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[qwertyuiopas]

Well, after trying the demo, I had only one issue: the window appeared too high and left, making the normal methods of interacting with it hard or impossible(close by taskbar, immovable).

Also, at least in openGL, the order of transformations is important..

In a rotational view like thing(works about the same as yours), I do stuff in the following order: zoom, vertical rotation, horizontal rotation, movement, drawing.

I (still) know nothing of XNA, but I would assume that order of operations could solve your problem.

[The Doctor]

I like the idea of normal citizens get experience at doing things... by doing them, like how Dwarf Fortress does it. Are you going to use that?

[Tahin]

Hm. I do think that it should keep track of your citizens separately, but that might get difficult.
Also, as far as customization goes, I'd like to see the ability to change how your tower and various buildings look at a purely aesthetic level. In an online game, having a unique identity is important. Also, customized units would be really nice.
Of course, that would be a bit difficult, but just a few sliders to determine chaos/order of your tower, and maybe the colors, or something, would be enough. As long as I can make my airland stand out in a sea of other airlands, I'm happy. Ooh, what about flags?
And I don't feel like booting into windows to check it out, but how smoothly can you move in the demo? The controls are one of the most important aspects of a game, for me. I understand that moving a giant flying chunk of rock around in the air might be a but cumbersome, but it should at least move smoothly.

[Ivefan]

Transporters and said traders could be zeppelins and/or large flying creatures carrying units or goods.
PTTG?'s suggestion about hex variations is good but even more variations could be made if one is able to set the affinity of the hex to an element or the element beeing dependant to the current status of the hex. eg A dry, rough, high and hot could have the affinity to Fire being volcanoic and adding the wind element from the elevation.

[omagaalpha]

Also, at least in openGL, the order of transformations is important..

I (still) know nothing of XNA, but I would assume that order of operations could solve your problem.

Note from my college class where we use XNA order tranformation is following
1. Scale
2. Rotated
3.  Move it

[wallish]

As far as elements go, I would recommend the Lords of Magic layout (a standard layout) consisting of elements and their opposites:

Life - Death
Water - Fire
Earth - Air
Order - Chaos

More info at wiki

Or, if you'd like, you can use the element system I started fleshing out for a game I was making.  It was the backbone of the ultimate spell system in which there were literally no pre-made spells (if you'd like to hear more just say so, it'd be a long post).  There were 10 elements, 5 and their opposites:

Life - Death
Fire - Water
Air - Earth
Chaos - Order
Body - Spirit

[PTTG??]

Suppose that elemental affiliations where special attributes of tiles that from as natural free-floating tiles. These element tiles can be captured and used to improve your Airland, granting unique bonuses. Meanwhile, you can mold and sculpt your Skyland Airland however you choose, using various spells to affect the landscape, but these special tiles remain valuable.

[Vactor]

Quick update: the zoom bug has been squished, i was actually wrong about why it was happening it was simply a redundancy i had overlooked.  I put in code to easily swap between looking at the 3 different airlands in the engine demo, with any commands being given affecting the airland in focus.  I am now able to have all 3 in motion at the same time by giving each one a movement command.

I'll probably do some work on a smooth camera movement from tile to tile within your airland (the swapping right now is an instant change).  After I have that in i'll probably scrap the multiple airlands, clean up my code a bit, and focus on developing the basic gameplay systems of a single airland, along with a simple UI.

Well, after trying the demo, I had only one issue: the window appeared too high and left, making the normal methods of interacting with it hard or impossible(close by taskbar, immovable).

qwertyuiopas what is your screen resolution?

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?

I haven't spent too much time on this yet but a quick brainstorm came up with:

fire-ice
holy-demonic
poison-cleansing
stone-wind
radiance-darkness
lightning-water
growth-decay
misery-joy

I haven't had a chance to really consider the implications of the various elemental pairings working with one another.  The habituation aspect of picking up ambient energies is something i'd like to happen rather slowly, i'd prefer it is something that the player doesn't necessarily notice occurring, but is rather a consequence of the choices the player makes about other things.
(for instance if a player cuts off a town from their supply of food, and a famine strikes, killing the population the tile they lived on would become haunted by evil spirits, while the tile would be scarred, making recolonization there difficult it would open the opportunity for the player to harness said spirits and bind them into their army.

The other thing that this allows is for tiles to act as sources of particular energies, using the evil spirit example they could spread misery out into adjacent tiles, affecting the goings on in those areas, frightening enemy units and decreasing their morale greatly if they are undisciplined.  Or a player could build a tower with a fallen star on the top of it, granting radiance and heat to surrounding tiles, allowing them to continue to grow crops even in the darkest of locations.  Glacial tiles would begin freezing the tiles around them, while Volcano Tiles would periodically spread lava over nearby tiles.

I like the idea of normal citizens get experience at doing things... by doing them, like how Dwarf Fortress does it. Are you going to use that?

Yes, you won't be popping units out of a barracks building. My intent is that you'll have to have citizens that are able to go to the barracks and train, you'll need enough horses to provide mounts for your cavalry, resources and artisans to build them equipment, or things to trade other players for these things. 

