My RTS (1 Viewer)

[Mithoric]

So I'm creating an RTS as some of you have already seen. You people can help me ...

1. What period should it be set in?
2. I need a name for it, it's temporarily called conquest.
3. What sides should it have in it countries/races?

Any other ideas and stuff you can suggest if ya want... And yes all of you can beta if you want .. It's planned to be free download from my site atm. But if I end up trying to sell it you can have free copies ..

I've done quite a bit of work on it, so far it can load maps and models, draw maps and models and the gui for menus and stuff. which is what I'm building now.

Here is the current pic of the moment --
http://mhtml.ithium.net/conquest/cq3.jpg

It shows the main menu which is now completed. . . working on the settings menu now, will move onto the single and multiplayer ones tomorrow in my free.

Any suggestions on the interface are appriciated. I know the metal needs scratches and the rust needs work, but that is just something I whipped up quick ...

 

[Collin]

Everyone behold Mithoric's game constructing skills.

At the moment.. don't really have any suggestions. I think that I would have to play an beta first to be able to really comprehend properly if there were any flaws/suggestions needed.

 

[Mithoric]

I am going to apply for early entry into Comp Sci for UOW, can I like include this in my folio?? Would that give much sway?

 

[Merforga]

I guess it would. Especially if it is very successful. I like my rts' set in the futuristic space genre. The style of game play i like is similar to RTS where the games are ussually nice and short unlike RTS games like AOE where its very hard to rush. As to races and countries.....hmm.....youd probably go for the generic "different races have different units sorta thing". But i spose thats all you can really do based on different races. An idea i sorta had when i wanted to make games was that each race needed more of one resource to construct its units as another race. This would mean that holding different resource piles would be more crucial. Another thing i saw in a game that i played was that the races they had were completely different. LIke the aliens evolved from their normal form to become stronger. They could evolve into anything they want but the main thing was that they needed to have been in the game for a long time for them to be able to be able to morph into stronger units whereas the humans are the generic build and tech up. Hmm im sorta rambling here.,..i'll shut up now lol. Good luck in your game and I hope your beta comes out soon!

 

[Mithoric]

Cool ideas! I especially like the resources idea, very cool ... it's supposed to be about strategy so I'm' going to include that for sure.

 

[Mithoric]

Well I've been working extra hard and seeing as we are in our last week before holidays the teachers are giving up a little bit more slack so I've had more time to put into the RTS.

So far I've rewritten the game engine 3 times and you know what they say, third time's a charm! The latest engine in it's current revision (0.3) is generating 1200+ @ 1680x1050 FPS without anything in the scene (ie; black screen) and 800+ with a map being rendered...not to shabby ..

It now supports audio and freetype antialised fonts (yay!) as well as mutliformat texture loading, zlib handling and raw format model loading.. Coming along very nicely indeed seeing as my game skills were pretty rusty a week ago. I should have new screenies this weekend if not sooner ... showing of my nice terrain renderer which will be completed .. I'm hoping that I'll have an alpha demo within 1.5 weeks.

 

[dakz0rz]

screw building your own engine.... use Torque with Shader pack

 

[Merforga]

I really like games where you can create your own units. you should be given a set amount of points to use on different tech level units and then depending on what you choose will effect their resource cost as well. So you can have a small weeny weak unit to start off with or a relatively stronger creature at the same tech level which costs more. If anyone has played shattered galaxy then I'm sorta steering towards that except more customisability ^^

 

[dakz0rz]

What sort of RTS are you trying to build?
A faster pace one or a slower pace one?

 

[sammeh]

make any races u have vastly disparate with totally different styles. i am one gamer who is sick of race a = race b except for some minute differences. balance in this case will be very difficult, but with extensive playtesting you should have no difficulties. thats my one rts oriented comment.

engine sounds good. coding one from scratch is a pretty big job, if you add to it doing artwork/graphics + interfacing + network protocol + etc etc - are you doing the whole thing on your own? if so it'd look great in a uni folio, and gl2u.

 

[Mithoric]

Yeah I've made the whole engine myself ...

 

[Mithoric]

I'm not quite sure about the pace of the game yet I'm still really focussing on the engine ... however it won't take much to alter the pace of it, just edit the data files for the units to change resource expenditure and speeds, health and damage etc ..

I've just decided that I'm going to go a little bit different to common RTS games such as starcraft, aoe series and ta which all use a combination of iso-, di-, tri- metric and sqaure tiles.. I'm going to use voxel terrain rendering .. what's voxel terrain rendering you ask? ...

Of course it will have a different viewing angle than those images for most of the game but seeing as I'm making it 3d instead of 2d I might have the option of free rotation and zoom levels. Should look wicked me thinks.. I've never rendered terrain before so it'll be interesting to see how I go. I'll release a free movement demo of it when I finish it (hopefully tonight) so you can have a look at my pretty engine ..

 

[Collin]

Is it just me, or should Mithoric be in a $50,000+ salary programmer job, instead of high school?

 

[Mithoric]

lol yeah I'm a super nerd , uni better accept me damnit!... Terrain renderer is working pretty well so far .. Just adding different sorts of filtering and optimizing it for performance when in a free movement environment. I will have a demo of it rendering for download tonight .. Just took me a while to read up on the png format specifications, god damn that's a cool format .. a 48mb bitmap can become 123.7kb png without any quality loss at all ... very cool..

 

[asha_ramirez]

Uber nerd, good stuff!

 

[Merforga]

Originally posted by Mithoric
lol yeah I'm a super nerd , uni better except me damnit!... Terrain renderer is working pretty well so far .. Just adding different sorts of filtering and optimizing it for performance when in a free movement environment. I will have a demo of it rendering for download tonight .. Just took me a while to read up on the png format specifications, god damn that's a cool format .. a 48mb bitmap can become 123.7kb png without any quality loss at all ... very cool..

I want to see this game already!!!

 

[Mithoric]

Haha, sorry I fell asleep ... So many late nights lately (no punn intended) and I just sort of passed out ...

I'm working fast now though, should be ready for tomorrow ..

 

[Collin]

Mithoric, can I be your manager if you ever become famous?

<The new John Carmack of the RTS genre>

 

[Mithoric]

lol I'm not that good ... admitedly I'm not that bad though ..
I'm getting there, almost ready for a preview of the terrain renderer. I'm still trying to optimize it, trying to find the most resource efficient way of rendering only a part of the map at a time. And I'm trying to find the best way to render it in the first place. Currently its rendering 2 triangles for each xz coord making for a really nice LOD but it's not exactly fast on all machines. And when you get all the units on there I'm afraid it may be way too slow. So to save having to swap the code I'm running all sorts of speed tests.

That and I need to fix 2 memory leaks ..

 

[Merforga]

Hehhe i can't wait ^^. I wanna be a beta tester!!!!