UFO:AI Online

[docwild]

Making a two player version would be relatively simple. An interface for controlling the alien side and then getting rid of all AI code (basically just different buttons). Games without AI are much.. much simpler. As for MMP, well that would be a whole different story... Probably just end up as deathmatches, may as well make a different game, IMO.

The beauty of this game is its engaging story, the bells and whistles of graphical eye-candy tend to get in the way of gameplay like this which is why we dont see three billion clones of it being released every two months by big software houses.

UFO EU is probably the last game I enjoyed playing (except the civ franchise), otherwise all games are doom or command and conquer. If anyone remembers the heyday of gaming, on the Amiga, the amount of innovative games which were invented is astonishing. Then the MS windows lot moved in and everything was about the latest greatest hardware, playability and innovation have been sacrificed. If you dont own the latest hardware, you cant play the latest games, and people continue to fall for it.

You know what, thats fine by me. Ill fire up UAE or dosbox and Ill play something which entertains me, and has done for decades rather than something you play through once and never touch again. If I want to look at pretty pictures I'll go to an art gallery or I'll play Myst.

[Destructavator]

Arg...coding...
Yeah, Irrlicht doesnt look too bad either. Have you looked at Sauerbraten?

Nope, I never researched Sauerbraten, so I can't really offer a comparison or comment on it.

If you do go with Irrlicht I can help with the coding part because I'm familiar with it, and because its easy to work with you'll probably be familiar with it as well by the time such a project gets mature.

If you go with Ogre - or Crystal Space, for that matter, I can help you just a little bit - mostly setting up the programming environment - but you would really need to recruit someone who really knows programming with Ogre, and you would have quite an uphill battle attempting to code anything.

If you go with something totally different or something not even in C++, all I could give would be a little extra artwork and some sounds and music, that's really it.

FYI I glanced at a game engine, open source, called Apocalyx (sp?) which is geared specifically for games and aimed at developers who don't know serious coding, but after trying a few demos I have to say that it is a bit limited, mostly because although much of the harder coding work is done for you it is hard to custom-tailor your game the way you really want it, leaving you stuck with "generic" or "stock" implementations of features.  Also, it runs mostly on Windows and only somewhat on Linux under Wine.

Edit:  If you give me a little time I can show you examples of a few things I've put together with Irrlicht, although I don't have any large, full-blown projects completed with it.  I do have a third-person shooter/RPG project I've started, hopefully one day to become a cross between Deus Ex and Max Payne, but I don't have a lot of it done yet.  (Mostly at this point just a single character with a few inventory objects/weapons that can run around a tiled (randomly generated) 3D map and shoot the weapons, with bullet impact marks, and change between different types of ammunition.  That and the target finder/crosshairs are a little cool in a way.)

[Legendman3]

There is a multiplayer but it dosent work because noones on

[vedrit]

Well....I wont be going with Irrlicht. I cant even get it to run

[Destructavator]

Well....I wont be going with Irrlicht. I cant even get it to run

Do you mean you can't run the already-compiled and built examples (in the "bin" folder)?  Or did you try to build something all by yourself (without help)?

If it's the second case, and you didn't even ask for help on what part you're stuck on, you're going to have about ten times as much trouble getting Ogre up and running (as well as many of the other, more difficult ones to work with).  Irrlicht is really the easiest of the ones out there, and if you can't make it work then I don't think you'll get your idea of a project off the ground.  Unless, of course, you go with one of those game-design kits that doesn't really involve programming, just lots of wizards for setting up data with pre-fab code that you can't really customize.  (which would make a crappy, cheap-looking game.  I know, I've looked at those.)

If you don't believe me, try getting your own Ogre program built and running from scratch.  It'll be even more impossible for you.

What exactly did you try to make Irrlicht run that didn't work?  I have a feeling that you tried something you weren't ready for yet and haven't given it a fair shot before jumping to a conclusion.  It works on just about any modern hardware, including iPhone and XBOX as well, right out of the box - by comparison Ogre and others don't unless sometimes done with lots of modifications and advanced tweaks.

Hint:  The examples - the already built and ready to go ones - require that they be run in the same, preserved folder structure as they are found in the entire downloaded .zip of the engine.  They look for the "media" folder and other folders in specific places to start up and run.

