Rallying call for all interested: Colonisation of the Moon mod!
- Thread starter JBG
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JBG
Prince
Okay. Thanks, 12monkeys, I might actually do that. Once I've played v.022A I'll start thinking about a progress chart.
Now, Woodelf, it's funny you should mentions sounds. Assuming you don't actually want a full-blown voice-man, I can knock up most sound requirements pretty easily. My old computer (which is currently in storage under my desk) has the Turtle Beach Aureal system which comes with a *.wav editor, which enabled me to knock together a number of sounds which I used in various Starcraft and Civ II mods I dabbled in. Assuming you want effects sounds, I can do them (if I have enough warning - reassembling my old computer might take a while
)
As for numberings, I'll get back to you once I've tested v0.22A. I think once we start getting to the 0.5-0.6 stage we can start thinking about using the -B suffix!
I can do basic graphics on my comp, but I'm afraid I'm limited to textures. I have DXTbmp, Dogwaffle, Adobe Photoshop 7, Microsoft Picture Manager and Microsoft Word - which in actual fact are rather a powerful combination.
That said, I always have maintained, AND STILL DO, that graphics should and must take a back seat to hard programming and XML progress. The intricacies of game mechanics and whether the Lunar Federation has a white flag or not are vastly different things and we should not let the appearance of the mod cloud our progress. Once we have major things sorted we can really concentrate on the graphics and, with luck, make SotM a beautiful, as well as an enjoyable, mod.
Right. Roll on the playtesting!
Now, Woodelf, it's funny you should mentions sounds. Assuming you don't actually want a full-blown voice-man, I can knock up most sound requirements pretty easily. My old computer (which is currently in storage under my desk) has the Turtle Beach Aureal system which comes with a *.wav editor, which enabled me to knock together a number of sounds which I used in various Starcraft and Civ II mods I dabbled in. Assuming you want effects sounds, I can do them (if I have enough warning - reassembling my old computer might take a while
)As for numberings, I'll get back to you once I've tested v0.22A. I think once we start getting to the 0.5-0.6 stage we can start thinking about using the -B suffix!
I can do basic graphics on my comp, but I'm afraid I'm limited to textures. I have DXTbmp, Dogwaffle, Adobe Photoshop 7, Microsoft Picture Manager and Microsoft Word - which in actual fact are rather a powerful combination.
That said, I always have maintained, AND STILL DO, that graphics should and must take a back seat to hard programming and XML progress. The intricacies of game mechanics and whether the Lunar Federation has a white flag or not are vastly different things and we should not let the appearance of the mod cloud our progress. Once we have major things sorted we can really concentrate on the graphics and, with luck, make SotM a beautiful, as well as an enjoyable, mod.
Right. Roll on the playtesting!
JBG
Prince
PS: Are GeoModder's progress screen files included in the v0.22A version? Sorry about the double post, btw.
Yes, Geomodder's screens that he was so pleasantly badgering () me about are now there, as well as Duke van Frost's prettied up tech buttons.
JBG - Not to be too pushy...but are you here for good or just 2 days out of a month?
) me about are now there, as well as Duke van Frost's prettied up tech buttons.JBG - Not to be too pushy...but are you here for good or just 2 days out of a month?
JBG
Prince
woodelf said:
Promising anything would be rash. For the forseeable future, unless I end up in Addenbrooke's again, I'll be here.
JBG
Prince
While I'm at it, I playtested v0.22A for 200 turns, and the following things (all minor, spurious and nitpicking) came up:
- Why does the Helium 3 plant give +50% defence?
- Why does a Radar Tower upgrade to a Fort in 1 turn?
- I'd suggest giving City Bunkers and Biodomes the Low-G construction prerequisite AT LEAST
- The Collector takes 15 turns to build and gives one gold - but the He3 exchange gives 3 gold and only takes 5 turns to build. Balancing here? Also perhaps making the collector more... ah... attractive to build might be in order
- The special/emergency civics need prerequisites (kudos for getting the to work, btw!
