Reading the file from the disk is slower, its better to turn it into an exe file so it can use the memory to search all those Goto Labels, and just read the game resources files like graphics and sounds in from disk.
MACHINE SPECS: MY OLD MACHINE I have the game running on is a Nec Powermate series desktop computer. with an Intel Core Tm2 Quad CPU. with 3 Gigs Ram 2.67 ghz (32 bit windows Vista Operating System.and has a 990 mb hdd.. VPM on that machine is set to 4606 it has a Nividia Geforce 8600 GT video card in it. But the video card is starting to degrade, I also have the game saved on my new machine also for a backup as well. But the new machiine is an HP Pavillion all in one Pc Desktop with windows 8.1 with 16 gigs ram with an Intel Core TM i7-4790t CPU in it, 2.70 ghz with a 2 Terabyte Hard Drive with a Nvidia Gforce 810A video card. That should be good enough to make a 3d game on it.
UPDATE: NEW STUFF ADDED. A Device called a WRCC or Wormhole Relocator Control Crystal has now been added. Long story short. It allows you to shift the wormhole entrance if you can't access it manually by ship if a system has far too much dense clutter preventing access. I will also include in some systems wormholes that are UNSTABLE and erractic and if you try to use these old decayed holes they will throw you anywhere in the galaxy so if you go in without the WRCC device and without the special Slipstream drive you are taking a risk of being thrown anywhere in the systems.......... It could take half an hour so before the wormhole finally appears back again in that system because its unstable and erractic.
Only a certain alien on one of the systems will have the WRCC But to get to him, you have to get pass the Megallanc Barrier (full of volatile gases), so If you get too badly banged up trying to get through the barrier, you may have to find a trader elsewhere to upgade your shields first. It will be costly so you will have to farm credits in order to buy the WRCC device if you want to use those old wormholes..
MINING: If you buy the Chiesek mining ore facility in Telos system, You get no staff, so you have to hire robots to staff it by asking the robots to work for you (they are found around the bars and clubs on Telos as soon as you buy the facility a mini treasure hunt game start and you need to hire 50 robots to staff it). But these droids are part of Bad Sector, and they will have their individual Personalities, as well as their Machine Rights "Demmand cards" as all these these robots carry their own labor right cards with all the heavy brainwashing of Bad Sector's Machine Work Rights..
One of the robots will be called corporate bull and if you come across that droid at reception he wil be pretty tough to try to convince to leave his job to work for you because he will defend himself with all kinds of time wasting corporate brainwashing waffle waffle nonsense from Bad Sector and I will give him up to TWO HUNDRED LINES of random utter rubbish to drone all away with.....If you grind all through all his business nonsene he will be the best worker, getting your mining extra credits. The only way to hire hm, you have to listen to all his corporate promos and other rubbish to impress him enough to work for you.
If bandits attack the facility, they may even try to steal some of your droids and threaten to sell them for scrap metal. If they break in and steal droids, your mining facility will stop functioning until you replace the lost staff and get rid of the intruders. if you Buy robots outside of Telos city to try to staff it with just slave labor droids from traders who don't beieve in Bad Sector's rights that will get the attention of Bad Sector because that faction is against slave labour of machines and try to cause trouble.
Also for the Dink Drink Drunk bar The bar that has overpowering Synthetic Drinks (these are not alcohol drinks) but they are alien drinks that have intoxicating effects. I need music that sounds Drunken every now and again of Plinky Plonk notes that go all lopsided and off-key to suit the Wobbly Giddy Head-Spinning atmosphere in the bar..so even the alien piano player is all intoxicated while trying to play the piano.
The ony guy that'a not intoxicted in the bar is the barman (go figure.).
The Drinks of this interstellar bar: Beat the Flake Shakes, Giddy Dew Drop Blocks, Nebula Sunrise, Saturn on the Rocks, and Unconscious Hits, The Head Spinner and Knockout Punch,, (bar is found in cities on certain solar systems;)
So I still think a 3d engine version is better than having just a 2d turn version based board system,. the advantage with a 2d turn based system is that I can put a whole load more rooms and alot more detail and switches and lags to put more depth in the storylines of the game than with a 3d engine which 3d has limitations on the amount of switches and flags I can use, unless you break it all down into small 3d modules but you do get a much better looking lifelike environment with 3D when you can get those 3d models and get all the dialog branches all working for them to bring it to life.
