4876
Creative Projects / Re: Sci fi ascii game brainstorming.
« on: February 26, 2009, 08:07:25 pm »
Well, you're in space. Pretty much all of it's completely empty. There's not realy a reason to stick to a grid, now is there?
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4877
Creative Projects / Re: Realistic Space Travel
« on: February 26, 2009, 08:03:10 pm »
The easiest solution to the fuell problem is, of course, to not bring any fuell with you. There are 2 known ways to accelerate a space-craft without the use of an internall fuell source, and those are:
Solar sails and their derivatives (magnetic sails, fission sails). They use radiation pressure from a star to act as an propellant, giving them a low but constant thrust. Not needing to bring any fuell or generators for propulsion makes them significantly more efficient then chemical or nuclear propulsion.
The second option would be the use of a Ramscoop, which is essentialy a fusion generator that plucks it's fuel directly from space by using a huge electromagnetic or electrostatic field. In theory this ought to provide unlimited thrust, but it depends on the drag generated by the solar wind and the ion denisty of the area the ship travles through. It's worth looking into though.
A last option, which does use fuell but provides impressive acceleration is given by Project Orion, which uses the explosion of nuclear bombs to push a ship forward. A thermonuclear Orion can, in theory, reach speeds of 0.1c, which would make traveling to some of the closer stars possible within 3 or 4 generations. The reason it's more efficient then a nuclear rocket is that in this desing the area that comes into contact with the exhaust fumes much further away, meaning it won't evaporate even at much higher temperatures, which in turn enables a much higher speed due to faster exhaust fumes.
Solar sails and their derivatives (magnetic sails, fission sails). They use radiation pressure from a star to act as an propellant, giving them a low but constant thrust. Not needing to bring any fuell or generators for propulsion makes them significantly more efficient then chemical or nuclear propulsion.
The second option would be the use of a Ramscoop, which is essentialy a fusion generator that plucks it's fuel directly from space by using a huge electromagnetic or electrostatic field. In theory this ought to provide unlimited thrust, but it depends on the drag generated by the solar wind and the ion denisty of the area the ship travles through. It's worth looking into though.
A last option, which does use fuell but provides impressive acceleration is given by Project Orion, which uses the explosion of nuclear bombs to push a ship forward. A thermonuclear Orion can, in theory, reach speeds of 0.1c, which would make traveling to some of the closer stars possible within 3 or 4 generations. The reason it's more efficient then a nuclear rocket is that in this desing the area that comes into contact with the exhaust fumes much further away, meaning it won't evaporate even at much higher temperatures, which in turn enables a much higher speed due to faster exhaust fumes.
4878
Roll To Dodge / Re: RTD: Unfettered Fate (One slot remaining)
« on: February 26, 2009, 05:59:55 pm »
To me, your writing seems fine to me, very fitting to the situation. I might have even left out the explanation to keep people even more confused. Might have created some hilarious reactions. Only thing that'll be difficult is determining exactly how much information you should give away to keep things interesting
Since you didn't post any requirements on races or something, I'm going free-form on this one
Calm down! Calm down, no need to freak out because some divine force pulled you through the aether to here.
Here? What is "here" in the first place?
Let's see if I can get something to help me
I try to open a small portal to my home. While it might not be large or stable enough for me to escape, it'll enable me to take some tomes and equipment here. If the portal remains stable long enough I try to take a tome of Applied Pyrosynthesis, a tome of Luminometric Interferometry, a wide-spectrum chromoscope and a directional sonograph, in that order.
And here's to hoping things here work as I'm used to.
With that out of the way, allow me to introduce myself.
I am Pardath Victor Ambron Virex, but most choose to leave the titles. My race should not be of importance, but since you seem to be interested, some call my brethren Nightwings, due to our obsidian-like scales and leathery wings, which in my case are indeed limp, thanks for pointing that out, as well as our tendency to hunt by night. As far as I am concerned we are not related to dragonkin, but who's to tell with all these magical experiments running around?
Since you didn't post any requirements on races or something, I'm going free-form on this one
Calm down! Calm down, no need to freak out because some divine force pulled you through the aether to here.
Here? What is "here" in the first place?
Let's see if I can get something to help me
I try to open a small portal to my home. While it might not be large or stable enough for me to escape, it'll enable me to take some tomes and equipment here. If the portal remains stable long enough I try to take a tome of Applied Pyrosynthesis, a tome of Luminometric Interferometry, a wide-spectrum chromoscope and a directional sonograph, in that order.
And here's to hoping things here work as I'm used to.
With that out of the way, allow me to introduce myself.
I am Pardath Victor Ambron Virex, but most choose to leave the titles. My race should not be of importance, but since you seem to be interested, some call my brethren Nightwings, due to our obsidian-like scales and leathery wings, which in my case are indeed limp, thanks for pointing that out, as well as our tendency to hunt by night. As far as I am concerned we are not related to dragonkin, but who's to tell with all these magical experiments running around?
