Hey, Sorta looking for a team or help

User Code & Projects
1

Hey guys, my name is Guy, But call me Nezin, No seriously.



Anyways, I am here today to ask for some help, im fairly new to JME3 ( compleatly accually ) But its free and might be able to handle what im looking for.



Heres a list of What im trying to do in a Space game, i do use refrences to a pre-existing game called EvE online.


  1. Twitch based gameplay, meaning that you fully control your ship in real-time in all the directions of space. Except for larger ships and Some Other things will be controlled otherwise


  2. Collisions on almost everything.


  3. Immersion; meaning real scales, dimensions and velocities. Planets are truely as large as real ones, and ships extremely small compared to them.


  4. Planetary landing with seamless transitions. If you can see something in the sky like a moon, you can get there in real time without seeing a single loading screen.


  5. Solar system dynamics. Bodies orbitting around each other, being able to watch a sunset or an eclipse. Planets are not just a fancy background ala X3.


  6. Travelling to another system doesn’t necessarily involve jump gates. sometimes they might be used depending on how far out the area your trying to get to is.


  7. A procedural universe – billions of star systems and planets, all unique, can use a random generator for one after making the first 23-100 systems.


  8. No skills, experience or levels ( Not sure about this one But will need some sort of system so people playing longer get bigger and better things but New players can still compeate)


  9. Less waiting time, when you want to mine, or go to a distant system.


  10. A living world, with NPCs flying around and living their own life.


  11. Being able to affect missions to other players or NPCs.


  12. Dynamic storyline. What i mean with “dynamic” is this: in most MMOs, you have a storyline ( sometimes very complex like in Eve ) written by the developers, and missions / quests related to it. However, none of those quests affect or make the storyline progress. storyline will be, by many aspects, closer to the one of a single-player game, with some specific player actions “triggering” a progress of the storyline.


  13. Owning an empire: multiple spaceships, stations, planets. Setting your own tax/rules for those. Enabling other players or even NPCs to fly your ships. Constructing buildings/factories in cities. Forming corporations, or owning actions into other player’s corporations.


  14. Multiple players flying in the same ship.


  15. Knowledge exchange. Prizes for being the first player to discover some special places / events ( like, analyzing a black hole, or discovering an unknown metal, or a new form of life ).


  16. Newtonian physics ( with computer assistance for eacy controlling ).


  17. Technology discovery plus patent system ( players have to hire scientists to make new technologies available in game, like a RTS’s tech-tree ). I know that Eve has blueprints, but as far as i understand, those are “static”.


  18. Being able to Get out of ship in into a station or onto a planet Walk around trade system


  19. Fairly Sandbox


  20. Another way to pay for game ( If monthly is decided upon ( using some for of ingame – currency ))



    Well, If im in the wrong section, i am sorry, but if you could steer me in the right one i would appricieate it.



    if you can help me, or join my Team, Please reply.



    Thanks.
2

Well @normen wrote the game with a friend of his so I think he can provide some help if need be :slight_smile:

3

I will preface this by saying that I hope I don’t come off as harsh.



You’ve obviously put a lot of thought into what you want to do with your game but I feel that you might not have a solid grasp on exactly what goes into making a game, or what a game engine provides, for that matter.



A few points:

  • Just about half of this feature list is made up of items that would not appear as functionality found in any engine out of the box. Multiple players in a ship, innovative forms of payment, style of gameplay, etc are all things that a game house would have to work through and implement based on their own volition. These are things simply too specific as it relates to the abstract idea of “game” for any one engine to provide and attract anything outside of a very narrow niche community.


  • I believe you’re taking for granted (and correct me if I’m wrong, of course) the amount of ‘fluff’ going on behind the scenes of a game. Running dynamic planetary simulations and the such are routines often tasked to supercomputers, I have a feeling your average user’s dual core notebook isn’t going to be able to handle this in addition to the other, extremely complex, features that you’ve listed.


  • The topic of immersion, as you put it, is a tough one as it pertains to scales and coordinate systems. Computers do limits to the amount of accuracy they can bring to a calculation. Working on scales as massive as space would require extremely aggressive scene partitioning and scaling. These are, of course, possible, but makes the notion of no loading screens a tough one. Based on your description, the game would be quite complex graphically speaking… it will take at least some time to swap these partitions as you move about.


  • Number 10 basically entails solving the problem of artificial intelligence. If you do that, then I wouldn’t worry at all about the pay structure.


  • Newtonian physics makes sense, but what do you mean by ‘computer assistance for easy controlling’? Do we get parametric control over the laws of science?


  • The question of a dynamic storyline is certainly an interesting one that I’ve not seen any game really pull off(except of course for games on social networking sites where advertising is a constant source of change).





