Water World
Community Forums/Showcase/Water World
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| Lastest version: Version 6 http://www.bansheestudios.com/sailing/waterWorldLiveUpdate.zip ********************************************************* Some of you may already know about this project as it grew out of a discussion in General Talk, but it's grown to the point where I think it deserves a showcase entry. Version 4 : http://www.bansheestudios.com/WaterWorld4.zip This version is much enhanced with the best graphics yet (and the worst for lower spec systems unable to display the game previous, although I just realised I forgot to remove the warnings). There's a few AI boats scattered about now (it can actually run a few hundred no probs but it was rediculous and that many floating about highlighted just how stupid they where!). The wind direction has been changed so you can sail against the current now, and collision detection is in so don't crash! [F1] respawn player [<- or W] left [-> or D] right [/\ or W] cheat move forward [\/ or S] chear move backward Some screenies:     |
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| Neat as hell! 1024x768 Fullgraphics = 36fps on 3.2GHz Radeon 9800XT. 640x480 Low graphics = 82fps Could be a good RPG, explore rockpools and find stuff etc. Few caves and it could be a smuggling simulator. Please add a key to put the boat upright again as once capsized it takes a while to right again. |
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| pretty neat, just a thought but maybe change the name because there is a movie called water world? not sure if it will conflict |
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| yeah but this is WAY better than the movie. |
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| very nice, Now we need a course and more boats for a race... IPete2. |
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| Try make the white dots on the water smaller |
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| Thank you for the kind replies. >>maybe change the name because there is a movie That's why I picked the name ;) It started out as a water tech demo. >>we need a course and more boats for a race I've nearly finished adding multiplayer, will launch it tonight or tommorow then maybe we can organise some races ;) >>Try make the white dots on the water smaller It's a performance/quality balance and i've chosen what I feel is the best, but there's nothing stopping you using a smaller monitor! ;) hehe |
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| cool, I look forward to a race... Keep us posted! IPete2. |
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| very nice. you may want to check the collision detection I ended up going under an island and then after a while I got a memory access violation |
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| You didn't go "under" an island so much as crashed into it and rolled over... The entity handle is positioned such that once upside down you would appear under the island. I dont plan on fixing this at the moment because the boat model will change when I animate it and the fix is dependant upon the boat mesh. The MAV occurs in the current version when the 30 second death-timeout (from your crash) auto-repositions the player. I think I fixed this for single player mode for the next release. Multiplayer works slightly differently. I've finished writting the multiplayer, chat and console commands. I just need to add server managed races and a few volunteers for some closed testing before I go live. Volunteers need to be on MSN (my msn is XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX ED: Done). Non-testers wont stay on my contacts list for long, i'm not looking for constant harassement at the moment ;). |
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| Thank you for being so positive. I've added online multiplayer support and a race feature after an all-night session. It's might still be a bit buggy so i've actually labelled this one BETA but it does work (at least over my LAN it does). I've been at this all night so please forgive any glaring oversights or errors in this post. http://www.bansheestudios.com/WaterWorld5.zip The game uses the host listing service called GNET so all servers can be publicly accessed, but you can turn this off from the ingame console if you want a private game. You may connect using GNET, direct connection, and localhost. There is a readme explaining the multiplayer connection process and live help by typing "help" ingame. It's not complex, but it is different to other games in the way that connectivity works. basically 1. start the game 2. type, "name yourName" to start a server 3. type, "start server" 4. type, "auto" to join a server 3. type "list" 4. type "server 1" or "server 2" etc etc... Firewall users may like to know that the default connection is on TCP using port 8082, although the port can be reconfigured from the ingame console. To start a race the server host types 'race'. You can change the length of the race before you begin by choosing the number of buoys to race around (max: 20), 'length 20'. If you crash you can reset with the 'reset' command in multiplayer, but this will automatically retire you from the race after the first minute. Currently race positions are only reported locally, but chat works so you can moan about your race position to your mates ;). Regrettably NTL cable modem users may have difficulty with GNET as NTL make you use a gateway which confuses the service. You will need to use direct connection to be a serer, but you can connect as a client normally. The game has forums to arrange races which are acessible from within the game. |
