I played the Battletech board game as a kid and I always thought Mechs were under powered. I used to joke that they were "nukes with pop guns" and I have been dreaming up how to remake them for a long time. I took what I had come up with to Battletechs creators (Harebrained Schemes) a month back and they refused to listen so now I'm going to do a Demo and try again.
I'm jumping in at the deep end with this project. I just started learning to program, I'm reading "Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++ Second Edition by Bjarne Stroustrup" and "Trigonometry by Michael Corral" and looking at Gnuplot to start with. I need someone more experienced to lead me.
It's a proof of concept, a Mech dueling simulator, it's heavy on trigonometry and the graphics will be rudimentary. In my vision the actual game (if it goes up) will be like Mech Commander where you set objectives for a small unit of one pilot AI Mechs that you train and command but we have to map out the fantastical physics of the time warp that Mechs create before we can even start programming the Demo.
Mechs are like tungsten Tardises; they don't have heat problems, they have all new weapons, armour and criticals and they burn a lot of fuel. Their engines are called "Time Stars" which accelerate time by heating up in second grams per second squared or grams per second (grams of antimatter). The Time Stars heat is called "Time Mass" measured in second grams, Time Mass manifests as a field of "fast time" that splits reality and allows the Mech to look into alternate futures. Gravity repels it making the Mech lighter and the forward progression of time cools it. A Mech can invert its Time Mass into "Mass Time" measured in gram seconds and warp to any one of its futures at any time, this also cools the Time Star.
The first thing we need to do is study wave forms and write a program that generates time waves in overlapping time fields and manages the time speed that the alternate realities experience. This example gives you a basis for visualization but the waves would obviously be distorted.
All Mechs primary realities (the X axis of a trigonometric graph) move forwards through time (upwards) at a constant rate but the pilots continuously probe the future. In the simulation Light Mechs have two pilots plus some reserves; the first pilot runs into the future as the "sine wave" passes the X axis, when they reach its zenith their reality disappears and a new reality simultaneously appears and starts its run where the "cosine wave" passes the primary reality (the X axis) with the second pilot at the controls. The first pilot back pedals through their movement history until they rejoin the shared history a little below the X axis, then they run forward on autopilot before reappearing as they pass the primary reality and take the controls for the "arcsine wave". At that instant the cosine pilot reaches their zenith, disappears and starts to back pedal; the cycle then repeats. A new reality should branch every time a Mech sustains critical damage, in a Light Mech this would warp the primary reality forward (upward) at no cost in Time Mass keeping the sum of the amplitudes constant but it would make the number of reserve pilots required unpredictable.
Training Mechs have one pilot and don't warp time significantly. Light Mechs split time into two primary waves and have two pilots. I think Medium Mechs split the two primary time waves into another four secondary waves that bounce along the top of two, undulating X axis, secondary realities that rise and fall in order to be intercepted by the primary waves at their Y intercepts (the points on the curves that indicate the Mechs time positions). They might need four pilots but it's not clear to me; I need to look at the waves in motion. Heavies might have four tertiary realities (undulating X axis) that extend eight tertiary waves above the Y intercepts of the four secondary waves and might need eight pilots. Assaults might have eight quanternary realities that extend sixteen quanternary waves and might need sixteen pilots.
If Harebrained Schemes reject the idea again I might look to develop my own story. My imagining of the future is that the human race will go extinct and leave behind two races of robots called the Gog (American) and Magog (Russian). The game would be a friendly sport played by the Gog Eternal, "Eye" ("I" in English) and the Magog Eternal, "Ear" ("I" in Russian) and the stakes might range from the ownership of servants to the sharing of technologies. I might be able to raise capital for a game called "Eyes and Ears" and a GNU AI called "Gog" multiple instances of which plug in as the pilots.