    This is an ambitious game! While I try to never discourage people from following their dreams and thinking in the largest scale possible, I would gently remind you that this game is assuming a number of very advanced research topics. My suggestion is to find the one that really interests you and try to crack it in the context of a game.
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Well thank you for your time posting, When i made that list, I made it Big, But there are things Like what is listed that can be done, With Some thought and time, With out being too hard To do, and not hard On the computer itself.



Still wondering if JME could handle A game Made in “Space”

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If you look around the forums a bit you will find Scalaxy, which was made in space (well, it was actually created on Earth, but you play it in space!) :slight_smile:

6

jME can handle it, the question is can you? If it was easy writing games at that scale then we would see lots of great games all the time. Creating games is a balancing between faking stuff here, computing stuff there etc etc… All those engineers working on the big titles dont get their money for nothing you know :wink:

Cheers,

Normen

7

What I’d reccomend is to start coding from the tutorials. You’ll get a better idea of the work involved if you understand the system at it’s core.



You do have one thing right though. You can’t do it alone. You’ll need Java experts as well as 3D design experts, and probably sound engineers at a minimum.

8

My game concept is single player, and I want it to feel massive (in the sense of experiencing an apparently huge universe) too.



I have learnt that if you are serious about your goals, you have to tap into Pandora’s box without fear and see what it hides for you. For me I found the real massive thing in my game: a pile of 34 books (exactly, for now, and thanks that I had some basic background in many areas). I have been buying them since last march to learn all things involved in making games (my wife is scared because I spent so much money, well no, I am scared, she’s just angry).



Man, I have a long road ahead yet. It goes from game design, to maths, Open GL/GLSL, 3D & 2D art techniques, specific tools, realtime rendering, AI, game architecture, life painting and drawing, storyboarding, animation, concept art, writting and story telling, music theory, audio engineering/mixing, psicology, phylosophy, mythology… oh my. A massive game certainly needs massive knowledge and will.



The thing is, at my “somewhat mature” age with two kids and a full time job, I am in no hurry at all. I am just enjoying the journey. If this is your mind set then by all means embrace the joy of neverending learning and discovery. Gain awareness about what it is to make a game and then polish your list of goals accordingly.



I have discovered that games are really something very special, they embody all that is human, joining Art and Technology in a diabolical dance, like Beauty and the Beast trying to find meaning and connection, for me its a challenge for a life.





Hope to be inspiring ;). Good luck!

1 Like
9

wow, I like this community, people are nice and awnser questions.



Anyways, Yeah, I cant do it alone i will need help, and im not nessecairlly Wanting to Dive Head First, I want to enjoy the trip, But accually get somewhere in the end.



I have spent weeks looking for a Engine that fit my needs and it seemed like this one might.



Still, if anyone has suggestions they are welcomed :slight_smile:

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My suggestion is to listen to @jiyarza, he is a poet! As long as you aren’t afraid of some trials and tribulations I think it will definitely be a rewarding experience. so then, have you started on those tutorials yet?

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No i have not, But I plan to in a few hours, Currently finishing up some other work.



I went to look at your Space Game and got a Open GL thread has crashed error



java.lang.IlleagleStateException: Function is not supported



Game display settings have been reset.



im going to work on getting it running here soon, But thanks for all the replies everyone

12

Hey, have you been going through my mind and stealing my ideas? :wink:

Actually, we haven’t planned all the advanced features yet, since we want to finish the more basic ones first, to see that they work well and get a working universe before we add more, but many of those things you mention we are planning in some way to include in our game Holicity.

Perhaps we can help eachother along the way and make two similar but different games (more fun than two games that are exactly the same and we have some ideas that would set us apart in the design)!

I wish you all the best of luck and hope to hear more from you and your game!

13

hmmm… the game used to run fine… some recent incompatibility with jme2?

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@normen, maybe an old build of LWJGL? I can’t remember the most recent oddity in the Java security vs. OpenGL binding wars, but IIRC one of the releases solved a problem caused by Snoracle

15

Might be, let me see how I can integrate that into the demo, its a build from svn and it changed a lot since the last build ^^ Its not really game-ish in svn :wink:

16

@Nezin I have played EVE online for a while and I wished I could make the perfect procedural space game, too, I can feel with you! :smiley: On the other hand, I’m more like @jiyarza, I have to go to work and I know I will never publish such a game. BUT it is fun to plan the pieces of it, and dive into such a project as hobby. No pressure from a company, we can enjoy the work at leisure…



I don’t know how many people work for EVE online, how long it took, nor what their salaries are. In any case, we see there are companies that throw money at people to create games as full-time jobs – and even then, not every paying highly-staffed company produces something successful. From that I conclude that 1 person with less budget cannot produce anything that is better than EVE Online in the same time… (and if you take longer, you will have to port your game to jME version 37 one day) :wink:



If you break down this project into smaller pieces, and solve each piece, then you will at least have several realistic successs ahead, just saying…


1. Twitch based gameplay, meaning that you fully control your ship in real-time in all the directions of space.


You mean for action-filled shoot-outs? You could make them turn on the spot like the small fighters in Babylon 5... :)
I wonder whether players will cope with shooting, navigating, and tactics at the same time. (EVE online doesn't let you steer because it would be too distracting from the game.)

