I'm a little curious how this game could be "strategy" when the player is piloting a ship. Under my understanding of the term strategy, players don't have an avatar at all in this sort of game - they are nearly pure resource allocation games. Maybe the name for that around here is 4X?

Either way, your basic problem in that sort of game in a space setting is that the map is mostly black space scattered with little dots. One dot can't be told from another by appearance untill you are so close to it that you can't see where it is relative to anything else. This is very different from a game like, say, Victoria or Civilization where the map surface provides all sorts of I/O utility.

In a game where the player is flying around, I don't think you need any visible grid at all. Nobody is going to be thinking in terms of "I want to fly down 1254 units and right 824 and forward 9245, all relative to my current orientation". They are going to want to be heading for a certain destination. Have them pick it from a list and put an aimpoint on the screen and let them fly to it. If the mechanics of flight itself are what present the challenge of the game, then you have a flight simulator. That's totally legit, of course, but again I'm puzzled by the application of the term "strategy" to it.

I've been dinking around with a space-based empire builder as a hobby project for years and it presents a lot of rather serious interface design challenges. But it has a lot of appeal, particularly as a hobby project, because so much of the art can be generated randomly.

Dalep: It may seem to be a sim(and it is), but I figure it's more strategy, because of the ridiculous variety of tactics, configurations, etc that will be included, and the pace at which the game proceeds. The main ship will be no more of an avatar than the mothership was in homeworld.

A planned feature(one of the primary features) is to make ship canstruction completely modular. Each part of a ship is an independant object, with structural objcts linking them all. presumably, you could put a communication device(radio, laser, quantum entanglement) on another collection of components and send that off to beat somebody up.

IT will be slightly player centric in that you have a main bridge, or command module, and it represents everything the player is. signals from distant spaceships(not more than a few light-seconds in very high thrust games) must reach this module before it will be draw to the screen.

Primarily, the player will be concerned with the management of resources(not as important in this game), information, and position. Strategy is the goal.


I don't believe that a cartesian(or any other) grid is useful in a game UI, because people don't think in coordinates. Rather, I'd like to create a method for allowing the player to find themselves in a black vodid with only little points of light for reference. I want to give a sense of position in the system, and I'm kind of ata loss to do that.

I don't believe that players will always want to go to a destination. It may be advantageous to engage someone out in the middle of nowhere, for example if your enemy has powerful kinetic wepons that knock you around more than they hurt, it is disadvntageous for you to engage thm in a plantary orbit. They may disrupt your orbit, such that you must expend a bit of energy to stay in the relative orbit that you want. with nothing nearby, you have nothing to fear from either crashing into anything or being slingshotted anywhere. it may also be advantageous to bem in an orbit that is on the opposite side of a body, in the interest of hiding.

Space will be black and cold, but the screen need not be. it willl be filled with varrying degrees of information on your ship, views of enemy ships(through telescopes) other information on enemy ships(such as that infered from heat signatures and other sensors). It will also have information on celestial bodies, such as planets. perhaps even asteroids that behave suspiciously(changing direction without the benefit of gravity, mass that doesn't match size) wll be displayed, all in glowing green for your viewig pleasure.

At the moment, I am just describing the interface, because I haven't put enough thought into modularity yet. I think I need some experimentation for that, and this game is not really in a condition that allows for that yet. I am a coder, but I'm still learning opengl, so this is more theory and potential application.

Viewpoints wil be external to spaceships, like in homeworld.

Paradoxish:
I like the idea of being able to set a point by pointing on a sphere relative to a reference point. I'll probably use the homeworld model: mouse for 2d point on the sphere, keypress and drag to change the surface of the sphere.

I really like the way you think, about motion, rather than position.

"I don't believe that players will always want to go to a destination. It may be advantageous to engage someone out in the middle of nowhere"

Well, a person doesn't need navigational aids to get themselves into the middle of no-where. The no-where thattaway is as good as the no-where thissaway. If you see what I mean. Of course you'd have a free-flight mode and player could just point the ship in a direction and go.

In software development, its really easy to fall into a trap of generalizing things that will always be specific and of creating features that will never be used. In general, its best to start out with the simplest interface you can possibly think of then then fancy it up as its inadequecies become apparent.

I'll confess I never played Homeworld, so the references don't much help me. But that's ok. Good luck.

check out EVE Online for a few basics ... and then keep improving from there (just like you are doing from your original homeworld influences) ... EVE Online is the first ever space ship command (not "piloting") game that felt at all cool and realistic (not TOO much of each, but just enough) ... unlike homeworld, you actually do point your ship "down" to fly to an off-axis asteroid field. And although there is a normal plane (each planet defines an orbital plane, and most solar systems have most planets within a few degrees of each other in that sense) ... in EVE online this is true too, but they went ahead and added some extra "wobble" that throws things maybe 10-15 degree more off these planes than I would expect to find in most solar systems ... but it makes for a fun 3D feeling world.

Quote:

Original post by dalep In software development, its really easy to fall into a trap of generalizing things that will always be specific and of creating features that will never be used. In general, its best to start out with the simplest interface you can possibly think of then then fancy it up as its inadequecies become apparent.

We concede. This is very wise, especially for someone like us with very little experience in game-design

Xai: We've played eve-online, and disliked it for the lack of lower level course control. essentially, you pick a destination and engage your ward-drive(or whatever they called it) That game did a very nice job of showing the vast emptiness of space.