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Eric
13-02-2007, 10:55 AM
Here is my entry blog for this years compo!
"Oil Rush" is the working title, the core of the game is delivering oil between locations on a 3D map with the help of pipelines. For the scenario part, things aren't fully settled, but at this point, it would involve some evil locust-like alien civilization, whose sole purpose is to invade worlds, squeeze them dry of oil and then move onto another world.

The pipelines game core will hopefully be derived in variety of levels, which would involve any or all the following aspects:
- network building: build pipelines, worming your way around terrain hazards in the most effective fashion (like track laying in Railroad Tycoon)
- network control: flip switches to control valves, pumps and storage tanks to achieve the best flow, and/or survive disasters
- network defense: defend your pipelines from natural disaster, enemy attacks and angry natives
- network offense: take down enemy pipelines
- first person: jump inside vehicles/turrets
The pipelines part will involve a flow simulation, so it won't be "just connect the pipes to get the oil"! For instance if you open a huge pipe going downhill all at once, you'll see a brutal pressure buildup at the bottom, which could damage the lower pipelines, leading to an oil spill!
The combat part will involve static defenses, aircrafts and maybe ground troops. The plan there is to reuse some of the AirBlast AI and simulation mechanics, so you'll have the choice of jumping right into the action, or standing back, giving broad orders to your units.
When attacking an enemy network, you'll have to figure out the weak spot, because there won't be enough firepower around to destroy everything. Similarly, when attacked or designing your pipelines, you'll have to avoid undefended weak spots, and control the network to avoid pressure buildups which would result in more indirect damage... :twisted:

Here is a very early screenshot:
http://photos-eric.chez-alice.fr/oilrush_img/2007-02-13a_low.jpg
I still have obvious scale issues to sort out: for the pipeline flow simulation to work out, the scale has to be realistically huge, so maps are 40km x 40km... and the pipeline here is supposed to be 10m above ground... :roll:

grudzio
13-02-2007, 11:24 AM
Nice idea. It reminds me a bit of 20,000 Light Years Into Space (http://www.pygame.org/projects/22/237/).

Oil is a very corrosive liquid, so you may add the option that from time to time pipes will get damaged and should be replaced to avoid serious leakage.

Huehnerschaender
13-02-2007, 11:53 AM
Looks great! And a nice idea, too!

Can't wait to see more....

chronozphere
15-02-2007, 10:43 PM
This is a very nice concept... you even have a snapshot :shock:

What kind of "point of view" does this game use??
3D/Isometric like age of empires III or a free camera etc... :?

You should definitly take some time to write a nice terrain renderer/generator. Are you going to include forrest and foilage or just pure rocks and cliffs??
When you have a nice terrain engine, you could make nice in-game movies and let the camera fly over the landscape with a nice sun-flare. :razz: Or do something like the main menu in 'farcry'.

Good luck with this.
8)

technomage
15-02-2007, 11:50 PM
Great concept Eric, I'm looking forward to playing this one :D

Eric
16-02-2007, 09:00 AM
Nice idea. It reminds me a bit of 20,000 Light Years Into Space.

Hadn't seen that one before, there may be some similarities indeed, though if I manage to complete the game as it is my head right now, it should play quite differently.


What kind of "point of view" does this game use??
3D/Isometric like age of empires III or a free camera etc... :?

I'm leaning towards something Warcraft-like, with "zoom" getting you between overview mode and near-3rd-person in fixed steps. There are a few problems with that approach given the world scale.


Are you going to include forest and foliage or just pure rocks and cliffs??

Yeah, I want trees, but being mostly cosmetic, they're going to be somewhat down the priority list... so it'll pretty much depend on a lot of factors, from models and texture availability to development time remaining. 3 years ago there was a GLScene "Forest" demo with thousandths of trees, today's hardware could probably handle tens of thousandths... 8)

Eric
16-02-2007, 07:53 PM
I've been experimenting on a small flow simulation for the oil spills... here is a screenshot and small video of the thing in action:
http://photos-eric.chez-alice.fr/oilrush_img/spilltest.jpg
http://photos-eric.chez-alice.fr/oilrush_img/spilltest.avi
For testing purposes, the heightfield is a slightly inclined sinusoidal field, ultimately, it'll be the regular terrain heightfield.
The simulation is reasonnably fast for limited oil spills (in the demo, worst case is at 3 ms of CPU time per step, plus 1.5 ms to update the textures), but it's not negligible... so high-quality spills will most likely be limited to dual-core CPUs.

savage
16-02-2007, 10:50 PM
Hi Erik,
do I need DivX to watch this video?

Eric
17-02-2007, 07:30 AM
do I need DivX to watch this video?

Yes, a DivX or a mpeg4-compatible player should be sufficient.

WILL
23-04-2007, 08:05 PM
Hey Eric, hows your entry doing? I hope that you are still with us. It's not over yet so you can still send us updates of your game even if you haven't met all (or even any) of the stage goals.