Empires on UE4: UE4 is FREE edition

Makeshift is the word I'd use.

I always get the feeling of junkyard spares being scraped together. Which I think was the intention, too. It might not actually look like that, but in my head, yeah it does.

 

Low res models and textures leave much to the imagination.
If you polish it up, you have to be a lot more definitive.

 

I hope nobody wonders why an empires sequel has never happened after reading this thread.

 

Gents - get working. You can have a simple form of project management and impact others works without telling people what to do.

Setup a Board on Trello.com - I can do this for you, or find someone to take project management and do this for the team.

Setup initial Board for UE4 Empires Mod.
Add columns: PROPOSED, BACKLOG, TODO, IN PROCESS, DONE

PROPOSED is mostly ignored until reviewed and moved into backlog.

BACKLOG is the work no one has signed up to do.

TODO is a task you want to work on or discuss, and invite comments from all prior to taking ownership. Someone else may be better equiped to work on that task than you.

IN PROCESS means you are working on a task and updating the team with this card.

Done = completed tasks.

This does a few things besides manage the tasks. It scopes the project and tracks the progress. It gives credit to all who have contributed and is self documenting mechanism for those that follow. It invites input from others, even if they are not working on the project. It gets away from a serial thread that may not pertain to the work you are doing, and focus's feedback specifically towards your tasks. It puts management into each of your hands.

 

Also do not use this forum to post anything other than from a spokesman, updates and recruitment. The team should not be talking in here due to the high troll count and negative community. This is why Trello will enable you to remain more focus'd and task oriented without disputing a direction outside the development team.

 

No, the most important point is to have someone who does shit.

 

Fly, are you just simply planning on continuing what Kylegar did or do you have something else in mind?

 

The physics engine isn't really pushed to the limit, although there are some hardcoded limits that we can't touch that prevent more detailed maps, some sound-related stuff and some other tidbits. MOOtant heavily optimized the networking. The 2013 branch of the SDK can supposedly run over more than one core, but the limit is still CPU power (and bandwidth) for how many players a server can handle.

 

Kylegar kicked this development effort off and was doing a good portion of the development and recruiting himself. I have not ventured into the development since I am not a creative graphics developer.

I am just hoping to enable you guys to self serve. There are some things I can contribute, but not many hours a day of development. Once you get a professional project manager involved, I would exit or find a programming niche that enables me to contribute. My experience at project management is limited and I wouldn't claim to be your ideal selection. Someone who knows about agile development and can recruit programmers and guide them through the development process is what you need.

There needs to be a deployment plan. Kylegar laid out a plan to do infantry first, which I think is a good plan. Don't get distracted with vehicles, but keep in mind the plan to add them. Security mentioned Boats, which I think would be a great addition after vehicles. At a finer resolution you need to break down all of the development steps which is what you could use Trello for. Then assign tasks and start working towards a goal. You could form teams to peer review final results and cross review on occasion to make sure the teams are not going in different directions.

If we can get some of the guys who support Empires Mod involved, then much of the necessary knowledge to fix what doesn't work, and keep what does will be easier.

The most important aspect of development is peer review. Most developers just want to code and not be checked, this is a protection mechanism against criticism. They think asking dumb questions makes them look dumb. You can't possibly know everything so learn from others. Peer reviews are NOT about reviewing style, but is about functionality. No discussion of not liking something unless you recommend a better way of doing it. You are reviewing the code - not the developer.

yada yada

 

This project has no coder so all your project management tips are in vain for now.

 

Just curious what are the limits your talking about ?
Also if the sound related stuff your talking about is the missile spam issue there is kind of a fix for that..

you can limit the number of sounds with soundscripts
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Soundscripts

Also check out the bottom - "Adding ^ in front of a sound name, such as "^weapons/explode3.wav" tells the sound engine that it is a distance based sound"

 

Heh. The distances for the sounds are hardcoded at less than a barracks length. For Empires, that just doesnt make sense. So thats one limit,

There are various seemingly arbitrary limits like number of entities active at the same time (4096, I think), limits on max vertices on screen, etc. Going over these instantly crashes the game with an error message.

 

So I think I see where the max "limit" for sounds is set.
well at least for the sdk.

Could I get a copy of Empires
sound.cpp
soundent.cpp
soundent.h

Edit - Forgot
soundflags.h
vphysics_sound.h

Or what would it take to get read access for Empires code ?