Dawn of Infinity Forums

[LANS]

Just out of curiosity, what did the old DoI code do? How far along was it?

btw: I'm nothing in coding skill compared to prophile.

[Captain Bob]

(not the latest old code screenshot, but close)

The old code got pretty close to what we wanted for 0.3. Version number-wise, we got up to 0.2.9. We had a nice loading screen and main screen interface for connecting to the dedicated server we kept running. We had working, textured 3D models, though all ships were the same (the Lunar light fighter). We implemented movement mostly like EV, except instead of a reverse key we kept a debugging feature where the down arrow would kill your momentum instantly. We also had a radar, and global chat using a bitmap font I created. In the background we had a spinning Earth planet. We had some eye candy effects like a parallax starfield and ships that bank when they turn. The ships had shields and a beam weapon. We even had bots for single player that would fly around and shoot you or other bots. Cade probably remembers some other neat features we had.

That's why it was quite disappointing to have to abandon all that work. What went wrong? Bugs, bugs, and more bugs. Your ship would turn endlessly, or teleport to random places in the system. When we tried to implement projectile weapons, they had the same problems, and usually you couldn't see them at all. Some of our best programmers were still in high school, which wouldn't have been a problem except they didn't know calculus and some other areas of math and theory, which became necessary when we had some heavy duty 3D math to do, and algorithms to compensate for the lag.

Don't worry if you're not the best coder. We've had plenty of smart people around here, and I'm convinced you're one of those with the wherewithal to author the next chapter of DoI. It's a shame nobody else seems to want to join us, though.
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[General Cade Smart]

Hey! I got mentioned! That means I must post! LOL. Plus its finally easy and interesting enough to post (Okay, the others were, the artwork thing and weapons... but anyway...).

I am honored to be mentioned! That must mean I am well known in these circles, eh? No really, why did you mention me? I have been wondering that for a bit... I think. Is it because I know everything there has ever been to DoI?

Cade probably remembers some other neat features we had.

Indeed I do! I will all of the features that were there, including major and minor features. I wonder why Bob left out the music though and other major features, like how to use the single player mode. And I like the screenshot! Its the main reason I wanted to write to this thread. It makes the thread feel so easy to respond to I immediately wanted to... but I couldnt until today. Oh, and the threads with pictures are the easiest and most concrete.

Oh, and amusing that I missed you saying chat. I wondered why you had missed a major feature (one of the biggest) until I reread... very carefully. And also the loading screen which I thought you missed.

Anyways! It had a lot of other features... too many to remember or mention. Amazingly, for such a boring release (it really wasnt exciting... the only interesting part was when others were in the game and chatting), and for so little features, it is amazingly difficult to list them all. It had so many minor features its hard to list them all (all that mattered). You know, all that mattered to the normal user?

It had music in the main menu, it wasnt too good, but at least it was music... oh wait, it wasnt that bad, I think I sorta liked it (?) but it was never good enough for me to listen entirely. I just played. But I still think its a major feature... sorta... because it was the biggest Captain Bob left out.

It also had a very cool log in screen... oh yes, Bob mentioned it, but not how cool it was. It was literally space... a view into space or how I should describe it. Captain Bob should show a picture of the log-in screen since it was so cool. From that very cool log-in screen (that looked so good it had a finished, 0.3 feel into it) you could log in by just entering the username and password. You could enter a server name (adress) and port, but I never understood it , had to read these forums. Oh well, now its irrelevant anyway, the server is dead.

Has been for years. Do you know for how long, Bob? We used to meet people... have people be in the game :nostalogia: That was cool and the only good part of the game. I still have fond memories...

It also had the ability to take screenshots (F12). And you could enter single-player mode by using the password usedemo (did you know that before, LANS? Or actually LNSU? LOL).

It even had statistics in a panel... forgot which button it was... it was some of them... damn, memory fades fast. I no longer remember because I havent played for years. Release another version, Bob, so I can remember!

It would show amount of shields (1000), which is amazingly much... I never understood why DoI ships had so much shields. Maybe Caprain Bob can explain, heh. And the amount of armor... and the amount of fuel left (most useful of all: when you were out of fuel, you couldnt use weapons. Weapons would use fuel. LOL.). The amount of armor was useful when you needed to run from the dangerous, overpowered perfect-aim bots (who were too powerful because could never be fooled...)

It had amusing texts on places that werent implemented. For example, one of them would show nowhere to go (lol). And one other communications channel jammed (or something). I suppose this is programmer humor? The style that I have always loved in DoI... weird but funny. Was Vulcan the one that did it? I thought always he was the funny one...

Other misc features:

You could change the graphics. Sage of Minerva (I never found out if he was a boy or a girl... was he a boy or a girl?) made a graphic full of sheep. So Earth looked literally like sheep. That was the only time ever it was used. Heh. I think Captain Bob said it was silly, but I dont remember the topic...

