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I am messing with TCL/TK off and on, maybe that can be of use???

Hey guys,
I've been lurking on and off every few months in this forum. I was wondering if you would have use for an experienced C/C++/Java/.NET/PHP/Whatever the $#@! else has code programmer on your team?
I've worked on several Half-Life 2 mods before of large size and I've been programming for roughly 8 years now. I'm in College but do have much free time. I have lots of experience working with a 3D game engine from working with Half Life 2.
I don't have much left from those old projects to show but I probably still have a few videos laying around of the kind of stuff I programmed for 3D Games.

My e-mail is imperio59@orange.fr

Cheers!

We will probably do a lot of the game using C++. I'm thinking Python will mostly be used for 'scripting'. It really is too slow otherwise.

And if you want, I'm sure the allegiance Dev team could use some help (contact DogBones) as they could always use more hands....

Well I've been messing around with Panda, it doesn't seem too complicated.

I don't have a problem writing in C++ either... I would probably be good at making the server, even from scratch if needed.

My dream has always been to make a video game where you can seamlessly move from a space fight to landing on a planet and having infantry fights... Something like mixing Planetside and Allegiance I don't know if it's realistic to do this for Quantus, but since the community comes from Alleg., I'm sure people wouldn't mind having part of the game be a space sim. I had some ideas about the Server design that could make this less painful, such as coupling 2 servers, one for space and one for land and "linking" them. You would connect from one to the other when you land.

interesting ideas.

To answer your previous question, your help would be greatly appreciated. Fact is, you would be the most experienced person on the dev team . whats your knowledge of networking code?

as for the space to ground part, I don't know how it would work gameplay-wise, you got any ideas?

Fuzz, remember that we're using a game engine written in c++, pretty much everything I need to do will be scripting that game engine to do what I want, the c++ is pretty much already done for me, so it will probably be mostly python. the only bits ill need to do in c++ will be the bits that are very specific to this game, or the panda devs just didn't think of (e.g. the procedural generation parts will probably get rewritten in c++ eventually). Anyway, the speed up from c++ really isn't as huge as you'd think, good design is more important (proof being that right now my coding is on hold because of a poorly written section of panda3ds c++, which is far slower than if I'd written it in python... I'm still trying to get enough of a grip of the panda code that I can fix, thank $#@! its open source).

Yea the idea I had for the space-to-ground thing was to have a twin sever, so you'd have the same logical sever (i.e people see "Joe's Awesome server") but physically it would be 2 different servers (one master, one slave).

People would play in space on one server, then when they want to land they would switch to the twin server. There would be some network communication between the two servers but if they are hosted on the same network they will be on a LAN so it's not a problem, even if it takes some bandwidth.

The idea gameplay-wise was to have some scenario in space (such as a blockade on a planet trying to be broken through, while ground special forces are trying to disable planetary defense) affect the ground scenario and vice versa.

You could have a multiple amount of triggers in each map that would only work if the server was twinned up, such as destroying something on the ground affects forces in space, or destroying something in space affects the ground.
For example, you could destroy a troop carrier capital ship in space, which would slow down respawn rate on the ground.
Or you could destroy ground communications jams, which would bring in more captial AI ships for the space guys...

Ideally the two would be flexible enough so you could also have the same scenarios being played as space-only or ground-only on servers that aren't twinned up. In this case the triggers would have a default value or state and would not be modified during gameplay.

I do have good experience with network code, I have written a whole FTP Server/Client suite in Java as a final end of year school project for one class, that included writing my own network wrapper classes and so forth.
I wrote something similar to WebMin in PHP for another class to administer a Linux server fully remotely.

I AM more partial to Java to be quite honest, the main reason being its cross-platform compatibility with very very little work, as well as automatic garbage collector (less worrying about memory leaks.) Maybe we can talk a bit more on MSN or something similar. I don't know how realistic it would be to import the terrain/model files Panda uses in Java though, I would probably have to rewrite or port a lot of stuff, but there might already be things done out there, who knows...

Anyways, if you're going to develop a multiplayer game, you need to work on client and server at the same time from the start. The Panda engine is a done deal already, so we need to add multiplayer capabilities to it and create a server to handle it.

So where do I sign up?

you already have, you've also taken the interview and gotten your own little office in the corner.

I suggest you try out python, its what most of the development will be in. good news is that it's cross-platform (also little work) and it has garbage collection. As a whole its pretty similar to Java in everything but syntax, but that doesn't take long to pick up.

the whole of panda was written cross-platform, so i am trying to make the game run on different platforms (in fact I'm developing it in Linux mostly now). The only thing that I have to remember is that you have to use a special file naming system so it works with windows drives and unixes root at the same time. Unfortunately theres no easy way to communicate with panda from Java, so its c++ or python only.

I'm not sure that having 2 servers would be needed, you could run it from 2 processes on the same server just as easily, or just 2 threads, or it could just be completely integrated... Considering what you've said, have you seen "Infinity Quest for Earth"? I suggest you have a look, It is going to have game-play like you've described and much more besides.


EDIT: oh, get a dropbox account, then PM me the email address you used, ill add you to the share (we're using it as a version control system)

Well, I kinda took charge techtree and gameplay wise, so let me address your idea:

I have actually been thinking about this too, and I thought this would maybe be a part 2 thing to be developed after we made the game. However, it might be better to build it in right away than to use spagetti code to link it.

I imagine this would work with the same units being available in space or on the ground, with some exceptions. I will create a thread about this to discuss.

I don't have much experience with Python. I did look a lot at the docs yesterday and it seems pretty robust, but runtime-interpreted languages will always have a cost.

Is it realistic to build a server with a... well... scripting language, truhfully, and expect it to run smoothly with 128-man+ servers?

I have to do a bit more research on this, see if it's been done before.