[Xsera] Other Xsera

@adam_0, on Dec 14 2008, 08:11 PM, said in [Xsera] Other Xsera:

We're planning to "unlimit" this game, meaning that the only hindrances to having 80 people on one multiplayer game will be your hardware. Hopefully. Of course, that's easier said than done.

That is extremely sexy sir- I wish more people did that when making games.

this will be excellent :hector_bird:

'prophile' said:

Now the fairly major change: I've split Xsera into two parts, the actual game Xsera and an independent game engine called Apollo. Apollo contains nothing specific to Xsera, and can be used as a separate game engine for other projects. In fact, I'm going to do exactly that.

This carries some major advantages. Multiple projects using the core engine means it gets far more in the way of updates to keep it running efficiently and with plenty of features for us happy developers to use. The engine is called Apollo, and, incidentally, if any of you are thinking of making a game any time soon, it's there for you to use!

Whoa, this is major. I had my doubts, but building Dawn of Infinity on top of a separated Apollo engine might actually work. I heartily approve of going in this direction. I should check out the IRC room sometime.

@captain-bob, on Jan 2 2009, 07:55 PM, said in [Xsera] Other Xsera:

Whoa, this is major. I had my doubts, but building Dawn of Infinity on top of a separated Apollo engine might actually work. I heartily approve of going in this direction. I should check out the IRC room sometime.

Yeah, come sometime. Also, you can download the latest build (although it's not stable at the moment) from github, link in the FAQ.

Nice to see Xsera is comming along nicely.
Looking forward to the demo.

@captain-bob, on Jan 3 2009, 03:55 AM, said in [Xsera] Other Xsera:

Whoa, this is major. I had my doubts, but building Dawn of Infinity on top of a separated Apollo engine might actually work. I heartily approve of going in this direction. I should check out the IRC room sometime.

Agreed. Having a generic "space combat engine" is a great idea. Given how many people like writing space warfare games, I can see it becoming a font of fun. Particularly if EV fans like Captain Bob write up a "space RPG engine" that adds onto it, allowing EV-style projects to be easily created. Hell, I can see people writing up a "space strategy engine" (a la Star Control I) which then make use of the combat engine to give people direct control over battles...

@sundered-angel, on Jan 6 2009, 02:03 AM, said in [Xsera] Other Xsera:

Hell, I can see people writing up a "space strategy engine" (a la Star Control I) which then make use of the combat engine to give people direct control over battles...

Empire at war meets ares?

@zamzx-zik, on Jan 6 2009, 08:08 AM, said in [Xsera] Other Xsera:

Empire at war meets ares?

What I always loved about Ares, and missed greatly in Empire at War, was the ability to take direct command of any vessel on the fly. In EaW, the ships don't always behave like they are ordered to, often breaking formation to go on personal vendettas/suicide runs. I don't appreciate their overzealous enthusiasm, especially when they go 1-on-1 with their DIRECT counter and are quickly annihilated. I often wish i could take over for myself. Ideally, the player would start at the helm of the most powerful ship in the fleet, just as the "fleet commander" units already do.

Then again, I'd be happy just having a group of people to play against. The Petroglyph mac community is nonexistent.

New progress post. Enjoy & discuss.

Great to here some news. I'm gonna have to ask Alastair about the shaders. Does that mean that the "no significant graphics changes" policy is changing? Also, does shaders mean that the GPU is going to be utilized?

I'm certainly no expert here... I just don't want to end up with performance issues on computers with relatively weak GPU's. I suppose the shaders could always be optional though.

I have faith in you guys

Shaders aren't necessarily complicated. In fact, under virtually all drivers now, the fixed-function pipeline is essentially emulated using shaders. Combined with the ARB_point_sprite extension it'll allow us to do some neat effects with particles - by offloading all the computation onto the GPU, which, even old old system, is fast, it'll mean we can do all sorts of neat little effects like smoke coming out of damaged ships, clouds of dust from destroyed asteroids or photorealistic fire, a la GPU Gems; I'd also wondered about using some kind of distortion mesh (if supported!) to essentially "warp" space in front and behind the player's ship if they're using warp.

