For testing and fun purposes, here's the combat simulator for bote:

http://www.botf2.com/bote/Shared%20Documents/CombatSimulator.zip

Take a look at the included Readme file and adjust the CombatScript.txt to your needs. It's best to give the Repeat Flag a value of zero for starters so that you have a graphical display of the fight. You need to copy Alpha6 shiplist.data from ..\bote\ships\data\ of your bote installation to the folder where you extracted the combat simulator into. You can of course extract it directly into the folder where your shiplist.data is located in, that would be the easiest thing.

View of a tactical combat (the image link is sometimes broken due to imageshack.us server downtime):

I've just tested the simulator - as usual you forgot some info, Mal.

Extract all the files into ..\<BotE-Installation-folder>\Data\Ships\

I have a few points about the simulator:

The simulator crashes if you try to close it mid-battle.

The simulator crashes if you click too often on the screen mid-battle.

The buttons are in German.

If you leave a gap where a ship *should* be placed in combatscript.txt then start a simulation, I get an error message saying "can't find shipclass". When I click on ok the simulator carries on as normal though.

If you move to another window during a simulation then return, when the battle is complete and it says "xxx wins this combat", you have to click on ok THREE times. You only have to click it once if you stay on the combat simulator window.

It's hard to tell the difference between ship classes.



I'm surprised no one else has posted here. Hopefully my points will be taken as constructive criticism and not anything else.

Thanks, I knew these bugs. But the CombatSimulator is only a development tool. So I give no support.

I uploaded some ingame pics of it. I think sir p. still needs to upload an alpha4 fully compliant combat simulator though..

Possible to replace dots with small "top view" of ships pictures to represent ships. Might look cooler.

I know this combat simulator was not meant to be good-looking in the first place as you can see. but nice idea, maybe sir p. amends this..

I assume that work being done on the simulator is currently on hold until more progress is made on the DeTrekification front?

right.

There are however two guys at our forum who downloaded truevision3d and are fiddling with it in order to see if it's any useful for 3d combat programming. still, it's in its very beginnings..

This looks interesting, are they flying around in 3D space or just 2D?

3d projected to 2d plane.

we're looking from side view or top view, then? Cool, are the dots using real ship data like shield/hull strengths and weapons damage?

I am thinking maybe this can be ported into true 3D, I have some experience with programming

this sounds interesting. it ain't be done in xml however no, just joking, you might wanna ask sir p. what he thinks about that. he has released the source for the combat before to mars_2 (a member here) so there's a good chance he will do that too for you if you want to take this task over.

I think top view, but I'm not sure.

and yes, they use real data. In fact that's how combat is computed in-game, i.e. that very simulator runs when a combat takes place.
that's why you need a shiplist file inside the combatsim folder so the sim can take the ship values out of that file and run the combat.

Haha yeah XML won't work here well I haven't mentioned it til now, I have a got a lot of programming hours under my belt, but it's all done with Java, Java ME too, and unfortunately Java isn't really suitable for any serious 3D games development.

But it has taught me about how to write proper code so it wasn't all bad plus it is so alike to C# and C# can interface with DirectX, so all in all I dont regret learning Java. I took a Graphics programming module in my final year, and I sorta wish I had the option to do that in my first year cause I really liked it. And now when I'm not job hunting I use my free time to play about with trying to render models

In fact, I found the Defiant model here and that was how I found this site.

I think I'll show you guys what I've done so far with the defiant model, I made a little game with it heehee

okay, let's have a look .

as for the other thing, it's up to our chief engineer how he handles that. he's usually not around on weekends so we have to wait a few days before he drops in. in the process of that (if successful ) you get the game (not the source, the game) sent to you first of course . he documented all his code pretty well so you shouldn't need much time to get into it. it's written in plain c++ using mostly OOP methods so it should be some good exercise for your after-college time not to get lazy and things..

So here's the little game I made, it's very basic and never intended for release, it might be a bit buggy so please bear with me.

Controls (are Flightsim like)
Up - pitch Down
Down - pitch Up
Left - roll Left
Right - roll Right
Space bar - Fire pulse phaser cannons

To run it you need have the Microsoft .NET Framework Redistributable (at least 2.0, 3.0 or 3.5 is fine) and the XNA Framework Redistributable 1.0 Refresh. You can download them below if needed.

Download .NET Framework Version 2.0 Redistributable (Don't need if you have 3.5, or 3.0 installed already)
Download XNA Framework Redistributable 1.0 Refresh

Then simply unzip into any folder, Run Practice.exe in the bin\x86\Release folder!

======================================================
Quick Credits:
Nemitor_Atimen of BOTF2 Forum for the Defiant Model, which I modified.
NoonienSoong on Riemer's XNA forums for the new Sky box textures.
Waylon Brinck for the guide on making asteroids,
and finally Riemer for writing the excellent XNA tutorials!
======================================================


^^ that's what I had in mind when i made it.



Rotated the camera manually in the code and took it, lucky I didn't crash into an asteroid :p



Here's the normal view.

Hehe that's quite a fun game! It's a shame that there are no sound effects or explosions...but you can't have everything, can you?

...One thing though, if you need .Net 2.0, can you use it if you have .Net 3.5? I had to uninstall .Net 3.5 yesterday because I was testing something, but you need .Net 3.5 to be able to run Supreamcy.

From the Microsoft Developer Network Library

I've just checked on another computer that it runs if you have .NET 3.5 or 3.0 installed.

