Cooperative Project

[Fyron]

It seems fairly strange to me to have a proprietary community project... Oh well.

[mac5732]

Since there are a number of different types of games out there that the public buys we lst have to decide what type/s we want to get into.
Wargames (War in Pacific, Steel Panthers, etc)
Fanatasy adventure (Heros, Dominionns, Disciples, etc)
Space Warfare (Space Empires IV, etc)
Shootemups (quake, Duke Nukem, etc)
Real Time games (Starcraft, Warcraft, etc)
We all like different kinds, so a consensus would have to be made as to the direction of the game/s to go

There are many ideas for each type of game, maybe, and I'm just rambling, we should decide the type lst, then look into the components, makeup, etc.
Just some ideas

[Tim Brooks]

Imperator Fyron said:
It seems fairly strange to me to have a proprietary community project... Oh well.

Only if everyone was working for free. Shrapnel will end up putting alot of money into a project like this. That is if we get enough interest to even do it.

[Suicide Junkie]

Coop, strategy eh?

What if you were to give each player a piece of an army?
Player 1 commands the land forces, while player 2 commands the air force, and in some scenarios, player 3 controls the navy.

Each will be trying to protect their own assets, while helping out the others to complete their objectives.

[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.