Major sci-fi racing game project

wildrj · Post by **wildrj** » Thu Jun 21, 2007 7:10 pm

in my case it will look nice on a college app

CuteAlien · Post by **CuteAlien** » Thu Jun 21, 2007 8:51 pm

GuerillaSoftworks wrote: CuteAlien; Firstly whats wrong with a challenge? Secondly what's your problem with effects and physics in a multiplayer game? And finally, without knowledge to base your assumptions on, why would you post in a such a tone as to attempt to put people down?

Nothing wrong with a challenge. Physics in multiplayer is very hard to do because you will have a lot more difficult interpolation problems than singleplayer. But like effects I mentioned it only because the problem is "too many features for a start".

And I do base my assumptions on lot of similar posts which regularly come up in all game programming forums. "We got this big (mmo) project and will pay by royalties later on. " This is as much of challenge as someone announcing he will win an olympic gold medal next week, even thought he didn't even do sport so far. It just does not work. That's not to put people down, but because this is the experience you will gain after having seen enough such projects fall apart. And I do know people who spend a lot of time on such project until they realized this. It's just frustrating.

Tommy wrote: @CuteAlien Roflmao hahahahhaaahahah. Seams u don't want any competition ha? By the way, the only thing that connects this 2 games will be the hover crafts and nothing else. And i think that Dread Knight's game will be better than yours Razz

Do you realize that such a game started now would even with a very good team working fulltime need at least two years? Not much of a competition ;-)

Yeah, I should maybe not have posted because the game sounds similar to our own. Unfortunately I didn't think of that, but just saw a typical project announcement of someone who didn't seem to know enough about doing such a game. Sorry for that, I'll just ignore reality now and wish the project best luck and a lot success.

GuerillaSoftworks · Post by **GuerillaSoftworks** » Thu Jun 21, 2007 9:00 pm

CuteAlien: I have been involve in projects that fall apart and i know its frustrating. However, I believe im going to take this opportunity. Simple reason for this being this is unlike those other project announcements that you mentioned in that it doesnt have the tone of, "We got this big (mmo) project blah blah blah blah", instead its more like, "Hey, lets have a go at this; see how we do", which I respect and accept.

CuteAlien · Post by **CuteAlien** » Thu Jun 21, 2007 9:15 pm

Dread Knight wrote: Again, sorry if this offends anyone..

I'm not offended. Actually I even understand you. I just don't want to see you waste your time and the time of others. If you still want to try, do try at least to get a really experienced programmer to counsel you for a while. I don't think you will find that on a forum, but maybe you or one of your other artists does already know one who is willing to help.

wildrj · Post by **wildrj** » Fri Jun 22, 2007 3:47 am

0_o i hover around these forums a lot and i can assure you cute alien there are some vary experienced programmers here just need to find one willing to help ehh

CuteAlien · Post by **CuteAlien** » Fri Jun 22, 2007 1:04 pm

Hehe - I didn't worry about them being here wildrj. But finding one that will invest that time for an unknown team will be hard. It's easier if he, or one of his team does know such a programmer personally.

Wyszo · Post by **Wyszo** » Sun Jun 24, 2007 12:28 pm

Heh, this toppic is so interesting, that I decided to register ;P

First of all - good luck, I am not sure, whether you more-less know how complicated is what you want to do. It's something really huge. And because of that, chances of succes are not as high as you may think. However, you wrote, that modeling team consist of few proffesionals. And that increases the probability of finishing the game, because if the team has good modelers, good programmers will finally join the team.

The project seams to have been started by a modeler (you?), because of what you said about plans for the future. Modelers always have no idea how difficult game programming is, and they assume, that programmers will do everythink what is due to be done QUICKLY, and that is not likely to happen. So basically the factor which spoils programmers team with modelers team is very important. And that should be the human factor. You wrote that in the project there is some kind of democracy and that's one of the biggest mistakes, which could be made in creating the game via internet. The project simply has to have a coordinator, otherwise soon or later it will be abandoned.

Moreover, there should be someone responsible for recruitment, I assume that's you

One advice - choose programmers carefuly, or better - leave it to some game programmer from your team. Otherwise you will end up with a team in which 7 out of 10 programmers are completely noobs as far as game programming is concerned. You can immagine how that approach could end.

Somwhere in this thread you said that you will probably use WAV or your own format. I'll reply simply: use OGG. It's completely free and as good as MP3.

Personaly I don't think this project will be ever finished, but I won't try to stop you from making your dreams came true.

I know projects which I thought will fall after 2 months and now they have been alive for about two years. But none of them is even close to be finished. And that's just because they all are MMO games.

On the other hand I know commercial projects which are almost finished or even released after 4-12 months of work. And gues what? They were created by less than 5 people. And none of the projects was MMO. You simply should change your plans. Wouldn't it be great to finish a singleplayer racing game after a year and see it in the box in every supermarket? Yeah, that would be something. Much easier to achieve, not as profitable as MMO game, but at least feasible.

Oh, and one final advice (I will be banned from this forum forever after this post ;P). DO NOT USE IRRLICHT (whhoaah, I will be cursed and banished from irrlicht society). It simply doesn't fit to such a big project. You will loose much precious time on improving the engine itself. It would be wise to choose the most powerful free engine, not the one which is the simplest to use. My advice - use Crystal Space instead (I know that some people from Irrlicht team read it - sorry about that).

