Rtw Clone

[Lord Adherbal]

I'm willing to give another look at C++ (I once did but got bored after Hello World ;)) if it appears this project is really going somewere. But that'll be atleast months from now (after ChivalryTW is done).

Good to see you have a map working already, now there are just another zillion things left to do :P

[ScionTheWorm]

hehe yes I'm not exactly planning my victory dance yet...

I'll try things out, get some system to define units. already found some horsemodel, but haven't been able to get it to animate yet. It's day two anyway. So if I can get these units to appear and hopefully move on the battlefield, I could similate ai with some dummy loops eating cpu to see what it can take. That's where the decision will be made I guess. if it can take what I have in mind, it would be awesome..

[alpaca]

Well, I'm not so sure if I have a lot of time really to participate on this as I'm currently doing another project with a friend and will start studying physics and mathematics in late october.
I might help a little, though. I'm no very experienced programmer (in fact I'm currently learning a little, and I don't know much c yet), but I could probably help with the theoretical bases, i.e. work on a concept draft for the game, which you'll need VERY much (I have to warn you though, that I have serious motivation problems in all my projects, I work a few weeks like a berserk and then might drop it for a week or two because I get bored).

I suggest making this as open-source as possible so that everyone who has a little spare time and some programming skills can extend this in a field he is good in (like AI, performance, etc.) and then send it to you; I would further suggest that you make this thing very modular (create a good component model) so that you can easily extend it without much loss of performance.

[ScionTheWorm]

yes very modular is the plan.

the stuff around the programming is extremely important. the whole architecture and design of the game will be a major challange. Especially if I can find some way to make things like ai in some way scriptable or accessible for the user via some easy interface.

What I'm currently having in mind is
- Strategy part (campaignmap, diplomacy etc) written in python: there's not the need for the performance that one need in battle, so this will make this part of the game much more easy to implement. very very much easier. the graphics engine supports being scripted like this. if the ai requires a lot of the cpu, some code (typical path finding) will be external in c++.
- Battle in c++: should work somehow like rtw with some new concepts. major problem is the ai. I have thoughts on how make custom made ai avaliable through python, without much loss of perfomance hopefully.

I have some thoughts about game design, and the two parts of the game will be pretty much two different games, quite like jerome described they did on rtw. it will help a lot to have discussions about the whole design and such before starting the serious coding.

I don't think I will take code contributions from people not in a dedicated team in the first phase (hopefully not me only, but maybe..). that's because everything has to be a very well designed and the code pretty consistent, the basics has to be in place for the modularity to work. when the skeleton of the game is up, the contributions can hopefully come, mostly ai, and not least, graphics and that kind of stuff. contributions to the campaginmap will, as explained over, probably be in python. then a contributor can for instance design a religion system. for the battlemap contributions will probably be in c++ since it has to go fast.

[player1]

I would recommend that you start focusing on one thing only, and then try to do it propetly. Spreading around too early killed many similar project.

So for start, go with custom battle mode only. Battlefiled, some units, some factions, game physics. After that, start working on AI for it (or maybe MP mode, whichever is easier to you).

Then after all its over, and looks good, start to think about campaign.

Too much thinking and too little doing killed many open source projects (large design document draft and very little code).

[Lord Adherbal]

yes the first step should be the battlemap. No point in having a campmap if you dont have a battlemap, while battles are games on their own. By far the most difficult part (aside the GFX engine perhaps, I never tried programming such a thing) would be unit logic. Even something simple like a unit moving from point A to point B is far more difficult then it may appear, and needs a lot of thinking on how the individuel soldiers should stay in formation while rotating, moving etc.

Something I can help with is writing AI logic (would be something between general logic and semi-code). Maybe think of a scripting language for AI scripting.

[player1]

Also, making script languages is not easy. You need knowledge of parsers as well as how to make compilers. There is a reason why developers prefer to keep AI in hard source code.

Of course, the benefit of open source project is that anybody can se source code, so script language is not as much required as in commercial products.