VectorStorm Forums: Recent Topics

VectorStorm Forums: Recent Topics http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ Discussing games, one brightly glowing comment at a time en-US Mon, 22 Mar 2010 07:22:43 +0000 http://bbpress.org/?v=1.0.1 <![CDATA[Search]]> q http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/search.php trevor on "MMORPG Tycoon 2.0 feature musings" http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/mmorpg-tycoon-20-feature-musings#post-392 Tue, 24 Feb 2009 22:57:13 +0000 trevor 392@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ Here's a quick question for you guys. I'm thinking about features for MMORPG Tycoon 2.0, and the big one that I'm trying to figure out at the moment is the multiplayer component. I've always felt like MMORPG Tycoon needed a way to play with other people.. turning MMORPG Tycoon into an MMORPG just feels like the right thing to do, to me. Preferably in such a way that grinding levels in another player's MMORPG gives you some benefits in the creation of your own MMORPG. The way I see it, there are three ways I could go: 1. MMORPG Tycoon 2.0 is a single-player offline game, exactly like MMORPG Tycoon 1.x. Ignore networking/multiplayer/etc entirely. 2. MMORPG Tycoon 2.0 is a locally hosted online game, where you can run your MMORPG as a server and have your friends connect, create characters, and wander around within your world, do quests, etc, with a networking model much like you have with games like Quake and Counter-Strike. Apart from this ability to have friends connect, the core MMORPG Tycoon gameplay is still a single-player offline experience, competing against computer-driven MMORPGs. Chief annoyance of approach #2 is that of NAT traversal; on the modern Internet, most users are behind NAT devices, and connecting to a server that's behind a NAT device is tricky at best, and sometimes impossible without reconfiguring network routers. 3. MMORPG Tycoon 2.0 is a centralised-server-driven online game, where a game server (probably running on mmorpg-tycoon.com) lets your game run like an actual MMORPG, so people can play your game even when your computer isn't turned on. In this approach, all MMORPG Tycoon 2.0 MMOs would exist in a single simulated "world" with a single simulated gamer population to compete over, and so you're not competing against computer-driven MMORPGs, but rather are competing against MMORPGs run by other human players. The number of real human players playing your game would, of course, substantially influence the behaviour of the simulated players as well. This would mean that, for example, spending the effort to craft well-written custom quests instead of just using the random cookie-cutter ones would actually help your MMORPG, where they couldn't help so much in the other approaches (since I can't code computer AI to recognise and appreciate good writing). The big downside of #3 is that being server-driven, it would be much more expensive for me to host, and if I was to go that direction, then I would probably have to go down the path of being subscriber-funded to cover my costs. I haven't run any maths on this, but I'd be trying to charge much, much less than the big real MMORPGs charge, and wouldn't be trying to earn a profit from it. But money would probably be required for online play, just to avoid bankrupting myself on hosting+bandwidth charges. (And incidentally, yes, I've actually written the core servers, client networking, and cryptographic and security services for a commercial MMO which is still running today. I'm not a n00b when it comes to creating massive-style online infrastructures.. though I've never dealt with the funding side, before.) Does anybody have any thoughts on all this? Does the very concept of being for-pay-per-month turn people off from considering option #3? (Back-of-napkin maths is suggesting that I could probably just about break even on a month-to-month basis for something around $2/month) Awesome Dino on "Another glitch in the forum" http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/another-glitch-in-the-forum#post-493 Mon, 21 Dec 2009 21:53:20 +0000 Awesome Dino 493@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ <a href="http://img85.imageshack.us/img85/5933/vscssbug2.png" rel="nofollow">http://img85.imageshack.us/img85/5933/vscssbug2.png</a> trevor on "Milestone for myself" http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/milestone-for-myself#post-491 Tue, 08 Dec 2009 20:41:26 +0000 trevor 491@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ So I've been playing with a lot of stuff over the past few months, but I'm starting to feel like I really need to put my feet over the fire, and so I'm setting myself a milestone to meet. My goal is to produce a fully playable miniature version of MMORPG Tycoon 2, representing a portion of the full game's feature set, and to have it done by the end of the first week in January. Let's call it January 4th. I'm calling this miniature version: "MMORPG Tycoon 2: Starting Area". In this, the player is tasked with creating a new starting area for an established MMORPG. He has a particular budget to