Dawn of Infinity has seen a modest amount of practical planning in the last month or two. LANS and I have been working out ship and weapon designs, and at this point I think we’ve laid out what we need to implement for DoI 0.3 at a level of detail we hadn’t achieved before. For example, one faction will have a railgun weapon, and we’ve worked out how powerful railgun projectiles will be, how fast they’ll travel, how many rounds you can carry, etc., as well as the story behind the weapon. I’ve balanced the weapons while making them unique, and paired them up to ships which are balanced and unique, the best I can before actual implementation and play-testing. On the graphics side, I’ve got all the ships for 0.3 loaded into Maya, and have poked around a bit at turning them into the md3/md4 format which Q3-based engines use.
Speaking of Q3, we’ve agreed on a minor shift in development. Rather than use Open Arena as our baseline engine, LANS has concluded the Tremulous engine will produce easier, ergo faster results. Unlike the stubborn Open Arena code, Tremulous will actually compile as a universal binary (UB) on the Mac. Additionally, while it also starts with the open sourced Quake 3 code, Tremulous is a more complex game with added strategy elements, many of which we can utilize for DoI’s MMORPG gameplay without having to write these features ourselves. For instance, we can change Tremulous’s armory, an interface where you buy and sell weapons and equipment, into DoI’s outfitter.
The second shift in DoI’s development is a personal change for me. Starting next week, I’ll begin a new job as a professional game designer. I’m very excited about this, and I anticipate doing a lot of the things I’ve done for DoI in this new position. The bad news is I’ll have considerably less free time for DoI and other projects. There’s also the possibility of working on a game all day, and then lacking the endurance to work on another game when I get home. DoI has maintained my interest for five years and counting, so we’ll see. In any case, I’ll always maintain an online presence.
Curious readers or newcomers can find some tasty nuggets of information, including a new render, on the discussion forum. Right now LANS is the only active developer, so additional help would be great.
- Captain Bob
I regret to announce I’m leaving the Dawn of Infinity project. Over the months and years progress slowed to a trickle, but now it has dried up entirely. I have no expectations for the project to continue development, but since I’m leaving, that’s no longer up to me.
Rather than find someone to take my place, I’m now content to let the project hibernate. Not die, but hibernate. The code is still in svn, and I’ve asked feanor to upload the content files with which I’d been working. Anyone is always welcome to check things out and pick up where we left off. They’ll have to figure out how everything works, but we’ve done the best we can to help. Between the forums and the wiki, there is pretty exhaustive documentation on what needs to be done. The website and forums are hosted at sourceforge, so there’s little danger of domains expiring etc. for a long time. You can contact me if you’re interested in carrying the torch, and need admin privileges.
After a long period where we haven’t made progress, I’ve decided to adopt an existing game engine to form the foundation of Dawn of Infinity. The engine we’re using now is the Quake 3 engine, specifically code from the ioquake3 project (http://ioquake3.org/). The Quake 3 engine has been used in a large number of first person shooters on multiple platforms since its release in late 1999. In 2005 the game’s source code was released, which led to open source projects like ioquake3.
Moreover, Quake 3 has a tried-and-true networking system that allows thousands of people to play in online matches with each other. I realized that a modern FPS engine will handle nearly everything we need for Dawn of Infinity 0.3. Once we make changes to the interface, camera, and physics, we can drop in our own art assets. Meanwhile the networking code, which has been such a big hurdle for us, will already be written. After version 0.3, I want to build on the Quake 3 code to add trading, missions, multiple systems, governments, and all those things that will make DoI a viable, interesting MMORPG.
Our vision for Dawn of Infinity hasn’t changed. However, using the Quake 3 engine should mean a lot less coding to get through in the short term. I’ve been documenting progress in more detail on the discussion forum, including screenshots, so head over there for the very latest in development.
DoI hasn’t seen progress over the last few weeks. Real life events have gotten in the way of me leading development. I intend to get things together again after Christmas. Until then, the developers are encouraged to continue on their own. We’ve put effort into the wiki, and I think at this point it’s capable of instructing a developer on what needs doing and how to do it.