If you tried to build something yourself, did you set the include directories and lib path inside your IDE?  (So the compiler knows to include the engine and use it to build the program?)

[vedrit]

I dont even try compiling my own. Even with all the programs to make it "easy", I just cant ever seem to do it right.
Everything in the bin folder is just examples. Nothing to use to make anything that I can see

[Destructavator]

I think you misunderstand how the engine (and other libraries as well) work.  Those little .EXE files in the bin folder are supposed to be simple examples, just a little of what the engine is capable of.  They're also tutorial projects that can be re-built with the documentation, so if you rebuild them in your IDE and re-compile you will know how to code those types of things.

To actually "make anything" you need two things (at least) that are *separate*, and this is true for ALL the engines, including Ogre, Crystal Space, and the others:

- You need a compiler, which is the software that actually builds the source code.  Examples are MinGW (used by UFO: AI), Microsoft MSVC, Borland C++, etc.

- You need an IDE, which is a program that edits the source code files, organizes them on-screen, working a little bit like MS word or Notepad but with many additional features meant specifically for source code C and C++ files.  The IDE is what tells the compiler the right commands at the command line for you to build the final EXE program.  (or DLL, or whatever you're making.)  UFO:AI uses Codeblocks or Eclipse for this on Windows.  Microsoft makes their own, some versions are free, and others exist, some of which are free and some even open source.

Think of it this way:  You are building a large house.  The IDE and compiler are your tools (hammers, saws, drills, etc.)  The engine is your raw materials and supplies that will make up the house (wood, metal, glass...)

All these things combined are needed to build the program.  The engine by itself is just a library of source code mostly.  Without the IDE and compiler you can't do too much with it, like have a huge pile of wood without the tools to make the house out of it.

The compiler and IDE, without any libraries, doesn't have anything to work with and can't just build a program out of nothing.

So it sounds like actually, yes, the Irrlicht engine examples DO run for you, you just don't have the programming tools to do anything with the engine.  To say "I can't even get it to run" is senseless, blind, and deep in misunderstanding of how a 3D graphics engine works.

Ogre and the others are even worse and more difficult, because Irrlicht has a built-in collision/gravity system for models and maps, a built in GUI system, etc.  With the others you need to get those things separate from other places.  (Physics engine, audio/sound engine, collision engine, network library, etc.)

If you were hoping for a "universal level editor" software utility that builds a game from scratch, those don't really exist, at least none that work very good  (I know, I've looked extensively.)

Nearly all the programming engines and libraries work like this.

To use any of them you *WILL* end up staring at lines of code on your screen, in some programming code language.

As a final note, game creation is very complex and takes a lot of work, even for a simple game.  There isn't any "easy way out" of all that work, or any way around it.  Now do you see why people can take over a year for making a dumb little 2D game?

[vedrit]

As a final note, game creation is very complex and takes a lot of work, even for a simple game.  There isn't any "easy way out" of all that work, or any way around it.  Now do you see why people can take over a year for making a dumb little 2D game?

No offense, but that is just a big "no duh"
I know its hard. It know it takes a long time. There is a saying, which is very true, that goes something like this: Anything that can be done quickly isnt worth doing.
HOWEVER, I was hoping for something like RealmCrafter, which is heavily geared towards the artistic rather than programing, meaning its a game engine, with a graphical interface similar to what you would find in a modeling program. Epic Games' UDK is close, and I'm learning it for another project, but its not GPL friendly.
I understand that for any particular project to be worth making, muchless playing, lines upon lines of code will have to be examined, edited, or flat out written. If I could do flat out scripting and coding, I'd already be working on this project and have a project or two already done. But I cant. Simply put, I just cant grasp the language and complexeties of scripting languages (Atleast without taking classes as if it were a foreign language)

All in all, Im not looking for an easy way out of the work,Im just looking for a graphical way of doing the work

[docwild]

Sounds like you want XNA, it'll cost you about 1000 pounds a year to do anything serious with it. Plus extra licensing costs if you release anything, and it's entirely .NET, so Windows/XBOX only.