I haven't looked into incorporating sound yet, maybe the starship din noise is easy, i'll try add that. Explosions should be fun, I was thinking the asteroids can split into smaller ones, like in the classic asteroid game. And then maybe we can have a UFO attacking you. Or even a Dominion Attack ship...

Ooh...splitting/exploding asteroids would be gooood.

If you needed some explosions inspiration, I would've recommended Jigalypuff's Explosion Test over on our old forums. Unfortunately, you need to log into Our Old Forums BEFORE you can download it, and i'm not sure whether they will accept new user acounts or not. I also tried testing the explosion test but it crashes for some reason.

I just spent the last few hours looking for audio, that stuff is hard to find
Okay, registering, and it still works! ...and I'm downloading it now Ooh, that's a cool little test game with the cardassian ship charging its phasers, what programming language did you use to make that?

I like the sound of one of the explosions, is it okay to use explostart.wav? It sounds like a small pulversing explosion and perfect for the soft and squishy asteroids.

The explosion test was created by Jigalypuff - so send him a PM and see what he says first. Jigalypuff is generally happy for people to use his stuff as long as he gets credit though.

I've uploaded some sounds that you might find useful.

Tested...and i'm in love!

The program was a tad glitchy at first - I couldn't get the Defiant to move at first until I fired its' Pulse Phasers, but it ran pretty smoothly after that. The program crashed when I made the Defiant ram into one of the exploding asteroids too.

These problems may be due to the fact that I installed .Net 3.0 AND .Net 3.5 less than 10 minutes before I saw your post, strings, and I didn't restart my computer. It never told me to do so.

Now all we need is the other 100 or so ships in the program, Phasers, Photons, Disruptors, Missiles, Shields, Ablative Armor, an AI, crew voices, tactical commands...

Great work, strings. You might want to have a word with Mstrobel, the creator of Supremacy. He programmed Supremacy in .Net, and we haven't got a combat system yet...

Thanks, I think what you saw was caused by me not setting the start point correctly when I resized the asteroid field. So all you saw was blank empty space hehe. It's fixed now.

Don't put it all in a list like that lol it sounds like a lot to do now. But yeah, I have to figure how how I can put in phasers... also, at the moment the pulse phasers are just 2D sprites and they face the camera always, so they look wrong if you move the camera up or down. I'll have to learn more and then I can make actual 3D glowing balls/beams of death and mayhem

I uploaded those explosion sounds to SharePoint. They are in your sound folder "Incomplete (background sounds)" that I renamed "background sounds" after adding in some other sounds I had uploaded earlier to the now deleted folder "sound fx." All the background sounds are under one folder "background sounds."

funny little game strings. very good.

I took all the sounds from Armada 1. There are plenty more, but those were the only ones that I thought were relevant to the program. I never realised just how many explosion sound effects you needed in one game until I grabbed those files for you, Strings.

Wow, this is a coincidence... I was hoping to develop a combat engine for Supremacy in XNA. Reason being that it would be really easy to interface with the rest of the game, as the game is also written in C#. The next release of XNA next month will allow you to host an XNA game inside a Windows Form (which I can host inside a WPF window in Supremacy), so it would be fairly seamless. You have any interest in helping out there? I'm sure we could find a way to make the combat engine compatible with both Supremacy and BotE.

Your little game looks very nice. I don't know if I can merge XNA and C# with C++ and MFC code. You can import clean C++ code in C# projects but no C# in C++ projects. But I hope we find a solution for this problem. The best way would be if the visuel part of the 3D-combat engine could be used in all of our games, Supremacy and BotE.

Hey Mike and SirP! I wasn't sure if WPF and XNA could run at the same time since they both make use of the GPU, but from what Mike said it seems the calls for compatibility have been heard by the XNA Team. This is very good news! Because XNA at the moment does not have the best GUI framework in place, if we can use WPF's stunning GUI capability and have them run seamlessly together then that's great for what we're trying to achieve!

SirP, I will try design the combat engine to be as general as possible, but it would still be using XNA and in C#, but what you said about being able to import C++ code in a C# project sounds promising, and I hope we can find a solution too, possibly involving an interface between C++ parts of the code and the C# parts.

We could theoretically use C++/CLI to build a native-to-managed bridge for integrating with BotE. It shouldn't be that difficult. As for WPF/XNA interop, we won't know for sure how seamless it will work until we can actually try it. But I figure since you'll be able to host an XNA component inside a WinForms form, and you can host a WinForms form inside a WPF control, then it should work *crosses fingers*. As for the GUI, as I understand it there is an airspace problem in that you cannot overlay WPF controls on top of a hosted XNA component. At least that's my conclusion based on what little documentation there is regarding WPF/DirectX interop. We can always experiment anyway...

Hmm okay, if the airspace problem prevents us from using a WPF GUI, we can still make a GUI in XNA, but I just love the idea of WPF controls on top of XNA

I am currently adding a basic HUD for the Defiant game, and then I'll try something harder like panels and buttons.

Before you put too much effort into an XNA-based UI, you ought to check CodePlex. There might be some open source projects already in the works .

BTW, if you have an MSDN subscription, you can download the Visual Studio 2008 RTM as of today . For everyone else, that means that the final release of .NET v3.5 will be available any day now for mass download, and you won't need the beta anymore for Supremacy.

EDIT: Um, scratch that, it's available now.