Category Archives: Sol

Guilds, Levels, and Dogfights, oh my

Posted by on March 27, 2007 No comments

I’ve added a couple posts to this thread on gameplay ideas for Sol. These focus on some guild intricacies like founding guilds, guild controlled NPCs, and guild controlled space; leveling up; crafting schematics; and dynamic NPCs. It also presents a solution to the top speed/dogfighting problem where people travelling extremely fast due to the lack of friction in space won’t be able to dogfight.

You’re encouraged to check it out and leave any comments, questions, or complaints you have. The groundwork for Sol is coming along; come be a part of its growth.

Oops

Posted by on March 17, 2007 No comments

Ok,

To all of you who I bothered over the past few days about why the hell I was getting such terrible framerates, I’m sorry. Somewhere down the line I turned on additive stencil shadows which DEMOLISHED the fps. Changing shadows back to modulative texture shadows sent Sol2D from 12 fps to 60.

Let this be a lesson to you. If you don’t know what you’re doing, use additive stencil shadows. :P

Sol2D Progress

Posted by on March 5, 2007 No comments

So,

Over the last few days I have made a lot of progress on Sol2D, so I thought I’d share here. As of right now I have:

  • a server/client choice menu
  • a connect menu where you can enter in some server information and successfully connect to it
  • There is a bare-bones, hardly-functional gui
  • after connecting you can drive around a little OGRE head (still need some models, hint hint)
  • an ‘arena’ which is simply a flat plane with a basic texture provided by the OGRE tutorials
  • a moveable camera that follows your ship (head) around, which you can rotate and raise/lower

Alright, now that I’ve written it down it doesn’t sound like much, but at the very least its a big step in the right direction. As I mentioned (whined about) above, I still need some basic models. There is a post about it on the forum if you want more information. We are talking seriously basic models here, so if you know anything about 3D modelling you can probably handle it.

Also, getting this far has made me realize I have absolutely no idea how to make a ‘radar’ widget for the GUI. I envisioned a 3D radar with blips in their respective places that rotated around with the ship, but I don’t know how to generate that kind of thing OR put it into the GUI (using CEGUI if that makes any difference to anyone). Any ideas, links, or ridicule will be most welcome.

Great news

Posted by on February 21, 2007 1 comment

If you read the posts earlier you’ll see that I was running into problems with my networking library being GPL. Yesterday the author changed the licensing to LGPL so we are back on track in that regard. Last night I created some new standard classes for my game engine that successfully create, encode, and decode packets and correctly sends them across the network.

Exciting!

Fleshing out Sol

Posted by on February 17, 2007 No comments

I just made an extremely long post here in the forum containing many fairly detailed implementation ideas about Sol. Please check it out and share your ideas about it there.

Here is the post outline:

         Players:
		lore
		xp/level/rank structure
		pvp
			rules and penalties
			player looting
			duels
			bounties
		misc
			guilds
			cloning
			currency
			travel – warp transports

	Skills
		Crafting
			Resources
		Ship Specialization
			Ships

	Weapons
		types
		calibration

	Universe
		systems
			planet zones
		factions