)
- The Public Theatre wonder centres the world map?
- Scouts (good graphic btw) need an attack sound or animation - or better still need their attack ability taken away.
- We need to persuade the AI not to spend 100% of its time on the emergency civics
- Scouts need to become obsolete w/radio cars or need to upgrade into them. Same with radio cars and Lunar Rovers.
- Too many barbarians - lost Black Sands in under ten minutes!!! (my capital!)
- Atom_smashing?
- Adv. Electrolysis and Semi-conductors both have the same graphic
- Whatever happend to Rabbit, White's beautiful Lancers graphic?
- Customs outpost looks rather too much like a solar collector to be credible
- Electrolysis Plant and Solar Plant have the same icon.
>whew<. All that said, however, it was pretty good to play. Great fun, actually! I spent the first few minutes laughing aloud at the stuff you managed to get in there! You all deserve a pat on the back.
Right. Ahem. I'll get working on the goals and targets sheet! Watch this space.
- Why does the Helium 3 plant give +50% defence?
- Why does a Radar Tower upgrade to a Fort in 1 turn?
- I'd suggest giving City Bunkers and Biodomes the Low-G construction prerequisite AT LEAST
- The Collector takes 15 turns to build and gives one gold - but the He3 exchange gives 3 gold and only takes 5 turns to build. Balancing here? Also perhaps making the collector more... ah... attractive to build might be in order
- The special/emergency civics need prerequisites (kudos for getting the to work, btw!
)- The Public Theatre wonder centres the world map?
- Scouts (good graphic btw) need an attack sound or animation - or better still need their attack ability taken away.
- We need to persuade the AI not to spend 100% of its time on the emergency civics
- Scouts need to become obsolete w/radio cars or need to upgrade into them. Same with radio cars and Lunar Rovers.
- Too many barbarians - lost Black Sands in under ten minutes!!! (my capital!)
- Atom_smashing?
- Adv. Electrolysis and Semi-conductors both have the same graphic
- Whatever happend to Rabbit, White's beautiful Lancers graphic?
- Customs outpost looks rather too much like a solar collector to be credible
- Electrolysis Plant and Solar Plant have the same icon.
>whew<. All that said, however, it was pretty good to play. Great fun, actually! I spent the first few minutes laughing aloud at the stuff you managed to get in there! You all deserve a pat on the back.
Right. Ahem. I'll get working on the goals and targets sheet! Watch this space.
I'd say simply go ahead and make the changes to issues you've listed above and save it as a different version for now. Most of the stuff got put in with either NONE or a low tier tech simply so we could play with it without waiting too long to see it in game.
I'll run through your points in order...
1 - copy/paste issue, easily fixed.
2 - No idea
3 - See above for adding them in ASAP
4 - The He3 Plant is the main reason for being there. The gold for food until Isolation idea...Collector must never have been balanced.
5 - See above for adding with no prereqs
6 - see #1, c/p most likely
7 - Add a sound, please!
8 - AI is not my cup of tea at the moment, but there needs to be stiffer penalties or time limits on using them maybe?
9 - Yeah, easy enough to fix
10 - Barbs would have been gone if Belizan's update had worked, I think.
11 - Atom-Smashing was a tech from your CivII mod. The first 2 eras I went by that. Some have been changed since.
12 - I added Semi-conductors late to get the tree to flow and never made a new button.
13 - Not added yet, needs to be.
14 - No idea
15 - We need building buttons
Thanks. For a while it was a labor of love. Sadly we haven't spent any time on it for awhile...
I'll run through your points in order...
1 - copy/paste issue, easily fixed.
2 - No idea
3 - See above for adding them in ASAP
4 - The He3 Plant is the main reason for being there. The gold for food until Isolation idea...Collector must never have been balanced.
5 - See above for adding with no prereqs
6 - see #1, c/p most likely
7 - Add a sound, please!
8 - AI is not my cup of tea at the moment, but there needs to be stiffer penalties or time limits on using them maybe?