My Options
If I do a 3D version then I can probably do up to 200 systems, so the game would be alot smaller, but they would look better in 3d. The downside: Alot more work to build and create, take a alot more GIGS for all the 3d resources, and is more trickier also to try to wire everything up, very slow development time is the downside of 3d...
If I continue to do the 2D turn-based version of the game, then I can fit alot more of the game in, 500+ systems. (very easy to build and make, fast and easy to wire this up.)
It's slow because I'm only using the wndows Cmd.exe dos interpreter to run the game with. It reads only 1 line at a time into the memory. so it has to spool it one line at a time reading from the HDD, that slows the HDD a little as the file gets more bigger and bigger as I continue adding lines of code into the script. So you start to get Lagging issues when the file reaches a certain size.....
If I had a batch to exe converter program that allowed big batch files to be turned into an exe file, then the game could then be loaded into the memory instead and it should run at a much more faster smoother speed with no more hitching or pausing issues. But beause the 2d version is turn-based a slight pause isn't going to matter much. But when you have the 3d version, its going to matter.
The other option too is to pack the audio audio and graphics files into a big sound and graphics Resource library pack file and read the files directly from inside the file but I don't know how to do that. But that would cut down all the hundreds of little files that cause hdd slowdown and lagging issues when the hdd has to skip over hundreds of little files in the directory just to try to read it.
But at the moment the batch converter that I did try out, only allows small batch files to be turned into exe' s and won't process a big batch file because when I tried the program had crashed on me when loading my file into it.
The Blueprint node system they use in Unreal is a bit like a C++ wrapper, the logic is the same, only difference with Blueprints, you don't have to type in those nasty brackets. you just plugin alot of these nodes instead.
Yeah I also thought that too that you just needed to turn off off the LIT mode and just build your geometry all up in the UNLIT mode instead and then when you ready, just rebuild all the lightmaps again and that solves the problem. But it didn't. when I tried to build geometry in the unlit mode, the lightmaps stilll kept on crashing.
They got patent bricks out there too, got to be careful not to get hit by any of those.
That's exactly what I'm getting at Unreal 3 is a workhorse, There are two things I don't agree with of Epic' Games engine set up methods. )THIS was UDK ENGINE I had these gripes.
1. Making you manually fetch the script files to edit manually through a third party program to manually hunt for all the scripts to edit instead of writing in all the new script changes to your game project directory.
2. Placing Lighmaps objects in at the start, intead of letting us place all the lightmap objects after we have first built up all of our geometry. This causes lightmaps to have to always be rebuilt all the time, slowing down the buld development time down to a snails crawl.
Not heard of Vector Operations or Projections but I did with a help of another guy did put a random array in my first batch game for teleporting me to any location in the gameworld. But I thought vectors was to do with 3d meshes or graphics.
But unreal 4 suppporting terrain map up to TEN TIMES the size of Skyrim, how can our machins support a terrain that size?
Imagine how long it would take to build that map with lightmaps
Ah Yes, unfortunately you need to script code to add in all the menu systems, the screens options, the separate screens from the game engine itself for the galaxy systems. Hmm .
Ok so the machine script is the glue to all the bricks. Well the batch to exe converter they have I don't think will work on my 52000 line batch script because its too long so it will crash, but if it did, then you have your 2d turn based massive game that the other guy was screaming out for because he loves those orion turn-based 2 board games. And I do admit turn based does have an element of addiction about it, (especially loot rewards) but when I tried to turn my 52000 line batch script to exe the program just crashed, saying something like file is too long error can't process batch file too many lines ect, and then found it, it can only compile short length batch files, not large ones. So I don't have a compiler than can do large batch files to exe...
But For the 3d version the 3d is the harder way, Why don't I just gather in all the bricks anyway and then I can start glueing things in last if I can't glue them up all now.then at least I will have all the game components all done and just need to glue the whole thing all together.
Unreal, Is what I call a workhorse engine, so a workhorse engine expects you to do all the heavy manual lifting. I hate that...Apart from its frequently lighting crashes, making you do everything all manually is the thing that I don't like about it. You have to do alot of extra work.
