Cooperative Project

[Baron Munchausen]

Tim Brooks said:
Hi All!

This is something SG Development has been kicking around for a while, and since we are now looking at what comes after All American, it is probably time to get some feedback on this.

The Project we have in mind is a coop strategy game, design, art, programming, all with input from some of Shrapnel Games' fans.

How we came up with this idea, was seeing the kind of mods that you guys (and gals) have put out for our games over the last 5 1/2 years! Alot of these are quite impressive, and we thought, hey, lets harness some of that creativity and game development desire.

So, what do you think? A good idea or not?

And before you ask a bunch of questions about what the game is about and other things, well, that will be decided by those that participate on the project.

Best regards,

Writing a game from scratch will be a huge project. Look at Free Orion, the response to the Master of Orion 3 debacle. It's now working towards version .3 after a couple of years development. I wonder if Shrapnel Games can afford to think in the 'long term' to this degree?

We have a few programmers in the Shrapnel forums, but we have vastly more artists than programmers. What would be better would be to license someone else's code to save development time and leverage your real advantage in the artistic community on these forums. I would still like to see the Star Fury engine adapted to a submarine simulation, for example. Do you suppose that relations with Malfador Machinations are good enough that you could license this code from him? (I sure hope he hasn't signed any 'exclusive' deals with Strategy 1st?) Some relatively minor changes in the physics of this engine, combined with artwork from the many prolific artists on these forums, could produce a very nice submarine game in a fairly short time. Under a year, I'd say.

How's that for an "idea"?

[Combat Wombat]

Oh man a submarine simulation its so perfect. I wonder how would would do depth in the starfury engine though, it likes to keep everything on one plane.

[Baron Munchausen]

Yeah, true 3D with multiple 'levels' is one of the changes you'd have to make to the Star Fury engine. And you'd have to give ships 'weight' so they'd naturally tend to sink if they aren't moving. And you'd need to make 'bubble trails' for torpedos that slowly rise and dissipate.

[GreyCloud]

I'd like to add my vote for a Submarine type of game, the difficulty will be making it 'special' even if you could license the starfury engine, could you really steer a summarie from outside ? ;p

A 4x Risk Game would also be great but again how could you make it 'special'?

Any game made in this method would HAVE to be easily modable - if not open source.

To throw a spanner into the works, how about making the game 'online'? so it could be multi player? I mean only the actual kinda engine -still have people buy the game so as to not have to compromise on art...

GreyCloud

[Phoenix-D]

Actually SF handles multiple levels quite nicely right now.

You just can't -move- between them, and it doesn't have the code to handle up/down firing arcs, so you automaticly get a full coverage.

[Baron Munchausen]

Good! That means all we would need to do is add the code to let ships move between levels and to let weapons fire at ships on different levels.

[Combat Wombat]

So whats happening with this, did I get excited for nothing?

[Suicide Junkie]

"E's dead, Jim"

[Tim Brooks]

Nope not dead -- waiting patiently for more interest.

[mac5732]

I'd like to see this move along some more, maybe we should post it in forum since some of the members might not check this forum???