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| Looks nice. Please reenable the FPS Counter. I got 43 FPS on 1024, high. And still the water seems to come through the boats walls. You could add "real" wind physics... that slows your boat down or speeds it up a bit... |
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| *blink*: But.. wind phystics are in? I have not animated the boat mesh or given control of the sail yet but it leans over and it's speed is massively effected. the fps counter is still there, type the console command 'fps' to activate it. Water coming through the boat walls (as happens in Virtual Sailor and Virtual Skipper too btw) is a problem I am yet to get far enough to address. |
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| After a handful of experimental online races i've uploaded a revised version 5 with some bug fixes and new console commands to improve the racing and online experience. The game now also has a chat room to meet other players wanting to race, acessed by typing "chat" into the console. As this is an update (loosing the BETA tag) the filename is the same as the last update: www.bansheestudios.com/WaterWorld5.zip |
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| Bah, I'm banned from chatrooms. |
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| Ack well Puki, maybe when the game is finished i'll set up a permanent server so there'll be no need for chat rooms. In the meentime if anyone fancies being a ginneapig for some multiplayer testing i'll be in the chat room most of today hoping a few peeps pop by: http://sailing.bansheestudios.com/chat.html Last night I knocked the website up which can be found here: http://sailing.bansheestudios.com Today I plan on starting work getting the sails to animate and be controllabe. |
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| I had some very positive tests with Luke from the Blitz forums today, positive in that they highlighted two big issues for me to solve: Firstly the game lags terribly and secondly since the release version i've messed the weather up whilst in multiplayer. As the weather makes a big difference to network traffic i've disabled it in multiplayer for the moment and produced a new .exe with what I hope will solve the lag issues. It's a trial .exe because until I play somebody over the net with it i've no idea if the problems are gone (it could be an issue with my router too I suppose). The revised .exe is here: http://www.bansheestudios.com/waterworld502.zip . It also features some other refinements to race handling with new console commands. |
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| My thanks go again to Luke who stepped forward once more and helped me resolve the lag and wind problems. A new version (5.04) is now available on the games web page for those that are interested. The network play in 5.04 now appears to be completely stable and utterly lagless (outside of any internet lag), capable of handling more players than you're going to find on any old knackered modem. |
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| Very nice, i love the feeling of this game! Maybe i should be playing some more sailing games. The water got increasingly turbulent, is this supposed to happen? Water looks great, i like how it changes colour if the depth is different. You should make it so that there is fog which gradually increases towards the camera range so we dont get the cutoff we get now. I had fps about 30 on high res high quality, on my p4 2.6 mhz 1gb ram, gforce fx5600 128mb ram. Maybe add a wind direction indicator so we know which way the wind is blowing :| and not just guesstimate? It's scary when you get out to open sea and dont know how to come back!! I hate that feeling. :) I saw only one other boat. For the fun of it, add an option for us to make huge waves :D pretty please? |
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| Thank you for the feedback Lenn I really appreciate it. The water got increasingly turbulent, is this supposed to happen? Yup. The water system is fully localised. You can enter a channel that has a rough entry from a seabed overfall or a few rocks that opens into a tidal river that opens out into a calm lake... In actuality i've used a few simple tricks to achieve the effect but the result is a sea state that - if I toned the waves down a bit - is actually suprisingly realistic in what it simulates. You should make it so that there is fog which gradually increases towards the camera range I hate fog. It was introduced as a cheep trick to hide short drawing distances on early 3D games, and it's still a cheap trick. Admittedly in this project I actually am not drawing that far, but that's not the point! Cheap is cheap... It's like lenseflare, which is such an accepted part of gameplay in current games but has absolutely no basis in real life what-so-ever, but when it's absent everybody says, "it'd be more realistic if you added lenseflare..." What I actually need to do is increase the drawdistance and use the fog to blend the distant landscape to a slightly darker colour than the sky to make a "haze" rather than a fog, which i might be able to do with a bit of trickery pockery. It's scary when you get out to open sea and dont know how to come back!! I hate that feeling. It'll be a bit easier when I make a chart to navigate with - but you could select a buoy (PgUp/PgDwn) and sail toward it using the bearing guide for the buoy. add an option for us to make huge waves :D pretty please? It's unfeasably rough already in the name of gameplay ! lol... maybe i'll tuck in a console command for you. |
