Something to think about.

General Stuff about Armagetron, That doesn't belong anywhere else...
Monkey
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Re: Something to think about.

Post by Monkey »

I believe he will come back and not just for nostalgia purposes. I know that he really likes this game and if we can do enough to improve it and hence increase both the size and quality of its user base, he'll be back on the grids :)
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Light
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Re: Something to think about.

Post by Light »

Monkey wrote:I believe he will come back and not just for nostalgia purposes. I know that he really likes this game and if we can do enough to improve it and hence increase both the size and quality of its user base, he'll be back on the grids :)
I think what would really make this game shine is utilization of the y-axis. Not sure it'll ever happen though, and another lightcycle game is bound to take the place of it at some point.
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Lucifer
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Re: Something to think about.

Post by Lucifer »

Light wrote: I think what would really make this game shine is utilization of the y-axis. Not sure it'll ever happen though, and another lightcycle game is bound to take the place of it at some point.
It'll take a rewrite to make true utilization of the y-axis, but I believe that, with some difficulty, a fake utilization of the y-axis could happen. Basically, it'd be like this:

You have "ramp" zones that are rendered like ramps and connect two different parts of a map (or maybe two different maps). You layout how the different parts of a map are stacked together, and create windows for the walls, but require the entire grid area on each layer be walled in, so you can only go from area to another by ramp.

Then the renderer stacks each area properly and you can see whatever you'd expect. So you could have ramparts surrounded a regular square game grid, and cycles on the ramparts can see down into the game grid, but need a ramp to travel down there.

We figured out at one point that that was feasible, but too much work to be worth it with the current renderer, and that maybe changing the engine to support the Y-axis formally could be easier.
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Monkey
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Re: Something to think about.

Post by Monkey »

I take it by Y-axis you mean having properly three-dimensional maps instead of just two-dimensional ones, right? That concerns me deeply. I'm a big fan of simplicity; I hate all maps with more than four axes, shooting, styball, high rubber, etc. Fort and sumo are already quite complicated/difficult and that's only in two dimensions, I really hope we don't spoil what we already have. All that being said, surprisingly, I'm not entirely against it, I'm just worried that it will be used in stupid ways, like rubber has been on high rubber servers.
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Lucifer
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Re: Something to think about.

Post by Lucifer »

Oh, we can guarantee it would be used in stupid ways. That's what happens in a community where 99% of the content is community-generated. Don't anybody get insulted by that, because you know it's true. You also know how important it really is to try out new server concepts and see how they do (I had the first map rotation server!).

The reason we say y-axis, in case you were curious, is because OpenGL is weird. They put the ground level as the X and Z axes, and the Y axis is vertical. (It's not that weird, actually, that's surprisingly standard in vector calculus, it just seems weird when you don't have the math background that supports it)

But we can also guarantee some good concepts would come out of it. So as with anything, the real question isn't "is this a good idea?", it's "For the amount of work it'll take to do this, will the good concepts that come out of it be worth the effort?" Since we have Fortress and Sumo in our history, which were relatively simple concepts to implement, we're generally of the "pick the lowest hanging fruit" variety of thinkers. If it's easy, it might get done. If it's not easy, and we don't need it, strictly speaking, it won't get done.
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