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all of us who love the game keep jabbering about what we'd like to see and how we'd like to see things work. personally, I'd love to hear what you think of what we have and where we're going. nothing technical, more a rough idea of what's important, what's working, what's not working and so on.
anyway, if and when you have time. :-)
anyway, if and when you have time. :-)
Like a State of the Union Address?
Yeah, speech! speech!
Well ya know if ya got time and all. :D
Well ya know if ya got time and all. :D
http://www.vendetta-online.com/h/news.html would be more appropriate than http://www.vendetta-online.com/h/work.html as the latter has been depreciated for a while.
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From what I've heard, the mission editor & new interface stuff are very nearly working, which I think means that more missions & player controlled Capital Ships (and possibly [somewhat] player controlled stations) should be coming soon. And of course the Hive stuff.
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From what I've heard, the mission editor & new interface stuff are very nearly working, which I think means that more missions & player controlled Capital Ships (and possibly [somewhat] player controlled stations) should be coming soon. And of course the Hive stuff.
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the news and work stuff is short term, relativly speaking. I'm thinking two years into the future. and more conceptual, not as much "SCPs are worse, we have a better economy based on number of asteroids and the number HIVE bots colliding in odd-numbered sectors" :-)
Landing on planets & walking around inside stations, duh!
Pfah, your all wrong, its alien invasions and the exploration addon! Yay!
Return to earth! You can so see it coming in the back story, and we all know we want to see wither or not the place is still around.
Lots of missions coming out of the upcoming mission editor is the most important thing right now.
Thats the main difference between this game and other mmorpgs. Missions with content and a roleplay background to support them.
Moriel
SKV
Thats the main difference between this game and other mmorpgs. Missions with content and a roleplay background to support them.
Moriel
SKV
I'm thinking Alamar means the "project roadmap" with milestone goals and all that.
Yeah, I'd like to see that as well. Use the DevWiki!
Yeah, I'd like to see that as well. Use the DevWiki!
two *years* in the future? Wow. Well. That's kind of a double-edged sword for me, because I do like talking about where I want the game to go, but so much can happen in two years that I dislike the idea of promising anything specific. But, I will say generally what directions I would like to go in:
I would like to create a lot more player involvement in the universe. Player factions, player-built stations, and the like.
I also really, really want to have actual plot advancement that takes place in game events, leading in significant directions and such. Naturally, I don't want to talk about plot specifics for the sake of not giving anything away. But, on the upside, we're now getting most of the tools for doing this sort of activity.. where it's been a little more problematic to do in the past. I mean, we could do like "john and some guides fly bot ships around one night" or something, but we couldn't very well like.. create a whole invasion of a new type of Hive or alien race or something, until we recently built the DELIVERATOR Lisp-driven infrastructure. Ie, we couldn't create real, persistent self-managing non-player entities until recently, or at least not without a tremendous about of hassle. So having a new pirate faction crop up, or a militaristic wing of a corporation break away, or anything like that was very difficult to actually.. implement, and is much much easier now. So I'm really looking forward to exploring the possibilities to the greatest extent.
The exploration addon is still out there, and something I want to do. But I'm prioritizing a bunch of general gameplay "make the universe better" stuff before that, as well as capital ships and such. We may have some interim small-scale exploration in the near term just to start to work out how the game mechanics should happen.
In the really long term (2 years), it's entirely possible that we could shoot for landing on planets. It's something I totally want to do. It's mostly a matter of having six months or so of free development time for at least Ray, or probably both Andy and Ray, to do it. I mean, it would be possible to do it sooner if we had like a zillion artists and just kinda hacked it together, but I don't want to do it that way. Basically, I want to create completely procedural planetscapes. A-la umm.. Terragen or Bryce or whatever. Procedural trees distributed on procedural plains and up to the tree line on procedural mountains covered with procedural snow. A wholly game-generated planetoid concept that could be infinitely and randomly recreated without the need for artwork of any kind. Doing this sort of thing isn't necessarily that.. technically challenging, per se, a great deal of research papers exist on exactly how to go about this sort of task (although, mostly for use in rendering, not realtime operations).. the big challenge is the tremendous amount of time that goes into tweaking algorithms until they actually *look* right. There's a whole lot of procedural software out there, and about 80% of it sucks, simply because it doesn't look very good, or realistic. Lots of procedural tree plugins for 3D modeling programs that don't make anything that looks very tree-like, so on and so forth. So, I really have no idea how long this would take to do, six months is guess. But, this is all relatively pie-in-the-sky right now, and I'm answering mostly for the sake of showing you something "really long range" that's in my head.