create the area, and is paid according to the number of subscribers, level 5 or higher, who graduate out of his starting area and into the rest of the game, potentially with bonuses for happy subscribers and/or for generating forum buzz. This version will primarily be based around the building and theming of a single region, and setting out quests and other activities for the new players to take part in. The player will get both on-foot and on-graveship controls. The third game mode I've mentioned in the past will not be included. Crossing fingers. Hope I can pull it all together into a fun experience within this timeframe! :) (And yes, I expect to distribute it once I've finished it, to get people's reactions to it. Perhaps I'll only link to it here in the forum, as I did with the 1.1 development version.. or perhaps I'll actually put it up on the main site. Haven't really decided about that yet. We'll see how it looks closer to the date.) Awesome Dino on "Lose/Lose" http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/loselose#post-488 Fri, 25 Sep 2009 01:37:31 +0000 Awesome Dino 488@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ Lose/Lose is a Mac-only game! <a href="http://www.stfj.net/art/2009/loselose/loselose.zip" rel="nofollow">http://www.stfj.net/art/2009/loselose/loselose.zip</a> There is no objective in Lose/Lose. You are given a spaceship, a gun and a horde of aliens that are deadly to the touch. Your gamer-instinct says "Kill them to survive!". Upon death, however, you notice a filename. A filename of the very same thing you've been working hard on for days. Curious, you look in the folder containing it. The file is gone. You panic, checking every subfolder, every nearby folder, the recycle bin, you even Google ways to do system-wide searches for a certain file. It's gone, however, and you have no idea what happened. Lose/Lose is a game where killing an enemy deletes a file. Dying deletes the game. It deletes every side-scrolling shooter rule from itself and punishes the player for failing AND winning. I suppose you could call it an interactive virus. trevor on "Spam account purges" http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/account-purges#post-450 Tue, 05 May 2009 21:05:05 +0000 trevor 450@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ Just a quick note that I've just done a very quick pass through the users list and removed all the users which had a name that looked like it was trying to sell Cialis (or similar pharmaceutical), and had never posted a legitimate comment (ie: one that actually made it onto the site, rather than being automatically flagged and confirmed by me as being spam). It was around a hundred accounts in total. If I've accidentally deleted your account during this process, I'm very sorry! Please feel free to re-create your account in the usual manner. To try to ensure that I don't have to do this again, I've enabled a few extra sanity checks during account creation which should stop bots from creating user accounts and taking up my time on another big purge in the future. Crossing fingers. :) MeerkatOfLulz on "Game Translations to Danish" http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/game-translations-to-danish#post-426 Sun, 29 Mar 2009 03:50:23 +0000 MeerkatOfLulz 426@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ First of all, I am 15, so if you don't like me being so young, that's alright. Now, I've been practicing English to Danish and vice versa ever since I was 5. I'm not so amazing that I can translate the Bible in 3 days, but I can translate many words and sentences. My grammar as well as spelling are pretty decent in Danish as well as English. My point is, if you ever need a translator for one of your games(or just make a translation-compatible game), I'll gladly shift every bit of English to Danish. Awesome Dino on "Trevor, how did you learn C++?" http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/trevor-how-did-you-learn-c#post-479 Thu, 16 Jul 2009 05:02:30 +0000 Awesome Dino 479@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ I've been trying(and failing incredibly much) to do some minor things and I can't seem to figure out an effective way. I'm thinking of just getting a book but I'm unsure which, and I'm still too young for any education on it. So, how did you learn it? Awesome Dino on "CSS glitch" http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/css-glitch#post-475 Thu, 09 Jul 2009 19:33:52 +0000 Awesome Dino 475@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ <a href="http://img191.imageshack.us/img191/4343/vscssbug.png" rel="nofollow">http://img191.imageshack.us/img191/4343/vscssbug.png</a> Just thought I'd let you know. trevor on "Moving to Amazon CloudFront downloads" http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/moving-to-amazon-cloudfront-downloads#post-472 Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:43:21 +0000 trevor 472@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ Just a quick note that I'm in the middle of migrating the main VectorStorm downloads (the ones available via the "Get-Games" links) over to Amazon's CloudFront