Empires: Perfect union project (playable demo)

Megel pitched a similar idea, where squad leaders had access to the command center, and could drop buildings, while in the command view, but then you would have people standing in base dropping unneeded buildings draining resources, also decentralizing the commander position would lead to more lone wolfing. Grant it I am still working on the UI. My idea would be to give the squad leader whatever his class the ability to drop "Field hospital" but make it similar to how the engineer would drop a turret, however this structure would have a time limit (3-5 minutes) and the cooldown would be 30 minutes. Also it would be weaker then the barracks by maybe half the health.

 

The commander is an integral part of empires, without it, there is nothing to really separate it from a game similar to Battlefield. Unfortuanately without having some type of commander the system does not work, and you would have chaos. But since nothing is set in stone at the moment, and I am still working on the core game mechanics I am open to any suggestions if you have a way to make it "better" while removing the commander.

 

Consistency. You have to maintain consistency (among other things) so people have a freak'n prayer of learning your game.

Changing the number of commanders is not only unintuitive, but inconsistent.

 

Afaik this project was supposed to be "What Empires could be". If they started changing fundamental aspects of the game, then it's not that. I think Liberal knows full well what I'm talking about, and he definitely knows what he's doing, so just let him get on with it rather than questioning the basics. I'm really looking forward to this and I'll be really upset if some fag convinces them to water it down.

 

The commander should be able to designate players on his team who can also drop buildings. However they would drop them from their fps view and not com view. Also com would still only be able to do research and most other things.

That's just something off the top of my head. The main point being there needs to be a way to spread out the responsibility of the commander through multiple players without diluting the role.

 

Dear God, you're talking about having multiple commanders. Scaling from one to many coms would require fundamental changes in how Empires works. On one side, you might have something that resembles Empires with a single com, but on the other end, you have a completely different game.

Everybody (including myself) wants to play super mega designer, but we really don't have revolutionary ideas. Just chill and let them have their vision.

There's a difference between giving some design advice and changing their vision. You have to be able to figure out what is their vision and what can be changed to achieve their vision. It's not easy to give advice and not step on people's toes.

Or you can just sit back and look at their awesome art and scripts.

If Liberal & Co. want to do that, squad leaders wouldn't be a terrible choice for limited com powers.

Players already understand the concept of a responsibility hierarchy, so it might be doable. Personally, I would keep squad leaders in first person view at all times. Maybe they could call in refs (in their area) and trivial stuff like that.

 

As far as I have noticed Liberal is trying to incorporate everything that Empires on Source had which:
1. is impossible, he has no resources for it
2. is incoherent, there are countless features fighting with each other
3. satisfies forum trolls but as soon as they start playing they'll whine about it like hell
4. doesn't bring any real fun for new players, old ones are bored anyway (see 2.)

But that's just what I think I see from far away as observer.

 

5. Mootant cries because he want to do it himself?

 

I am not sure what you mean by resources?

The only thing really missing are animations for player models specifically, but everything else is already been created.

Don tried to rip them from the game, but I could not use them for dynamic movement in Unity because it was missing key animations. I am trying something else in blender where I use bvh motion capture files then take existing movement, modify them to match my needs. Also I have looked at cheap Mocap software as an alternative so I can make more organic animations.

I spent the project up into mini-sandboxs to make it easier on me, and if I can find another programmer, for them to focus on one aspect.

Right now those mini-projects are:

flight(about 50% done as seen in the videos)
multiplayer(25% )

FPS(25% no animations wanting to wait to really daive into some of the dynamic movement used in other unity projects)

UI(50% I keep changing my mind on how the overall style, and working out how I will recreate the armor/plate system, and instead opting for a percentage for overall armor instead. Alos playing with adding a persistent skill tree where players could define there own classes )

Tank(50% The tank script I wrote is very simplistic, and needs some major tweaks for realism sake, but it works. )
Watercraft(50% players and boats have separate properties when it comes to water, since using the same script for both was challenging. Got the submarine to dive below water, now just have to add realism to how it behaves, and define the role of the boat. )

RTS(50% I have a working RTS camera which I have been testing. Still figuring out how I am going to tackle building placement, but right now the script I wrote detects the terrain height using raycasting. its coming along, but not quite there.)

I have all the resources I need to finish my project, if I had a few more people helping me, and more time I could of had something playable sooner, but atm I have to think about real world thing, and plus I work two jobs, which leaves me drained when I get home, so the only time I can really focus on coding is during the weekends.

 

Perhaps this is what moody is talking about? The resources he mention mentioned might be time to code and programmers.

 

I'm mostly talking about the scope of what you're attacking vs resources you have available. I remember Krenzo's statements about 90% of gameplay code, aircrafts code being done and only waiting for models and so on. Like he said afterwards it was to a degree caused by HL2 hype. I just wonder what kind of drugs does your dealer sell if you're saying you can implement all that and polish it given 20 h max per week.