The game engines are not yet at the point where they have got all the tools avaliable to allow users to quickly construct the big interactive scenes in the games like the one I'm trying to do. EXCEPT if you string together a bunch of powerful programs to help you do it like Worldmachine to build distant hills and landscapes with. So I might give Unreal another chance. Since it looks like it can import big scale landscape in from worldmachine. I will take a look at worldmachine to see what it can offer, it might be just like Terragen in making the landscapes. and for doing all the game props you would need 3ds max or Blender, and zbrush. I'm not sure what Zbrush is, I think is for smoothing the models to make them look more better and polished in the game but it probably creates the 3d models as well, and for trees and grass you would need a program like speedtree. I haven't looked at these programs yet. Because I have not started work on the 3d interactive landscapes of my planets.
And for the space skymaps I would need a 2d art generator program to draw the nebulas and stars and planets. for the skyboxes. and if in space itself, you would need th space skyboes as well as the 3d cloud nebulas to beable to fly into the actual nebula which would I think have to be generated either inside the engine as a 3d cloud or place in as a big static 3d mesh.
So let's start adding it up
Worldmachine will cost $99 to use it if not using the pro license.
Zbrush over $700 dollars the commercial license will cost to use for a single user.
Speedtree Subscription based service $19 a month
3ds Max or Maya - Over $5,000 for these 3d modeling programs. I love to see how they can keep this price up with the world already in a global recession. I think they need to rethink their strategy because people are not going to have the money when times are hard..
Alternative - BLENDER - FREE.
The Disadvantage, UNREAL likes Importing in from 3DS MAX or from MAYA can import from Blender, but dosen't always like Blender.
So we can either buy these programs, and bankrupt ourselves in the process, or we can wait until the tools for the game are made as plugins for the engines like with Unity with the Dialog text package, (Unity don't have cinema cutscenes in their Dialog package yet or UMA to procedurally create 3d game models inside the unity engine which is a break through for Fernando. Or maybe they will create a realistic looking 3d ocean shader package as well.
Depends on what type of game you want. Since mine has storyline dialog in it, I don't have to think too long about writing alot of code because I'm busy writing out all the storylines.
NOW I'm going to talk about Unity.
UMA-2. I watched a video on this to see what it was, and found that This unity program script reminds me alot of Make Human or FUSE. Create your own 3d human models type of script for the Unity Engine. Looks rather interesting...
And then I looked at the other link to do with creating Interactive Dialog in Unity
CUTSCENES
MY LIST OF IMPOSSIBLE DEMMANDS Well the truth is I want my close-up scenes (where you walk up to people in the game to talk to or trigger off a turn-based cutscene) to be in Wide Screen Cinematics with the Subtitles on or just audio if they are turned off. There is to be no other clutter at all or any game characters popping in and out like Mary Pop-ins with their small little speech dialog boxes.
You get enough of that pop up stuff with the unwanted websites.. Instead the game characters are to remain on the screen where they are at all times as they talking out their dialog and nobody is to dismiss themelves or pop out or in unless they are forced to leave the scene or to enter the scene as part of the game storyline.
For game intermission sequences (scenes) over radio transmisions with characters that are in another location, Tiny Pop up Pic with audio that turns on and of when they talking their audio to you and at the same time you answer and talk back audio to them (be even better if face pic is lip synching the audio). THIS IS NOT TURN-BASED dialog. because you can still run around on the planet while still talking to them while on the move just like in real life. So I want the interaction dialog in the game to be realistic fully interactive in these transmission intermission scenes.
And if a party member is mumbling at random saying silly things every now and again like everyday people do when they talk loud to themselves, or speaking idle chat to you audio only.or show subtitles if its turned on.
So do I want to make a game like Orion 2 Universe which is all seems to be a turn-based game played on these boards? No, I don't want everything in my game (in the 3d version) to be all just turn-based. I want full 3d interaction in parts of the game as well especially for the ground and inside the ship) and just let the main storyline dialog be turn based with cinematics cutscenes (which can be also bypassed if you don't want to watch through them)...
Reading the file from the disk is slower, its better to turn it into an exe file so it can use the memory to search all those Goto Labels, and just read the game resources files like graphics and sounds in from disk.
