Extended Project Description

This page is here to provide an extended description of the goals of the Mandate Engine project. I know its a big wall of text but each aspect will be expanded upon elsewhere in the Wiki as a separate page.

The Mandate Engine is an engine I am developing, expanded from the Glest Advanced Engine, to support a series of 7 games I plan to design based on some abstracted concepts from my ideal MMO concept. This concept exists in parts all over the web, primarily in my posts on MMORPG.com Embarrassing I know :)

Each of these games is RTSish but emphasizes concepts from various other genres. The first game and the one I am primarily implementing the features for in the engine now is a more general concept blending RPS, RTS, TBS, Sim, and City Building genres.

I am implementing several side projects as well on the engine and due to the large feature set it has to support a few minimal changes allow you to make an open source version of any game you want. Currently, as of this post, I am implementing what I choose to call a Majesty-like for a fun break from lower level work in graphics and GUI. This game contains some basic ideas from Majesty but extends a little bit beyond what that game did. By Majesty I mean the first game and not that remake which literally made me cry when I realized how out of the Majesty spirit it was.

Back on the engine itself it attempts to add quite a bit of lower level functionality to the existing GAE base. There will be libRocket integration for the GUI, a new model format with support for a larger suite of graphical effects and support for things like props and swappable weapon meshes, armor meshes, and textures. This should increase art productivity a bit.

In addition I would like to add support for polar coordinates instead of cardinal directions, walkable walls and buildings, sea and land units which have their own coordinate origin so you could for instance move about on the deck of a moving ship and some local coordinate based building options, effectively expanding structures. I would also like to get support for separate weapon actors. So a fortress could support multiple towers that fire independently or mechs could have various weapon emplacements.

I am extending the command system to support faction/global commands, especially since my Majesty-like requires them but also for trade and diplomacy. I also added and am in the process of adding different kinds of build options such as placing a foundation marker and then allowing construction based on moving local resources into the foundation which each build action costing resources over time. There is also a resource over time action for the existing global resource system.

Another game play feature involves using structures instead of nodes for resource production like Warlords Battlecry where multiple worker units can increase mine output and such. Similarly structures can produce both resources from nothing, units from nothing, new resources from old resources, units from resources, items from resources or even units from items all on a timer or just by command. The unit from item system allows for stuff like customized mechs or ships or w/e, although I am not sure how I will handle it model wise.

Most of these features will be handled in the XML, although the game currently has Lua scripting support. I was thinking of switch to or adding Python and/or Javascript, I am not a Lua fan. I also added a couple of RPG features controlled by XML like arbitrary damage and damage resistance types and armor types. There will be a stat system for heroes and an enhance level system from all units, Glest derivatives currently support only a simple level system. I also added new effects like lifesteal, manaburn, poison, fear, and awe.

The next part we get to is AI. I am adding a couple separate AIs for side projects now but I intend to merge it all into a larger utility based AI system. AI will be able to accept various player inputs to allow fine control, but it will also have some hard coded but flexible capabilities. For instance the AI can understand maps similarly to a player on its own even without modders hard coding in things like chokepoints. The AI can read the part of the map it can see, that's right screw cheating AIs, and it will make defenses on choke points and such on its own. It should have a decent wall understanding as well.