Couple Quick Questions
Posted: Sat Jan 26, 2013 9:47 pm
I grew up on Ambrosia's Escape Velocity series, and long searched for a 3d sim equivalent. Vega strike is probably the closest I've seen and I'm interested in using it as an engine to produce a game project for which I've had in concept for years. Now mind you, I'm graduating college, getting married, and have a whole lot of real life to look to, so my dabbling with this sort of thing is limited to occasional free time at the moment. Still, this is something I'd like to do as a hobby perhaps, so I have a few questions.
1. Is this engine still being worked on? A dead engine is no use to me. There'd be no one to address bugs or necessary features, and my skills are primarily in the art department, so I would be unable to improve on the engine code myself. Any work I do would likely be spread out over the next few years, so dying isn't really good either.
2. Is it possible to boil the vast amount of existing content down to say, the SOL system and a handful of ships and outfits? Since I'd be starting from scratch I'd want a very small space to work in to experiment with the engine's features and new content. How co-dependent is the content? Will the whole thing fall apart if I start deleting stuff?
3. Which OS should I use? I use an intel mac which has both OSX and Windows XP. My graphics software is all on the mac side, but if its easier to edit the windows version of VS I can transfer completed art between OS's.
4. Where should I start? I have no knowledge of C++ or python. I've looked as some of the 0.5.0 files on the mac side, and a lot of values for ships, weapons, outfits, ect, seems to be fairly self explanatory and reasonably moddable. But there's alot more I can't find, such as systems, stations/planets, UI, text description for said stations/planets, and more. Also, all image files are not recognized by any application I have, despite being pngs? There were other things I was wondering about but its not coming off the top of my head.
I'm not looking to make things more complex, indeed my concepts are rather less elaborate than VS itself is projected to be. I'm tentatively considering working on a 3d remake of the original Escape Velocity.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_Vel ... ideo_game) Not because it's particularly worth remaking, but largely because its ships and stations are highly simplistic and I can re-create them with ease, plus it has 2d art I can recycle. It also has a small universe in comparison with later EV games, and other games of the genre. Thus porting it to VS would be more a matter of implementation, which would give me a chance to learn my way around the engine without simultaneously worrying about world-building and art. Then when I feel comfortable with what is possible, I could start from scratch on my own project.
/Durandalski
1. Is this engine still being worked on? A dead engine is no use to me. There'd be no one to address bugs or necessary features, and my skills are primarily in the art department, so I would be unable to improve on the engine code myself. Any work I do would likely be spread out over the next few years, so dying isn't really good either.
2. Is it possible to boil the vast amount of existing content down to say, the SOL system and a handful of ships and outfits? Since I'd be starting from scratch I'd want a very small space to work in to experiment with the engine's features and new content. How co-dependent is the content? Will the whole thing fall apart if I start deleting stuff?
3. Which OS should I use? I use an intel mac which has both OSX and Windows XP. My graphics software is all on the mac side, but if its easier to edit the windows version of VS I can transfer completed art between OS's.
4. Where should I start? I have no knowledge of C++ or python. I've looked as some of the 0.5.0 files on the mac side, and a lot of values for ships, weapons, outfits, ect, seems to be fairly self explanatory and reasonably moddable. But there's alot more I can't find, such as systems, stations/planets, UI, text description for said stations/planets, and more. Also, all image files are not recognized by any application I have, despite being pngs? There were other things I was wondering about but its not coming off the top of my head.
I'm not looking to make things more complex, indeed my concepts are rather less elaborate than VS itself is projected to be. I'm tentatively considering working on a 3d remake of the original Escape Velocity.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_Vel ... ideo_game) Not because it's particularly worth remaking, but largely because its ships and stations are highly simplistic and I can re-create them with ease, plus it has 2d art I can recycle. It also has a small universe in comparison with later EV games, and other games of the genre. Thus porting it to VS would be more a matter of implementation, which would give me a chance to learn my way around the engine without simultaneously worrying about world-building and art. Then when I feel comfortable with what is possible, I could start from scratch on my own project.
/Durandalski