MACHINE SPECS: MY OLD MACHINE I have the game running on is a Nec Powermate series desktop computer. with an Intel Core Tm2 Quad CPU. with 3 Gigs Ram 2.67 ghz (32 bit windows Vista Operating System.and has a 990 mb hdd.. VPM on that machine is set to 4606 it has a Nividia Geforce 8600 GT video card in it. But the video card is starting to degrade, I also have the game saved on my new machine also for a backup as well. But the new machiine is an HP Pavillion all in one Pc Desktop with windows 8.1 with 16 gigs ram with an Intel Core TM i7-4790t CPU in it, 2.70 ghz with a 2 Terabyte Hard Drive with a Nvidia Gforce 810A video card. That should be good enough to make a 3d game on it.
=========================================================================
UPDATE: NEW STUFF ADDED. A Device called a WRCC or Wormhole Relocator Control Crystal has now been added. Long story short. It allows you to shift the wormhole entrance if you can't access it manually by ship if a system has far too much dense clutter preventing access. I will also include in some systems wormholes that are UNSTABLE and erractic and if you try to use these old decayed holes they will throw you anywhere in the galaxy so if you go in without the WRCC device and without the special Slipstream drive you are taking a risk of being thrown anywhere in the systems.......... It could take half an hour so before the wormhole finally appears back again in that system because its unstable and erractic.
Only a certain alien on one of the systems will have the WRCC But to get to him, you have to get pass the Megallanc Barrier (full of volatile gases), so If you get too badly banged up trying to get through the barrier, you may have to find a trader elsewhere to upgade your shields first. It will be costly so you will have to farm credits in order to buy the WRCC device if you want to use those old wormholes..
MINING: If you buy the Chiesek mining ore facility in Telos system, You get no staff, so you have to hire robots to staff it by asking the robots to work for you (they are found around the bars and clubs on Telos as soon as you buy the facility a mini treasure hunt game start and you need to hire 50 robots to staff it). But these droids are part of Bad Sector, and they will have their individual Personalities, as well as their Machine Rights "Demmand cards" as all these these robots carry their own labor right cards with all the heavy brainwashing of Bad Sector's Machine Work Rights..
One of the robots will be called corporate bull and if you come across that droid at reception he wil be pretty tough to try to convince to leave his job to work for you because he will defend himself with all kinds of time wasting corporate brainwashing waffle waffle nonsense from Bad Sector and I will give him up to TWO HUNDRED LINES of random utter rubbish to drone all away with.....If you grind all through all his business nonsene he will be the best worker, getting your mining extra credits. The only way to hire hm, you have to listen to all his corporate promos and other rubbish to impress him enough to work for you.
If bandits attack the facility, they may even try to steal some of your droids and threaten to sell them for scrap metal. If they break in and steal droids, your mining facility will stop functioning until you replace the lost staff and get rid of the intruders. if you Buy robots outside of Telos city to try to staff it with just slave labor droids from traders who don't beieve in Bad Sector's rights that will get the attention of Bad Sector because that faction is against slave labour of machines and try to cause trouble.
Also for the Dink Drink Drunk bar The bar that has overpowering Synthetic Drinks (these are not alcohol drinks) but they are alien drinks that have intoxicating effects. I need music that sounds Drunken every now and again of Plinky Plonk notes that go all lopsided and off-key to suit the Wobbly Giddy Head-Spinning atmosphere in the bar..so even the alien piano player is all intoxicated while trying to play the piano.
The ony guy that'a not intoxicted in the bar is the barman (go figure.).
The Drinks of this interstellar bar: Beat the Flake Shakes, Giddy Dew Drop Blocks, Nebula Sunrise, Saturn on the Rocks, and Unconscious Hits, The Head Spinner and Knockout Punch,, (bar is found in cities on certain solar systems;)
So I still think a 3d engine version is better than having just a 2d turn version based board system,. the advantage with a 2d turn based system is that I can put a whole load more rooms and alot more detail and switches and lags to put more depth in the storylines of the game than with a 3d engine which 3d has limitations on the amount of switches and flags I can use, unless you break it all down into small 3d modules but you do get a much better looking lifelike environment with 3D when you can get those 3d models and get all the dialog branches all working for them to bring it to life.
