Creating a Game: NEED HELP! by dygfloyd

GENERAL DISCUSSIONS

Creating a Game: NEED HELP!

POSTED BY: DYGFLOYD
UPDATED: Saturday, April 17, 2004 15:07
SHORT URL:
VIEWED: 4083
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Thursday, April 15, 2004 5:59 AM

Hello Everyone. I started creating a Firefly game in Flash awhile ago as a way to teach myself Actionscript 2.0. Now, I'm starting to have enough fun with it that I thought I might see if anyone else wanted to help.

Right now, you can't do a lot. You can just fly around in Serenity and "land" on planets. (I put land in parenthesis because all you do is crash into a planet and it throws up a message that says "you have landed on (( name of the planet ))". )

I would like to turn this into a very simple RPG that people can customize to create new adventures, planets, and tools. Eventually, you would be able to fly around the 'verse, pick up jobs and make a little money while avoiding the Reavers, alliance, and other nasties.

If you want to play with this simple test, feel free to download it on my website at http://www.dygfloyd.com/firefly/

If you want to be part of the team, help with graphics, ideas, help write the story, then just send me an email at steve.steward@bhi1.com (work) or at home at steve@dygfloyd.com.

Thanks everyone!

Steve Steward
steve@dygfloyd.com

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Thursday, April 15, 2004 6:19 AM

DYGFLOYD

One more quick note:

The file on my site is JUST A TEST. If you want to find the few things I've added to the Universe, they are located at these quadrants:

0,2 : Persephone
10, -5 : Dabienwa
-2, 2 : Alliance Post
-5, -6 : Core World
1,2 : Sephapod
0, -2 : Reaver

As you can see, I am in serious need of graphics. I'm just using red balls for the planets and the reaver uses the Serenity graphic. I also apologize for blatently stealing a graphic of serenity off this site. I'd like to give whoever did it proper credit.

THanks

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Thursday, April 15, 2004 7:45 AM

SIGMANUNKI

I'd help but I have no knowledge of Flash and/or ActionScript.

I know C/C++, Python, Perl, PHP and some others. Actually, I would scare a diehard MS person with my absolute lack of Windows knowledge. I'm a *NIX man. OpenBSD to be specific.

If you have use of any of that I can usually spare at least acouple hours a week beyond my own projects.

----
"If you truly love the memory, you must set it free()!" -Me
"Also, I can kill you with my brain." -River

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Thursday, April 15, 2004 8:52 AM

DYGFLOYD

Hey, code is code. Plus, I need help with more than just code. Graphics, story and all sorts of other things. Especially the little details that will make it a real Firefly game. Feel free to help out as much or as little as you want. I'm just doing it for fun. I only posted this because I thought other FFF might have fun creating this sort of thing too.

What would really help is a good object model (doesn't have to be language specific) that could be used to help customize the game.

That means this Flash part of it would just be an engine. The rest (all the dialog, ships, planets etc) would all be pulled from easy to update text or Flash files. Then, other people who don't know as much code could tweak it to make their own games.

I think that's a bit of a pipe dream but if I can rustle up enough help, maybe it might happen.

If I get a lot of requests for the code, I'll just post it at that same URL so people can change it as they see fit.

Steve Steward
steve@dygfloyd.com

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Friday, April 16, 2004 10:27 AM

SIGMANUNKI

BUMP.

IMO, object models are highly over rated. When I code, I might walk over to a white/chalk board and jot something down, but, since the program is still an idea, that model will undergo change throughout the development process.

Nothing should be set in stone until the a good chunk of test code has been completed and the structure is pretty well set in place. ie When you stop writing the basic structure and start expanding what you already have. Then and only then should you start writing these docs. And mainly for those that join later.

ps When did everyone start coding in flash?