9 - Yeah, easy enough to fix
10 - Barbs would have been gone if Belizan's update had worked, I think.
11 - Atom-Smashing was a tech from your CivII mod. The first 2 eras I went by that. Some have been changed since.
12 - I added Semi-conductors late to get the tree to flow and never made a new button.
13 - Not added yet, needs to be.
14 - No idea
15 - We need building buttons
Thanks. For a while it was a labor of love. Sadly we haven't spent any time on it for awhile...
JBG
Prince
Whoa, Woodelf! 3,333 posts! That must be symbolic!
I can try to iron out the points I outline above, and I can post it as a 0.23A patch.
Belizan, Matthewv, DSquared and GeoModder, if you're out there, guys, please report in! We need to get moving again!
Keep thinking of sounds we could use. Rabbit did the awesome helmets/tanks for the Seals, marines, ect, but they make machine gun fire sounds. If that could be changed to laser, photon, or space sounds we'd be in good shape. Same as with the tanks and the turrets.
woodelf said:Holy crap, it's a JBG sighting!
Honestly, I don't know where we stand with this at all. Belizan and his friend are doing something, dsquared is doing taxes/school, matt is doing school, geomodder is doing who-knows-what, and I'm playtesting FfH and helping padmewan (sp) on a SMAC-type mod. I think we all want to see a Lunar mod succeed, but none of us were Leaders. I'll let Belizan chime in to see what's going on.
Scan the kazillion pages and see where we are how rudderless we became....
I don't feel like we are currently rudderless, what we are is blocking.
The current code base has a bug in it which I haven't had time to track down (because I'm doing taxes and working and stuff). Matt tried and gave up. We may have to roll back to our previous working version, we'll see. But in the interim, Warsong and I have been moving forward with the new design document, and it's coming along great
. We're working on prelim unit and tech lists now for ages 1-4. As soon as we have more portable design documents, we'll post them up here for RFC.I guess the most urgent bit matter we have right now is tracking down the bug in the codebase, which is "hard" especially because we now have multiple versions based on Matt and I correcting different perceived bugs in the XML. I started merging mine with Matt's, but haven't finished, as I really have to finish my taxes (no, still not done). Worse, my mother and my nephew are landing here for Spring break (i.e. a week) starting tomorrow, so I don't imagine I'll have a lot of time next week either
. But the week after that, I should finally... FINALLY... be able to get back to working on this.JBG said:
Actually we have a new design underway, which Warsong and I have been putting in quite a lot of work on. Warsong needs to do the development work via email, so we've been trading emails back and forth, about 8 per week, going over a wide range of ideas, features and methodolgies for the moon. I think it looks pretty cool, at this point, and we're in the processing of geling all our implementation and modelling ideas together into a cohesive design.
In the interim, while the new design was being prepared, we were working on testing ideas out in the old mod, but we broke it
. In actuality, it was almost certainly me who broke it, by messing with the XML, although no one has been able to figure out how or why. Debugging it takes a long time, though, and I've had taxes to do and I was sick for about 2 weeks (I think I'm better now, knock on wood), so things have stagnated there. Everyone else is sort of spinning their wheels because they gave up on debugging the current version weeks ago. When I get a chance to either fix this version or rollback to a previous version, we'll start moving forward with incremental feature aggregation and testing. All the while moving the new design forward.My expectation is that Warsong and I will have a design document worked up in 1-2 weeks excepting any breakdowns in responsiveness caused by my visitations. Once the basic design shell has gelled, I'll bring it here, and we can go over the new design to see if we can improve it further. I'm pretty excited about it
. Warsong has pulled in a lot of real world research related to the Moon. It's very cool .woodelf said:
I think my motivation has been quite constant, I've just had to deal with taxes and being sick, and having visitors. We waited a lot longer then two weeks for JBG to return, and he just disappeared. You know why I've been busy.