4879
Roll To Dodge / Re: RTD: Unfettered Fate (Four slots remaining)
« on: February 26, 2009, 05:26:36 pm »Anyway, would you mind putting up a basic background already? Or do you want to wait untill there are enough players?Basic background... Well.. Should I put it up in the OP, or a new post entirely?
I'd put it in the OP, since that's what people read first
4880
Roll To Dodge / Re: RTD: Unfettered Fate (Four slots remaining)
« on: February 26, 2009, 05:14:24 pm »Is that a chance with a 3 or one with a 6?Hopefully, this'll be my first RTD, though there might be a problem with people from different time zones...If it becomes a major problem, we'll just have people set up multiple actions, and they can ask me to adjust where appropriate, or something like that. Chances are, it will work out.
Anyway, would you mind putting up a basic background already? Or do you want to wait untill there are enough players?
4881
Roll To Dodge / Re: RTD: Unfettered Fate (Four slots remaining)
« on: February 26, 2009, 04:49:18 pm »
Hopefully, this'll be my first RTD, though there might be a problem with people from different time zones...
4882
Other Games / Re: Capital Ship Sim
« on: February 16, 2009, 02:01:15 pm »Physics is HARD to handle right, and not because the simulation is difficult. It's hard to make it fun. Go play "Terminus" if you want a realistic physics space game. It's pretty comical sometimes, like when you fill up your freighter with gold and head back to base and your ship doesn't move because you are so massive that youre thrust barely accelerates you, and then once you're moving the collision light comes on before you can even see the starbase, and you only avoid a crash by frantically, slowly dodging off to the side. But you quickly discover that fast maneuverable ships have INSANE advantages, and also that space combat is pretty boring that way. Early BC3k versions had messed up combat where fighters would go by so fast you couldn't even see them. But it's realistic! Heck, even Terminus put horribly arbitrary caps on velocity, because otherwise the game would suck. Space games love to use "constant thrust = constant velocity" aka Star Wars physics, because it's more fun. What will you choose? Hmm.
Why are you trying to use your thrusters to accelerate and slow down anyway? Try using a planet to generate a slingshot effect
Also, a cap ship fight has little to do with dogfighting in space, and any game that tries to simulate that will indeed fail horribly. It's not just the physics, but they usualy completely misinterpret the range of weapons. A simple military grade can easely have a range in the order of the distance between earth and the moon (funny fact: that's actualy how they measured the exact distance between the earth and the moon), probably way, way further, and missiles in spcae also reach much further since they don't have to deal with friction. Hell, a ram scoop engine has a diameter of several kilometers and so do many solar sails. When you're talking about space, distances you're familiar with just don't hold any meaning any more. Take a look at star treck: Many of the distances are measured in thousends of kilometers, but that's nothing. Many fights appear to be on a scale in which the ships can see eachother. But even modern fighter-jets can't see eachother by the time they launch their first missiles...
Sure you wouldn't realy be able to dogfight, but instead you'd be using a more tactical aproach to combat, in wich you're fiddling with shields and weapons, and targeting vital systems and such. Trying to blow missiles out of space is also possible...
4883
Other Games / Re: Capital Ship Sim
« on: February 14, 2009, 05:09:40 pm »Exactly how much effort would be required to create a game of that sort using conventional means? I mean stuff like DarkBasic or Blitz3D...
Something like Battleships Forever with the RPG system of Space Rangers and crew/customization extras like in Flatspace. I know that making a commercial-grade product is really hard, but something more basic?
Let's see:
Physics is simple. As long as you don't intend to go near the speed of light, newtonian mechanics suffice and those are friggin easy to program. Only other thing you'd need is collision checking, which would be somewhat tricky, but not undoable if you know how to do it.
Getting all the ships to actualy work, including realistic subsystem usage would be slightly harder. Basicly what you'd have to do is make each part of a ship a seperate object with it's own characteristics, and then pass things like sensor data, life support, fuell and inertia to the rest of the systems, possibly through a general "ship" object. Then it'd be possible to have multiple people runnign the ship.
Having the ship function as an object to run around it isn't that hard. You'd need to treat the location of the players and NPC's as relative to the ship, so they move naturaly with the ship. Artificial gravity is also possible by relating it to the ship.
Next thing would be weapons, which is just collision checking and passing data to objects to represent the effects. The effects themselve would be easy or dificult, depending on how sophisticated you'd want them to be.
That leaves us with things like planet desing (fractals?), ship and station desing (L-systems?), interaction between ships and stations, background lore and all kinds of smaller things. Animations and sound. All in all, this is going to cost the most time, since you'd either need to hand-craft each ship and station, or find an algorythm that can create them without generating illogical effects or plainly breaking things.
