Laying out the Foundation
So i did a bit of thinking today and i thought about how the bots should move, how the shots will take effect, what Physics engine will be used and even the build system i would use to ensure cross-platforming… however, after a while i realised that my thoughts were generally incoherent, because (i had to admit) i was going at the project, from the wrong end… it is true that i wanna learn about engines and game components, but first, we had to have a base…
As a result, i decided i wanna lay down the ground rules to what this project is all about, and what i actually want from it… so here is the ground work about how the project will be used and how it will work:
- the users will be presented with two things, an API (basically some shared libs that are linked in the code) and an app that runs the simulation
- the app can be run in full mode (simulate match and render events) or in just AI mode (simulate match and present a script of what happened) or just a renderer (read a script and animate what happened)
- the arena must be VERY moddable, ie: players can create their own:
- Levels (ie: terrain + objectives)
- Game types (ie: king of the hill, last man standing, allows buildings or not & rules)
- Models and textures for the units in the game
- the players must have the option to code as little as they want of their bots (only the top strategy for the team they are playing) or could get down and dirty to replace everything about the engine itself (ie: even the aiming, shooting and pathfinding algorithms)
- coders submit their inventions in source code format, that is formatted in a certain way (packaging system) in order to be available for other coders and easily added (everything from custom unit models & animations to AI strategies and algorithms to even Gfx engine and physics engines)
- perhaps provide a python (or lua?) scripting interface for quickly testing code or algorithms
As for the game itself, i wanna try and make it scalable, from a VERY simple grade (just a number of teams, each team with one bot shooting each other, last one wins) to a VERY complete and complex grade (think full RTS but AI code instead of players, with resources, buildings, walls, transports, siege, etc)
thats all for now folks… the design is not complete and in no way coherent yet, but atleast now i have a starting ground… i will try to tackle these points one at a time, but generally it is clear that the main point will be to think of making the engine highly moddable as possible…
as always, any comments are more than welcome… keep you posted