Re: 12 Monkeys, I don't entirely disagree, but I don't entirely agree either. We have definitely hit a lull caused by our inability to debug that release, and that's hurt us alot. I knew it would, but I just haven't had the time to debug it. I spent two days on it, it didn't get solved, I handed it off to Matt, hoping he could figure it out, but he didn't, and I haven't had time to invest in it since. That's no one's fault, that's just the reality of a volunteer coding project. Bugs like that are a nightmare. Perhaps I should have already decided to have us rollback to the previous version and move on from there, but I'd immediately want to go add the same features that broke it in the first place :/. What I really wanted to do was find out /why/ it was broken, so we could not have that same problem in the future. That knowledge has thus far eluded us
.As for the small plan idea, I think that's not the way to go. What we need is a clearer idea of our destination, which is what the new design doc is all about. Then, once we've got our destination firmly in mind, we can come up with a migration plan with small manageable steps to get us from here to there.
JBG said:Okay. Thanks, 12monkeys, I might actually do that. Once I've played v.022A I'll start thinking about a progress chart.
Now, Woodelf, it's funny you should mentions sounds. Assuming you don't actually want a full-blown voice-man, I can knock up most sound requirements pretty easily. My old computer (which is currently in storage under my desk) has the Turtle Beach Aureal system which comes with a *.wav editor, which enabled me to knock together a number of sounds which I used in various Starcraft and Civ II mods I dabbled in. Assuming you want effects sounds, I can do them (if I have enough warning - reassembling my old computer might take a while
As for numberings, I'll get back to you once I've tested v0.22A. I think once we start getting to the 0.5-0.6 stage we can start thinking about using the -B suffix!
Jesus, I can't even do my taxes? Woodelf said we needed a sound person because he and I discussed during your several month absense how you were our sound person
. If you are back, then clearly you can handle our audio needs . I agree that graphical issues are secondary to actual module structure and features (XML & Python work). But you have to understand that there is a lot of lead time involved in getting unit graphics done, and we're not doing them ourselves, so we ask others to do them and we incorporate them as they become available. You also have to understand that Woodelf really likes the pretty graphics. I've been all about letting Woodelf handle that aspect of mod.As for version numbers, again, because Woodelf loves to add graphics, perhaps a bit too rapiciously, our version numbers have gotten very confused. I would be working on a release, say, 0.17, and he'd release graphic patches for .16, .17, .19, .20, .21, etc. So we have a synch issue there. We settled this issue already by having a master mod holder. The plan was for Matt to be the merger, and me to be the releaser, therein forcing Woodelf et al to send their files to Matt for merging, and Matt would send them to me for QA and version number assignment. I think Matt burned himself out trying to debug our current version, however, and therein a different setup may be required. I had thought to worry about that *when I had time*.
I would appreciate it if you would not hijack the project. The remaining contributors on the project, after waiting months for some word from you JBG, made a commitment to move forward with a new plan, and a hell of a lot of work has been done towards that by myself and Warsong. You have no idea how irate I'm going to be if you derail us.
JBG said:While I'm at it, I playtested v0.22A for 200 turns, and the following things (all minor, spurious and nitpicking) came up:
- Why does the Helium 3 plant give +50% defence?
- Why does a Radar Tower upgrade to a Fort in 1 turn?
- I'd suggest giving City Bunkers and Biodomes the Low-G construction prerequisite AT LEAST
- The Collector takes 15 turns to build and gives one gold - but the He3 exchange gives 3 gold and only takes 5 turns to build. Balancing here? Also perhaps making the collector more... ah... attractive to build might be in order
- The special/emergency civics need prerequisites (kudos for getting the to work, btw!
- The Public Theatre wonder centres the world map?
- Scouts (good graphic btw) need an attack sound or animation - or better still need their attack ability taken away.
- We need to persuade the AI not to spend 100% of its time on the emergency civics
- Scouts need to become obsolete w/radio cars or need to upgrade into them. Same with radio cars and Lunar Rovers.
- Too many barbarians - lost Black Sands in under ten minutes!!! (my capital!)
- Atom_smashing?
- Adv. Electrolysis and Semi-conductors both have the same graphic
- Whatever happend to Rabbit, White's beautiful Lancers graphic?