Basically, what it boils down to for right now, is we're implementing the game that we *meant* to ship. Almost all of the features and things that we're trying to get into place, and the gameplay mechanics we're trying to fix, are all things we meant to have in place at shipping (as we meant to have a publisher give us a bunch of money and let us hire more people). The "landing on planets" stuff is beyond the scope of our original design, but is still something I would like to do. We haven't yet cought up with where we *meant* to be, and once we do, then I'll feel more comfortable speculating more concretely on the Next Stage.
For the next six months my attention is entirely focused on making the universe more.. Universal and interesting, having our existing gameplay and new gameplay all work together in useful, functional ways. Mining becoming necessary for crafting and/or assembly of large/special ships and addons, but mining requiring competitive confrontation with the Hive, who also wants resources, which affect the economy, which impact this that and the other thing. Everything should be one big mesh of propogation. You kill a trader here, a resource is more in demand there, a mission is spawned over there to protect traders, another to acquire a resource, a ship cost increases because a resource is more in demand, so on and so forth. NPC factions that actually respond like a faction, or even like non-player *characters* and do interesting things.. react to piracy or faction changes or economics in ways that actually demonstrate the character of their particular factions. Players needing to work together in cooperative ways for both PvE, non-combat (mining/trading/crafting) and PVP to achieve higher-level goals. An actual *interactive* and responsive universe.. the one we have right now is nothing close to what I wanted. Some of this means New Gameplay, and some of it means redoing existing gameplay to be a lot better. I think that, bar none, this is the thing that most needs addressing in our game. We have a lot of disparate elements that do not converge in any useful way and impact one another, it's all very haphazard and dumb, and I want to fix it up the way it was meant to be.
In other news, related to this subject, I will be using the design wiki more often again. I meant to post to it last night, but I'll be posting to it tonight instead. Just some short term things, but that's where the design for a lot of this is going to crop up. Why haven't I *been* using it? Well, mostly because we've been working on long-term (ie, 4-5 month) projects, like the DELIVERATOR, that either had existing design documentation (the hive) or didn't really need any (ray redoing the UI underpinnings), and I've been rather busy elsewhere. The whole intention of the Design Wiki was to show you guys what we were doing and what was going on, and that hasn't really come to pass yet.. but, I think it'll start to demonstrate some of it's potential over the next week or two. So.. until then :).
http://design.vendetta-online.com/wiki
I would like to create a lot more player involvement in the universe. Player factions, player-built stations, and the like.
I also really, really want to have actual plot advancement that takes place in game events, leading in significant directions and such. Naturally, I don't want to talk about plot specifics for the sake of not giving anything away. But, on the upside, we're now getting most of the tools for doing this sort of activity.. where it's been a little more problematic to do in the past. I mean, we could do like "john and some guides fly bot ships around one night" or something, but we couldn't very well like.. create a whole invasion of a new type of Hive or alien race or something, until we recently built the DELIVERATOR Lisp-driven infrastructure. Ie, we couldn't create real, persistent self-managing non-player entities until recently, or at least not without a tremendous about of hassle. So having a new pirate faction crop up, or a militaristic wing of a corporation break away, or anything like that was very difficult to actually.. implement, and is much much easier now. So I'm really looking forward to exploring the possibilities to the greatest extent.
The exploration addon is still out there, and something I want to do. But I'm prioritizing a bunch of general gameplay "make the universe better" stuff before that, as well as capital ships and such. We may have some interim small-scale exploration in the near term just to start to work out how the game mechanics should happen.
