Some thoughts on improvements to the game

[Gandalf Parker]

Originally Posted by Squirrelloid

No, seriously, I'd be totally interested in collaborating

If you mean Illwinter (the Dom3 devs) if I remember there is a language requirement (swedish? finish?).

There are tons of such projects that you can just jump in on.
You might check the Shrapnels forums. I remember that the Combat Command Series guy (Horse & Musket amoung other award winning games) asked for more programmers here a couple years back. Shrapnel has put out various calls. For Female game programmers. And another thread to gather together programmers, sound, graphics, writers, etc to try and do a collaborative in-house project (I dont think it got past the discussion of what kind of game it should be).

But I digress. Its no longer my place to mention those. I would suggest that you check out SourceForge which has tons of open source projects for games and you can jump in with any side skill involved with game development.

[Ballbarian]

Originally Posted by Sombre

I agree they /can/ theoretically be useful, but the noise rate appears to be somewhere around 99.99%. You say semirand was born of someone's vision, fair enough. I highly doubt it was this kind of brainstorming. Semirand's fundamental ideas are not pie in the sky and never were. There's a LOT we can already do regarding dom3, but these kind of threads go way, way beyond those limits imo. And since we're using personal examples, I haven't found a single useful idea amongst any of the vast number of 'brainstorming' posts on these forums.

Certainly too far fetched for a Dom3 patch, but I am thinking in broader terms. Yet another personal example is a game project that I have fiddled with for several years now. It is a blend of concepts from Dom3 and Lords of the Realm 2. There are pages and pages of conjecture, sample algorithms & programs scattered across my hard drive that are all about ideas. Time that I spend in a text document thinking through game concepts and mechanics is time not spent writing the program. A discussion like this one is very interesting to me as the pitfalls of a given feature or technique are weeded out. It's not so much a step by step manual of what to do, but rather food for thought.

It might be argued that the discussion is wandering away from Dom3 possibilities and should therefore be squelched. I wonder if it might be interesting to the developers regardless?

(Sorry for going so far OT myself.)

[Illuminated One]

Well, I do find it interesting, from a slightly similar point of view.
And it is certainly doing no harm.

[NTJedi]

Originally Posted by Ballbarian

It might be argued that the discussion is wandering away from Dom3 possibilities and should therefore be squelched.

Just more useful if the ideas are placed on the shelf until Dominions_4 begins. I've provided a healthy list of improvements for Dominions over the years, yet I know reviving them will not provide any changes, until we know development of Dominions_4 begins.
Squirrelloid mentioned willing to help someone lead a project for his idea which is extremely unlikely to happen. Now if he was leading the project and already has working pieces than he might be able to find someone to help him with a few adjustments/improvements.

[Squirrelloid]

Originally Posted by NTJedi

Just more useful if the ideas are placed on the shelf until Dominions_4 begins. I've provided a healthy list of improvements for Dominions over the years, yet I know reviving them will not provide any changes, until we know development of Dominions_4 begins.
Squirrelloid mentioned willing to help someone lead a project for his idea which is extremely unlikely to happen. Now if he was leading the project and already has working pieces than he might be able to find someone to help him with a few adjustments/improvements.

Ah to have that kind of time. No seriously.

[Gandalf Parker]

I think that some of the best ideas that became useful to this community were not treated well when offered just as ideas. But they did help move us forward when someone else was sparked by the idea to flesh it out.

[Sombre]

Examples?

[Gandalf Parker]

Not like they were actually attacked. Some might have been but I tend not to remember things like that. This community is too great for that. But sometimes the helpful suggestions werent always taken as helpful suggestions by the original poster.

[lch]

Originally Posted by Sombre

I agree they /can/ theoretically be useful, but the noise rate appears to be somewhere around 99.99%.

I have to back up Sombre on that one. I have TONS of very awesome ideas. Ideas that I very much wish somebody else would implement for me, or even just help me to work on. And sometimes I do fail to restrain myself from propagating them, though I know that to walk the walk is a lot more difficult than to talk the talk. I haven't seen anybody seriously saying "Hey, I want to do something awesome, but I don't know what, give me something to work on" and then following through with it here - so as far as market economies are concerned, there is a lot more supply than demand for ideas to work on here. I'm very glad that there are a couple of altruistic people here that find the energy to make sure that not everything stays at the "idea" level.

Regarding suggestions to the devs, I wouldn't condemn them, the devs should see those suggestions as a form of flattery. People do care about their game, even when they criticize it. But those people should be very, very aware that their suggestions, however good and meaningful they might be, will have minimal chance of getting implemented, for various good reasons.

[Gandalf Parker]

There are always more ideas than results. The other side of the coin (often seen in the open source world and mmorpgs) is the abundance of experts offering assistance who never follow thru which is probably another version of the same thing. Id rather have the semi-productive ideas than the non-productive help if I had to choose.

Anyway Im not sure that holding back the ideas is a good idea.
Altho it does have a drawback of lost credit. Ive been promised any number of times to be mentioned in the credits (even on this forum) for extensive email conversations fleshing out a project that I recommended and others have finished. Luckily Im not real bothered by that but if I was then I would certainly understand holding back the flow of ideas. You would probably have to even take into account that some of the projects which were completed by the original suggester were more often IMHO spurred on by people saying they want it. Not to mention the projects done out of spite for the original persons refusal to do "such a simple task".

Squelching idea conversations or DIY responses might have had a large impact on this community altho we will never really know. Im not sure if we would have CBM, or SemiRand, or a pbem server. Or map generators (even the in-game one), or the many map modification utilities. Are you sure that the utilities for checking status on online games, or score charts, or backups would have just appeared out of the blue without someone requesting it?

Then there are any number of popular modded nations, spells, AI improvements, special maps which I think sparked from an idea put forth not by the person who developed the mod. Im probably biased or dont fully understand what the wealth of worthless ideas was.

Gandalf Parker