- Customs outpost looks rather too much like a solar collector to be credible
- Electrolysis Plant and Solar Plant have the same icon.
>whew<. All that said, however, it was pretty good to play. Great fun, actually! I spent the first few minutes laughing aloud at the stuff you managed to get in there! You all deserve a pat on the back.
Right. Ahem. I'll get working on the goals and targets sheet! Watch this space.
0.22A didn't crash for you in 200 turns?!? ???
Belizan said:
Relax.
It's old 0.21 with Geomodder screens and new tech buttons. Nothing of your Python stuff.
edit - And I won't dispute that I went nuts with numbers, but it was internal and just units. They never crashed because I didn't add anything radical, that was for you and matt!
JBG said:
200 turns? It should have crashed...
JBG said:
Cut and paste error on Woodelf's part that none of us have ever caught before. 8).
JBG said:
No idea.
JBG said:
In the current design, sure. We left it that way because it was more fun, and we didn't feel like doing a bunch of little incremental fix ups like that when we knew we were going to be reworking the tech tree anyway. There are a *huge* number of things to change around at the point where we start allowing ourselves to do that sort of fix up, and we wanted to enact those changes in a much more orderly and organized fashion to give the mod a more cohesive feel, as opposed to the hodgepodge sort of directionless design it has now.
JBG said:
There are a lot of questionable balance issues with buildings. Personally, I always looked at it as a diminishing returns sort of idea. There are a lot of ways to make money on the moon, some are much better then others. The Collector represents one of those not so efficient ways that people can build if it makes sense in their strategy.
JBG said:- The special/emergency civics need prerequisites (kudos for getting the to work, btw!
I coded those to the specifications you listed, plus the ones I managed to beat out of you on the boards. We haven't touched them since. Note that the no unit within one square of a major city feature is still not coded.
JBG said:- The Public Theatre wonder centres the world map?
It shouldn't. If you are playing with the latest version, you should start with your map centered.
JBG said:
Graphics issue. And an expensive one to solve too.
JBG said:
Not sure what you mean? The AI spends as much time as it is allowed in National Emergency, and then leaves it when he starts to incur a happiness penalty. The AI really likes National Emergency over the other special civics. And I don't blaim it. But the AI is *following* the rules. The rules you laid out actually.
JBG said:
No. Lunar Rovers are the APCs of the moon. Minus the A. They carry infantry around. Scouts should upgrade into Radio Cars though. But these are minor incremental changes. The entire unit tree is getting rewritten.
JBG said:
This is old news. Barbarians are being removed in standard play.
JBG said:
What?
JBG said:
Not sure what you mean, but a question for Woodelf
.JBG said:- Customs outpost looks rather too much like a solar collector to be credible
Graphics. Don't care
. Since the new design may not even have a customs outpost, we, or at least I haven't been worrying about these sorts of very specialized models.JBG said:
Graphics issue. BTW, someone made us an entire set of coordinated buttons, didn't they? We just haven't put them in yet.
JBG said:
JBG said:
If you want to do some incremental improvements to the existing mod as an interim step before we move to the new design, that's fine be me (and entirely consistant with what we were doing before, modulo our bug issues). I am going to be busy for the next 10-12 days.
JBG said:
We have always been moving, but Woodelf apparently doesn't listen very well, and you have been out of the loop for a long time. Warsong and I have been actively working on the new design for weeks.
woodelf said:Relax.
It's old 0.21 with Geomodder screens and new tech buttons. Nothing of your Python stuff.
edit - And I won't dispute that I went nuts with numbers, but it was internal and just units. They never crashed because I didn't add anything radical, that was for you and matt!
Ug... Woodelf, how many times do I have to tell you this. It was XML stuff that I added. XML. Building and Unit changes.
No but you did confuse the hell out of me because you kept stepping over my versioning system, and your own patches got all confused. Too many patches = BAD. I don't know how many times and ways I can tell you this. I still don't know that our bug isn't that somehow between Matt and I we missed one of your patches.
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