primem0ver
Emperor
LOL Laskaris! You stole my thunder!
LOL Laskaris! You stole my thunder!
Keep in mind that the GeoRealism project is actually a spinoff of an earlier project to create a world "evolution" simulator that I started several years ago and have temporarily abandoned. It is one of my life long goals. If we decide to go the hex tile route, I think my project has a LOT to offer in the way of a start on a usable system (though currently it has its challenges to be overcome). It can be used as a primary or an underlying grid. I can release the source code for that project if it is desired and I am going to spend the next couple posts presenting it.
I am very interested in going for globes with a base grid of equal area hexagons (and 20 pentagons) as you propose.
Hello C2C team. I have been following this mod for quiet a time now. I installed an early version back in the day I think it was v13 and quiet liked it even though even back then I thought the prehistoric ara was way too long but hey that's by personal opinion. Anyway I didn't update it for quiet a while since I wasn't interest in Civ IV as CivV came out and there was a promising mod for it unfortunately the main dev guy got fed up with Firaxis slow Dll release policy that he quiet. So I looked back at C2C and reading about MultiMap it got me extremely excited. As it would finally make it possible Civ to be what I always wanted it to be something closer and even beyond CtP. Sea/Underground colonize and a proper expansion into space.
In the end I actually installed v26 just to see how far it has progressed. And I was really impressed.
Okay long story short. I don't want to be a scaremonger but seeing this post from Kosling made me really scared for the future of C2C. Simply because I've seen this happening so many times over. Making a mod and making a complete new game / game engine are two very very different things. And people coming from the first tend to totally underestimate the amount of work for the later.
So here is my worst predication how things will pan out:
People get excited about Koshlings idea and there is a real drive at the beginning but over the months it is going to fizzle out really quickly simple because the amount of work and the lack of visible progress. Visible progress is usually very important for people as they would like to see the things and the ideas in action not just on paper or in abstract code. But building something from ground will take a very long time if not years before you will be able to see the first progress. Unlike in a mod you put something in and you can basically see it very quickly.
Even after the first release in general lots of people will be disappointed by it as it just doesn't look very good as all the assets and graphics will be missing. Never underestimate this. So even more people will loose interest in the idea so that in the end it will most likely die a slow death.
At the same time as now most attention and resources are carried away to Koshling's new project progress in C2C will slow down as well so much that people who even quiet Koshling's project will not return to C2C naturally.
Or to take a famous quote: If you are trying to chase two rabbits you will loose both!
Great, let's look into it! Just one very small correction: the twenty-sided dice has to be filled up with 12 pentagons, not 20. I think primem0ver also got it wrong in his post.
Fairly trivial error, but I just wanted to squash it before we get confused over this.
I think you don't really realize that we can use a lot of pre-existing code for the complex stuff (render specifically) and save ourselves a whole lot of time. Given what I understand Koshling's and AIAndy's abilities to be, along with what I know mine to be, I suspect that we could see something come of this much sooner than you suspect.
@primem0ver:Also, Koshling wants to code this all in C# and have the rulesets be modular, so that would mean that we'd need new code for that.
Eeewwwww...!
I love C# as a language and know it fairly well because it is much more object oriented and easy to learn while still being based on the very readable C++ format. My project was built on C# in the original implementation.
However, I am very opposed to doing the graphics handling and number crunching in c# because c# does not use native data types (strictly speaking). From what I can tell, all data types in c# are actually objects even if the data itself is formatted in the same way as a native type. So adding a new local variable is not as simple as increasing the stack pointer anymore. Creating an instance of a simple data type requires the same object overhead in terms of processing time because a constructor (and later a destructor) must be called. In my experience this has a major disadvantage when it comes to the time it takes to do number crunching and graphics handling (which is why I am undertaking conversion to C++).
The whole point of the frames per second data (in my screenshots) that appears in the upper left corner of the 3d drawing was to figure out what number crunching and processing would do to the fps count. I did not like the results...
Ultimately I think a mixed language project may be the best approach.
However, no one has really commented on my suggestion to use OGRE with it's wrapper MOGRE for graphics, so I don't know if anyone else wants that or even cares.
Probably because we aren't familiar with it. My biggest question in using an already existing graphics engine is whether or not it can be adapted to use the plot systems we might be adapting... I suppose the answer would be yes if it is completely open source.
OGRE (www.ogre3d.org) is made available under the MIT License.
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@anyone technical:
Here are some links to documentation and explanations for OGRE and the MOGRE wrapper.
OGRE website
Manual from a technical perspective
Non-technical FAQ
MOGRE website