service. This should result in faster downloads, and also stop the site from collapsing if/when a major news portal links to us, as it did back when MMORPG Tycoon 1 was initially released. Or at least, that's the theory. This is kind of a trial thing, to see how moving the downloads elsewhere affects load and bandwidth usage on the main webserver. Should be finished migrating download links within a few hours. trevor on "I am not a web designer" http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/i-am-not-a-web-designer#post-461 Sun, 14 Jun 2009 16:12:54 +0000 trevor 461@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ You all know that the look and feel of the forums has been annoying me for an awfully long time; how they didn't provide a link back to the main site, how they looked kind of cheap.. things like that. I'd been considering moving over to a different software with integrated forum support (Drupal), but that seemed like too much ongoing hard work. And I've looked at a number of different Wordpress-integrated forums, but they were all either ugly or slow. So in the end, I bit the bullet and spent far too many hours today learning CSS and brushing up my HTML skills by working on the existing bbpress-based forums, and I think I've managed a pretty big improvement. The look is tied in much more closely to the main site now, complete with links back. It's close enough that I suspect most casual visitors wouldn't even realised they've switched into an entirely different website software when they visit the forums. If you notice anything that looks weird and/or incorrect, please let me know so that I can sort it out. But I'm generally pleased, at the moment. :) Kris015 on "Any life in here?" http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/any-life-in-here#post-431 Wed, 29 Apr 2009 04:11:07 +0000 Kris015 431@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ I feel like im the only one here, anyone out there? Trevor? Meerkat? Token? someone?! trevor on "Some quick general musings" http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/some-quick-general-musings#post-436 Sat, 02 May 2009 14:28:46 +0000 trevor 436@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ First issue: Save games. VectorStorm, as a library, was built around the idea of emulating a fictional vector graphics game console on the PC, complete with a basic game engine wrapped around it. You can see this behaviour in many places, particularly how most of my games refer to the "A" and "B" buttons (which typically are mapped to the <space> and <alt> keys on the keyboard), because they're thinking about this fictional game console. Similarly, in the original release of MMORPG Tycoon, it had three "save slots", exactly as used to be done on old cartridge-based games. For MMORPG Tycoon 2.0, I'm thinking about saved games again, and how they'll be handled. I see two possibilities; either I can continue with the way things are done now (which can lead to conflicts under certain multiple-user-accounts-on-one-computer issues), start storing the saves in per-user directories (maybe somewhere inside the "My Documents" directory under Windows, and the "Documents" or "Library" user directories under OS X), or else actually use a standard file selector box to save and load your saved games to wherever you want. This would, of course, mean that you could have as many saved games as you want, and put them anywhere you want. It would also mean that the standard OS GUI would encroach into the game.. so I'm a little hesitant about that. I guess I could also do a FPS-style "we pick a save directory somewhere and have an in-game file browser that lets you pick from anything inside that directory". Second issue: The bloom visual effect. I really like the "glowing vectors" bloom pass that's automatically present in VectorStorm games. However, making that effect look good for glowing lines drawn over black has caused some problems for games which don't draw over black.. the issue is that it makes absolutely everything on-screen about 50% brighter than it would otherwise appear to be, so if anyone plays the game with bloom disabled, then the game appears extremely dark. I'm thinking about seriously toning back the bloom shader, to make bloomless-rendering appear closer to bloomed rendering. (On the other hand, I still want some glowing-wireframe-over-black sections in MMORPG Tycoon 2.0, so I'm not quite sure how to reconcile the two. Maybe I just require people to support bloom, in order to run at all?) You can see the problem if you go back and run 'Lord' with bloom switched off; it becomes a very dark game, because most of the light shades were only appearing due to the brightening of the bloom. Anyone have any thoughts on this? Third issue: I'm arguing with myself over the user's interface to MMORPG Tycoon 2.0. Whether to give him an interface much like he had in 1.0 (omnipotent deity looking down upon his creation), or whether to give a more up-close interface; put him closer to the ground, looking forward. The big benefit of being closer to the ground is that you get more bang for the buck out of the 3D terrain and