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| It looks cheaper without fog. Because no fog makes it utterly unreal and breaks any sort of illusion a player might get into because in reality the world doesnt just stop existing at a certain point away from you and then appear all of a sudden as you approach. :) Lensflare is cheap and unrealistic, unless you are simulating a "i'm filming this with a video camera" effect. LOD terrain sounds good to me. I didnt see PgUP / PgDN listed anywhere. maybe i'll tuck in a console command for you. Awesome! Can't wait... Dont know why i like it so much :| |
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| Just be sure not to discover the multiplayer races, they're strangely compelling. Slow enough in pace to allow you to chat, but busy enough in route finding, dodging obstacles, overtaking etc. to get the tension up... I've become an addict myself! Development on this is moving fast with 2 or 3 public releases a day over the last few days (because every time I send a file out I need to increment the version number - even if it's botched!) so i've decided to write an automatic updater which i'm working on tonight. Hopefully i'll get that done by the morrow and you can see the latest version ... I've not quite got as far as the sails yet though - I have been trying but it's actually quite difficult. |
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| Looks really good. Especially like the multiplayer. I've got some sail code - if you're interested get in touch. Take a look at :- http://www.simsation.co.uk/golower.html to see it in action. cheers, Funky Frank |
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| Hey, good fun! One helluva lot better than the real thing(I hate sailing :)). The scaling of the boat vs sea felt very off to me though, felt like the boats were two inches long and dumped out into the open sea. But still, very nice. |
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| @Funky Frank, Thank you, I may very well take you up on that offer after i've had another go myself. That's very kind of you to offer. Erik Thon, I'm glad you enjoy it. Indeed the scale is a little out - I feel it's the sea being too big rather than the boat being too small, and it was very deliberate. I didn't want to make a pure sailing sim, i've done a fair bit of sea sailing myself and it's dull as hell, yachts where made for martini's in the marina! So with regards the map and the state of the sea i've exagerated things a little to make it more of a game. Otherwise the most interesting thing to happen would be loosing your prop to a lobster pot... I've now produced a live update program and i've set up a semi-permanent server - actually it's my PC running the game in the background. It's not a proper graphicless server applet yet and isn't "final" by any means but it should help to provide a meeting place for sailors and i'll be on it myself quite a lot testing stuff. I will ocassionally need to update the dev server well before releasing a client version on the live update yet so dont despair if you cannot connect to it. You can get the live update application from the games website: http://sailing.bansheestudios.com |
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| great job Becks... --Mike |
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| Hehe, I'll have to check this out. I used that sail boat model in one of my first ever projects ;) |
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| This rocks my socks. |
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| Becky, You should allow us to show our appreciation of Water World by entering a Gallery Picture... IPete2. |
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| I am one step ahead of you IPete2 ;) http://sailing.bansheestudios.com/galleryupload.php I was thinking of building it into the game too though, but havn't decided on a user interaction method. :) |
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| keep clicking the Gallery link until you get: Forbidden You don't have permission to access /gallery.php on this server. Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered |
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| How about a full screen mode, or am i missing something? :o) |
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| Becky - Yeah that's good but I meant at Gallery on BlitzBasic.com so that people can score your work. IPete2. |
