Squid Empire

Resource concepts mostly done. If anyone has any suggestion on how to lay it out I'd be very grateful - it's pretty hard to look at at the moment... Sketchup image concepts are in the works too

Here are some responses to the initial post: You're correct to say that the players shouldn't be concerned with the engine, it should be an entirely technical topic for the developers only. The fact that players are talking about it shows that there's a problem. It's an indirect path, but the players are responding to shortcomings in the project as a whole by fixating on the engine. Development of the W3D games is about as slow as it can be (I know it's just a hobby), and the graphics are not a major concern of the teams. The reason some people are recommending updating the engine is that they believe that doing so would help the fix these problems. By changing to a newer engine, the teams would be able to move faster: because of the support, communities, resources, and technology these engines offer - as compared to the entirety of W3D knowledge existing in this small community. It's not a direct criticism of the W3D engine at all, but a statement that "Hey, you've been slogging away on this ancient engine to make these games, and in 10+ years we have something 'passable'. Maybe if you switch to some modern tools, you'll be able to create better games, faster?" Using a AAA game as an example isn't really relevant, as they're working with gigantic teams and heavily modify their engines themselves in a very short time. And for them it's true that the engine they use, so long as it supports their game and looks on par, is of little consequence to the player. Again, it's true that our teams have been editing the W3D engine to suit our needs, the pacing of that is what creates the issue. It might be that W3D hub simply doesn't have the staff to do what we want using this engine. In my opinion, switching to a modern engine would allow faster, more rewarding work (especially as it would give the team members marketable experience with modern tools), thereby giving the players a better game sooner. However the downside would be the loss of years of W3D work and the likely death of the engine completely. It boils down to the question of whether this team exists to create TSR, AR, and the other titles, or whether this group exists to preserve and update the W3D engine.

[sketchfab]8a4d54f6946a45018f3494a4e40e7430[/sketchfab] Bipedal Extraction Rig by Squid Empire on Sketchfab This one here! I'd like to keep vehicles simple for now, but if I get the conditions to add this you bet I will I can't really comment on the engine, but I'll take any suggestions. If I had to make a prediction I might hazard Unity 5. There is a scale of building pre-fabrication I suppose from Minecraft style lego blocks to Age of Empires style pre-built buildings. Ideally, I would lean towards the method used in Rust, but perhaps with even simpler options. A player could place a 4mx4m room using the material they like, and then add things like doors, windows, ladders etc onto the walls. Room could be placed next to each other to make larger rooms. To make a room functional, you would add some certain objects. For example, to make a home you might add a bed and a cupboard to a room of at least 8mx8m floorspace (2 'units). A crushing plant for a mine might need 16mx16m, a diesel generator, a control module, an industrial device, and a storage module. These devices would be crafted by the player and placed down in first person or via 'mayor mode'. However to keep things simple, the method of simply placing pre-built structures could work. Perhaps if you went this route you could have player made content included - with a steam workshop sort of thing for buildings (as Dave suggested previously).

*Concept title and image are subject to change Introduction General overview Disclaimer Please read Concepts Collection of all concept images and content Additional Information Information not contained above

The award for the most anti-climactic boss goes to... 1. Nihilus from Knight of the Old Republic 2 Followed by: 2. General Augustus Autumn from Fallout 3 3. SHODAN from System Shock 2

Thanks Dave. I guess I'll do a Bfranx and post random concept images until I learn some 3D. Hopefully that'll at least annoy Synaesthesia

Oh yeah! I've heard about a lot of these and try my hand at many of them, and you were right to say it's a huge mix and requires a lot of learning. Even more programming to make it I'd imagine. I haven't played Valkyria Chronicles but I did see it when it came out. It seems that on the scale of FPS ---- RTS most hybrids are in the FPS zone. One I played was Iron Grip: Lords of War (which had a cool steampunk aesthetic), that game was a FPS tower defence. I think that sort of mix would be fairly common, as evidenced by the games you listed Dave. I remember Natural selection too, which again I was thinking of buying... It's a bit dubious to say that the games didn't get the reignition they deserve, while they may have had bad luck conspire against them; if there was a true niche they needed to fill they would still be going I think. It might be that there's just no market for this sort of game, and that we three here are the only ones who would play it! The city-building FP game I was thinking of above would be my ideal game and I would absolutely love it even if it was full of bugs and had placeholder graphics, but I can't speak for the population of video gamers as a total. This is sorta the reason for this thread. With enough willpower and willing people, we could make this game. The question is; is it worth looking into? Is there any need for it, or would it just be a waste of everyone's time.