In the really long term (2 years), it's entirely possible that we could shoot for landing on planets. It's something I totally want to do. It's mostly a matter of having six months or so of free development time for at least Ray, or probably both Andy and Ray, to do it. I mean, it would be possible to do it sooner if we had like a zillion artists and just kinda hacked it together, but I don't want to do it that way. Basically, I want to create completely procedural planetscapes. A-la umm.. Terragen or Bryce or whatever. Procedural trees distributed on procedural plains and up to the tree line on procedural mountains covered with procedural snow. A wholly game-generated planetoid concept that could be infinitely and randomly recreated without the need for artwork of any kind. Doing this sort of thing isn't necessarily that.. technically challenging, per se, a great deal of research papers exist on exactly how to go about this sort of task (although, mostly for use in rendering, not realtime operations).. the big challenge is the tremendous amount of time that goes into tweaking algorithms until they actually *look* right. There's a whole lot of procedural software out there, and about 80% of it sucks, simply because it doesn't look very good, or realistic. Lots of procedural tree plugins for 3D modeling programs that don't make anything that looks very tree-like, so on and so forth. So, I really have no idea how long this would take to do, six months is guess. But, this is all relatively pie-in-the-sky right now, and I'm answering mostly for the sake of showing you something "really long range" that's in my head.
Basically, what it boils down to for right now, is we're implementing the game that we *meant* to ship. Almost all of the features and things that we're trying to get into place, and the gameplay mechanics we're trying to fix, are all things we meant to have in place at shipping (as we meant to have a publisher give us a bunch of money and let us hire more people). The "landing on planets" stuff is beyond the scope of our original design, but is still something I would like to do. We haven't yet cought up with where we *meant* to be, and once we do, then I'll feel more comfortable speculating more concretely on the Next Stage.
For the next six months my attention is entirely focused on making the universe more.. Universal and interesting, having our existing gameplay and new gameplay all work together in useful, functional ways. Mining becoming necessary for crafting and/or assembly of large/special ships and addons, but mining requiring competitive confrontation with the Hive, who also wants resources, which affect the economy, which impact this that and the other thing. Everything should be one big mesh of propogation. You kill a trader here, a resource is more in demand there, a mission is spawned over there to protect traders, another to acquire a resource, a ship cost increases because a resource is more in demand, so on and so forth. NPC factions that actually respond like a faction, or even like non-player *characters* and do interesting things.. react to piracy or faction changes or economics in ways that actually demonstrate the character of their particular factions. Players needing to work together in cooperative ways for both PvE, non-combat (mining/trading/crafting) and PVP to achieve higher-level goals. An actual *interactive* and responsive universe.. the one we have right now is nothing close to what I wanted. Some of this means New Gameplay, and some of it means redoing existing gameplay to be a lot better. I think that, bar none, this is the thing that most needs addressing in our game. We have a lot of disparate elements that do not converge in any useful way and impact one another, it's all very haphazard and dumb, and I want to fix it up the way it was meant to be.
In other news, related to this subject, I will be using the design wiki more often again. I meant to post to it last night, but I'll be posting to it tonight instead. Just some short term things, but that's where the design for a lot of this is going to crop up. Why haven't I *been* using it? Well, mostly because we've been working on long-term (ie, 4-5 month) projects, like the DELIVERATOR, that either had existing design documentation (the hive) or didn't really need any (ray redoing the UI underpinnings), and I've been rather busy elsewhere. The whole intention of the Design Wiki was to show you guys what we were doing and what was going on, and that hasn't really come to pass yet.. but, I think it'll start to demonstrate some of it's potential over the next week or two. So.. until then :).
http://design.vendetta-online.com/wiki
so in other words, you are going to make the game even more addictive and gonna steal even more hours of our life, Damn you!!!!!! :D
hehe, nice, keep it up, love the long term goals you've stated here.
hehe, nice, keep it up, love the long term goals you've stated here.
