Anyway, decorators! Scroll down a bit for the epic explanation. In my case,  I wanted to have a simple prompt function which then passes its result to the prompt method for the room/level. Not so easy if you call the prompt function in main(). Hmm…

http://pastebin.com/0JXQhmNY

Thank you e-satis!

PS. I can’t properly paste Python code. Stupid Wordpress…

In the case of a sandbox game, a great chunk of the time in the artificial space universe the player will spend flying from point A to point B somewhere in space. Hence why that aspect of the game is pretty crucial, since the player might get bored over time when repeating that task, regardless of whether or not there is a comprehensive autopilot function visible to the player. That’s one of the problems we’ll notice once we want to break up the “big” game atoms into smaller pieces. Breaking up that chain reveals that a great deal of repetition is present, which can’t be broken up by a waterfall design. So making flight least painful or boring as possible is important! Unless the aim of the game is to bore you to death.

The concept of space flight differs a lot from game to game. It’s also linked to the objects in space are arranged - whether you travel from one star system to another, or from one section to another inside a big star system, or even just “random” sectors in space connected through some kind of gates or whatever, that all defines the layout of your star systems or sectors, etc. . Whatever we’ll choose, it’ll fundamentally define the way the game is played. Instead of choosing one right in the beginning, I’d like to discuss that first.

I’d like to briefly describe some layouts/concepts which come into question and point out the one concept I like the most right now. Disclaimer: All those concepts revolve around star systems with no objects moving around the sun(s)/planets/etc., i.e. “unrealistic” systems.

1. The gameplay-relevant sections are star systems which are divided into sectors according to the position of planets, stations etc. (one other way to divide the star systems is into equal rectangular sectors, however that’s pretty inconvenient in my opinion and doesn’t suit my image of the game) The means of travelling between objects inside the system consist of acceleration gates or rings (or whatever they’d be called) that would convey ships from a relevant sector to another. Travelling from one star system to another is done using jump gates and/or worm holes, whose positions are independant of those of the remaining stellar objects. In case of acceleration rings, the disruption of one portion of the ring system would be possible, thus allowing pirates to disrupt these and camp at those acceleration lanes. (People who have played Freelancer are familiar with the concept of “lane hacking”)

2. The relevant sectioning is done in space sectors. Space sectors are small chunks of important space, arranged in a matter possibly independent of logic of any kind ;). Travelling inside those sectors would be no big deal as distances aren’t big. Jump gates interconnect all space sectors.

3. The concept I favor the most is kind of a compromise. I just see it as the best way to include some interesting gameplay mechanics and get some action going. The gameplay-relvant space portions are star systems, which are again divided into sectors of different size adjacent to stellar objects or inside formations etc. (asteroid fields/rings, dust/gas clouds, scrap fields, rock formations of other origin). The means of flying from one sector to another would consist either of a “in-system jump drive” or, again, acceleration gates. However, travelling from one star system to another requires the space ship to be far enough from the gravitational influence of the sun(s) and planets, meaning that one would need to get to the system’s far end (depending on its size, the “far end” can vary :D) to use the inter-star jump drive. Parallel to #1, pirates would eventually be able to stop ships by disrupting acceleration lanes or the ship’s in-system jump drive along the path.

Discuss.

I recently supported OpenGameArt.org with a few submissions I dug out from the ancient catacombs that is my textures folder - some of which were supposed to get into a CS map called de_southernfrance (hence the sf_ in the beginning of the file name) a friend made, others were supposed to get into a Sauerbraten map I wanted to make or something else. I still have to upload a bunch of other old textures, though. I’m even thinking about subscribing to OGA with 5$/month. What about you?

In other news, I use identi.ca now, kind of… It’s like Twitter, but without the suck. I’ll use it for my FOSS moments I guess.

Stay sharped.

simple-times

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license 3.0

I finally got around jamming something as a whole with my keyboard, my bass and my drum machine. Just for the record though, I mainly play bass guitar, so the keyboard part sounds a bit clumsy.

http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/10/custom-brushes-in-photoshop/

Eat that.

I recently realized what used to make me feel disinterested amid a campaign or a mission inside a game, be it Heroes of Might and Magic V, X, Etherlords or Earth 2140, which are all actually fine games, if it weren’t for that little thing.

I’m usually very patient. Usually. If it seems reasonable to me, I stay patient. After all, people nowadays have a much shorter attention span and tend to be less patient if they’re not directly stimulated; it’s not my fault that I’ve also  been affected by that development. And I think it’s more or less the same with everybody else who has been tangent to modern media, be it the Internet and computers or just television or FOX. As usual, I can’t prove that statistically right now (Andrew :P), but there are several studies and more serious essays on the shortened attention span of people nowadays and how it affects our lives, the media and education for example, just google it. If it wasn’t so we wouldn’t have so many random and useless YouTube channels and the average American teenager could form complete and thoughtful sentences without chopping them apart with a “…like…like…”.

