Looking for suggestion for newbie

[philhelm]

Hi all,

I would like to add something Vega Strike that is related to interactive narrative for a grad school class. Does anyone have a suggestion on what feature I could work on that would be completable within a month or so that would contribute to the narrative of the game that is interactive and/or dynamically generated?

Thanks
Phil

[Fendorin]

Hello philhlem

you are Welcome

i m not english and i didn't understood clearely ?
You want contribute and propose your contribution work too your gradient school?
Maybe you should to be more explicit :
what kind of skill you have (hand writting?, Graphics?,coding..IA working)

And what kind of software you know/use.

Thank

[philhelm]

Sorry for the confusion.

I want to contribute something to Vega Strike, that I can also evaluate and submit as a project for my graduate course in the comp sci masters program.

I have java/c++ coding skills, familiarity with visual studio express. I have what i think is a working build of vega strike, and i would like to contribute something that has to do with the story of the game. does that explain it better ?

[loki1950]

Missions/quests might be what you have in mind then as that's where the story line is built and they are written in Python not C++ Here is the relevant wiki page http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/wiki/ ... _Campaigns have look and see if that is what you have in mind. might take more that a month though if you want to plan and implement one a quest that is.And we can sure use more story.There is also a background doc that we have that contains some spoilers so is not on our public list of docs so let me know if need it and i will add you to the relevant group.

Enjoy the Choice

[philhelm]

Hmm, if creating a story/quest/mission takes more than a month - what about enhancing one of the current stories? Or, perhaps creating a script that generates story data or character behavior or something to that effect ? Or, any other ideas?

[loki1950]

That's the problem not much to work with ATM as all we have is a short introduction quest and the tutorial but an extension of the intro quest should fit your requirement the link to the wiki should get you started as to the the how too. the actual files to look at are in the data/modules/quests folder hope that learning Python is not a problem in that month.

Enjoy the Choice

[ace123]

It's entirely up to you what you want to do. If you are doing C++ code there are a lot of areas of the code that could use improvement. (for example, pick your favorite annoyance you have seen while playing the game).

One interesting thing to work on is to code missions in python. There is an entire multiplayer front that is minimally working but has no missions coded for it, as an example. Like you could try making bounty missions against other players which is something I have wanted to try for a while.

And the missions that we do have are horribly out of date and may still be the same code that was ported to python many years ago.

If you want to show that you wrote something concrete, you can try to make some unified base and navigation computer system that can be accessed from anywhere. This may be a bit ambitious for only a month-long project and I don't know if GUI is your area.


Something that would be really cool and may not be as hard as it sound would be a translation system. By translation system I am asking for nothing more than finding the best way to convert all of the Python and C++ strings that are displayed in-game to use something like gettext -- by wrapping them with _ for example (and don't care about debug statments). Then you just need to have it read a configuration variable that holds the current variable and everything is translated.

Another thing is a new configuration file format. If you look at the vegastrike.config you will notice that there are a lot of comments that get moved around whenever you switch options. Because of this mashup of comments with XML code it is virtually impossible to allow custom user changes to the file without destroying the pre-configured options.
So you can try things like having preset tags and also allow for custom tags in the user's home directory. The setup program can be entirely independent of vega strike for now, and can just produce as its output a "vegastrike.config" that has all extraneous tags removed. This is a problem that has plagued Vega Strike's users for many years and will continue to be a roadblock for any in-game configuration system.

[Shark]

This may not be what you had in mind, but you may find the idea interesting...

You could work on creating procedurally-generated missions. The idea I had was for missions to have a certain grammar, but to be able to switch the subject/verb/object interchangeably. Here is an example of what I came up with:

Code: Select all

SUBJECT -> SBJ-MODIFIER ---------> VERB -----------------> OBJECT -------> OBJ-MODIFIER

player     wh/ undetected          engage/defeat           ship            in motion
squadron   w/i time limit          defend/guard            squadron        stationary
           w/o ability             capture/disable         subsystem       cloaked
           bef/ escape             locate/detect           volume          in SPEC
           bef/ repair             rendezvous w/           point           docked
           wh/ disabled            move/jump to            object          friendly
           bef/ date               evade/escape                            neutral
           w/i distance of         collect/salvage                         enemy
                                   dock w/
                                   repair
                                   interdict

This would involve a lot of work, so it might not fit within your one month time limit.

[Shark]

Something that would be really cool and may not be as hard as it sound would be a translation system. By translation system I am asking for nothing more than finding the best way to convert all of the Python and C++ strings that are displayed in-game to use something like gettext -- by wrapping them with _ for example (and don't care about debug statments). Then you just need to have it read a configuration variable that holds the current variable and everything is translated.

The best way to accomplish this is to store all strings in a separate file in an array. The game would then read this file from the "English", "German", etc. directory and look the strings up by their index in the array.

[edit]
A simple list of variables would work, too. Take this for example (forgive my poor German):

Code: Select all

// English
var fixerA_1 = "Howdy!"
var fixerB_1 = "Hi there!"
var fixerA_2 = "Do you have anything for sale?"
var fixerB_2 = "Why, yes, I do! Would you like to take a look?"
var fixerA_3 = "Why, yes, thank you!"

Code: Select all

// German
var fixerA_1 = "Hallo!"
var fixerB_1 = "Wie gehts?"
var fixerA_2 = "Hast du irgend etwas zum Verkaufen?"
var fixerB_2 = "Ya, willst du es sehen?"
var fixerA_3 = "Ya, danke!"

Code: Select all

// Mission script
npc_say(fixerA, fixerA_1)
npc_say(fixerB, fixerB_1)
npc_say(fixerA, fixerA_2)
npc_say(fixerB, fixerB_2)
npc_say(fixerA, fixerA_3)

[philhelm]

Thanks everyone for the suggestions.

I think based on the intent of the project theme and parameters, I am going to try to implement a narrative planning system (story generation) by implementing the IPOCL algorithm described in this research paper:

http://people.ict.usc.edu/~riedl/pubs/aamas04.pdf

So, my first steps are (I guess) to investigate the intro quest python scripts (quest_intro.py and quest_intro2.py) and determine how this algorithm can be integrated into the game.

Basically, when I am done, this will show that the agents/characters in the intro quest(s) can have dynamically assigned behaviors that contribute to a story that evolves as the characters interact. This probably sounds pretty ambitious (even to me, it does) but I think it can be done. If anyone has any suggestions or questions, I am all ears ..

[Shark]

As for the algorithm you linked to, I can't claim to understand anything in the document. So, good luck! I hope to see what you accomplish!

[philhelm]

Ya, I hear ya.. sometimes I think it's purposely worded as complicated .. I had to read it quite a few times before I even begun to grasp it.

I hope it works too... we will see what happens. Thanks for the suggestions - I am sure I will be on here a lot for some more help with the game !

[Shark]

If I knew C++ I would probably lend a hand, too.