Super-features of future releases

[Breakable]

Hello there,
While waiting for the 0.5 release to become a reality, and not finding much of a way to contribute, I got an interesting idea. Each time in a while there is a super-feature requirement popping into the ether. Something like a p2p MORPG, OGRE implementation, economy revamp, etc - something that would take really a lot of resources to implement. So I'm posting here to ask you to speculate about what kind of superfeatures would you like to see someday in the vegastrike engine.

Superfeatures i heard of:
1.Dynamic and believable economy
2.VS on Ogre
3.Ability to build/buy stations/planets/star rings/star spheres
4.Lua implementation instead of/together with Python
5.P2P MORPG
6.Seamless planetary flight (most likely requires No 2.)
7.Station internals, walking around (most likely requires No 2.)
8.RPG elements for pilot/ship/faction
9.Faction interaction/management

Edit - noted only after poll was started so please vote in comments:
10.Content creation kit - a full suite of tools for modders
11.Enhanced AI - take what you can/run when threatened
12.Unexplored/uninhabited systems and exploring

From this i think the most exciting to see would be the Dynamic economy.

PS:Some items might seem to be somewhat easy to implement like adding Lua to scripting language list, but you never know until trying...
PSPS:Dont mix features with SUPERFEATURES!

[Deus Siddis]

Voted for Ogre. After that I would vote for seamless planetary flight as second highest priority.

As far as a dynamic economy, do we even know that there will be modern economics facilitating the spread of resources in a thousand years or will an advanced form of nanotechnology produce whatever substances and materials a world needs from sub-atomic particles. . . ?

Honestly what does it matter, there's a whole galaxy waiting to be explored and conquered, so who has time for merchandise?

[Zolk]

I voted for better economics, as I like cargo flights.
But walkable station internals would also be very nice.

[bgaskey]

Better econ...everything else is not as important to the basis of the game imho. its just eye candy mostly

And no LUA...wtf is lua...python ftw

[javier]

Agree. But it should must include expenses for the player to force him to keep earning credits for maintaining his fleet, and making difficult to grow it without limit. If you have a capital ship, you must keep it busy or you're going bankrupt.

[pyramid]

Drooling over money? No way
I have NEVER seen an inspiring gameplay where economy was involved. Can't imagine anything more boring than hauling cargo from one place to another or mining resources for hours and days in a row (see EVE, X series) just to get another piece of equipment. That's real life, not a game. Never, ever, in human history, money has made somebody happier than a good story.

A game should distract and entertain in whatever way it does that but it doesn't need to simulate actual real life. Instead of playing accountant (you may try some sim trade if you like that), I'd rather have something captivating. The best games you will remember had actually a story that is believable and involving. Freespace - not a singe cent; Freelancer - moneysoft, what's that?; Independence War 2 - marginal appearance, story was on focus; Tachyon the Fringe - fun fun fun, marvelous dialogs and voice acting, you laugh yourself out of your skin; The Star Trek series - money belongs to the dark past of humanity, a better society is on the rise where contribution. involvement, morale are placed above material possession.

I can imagine that in VS universe the latter is not the case, given the so much materialistic war and struggle for power and possession of systems. Humanity didn't grow up, though certainly being technologically capable of providing enough resources through the use of advanced machinery or robotic servants for the more unpleasant tasks.

Economy, the exchange of goods and services, trade, supplies transportation, getting upgrades for campaigns, getting ships for favors, getting money for services, all right.

But forcing the player to participate in this vicious capitalistic circle?
Please don't.

[safemode]

truth be told, I think there are going to be two directions feature wise for 0.6 (though it's mostly going to be backend cleanups for 0.6).

1. online play ... in some way will be worked on.

2. Campaigns in VS. I'm trying to push mine of course.


I really want to work on getting the political military strategy of factions and flight groups to coordinate better. I think the AI reacting dynamically to themselves and you and giving you the ability to make some of the decisions that tilt one faction to another will work for an immersive gameplay experience.

[Breakable]

...
I have NEVER seen an inspiring gameplay where economy was involved. ...

What about the X series ?

I think the problem withe the economy everywhere is that the game requires tedious work instead of making opportunistic gains available. If its a single player i don't see why player should not be able to outsmart the system a little with the risks involved.
Something like the Fallout2 allowed you to do - you were able to finish the game in 15 minutes if you knew how, but usually people played until all the Easter eggs were found.

[javier]

For all who don't enjoy the trader ways, how about allowing to enlist to one faction and make a career in their military forces? You're assigned a ship and missions to fulfill, and with your success you will be ascended until the higher ranks, where you even can be the admiral of a whole fleet.

[pyramid]

What about the X series ?
I think the problem withe the economy everywhere is that the game requires tedious work...

"X" were fine pieces of games if you got the nerve to endure the endless trading and empire building (actually i only got it through X2, nevermore). I really felt like playing "Sim Space Tycoon" rather than "Han Solo Kaboom", at least in the beginning, and that's what stayed as a memory of the game. It's certainly not the economy that made it interesting.

