[Balder-devel] RE: Where do we want to be in 2 months time frame ?

[bhansen <bh...@uv...>]

Yes, this looks fairly good, but I've a few concern and other things to 
mention.

First, I've already got a testmap in there,  it's a rectangular room, with 
potrals that are just mirrors for now, but could easily be conected to other 
sectors (like cordors).  In any case, balder will currently load up any CS 
map, and spawn guys at the camera spots, or some default spot if there are no 
camera start locations.  So basically we need to figgure out how to define, in 
a map file, which sectors have gravity and which don't;  probably some other 
things too (like placing buttons etc.).

I'm not sure we should worry about sound just yet, as it's really not 
essential to gameplay behavior.

My major concern is the network thing. Since it will primarily not be intended 
as a single player game when complete, and because non network/multiplayer 
code is not always easy to convert to convert to multiplayer code, I think it 
might be essential to build this in as early as possible, or we may find 
ourselves rewriting a lot more code than we'd like.  It is important to 
structure things so that everything will stay in sync without too much hassle.
 As long as we keep this in mind then things should go ok.  In any case, the 
main part of the game should not care, or even be able to tell where the 
orders or player state updates or whatever are comming from.  So it won't 
matter if a soldier is under a player's control or a bot's.  Just give them 
all a standard interface to work with.  This has the added advantage of making 
it easy to implement all kinds of bot schemes, none needs to be tied to the 
main game code, thus we can implement a really basic dumb bot for early 
testing.
    So I guess my main point is we at least need to give some thought to the 
network structure and implementation before we get too far, which means we 
should probably read up on it.  I read through this page 
(http://www.parsec.org/netdocs/index.html) and they outline some different 
techniques quite nicely I thought.

this email is longer than I meant again, but hopefully everyone understands 
what I'm trying to get at here.  Anyway, last thing i should mention is that 
since school finished up and all, I've left Victoria, now hanging out at my 
sister's in Portland untill about may 8th, then we're driving back home(in 
Alaska), with some side trips, which gets me there probably sometime before 
may 20th.  So I'll be around email most of that time, but I can't really do 
much else as far as writing code or anything untill I get home.

Bj=F8rn

>=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D Original Message From Sebastien Marchal <joj...@la...> 
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
>Hello Bjorn,
>
>    I thinck that in order to start working on the 'bread and butter'
>stuff that will make the game,
>we should define a first 'tier' with some minimum features. I propose
>the following:
>
>    - A spherical arena, with 2 entry coridors and doors
>    - The victory condition is implementable
>    - The player is alone against a random bot
>    - We can shoot at the other guy
>    - We can do simple moves (but that include running into the arena)
>    - No network at this point (Well, we don't really have anybody that
>knows about networking code ?)
>    - Some default sounds
>
>    That would allow us to do some gameplay exploration on how to do
>movement
>    properly. Defining this tier will also enable us to define where are
>the areas
>    that are most likely to undergo major re-work, and that should
>therefore be
>    properly 'interfaced'.
>
>    Best regards,
>
>                Sebastien.