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| >Forbidden >You don't have permission to access /gallery.php on this server. Sorry Scott, but unfortunately this is part of the server's Denial of Service flood protection and cannot be dissabled. The only solution I can think of is to use pop-up windows for the images (as that way a new address is sent to the browser, thus fooling the DOS protection, but I always hate pop-up picture windows when browsing the net myself, so i'm not sure what to do. |
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| Ah, I see. I thought it was just blowing up after the last picture was shown. My bad. |
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| Becky, is there an option to use full screen instead of windowed? |
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| I have not yet enabled a fullscreen mode Ross, mainly because there is no options screen yet. Having a fullscreen app would make the program go fullscreen just as multiplayer users are getting a firewall request to go online. When the game is further into development and I start worrying about the front end interface i'll add an option for fullscreen mode, but it would be impracticle to address your request right now, sorry :/. |
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| Ah right :o) It's ok. I just wanted to see how fast it would run in full screen mode. No worries :o) |
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| /me waits for big waves |
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| Oh yes Lenn, I forgot to let you know earlier... Download 5.8 or higher Lenn, the command is waveamp <n> where n is a number between 0 and 9 :) The wave size has an impact on sea colour, and at the 8 and 9 settings it can be a bit, well, wierd in places. Wave size is dependant upon single player, as it could effect race results in multiplayer. If anyone tries out the new dedicated server i'd be interested to hear feedback, I havn't had much of a chance to test it over an internet connection yet. If anyone could convert the boat into a single entity and delete the sails I would be grateful as I dont have a modeller at the moment and i've nearly finished adding the new animated sails but the model still has a sail on and if I load it as an animmesh and delete the sail I then cant get the scale and rotation right. |
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I'm nearly there, I have sails in and they flap about if let too loose and bulk when kept tight and stuff, but I need to make more textures for them before i'm prepared to release it, so I guess either tonight or maybe tommorow v6.0 will be out. |
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| v6.0 is out on the auto-updater. There's only a handful of textures at the moment because the boat model is only temporary. Importantly though, this update is about the sail. To keep things playable I have decided that you cannot capsise yourself with the sail - but to get the most speed out of your yacht you'll need to use it. Control for the sail is on the cursor up and down keys. Wind strength and bearing is still constant to make it easy (but this isn't permanent!). The ideal sail position is to extend it just far enough to get a little itsy tiny weeny bit of flutter. |
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| Becky: On the front news page, it says the multiplayer game is on August 10th instead of Sept 10th. I guess everyone will realize the mistake - unless they have a time machine :) - but just thought I'd say. [edit]Nervermind. I see this has been mentioned in another thread. |
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| Do you have any tips on getting it faster than 6 kts? |
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| I believe there is a working time machine on the island of Ponga Ponga - hence the directions given. |
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| Yah ok ok I didn't register the month changing. I soon will though *grrrr*. >:¬/ Do you have any tips on getting it faster than 6 kts? Yes, there are a number of factors which control your speed. Firstly you need to know that the speed given is your speed through the water only, and that the water is also moving so the speed shown does not factor your "over ground" speed. If you run with a strong current you can get another 6 kts ot so that aren't displayed. Secondly you also need to know that in the latest version the wind bearing and strength changes. In a strong wind, on a good tack with the right sail setting it is possible to achieve about 16kts through the water, other times you'll be stuck in irons. If your heading in a given direction and the wind is against you then you need to tack across wind, when the wind is on the nose no amount of sail control will capture any wind in the sail, the more wind you get in the sail, the faster you go. This bring us up to the last and most important point of all. Get your sail flat to the wind. If you have your sail too tight you are missing out on potential wind and if it's too loose and flapping about then it's not doing you any good either. In the perfect world you would know exactly where the point is where if you let the sail out anymore it would start flapping about. Of course, you dont know where that point is until it starts flapping - therefore most sailors work on the following principle: Keep a little tiny itsy witsy bit of eeny weenie flapping going