My Proposal

Look at this before reading.

A dwarf fortress map. It looks amazing, and uses only the IBM PC-437 character set. Angband (which is of the ascii game type), and other games like it, are called roguelikes. They are extremely fun.

Why do I bring this up? Because I love these kind of games. There's so much more to a game when the graphics are limited. Math is more complex, battle is more complex, and descriptions are descriptive. So many things are taken into account simply because they are not required to be rendered.

Thrive should be this way. Why? Because it just makes sense. We want to have vast amounts of population mechanics, and we want to get it done. Amazing graphics are something an unpaid programmer cannot accomplish. I believe sick gameplay to be better than elite graphics any day.

Don't like it? Sure. That's fine by me.

I frankly don't care if we have a graphics engine at all, but the game kind of requires 3D gameplay. The whole point is that we can make it, and there are graphics engines out there that we could potentially use (ogre). However, yes, graphics are a secondary objective.

There's one distinct flaw in ASCII games: for most people it's very hard to orient in such graphics.
We are going for hell of a revolutionary game, people are not going to complain (much) as long as we will have nice and clean graphics. It doesn't have to be Crysis. If it will not be "What the Belgium is that yellow letter D?", everything will be okay.

First-person necessitates slightly (I don't want to say better, but...) more easy-to-understand graphics. I mean, we don't have to go extrordinarily whole-hog and have Halo-style graphics, but we want to be able to see what we've made. The above map looks like it would work during a civ-style bit, but probably not as well when you're a wandering lizzard or something.

Commander Keen wrote:

There's one distinct flaw in ASCII games: for most people it's very hard to orient in such graphics.
We are going for hell of a revolutionary game, people are not going to complain (much) as long as we will have nice and clean graphics. It doesn't have to be Crysis. If it will not be "What the Belgium is that yellow letter D?", everything will be okay.

Agreed. We're not exactly coding CryEngine or Frostbite here.

Hmm.. well then. I was thinking of this for feasibility. Everything is so much simpler --integerial positions, distance checking, no meshes, etc.. Camouflage would be doable, as would visualizing smell.

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First-person necessitates slightly (I don't want to say better, but...) more easy-to-understand graphics. I mean, we don't have to go extrordinarily whole-hog and have Halo-style graphics, but we want to be able to see what we've made. The above map looks like it would work during a civ-style bit, but probably not as well when you're a wandering lizzard or something.

https://2img.net/h/i70.photobucket.com/albums/i115/biochemist123/screen3.png

It would be even more zoomed in than that.

I don't really know what I'm looking at in that screen, except water because it's blue. That's something we really don't want to have, people should not have to play the game to recognize what they see in a screenshot.

I can understand saying ASCII games have some advantages for games like Dwarffortress but if you look at they way this game is going you can easilly understand that it would be almost impossible to implement this game in that form. It would probaly work for all the single stages but the differnt game stages cooexsist and that makes the whole thing very complex. All in all this game will be made into a 3D virtual reality and that fits perfectly to the project.

I think i speak for the most of the people here when i say: From the beginning on we all expected a 3D game and we have already spent alot of effort in this direction (tech editor and stuff that expects a 3D game world).

and Keen, that yellow D is a *beeeeeep* *beeeeep* Belgium *beeeeep*. Sorry for my bad language but i have already censored it. xD

No offence, Roadkill, but it's pretty much greek to me. I think there's trees...

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but if you look at they way this game is going you can easilly understand that it would be almost impossible to implement this game in that form. It would probaly work for all the single stages but the differnt game stages cooexsist and that makes the whole thing very complex.

False. This completely simplifies it. How are 3D coordinates, vectors, and animations more simple than characters?

I know the way this game is going; all bark, no bite. AFAIK, I am the sole programmer. If we want something done, we need to write it. I am merely proposing options.

roadkillguy wrote:

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but if you look at they way this game is going you can easilly understand that it would be almost impossible to implement this game in that form. It would probaly work for all the single stages but the differnt game stages cooexsist and that makes the whole thing very complex.

False. This completely simplifies it. How are 3D coordinates, vectors, and animations more simple than characters?

I know the way this game is going; all bark, no bite. AFAIK, I am the sole programmer. If we want something done, we need to write it. I am merely proposing options.

While we do want simplicity, and we want the game done, an ascii game is not an option.

roadkillguy wrote:

AFAIK, I am the sole programmer. If we want something done, we need to write it. I am merely proposing options.

There's still Bashi, but he's like the God: everyone knows him, but no one has ever seen him.

Unfortunately, Scio's right, ASCII is not an option. We can try to minimise reinventing the wheel as much as possible by using 3rd party libraries, but at least basic 3d is an absolute must.

The only alternative i could imagine are 2D sprite graphics. Me being honest: "ASCII grafics just sound dumb". And im not just saying that, i spent more then 5 min thinking about this. Its just not combinable with the game concept.

I forgot to say that 2D grafics would also be impossible to combine with the game concept.*

I'm with the crowd. Let's make it 3D, and heck, let's even make it look good! But graphics is waaaay down the list here. Mainly graphics are simply our means of communication, therefore they should be as advanced as we need them to be. (Thinking sensory overlays here.) Also, if we could find a way to work draw distance better than what most games seem to do (Playing Fallout 3 is always an adventure, when a giant billboard could pop from the aether anywhere and anytime.) I'd be a happy girl.

However, my absolute biggest worry is animations and clipping. If they don't look good, then then we have no immersion, no since of reality, and likely a smaller fanbase. We could have NES graphics for all I care, so long as our animations and clipping are good.

Commander Keen wrote:

There's still Bashi, but he's like the God: everyone knows him, but no one has ever seen him.

That, and whatever happened to Papergrape? Or am I so far out of the loop that everyone else knows what I don't...

Also, supporting Tenebrarum here, clipping is going to be a big pain in our belgium because of the vast variety of shapes that an organism will be able to take - other games manage by limiting shapes and sizes of PC's (Think the sims - all the same height for ease of animation) and limiting their range of animations. With all of our different creatures and their interactions with the environment... Good on you and whoever else ends up running that madhouse, Roadkill.

And I'm sorry, but the ASCII still looks like a bunch of funny dots to me. I obviously didn't play enough videogames until I became a teenager.

we can discuss about the actual graphics later but it will take forever to find a concept to make animations look good. the spore aproach wouldnt work in our project because:

1) As far as i know the animations for every bodyelement(mouth, leg and so on) are presaved and just ajusted to the size

2) That system already sounds like a b**** to make but rarely resulted in good animations.

So we need a new animation system. We will have to of course base it of the skeleton in the OE.

???NEW THREAD???


Maybe we should make a very easily accesable list of programmers and members of this group that are trying to become programmers with a line that shows the last time the visited this site.

BastianKraft wrote:

Maybe we should make a very easily accesable list of programmers and members of this group that are trying to become programmers with a line that shows the last time the visited this site.

We have a user-groups section, maybe we could add a 'programmers' group to that, rather than just making a thread which will get buried in the dusty regions of this site? Currently we only have one, 'Moderators', which is just for selecting who gets the virtual spanners and screws of this forum. (Of course, they'd need virtual screwdrivers and those screw-cog things to actually be able to do anything)

I ment a thread for the animations.

And a better and less hidden list of the programmers would just be good.

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1) As far as i know the animations for every bodyelement(mouth, leg and so on) are presaved and just ajusted to the size

How do we get around this? Somehow you need to tell the game, "Put a vertex here, and attach it to this armature."

... I don't actually know. Talk to the father of the OE scio about how vertexes equate to muscles and bones and joints. I think he has something hiding out in that brain of his...