Right, in the Supremacy XML data files, I notice that every object in the game is given a key name, ie. a distinct and easy to understand name to refer to and gain access in programs. The major race ships already have a naming convention like:

ROM_WARBIRD_II
FED_EXPLORER_III

I'm going to make sure I follow this in my data structures. But what about for the minor races and their ships? Is there a XML file done already? f there's already exists a minor_race_ships.xml with all the info filled out. That would be awesome.

If there isn't, how about this:

Okay I'm referring to a copy of the Minor Powers Ship Database.xls by Zeleni and Matress (oh, if there's an updated version please send me)

and we key name them like this...

Acamarian Raider 1 ACAMARIAN_RAIDER_I
Acamarian Raider 2 ACAMARIAN_RAIDER_II
Andorian Warcruiser 1 ANDORIAN_WARCRUISER_I
Andorian Warcruiser 2 ANDORIAN_WARCRUISER_II
... etc ...
As for names with apostrophes, just take out the apostrophe.
B'omar Fighter BOMAR_FIGHTER
T'Lani Heavy Cruiser 1 TLANI_HEAVY_CRUISER_I
... etc ...

simply replacing space with underscore?

Too long? I dont like shortening the race name, since ACA_ or AND_ is not informative enough, I also thought about shortening the reoccuring descriptive words like Heavy, Light to H, and L respectively - so they appear as H_CRUISER / L_CRUISER. But I decided against it since the majors' key names do not do this.

You seem to have it nailed. I usually spell out the minor race names because there's so many of them. The minor race and empire stuff all go in the same XML files.

EDIT: And yes, all spans of whitespace get converted to a single underscore, and all characters except letters, numbers, and underscores ([_a-zA-Z0-9]) get dropped. By convention, all my keys are uppercase.

Sounds fine to me Wait for mike to see what he has on mind.

Minor database is updated but only with ship descriptions, but i think of adding 2 new tech levels (upgrades) to each ship for example bomar_fighter_I (tech 3) upgades to bomar_fighter_II (tech 7) when minor race reachs new tech level, in this case tech 7 and finally bomar_fighter_III (tech 10). Number of ships in the game will be always the same with one differnce, minor ships will upgrade automatically for keeping game balance and reality even in late stages of the game. This is another thing which waits Mike's approval.

I'd agree with the simple affixation of race + shiptype/Class, i.e cruiser, heavy cruiser, dreadnought etc. Fits with the general theme.

Regards Wolfe

thanks you all. Good to set some standards now and make it easier later.

Another joyful task someone may eventually have to do is assign both hitpoints and 'cannon' positions for each ship .

Oh what fun that tedious job may be, i nominate MOE

Regards Wolfe

Oh...i've actually already started adding in the minor races ships to the game, and i've used a slightly different naming system to the one you've described. The reasons for this is because the EMPIRE ships actually use a different system as well. Your system actually makes it easier to perform edits later on though, so i'll go back and change the names of all the ships.

The system that I used (And the one that the Empire ships are currently using) is this one:



As opposed to Strings' version which is:



Each ship has its own class name as well, which is displayed further down in the editor. Wolfe and Zeleni have already made these names for me. (Lornak class Acamarian Raider 1, Tralesta class Acamarian Raider 2, Kumari class Andorian Warcruiser 2, Altira class Andorian Warcruiser 2...)

Depending on how the .xml files are written these names may also help to identify the ships later on.

As for setting the hardpoints...i've enver done anything like that before. I wouldn't know what to do. Unless you came up with some graphical representation where I could point-and-click on where the weapons should go, i'm not sure i'd be able to do it.

And as for the ship upgrades, Zeleni, like I said before, come up with the stats and i'll do it. If Mike could implement an auto-upgrade feature that I could select for the minor races' ships it would make it work better.

Just define the ship upgrades the way you normally would, and I'll implement the auto-upgrade logic myself. It's a simple matter of checking each minor race ship for possible upgrades on each turn and then upgrading them on the spot.