Sounds great for the tutorial. Personally I love the manly european narrators from the Anno games (not 2070 lol) and would have one of them narrating the tutorial haha That's what I was thinking of for the citizens too. It's the same style used in a lot city-builders (like the Settlers, Tropico, Banished etc.). How in depth would you have to go though? Would it be like Tropico, where some citizens are better at some jobs, and you have to micromanage them to shift them around, or simpler where the citizens are all equal (like in Age of Empires) and they can all work well anywhere? Say you're playing in first person, I'd think the most you could do would be to select one tree or rock for 'harvesting', whereas if you're in 'mayor' mode you can click and drag for an area of 'work here' - like in Banished. But when you're in first person, you can get some citizens to follow you (like you said) and go on adventures, they could have weapons and act as your army, and help you construct camps along the way. One problem I just thought of fits into this. How much can the player 'see' in RTS mode? In most RTS/city-building games the player can see the whole map at a time. But in this game if you could do that it might take away the fun of exploring in first person mode. On the other hand, if you limit their mayor-mode view to just their town, how can they tell their people to mine the forests just outside of it? Resources are cool. I would be tempted to go the Anno route and have heaps of resources, that can be combined and worked in chains. As for how they're collected... Ideally you would have a Minecraft system I think. But pragmatically, it might be hard to implement an underground with resources strew about in a modern 3D engine without 'blocks'. My suggestion would be to have areas of fertility, like in Tropico. Certain areas are richer in some resources. Maybe you'd need to conduct a survey to find out an areas fertility, or maybe it's automatically discovered for you. You could then build an iron mine in an iron rich area, and as long as people work there it provides iron. Or you could build a sugarcane farm in an area suited to that crop. This would mean you'd try to build your town in an area with the resources you want or need. Trees I think would be handled differently, with lumberjacks actually cutting them down, and replanting them. As for resource transportation, this game is begging to have lots of AI's moving around so I would say go for the people carrying stuff all the way. I suppose having a stockpile where people take everything would be great, but they have to actually take it there! It would be awesome to build a road from your distant silver mine to your base and then see trucks loaded with silver lumbering along to deliver it to you. You could have 'shop' buildings in your town that distribute your food etc from your stockpiles to your people. Yeah I'd imagine that a Age of Empire RPG would quickly become a comedy game, what with 10 war elephants on a small boat, or villagers being paid a lump sum of 100 food for indefinite indebted servitude to the mysterious overload that controls everyone's actions

Great ideas Dave! Graphics are interesting yes. Personally I love me some good graphics, but I can totally see why you'd want to limit them. Perhaps if you used a fancy rendering system that turned objects you can't directly see into wireframes or something that might same some memory... You probably couldn't go the Minecraft way of only rendering what's in your 'sector' because then any AI's you had that went out to chop wood would simply cease once they left your render range. As for settings - nice. When I originally though of this I pictured a colonial theme (for obvious reasons) but then I went Sci-Fi. Finally I ended up with a dieselpunk/colonial hybrid but as you pointed out, it's good to have some strong enemies that make sense in your world - and my concept did lack that. As for how a town started, that's another good idea. It sounds like the start settings in Banished. I had though of having a start like Minecraft, as a lone newcomer to a New World, with just your backpack and some tools (maybe you could pick from some character classes for some RPG elements). I'd have some roads and towns already existing (for combat or trade) and if you build near a road (or build a road near your place) then NPCs in cars or on foot would occasionally travel past you. You could then hire them or they might trade with you - like in the iPad game Towncraft. Building the buildings is a challenge. I think you're suggesting a system like in Spore - I hadn't thought of that and it solves some problems. The biggest problem I think with building is that there should be a balance between the hight scale town planning and the low scale architecture. If you have to design each home by scratch yourself that'll quickly get tedious and frustrating, but if you don't get any control over your town's architecture it won't feel custom enough. I had thought about a complex SimCity style system where citizens build their own homes on plots of land you designate, using whatever materials you supply. That would require powerful generation tools. Another idea I had would be to have a bunch of components related to the building type and level. A citizen's house would be their own property and they'd decorate them themselves, but factories and shops are built by the player by using pre-built room templates and then placing specific components into them. You could build a lumber mill by first building a brick building, and then placing a 'saw' and a 'engine' into it. Maybe later on you'll upgrade it by placing another saw, a generator, a burner and a storage room. This one of the coolest parts of the game but also one that would need the most work For the RTS style building, I would have a component be a 'mayor's desk' or something like that that you can place in your home or town hall. Using that puts you into RTS view. I can see why a tutorial would be important haha Would a story based tutorial or an abstract narrated one be better? Another important area of the game would obviously be the AI citizens. Should they behave autonomously, carrying out their own lives and businesses, or should they work under your dictatorial thumb? I supposed you could have 'private' citizens that runs banks and insurance companies and provide your settlement with money that they generate as long as they're happy and working. Then you'd also have 'workers' who respond to your commands in a indirect way, you could say 'cut these trees' and the nearest free workers would get on it. I'd say the most important 'victory condition' would be your people's happiness. Providing your citizens with a nice city with plentiful bear and food would cause them to be happier thus increasing your score. That would be interesting! You could start out as a villager and level up to eventually become a paladin. Image if you came across a enemy monk who tried to convert you haha