I would like to see something more innovative in VS the game. With over 3000 users, we should be able to come up with things more original than a 2-20 people large group of developers, artists, and story writers creating commercial games. That I am certain of. In which way this will happen, only the darwinist evolution of community, engine, and data can tell.

Certain is that, what will get implemented in future releases, is what the devs and contributors will contribute and commit. That, in open source projects, tends to be that stuff that they identify themselves with, no matter how many nice and useful wishes there are in the forum(s) (actually a lot of talk and re-talk again and again, but also many useful contributions). At the end what counts and gets committed is "code and pixels". I see this forum "Future Development & Feature Requests" as a catalog of ideas from which willing community members can pick an interesting topic for their contribution. Contrary to the forum description, it tends not to be seen as a task list for developers, although they might pick a thing or other from it at times.

I see the difficulty of the community to contribute. The wiki is seldom looked up, no wonder, since the documentation is in a really bad shape. Ideally coders and contributors would maintain the parts that relate to the work they are developing (at least after major milestones). I can only do as much as my part, which I believe is in a quite acceptable shape (development/art), my others contributions however are sadly not (cockpit changes).

Being idealistic in nature, I would like to encourage everybody to try contribute a tiny piece of what they would like to see in the game (or engine). Yes, it costs (a lot of sweat, sometimes tears, doesn't cost money though) to get it figured out, to get behind it, to find out how, where, what... Many say "I can't code". You don't need to. There are a thousand and one ways to contribute. "But I can't model, paint, write, whatever ...". Excuses, because one of the most amazing features of homo sapiens is the ability to learn (and pretty fast, too).

The more people contribute, the better and faster the game will become captivating, realistic, and containing the features that you want to see. It's a tough learning process in the beginning, but the community has a lot of latent know-how. I haven't seen a case yet where questions were not answered. And when you finally got it figured out the way to integrate your contribution (the joy, the pleasure, the fulfillment), update the wiki

Besides the lead and other developers, a recent active example is chuck_starchaser's development of the shader code (it's worth to see how nice suddenly the dark, dim, dull ships look like with the new code). A shining example, a light in the darkness.

Another outstanding example is dragonseraphangel (the smiley filled posts) with his persistence and willingness to learn how to model a vessel. Admirable if it leads to an actual commitment.

[klauss]

I wonder why there's no "complete content creation kit" in that list.

Wonder why there isn't a story? Because only developers can write it! Content creation tools are lacking. They're either too unfriendly to the common user, hence unusable by most, or simply nonexistent.

If you ask me, I'd only vote for Ogre because that's what will bring a whole lot of new tools into play. Ogre already has extensive converters and visual aids. But from a gamer's perspective, the most important thing is a story. And to get a story, you need story writers. And for a story writer to be able to do his job, you need a whole set of tools to aid him.

Hence, my off-the-list vote is: "A complete content creation kit".

[javier]

An enhanced AI able to manage fleets with some tactical sense would be much appreciated, also. Carriers launching fighters to attack an objective, interceptors trying to destroy bombers before they blow up the combat group and stuff like that.
And please, we all know uln are stupid, but ending the nonsense attack of the dodos wouldn't hurt either. Having an AI who knows when to hit and when to run would be a major improvement.

[vodalian]

Better econ...everything else is not as important to the basis of the game imho. its just eye candy mostly

And no LUA...wtf is lua...python ftw

How do you know python is FTW if you don't know what lua is?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lua_%28pro ... e%29#Games
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lua_%28pro ... anguage%29

I personally like LUA, it is user friendly, developer friendly, appropriate for games, low footprint, and is tried and true (as you can see by the list of games/programs which use it)

[safemode]

there's plenty of reasons for wanting OGRE, despite the lack of performance comparisons. But storywriting has much more to do with not having frontends to "help" non developers write python and XML scripts that make up campaigns,missions,systems. I really doubt changing the graphics engine is going to change our modding frontend. Now, for the graphics front, ogre may fascilitate that, but I really dont see it helping much for writing campaigns and missions.

[bgaskey]

I personally like LUA, it is user friendly, developer friendly, appropriate for games, low footprint, and is tried and true (as you can see by the list of games/programs which use it)

But i know python thats why its ftw really I have no objection if other want to port to lua, but I don't think its the best use of developer time...and some games use python too .

I guess what I really meant by economy tho was an immersing dynamic universe, including a lot of the stuff mentioned like better faction ai's and relation system, quests, and joining factions etc.

[safemode]

My argument for lua or python is that eventually, we should move to something easier to learn and lighter weight. But right now, we can't move to LUA without losing functionality, because our scripts do a whole lot more than just shuffle variables around.

We need to implement the complex features in python now, in C++, then offer after the codebase gets API cleaned, we can provide a simple and powerful LUA api to make scripting lightweight and fast and easy to edit.