Ok then Mike, will do.

What about the weapon types? Would it be possible to increase the number of types? Currently there are only two types of energy weapon and 2 types of secondary weapon. Maybe i'm being overly pedantic, but some of the weapons that the minor races have don't perfectly match these types. If we could come up with some extra weapon types, I could fit them in better, and it would mean we could put more eye candy effects in the game too.

It would also be nice if I could perhaps specify the weapon colour or something. If the weapons were objects then you would just need to add different colour textures and it would be a whole new weapon!

For example, we could have:

Energy Weapons
Beam (Already implemented, constant stream of energy)
Pulse (Already implemented, small, fast, multiple hits of energy)
Bolt (As in Disruptors, a large, single, moderately fast hit of energy)
Wave (Limited range, but an expanding wave of energy that may hit multiple ships or shields depending on how shields work. Like the Plasmatic Pulsar Device from Starfleet Command 2)
Matter Stream (Weapons that send streams of destructive particles at an enemy. The particles disperse over distances and so lose their effectiveness as the range increases. Like the Fusion Cannon from Starfleet Command 2. Early Vulcan and Andorians ships used these)

Secondary Weapons
Torpedo (Already implemented)
Missile (Already implemented)
Explosive Charge/Mine

Could it be done? Obviously the above list is just possibilities, and people may decide to change/remove/add to it in future.

The weapon categories in the editor are only needed for the automated combat system, which only distinguishes between directed (beam) and undirected (projectile) type weapons. Any other details are only needed for the tactical combat system, so those will be Strings' responsibility .

Should I convert the model file names to this format? Will an extension exclude conflict with other data files for the ships as outlined above? - Or just name the folder for the model in that way?

Anything is possible MOE,

Some require probably texture changes and how often they get fired each weapon 'cycle', mines i don't think would be to hard either.

Regards Wolfe

I'm just trying to think of possibilities before anything is programmed - it's better to think of them now before some element of the programming accidentally prevents an idea from being implemented.

I'm actually working on this right now, and it's exactly the reason why I brought this topic up. When I'm done you'll have an graphical editor for ships, stations and shipyards, graphical as in with a 3D viewport that lets you see how it looks, just as it would be appear in the final combat engine. The Supremacy editor will remain the editor to change build costs, tech levels and such. But I need the key names to be the same between the two editors so that they match and are talking about the same thing.

Okay on to what the editor does, apart from just inspecting a model, you can make minor graphical adjustments with it, like a model's:

Orientation
- 90 degs rotate buttons plus an input box for a specific angle and axis to rotate on.

Size
- A slider and also an input box for ship length in meters (ship will resize automatically to that many in-game meters)

(Which way the model is facing and how big models are vary wildly because of the fan based nature of our models, and how we don't stick with 1 coordinate system or scale. And even if we do, some modelling programs have their own variant of the Left/right handed system (facepalm), and different exporters resize a model differently as it processes it)

Lighting
Each ship can be adjusted to receive different amounts of ambient lighting and reflect different levels of light, imagine...
- dark, stealthy romulan ships with little reflected light
- small, occasional, glints of the metallic hull of the nx-01
- entire ship reflecting a small amount of light, the vulcan ships.

Weapons
Matress wants different colours for weaps, matress gets different colours for weaps. Should be easy.

Weapon hardpoints
Tricky, I'll have to include a few extra camera viewports later. And if I recall correctly, or if I can find my notes again from the Graphics 2 lectures. I should be able to implement a orthographic camera, meaning that objects will retain their proportions regardless of perspective. Hard points will take the form of wireframe cones or something clever I'll think of. EDIT2: Wolfe suggested triangle picking on models which can return the position relative to the center of the model (0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f). Good idea.

Anyway, it'll take some time.

So far what I've done is written up an early version of the shader that will power the combat engine, that was headachey but I got per-pixel blinn-phong lighting sorted. (short explanation: pretty.)