Hm. I do think that it should keep track of your citizens separately, but that might get difficult.
Also, as far as customization goes, I'd like to see the ability to change how your tower and various buildings look at a purely aesthetic level. In an online game, having a unique identity is important. Also, customized units would be really nice.
Of course, that would be a bit difficult, but just a few sliders to determine chaos/order of your tower, and maybe the colors, or something, would be enough. As long as I can make my airland stand out in a sea of other airlands, I'm happy. Ooh, what about flags?
And I don't feel like booting into windows to check it out, but how smoothly can you move in the demo? The controls are one of the most important aspects of a game, for me. I understand that moving a giant flying chunk of rock around in the air might be a but cumbersome, but it should at least move smoothly.

I am very conscious of the fact that a lot of the identification that people feel with their avatar in an online game is its appearance.  My hope is that players will be able to make their airland and their tower distinct in many ways.  One of these would be the style of atmosphere based on the various types of buildings, races, elements.  I would want there to be a distinct difference that could range from having wooden palisades with wooden spikes and pitfalls, granite stone walls covered in moss, smooth marble walls that cast a protective semitransparent dome across the airland. 

This is all very very art intensive and is very much far on the horizon at this point.

The other aspect of individuality will be the types of units you are fielding, perhaps there aren't many other players fielding an army of mixed units of holy warriors of darkness along side druids of the cleansing rot .

[PTTG??]

You say that unit selection will be a part of customisation; with this include unit designing? equipping such and such armor, giving them all swords of a certain type, designing a banner? Something like, well, I hesitate to say it again, but, SMAC's unit workshop? That would actually cut down on the amount of art you need because you only need to design, for instance, 10 different items each for 6 slots, and you will have 1,000,000 different possible units.

I'm playing with a spreadsheet over here. This is to experiment with the kinds of values one would need to get a good variety of tiles. I've used Temperature, Roughness, and Moisture. Take a look at what I've got so far:

Code: [Select]

Temp Class Speed Support Food Wood Mine Pop
1 Cold 0 -2 -2 1 0 0
2 Cool 0 -1 0 1 0 1
3 Tmrpt 1 0 0 0 0 2
4 Warm 0 -1 0 -1 0 1
5 Hot 0 -2 -2 -1 0 0

Rugh
1 Flat 3 1 3 1 -5 2
2 Rollng 2 0 1 1 -3 1
3 Mixed 0 0 0 0 0 0
4 Hilly -2 0 -1 -1 3 -1
5 Mnt. -3 -1 -3 -1 5 -2

Mist
1 Prchd 1 -1 -3 -3 1 -1
2 Dry 1 0 -2 -1 0 0
3 Moist 0 0 0 0 0 1
4 Wet -1 0 2 1 0 0
5 Sokd -1 -1 3 3 -1 -1
This seems to be working well. The base number is 5 on a 10-point scale, so a parched flat hot location gets -2 points to support for being hot, +1 for being flat (and thus easy to navigate), and -1 for being super dry, for a net -2. This means that the location is (5-2=)3/10 in terms of 'support'.

[Tahin]

I like the idea of having simple mix-and-match customization, especially if it has actual gameplay affects. And all those numbers make my head hurt. Probably something to do with the fact that I just got done with my math final.

[qwertyuiopas]

1024*768

[Servant Corps]

People will always gravitiate towards the path of least resistance. If players gain +5 Attack if they wear pink, then by golly, everyone will wear pink. Nobody would wear any other color.

If you want customization, you have to make sure it DOESN'T matter. Then people would surely mix-and-match and choose what they like.

At least that is my cynical obesrvation of the MMO Scene. Also, if you do get this off the ground, don't reveal any stastitics at all about the game. That was the downfall of Urban Dead, as soon as stasticis were revealed, people begin to complain, and soon, the Drama outside the game became more important than the actual Game itself.

[The Doctor]

This seems to be working well. The base number is 5 on a 10-point scale, so a parched flat hot location gets -2 points to support for being hot, +1 for being flat (and thus easy to navigate), and -1 for being super dry, for a net -2. This means that the location is (5-2=)3/10 in terms of 'support'.

Unless, of course, the player fields armies of Sandworms, or something, that thrive in hot, dry, flat areas. So they would get +2 for hot, +2 for no water, +1 for flat, for a total of +5. Add to that the fact that Sand Worms, to continue the example, are hard to notice coming unless you know what to look for, so they would generally get a +2.

All this is just to mean that what might be right for some, may not me right for others. You wouldn't exactly want Mountain Goats in that desert, but Sandworms would be perfect.

[Duke 2.0]

 Question: Will all gameplay happen in the island view? The way I see it in my mind, the view of the whole island would be like civilization. Very abstract, but it conveys the major information about the different parts of the the island. Then you would be able to zoom into one of the tiles, DF style, to see the local region. Here individual units would do stuff. Of course everything would be abstracted when you zoom out, so it would be a lot less processor intensive.

 Correct me if what I'm thinking of is incorrect. While you have provided many elements of what the general game is, there has been to real comparison to what type of gameplay you want. Even DF can be compared to different games in terms of gameplay, despite how unique it is.

[Boksi]

If you really don't want to make customization too powerful, use mathematics to balance normal units. Seriously, it works, and if you do it right you can actually make sides that aren't exact copies of each other.

Then you'd only have to worry about spells and the more advanced units.