Joking aside; Games that rely on a single set of gameplay mechanics while trying to provide a more complex view of the storyline missions very often suffer from that very syndrom, because limiting oneself to that simple set means that over time, you must increase difficulty and the duration a single atom or objective draws the player’s full attention. That also happens very often due to lack of creativity. If you have to save a princess locked in the highest tower of the biggest castle full of evil minions, please, make that objective at least partly interesting by removing some of the grind elements and add enemies, puzzles or traps that should make the player actually ponder anew how to play the game. If the player dies/fails constantly in a certain part of the game, even though no new motivation, eg. something new to master, is given, something is going terribly wrong. And I’m not telling you to lower your game’s difficulty level or make it accessible for idiots, that’s what a great part of the gaming industry is there for, think of something else for christ’s sake.

Prime example, HOMM5. You got to get this and that, beat enemy hero. You must flee from someone, flee and capture city. You got to get somewhere, capture city. Inbetween, there are rarely any nameable events besides the enemy team sending heroes with an average number of troops every few turns to annoy you. You basically can’t do anything wrong, except if you haven’t grinded enough. I know it allows for a fast and idiot-proof level design.

You will reside way, way too long on one single objective or mission, which is bad, baaad I say. It is the devil’s opus!

That will be an important part of the guidelines when I working out my space sim game design. If it doesn’t happen, you’ll still have a nice resource of things you should ponder about when designing a game.

Have a nice day.

If you compare this relatively vast user base, of which some might be potential contributors, with the very weak development progress over the past few years, you’ll instantly notice disproportionality. GIMP’s power as a competitor who’s just as strong as Photoshop fades away.  What have we got recently with 2.6? Brush dynamics when using tablets and a new main window, great. I still dream about a brush extension system similar to the one that got introduced with PS CS1, even though I don’t like Photoshop at all. I don’t like it’s bloated like crap basis, I don’t like its unintuitive GUI and I don’t like the fact that it runs only on OS X and Windows. But there is a bunch of stuff in PS I’d like to see in GIMP, too.

I don’t say that the effort by the GIMP developers and everybody else contributing is futile. Quite the contrary, I say it’s going in the wrong direction.

Blender for example has a smaller user base, still pretty big though for a libre program, but still progresses nicely, even overcomes many conceptual rehauls over time. It provides functionality to the user even commercial 3D graphics suites sometimes lack, and all that despite it having a bad code base. The comparison may be disproportionate since Blender is a 3D application with its own renderer, modelling, sculpting, uv-unwrapping, texture painting, Python scripting and multi-pass functionality, while GIMP is a 2D image manipulation program. But they’re equally important in the process of game art…

…wait, what?

PS. Don’t you dare compare me with

Attribution to http://xkcd.com

But that is not the reason why I decided to post again after this evident break. I know, I know, I’m kind of late on this one, too, but the thought arose in me a few days ago, which I now want to write down and spread it on the internet.

RockPaperShotgun (god bless them for their awesome - I’m not religious though :P) recently sparkled my attention with their article  “Unreal Tournament 3 And The New Lazarus Effect”, in which the autor wonders how the number of UT3 players could rise by 2000% [sic] in a short period of time. In a nutshell, Steam started to sell Unreal Tournament 3, Epic announced and probably already have released a big Unreal Tournament 3 update including new game modes and technical improvements, Epic also is about to release a vast update for the Unreal Engine 3, including improved tools for level designers/environment artists (yay). The consequence is a rise of players and thus of sales and thus of money Epic is gaining. It’s remarkable because UT3 has had very poor sales, in comparison to the money and effort that had been pumped into it. The rapid and astonishing growth of the community and player base is quite an interesting phenomenon.

Which leads to my conclusion: That’s exactly how FOSS games are or rather should be developed, right? Usually, FOSS games are worked on and polished regardless of their popularity or the size of the player base. As far as I can see, the popularity of a game isn’t really the main factor influencing a potential contributor towards doing the first steps. Furthermore, a game with a small player base and bad PR during their Beta/Gold phases (and seriously people, games in their Gold phase should be sophisticated, complete and fun to play…) can change that by delivering an update providing new elements to the game. Thus, a “dead” game can rise from the dead (just as Lazarus did, hence the name :P) and gain popularity with a change of concept, new updates and community activity, meaning that passive development is something manageable after all.

If you look at this from a “ransom” point of view: Once popularity is on its downlow, you can gain momentum again by releasing a shiny and big update or so, which is only possible on the Internet and mostly practiced with FOSS games, while not being anyhow bound by sales of physical media or something.

Discuss.

EDIT: Andrew pointed out some weaknesses of my blog post, especially the fact that I don’t back my assumption with statistics (which probably aren’t present anyway). Just to clear things up though: I’m trying to say that there might be an increase in popularity and awareness of the game as a reaction to a big content update or something along the lines of that. Cheers.

