views. could even have a 2d asciii rep of the view if you want. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest stewart Posted October 11, 2002 Report Share Posted October 11, 2002 Well it's really just changing the "skins" of the environment rather than the player. Did you ever try ascii Quake? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gangsta Posted October 11, 2002 Report Share Posted October 11, 2002 Yes I've seen ascii quake and ascii doom. kind of crazy but at a really hires screen it is even playable. I used was good at making ascii and ansi fonts back in the BBS days. Love old school ascii style fonts. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest stewart Posted October 11, 2002 Report Share Posted October 11, 2002 I've only heard of it but never seen it running. It must be like those 3D drawings where it takes a while to "see" it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gangsta Posted October 11, 2002 Report Share Posted October 11, 2002 It's like those ascii drawings of faces that were popular in the 80 and made with dot matrix printers (hmmm prolly daisy wheel too). An episode of X Files had something like it. With a real high res. you don't have problems seeing anything. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest stewart Posted October 11, 2002 Report Share Posted October 11, 2002 Has anyone made any animations of it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gangsta Posted October 11, 2002 Report Share Posted October 11, 2002 it is called aalib or ascii art lib. It's an open source library that you can use as any other screen library. like games on linux that support the svgalib many times also have aalib support. UAE the amiga emulator has aalib support. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest stewart Posted October 11, 2002 Report Share Posted October 11, 2002 No I meant animations or samples of play in ascii Doom or Quake. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gangsta Posted October 11, 2002 Report Share Posted October 11, 2002 I only remeber seeing a screenshot. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest stewart Posted October 11, 2002 Report Share Posted October 11, 2002 Can you post that? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gangsta Posted October 12, 2002 Report Share Posted October 12, 2002 Not really was one of those slashdot stories that interested me enough to follow the links a long while back. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest stewart Posted October 12, 2002 Report Share Posted October 12, 2002 C'est domage. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Please sign in to comment
You will be able to leave a comment after signing in
Sign In Now