----
"If you truly love the memory, you must set it free()!" -Me
"Also, I can kill you with my brain." -River

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Friday, April 16, 2004 11:22 AM

DYGFLOYD

Well, right now it's no one. Just me. I was just playing with it, as I mentioned, to learn AS 2.0. They've added some great features that allow you to work similiar to Visual Studio.

Umm...I'm not sure if I agree with your assesment on object models. What is your background? Is this a process you learned on your own or was it taught?

Just so you know, I have a degree in computer engineering (ie: I design motherboards and processors) but I'm the Technical Director of a web development agency in downtown Chicago. I worked in Perl for years but I use PHP more often than not for web jobs. Offline, I use just about everything. Visual C++, a smattering of C#, Java, good old C and quite a few others. Many of which you've probably never heard of. (Like Scheme. That was developed at MIT and is based solely on recursion. or Modula 2.) I have a Linux box set up at home that I use for my file and web server. Like you, I distrust MS for anything web related. However, I also work on PC's and Mac's. As a full time web developer, you gotta pay attention to the market.

On small projects, I will work the way you mentioned but for larger one (especially in teams) I don't see how you can do it and get any reliable result. Your code will evolve throughout the project and that's why you need these models. Nothing is ever set in stone, of course. These models are just used for guidelines.

As you are creating them, you will run into tons of little things that you normally would not have thought of until development. This way, you catch them up front and it saves you tons of debugging and coding.

Just so you know, I'm not questioning your method. I'm just asking how we would overcome these obstacles. For example, when working in a group, you normally assign different objects to different people. The different teams will need to know what the public methods will be and their return values. Without that, they will not know how to talk to them.

For example, if I was going to write the object for a crew_member, how would you know how to talk to that object if you were writing the object for merchant_terminal without an object model?

I guess this would be especially important when defining a schema to allow others to create their own modules using simple text files.

Just a few thoughts to think about. Let me know your solutions.

Thanks!

Steve Steward
steve@dygfloyd.com

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Friday, April 16, 2004 11:38 AM

CAPTAINCERENTZ

What about looking at Java as the programming language. There are already a ton of worthwhile projects using java to create very cool cross-platform games, such as MegaMek, a Battletech tabletop game simulator that does an exquisite job of creating the old tabletop Battletech game on your computer. It is multi-platform, multi-player and quite fast as well.

You just have to stay away from the JIT approach and create full on executable JAR files, to get speed out a Java App. I have become quite impressed with Java since seeing that app and looking up many others.

There are some extremely cool 3D Java games out there too, using the Java 3D Libraries.

One thing you could do is put the whole thing up on Sourceforge and make the whole game an Open Source project, you might be surprised at the number of people that would be willing to work on such a project, especially if you got something decent started and got a post up on Slashdot about it...

I can do some playtesting for you and if you switch over to Java, I could eventually help out with the coding, since I currently only have time to focus on learning one programming language and that is what I started with.

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Friday, April 16, 2004 12:09 PM

SIGMANUNKI

Quote:
Originally posted by dygfloyd:
Umm...I'm not sure if I agree with your assesment on object models. What is your background? Is this a process you learned on your own or was it taught?

I graduated with honours from Red River College ( http://www.rrc.mb.ca/) in the Computer Analyst Programmer program. After that I taught C++ for a term in Con. Ed. and worked as a web developer for about a year (Perl, PHP, C) before getting laid off (like many of us). I have gone back to school first in Physics and have since moved over to Math. Next academic year will be my third. After my 1st year I did some numerics in the physics department as a summer research student.

Currently, I have been working with Python and think it's a wonderful language. Especially when you consider the py2exe program and its portability.

I've coded on BeOS, Linux, OpenBSD and a touch on Windows (hated every second of that). But mostly OpenBSD, which is also my workstation OS.

I think that once someone get to the point of knowing what the structure is then they should write at least the first docs on that and then get other people on board. Just so the others know what's what when developing there own chunk of code. Until that point everyone could go in there and go in there own directions and that wouldn't end well. Also, it would make managing the team troublesome, unless you rule with an iron fist.

