OT = How Does Shrapnel Stay In Business

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Originally posted by geoschmo:
Uh, as long as it has a good beat and I can dance to it I'll be happy.

Geo

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LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL!

It was a secret, but I guess that I may as well reveal what I thought was the neatest idea of all before somebody else mentions it and I cannot get credit for being the first to think of it. I find all the tables of numbers to be boring and require too much time to evaluate. So my idea was to have brief - perhaps 2-3 seconds of musical tones looked up and played as you move the mouse across the map at the current zoom level. Coupled with texturing, color, and pattern it would allow four factors you consider to be the most revealing of how well your managers are doing to be available for evaluation without going to a menu.

As an example you might be interested only in the red pebbly triangles that play a fart when the mouse is over them....

[capnq]

LCC, large chunks of your description sound like what the developers of Master of Orion III are working towards, according to their Web site.

Personally, your audio status indicators idea sounds like interface Hell to me. I've seen people describe Black & White as unplayable because of the scarcity of numeric status reports, among other things.

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Cap'n Q

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the
human mind to correlate all of its contents. We live on a placid
island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was
not meant that we should go far. -- HP Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

[This message has been edited by capnq (edited 02 August 2001).]

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Originally posted by capnq:
LCC, large chunks of your description sound like what the developers of Master of Orion III are working towards, according to their Web site.

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I will have to check that out! I certainly do NOT want to waste my time reinventing the wheel...

quote:

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Originally posted by capnq:
Personally, your audio status indicators idea sounds like interface Hell to me. I've seen people describe Black & White as unplayable because of the scarcity of numeric status reports, among other things.
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I suppose I was not clear. As an OPTION to get a FEEL for how things are going with your managers and also to visually check for problem CLUSTERS on the map, you COULD specify association of four different values NORMALLY presented as tabular alphanumeric data, bar graphs, or charts to be displayed as color, texture, pattern, and sound. Each of the variables would have several possible values. Depending on the value of the variable, you get something different displayed on the map. For example :
1) Color : Red, Blue, Green, Yellow, Cyan Magenta, anything else in the color chart, whatever you LIKE to move the color selection bars to create...
2) Texture : None, pebbly (dot grid), line grid, crosshatch, whatever you LIKE.
3) Pattern : any set of icon masks you like : such as plain old vanilla triangle, square, 5 point star, 6 point star, pentagon, octagon, circle, nested targeting circles, whatever in the world you LIKE.
4) Any sound file of appropriate length, Bach to Wagner, farts, screams, laughs, applause, whatever you LIKE.

And of course there is the old filter standby, STROBE whatever lies in the specified Category....

[Baron Munchausen]

Well, after 8+ hours of imprisonment behind Sprintnet's f*ed-up services I can finally access Shrapnel again & what do I find? Development of new games starting in the open forums? (BTW, anyone got some good terms of abuse for Sprintnet? )

LCC, you are smoking something pretty strong if you think a game like you are describing can be done in 50,000 lines. Back before MS Windozer plowed all the competition under I was writing relatively simple things in Turbo Pascal like usenet news readers. And my simple MS-DOS newsreader ran to 20,000 lines if you include the supporting units as well as the main code. (I tended to think "object oriented" even back then before it was a buzz word and kept compartmentalizing stuff into units to make it manageable.) Anyway, this was a single-user program designed for immediate user input and output. No multi-player, no PBEM, no AI, no 'simulations' of planetary or stellar events, no combat between ships with various settable attributes.... you get the picture. I would bet SE IV or even SE III are over 100,000 lines. MOO III will probably be a quarter million or more. The latest Versions of Windozer are supposed to be several million lines. You are WAY behind the times and had better take a refresher course on programming in Windozer environments, or *IX, before you get too far along in your estimates of how much work it will be. Aaron should be back from vacation soon. I wonder if we can get him to tell us how many lines of code are in SE IV?

[This message has been edited by Baron Munchausen (edited 02 August 2001).]

[Atrocities]

spirit net, your only on in the after life.

Ditched them a long time ago. Now have qwest DSL. AT&T @ home is just as bad.

[Baron Munchausen]

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Originally posted by Atrocities:
spirit net, your only on in the after life.

Ditched them a long time ago. Now have qwest DSL. AT&T @ home is just as bad.

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Unfortunately I have no choice. It's not 'DSL' for me, it's the uplink for my ISP. So, unless they change providers there's not much I can do. The other ISPs in town are much more expensive than this one.

[This message has been edited by Baron Munchausen (edited 02 August 2001).]

quote:

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Originally posted by capnq:
LCC, large chunks of your description sound like what the developers of Master of Orion III are working towards, according to their Web site.

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Okay, I checked out the Official site by Quicksilver Software. IMHO this is just a bigger Version of the SOS PHD they put out before, and while that was okay 3-7 years ago, it will NOT compete 3-5 years from now. I bet their AI still has to cheat and not use the same rules as the player just to survive....

Aaron has the right idea for the future, let the players/modders decide what they want the game to be. I propose taking Aarons concept further, but he was by NO means the first to think of this, nor was I of course. The General Purpose Simulator notion has been kicking around for a couple of decades ever since typical machines passed the Megabyte memory stage. (BTW that was thanks to the DEC VAX when they dropped the price of memory from $500,000 per Mb by IBM to $20,000 by DEC - BIG TIME OUCH FOR BIG BLUE!) But you need close to a Gigabyte and a mutiple GigaHertz processor to make it a usable notion. I propose writing the engines of a primitive GPS and providing seed data for a typical "game" along with all the interface required to make it playable. If I do it right, then the engine could be used with the appropriate data to simulate our world economy, or that of a nation, or a city, or a company, or whatever the heck you wanted. I just do not think that there is a market for it yet except as a game, because target specific simulations/ modeling would be MUCH MUCH faster and probably get MUCH MUCH more detailed than the interpretive engine would support on a PC. Of course the supercomputer of today is the pocket pc of next decade. Read John Varly "Marooned in Realtime" IIRC. My SF books have been packed since 89 for lack of shelf space.....