PGD Dog Fight Competition

[lithander]

No screenshots and no demos yet, but I've started working on an entry today and can give some infos about what I'm planning to do.

The game will be called Scrap Hunt and settled in a sci-fi scenario. Allthough there are two players duelling I need to refer to the more general definition of Dogfight (a fiercely disputed contest) to make it fit in the theme.
The game could be called classic, it's arcade like: Few controlls, a two dimensional environment, simple, straight-forward goals, but - hopefully - a compelling gameplay that is easy to grasp and hard to master and most important fun to play. As the gameplay demands no 3D-environment I'll use a 2d sprite engine based on sdl that is yet to be develloped. (No need to try to do a 3D game just for the sake of technology as it will look like crap anyway compared to the games currently on the shelves. )

So much info on Scrap Hunt for now.
The stuff you guys posted about your games looks very promising. I really look forward to the final results. I think the whole contest will give pascal gamedevellopment and thus our community a nice boost and that's one of the reasons why i take part.

-lith

[Eric]

I'm not sure yet if I'll be able to make a playable game in time for the competition, but here are two screenshots for the end-of-first-weekend (probably looks better than it plays )

Let's revive this thread!

[Sly]

That looks very cool, Eric. Keep it up.

[Sascha Willems]

Really looking great, hope you get your entry finished so that we can see it in action.

P.S. : Could you tell what you're using for (OpenGL for graphics? Or glScene) and what (if) physics engine you use? Since your game looks similar to mine (except that you use modern aircrafts) I'm interested. I'm using Newton for my game and together with it's buoyuancy-feature (that word is damn hard to spell *grr*) it was very easy to implement arcarde-like aircraft physics.

[Eric]

Thanks
Particle systems are the easy part though, the real gameplay stuff is another story :?

> Could you tell what you're using for (OpenGL for graphics? Or glScene)

GLScene (and thus OpenGL).

> and what (if) physics engine you use?

None, I just slapped together a small function to serve as flight model. Same story for the collision system, which is rather a placeholder for a real collision system to be added later (if time allows). I'm trying to press on to the rest of the game first (AI, UI, missions/levels...).

> Since your game looks similar to mine (except that you use modern aircrafts)

Wether or not I keep the "AfterBurner" 3rd-person style will depend on wether or not I find time to make cockpit graphics, and it's modern because the only nice 3d model I had was a modern aircraft
Dunno if you've tackled the AI part yet, but as I'm aiming for low-altitude combat, I've trouble preventing crashes in the canyons during dogfights and "sitting duck" behaviour at the same time... AI's not much of an opponent yet :roll:

[Sascha Willems]

I'm not planning to implement AI. Since I'm using "real" physics for my aircrafts, I would not only have to teach the AI not to crash into the terrain but also on what to do to change the airplanes direction. It's not just "if you want to face the player, then turn 20A¬? to direction X" like one would do in an ego-shooter. I'd rather have to teach a neural net (I guess, a statemachine wouldn't do the job with physics) on how much force/torque and speed to apply to get into the right direction.
And since I don't have all the time I wish I had for this game I'll only implement multiplayer. So you either battle on one PC via splitscreen or you play over LAN.

Right now I'm finishing off my game, like adding some stuff to make gameplay more fun (like bonus objects) and I'm also enhancing graphics a bit (though I don't think that I'll implement shaders, I don't have time for that).

[Eric]

> So you either battle on one PC via splitscreen or you play over LAN.

hmmm splitscreen, hadn't thought of it... I'll keep the idea as backup plan
By LAN, you mean it as "fast LAN with zero lag", or do you plan to have some movement prediction or anti-lag trick?

[Sascha Willems]

Since it's only two players I haven't built in any lag-compensation techniques. I've tried the game over a real network with two players and it worked without problems and lag. But maybe I'll build in some off that stuff for the client as it shouldn't be too hard. Right now the server also calculates the matrix of the client plane, and I've thought of letting the client calculate it itself as long as the server doesn't send one, and as the server sends a new matrix it get's updated on the serve. But as I said I don't think that I'll need it, and besides this especially debugging in a network is no fun at all, so I'm glad if I don't need to work on the networking part.

[Mad_Aeon]

I can be wrong, but did some posts in this thread disappeared?
For example I posted some questions about the minimal hardware (and get replies too) but I can't find these posts anymore ?!?

[Eriken]

You're right, take a look at the newspage for an update on what the problem is
_____
Eriken