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Vendetta Online is a nice space based MMO, I was in the beta test for the last two months or so before it went live. It is not overly similar to EV. Its in 3d, you cannot get capital ships (at least not yet), cant land on planets, cant board/capture ships. It is no EV, but that its a small solo company game made by like 6 developers, it is impressive. Ohh, my point is that an online EV like game would be different then vendetta, and would attract players.
I recommend using a compiled language (like C). Steer clear of object oriented languages, as construction/deconstruction tend to add significant overhead to a game engine's speed. By all means use an object oriented model for development, but implement your model using traditional structs, enumerated types and manual memory management.
I recommend using OpenGL as your graphics language. It supports both 2D and 3D viewable areas, and is supported on all major platforms. It is also hardware accelerated on those platforms.
I do not recommend a visual editor. At least, not for games. Use a traditional IDE, or even a good old text editor.
Plan your project well. Complete your specification before starting to code. Code in very small sections, and test each completed chunk before moving on. Part of your specification should include what each section does and what values it should expect (and handle).
All the best,
Dafydd "pipeline" Williams @ ATMOS Software Productions Pty Ltd
I just remembered something. Dawn of Infinity, the MMORPG based on the EV style gameplay.
i tryed Vendetta Online but i dont like it. its too big for the amount of players it has. i played for about an hour and didnt see anyone else.
thanks to pipeling for the advise, i never even considered open gl. it'll make it a lot easyer.
pipeline, on Jan 2 2005, 09:25 PM, said:
I do not recommend a visual editor. At least, not for games. Use a traditional IDE, or even a good old text editor. View Post
vi Standard on all UNIX based machines.
Or if you are using a crappy Ms-DOS based mahcine there is EDIT.
I love old-school command line editors.
This post has been edited by The Real Darth Bob : 03 January 2005 - 09:24 AM
I've wondered for a while if something like a MOO would be a good model to use in making a multiplayer game similar to EV. In many ways, the structure of EV reminds me of MOOs with the exception that things are not object oriented. For example, each system is sort of like a descendant of $room and the connections would be descendants of $exit.
Hell, I'd be happy as a clam if a EV-like game appeared that was not multiplayer but allowed for in-game programing and object oriented setups. Then one would have far more power than the present tease of using {} evals in descriptions and one could make a truely adaptive EV vs fixed, predicatable setups.
-STH
I would happy with an event scripting language similar to marathon's pfhortran or Civ II's in EV.
And I'm sure all people working on plugs that require that kind of complexity would be happy too.
Several people tried to create EV-like online games. The most successful of them is Vendetta, which is very much like it. Another is Dawn of Infinity, though they seem to stall (I had links to their website but they no longer work). Not 3D anyway. Someone also wrote a little game named Event Horizon (can't remember the name), which was more EV orientated, but it is incomplete and doesn't look like it'll ever be completed.
Creating EVN took years and would take much longer to create it with 3D models and network capabilities, which is probably the the reason why they didn't and will never do.
If you want to try, good luck. But don't be amazed when someday you feel the desparate urge to throw your computer out of a 10th floor window and jump after it.
I was thinking of something like Metrowerks or BBEdit.
Dave @ ATMOS
I don't think it'll happen. I don't quite think he understands what he's getting into. Even though I won't be able to run it, if it's ever made, I'll buy 3.
Arion, on Jan 3 2005, 04:51 PM, said:
If you want to try, good luck. But don't be amazed when someday you feel the desparate urge to throw your computer out of a 10th floor window and jump after it. View Post
Hi, I'm one of the Dawn of Infinity Developers.
Your statement is partially incorrect, we do use OpenGL and we draw 3d models of the ships. However, the ships can only move in two dimensions with a top down view.
Yes, we do stall a lot but we do have a lot of code at the moment. At the moment we're thinking of merging the client and the server code because the way we are doing it at the moment is a bit silly. We have the client written in C++ in a very OOP way and the Server is in C in a much less oop way. The problem with this is that we now have two versions of the Engine, one in the server and one and one in the client. We're written practically twice as much code as is neccessary! Not a good idea
When we get a version that works well with lots of people then we'll post here.
Corun, on Jan 5 2005, 12:51 AM, said:
We're written practically twice as much code as is neccessary! Not a good idea View Post
That smacks of bad planning, if I may say so.
pipeline, on Jan 4 2005, 11:45 PM, said:
Dave @ ATMOS View Post
I was exagerating
But yeah, it is still pretty bad planning.
Why exactly is this on the EV Developer's Corner?
Dunno. Want to lock it?
pipeline, on Jan 5 2005, 05:26 PM, said:
Dunno. Want to lock it? View Post
mrxak would absolutely love to lock topics. If you've seen the Escape Velocity boards, you'd understand that he's the Moderator equivalent of a sado-masochist; locking topics most likely gives him pleasure(this was not meant to offend anyone... just point out that mrxak probably would like to lock it).
you might as well lock this, it probably isnt serving any purpose.
This post has been edited by Smither : 06 January 2005 - 07:19 AM
Good luck making Rune Velocity!
Yeah, this is getting really off topic
Come back when you have something to show, so many people (including myself) have gone rar! MMO EV! Tomorrow! Yes!!!! without realising how much work there is behind it. I'm not saying don't try, but the first thing to think about is the mission engine - that's the core of EV gameplay. Once that is working, then think about graphics. And don't use VB. Just don't. Pure Java, C#, or even better, straight C using SDL for graphics. The simpler the better.