My Options
If I do a 3D version then I can probably do up to 200 systems, so the game would be alot smaller, but they would look better in 3d. The downside: Alot more work to build and create, take a alot more GIGS for all the 3d resources, and is more trickier also to try to wire everything up, very slow development time is the downside of 3d...
If I continue to do the 2D turn-based version of the game, then I can fit alot more of the game in, 500+ systems. (very easy to build and make, fast and easy to wire this up.)
It's slow because I'm only using the wndows Cmd.exe dos interpreter to run the game with. It reads only 1 line at a time into the memory. so it has to spool it one line at a time reading from the HDD, that slows the HDD a little as the file gets more bigger and bigger as I continue adding lines of code into the script. So you start to get Lagging issues when the file reaches a certain size.....
If I had a batch to exe converter program that allowed big batch files to be turned into an exe file, then the game could then be loaded into the memory instead and it should run at a much more faster smoother speed with no more hitching or pausing issues. But beause the 2d version is turn-based a slight pause isn't going to matter much. But when you have the 3d version, its going to matter.
The other option too is to pack the audio audio and graphics files into a big sound and graphics Resource library pack file and read the files directly from inside the file but I don't know how to do that. But that would cut down all the hundreds of little files that cause hdd slowdown and lagging issues when the hdd has to skip over hundreds of little files in the directory just to try to read it.
But at the moment the batch converter that I did try out, only allows small batch files to be turned into exe' s and won't process a big batch file because when I tried the program had crashed on me when loading my file into it.
Mind you maybe turning my batch file into an exe might speed up the running of it. since exe's load themselves all into the ram don't they?
The Blueprint node system they use in Unreal is a bit like a C++ wrapper, the logic is the same, only difference with Blueprints, you don't have to type in those nasty brackets. you just plugin alot of these nodes instead.
Yeah I also thought that too that you just needed to turn off off the LIT mode and just build your geometry all up in the UNLIT mode instead and then when you ready, just rebuild all the lightmaps again and that solves the problem. But it didn't. when I tried to build geometry in the unlit mode, the lightmaps stilll kept on crashing.
They got patent bricks out there too, got to be careful not to get hit by any of those.
That's exactly what I'm getting at Unreal 3 is a workhorse, There are two things I don't agree with of Epic' Games engine set up methods. )THIS was UDK ENGINE I had these gripes.
1. Making you manually fetch the script files to edit manually through a third party program to manually hunt for all the scripts to edit instead of writing in all the new script changes to your game project directory.
2. Placing Lighmaps objects in at the start, intead of letting us place all the lightmap objects after we have first built up all of our geometry. This causes lightmaps to have to always be rebuilt all the time, slowing down the buld development time down to a snails crawl.
Not heard of Vector Operations or Projections but I did with a help of another guy did put a random array in my first batch game for teleporting me to any location in the gameworld. But I thought vectors was to do with 3d meshes or graphics.
But unreal 4 suppporting terrain map up to TEN TIMES the size of Skyrim, how can our machins support a terrain that size?
Imagine how long it would take to build that map with lightmaps
Ah Yes, unfortunately you need to script code to add in all the menu systems, the screens options, the separate screens from the game engine itself for the galaxy systems. Hmm .
Ok so the machine script is the glue to all the bricks. Well the batch to exe converter they have I don't think will work on my 52000 line batch script because its too long so it will crash, but if it did, then you have your 2d turn based massive game that the other guy was screaming out for because he loves those orion turn-based 2 board games. And I do admit turn based does have an element of addiction about it, (especially loot rewards) but when I tried to turn my 52000 line batch script to exe the program just crashed, saying something like file is too long error can't process batch file too many lines ect, and then found it, it can only compile short length batch files, not large ones. So I don't have a compiler than can do large batch files to exe...
But For the 3d version the 3d is the harder way, Why don't I just gather in all the bricks anyway and then I can start glueing things in last if I can't glue them up all now.then at least I will have all the game components all done and just need to glue the whole thing all together.