@redsteven, on Jan 20 2009, 10:16 PM, said in [Xsera] Other Xsera:

Great to here some news. I'm gonna have to ask Alastair about the shaders. Does that mean that the "no significant graphics changes" policy is changing? Also, does shaders mean that the GPU is going to be utilized?

The policy is "no significant changes on the graphics for the original remake", which still holds true: there will be a button (read: really big red button) that will allow all preferences and settings to default back to Ares-like settings (or something of that sort) - hopefully for a very authentic experience.

I've got exams (or at least mad studying) until tuesday, then I should have time to finish the blowfish encryption stuff, and start on RSA to swap blowfish keys.

Good to hear, good to hear.

I don't have anything against adding optional spiffy graphics - it would be pretty cool, actually.

So what do you guys think about implementing actual missions and stuff? Once the Engine is up and running, is adding in the original campaign going to be a cakewalk (relatively speaking, of course)?
Or is it going to take some serious effort to find out all the triggers and stuff that were in the original campaign and port them over?

@redsteven, on Jan 21 2009, 03:05 PM, said in [Xsera] Other Xsera:

Good to hear, good to hear.

I don't have anything against adding optional spiffy graphics - it would be pretty cool, actually.

So what do you guys think about implementing actual missions and stuff? Once the Engine is up and running, is adding in the original campaign going to be a cakewalk (relatively speaking, of course)?
Or is it going to take some serious effort to find out all the triggers and stuff that were in the original campaign and port them over?

Here's what I'm imagining (and this is not something I've collaborated with everyone else, so it's easily subject to change): after the first demo, major overhauls will go underway to allow for the usage of all the ship and weapon data, allowing us to rapidly import them using Pallas' data (in fact, I've been working on getting this ready in between working on other things). As soon as that system is in place, the second demo will be released (with lots more features than the first). After that, AI and triggers should be the biggest items on our plate.

@prophile, on Jan 20 2009, 11:51 PM, said in [Xsera] Other Xsera:

...by offloading all the computation onto the GPU, which, even old old system, is fast...

How old would something like this work on? My PowerBook's Radeon 9000 (64 MB)? My G3's Rage 128 (6 MB)? If this is what I am imagining, my 1 GHz PB might struggle a bit.

Github won't let me download anymore. It says "This repo is too large to generate a tarball. Our new download system is in the works. Sorry about that." Zip didn't work either.

@gavin83209, on Jan 21 2009, 08:37 PM, said in [Xsera] Other Xsera:

Github won't let me download anymore. It says "This repo is too large to generate a tarball. Our new download system is in the works. Sorry about that." Zip didn't work either.

From what I understand, github is undergoing some major changes. Sorry that the download doesn't work, although there's nothing much to see anyways...

It's not your fault. I have yet to upgrade to Leopard, and I can still use my copy from 11/21 if needed.

@gavin83209, on Jan 22 2009, 04:37 AM, said in [Xsera] Other Xsera:

How old would something like this work on? My PowerBook's Radeon 9000 (64 MB)? My G3's Rage 128 (6 MB)? If this is what I am imagining, my 1 GHz PB might struggle a bit.

Obviously I'll degrade graphics for older systems if Xsera struggles.

@adam_0, on Jan 21 2009, 10:05 PM, said in [Xsera] Other Xsera:

Here's what I'm imagining (and this is not something I've collaborated with everyone else, so it's easily subject to change): after the first demo, major overhauls will go underway to allow for the usage of all the ship and weapon data, allowing us to rapidly import them using Pallas' data (in fact, I've been working on getting this ready in between working on other things). As soon as that system is in place, the second demo will be released (with lots more features than the first). After that, AI and triggers should be the biggest items on our plate.

And how's that going? Has Pallas been able to reliably extract that data? Or do you think that a fair amount of it will require play-testing the original game to find out about what triggers there were?
I assume that Pallas has that stuff under control – just wanted to check though

@redsteven, on Jan 24 2009, 11:35 PM, said in [Xsera] Other Xsera:

And how's that going? Has Pallas been able to reliably extract that data? Or do you think that a fair amount of it will require play-testing the original game to find out about what triggers there were?
I assume that Pallas has that stuff under control – just wanted to check though

Data extraction is going well, although we won't need most of that until after the first demo. The systems are not yet in place to deal with Pallas' extracted data, although when they are, I'm sure it'll only be a little while until it's all set up and working.