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[Yanlin]

I'd love to help test it. This looks bloody awesome.

WE SHALL DEFEAT WoW!

[Drakale]

Hey there, i have been following this and i must say i really like your concept 

I saw your rendering of multiple islands and I was wondering, do you expect to render every other adjacent players in a seamless way? Seems a little ambitious, especially if you are expecting to have hundreds of simultaneous players. Maybe you could fragment the sky in zones, delimited by height, but this kinda defeat the cool concept of higher isles banding together on lower ones.

[Asehujiko]

I'd love to help test it. This looks bloody awesome.

WE SHALL DEFEAT WoW!

Good job jinxing the project. Claiming to beat wow is a surefire way to go under. Need i cite Tabula Rasa, Hellgate Londed and soon to be Hyborean Adventures?

[Servant Corps]

PVP MMORTSes will only target a certain niche anyway. You can't beat WoW. What you need to do is make sure that you dominate this niche, keep subscription fees coming, and manage the progression grind to ensure that people stay within the game. As long as the money pours in, you prevail.

[Vactor]

I've got a standalone(should be at least) engine test that people can check out if they'd like.  I want to make sure that people are able to run it on various systems.

http://rapidshare.com/files/171536777/Airlands.01.01.rar

demonstrates individual airland z level movement and multiple airlands

Controls:

Q = zoom in
A = zoom out

Arrow Keys = orbit Camera

Z = decrease 1 z level
X = increase 1 z level

known issues:
- hitting z or x before the airland has completed an in progress z level movement will offset the relative elevation, allowing you to get stuck between levels.
- resolution is set at 1280 x 960, if your screen is smaller than this just use alt-f4 to close it.

[Boksi]

...

Awwwww....

I've got to figure out how to install this damn service pack. Stupid .NET framework, why do I need to have the WSP 2 installed to use it? Grrrrr....

[Hawkfrost]

Trying it now...

It works with Linux right?

EDIT: Nevermind, it doesn't.
I'll switch over to XP sometime and try it.

[PTTG??]

So, when you are playing, will you have the opportunity to define the "culture" of your Skyland Airland? By this I mean, will you be able to build:
-A symmetrical, fortified cityscape from end to end, with concentric walls of white stone.
-A rural network of farming villages with a big town by the tower.
-A rocky misshapen lump that, while unpleasant to live on, is strong against attack.
-A ring of rocky walls surrounding a lake with the tower in the center.
-A topographic map that, when seen from above, looks surprisingly like a rectangular, bearded face...
-An organic pattern that happens as new needs appear and new areas are attached to the edge as necessary.

Something else: While I understand that combat would require direct docking so as to successfully gain territory, why would trade and other things? Free Traders could have vessels with Flying Stone ballast and travel from Airland to airland, or have players arrange regular shipments of trade goods amongst allies. At the same time, you could plot to have spies and small groups of soldiers fly to enemy Airlands to board and cause some havoc- though you couldn't gain land, information can be just as valuable.

Small traders have two advantages: one in that they allow allies to have permanent lasting trade without being joined at the hip, and it encourages players to have areas that are accessable- after all, traders need to get to the stockpiles easily, but that means having a direct path from the edge of the airland where the docks are to the very heart!

About the "balance on- and off-line players thing: Perhaps you should go with the old standard of daily action point allowances? In this case it could be mana points used to change course or attack or cast spells, to name a few things, and you need to go into a trance to restore them. Even without any mana points though, you can still give normal orders to your troops (I like the standing orders thing, like giving orders for troops to patrol an area or respond to scout reports from over here). This means that someone who's AFK is doing something important- restoring points- and though it's necissary to spend some time AFK in order to play well, there's no aboslute limit- even with no points, you can give orders and protect yourself, but if you save energy for later, you are much stronger.

One last thing- Why have engineers? You're a mage! As the armies control each new tile, it falls more onto your mystical influence. If you break contact with your opponent, tiles more than 50% controlled by you are more strongly connected to your tower than his, and thus come with you. The more strongly tiles are connected to you, the less mana it takes to rip them away from the opponent, thus discouraging players from simply sending the armies quickly overland and claiming 51% of everything, as this would take huge amounts of mana. What works better would be moving out and capturing tiles 100% at a time.