Just to annoy you, I get it for free but I've never used it...

Learning to program isn't as hard as it looks, ANSI C has about 30 keywords to learn for example. If you expect to read about programming and then understand it you are making some false assumptions. Like anything worth doing it takes practice and discipline, there are no shortage of tutorials out there; nobody was born knowing how to code. That isn't even the end of the story; if you don't know about vertices and matrix calculations you have some very basic reading to do.
 

As for game studio software, well if you get a good one it's worth its weight in gold and so you pay through the nose for it. Maybe one day the open source alternatives will overtake but it's an odd market as far as games are concerned.

Btw, i taught myself to code and I've been to uni to learn it... You are better off teaching yourself.

[Legendman3]

I LIKE PEANUT BRITTLE! ALL HAIL WHOEVER MAKES THIS MULTIPLAYER!!!!!! WOOT!

[DiDiT]

legendman... WTF... I mean really, WTF!


UFOAI already has working on-line play, is your firewall letting it out?

[vedrit]

Learning to program isn't as hard as it looks, ANSI C has about 30 keywords to learn for example. If you expect to read about programming and then understand it you are making some false assumptions. Like anything worth doing it takes practice and discipline, there are no shortage of tutorials out there; nobody was born knowing how to code. That isn't even the end of the story; if you don't know about vertices and matrix calculations you have some very basic reading to do.

Im not saying people are born to code. But some people learn it better, quicker, and more thuroughly than others. Its just one of those things about the human mind.
I'll put it this way: I struggled to learn the basics of HTML, the BASICS, from several sources.

[Duke]

Vedrit,
you don't necessarily need to learn how to code to create a great game.

What you desperately need is a convincing *concept* that  explains why it would be sooooo great to have an MMPORG version of UFO:AI. It's NOT enough to have some followers who say "Yeah, I'd love to see that.".

Such a concept might attract the coders, modelers, mappers, artists, (...) needed to create the game.
The coders will decide which engine to use btw.

I haven't seen such a concept in this thread so far, so you did not convince *me*.

[Destructavator]

Duke is right - if you don't do the coding but team up with someone who does, you should let that person decide what engine and other libraries to use - if, of course, you can come up with something that stands out and attracts such a person.

If you are having trouble getting your concept to really stand out and get a coder seriously interested, perhaps you could apply your art skills and come up with some original models and other content, hopefully something that stands out in that way, so that someone who programs will want to see that model/artwork in a game and agrees with your concept.  I've seen some (although not a whole lot of) programmers who want to further their coding skills and consider making a game but don't know for sure what they want to make, sometimes concerned that if they start something they might have trouble getting enough artwork and content for an idea.  If such a person stumbles across what you've got so far they may very well make you an offer, although please understand that they will probably want parts of your game changed here and there or compromised on.  Unless you have tons of money to hire programmers to make a game for you so you're the boss, that's something you'll have to accept and deal with.

As for your concept, the market has so friggin' many wannabe MMORPG developers already that your idea isn't really standing out.

I've seen this many times before - someone who has a burning desire to build their game idea, really wanting it to be made and not die, but not having the skill or ability to program or really build it.  I'm sorry to say that in most cases I've seen either they have to learn to program, come up with a PROFOUND idea that really attracts people to help them (almost any gamer can come up with a common idea for building a game they'd like to see, I haven't seen one who can't yet), get lots of money to hire programmers to code it for them, or it just plain dies out and never gets off the ground.

Edit:  As I said If you pick (or allow) an engine that I have familiarity with I'd be willing to help out some, but I'd be a "part-timer" and you would still need more people.  Still, that's better than absolutely nothing.  I do admit though that if I saw a more interesting game concept that really stood out I might devote more time to helping out, if it gets started.

[vedrit]

But this isnt a 'burning desire', just something I thought people might like. If you dont like it, then I will never be able to convince you to even play, much less work on it.
I wont try and convice anyone to work with me. If they arent convinced from the first get-go, then tough luck for me. Duke, you see lack of concept. I saw concept within the first few of my posts. If you want anything more than what details I've posted, then you want more than just concept, you want hard, 100% gurantee to work and be in the game, content. That, I cannot provide