Need Help New Age of Sail Sim Announced

[bix]

re engines, infernal or otherwise:

i have about 30 years of really useful code that i have diligently coiled down in a cross-platform, seaman-like manner. that is why i have put all my eggs into this basket called "marmalade." it is also why i can bob to the surface and say "hello, i got this game."

in its most trivial description, marm is a fantastic xplat deployment tool wrapped around opengl. i click one button and it builds for ios, droid, win, and mac. thank you jesus!! this is because all the code i write never, ever, ever, uses platform specific "conceits." it is just good old fashioned ansi c++. all of it.

there exists this toy called "unity," it looks nice, but no thanks. it is quick to get something on screen, but tell me how are you gonna implement shifting sandbars in a naval sim? and what is this c# crap?? you mean to call yourself a programmer yet you don't want to manage your own memory??? just try to make a game on a ps3 (not to mention a Wii) in "managed" code. boa sorte!

then there are the AAA engines, but you need a AAA team of about 20 dedicated, well paid individuals to bring a game to market. it'll be a gorgeous game for sure, if you ever get it to market.

it is why i constantly apologize for my graphics... lady and gents, i'm making the game first, i'll worry about explosions and blood splatters later. marm supports a lot of graphical features, i am sad that it does not support spherical environment mapping (at the moment), but my water looks nice enough, and i want this to run on tablets and i'm not gonna sacrifice +50% of my cpu to water. smart opponents, THAT is what matters. the world is all that is the case.

any posts regarding technical fetishes or ludwig wittgenstein should spawn a new thread.

best regards,
j.b.k. de sa

 

[bix]

as pieter mentioned, i still don't have a name for this game.

i have to say it, just 'cause winston churchill said it first - the only traditions of the royal navy are "rum, buggery, and the lash"

hmmm not really appropriate for a game title, but i'm looking for something equally evocative.

jbkds

 

[Pieter Boelen]

MASTERING A SHIP HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH DRIVING A CAR!!!!!

Very true! That is why in real life I AM legally allowed to sail 285 m long ships, but NOT drive a car. Because I don't have a driving license, see?

putting the player in the position of the captain is a big mistake. they must start in the position of the admiral, and work their way DOWN to the noble rank of master and commander

Now that is definitely a very different way of looking at things! I do see your point though. Very interesting.
From what I can tell, you are mainly making a strategy game with ships and then that makes perfect sense.
After all, your MAIN concern should be "winning the battle". How each ship is operated is not the primary concern.
Although it is great of you to allow the player to eventually do that too. Helps a lot with replay value because there are more different things you can do.

re engines, infernal or otherwise:

Infernal Machine? That was one of my favourite games many years ago.

i have about 30 years of really useful code that i have diligently coiled down in a cross-platform, seaman-like manner. that is why i have put all my eggs into this basket called "marmalade." it is also why i can bob to the surface and say "hello, i got this game."

in its most trivial description, marm is a fantastic xplat deployment tool wrapped around opengl. i click one button and it builds for ios, droid, win, and mac. thank you jesus!! this is because all the code i write never, ever, ever, uses platform specific "conceits." it is just good old fashioned ansi c++. all of it.

That does sound very cool!

it is why i constantly apologize for my graphics... lady and gents, i'm making the game first, i'll worry about explosions and blood splatters later. marm supports a lot of graphical features, i am sad that it does not support spherical environment mapping (at the moment), but my water looks nice enough, and i want this to run on tablets and i'm not gonna sacrifice +50% of my cpu to water. smart opponents, THAT is what matters. the world is all that is the case.

One fairly simple thing that I think could help you a great deal with the graphics is to swap out the ship models with more realistic looking ones.
These ones look quite similar to the toy ships we had on the worldmap in the original unmodified Pirates of the Caribbean game we've been working on for the past 10 years.
We've got a lot of much better ship models in our modpacks now; perhaps some of our modelers would be kind enough to let you use their work?

 

[bix]

pieter,

congrats on not having a driver's license! a rare accomplishment. i'm proud not to own a mobile phone at the moment (lost it a few months ago), but my wife will force me to get one soon enough.

i have a few ship models stored up, but i'm starting with the lowest poly models for now, for the sake of speed. i hope to maintain 60fps on the PC, meaning about 25 on a tablet. eventually i'll make the graphics quality scalable.

once all the expensive game code is sucking up cpu, i'll figure out how much i have left to spend on polys and textures.

then, if folks want to donate a model under that polycount, i'm more than happy to accept. credit and freebies will be awarded.

best,
j.b.k. de sa

 

[Pieter Boelen]

congrats on not having a driver's license! a rare accomplishment. i'm proud not to own a mobile phone at the moment (lost it a few months ago), but my wife will force me to get one soon enough.

HA! I used not to have a mobile phone; now I've got an ancient-by-now Nokia because my parents figured I MUST have one.

i have a few ship models stored up, but i'm starting with the lowest poly models for now, for the sake of speed. i hope to maintain 60fps on the PC, meaning about 25 on a tablet. eventually i'll make the graphics quality scalable.

Scalable graphics on ship models sounds complicated to me; you'd have to make several sets of models, I think.
The unmodified PotC ship models were pretty low-poly. It's too bad you can't use those because of license reasons.
Our own custom models are, of course, much more high details. But maybe optimizing them by removing detail wouldn't be too difficult.

Do you really foresee massive performance issues just from the game mechanics?

 

[bix]

scalability is handled with what is called Level Of Detail, or LOD for short. any pro game modeler expects to be required to deliver models in at least 3 LOD sets.

re performance in the game mechanics, yes. think of it like a chess game. it takes a hell of a lot of computing power to beat a reasonably accomplished chess player - let us just say a very serious hobby player - you know, guys like us.

jbkds

 

[Pieter Boelen]

re performance in the game mechanics, yes. think of it like a chess game. it takes a hell of a lot of computing power to beat a reasonably accomplished chess player - let us just say a very serious hobby player - you know, guys like us.