Of course, even if you have 100% control of a tile, if it is isolated amongst enemy tiles- that is, not connected all the way back to you and able to slide out of place, it remains with the enemy. Tiles that aren't 100% allied with the current holder of them gradually tick back up to 100%, meaning hit-and-run attacks, or the action of spies and mercenaries, have a small but important ability to create weak beachheads on enemy Airlands.

Now I must stop typing, or I will forget to eat.

[Tahin]

Hm. I'm not sure about having "action points" in a game that should really be real-time. Action points always seem like a poor way to keep people from playing. You want people to play. If you just give people who are offline some advantages, or just make them disappear after a while, then it should actually be fun.

Also, please don't fall into the trap of "you need to be level 70 to have fun, and it will take you weeks if not months to reach that, so until then you get to grind endlessly!" The game should be fun and playable at all experience levels.

I don't know if anyone already mentioned this, but you should be able to "tow" other airlands around. Several small airlands could dock and form one large airland, allowing newbies with some friends to carry out raids just like a larger airland. Then, of course, you'd have massive airlands docking with other huge airlands, which might require some limitation, or something.

[socially_inept_butterfly]

I don't know if anyone already mentioned this, but you should be able to "tow" other airlands around. Several small airlands could dock and form one large airland, allowing newbies with some friends to carry out raids just like a larger airland. Then, of course, you'd have massive airlands docking with other huge airlands, which might require some limitation, or something.

The magical power required to hold together large airlands is just to much, so only the smaller sort can do it...that's an easy limitation, right?

[Vactor]

First off has anyone gotten this to work? (yes right now its just for windows, but let me know if anyone gets it working on anything else)

So, when you are playing, will you have the opportunity to define the "culture" of your Skyland Airland? By this I mean, will you be able to build:
-A symmetrical, fortified cityscape from end to end, with concentric walls of white stone.
-A rural network of farming villages with a big town by the tower.
-A rocky misshapen lump that, while unpleasant to live on, is strong against attack.
-A ring of rocky walls surrounding a lake with the tower in the center.
-A topographic map that, when seen from above, looks surprisingly like a rectangular, bearded face...
-An organic pattern that happens as new needs appear and new areas are attached to the edge as necessary.

in short, yes, this is exactly how i want the game to play.  My hope is that I can avoid a one good solution system, where each of these different playstyles will have its unique advantages/disadvantages.  I'm a bit unsure about multi-tile bodies of water right now, but the same effect could be had by leaving negative space (ie a ring of tiles around the edge with spokes that lead inward to the center tower.  As far as a topographics go right now I'm considering a rather simple system of 5 different types of tiles: Mountain, Hill, Flat, Valley, Pit, all existing on the same 2d plane.  And while at some point having multi-tile slopes would be great i'd like to tackle some other things first. 

(also it is a hex tile grid so making bearded dwarf images would require some adjusting)

As to your other ideas:
- I do really like the trading vessels, and it is quite likely that i'll go that direction.  I'll still allow direct docking for trade.  I'm unsure if these will be npc driven, or if players can devote their airland to developing fleets of vessels and become wealthy merchant princes within a free market system where players can post buy and sell offers in a marketplace, similarly to how the Eve market works.

- As far as action point allowances go, This has always seemed to be used in turn structured browser games, in order to stop people from playing.  I would prefer this game to be one you can sit down and play for an hour or two, or one you can spend the entire weekend playing with some friends.  I will of course have some limiting factors, land development would take time in addition to resources, avatar advancement would also likely be time based, again, more akin to Eve in that regard. 

-Tile capture is something i'll be considering as this goes forward, one of the ideas behind the engineers is that various tiles would have different types of bond attachments on some of their sides, and if the player moved the tile to line up the side of one tile with the side of another tile that shared the same bond attachment they could enhance the strength of the bond.  This would give the player another choice to make when arranging tiles, what may create the strongest physically bonded airland, wouldn't necessarily create the best surface for your civilization to grow on. (ie choosing between putting a mountain tile in the way of a high traffic route, or using a flat tile that isn't bonded as well)

[PTTG??]

Let me clarify what I mean by what Mana Points would be used for. I'm thinking specific actions, like re-organizing the landscape, casting super-spells or attacking/docking with other Airlands. In other words, actions that should be balanced to be limited.

Most actions, including but not limited to: upgrading tiles, training armies, making treaties, defending oneself, giving orders, would be non-magic. These are things that should be unlimited or unrestricted.