I have this opinion because only the original developer knows what direction (s)he wishes to go in. And those docs will be able to let the other developers know that direction and then and only then will the other developers be able to contribute to any significant degree.

Quote:
Originally posted by dygfloyd:
Many of which you've probably never heard of. (Like Scheme. That was developed at MIT and is based solely on recursion. or Modula 2.)

Perhaps you shouldn't assume what I wouldn't know since you have no clue what I have done or what education I have.

The above is a good sample of my history and my opinions. But, I have no interest in getting into a pissing contest here. I have let you know what languages I know (and are comfortable with) and what I am willing to do. If you want to use me, you know at what point I'll be willing to join and you have a way of contacting me though the messaging system here with my user profile.

But, from one programmer to another, I would recommend at least looking into pygame ( http://www.pygame.org). It's quite nice, especially considering ease of cross platform development abilities of python

----
"If you truly love the memory, you must set it free()!" -Me
"Also, I can kill you with my brain." -River

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Friday, April 16, 2004 12:35 PM

SIGMANUNKI

Quote:
Originally posted by CaptainCerentz:
There are some extremely cool 3D Java games out there too, using the Java 3D Libraries.

Java has those *really* long names (ie System.out.println("Hello World"); ) which only gets worse as your program gets more complicated. It is cross platform but have they worked out the different thread behavior for different platform problem yet? I was never comfortable coding in Java as I learned it after C. I found it kind of like programming with hand-cuffs on.

Python has pygame ( http://www.pygame.org) and PyOpenGL ( http://pyopengl.sourceforge.net/). Which are quite standard and cross platform.

Both have free (unlike Flash) compilers, but, it's DygFloyds' decision.

----
"If you truly love the memory, you must set it free()!" -Me
"Also, I can kill you with my brain." -River

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Friday, April 16, 2004 2:34 PM

DYGFLOYD

SIGMANUNKI:
Yeah, I feel your pain on that one. While I was never laid off, I think almost everyone I know was. Here is Chicago, it's been rough for almost everyone. Only now is it beginning to pick back up.

When I assumed you didn't know Scheme, I didn't mean to imply you were stupid or uneducated by saying you probably had not heard of it. I meant it because it's such a rare language that almost nobody knows it. The only two schools that taught it that I know of were MIT and U of I at Champaign/Urbana. Since MIT is number 1 in CompSci and UofI is number 1 in CompE, I figured it was just an evil exercise meant to torture us into knowing recursion backwards and forwards. Why anyone would learn that evil language outside of school is beyond me. :)

From my perspective, I'm also really big into planning. At both MIT and U of I, we were not allowed to use computers in our first CS class. WHile I thought it was annoying at the time, I later realized it instilled a wonderful ethic for developing projects. This was especially relevant for CompE because you couldn't really "test" your chip until you sent it off to the manufacturere. Since most of them had minimum orders, you better make sure you got it right the first time! :)

Well, I think all those are great suggestions. I would easily entertain a change in language because, as I said, I was mainly doing it as an excercise in Flash. While, as a web developer, I love Flash (I guess as all good web developers should despite it's misuse) it is slow when it comes to heavy processing.

I think Java might be an excellent choice. It's a wonderful language. Probably the best design I've seen in a language.) It does have some overhead as Sig mentioned but that's never really bothered me. It used to have some major issues with refresh rates but I'm guessing that's been corrected if they have a 3D engine in Java.

Python I'm not as familar with. Of course I've toyed around with just about everything but I really haven't put in enough time on it to make an educated evaluation of the language. I prefer not to use "canned" libraries in most cases. Not because they are bad but because I write these things as exercises to learn more about the languages.

For now, let's let majority rule. If we get several people, let's all vote on the language and then we can move forward from there. I'm pretty open either way.