You could see the FPS. It was somehow interesting to me. I dont know why. Maybe because I wanted it to be as good as possible?

And how could I forget a another major feature! A feature so big it made me consider dropping FPS from the list... except I oddly like it... You could press R to locate nearest hostile ship. See! DoI has (had) so many features you cant remember them all! I only remebered it as I was brushing my teeth and thinking about the features DoI did have. Then it came to my did: it had R for nearest target! How could I forget that!

It also had A for autopilot, a indispensable feature that I always used in EV. It was useful for navigating in impenetrable nebulas, because you could only navigate by when you tried to find F-25 (in the Ji Nebula) in EVO. You couldnt find anything, because the radar was literally completely full of green interference. Without A, finding the planet would have been impossible. A was also useful in some cases when you wanted to stay at the same position as as AI ship or follow it.

I didnt use it in combat though, since it was useless. I could aim better myself, and wasnt restricted in moving. Maybe this could be improved in doi, Bob? Its so slow in moving its useless, and it arbitrarily restricts how I can move (!), one thing I never understood. In short, its better to fight yourself, than to ever use help (shame. what kind of help is it if it always useless?). Its too slow because I restricts the way I can move, its so slow and clunky, its like I am not supposed to move while using auto-pilot (...). Which means I cant fight and have moving automatically controlled at the same time (which would save me from having to move and free me to fight). It becomes worthless.

Then there is minor stuff that isnt worth listing (such as hacking a file to change your resolution) because the post is already so big.

I hope that was a compherensive list because LANS asked "what did the old game do?
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[LANS]

I'm going to have a look at the old code and see if I can get it running for the hell of it. I'll spend a few minutes seeing if I can fix any of the bugs, because if I can get it to work it might be easier than using quake. I'll look into how it does networking, and I might swap it for the Internet COmmunications Engine (which Xsera is using).

Edit: I'd like to have a shot at crushing some of the bugs, how do I compile the old one? The makefile that is included doesn't work. It doesn't appear to have any unusual libraries which I don't have.

[tycho]

hey guys
i've been following development on and off for a while now. i've wanted to help you guys out, but i've always been at opposites with you on most of the programming decisions.
ie: c++(i think it was c++...?), openarena/tremulous/3rd party engine, etc

my issue with c++ is that i use a mac. it's akin to shooting yourself in the foot, making a mac app in c++. c or obj-c is much more appropriate.
my issue with 3rd party engines is they are usually c++ and they force devs to work around their limitations(frictionless floors, etc)

my solution. go back to creating a unique client/server code base. make the server in c, thus reducing platform dependancies. make an obj-c/cocoa mac/iphone client while simultaneously making a c++/.net windows version or a c++/c/whatever SDL version for windows/linux(i don't think .net is really appropriate for a game. SDL is much better).

i would have no problem at all heading the mac development and contributing to the server dev. i relaise this 'seems' like a lot of hard work(what do you really expect?), but i think in the long run it will eliminate many problems and provide us with playable versions much quicker. it will also be a good learning experience for those of us that want to continue developing games and even other cross platform apps.

just my 2 cents.

[LANS]

Tycho, you're more than welcome to help, but I don't have the skill, ability, or time to code this stuff from scratch. If you know what you're doing, I'll help, but I have no objective-C experience myself.
Right now I'm helping to code the Xsera project (http://nfreader.com/xsera/ ) because after that's done, I can easily convert it to be ev-like. Unfortunately, its also in C++.

[Captain Bob]

Hey Tycho, great to hear you're still with us.

I don't want to sound mean by saying this, but the phrase "we've tried that" comes to mind. We've gone through about 4 from-scratch re-writes since we started DoI. We've tried different languages (java for one) and different libraries. We kept running into problems, and at this stage I have some idea why.

We've always had good, dedicated people, but we don't have the manpower or the talent of a fully trained dev team. We don't have an expert networking programmer, graphics programmer, or software engineer. There were gaps in what we knew how to do, and trying to fill those gaps among us required an effort in coordination I couldn't hack at the time.

While you might see using an existing engine as limiting because it can't do x or y, I look at it differently. If we build our engine from scratch, it can't do anything until we add it ourselves. I like Quake 3 because I've played games using it for hundreds of hours. I know through firsthand experience that its graphics engine and networking architecture are robust, cross-platform, and modifiable.

I'm surprised that you think C++ is inferior to C or Obj-C for our purposes. I also question how much we can get from the Ares engine. I never had the full version of Ares... I was under the impression its networking was limited, since it was made in the days before master servers, broadband connections and the like. Xsera also doesn't aim to do improvements over Ares other than OS X compatibility. Mixing and matching Ares code with, say, Tremulous code could be as involved as just starting with one codebase and adding to it, unless both engines were unusually well-written.