It’s unknown when our old wiki will come back online. As a result, we’ve started up a new wiki. It’s a different kind of wiki (WikkaWiki) and is hosted at sourceforge, so it should be more reliable. The url is http://www.dawnofinfinity.org/Wikka/wikka.php?wakka=HomePage . The success of a wiki depends on its writers, so please help us fill it out. Thanks to Rigdern for picking a wiki that works on sourceforge and getting it up and running.
Of particular interest is a page for current tasks: http://www.dawnofinfinity.org/Wikka/wikka.php?wakka=CurrentTasks . This will be maintained as a short-term, focused list of what the development team is working on. If you can’t reach the rest of us and are wondering what comes next, this should give you enough information to get started.
There are several developments to report. As an aside, it’s only now that I’m updating the progress log, because I lost my account info for the site until Geuis helped me out. First, feanor and I successfully uploaded the code we’ve been working on to sourceforge. Unlike before, it was uploaded to the subversion server at the dawnofinfinity project, which should pave the way for putting all code there in the future. Secondly, cookies are working on our forums again. The problem turned out to be just a typo, which one of our newer coders Rigdern found. Thanks to him, you can stay logged in to the forums, see which posts are new, and all the other benefits of cookies. Lastly, we tried a new collaborative editor, called DocSynch, which runs as a plugin for the text editor Jedit. The problem with SubEthaEdit, which we currently use, is it isn’t crossplatform, so people on Windows or Linux can’t collaborate in real-time. Unfortunately we couldn’t get Jedit+DocSynch working with multiple users, so it might be back to the drawing board. But the thing to remember is now everyone can checkout the code on sourceforge now and work on the code by themselves.
After everyone took the summer off, we’re once again working on the project’s code. The transfer to subversion, and dawnofinfinity instead of openevgalaxy, has encountered hurdles. It doesn’t look like we’ll be able to migrate all our code at once, but luckily we’ve decided to re-examine each file individually anyway. We’ve started working on the basic data structures we’re going to use, pulling older code from the csa and iserv modules. Using SubEthaEdit and AIM, we’re collaborating on one file at a time, adding it to a new collection that will eventually be a working new version of DoI. We’re trying to get this growing collection uploaded to sourceforge as soon as possible.
Along with our regulars, we’ve picked up a couple of new coders, like Rigdern, to help out. It’s always nice to have another pair of eyes looking things over, seeing if things make sense, so speak up on our forums if you think you can help us with the coding.
In other news, our wiki is down, because the maintainer, Geuis, is switching ISP’s. It should be back up shortly, with the same address.
We’ve decided now is a good time to move our code. We’re moving in two ways. The first is to move from one sourceforge project to another. We use both “openevgalaxy” and “dawnofinfinity” over there, the former being a holdover from when we were called OpenEV. Moving our code to dawnofinfinity should remove the last remnant of our old name. This move won’t affect the website or forums, only the source code.
Our second move is from CVS to SVN. CVS and SVN are two different systems for managing code. CVS has been mostly adequate, but SVN is a popular new system that most of us see as an improvement. One of our developers has had trouble with CVS, so once we move he should find it easier to integrate code with the main branch. We’re trying to do both of these moves at the same time. Right now we’ve enabled SVN for both projects but are still figuring out how to actually transfer the code.
After a long meeting today, I’ve conceded that a re-write is worthwile. We’ve started a new module in CVS called uv, for unified version. We will build it from scratch one layer at a time in order to insure:
- low-level networking works before we add things like movement that rely on sound network code
- we use the same codebase for client and server
- the code is readable, editable, and executable by all, not just the person who wrote the code, and not just on some platforms
We’re also going to try using the Raknet networking library, which will hopefully handle what we need for DoI and save us from writing a lot of code. At least two coders are on spring break, so we hope to make some serious headway before we’re all tied up in real life again.
Confused? Don’t worry; we’re not. We had put some hacks in the engine to fix some bugs (having to do with the angle the ship points and flies). Now we (think) the bugs are squashed for good, but we haven’t had time to remove the hacks again. So since the hacks fix something that doesn’t need fixing anymore, they now cause problems. To use feanor’s words, it’s now “differently weird.” Once we take out those hacks the bugs should fly away to bug heaven for good. So far our strategy of methodically going through all the math in the code is paying off.