Hey there
I played the Battletech board game as a kid and I always thought Mechs were under powered. I used to joke that they were "nukes with pop guns" and I have been dreaming up how to remake them for a long time. I took what I had come up with to Battletechs creators (Harebrained Schemes) a month back and they refused to listen so now I'm going to do a Demo and try again.
I'm jumping in at the deep end with this project. I just started learning to program, I'm reading "Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++ Second Edition by Bjarne Stroustrup" and "Trigonometry by Michael Corral" and looking at Gnuplot to start with. I need someone more experienced to lead me.
It's a proof of concept, a Mech dueling simulator, it's heavy on trigonometry and the graphics will be rudimentary. In my vision the actual game (if it goes up) will be like Mech Commander where you set objectives for a small unit of one pilot AI Mechs that you train and command but we have to map out the fantastical physics of the time warp that Mechs create before we can even start programming the Demo.
Mechs are like tungsten Tardises; they don't have heat problems, they have all new weapons, armour and criticals and they burn a lot of fuel. Their engines are called "Time Stars" which accelerate time by heating up in second grams per second squared or grams per second (grams of antimatter). The Time Stars heat is called "Time Mass" measured in second grams, Time Mass manifests as a field of "fast time" that splits reality and allows the Mech to look into alternate futures. Gravity repels it making the Mech lighter and the forward progression of time cools it. A Mech can invert its Time Mass into "Mass Time" measured in gram seconds and warp to any one of its futures at any time, this also cools the Time Star.
The first thing we need to do is study wave forms and write a program that generates time waves in overlapping time fields and manages the time speed that the alternate realities experience. This example gives you a basis for visualization but the waves would obviously be distorted.
All Mechs primary realities (the X axis of a trigonometric graph) move forwards through time (upwards) at a constant rate but the pilots continuously probe the future. In the simulation Light Mechs have two pilots plus some reserves; the first pilot runs into the future as the "sine wave" passes the X axis, when they reach its zenith their reality disappears and a new reality simultaneously appears and starts its run where the "cosine wave" passes the primary reality (the X axis) with the second pilot at the controls. The first pilot back pedals through their movement history until they rejoin the shared history a little below the X axis, then they run forward on autopilot before reappearing as they pass the primary reality and take the controls for the "arcsine wave". At that instant the cosine pilot reaches their zenith, disappears and starts to back pedal; the cycle then repeats. A new reality should branch every time a Mech sustains critical damage, in a Light Mech this would warp the primary reality forward (upward) at no cost in Time Mass keeping the sum of the amplitudes constant but it would make the number of reserve pilots required unpredictable.
Training Mechs have one pilot and don't warp time significantly. Light Mechs split time into two primary waves and have two pilots. I think Medium Mechs split the two primary time waves into another four secondary waves that bounce along the top of two, undulating X axis, secondary realities that rise and fall in order to be intercepted by the primary waves at their Y intercepts (the points on the curves that indicate the Mechs time positions). They might need four pilots but it's not clear to me; I need to look at the waves in motion. Heavies might have four tertiary realities (undulating X axis) that extend eight tertiary waves above the Y intercepts of the four secondary waves and might need eight pilots. Assaults might have eight quanternary realities that extend sixteen quanternary waves and might need sixteen pilots.
If Harebrained Schemes reject the idea again I might look to develop my own story. My imagining of the future is that the human race will go extinct and leave behind two races of robots called the Gog (American) and Magog (Russian). The game would be a friendly sport played by the Gog Eternal, "Eye" ("I" in English) and the Magog Eternal, "Ear" ("I" in Russian) and the stakes might range from the ownership of servants to the sharing of technologies. I might be able to raise capital for a game called "Eyes and Ears" and a GNU AI called "Gog" multiple instances of which plug in as the pilots.
The project will be on Linux and will probably be mostly in C++ at https://sourceforge.net/projects/battletech-timewarp with a mirror a Github.
Send me a message at abdi.nv@gmail.com if you can help.
Cheers
Last edit: Norman Vaughan 2017-03-10