[rivalin]

I'd choose Ogre as it's the gateway to so many other things. Some of the other features described as "super" really aren't, they're absolute requirements, eg the already mentioned content creation kit, I can't count the number of times I, and probably doubtless others have gone over what it would take to create a mod for this game before thinking the better of it. I'm sure the high ups have all they need, but VS will never gain popularity while people are going off half cocked to make Vegastrike MMO even as the basic model converter carries instructions along the lines of "follow these easy 678 steps to use the OBJ>BXFM>XMESH>MONKEY>1337command line>explosion converter

[safemode]

OGRE doesn't write python, so I dont think that's gonna help you make a mod. OGRE doesn't write XML either. OGRE is a graphics engine, with some additional extensions to handle some of the physics behind those graphics. It's not a game engine. That's what crystal space is. To a lesser extent, that's what VS is.

What may exist are apps made to work with ogre so you can load up models and view in-game graphics. but VS works on a python and XML scripting frontend. This has nothing to do with OGRE.

making GUI forms of the converters and other tools still has nothing to do with OGRE. It's just been a lack of developer interest in needing to make GUI forms of those tools. OGRE again, doesn't come into play there, as it's a data-level transormation, no rendering is needed.

[shadow_slicer]

I originally voted for a dynamic economy, but would like to change my vote to "content creation kit". None the features in the poll are really as important as good content. OGRE won't change the way the game looks or plays. The economy really just provides an extra diversion for the player. All of these features might be nice, but won't dramatically affect gameplay. What will affect gameplay is giving the player something to do.

Due to the sheer size of the VS universe, quite a few campaigns or sidequests will be necessary to make the universe feel less empty. There are also additional complications: due to the dynamic universe, bases will change hands and campaigns will need to adapt due to these changes. This means that the shear amount of content that needs to be created for vegastrike is HUGE. The sooner this content is made, the sooner it can be debugged and balanced, and the sooner more content can be made.

[klauss]

there's plenty of reasons for wanting OGRE, despite the lack of performance comparisons. But storywriting has much more to do with not having frontends to "help" non developers write python and XML scripts that make up campaigns,missions,systems. I really doubt changing the graphics engine is going to change our modding frontend. Now, for the graphics front, ogre may fascilitate that, but I really dont see it helping much for writing campaigns and missions.

Normally you'd be right, but the move to Ogre needed some filesystem changes that prompted a complete rearrangement of files and the modding system. So... it would help. If only merely organizing files and allowing the use of some very user-friendly converters already developed for Ogre.

However, it is true that content-related tools can still be created without the need to wait for Ogre. Campaign editors, UI designers, system designers, unit designers... they all handle metadata that is quite separated from the core graphics files Ogre would help with. And they're among the most important tools that are needed too. And it is true too that the main problem is lack of developers devoted to that task.

[charlieg]

I personally like LUA, it is user friendly, developer friendly, appropriate for games, low footprint, and is tried and true (as you can see by the list of games/programs which use it)

Ok, but you miss 1 point and it's the key point: VegaStrike + mods already has a lot of Python code.

Are you going to rewrite it all? Test it all?

Unless there is a really, really, and I mean really compelling reason to move to Lua then you are needlessly stretching already-low resources.

[vodalian]

I personally like LUA, it is user friendly, developer friendly, appropriate for games, low footprint, and is tried and true (as you can see by the list of games/programs which use it)

Ok, but you miss 1 point and it's the key point: VegaStrike + mods already has a lot of Python code.

Are you going to rewrite it all? Test it all?

Unless there is a really, really, and I mean really compelling reason to move to Lua then you are needlessly stretching already-low resources.

I wasn't the one who added it to the list, I was merely giving my opinion about one of the options. Whether or not scripts need to be rewritten, it doesn't change the facts about LUA and it's suitability for a project like this. Besides, in all honesty some of the scripts could use a rewrite anyhow. It's a fact that will eventually have to be faced if the core gameplay is going to be updated any time soon. Also, adding support for LUA doesn't mean you have to rewrite all the scripts right away, or at all.

[Breakable]

... Also, adding support for LUA doesn't mean you have to rewrite all the scripts right away, or at all.

This is important to note. Adding LUA as a scripting language does not mean you need to remove python first.

PS:Please don't be so serious about this thread - its just at the level of substance of what dreams are made of...

[loki1950]

PS:Please don't be so serious about this thread - its just at the level of substance of what dreams are made of... Wink

One of the reasons i refer to this forum as "The Dreamers Lounge"

Enjoy the Choice [/quote]

[legine]

I vote the CCK (Content Construction Kid) Klaus suggested. That would make it easier in extending content. Which is a important to a game. Graphiks are only important if you dont have content like a good shooter ...

@lua vs Python.
The aims of Python and Lua are pretty similar. The major difference is that python is a full grown langage while lua is realy not more then a clever script language.

I think you can teach easier python then lua, because of the good ressources that are around. And Python has its claws in more toppics then Lua. I am sure we can use python for more then just scripting in the long run in case we need it.

@OGRE
I see OGRE as a chance to fix some chaos within the code. I am not sure what and where. But I feel that VS engine has some old heritage to fight with. But to me it is more the nature in things to go on then a super feature...