on at the very edges of your sails. This shows you are right next to the perfect angle, if you get it any more perfect and the wind changes direction you may end up with your sails too tight and not notice - so keeping the slightest bit of slack there lets you know your on the very edge. To do this requires almost constant small adjustments as you continually modify your tack in search of more speed in relation to your destination (relativity is important because quite often in sailing you dont sail to your target because of the wind), and as a consequence then make small adjustmets your sail position. There just isn't a way to find a sweet spot and keep it there for long, and that is half the challenge of sailing at high speed. At some point, your going to be doing less than your potential maximum, and that point is a constant known as "all the time". With regards to wind: In addition to the global wind direction and bearing the sea surface colour also changes to show differentials in local weather. Darker patches of sea appear where there is more wind, and lighter patches appear where there is less wind. |
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| Becky, your news item says 10th "August" not "September"! better change it. [edit] sorry just saw you knew already in another thread. |
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| Becky. this is AWESOME. i was sailing aronud for about an hour yesterday, was pretty sure someone else was in there, didnt have to login or anything? The music goes very well. Neat work! |
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| Yeah I like the music too, did you make it? |
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| @Cygnus - ack sorry, the game starts in single player mode I dont yet have a permanent server, although the thought has crossed my mind but such things are expensive but I kind of have an idea for this game... I'm having a few problems with GNET making server listing take some time at the moment (because GNET doesnt list my IP# correctly so I did a hard coded ping to my IP# when you list servers and if i'm not there it takes ages, but today I plan to fix this issue with a better bodge job). To join multiplayer, type readme into the console. I am glad you like the music, it is by Rachel Nusbaumer: http://www.rachelnusbaumer.com. She's an old friend of mine and a very good classical musician, if you like stuff like Rondo Veneziano you'll probably like most of her music too. |
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| Hmm, Okay. If i was alone, then your AI was jittering like it had Lag issues :P. I do indeed like the music and how it mixes with the atmosphere and the wind. If i had a larger screen, i'd be thrown into the game for sure. Very tallented. |
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| Am I the only one getting extreme screen flicker running this (version 4)? I tried in 640x480 and 800x600 in all graphic detail levels. Can't try 1024,768 as my monitor doesn't support it. I tried version 6 but the multiplayer connection info just seemed to go on forever and I didn't make it to the actual game. setup: 1Ghz Athlon, GeForce2 32meg, win98SE. |
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| Big10p. v6 never did that to me. it did an auto-update, which looked lke it hung, but i hit space and the game started. I dont get any screen flickering. Becky- i may suggest taking the "waitkey" out of the updater :D |
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| v6 never did that to me. it did an auto-update Ah, is that what is was doing. My eyes tend to glaze over when I see a console screen just filling with text messages. :PI do remember it getting to about 5% after about 5 mins waiting though. Lifes too short. :/ |
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| Jus go to the website and grab the newest one so theres nothing to download. :P mine worked fine :D |
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| OK, got the latest version which works now that it's in windowed mode. Mine didn't like the fullscreen version, for some reason. |
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| Hidden firewall message by any chance? |
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| then your AI was jittering like it had Lag issues The AI worked ok enough in earlier versions but is now broken and just sails in a strait line. My focus is on multiplayer but I may go back and do something with the AI's later. They shouldn't be lagging though - and jitter in multiplayer is extremely rare also as the code seems quite stable since v4.something-or-other (reconnect if you ever get jitter). Am I the only one getting extreme screen flicker running this (version 4)? I have used cube mapping and multiple texture layers, if your graphics card doesn't support it then you can get flickering - i've had it when testing on old graphics cards myself. Try using low quality mode which doesnt do the cube map (but is still pretty hefty on the texture layers). This can be a particular problem on graphics card drivers that report they can support more texture layers than they really can, such as GeForce GTS cards where the driver reports 8 layers and the card supports 2. I tried version 6 but the multiplayer connection info just seemed to go on forever Fixed on the auto-updater today, but wont be updating the archive downloads until later when i've added more stuff. The auto-updater is a seperate .exe so those console messages where nothing to do with the update process. If you downloaded version 4, you are probably still running v4. taking the "waitkey" out of the updater Due to excellent planning, the auto-updater is unable to update itself ;). I could do a new version though for any fresh downloads... |