constructions, which can be much larger on screen, and can tower upward into the sky. The downside is that it really isn't what people expect from a "Tycoon" game.. and maybe it'd hurt gameplay, compared against a facing-downward, north-oriented view that can simply be panned across with arrow keys, as happened in MMORPG Tycoon 1.0. Anyone have any input on any of these things? Am curious to hear any thoughts, to maybe kickstart something in my head. :) trevor on "MMORPG Tycoon 1.1p1 Available for Testing" http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/mmorpg-tycoon-11p1-available-for-testing#post-286 Sun, 19 Oct 2008 20:31:51 +0000 trevor 286@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ PC: <a href="http://www.vectorstorm.org/downloads/MMORPG-1.1p1-Win32.zip" rel="nofollow">http://www.vectorstorm.org/downloads/MMORPG-1.1p1-Win32.zip</a> Mac: <a href="http://www.vectorstorm.org/downloads/MMORPG-1.1p1-OSX.dmg" rel="nofollow">http://www.vectorstorm.org/downloads/MMORPG-1.1p1-OSX.dmg</a> (universal binary, requires OS X 10.4 or later) Latest update: PC: <a href="http://www.vectorstorm.org/downloads/MMORPG-1.1p2-Win32.zip" rel="nofollow">http://www.vectorstorm.org/downloads/MMORPG-1.1p2-Win32.zip</a> (exe only; need the libs and data files from the 1.1p1 archive linked above) I'm most interested in whether people have any trouble starting up or etc, (I hope this won't have the "didn't create all the needed directories" problems that the 1.0.x series did), general performance, and whether people think I've gone too far with the stretchy cursor and moving UI elements. I'd also love to hear if people have particular bits of information they'd like to see added to screens, or other thoughts. General suggestion (from my short time playing this full version) is to zone a region as level 1-3, place a respawn, a town, and a starting point in it (optionally adding roads), then kick up the speed to maximum for a little while. After a very short while, you should have enough subscribers to start placing quest givers (the exclamation mark), and then you're really into the meat of it. And of course, if you manage to make it crash, then I'd be thrilled to hear how. (For example, I fixed a crash bug about an hour ago. To get the crash, you had to place a quest-giver, exit the game and reload, delete the quest-giver, and then exit the game and reload again. On that second reload, the game would crash) Kris015 on "Lord Problems!" http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/lord-problems#post-407 Thu, 12 Mar 2009 22:02:03 +0000 Kris015 407@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ I can't start the game.. When i do it says: Failed Assertion: Unable to load texture Data/Lord/FreeSerif.png: Failed Loading libong12-0.dll: Was not found Failed condition: (loadedImage !=Null) at .\VS\Graphics\VS_TextureInternal.cpp:40 Hope it can be fixed ;) BTW i use Windows XP Kris015 on "Lord!?" http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/lord#post-383 Sat, 17 Jan 2009 20:46:01 +0000 Kris015 383@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ What is this "Lord" you are talking so much about? Is it the game? trevor on "The Official 1.1 Progress Log" http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/the-official-11-progress-log#post-130 Sun, 17 Aug 2008 08:18:12 +0000 trevor 130@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ Stuff to be done for 1.1: <ul> <li>Rendering optimisation: Finished</li> <li>Monsters actually present on map: Finished</li> <li>Animated vector sprites for adventurers and monsters: Finished</li> <li>Player AI to cope with real monsters: Finished</li> <li>Revised map look: Finished</li> <li>Revamped road system: Finished</li> <li>Player pathfinding: Finished</li> <li>Queued building system: Finished</li> <li>Additional building types (shops, taverns, etc): Finished</li> <li>Updated player AI to use these building types: 50% implemented</li> <li>Finite quest-giving system: 70% implemented</li> <li>Player AI modified to form parties: 50% designed</li> <li>Tutorial: 50% designed</li> <li>Modified player manager to support infinite number of subscribers: not started</li> <li>Final pre-release optimisation</li> </ul> megaxx on "The game doesnt start..." http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/the-game-doesnt-start#post-380 Mon, 12 Jan 2009 09:52:28 +0000 megaxx 380@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ Hi there mate. The game is just not starting. It says it found a problem and it is going to close. This is what is inside stdout.txt : VectorStorm engine version 0.0.1 Loading preferences... Checking supported resolutions... Available Modes 0: 320 x 200 1: 320 x 240 2: 400 x 300 3: 512 x 384 4: 640 x 400 5: 640 x 480 6: 720 x 480 7: 720 x 576 8: 800 x 600 9: 1024 x 768 10: 1152 x 864 11: 1280 x 720 12: 1280 x 768 13: 1280 x 960 14: 1280 x 1024 15: 1360 x 768 16: 1440 x 900 17: 1600 x 1024 18: 1600 x 1200 19: 1680 x 1050 20: 1792 x 1344 21: 1800 x 1440 22: 1856 x 1392 23: 1920 x 1080 24: 1920 x 1200 25: 1920 x 1440 26: 2048 x 1536 Initialising [800x600] resolution... Successfully detected all required extensions