Anyway, I wish you luck. I love hover racing games, that's why I am working on one :]

CuteAlien · Post by **CuteAlien** » Sun Jun 24, 2007 1:17 pm

Wyszo wrote: Oh, and one final advice (I will be banned from this forum forever after this post ;P). DO NOT USE IRRLICHT (whhoaah, I will be cursed and banished from irrlicht society). It simply doesn't fit to such a big project. You will loose much precious time on improving the engine itself. It would be wise to choose the most powerful free engine, not the one which is the simplest to use. My advice - use Crystal Space instead (I know that some people from Irrlicht team read it - sorry about that).

I agree with nearly you whole post. But certainly not with the last paragraph ;-). Why do you think there is a problem using Irrlicht for a racer? We used it for our racer which is maybe not that big, but so far Irrlicht worked very well. I did not regret using it and even plan to continue working with Irrlicht.

Wyszo · Post by **Wyszo** » Sun Jun 24, 2007 2:09 pm

CuteAlien wrote:
Wyszo wrote: Oh, and one final advice (I will be banned from this forum forever after this post ;P). DO NOT USE IRRLICHT (whhoaah, I will be cursed and banished from irrlicht society). It simply doesn't fit to such a big project. You will loose much precious time on improving the engine itself. It would be wise to choose the most powerful free engine, not the one which is the simplest to use. My advice - use Crystal Space instead (I know that some people from Irrlicht team read it - sorry about that).
I agree with nearly you whole post. But certainly not with the last paragraph . Why do you think there is a problem using Irrlicht for a racer? We used it for our racer which is maybe not that big, but so far Irrlicht worked very well. I did not regret using it and even plan to continue working with Irrlicht.

Well, I am using Irrlicht too - in simple, but commercial racing game. It's well documented, very simple to use, extremely intuitive, etc. but...

- yet has problems with stability especially when the scene contains large amounts of triangles - problems with octree
- comparatively slow when rendering scenes which has > 40-50 thousands of tris
- still quite a few bugs, I guess every engine has problems with them, but certainly there are free engines, which are much better tested
- still less functional than Ogre or CS, if you do something bigger you will have to add new features by your own
- lack of post processing effects

- only strencil buffer shadows are supported

I think if you give a try Crystal Space + Crystal Entity Layer you would not want to return to irrlicht.

I understand that it was a great effort to create Irrlicht and I can't deny it's very good tool (otherwise I wouldn't be using it), but Crystal Space is simply better - 10 years of development resulted in great stability, tons of utilities, and so on.

end of offtoppic

EDIT:

wildrj wrote:0_o i hover around these forums a lot and i can assure you cute alien there are some vary experienced programmers here just need to find one willing to help ehh

wildrj, just play cute alien's game (link in his signature) and stay quiet ;P

omaremad · Post by **omaremad** » Sun Jun 24, 2007 2:19 pm

Thanks for your advice cute alien, if find H-Craft a great inspiration by the way because it give hope of a project being completed and sold.

Anyway i decided to join the team just for the fun of it but it seems things are going a bit slow.

I think there are currently 5 members? only 2 other than me seem to be active. so basically what Wyszo said is comming to fruition already lol.

At the end of the day i decided to join at least for the free good art

As for irrlicht being bad for big project well it depends, a game with say 10's of animated models on screen then yes irrlicht isnt suited, but static hover crafts its fine. As for the tracks it looks like they are going to be pretty high in polygon counts so i added opengl displaylist compiliation to the engine, i also have a store of various mods to the engine i made so the engine tuning is done.

Otherwise you will end up with a team in which 7 out of 10 programmers are completely noobs as far as game programming is concerned

This quote is pretty good since its usually begginer coders hat have enthusiasm to join these things, while experienced coder are probably to depressed from a past experience from when they started to bother joining teams.

As for the MMO thing it should be just online racer,Dread night just meant out of race interaction for selling ship parts with each race having < 10 racers.

Anyway thanks Wyszo your post is very valuable, wouldnt hurt if you posted on the wiki under offtopic or something (of course censoring the irrlicht part)

Cutealien thanks for the advice too, it would also be fun to see you on irc, btw are you planning a sequel to your game?

Wyszo · Post by **Wyszo** » Sun Jun 24, 2007 2:30 pm

omaremad,
well, I won't paste my post in Irrlicht Wiki, because I would first have to rewrite it, so it would be a little more general. And I won't do that, because my english is definitely not as good as I want it to be - I do a lot of mistakes which I'm not even aware of. If anyone, who is not afraid of english want to change my post a little (yes, you can throw part about irrlicht away xD) and paste it in wiki, feel free to do this.

BlindSide · Post by **BlindSide** » Sun Jun 24, 2007 3:10 pm

- only strencil buffer shadows are supported

Funny guy..

It took me less than a week to implement my shadow maps.

Wyszo · Post by **Wyszo** » Sun Jun 24, 2007 3:18 pm

exactly - think about that in that way: you lost a week implementing something what would be given to you for free if you had decided to use some other engine. You could spend that time on implementing ingame features.

omaremad · Post by **omaremad** » Sun Jun 24, 2007 3:24 pm

Learning time isnt a loss for people that dont have deadlines and wages.

CuteAlien · Post by **CuteAlien** » Sun Jun 24, 2007 4:02 pm

Wyszo wrote:exactly - think about that in that way: you lost a week implementing something what would be given to you for free if you had decided to use some other engine. You could spend that time on implementing ingame features.

On the other hand no engine ever does everything you need. Not even the really expensive commercial ones. Having an engine which is easy to extend is worth a lot. I also did some modifications, but the important thing was that it was always easy do to that.

I'm sure CrystalSpace is also a good engine - I just didn't check it because the license did not work for us.

@Omaremad: I'm back on IRC as soon as I find time again. Currently I have just too much work.