Brian Rubin {l Wrote}:Oh, stuff like inspiration, time spent working on it, how much work it took in creating it, planned features and such like that.
Ok....
Inspiration, well obviously Artemis, as I've mentioned. I've never played it myself, but I've seen youtube videos, and it seemed like a cool idea, and not having (nor wanting) a windows machine, I figured, well, I guess I've got to make my own version. This is a bit of a pattern for me, as another game, or more like a novelty than a game which I made, called "Be The Wumpus" came in to existence in the same way -- taking the kernel of an idea of an existing Windows-only game and making my own version of it. Of course, the Star Trek TV series also informed the design of the game to an extent -- same as it did for Artemis, presumably.
Time spent working on it... hmm, well, as the painters say, my whole life up to this point. Well, I first began working on the network part of it, in the form of a generic lobby server which can be found here:
https://github.com/smcameron/ssgl although that code is out of date and buggy compared to the variant which is found within SNIS -- need to fix that, I suppose -- about 2 years ago I guess (according to github). I got bogged down with that when I couldn't figure out how to do NAT punchthrough for peer-to-peer connections. So that lay fallow for a couple of years. But, the initial impetus for the lobby server was to make a game similar to Artemis, and that would have been in the fall of 2010, when I first became aware of Artemis. But, I got bogged down in the NAT punchthrough, and Christmas rolled around, and vacation, and I got distracted, and just dropped it. I think I also had some of the network code for SNIS partially done (but buggy as hell) at that time. But in any case, I dropped it at the end of 2010.
And then, in November of 2012, there was a "hackathon" at Platform Houston (
http://www.platformhouston.com/ ) and I knew one of the guys involved in that place, so I said sure, I'll go to this hackathon, which was a 2-day weekend thing, see what you can cook up in two days. So I was kind of fishing around for ideas of what to do, and I thought of this old idea of doing a variant of Artemis, and I remembered Space Nerds in Space that I had started back in 2010, so I thought, ok, let me pick up that ball again.
So I spent a couple days of hard programming getting that onto it's feet. So, all the infrastructure work that I did in 2010, building the lobby code, and the network code, that, by itself, did nothing, and was quite a lot of drudgery to write (all C code, from scratch, not much in the way of pre-made libraries, just because, that's how I roll, usually, not for any good reason other than sheer pigheaded stubbornness, really) -- all that work served me pretty well, and having taken that long break, well, I got the thing to where you could 'drive" and "shoot", and had several different "screens" all potentially separate processes communicating via network working in those 2 days. And of course I re-used a lot of ideas and code -- esp. the font system -- from Word War vi -- so the graphics kind of have that look -- everything is drawn with lines, so everything is scalable. One thing that has always irritated me is when you start up a game and it's at a fixed resolution, and esp. old games written for low-res systems that now look tiny on modern systems, so I tend to make my games scale. Anyway, I digress.
So, over Thanksgiving I had a good solid week off work, and put that to use on SNIS, and made a lot of good progress. Most recently, I've gotten bogged down in the 3d graphics aspects. This is probably a mistake, in several ways. First, I was trying to make my own software 3d renderer. It soon became clear that 1) debugging the thing is really hard for me, 2) it's not fast enough. So there are a couple possible solutions to that, one would be to use gtkglext to do the graphics and well, I'd have a different set of bugs (that I would presumably create) to worry about and lose some portability, but it should be plenty fast, and the other possibility is just use a wireframe renderer (already done, mostly) and don't worry about making the 3d graphics all fancy. If it's good enough for Elite on the old BBC micro, then it's just plain good enough, right?
Esp. considering the game is fundamentally a 2D game, so the 3D graphics are somewhat superfluous, *except*, for that starship bridge experience with a big projection screen, you've got to have some kind of "out the window" view, right?
As far as planned features, well, I suppose I would aim for the minumum set of features that will make a fun game, as a start. That is, each station has got to have enough for the players to do, and behave in ways that encourage cooperation between "crewmembers", the crew has got to be able to get their ship into interesting and dangerous situations and be able to get out of them (or not) in some kind of interesting and fun way, and basically have something to do, other than merely mindlessly driving and shooting.
The game as it stands today is not ready to be reviewed or played. For starters, there are some bugs that need fixing first, but there is quite a lot else that needs doing.
In the last few weeks, I've been distracted from SNIS, (adding shiny laser projector support to Word War vi, and other little amusements).
But, I hope to get back to SNIS development soon.
Feel free to ask more questions.
-- steve