Have ideas? Help me build my (your!) game.

[sscadmin]

Looks very good I definitely need some classes to do some artwork like that. Checked out that gallery and there is some nice art in there.

[s2odan]

charlatan wrote:
.... I'm looking for suggestions of features you would like to see in your dream game of this type. Anything you couldn't do in another game that you wanted to, or just cool ideas. I cant guarantee they will happen, but I am compiling a list and will check in my progress as I complete requests. .....
Well you seem to have some good ideas already which if completed would put this well on the way to becoming 'dream' space game.But add Newtonian/Realistic physics and space-flight to the mix and I think it will be one big step closer. :)A realistic selection of weaponry would be nice too. Most games have such a limited selection, it would be nice to have multiple choices in how to engage the enemy. You could have the 3 basics, variations of ballistic weapons, Directed energy weapons (particle cannons, laser beams) and missile weapons. But use many variations of each. As well as many missiles with varying functions, some are traditional explode, some might surround the ship like a Tholian web ;)Atmospheric flight model and seamless planetary landings would be very nice too.How about a modular ship design system? You could have the basic ship hulls, and add a selection of various parts, all of which are upgradable but the ship would change visually too?Engines, coolant, weapons, shields, armor ect all these might be visible changes.

[Braindead]

I second the modular ship thing. this type of stuff always gets me drooling like an idiot oh, nice art on yer deviantart page btw. also got me drooling. i think i need a bucket or something...

[snwboardn]

My biggest complaint is the lack of feeling of being apart of a universe and that your actions matter... For me I almost want a strategy game in a 3d world... Take this for example;Say you blow up a transport ship, well I want it to matter that you blew up that transport ship... Now X race doesn't have the materials they needed from that transport ship. It doesnt have to be overblown with menus but make the economy matter not just spawn another ship in a random 5-10 minutes... Keep track of the resources, how many asteroids they own, how many space stations they have... If they don't have the resources to make another Destroyer they can't unless maybe the player has all the resources so they either attack the player to try and get them back or bite the bullet and make peace with the player to maybe try to establish some sort of trade route. I saw alot of story based things in here... and the problem with that is it creates linearity... If I try to go off the beaten path does the story change? I mean yea Lost Planet, best story I have played maybe ever, great acting and what-not but guess what? Now that it is over I have absolutely no inclination to play it again... X series... absolute horrible story but even after years I still load it up and play it time and again, (until some mechanic of the GOD engine pisses me off). Now a way around that is giving a story but maybe only offering certain story lines under certain conditions... say you attack race Y and make them your enemy, well you can't do a certain mission with them but another story opens up... Which is hard to do but at the same time I would much rather take an open environment and being able to create your own story than one that is written in stone that you have to follow... With that same concept make the player able to do crazy things... One of my favorite things to do in Doom was get the Imps and the other demons to attack eachother, while you just sit back and marvel at the chaos you created... make it realistic if you attack some lonely ship in the outskirts of the universe and nobody is around, who knows who killed them? Maybe if you are in good standing with that race they will just assume it was random pirates... I dunno that is just my take on it...

[Rith]

That sounds complicated to code. It would be beyond awesome, though. I'm disappointed when I stealthily kill a member of a faction, in a game, and the entire faction knows about it.It's like they're omnipresent or something.But realistic enough to be able to provoke a galactic war? It would be an instant classic, in my opinion anyway.I would try to make a peaceful coalition to advance technology, and use that to get an awesome planet destroying capital ship. Then I'd start a galactic war.

[Knudow]

A cool thing would be to have a game encyclopedia like Mass Effect. You can read facts about planets, important ships, history...You can play the game without reading all that information, but , for the people who likes a consistent universe, it's pretty sweet.The good thing is... you can get help for almost anybody for this, because you don't need to know how to code, draw o model... they just need to create backgrounds for planets, and this can be done individually without having to know all the info about the rest of the universe!(I bought Spaceforce for 2€ some weeks ago, started watching Battlestar Galactica, installed the game, looked for info on how to play it and... going from link to link I stumbled upon this thread, and I loved the idea (I'm a firefly fan ))

[snwboardn]

Rith wrote:
That sounds complicated to code. It would be beyond awesome, though. I'm disappointed when I stealthily kill a member of a faction, in a game, and the entire faction knows about it.It's like they're omnipresent or something.But realistic enough to be able to provoke a galactic war? It would be an instant classic, in my opinion anyway.I would try to make a peaceful coalition to advance technology, and use that to get an awesome planet destroying capital ship. Then I'd start a galactic war.
It couldn't be more complicated that a 3rd person strategy game, I assume they maintain some kind of resource log... If they don't have X amount of this resource and Y amount of that resource they can't do certain things... You could create their attitude as a function 0-100 of aggression, peaceful, militaristic, and couple that with their current standing and the odds of success of a certain aggression... And not that God knowing, make them have to send spies to gain knowledge of your sectors... Or attempt to infiltrate your race if you go that way, that doesn't even have to be anything more than a dice roll depending on the skill of their current spies... Or if they manage to get a fast ship into the player's sector and that ship can get within an X ammount of distance of objects they can either A) try to make it out of hostile territory with the information on-board, or maybe B)send a signal back to their home base and risk being seen... and that again falls in-line with that little scout ship just isn't another piece of crap that they can throw away and actually means something. As far as artificial intelligence that to me seems like the easy part, as far as making something realistic like that and having the computer act realistically to known circumstances... The hard part to me is making a believable AI when it comes to dogfighting... when you are in a completely 3d space where you can move in any direction, and have multiple different ships with different abilities, making combat even somewhat believable is completely beyond me.