(Long: A shader is the program that your GPU runs for every point in your model, transforming it to a on-screen pixel. Blinn-Phong is an commonly used and efficient algorithm that gives an illusion of realistic specular reflections.)

The 3D viewport runs in a windows form now. And I've hacked together a solution for XNA to load in new models at run-time. and development contines...

EDIT1 - Kenneth, don't worry about making the shipnames on sharepoint follow this convention. The ship names of the ships on share point just need to be human readable.

At the export to game stage however, a Romulan Warbird D'Deridex model have to be exported to .x format, and named ROM_WARBIRD_II. It also have to be put in a folder called ROM_WARBIRD_II along with its textures which can be named whatever.

You couldn't add a feature of triangle picking, on models which can return the position relative to the center of the model (0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f).

Regards Wolfe

This project is really going forward . Sounds great Strings!

EDIT: What about combat math, are you going to use dafedz model of damage calculation for combat result?

Good idea should work in most cases. If not then tweak values and confirm again with camera.

Yeah Zeleni, for the combat maths I will follow Dafedz' system. Other technical details for the combat engine, like networking for multiplayer play, still have to be worked out. I'll talk to Mike about that because I think he's got a server-client architecture in place that caters for multiplayer play, and so maybe I can just input/output into Supremacy's networking classes.

Now lets make it more complicated!

Matress wants to see planets and asteroids and comets and blackholes...um...well...we wouldn't actually see a blackhole, but you know what I mean...and dust clouds and asteroid belts and planetary rings and nebulae and it all has to be working with Newtonian physics and perfect representations of a planetary system...

Lol, one thing at a time, and all in good time

Wow, I can't tell you how glad I am to have you onboard, Strings . I don't think we need to worry about networking the combat system--you can just expose a callback where I'll send everybody's combat orders for the turn (and then you can kick off the calculations and animation), and events for when the local player submits her orders (and maybe for when combat is over). I can include an integer in the combat initialization data (whatever that ends up being) that you can use as the seed in your random number generators, so that any random values will be the same across all clients (and thus the combat results will be the same).

Or maybe not the same? based on someone's intel, they could get a report that someone lost a battle, but actually won. Or you could lie to your own people and say you won when you lost, if you had a strong enough intel. Propaganda anyone?

The Borg are not in the minor race ships list, are they in .. maybe random events?

anyway, I'm applying the same naming system to them. so ..

BORG_CUBE
BORG_SPHERE

etc

Early screenshot of the editor:


Yep that's a slowly rotating UFP emblem

Update on progress:
- Fixed an issue with the viewport crashing program when running on nVidia cards and/or under XP.
- A missing info.xml no longer causes crash, but gracefully informs user of missing file.
- Implemented the rotate by 90 degrees with buttons, via input box still needs work, so does saving changes to the .xml file.

It's nice to hear about "viewer" progress! Keep up good work Strings
Ohhh Borg, i will add borg to shiplist as sphere and cube

...however, if you separate the model editor out from the rest of the form (as a user control, for example), and just set the unique key as a property, it could be embedded in the main Supremacy editor for individual ships . Potentially, anyway--no sense in getting ahead of ourselves .

Yeah I've toyed with the idea too in my head It is already a user control, and it has a ChangeSelectedModel(string key) public method so it is definately doable.

The Borg are aready in on my shiplist, Zeleni, and i've got more designs in there than just the Cube and Sphere......although I haven't exactly updated the shiplist in months...

...

Good work, Strings! Animated insignia, eh? Ooh that gives me an idea, Mike! Why don't you implement... *Idea hidden to maintain Mike's sanity*

More designs? it's ok by me.

Yes indeed, Mike and Strings are doing great stuff.

Yep, more designs!



...Two designs. Two whole extra designs.

Oh, and the "Cylinder" is just what I called the little scout ship from Armada. Technically it's a cone though...meh.

These are the models we have so far

Nice ships, though bottom one is a bit green

Regards Wolfe