Oh, new post.
EDIT:
Hmm, I see. Sweet, I'm really glad that we'll have that flexibility. I see what you mean about the problems with point limits. I'll continue to think about this...

About tile types, we've been playing Sid Meir's Alpha Centauri, and if you think about it there are some nice ideas to take from the terrain system there. In SMAC, they have moisture, elevation, and rockiness, values for each tile. That combines to create a matrix of possible tiles. A similar system could be used here using, say, Moisture, Roughness, and Temperature. With a Low, medium, and high value for each tile, that gives you 27 possibilities, and an easy way to modify them; simply cast a warming spell, and that area will change from being tundra into prairie. Cast it again, and it becomes desert. Add special items, like structures, mines, river sources, and you will have a lot of orderly variety.

[Aqizzar]

First off has anyone gotten this to work? (yes right now its just for windows, but let me know if anyone gets it working on anything else)

I'm trying to install it now but this is taking forever.  It's still doing the .NET framework setup.  I keep thinking it's frozen, but every time I hit the cancel button the progress bar jumps a few more spaces.

EDIT: Okay, it worked.  Program runs just fine, no problems on my custom-built PC running XP.

I guess you didn't implement the camera movement limitations yet, since you can spin 360 around the island and look at it upside down.  For the button-mash-z-level-misalignment, you could just disable z-level control while the island is moving.  Also, why does the camera automatically zoom in as altitude goes down and vice versa?


While I'm waiting, here's a play balance framework idea.

You mentioned that heavier, i.e. higher-level islands would float lower, and lower-level islands would be protected by their altitude.  Meanwhile, new land and resources could be acquired on the ground, I assume by wrenching new chunks of earth into the sky.

How about a reversal, giving low-level players more power.  Like this-

-To get new tiles/resources from the ground, players have to send vessels of some sort down to bring it back up.

-The smaller the island is, the lower to the ground it is (justification being something like islands get their lifting power by repelling the ground, big islands being better at it).  Also, when islands are damaged, if a chunk breaks off, it'll sink back down to where to where its new size would naturally put it.  Obviously there'd be ways of changing altitude without changing size, but a given size island would have a natural repulsion that it tries to gravitate to.

-When forces are sent to attack other islands, if they're too badly damaged they'll try to fly home.  But damaged units (vessels? creatures?) have a hard time regaining altitude.  Forces sent upward have an easy time retreating, but forces sent downward that don't succeed will probably be lost completely.

-The result of these taken together give low-level players a lot of relative power.  Smaller islands have better access to new resources from below and loot falling from above.  Big islands have to send their resource ships through a gauntlet of piratical newbs.  And if they try to attack newbs, they have to face a hard choice - send some of their forces that could be a complete waste if it doesn't succeed; or send a lot of their forces, and be left open to attack by other players.

-As an aside, the "bigger islands float higher" system would impose natural limitations on island size and resources.  The higher into the air you go, you have to build new ways of supporting your population.  And islands could only get so big before they risk shunting themselves right out of the atmosphere, and would have to jettison some lift.

[Vactor]

EDIT: Okay, it worked.  Program runs just fine, no problems on my custom-built PC running XP.

I guess you didn't implement the camera movement limitations yet, since you can spin 360 around the island and look at it upside down.  For the button-mash-z-level-misalignment, you could just disable z-level control while the island is moving.  Also, why does the camera automatically zoom in as altitude goes down and vice versa?

Yeah, the misalignment and camera limits i just haven't done yet, the camera is zooming because of the way i have my translation and view matrices tied together, the camera thinks of itself as always facing straight down the z axis, so while it is tracking the airland as it moves the camera's position down the z axis it thinks that the camera needs to be moving down its zoom (also the z axis).  This will be getting fixed at some point, I just wanted to get something out on other people's computers to make sure I could get it to work on them.

[Neonivek]

To what extent will Tiles be transformable by absorbing Ambiant Energies? (such as the electrical storm example you gave which is interesting as land)

Also how many elements are you planning on?

It would be interesting if some combos could have unexpected outcomes such as by transformation. Having a land go from Fire to Normal brings Igneous land, Ice to Normal brings Sedentary land, Both fire and Ice and you get Metamorphic Land!

As for Water: If they go over the edge you could make some nice looking waterfalls and maybe a rainbow... Same goes with Lava... plus any other liquid you think of adding.