for bloom shader. Screen Ratio: 1.333333 OpenGL Version 2.0.5529 WinXP Release Red size: 8 bits Blue size: 8 bits Green size: 8 bits Alpha size: 8 bits Color buffer size: 32 bits Depth bufer size: 24 bits ++ Initialising mixer ++ audio frequency=44100Hz format=S16LSB channels=2 ?? No sound driver reported by SDL_AudioDriverName. >> MEMORY STATUS >> Heap current usage 0 / 16777216 (0.00% usage) I hope you can help me mate. By the way, I think that this game is a great idea :D I'm going to bed now ;D Thanks! Street Wolf on "New 3D Terrain in relation to MMORPG Tycoon. . ." http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/new-3d-terrain-in-relation-to-mmorpg-tycoon#post-371 Mon, 15 Dec 2008 13:26:56 +0000 Street Wolf 371@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ It's been awhile since I've posted, but I've noticed the new blog posts in relation to 3D terrain. Is there any chance of any parts of it ever being incorporated into MMORPG Tycoon? trevor on "Quick development straw poll" http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/quick-development-straw-poll#post-329 Wed, 12 Nov 2008 17:51:35 +0000 trevor 329@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ Hey, guys.. wanted to quickly see what people thought of a couple development things running through my head: 1. Would you hate me forever if I removed the "Move Building" tool? It'd mean that if you wanted to move a building or a road, you'd have to actually delete the old one, and build a new one in the new position. Main benefits of this are that it's marginally more realistic, it gets rid of the design question of how much moving a building should cost the player, and it frees up space in the "Town" tool pane. The downside, of course, is that you'd have to delete the old building and create a new one. Which might be annoying. If I did this, it would be as part of 1.1, to help make space for more new buildings. 2. I've been thinking about slightly reducing the size of the MMORPG map. Right now, it's played in a 20x20 grid of regions; I've been thinking about dropping that to 15x15. Is anyone imagining they'd actually use the larger grid? Benefit of reducing this is that it'd become cheaper to draw the fully-zoomed-out map, and it'd make the game somewhat less imposing for a new player. Bizarrely, under Windows, drawing the zoomed-out map seems to be the most expensive thing in MMORPG Tycoon. (I'm going to be profiling this to find out why it's so expensive) This is a minor point; it'd be trivial to make the size of the map something that could be set in the UI; the save game files already support arbitrary-size maps. If I did this, it would probably be for version 1.1. 3. Moving "time" to be a more obvious part of the gameplay than it is now. Right now, there's no real sense of "time" to the game. That is, although there's a little clock in the top right corner of the screen and a "current day" counter, that doesn't really enter gameplay in any meaningful way.. and yes, you may notice you have more people connected during US prime time hours than at other times of the day.. but by and large, time can be totally ignored in the game. What I'm proposing is to do something similar to (but less extreme than) what's done in Square's "My Life as a King", where gameplay briefly stops at the start of each new day, to present you with reports on the events of the previous day. In MMORPG Tycoon, I don't imagine that gameplay would actually stop in the same way, but I'd like to provide a pop-up that updated reports have arrived, and I'd like to use the "skip ahead to tomorrow" functionality used in that game. This way, instead of having four "time speeds" (paused, normal, fast, ultra-fast), you'd have three, and a "skip to tomorrow" button. The "skip to tomorrow" button would run the same simulation calculations, but could run much faster by not needing to draw the world while it's doing it. Benefit is that it means you always know exactly when you have new reports available. Drawback is that it might be a bit intrusive (though if that's the case, I could switch it to 'weeks' instead of 'days'). This increased focus on time would be for 1.2 or later; this is not something I'm contemplating at all for version 1.1. As players, do you guys have thoughts on any of these? Good ideas, bad ideas? Gil on "Another startup problem" http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/another-startup-problem#post-269 Mon, 13 Oct 2008 02:39:11 +0000 Gil 269@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ I made sure everything is unzipped correctly, directories are there. Here's my stdout.txt VectorStorm engine version 0.0.1 Loading preferences... Checking supported resolutions... Available Modes 0: 320 x 200 1: 320 x 240 2: 400 x 300 3: 512 x 384 4: 640 x 400 5: 640 x 480 6: 800 x 600 7: 1024 x 600 8: 1024 x 768 9: 1152 x 864 10: 1280 x 800 11: 1280 x 1024 Initialising [800x600] resolution... Successfully detected all required extensions for bloom shader. Screen Ratio: 1.333333 OpenGL Version 2.0.5757 WinXP Release Red size: 8 bits Blue size: 8 bits Green size: 8 bits Alpha si That's it. I hope you can help me :)