Sorry if I sound negative. I'm downloading Xcode for Leopard as I type this. I'll try to figure out how to get the old DoI code compiling once I have a working dev kit.
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[tycho]

good to hear from you guys as well.

i didn't even realise ares went open source. that's pretty cool. i've been an apple junkie for years and always like revisiting it's history in this kind of form. like the marathon source, 68k emulators and copland betas

didn't sound negative at all, bob. it's your opinion. i totally understand your points, but i have seen examples that prove and others that contradict them.

also, i don't think lans was saying he would incorporate code from the xsera project into tremulous. merely modding the porting code to replicate the proposed functionality of DoI.

it would definitely be interesting to have all our ideas come to fruition and then to compare and critique them. i bet we'd find that, in the end, the choices made didn't really affect the end product at all.

[LANS]

Mixing Xsera and Trem would be more work than either from scratch.

Xsera is not a straight port of the Ares code, we can't do that because frankly, the original Ares code is terrible. We're rewriting everything from scratch, using Lua for scripting, and the only thing being kept from the original ares is the models and the inspiration. I've discussed keeping the capability to turn Xsera into DoI with the other Xsera devs, and they agree that it should be done once we finish the basic ares port. And its not a straight ares port either, it will be improved. We will implement huge servers (right now the practical limit is 16 players per game, but we hope to increase that), and multiplayer missions.

As far as running into the problems DoI has had in the past, its less of an issue because of the varied knowledge of the programmers. Notably, bob has said that DoI has almost always been coded by high-school programmers with lots of enthusiasm but little experience. Xsera is being run by prophile, who really knows what he's doing, not to mention we have contributions from Sfiera/Pallas Athene, and Adam_0/Rebellious. EVweb isn't helping right now, but he has expressed interest in the project and shows up in the IRC channel often.

[tycho]

idevgames is running udevgames again.
one entry is c++, SDL.net, ev-esque game
http://www.udevgames.com/games/entry/Galamayo/
"Galamayo is a 2D multiplayer top down space shooter inspired by the Escape Velocity series of games. It is written in C++ using the libraries SDL, and SDL_net. Find someone else to play with. It is highly recommended that you use three computers for this game. One to host, and two to play on. If you have a very fast computer it may be possible with 2 machines but I haven’t tested that."

[Captain Bob]

That was an entry from 2003, FYI. Also, is there a download link? I don't see one.
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[Captain Bob]

My new job is keeping me busy. I still check the forums daily, but I may not have time to recall how to compile the old code until next month.
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[Corun]

Hi guys. I thought I'd look at the forums. I've been busy doing lifey things over the past year or years or whenever it was that I last visited. I'm now at Imperial College London doing Computing, in second year. Also been running a company with a friend: http://thecosmicmachine.com/ . So yeah, busy. But, you can have my two cents and maybe a little bit of my time over the coming few months.

[Captain Bob]

Hey, Corun. I'm always happy to see one of the veterans come back.

Do you remember exactly what you need to make the old code (0.2.9) compile in OS X? That would help out LANS.

Regarding languages and source engines... you all know how I feel by now. I just don't think we have the 'staying power' at this point to create an engine with the stability we need. It's like preparing a meal: in the real world, you've got school or a job, so you don't have time to make dough from scratch and bake it to make bread for your sandwich. You just buy some bread. Or if you don't have the time and patience for that, you go to a deli and buy a sandwich somebody's already prepared. Quake 3 is our readymade sandwich, and it's free. We may have to come up with a bag of chips ourselves, and we may have to pick off the onions we don't want, but having that sandwich goes a long way toward having the full meal.
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[Corun]

[LANS]

If anyone hasn't noticed, the Xsera project has agreed to create DoI using the Xsera engine once the ares-style Xsera is finished. I'd love to code a DoI engine from scratch, I just don't have the ability or time to do it, which is why I'm helping with Xsera instead. We've already got the ability to fly a ship around, we ave a parallax starfield, the ship can fire up to five missiles, missile guidance works, the ship can make sounds, and the network backend is mostly implemented (its missing encryption, but that's coming soon).

Thanks, but I'm not spending any time right now no 0.2.9 when I could be implementing blowfish network encryption for Xsera.

[Captain Bob]

I'm keeping up with Xsera's development on Ambrosia's forums, but thanks for the update.

In my experience from DoI, networking was the most daunting task to add, followed by 3D graphics. I encourage you and the other Xsera devs to approach networking thoughtfully, and expect it to take quite some time before it's usable.

Does Xsera have a design document, or something equivalent to DoI's phase list (excuse the spam)? I think such a planning document would be beneficial.
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[LANS]

We haven't made anything official because we all know what needs to be done in what order, have our separate and independent tasks, and keep a todo/done list. We'd rather spend the time it would take to think up such a list coding.