Obviously the Renegade games are built around playing the RTS command and conquer games as the units in a first person perspective. I've been putting some thought into how an RTS (leaning towards city building) could be built in first person. My concept would play like a mix between Minecraft or Rust and Anno or Age of Empires. I liked Minecraft but was frustrated by the emptiness of it, the hollowness of your creations, and Anno games are great, but it would fantastic to play as the mayor, wander your own streets, and have greater control over the micro architecture of your base - not to mention lead your armies into battle! The goal would be to mix the 'macro' elements of the RTS game (the abundance of 'citizen' AI's, large scale cities that manage themselves) with the 'micro' elements of a sandbox building game (resource gathering, crafting, architecture, exploration, fighting). Has anyone got any thoughts on this? Is there a market for it? How would you do it? What theme/setting would be best? Maybe there's a different way to convert an RTS game into a first-person game?

Here's a crappy quick one.

Not really pixelart but here's some music I've been writing

I can't believe I forgot about that :/ I've gone back and finished what I had done before I suddenly forgot it even existed: (edit: sorry for typo >.<)

Here's a random dump of sketches from my textbooks this year so far. It's a huge image so you might need to open it in a new tab + zoom in bonus points to whoever can spot the soviet conscript

Glad you like it

Here it is! I couldn't help but see it as something from Top Gun or another late 80s movie so I kind of went with it. Hope you don't mind And a less silly version

While the models are definitely higher quality than vanilla, balance overall in vanilla renegade is much better. Most maps in renegade are 50/50 odds for each team winning (other than field). Reborn on the other hand is definitely lobsided in the balance department. Also it needs a serious rework of the repairgun and c4 mechanics as well as more variety in characters. Think of the changes made between Tiberian Dawn and Renegade. Vehicles are also rather useless unless you have a huge rush. There's no convenient way to repair a tank on the battlefield. The mobile repair tank is clunky and requires another person and GDI has to return to base and pay money to repair a tank. Also the lack of the ability to repair nod characters in the field is also a sore point. (other than cyborgs in tib). What i think would be cool if someone could renegadize tiberian sun, the same way tiberian dawn was tweaked. That would be interesting, but the teams here have always leaned more towards making the new games more like the original RTS's. Many of the devs dislike the renegade approach and prefer to keep their games more faithful to the sources - instead of interpreting them in their own way. A more renegade-ish TS would be interesting though, applying a lighter, gamer-y art style would definitely result in some interesting changes elsewhere.

Sure thing!

Here's a neat little voxelart tank. A voxel is just a 3D pixel. I used a program for editing RA2 units so it uses the RA2 rendering and pallet. The first two images are .gif's but you have to click on them for them to animate

Here's a black hole As scientifically accurate as I could manage! What with the gravitationally lensed accretion disk and the relativistic jets

I've been talking to a variety of people on whether online multiplayer, team-based FPS games can have atmosphere/immersion. My standpoint is 'optimistically yes' but I have to admit the opposition has a good argument. A lot of the people I talked to play 'Counter Strike - Global Offensive' so that's where they're coming from. I don't really play any online games so that's where I'm coming from... My friends say that it can't work because atmosphere relies on immersion, and playing a multiplayer game means you'l be playing the same map over and over, dying and respawning all over the place. No matter how beautiful your world is, players will cease to see it after a couple of dozen rounds. Trying to build atmosphere (though quiet environments, slow pace etc.) is also doomed to failure because you'll have a team of chums on the voice chat loudly enjoying themselves, oblivious to the subtle wind effects. Inevitably, your game will become simply a chessboard to your players, where the actual game-world is almost entirely irrelevant. What does everyone here think? Is it possible to have a multiplayer fps game with immersion/atmosphere? How would you do it?

I like the direction you've gone. There's different styles of course, and I suppose Synaesthesia's pictures are obviously more realistic.

My favourite sound I've heard in a while is that little tone when you open up one of those Seegson conduit/switchboard thingys

Thanks To answer your question; that's totally subjective (I'm amateur at best) but anything I can do is because of practise

Thanks I could draw a deer (maybe - I've never been good at animals) but it would probably be a reindeer Here's a portrait of a medieval robber baron;