Long term sounds good, but I'm more excited to see the short term stuff finished asap!!
thanks John, and I wasn't looking for promises. I am more interested in what you wish to create. it's interesting to see what does something like "player involvement" means in your mind, and how you see the factions interoperate and such things.
we mostly see game mechanics, since that's what we deal with in the game day to day. these mechanics are in themselves interesting to tweak into a balance of sorts, but they're a framework for ideas, not the ideas themselves. I wanted a peek at those ideas, and that's mostly what I got. the reason I said "two years" is simple, I'm aware that Vendetta will be different in two years. the question is more where you'd take us if it was all up to you. =)
there are a few things I find really neato in your post though. one is that you obviously wish to let the universe be run by dynamic code more than divine intervention -- at least on a day to day basis. this is *really* ballsy, and I like it. lots.
secondly, using procedural techniques to generate stuff. I say stuff, because if you do it for planets, it'll probably be used for new systems and sectors too, I've actually written code to generate layered universes, and I know how much tweaking you'll need. but, the great upside here is that *when* you pull this off, expansion is magical. the next step just happens, and you can sit back and enjoy the ride as much as the players. *really* ballsy again, but it gives true meaning to exploring. :-)
adding some glue to all the neat bits we have, and internal dependancies on all levels is definatly a good thing. I also agree that it's the best goal short term, simply because it will be the day-to-day foundation for a lot of the rest of the game.
oh, and it's not important that it looks like a tree, just something that looks like a tree-analogy. which, oddly enough, can be harder to make since new and weird stuff tends to make people scream about it looking "unread" even if it's rendered well.
anyway, thank you. highly appreciated. :-)
we mostly see game mechanics, since that's what we deal with in the game day to day. these mechanics are in themselves interesting to tweak into a balance of sorts, but they're a framework for ideas, not the ideas themselves. I wanted a peek at those ideas, and that's mostly what I got. the reason I said "two years" is simple, I'm aware that Vendetta will be different in two years. the question is more where you'd take us if it was all up to you. =)
there are a few things I find really neato in your post though. one is that you obviously wish to let the universe be run by dynamic code more than divine intervention -- at least on a day to day basis. this is *really* ballsy, and I like it. lots.
secondly, using procedural techniques to generate stuff. I say stuff, because if you do it for planets, it'll probably be used for new systems and sectors too, I've actually written code to generate layered universes, and I know how much tweaking you'll need. but, the great upside here is that *when* you pull this off, expansion is magical. the next step just happens, and you can sit back and enjoy the ride as much as the players. *really* ballsy again, but it gives true meaning to exploring. :-)
adding some glue to all the neat bits we have, and internal dependancies on all levels is definatly a good thing. I also agree that it's the best goal short term, simply because it will be the day-to-day foundation for a lot of the rest of the game.
oh, and it's not important that it looks like a tree, just something that looks like a tree-analogy. which, oddly enough, can be harder to make since new and weird stuff tends to make people scream about it looking "unread" even if it's rendered well.
anyway, thank you. highly appreciated. :-)
The existing 7000-odd sectors (aside from the original 18, which I hand made and are scattered around the "new" universe) are actually all procedural. Distribution of the objects is procedural, at least. Unfortunately, that's why they're all kind of boring and the same right now, more tweaking was needed.. but we also needed to hurry up and release. Re-tweaking a lot of the existing universe is something else that's on my plate for the next half a year. Probably hand-tweaking some of the "big" sectors as well (like nation or faction homes, locations of historical note, etc).
Glad my answer provided some illumination, and I look forward to further describing what exactly we're going to do via the Wiki.
Glad my answer provided some illumination, and I look forward to further describing what exactly we're going to do via the Wiki.
DELIVERATOR: Lisp code that wears black, wields a katana and delivers pizza with extreme prejudice. I like :)
Sounds like a great plan. I look forward to seeing where VO will take us all.
Sounds like a great plan. I look forward to seeing where VO will take us all.
Feel the power of superfluous parens!
(eh, Common Lisp
(which is what everyone uses (?))
doesn't have superfluous parens
(which anyway should be formatted
(according to standard Lisp rules
(reading the hyperspec helps))))
(which is what everyone uses (?))
doesn't have superfluous parens
(which anyway should be formatted
(according to standard Lisp rules
(reading the hyperspec helps))))
This one post has reafirmed my faith in you guys!
I never left, cos I cannot P
My name is yodaofborg, I have been a vendetta addict longer than the current loonyverse.
I never left, cos I cannot P
My name is yodaofborg, I have been a vendetta addict longer than the current loonyverse.