Really? I never would have thought that. Didn't they have computers that were good at playing chess already 10, 15 years ago? Since then, computers have gained a LOT of processing power.

 

[bix]

sure, but it took a team of the best computer scientists at ibm to build "deep blue," which in 96 was finally capable of beating kasparov. that was no desktop pc mind you, but a massively parallel processing system.

also, most game AI at some level or another "cheats." i'd like mine not to have to do that. so far, it sticks to the same set of info that the player has available ie. it has no more domain knowledge than you do. it is hugely better at estimating shot charge and trajectory than any human could ever be.

also, remember the AI in a fleet battle handles all the opponent ships. path planing, estimating tack evolutions, as well as its internal tactics. plus it handles all of your ships that you are not actively commanding. my goal is to 64 ships on screen at the same time, that's a lot of ships in my opinion. not to mention that i want to support barges and longboats, so potentially it will be 64 ships plus 2-8 boats per ship.

the computer must also calculate all the physics for all these ships, and all their projectiles, and then draw them on the screen in a reasonably pleasing manner.

just my humble opinion, but i think the game industry spends too much time, cpu and otherwise, on the latest visual effects, and not enough on game mechanics. i think almost any game could be made vastly more interesting if more cpu was budgeted to internal systems and AI.

best,
bix

 

[bix]

FIRST PUBLIC RELEASE:

think of it as a "live" video. you can do nothing yet, other than move the camera.

- to pan the camera, click and drag the mouse. be careful, it's a bit touchy.
- up/down arrow keys pitch the camera.
- left/right rotate the camera, but i would not recommend it. that's really just for my own debugging.
- w/s keys raise and lower the camera. careful with those too, there are no "stops."
- escape key exits.

it will run in full-screen mode, but you need to hack a text file called "app.icf" in notepad, and enter your screen resolution:

here's the salient portion:
WinFullscreen=1
WinHeight=480
WinWidth=640
WinFullScreenHeight=768
WinFullScreenWidth=1366
WinPosX=10
WinPosY=10

my res is 1366x768 - put yours in there. i assume everyone can handle this.

about the scenario -

16 orange ships (you) face off against 16 black ships (the enemy) with hazardous islands between. each ship chooses it's opposite ship to hunt and engage. no cannon yet, soon soon. the wind is coming from due east so no side has the gauge.

i truely hope this does not "underwhelm" you. there are many things i had to gut from the release because, here and there, they were producing unexpected results. i did not want to confuse this first release with anything blatantly horrible, so it is a little less advanced than i would like. oh shut up, stop apologizing!

from here on in, every friday afternoon(ish) i will make a release with the latest and greatest. here's my roadmap till june 1 (and beyond)

week 1:
- add user ability to change the wind direction.
- command ships (sail to point, follow ship friend/foe)
- automated gunnery
- ship "animation" ie sail orientation, helm/rudder, and ship heel
week 2:
- set sail plan on individual ships
- change time scale
- visualize tacking/wearing/boxhaul (i hope)
- visualize combat damage
week 3:
- initial "captain" mode, fully manual control of the ships, toggle to auto
- gunnery control/command manual semi-auto and auto
week 4:
- captain mode complete (i hope)
- multiple scenarios with different objectives ("missions" or "levels")
- "official" beta release.

most everything mentioned above exists in one way or another, just not yet fully resolved.

and here's the url you have been waiting for:
http://www.cityarts.com/signal/signal.zip

unpack to a folder of your choice, edit the app.icf, and run engine.exe. upper left corner of the screen shows fps, you should be running at 50+


check the discussion on subsim if any points are unclear.
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=188692&page=9

best,

bix

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Do you have some sort of a name for your game yet? I reckon this deserves a new post to get everybody's attention!

 

[bix]

how about "Signal - Close Action!" for now.
i'll worry about copyright when i try to sell it.

bix
ps. i'd be pleased if you made the post

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Post made. See here: http://www.piratesahoy.net/threads/signal-close-action-first-public-release.20452/
I adjusted your original text to read a bit more like an official announcement. Let me know if you want anything changed.

Edit: Posted it to our Facebook and Twitter profiles too. I hope this'll help.

 

[bix]

thanks! everything great, but perhaps in re app.icf it should read something like "put YOUR screen resolution here"

btw just sort of like you don't drive a car, i don't do facebook or twitter. i'll let the ship's company handle that when necessary, and i actually have a ship's company. too much feedback is worse than too little.

thanks again!
bix

 

[Skyworm]

Heya here!

just my humble opinion, but i think the game industry spends too much time, cpu and otherwise, on the latest visual effects, and not enough on game mechanics. i think almost any game could be made vastly more interesting if more cpu was budgeted to internal systems and AI.

I absolutely sign this.
I am playing computer games since ... well, about 25 years. And I have never ever encoountered a games AI that deserved that name. In most cases, they cheat by superior knowledge, more resources at hand, or just by out-micromanaging you in the case of real time strategy games.A computer can well handle 30 singe units simultaneously, while a human can't.

Your project looks most interesting.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

thanks! everything great, but perhaps in re app.icf it should read something like "put YOUR screen resolution here"

Doesn't it already say that?

Unpack to a folder of your choice, then edit app.icf in Notepad to set up your screen resolution with the following two lines:

Not that people are going to read that.

btw just sort of like you don't drive a car, i don't do facebook or twitter. i'll let the ship's company handle that when necessary, and i actually have a ship's company. too much feedback is worse than too little.

We never did manage to get an incredible amount of followers through Facebook and Twitter. But all little bits help to get people to know about your work.