Working on a smallish PC game

[TheTerminator2004]

<br>Color me intrigued. I can't really help you with programming or anything, but I can give a little feedback.<br><br>When you were talking about travel and the map, I kept thinking about Fallout, how you click on a place in the big map and your trek across would only be halted for special encounters. I don't know if you'd want to do something like that, but I think it's worth considering. Also worth considering is how you would have one tile of the map loaded at a time in the game. (I don't know if that's what they're called, but I assume you'll understand what I'm talking about.) If you did something like that, it would probably help the engine not to lag.<br><br>However, I see one set problem with your premise for this game: How can you be a ruler or nobleman of some sort if you're always on randomly generated land? Unless the character's goal is to always conquer far-off places, there's really no way to do it if you can't always go back to your castle or base of operations. There's no reason to even be involved with the government if it always changes and what you do has no lasting impact. But I don't know, perhaps I'm just misunderstanding you?<br>

<br><br>The idea is, the world etc is generated when you start the game, and then it remains constant for the entire game. So rather than generating an area, then discarding it when you go somewhere else, it just generates the entire place at the start, civilisations and all. The world will still change over time (people will be born, and die, battles fought, cities captured, etc), but not randomly. <br><br>Although, having a game which constantly changes could lead to some interesting gameplay mechanics too, now you mention it... maybe I'll give that a go in my next one<br><br>I probably will split it into some kind of overworld, and local maps though, like you say. It would probably be easier to deal with - generate one big map, with cities, dungeons, etc on it, and then switch to a close-up view when something happens (for example, a city, or the inside of a cave - or even just a field if you have a battle in the middle of nowhere), which would be generated the first time you enter it (thus avoiding generating detailed maps for every single tile, the majority of which would probably never be used).

[TheTerminator2004]

Things are taking slightly longer than planned, since I made the silly mistake of accidentally deleting a folder full of crucial libraries, which all need to be set up in exactly the right way for my game to work. I've spent the past 3 hours trying to fix it, and I still can't get everything working again. No idea how long this'll take to fix.

 

Other than that one setback however, I've been making steady progress, though I'm still a long way from having anything to show off. Once I can get back to coding, it shouldn't be too long before I have a main menu working. Once thats done, the actual game screen will come next. This will show the world map, and allow the player to move around. The gameplay will be added in bit by bit after that.

[Vagrant0]

Nobody has yet taken me up on the offer:

http://thenexusforums.com/index.php?showtopic=183886&view=findpost&p=1599718

 

Might make use of some of those systems and elements that you're working on here. Just saying.

[TheTerminator2004]

No offense, but I think a lot of your design would be pretty unworkable, mostly because it seems to be far too complex to easily be made into a game. It would take a long, long time to make all that, and even if you could, computers just aren't powerful enough to run it all (though, it may well end up being possible sometime in the future, when PCs have improved enough). Right now, Eve Online is the most technically demanding MMO (and I'm talking about serverside here - running the client for your game wouldn't be so hard) - and that's nowhere near as complicated as this. CCP have done various presentations etc on their server infrastructure, so if you want more info on the maximum amount of power you could reasonably expect to have available for an MMO, I'm sure I can find you a few links.

 

You might want to check out Wurm Online though, as the most similar existing MMO to your design - it's basically a game about living life in the wilderness, where you can build yourself a house, make tools/pottery/carts/boats/etc - combat plays a much smaller role, though it is there. There's a free server available to try the game out on, but it is limited quite a lot. On the paid servers, you get entire cities of players, all living in houses, running shops etc, and on the servers where combat is allowed, there's often all out war between them. Well worth checking out.

 

In other news, I've finally managed to (somehow) fix the library problem I was having with my game! So finally, it's back to actual development again. :D

 

EDIT: Seems I spoke too soon. The bloody things still broken.

[TheTerminator2004]

Fixed it! Finally! :D Spent ages trying to figure it out, and (as always) it turned out to be something incredibly simple. But, it's actually working now, so I can finally go back to developing the actual game.

 

Well, at least, I can once I can get the gui library to work properly... oh, the joys of programming.