Typical combat designs in space sims consist of chasing the enemy by flying around in circles, while he may or may not be able to get you on his front side to be able to shoot you. If the enemy has gotten turrets, you’re screwed, - or not - depending on the game’s design. Simply put, the ships with the highest speed, most firepower and fattest shields wins. One of the obvious reasons why combat is so dull is the very simple ship balancing. Every ship owner will come to a point at which his ship is basically worthless, due to the “if you aren’t this big, you’re too weak” design, meaning that every “more advanced” ship can defeat any ships below it, regardless of fitting or tactics - no exceptions allowed. That design can be loosened pretty easily though. I’d like to introduce a design with more variations, involving more tactics - rather than just a straight line.

(both diagrams were made by Tranberry from the FGD forums, visit his wobsite under: http://tranberry.se )

Instead of being instant cannon fodder and thus good for basically nothing at all, fast and light-weight ships, you may call them interceptors or scouts, now have the possibility to be used for, what their name actually suggests, interception of fighters and bombers. They should be quite effective in groups, especially for perturbing the enemy. Interceptors/Scouts should be the cheapest ships in the design. Excluding civilian ships, if there is the need for a separation between faction/military ships and ‘mere’ civilian ships or ships manufactured by independent companies.

The gap in-between would then be filled by fighters, which would be somewhat limited omnipotent packages, perfect for raids, escorts and patrols in small numbers and for hit-and-run tactics, in which you don’t necessarily want to lose a great bunch of your ships.

The next class is filled by heavy fighters and bombers. Heavy fighters, the more expensive variants of the fighters - also with a much greater mass - are intended for universal use. If you have the money and the nerves, that is. The fighter<>heavy fighter relationship might be a critical point in the design when it comes to balancing. Bombers will be designed for anti-capital assaults. They’re particularly slow for their size, although they will have the ability to get a fair speed boost for a limited amount of time during strikes and for evasion of heavy capital turrets and missiles, and their energy systems will be specifically designed for the carriage and launch of very heavy missiles or energy-based bomber equipment, so they won’t be abused as “very-very-fat” fightercraft.

The gap between capital ships and heavy fightercraft will be filled by gun boats (their purpose being the interception of small and medium fightercraft using turrets), corvettes, cruisers and frigates… I will have to think this class through I think.

The capital ships (destroyers, carriers, etc.) are self-explanatory.

As I was already saying in the beginning of this mess of an article, another quite soporific spice put into combat design is limiting and boring navigation and flight physics. Though by any means, do not interpret this statement as it would promote realistic space physics; please don’t. Ultra-realistic flight physics destroy the fun of combat completely. Instead, consider flight physics a way to introduce new elements to combat. Instead of putting all down to physical laws, you should also think of ways technology would’ve worked out the issues of space flight by then. After all, it’s a science-fiction game - don’t take the ’science’ thing too seriously.

Imagine a simple spaceship having two engines. This would allow the ship to accelerate in one direction and thus travel in one direction, but it’d be heavily affected by the gravitational force of the celestial bodies near or not so near it. Thrusters on the front side and on every other sides are added to allow manipulation of the direction in which the ship is heading, as well as the roll of the ship. After a while, a trick allows to get the gravitational force of the celestial bodies out of the picture, which allows much more freedom for space flight. Also, the correction of the course by the thrusters is handled automatically, even though more advanced pilots may consider manual operation for sliding/gliding. The thrusters on the front side are especially effective, in so far as it is possible to stop immediately, decelerate and then recelerate again, making room for many wicked maneuvers. Just to picture it:

You can bite your fingers off at that, vector mathematicians.

Now to a little bit of history. In the history of sefaring, due to the lack of long range weaponry suitable on sea, the first way of nautical combat was quite simple: ram the enemy! The ships were obviously constructed with that kind of combat in mind. The nose of the ship was reinforced with metal and made extra sharp. Thus, the ships weren’t too big and were quite agile. That method of combat was used by the Greek and by the Phoinikians, probably invented by the Pelasgians. Don’t quote me as a reliable source though; the origin of this tactic is unknown.

During the Punic Wars, the Romans were faced with that tactic, since the Carthaginians/Phoinikians were masters of seafaring and nautic combat. They were at disadvantage, as their ships were quite… crappy. Until they had found a solution, they were never able to secure their sea or cut off the Carthaginians from their usual trade routes (Sardinia, Sicilia, etc.). One day, they decided to turn the whole thing into land combat again and filled a whole ship with soldiers, everybody well equipped and well trained for battle. They tricked the Carthaginian ship into approaching them, at which they evaded the Phoinikians, smashed their rudders,  sailed to one side of the enemy ship and jumped over. Seamen can’t fight. And so they were doomed. And so, boarding ships was born.

The same thing would be quite interesting in space: Ships of the size of corvettes - so right in-between capital ships and bombers - with the ability to harden certain areas of their shields for a period of time. A new kind of hit-and-run tactic would be born.