[dogscoff]

Suggested this a while back and I've been thinking about it more and more.

It sems to me that we have a disproportionately high number of programmers on this forum. We also appear to have quite a lot of people with plenty of spare time. If there's any crossover between these two demographics, here's something to keep you busy...

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!SEIV sub-games!
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We all know what it's like waiting for a particularly large turn to process, and if/ when TCP/IP is implemented we'll all be waiting around even more. What we need is a little SE4 inspired subgame to play while we wait.

I'm thinking perhaps a little card game, tetris or a space invaders clone. Nothing requiring too much concentration (ie chess, or another 4X game- that would be stupid), just somthing to keep the brain ticking over between turns.

Obviously multitasking a second game will slow down your turn processing evn more, but who cares? We won't be bored=-)

Of course the cleverest programmers would take images / data from the SE4 directories to use in the sub-game. For example, a card game might replace the Jack/ Queen/ King images with warship pictures. How about a Whack-the-Mole game which uses the racial portrait images? A defender clone could take the attack/ defence bonuses of each race into consideration as you shoot at their ships... you get the idea.

Anyone interested in picking up the gauntlet? I wish I was a programmer, because I have loads of ideas but I can't do anything with them. *sigh*

MM have already "officialised" at least one community project (PBW) and Matryx's mod launcher could be next. I've heard rumblings of a screensaver, so why not a sub-game? If it's good enough it might even make it onto a future SEIV expansion pack disc.

If they felt inclined Shrapnel could even sponsor this as an official competition, with a token prize (like a big promotion on the forum Boards=-) for the best game.

Come on then, who's interested? Let's get the ideas flowing...

[This message has been edited by dogscoff (edited 15 August 2001).]