2. Collisions on almost everything.
3. Immersion; meaning real scales, dimensions and velocities. Planets are truely as large as real ones, and ships extremely small compared to them.


In real scale, there will be nothing to collide with -- real space is empty, I'm afraid... Have you ever calculated what that means? If you implement the distances in real scale, you see nothing because all planetary object are invisibly tiny. If you implement the planet sizes in real scale, you see nothing because everything is too far apart. Those are the two options...
Also, do you want to allow faster than light speed and instant braking at the destination? Either the scale or the speed has to be unrealistic. Otherwise, your players have to wait 100 years to reach the first waypoint...

4. Planetary landing with seamless transitions. If you can see something in the sky like a moon, you can get there in real time without seeing a single loading screen.


Sounds cool, you may be able to load the next object while flying there, that's how EVE does it anyway.

5. Solar system dynamics. Bodies orbitting around each other, being able to watch a sunset or an eclipse. Planets are not just a fancy background ala X3.


Hm. I would't know how to do that in a game engine. It's a game engine, and a physics engine -- but alas no optics engine.

6. Travelling to another system doesn’t necessarily involve jump gates. sometimes they might be used depending on how far out the area your trying to get to is.


Everything in real-scale space will be FAR. The closest planet is years away.
I'd recommend to screw "real scale" and scale it down to a level where the game is most fun.

7. A procedural universe – billions of star systems and planets, all unique, can use a random generator for one after making the first 23-100 systems.


I'm a fan of this idea I have to admit. I wouldn't go for billions, but randomly generating a few dozen levels, that's what I'm trying to achieve.

8. No skills, experience or levels ( Not sure about this one But will need some sort of system so people playing longer get bigger and better things but New players can still compeate)


I've been thinking about that too, it's tricky to keep experienced and inexperienced people satisfied witht he same thing without being unfair.

9. Less waiting time, when you want to mine, or go to a distant system.


Sorry, but that contradicts "real scale" and "no load screens" :) In EVE you wait long while flying because it HAS to load the stuff at one point...

10. A living world, with NPCs flying around and living their own life.


How do you define this life? Have you ever played the Sims? Can you re-implement the Sims? Usually games do "lazy" generation of events. System A is in peace and system B at war. If you decide to fly to B, it generates the details of fraction b1 and b2 and b3, etc. And when you land on a planet it egenrates the cities etc. Not everything at the same time -- nobody will ever see it.

11. Being able to affect missions to other players or NPCs.
12. Dynamic storyline. What i mean with “dynamic” is this: in most MMOs, you have a storyline ( sometimes very complex like in Eve ) written by the developers, and missions / quests related to it. However, none of those quests affect or make the storyline progress. storyline will be, by many aspects, closer to the one of a single-player game, with some specific player actions “triggering” a progress of the storyline.
15. Knowledge exchange. Prizes for being the first player to discover some special places / events ( like, analyzing a black hole, or discovering an unknown metal, or a new form of life ).


Affect other players? You mean trolls and griefers and spoilers...?

Progressing a global storyline and discoveries sound good. And then publish an ingame newspaper "player hotsexylady123 rescued the princess" and "sucksd1ckL0L invented plutonium". :D Problem is, how do you generate enough missions and minerals so everyone "wins" a few times....?

13. Owning an empire: multiple spaceships, stations, planets. Setting your own tax/rules for those. Enabling other players or even NPCs to fly your ships. Constructing buildings/factories in cities. Forming corporations, or owning actions into other player’s corporations.


Thats just like EVE does it. I don't know how they calculate or manage stuff, but that part seems doable. (Just include a note in the rules that you cannot help if anyone got cheated...)

14. Multiple players flying in the same ship.


I wonder why EVE doesn't allow that, is there a catch?

16. Newtonian physics ( with computer assistance for eacy controlling ).


I assume you mean de/acceleration, three-body-problem and gravity swing-by manoevers? You have looked at the maths before you said that, ... right?

17. Technology discovery plus patent system ( players have to hire scientists to make new technologies available in game, like a RTS’s tech-tree ). I know that Eve has blueprints, but as far as i understand, those are “static”.


Hm. Would would they be other than static? By which unstatic rules do you allow players to slap together random stuff and create new stuff?

18. Being able to Get out of ship in into a station or onto a planet Walk around trade system


That would be nice -- EVE said they are investigating that, too, because people keep asking to see their characters walk around! But then you need good customizable models, at least on Second Life level (and in second live, customizing the model is half of the game, not 5% as in your idea).

As I said above, I'd beak that into small individual pieces, and see where you go from there. Keep us informed!
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