Steve Steward
steve@dygfloyd.com

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Friday, April 16, 2004 3:21 PM

SIGMANUNKI

Quote:
Originally posted by dygfloyd:
At both MIT and U of I, we were not allowed to use computers in our first CS class.

We were forced to do DFD's for about 3 weeks and had to submit one with each program thereafter for the remainder of that first class.

Of course, with software, we can just open a source file and change was needs to be changed. And as you point out it's quite different with hardware.

Quote:
Originally posted by dygfloyd:
I prefer not to use "canned" libraries in most cases. Not because they are bad but because I write these things as exercises to learn more about the languages.

To be fair, I think when it comes to graphics our hands our tied, which is pretty much all those python libraries do.

Quote:
Originally posted by dygfloyd:
For now, let's let majority rule. If we get several people, let's all vote on the language and then we can move forward from there. I'm pretty open either way.

Sounds good. But, I think that before a vote is made, someone should figure out what the requirements of the game are so that we can pick the most appropriate languages to vote on.

----
"If you truly love the memory, you must set it free()!" -Me
"Also, I can kill you with my brain." -River

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Friday, April 16, 2004 5:27 PM

SHINY

You might want to contact St.Jayne, as he has experience with Flash programming (he wrote the 'Battle of Serenity' Flash Game on this site)

Please help Haken keep this site running by occasionally clicking on some of the sponsored ad links on the side of the page!

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Saturday, April 17, 2004 1:07 AM

CAPTAINCERENTZ

Quote:

Java has those *really* long names (ie System.out.println("Hello World"); ) which only gets worse as your program gets more complicated. It is cross platform but have they worked out the different thread behavior for different platform problem yet? I was never comfortable coding in Java as I learned it after C. I found it kind of like programming with hand-cuffs on.

Java does have some long class names. I suppose that could become complex as a project grows, but I have to say that most any project can become complex as it grows in size, it all depends upon the level of documentation and obfuscation put into the code by the developers. If everyone ignores putting any kind of visually appealing, ie easy to follow structure in the snippets of code they offer, then what can one expect?

I find it odd that Java was never comfortable to you as I learned some C before learning Java and have seen some structural similarities between the two languages.

I can't tell you if they worked out the different thread behaviors for different platforms. Doesn't that have more to do with the Java Virtual Machine more then the actual Java code though? At least how I understand it...

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Saturday, April 17, 2004 7:29 AM

SIGMANUNKI

Quote:
Originally posted by CaptainCerentz:
Java does have some long class names. I suppose that could become complex as a project grows, but I have to say that most any project can become complex as it grows in size, it all depends upon the level of documentation and obfuscation put into the code by the developers. If everyone ignores putting any kind of visually appealing, ie easy to follow structure in the snippets of code they offer, then what can one expect?

I am speaking more in the sense that you can have very long lines of code with nesting function calls (which I do all the time in C, Python, etc. I see other people doing the same thing a lot as well).

Quote:
Originally posted by CaptainCerentz:
I find it odd that Java was never comfortable to you as I learned some C before learning Java and have seen some structural similarities between the two languages.

There are similarities, but, when I code it, knowing the freedom that you have in C, when I code Java, it feels like I'm coding with handcuffs on.

Quote:
Originally posted by CaptainCerentz:
Doesn't that have more to do with the Java Virtual Machine more then the actual Java code though? At least how I understand it...

That is what I'm speaking of. The Java code is no different, but, the behavior differs from platform to platform. So, you don't know if your program will work the way you think it will everywhere.

But you are right. There must be a standard bracing style, documentation, variable naming conventions, etc. in any project. But, not that Hungarian notion that is in a lot of code out there. How useless is that?

----
"If you truly love the memory, you must set it free()!" -Me
"Also, I can kill you with my brain." -River

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Saturday, April 17, 2004 7:45 AM

LINDLEY

The description of your game sounds vaguely similar to the game which I'm working on a Firefly mod for---- www.ambrosiasw.com/games/evn , which is shareware. So we're working along similar lines-----its just that you have to first create a new engine, while I'm using an existing engine and just creating content.