Unreal, Is what I call a workhorse engine, so a workhorse engine expects you to do all the heavy manual lifting. I hate that...Apart from its frequently lighting crashes, making you do everything all manually is the thing that I don't like about it. You have to do alot of extra work.
The game engines are not yet at the point where they have got all the tools avaliable to allow users to quickly construct the big interactive scenes in the games like the one I'm trying to do. EXCEPT if you string together a bunch of powerful programs to help you do it like Worldmachine to build distant hills and landscapes with. So I might give Unreal another chance. Since it looks like it can import big scale landscape in from worldmachine. I will take a look at worldmachine to see what it can offer, it might be just like Terragen in making the landscapes. and for doing all the game props you would need 3ds max or Blender, and zbrush. I'm not sure what Zbrush is, I think is for smoothing the models to make them look more better and polished in the game but it probably creates the 3d models as well, and for trees and grass you would need a program like speedtree. I haven't looked at these programs yet. Because I have not started work on the 3d interactive landscapes of my planets.
And for the space skymaps I would need a 2d art generator program to draw the nebulas and stars and planets. for the skyboxes. and if in space itself, you would need th space skyboes as well as the 3d cloud nebulas to beable to fly into the actual nebula which would I think have to be generated either inside the engine as a 3d cloud or place in as a big static 3d mesh.
So let's start adding it up
Worldmachine will cost $99 to use it if not using the pro license.
Zbrush over $700 dollars the commercial license will cost to use for a single user.
Speedtree Subscription based service $19 a month
3ds Max or Maya - Over $5,000 for these 3d modeling programs. I love to see how they can keep this price up with the world already in a global recession. I think they need to rethink their strategy because people are not going to have the money when times are hard..
Alternative - BLENDER - FREE.
The Disadvantage, UNREAL likes Importing in from 3DS MAX or from MAYA can import from Blender, but dosen't always like Blender.
So we can either buy these programs, and bankrupt ourselves in the process, or we can wait until the tools for the game are made as plugins for the engines like with Unity with the Dialog text package, (Unity don't have cinema cutscenes in their Dialog package yet or UMA to procedurally create 3d game models inside the unity engine which is a break through for Fernando. Or maybe they will create a realistic looking 3d ocean shader package as well.
Depends on what type of game you want. Since mine has storyline dialog in it, I don't have to think too long about writing alot of code because I'm busy writing out all the storylines.
NOW I'm going to talk about Unity.
UMA-2. I watched a video on this to see what it was, and found that This unity program script reminds me alot of Make Human or FUSE. Create your own 3d human models type of script for the Unity Engine. Looks rather interesting...
And then I looked at the other link to do with creating Interactive Dialog in Unity
CUTSCENES
MY LIST OF IMPOSSIBLE DEMMANDS Well the truth is I want my close-up scenes (where you walk up to people in the game to talk to or trigger off a turn-based cutscene) to be in Wide Screen Cinematics with the Subtitles on or just audio if they are turned off. There is to be no other clutter at all or any game characters popping in and out like Mary Pop-ins with their small little speech dialog boxes.
You get enough of that pop up stuff with the unwanted websites.. Instead the game characters are to remain on the screen where they are at all times as they talking out their dialog and nobody is to dismiss themelves or pop out or in unless they are forced to leave the scene or to enter the scene as part of the game storyline.
For game intermission sequences (scenes) over radio transmisions with characters that are in another location, Tiny Pop up Pic with audio that turns on and of when they talking their audio to you and at the same time you answer and talk back audio to them (be even better if face pic is lip synching the audio). THIS IS NOT TURN-BASED dialog. because you can still run around on the planet while still talking to them while on the move just like in real life. So I want the interaction dialog in the game to be realistic fully interactive in these transmission intermission scenes.
And if a party member is mumbling at random saying silly things every now and again like everyday people do when they talk loud to themselves, or speaking idle chat to you audio only.or show subtitles if its turned on.
So do I want to make a game like Orion 2 Universe which is all seems to be a turn-based game played on these boards? No, I don't want everything in my game (in the 3d version) to be all just turn-based. I want full 3d interaction in parts of the game as well especially for the ground and inside the ship) and just let the main storyline dialog be turn based with cinematics cutscenes (which can be also bypassed if you don't want to watch through them)...
And Does having high typing speeds help with the development time?
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