Last thing would be NPC's. Writing a good AI isn't simple by any stretch of the imagination.
4884
Other Games / Re: Elemental: War of Magic - Stardock's upcoming fantasy TBS
« on: February 09, 2009, 07:10:40 am »Do you think a Quad-Core with 4 gigs of RAM would be able to run this game?
Knowing stardock you could probably run 6 instances of the game on your pc
4885
Other Games / Re: Calling All Gamemasters! D20 Modern.
« on: February 08, 2009, 04:20:22 pm »
Another option would be to say that anything involving magic generates powerfull electromagnetic radiation. While it's harmless to humans in all logicaly possible concentrations, it will slightly heat people up, and more importantly it will create an induction current in metal rods and wiring, and it'll also apply a strong Lorenze force to anything using electricity. The most notable results of this are spectacular failings of electrical systems, and a strange, tingling feeling felt by anyone holding a metal object in proximity of a mage. A simple Faraday cage would shield the electrical systems though.
4886
Other Games / Re: The Roguelike Development Megathread
« on: January 29, 2009, 12:22:42 pm »Oh... And If someone knows a nice clean algorithm to make animations based on time (like zapping a wand in ADOM) I would appreciate it.
Assuming you're using some sort of sprite-based animation, you could load all pictures into an array, set a variable to 0, load the first picture using the variable and increment the variable by one. Rinse and repeat, by putting the code that increases the aforementioned variable in the loop that gouverns the game.
4887
Other Games / Re: The Roguelike Development Megathread
« on: January 28, 2009, 03:42:11 pm »Hmm, good idea. I still like my 3d array because my map is 3d (because I'm crazy--not recommended), but replacing the vectors with vector*s with null for empty is a decent idea.
I would *not* go so far as to make creatures a linked list. I mean, I could imagine someone saying "each tile has a pointer to a creature or null, and each creature has a pointer to the next creature on the tile", but that way lies madness. If you were coding twenty years ago that would be worthwhile, but not today.
Er... it would make more sense for each *creature* to have a pointer to the tile it's sitting on. And what would be the alternative to a linked list of creatures? A fixed array, so you can only have a maximum of X ever? Or are you going to realloc() your creature array whenever you need to add a new one and just hope that you have enough contiguous memory free?
You could just use a vector. Those things do rescale pretty well.
4888
DF Suggestions / Re: New Power Source?
« on: January 28, 2009, 02:32:11 pm »
Let's see, what do we need for AC electiricty as a powersource:
Powerfull permanent or electrical magnets.
Understanding of the Lorenz force and Maxwel's laws.
Copper or silver wiring, preferably very pure, since oxides and ceramic compounds influence conductivity in a bad way.
A gearbox-like instalation to keep the rate of revolution constant.
Ceramics or polymers to use as insulators.
And for DC batteries:
Understanding of the concept of electrochemistry.
A stable sulfuric acid industry.
Industrial scale lead mining and processing (unless you want lithium batteries, in which case you'll need Lithium and the understanding of cristalography on a nano scale)
Again, wiring.
Polymers, ceramics or corosion resistant metals. Ceramics do have the tendency to break when a force is applied though.
High grade magnets for the enignes, and a concept of electric current to get a DC engine to run in the first place.
Somehow it seems completely within reach of dwarven craftsmanship....
Powerfull permanent or electrical magnets.
Understanding of the Lorenz force and Maxwel's laws.
Copper or silver wiring, preferably very pure, since oxides and ceramic compounds influence conductivity in a bad way.
A gearbox-like instalation to keep the rate of revolution constant.
Ceramics or polymers to use as insulators.
And for DC batteries:
Understanding of the concept of electrochemistry.
A stable sulfuric acid industry.
Industrial scale lead mining and processing (unless you want lithium batteries, in which case you'll need Lithium and the understanding of cristalography on a nano scale)
Again, wiring.
Polymers, ceramics or corosion resistant metals. Ceramics do have the tendency to break when a force is applied though.
High grade magnets for the enignes, and a concept of electric current to get a DC engine to run in the first place.
Somehow it seems completely within reach of dwarven craftsmanship....
4889
DF Suggestions / Re: Painting and Painters
« on: January 28, 2009, 02:21:31 pm »
Couldn't you paint over an engraving, essentialy making it a relief mural? Add in a few gems from a gem setter and that +engraving+ is suddenly worth more then your entire fortress 
4890
Other Games / Re: The Roguelike Development Megathread
« on: January 28, 2009, 01:05:33 pm »Er... it would make more sense for each *creature* to have a pointer to the tile it's sitting on.I have each critter store its coordinates on itself, but that's equally good.
I might be mistaken, but doesn't that complicate things like checking which tiles are walkable et cetera?