Good luck with everything.

I know both C and Java, and I must say, both have their uses. For low-level programs, I *far* prefer C. However, when complicated data structures start getting involved, Java is *really* nice----it is far easier to swap out an ArrayList for a HashTable, for instance, than it would be in C.

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Saturday, April 17, 2004 7:48 AM

MEREN

I don't know anything about programming (compared to you umberspiffy people) but I do have a reputation in my area as a good DM and would love to help out with any story/quest stuff.

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Saturday, April 17, 2004 7:50 AM

JENTLE

I'd be willing to help with graphics and such, but only if it's a game I can actually play, which as I'm a fervent Mac user, would point to Java (I believe).

I'll keep an eye on you guys to see what happens.

Here's a little of my artwork -

http://jentle.epilogue.net

==================
Every well-bred petty crook knows that the small concealable weapons always go to the far left of the place setting.

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Saturday, April 17, 2004 8:11 AM

SIGMANUNKI

Quote:
Originally posted by Jentle:
I'd be willing to help with graphics and such, but only if it's a game I can actually play, which as I'm a fervent Mac user, would point to Java (I believe).

Well, if C or C++ is used there is the libSDL which runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, *BSD, BeOS, etc. It's IMHO, vastly superior to DirectX.

We'll be getting a iBook soon so I could work on the Mac stuff (OS X) provided I have a compiler.

If Python is used then pygame is supported on the same platforms as previously mentioned. I'm not sure if OBSD supports pyopengl but I know someone is working on getting that working. We'll see come May 1 if it in OBSD 3.5.

Java is of course available on all these platforms, but, I don't know about the new Java 3D. I think it's probably at the same status as pyopengl.

I think that's all the languages that should be seriously considered, but, DygFloyd might have some others to bring up. Pretty much if one of those is used I don't see much of an issue with you being able to play it

Quote:
Originally posted by Jentle:
Here's a little of my artwork -

http://jentle.epilogue.net

"Dolphin Mermaid" would be my fav.

----
"If you truly love the memory, you must set it free()!" -Me
"Also, I can kill you with my brain." -River

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Saturday, April 17, 2004 8:34 AM

JARED

Quote:
Originally posted by SigmaNunki:
But, not that Hungarian notion that is in a lot of code out there. How useless is that?

ok, now thats the point where i start getting interested (not having redundant prefixes twice as long as the name itself is kind of tempting *lol*).

if i may just ask which platforms youd like to support? depending on that i might point my finger at opengl and either glfw, allegro or sdl. sdl has some annoying habits, but is rather complete if you can live with only mac/win/linux.

if you think anything here
http://festini.device-zero.de/Programming/Downloads/index.xml
or (for less able browsers)
http://festini.device-zero.de/downloads/index.shtml

or the knowledge used to create anything there is of use, then just let me know. some of them require a halfway recent graphics card and the framework might require a few libs that might be missing.

i (like obviously many others) thought about a firefly game and what it should be like (interesting enough, after thinking about it i guess a space flight part shouldnt be too extensive.. serenity isnt armed and just flying in a straight line for hours isnt that tempting.. short sequences for different events maybe).

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Saturday, April 17, 2004 3:06 PM

JENTLE

SigmaNunki:
Yeah, I may be somewhat 'tech', but I'm mostly 'artist' so a lot of that came across as "blahblahblah, blah blah blahblah."

Good to know there might be a Mac version in our future - and yes, I'm all about OSX.

==================
Every well-bred petty crook knows that the small concealable weapons always go to the far left of the place setting.

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Saturday, April 17, 2004 3:07 PM

JENTLE

SigmaNunki:
Also, thanks.

I'm pretty proud of her.

==================
Every well-bred petty crook knows that the small concealable weapons always go to the far left of the place setting.

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