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| I don't think so. I pretty sure my Firewall takes me back to the Windows desktop when it needs to display a message. Did version 4 even have net access, though? |
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| Multiplayer has been in since v4 but it won't try to connect to anything unless you tell it too, but at least it's working for you now and that's the main thing :) |
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| I have used cube mapping and multiple texture layers, if your graphics card doesn't support it then you can get flickering - i've had it when testing on old graphics cards myself. Try using low quality mode which doesnt do the cube map (but is still pretty hefty on the texture layers). This can be a particular problem on graphics card drivers that report they can support more texture layers than they really can, such as GeForce GTS cards where the driver reports 8 layers and the card supports 2. Yeah, it's probably my old GeForce 2 that can't cope then, although it still happened in the lowest graphics quality mode. BTW, I didn't notice anything being cube mapped - I *think* my GF2 can do cube mapping, not sure. Hmmm. |
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| Gf2 doesnt do cubemapping :) Becky: itd be possible to add "updater updates" into the main game EXE, which would, itself, download through the old updater ;) |
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| Gf2 doesnt do cubemapping :) Oh, bugger. I was pretty sure that demo that came out when cube mapping was introduced to B3D, worked - must be mistaken.Yep. After actually plaing the game, I get nasty 'black highlighting' on the waves - normally symptom of non-working cube mapping. Ah, well, I enjoyed sailing around, anyway. :) Nice one, Becky. How are you doing the sea mesh deformation? Seems a hell of a lot of vertices to move using the fairly slow blitz vertex commands. |
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| The trick, as with all games, is just to keep it simple. I'm using vertice manipulation commands on a sin() wave and i'm moving the mesh. It's very easy to calculate and the result is quick enough, although it's the heaviest part of the program code - given the seaborn nature of the game it is an accepteable performance hit. I couldn't do this effect as it is for a land orientated game without the game suddely slowing when you got to some water. |
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| your musician friend's website is down. |
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| It works for me, not that there is much I can do if it goes down anyway ;) |
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| I finaly got Max installed again last night and this is the result, it is based upon a real yacht although is not a true likeness (I did it from memory and I consciously changed a few things anyway). I wont have this model in and ready in time for the tournament because I dont want to break the game and have nobody able to connect, so i'll be adding this to the game next week which gives me a chance to make some more textures and to dirty them up a bit which will increase the realism as with the solid blocks of colour it has now it looks a bit cartoony.  |
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| Gf2 doesnt do cubemapping :) All NVidia cards, from the GeForce256 and up, can do cubemapping. You need to disable WBuffering for it to work in B3D though (if you're using 16bit, obviously). |
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| Ahh? i dont know why, but i thought cubemapping was a geforce4 thing! :) |
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I've started work on goosewinging for next weeks update. |
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At the moment it is console driven but by early next week I hope to have a graphical interface for customising your ship. |
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I made this tonight, I plan on adding it next. |
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| I've been admiring your work silently for some time now, but I was wondering if there was some setting somewhere I'd missed that would enable a full-screen mode... or are you not a fan of full-screen modes? I realise it could be problematic what with firewall windows perhaps popping up in the background and the game looking like it's freezing and whatnot... Perhaps some wacky key combo to enable full-screen mode that people won't accidentally trip over and change from the default and safe windowed mode? |
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| How about a chinese fishing junk or a kon tiki raft! |
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| Thank you LO7. The main reason it is windowed mode at the moment is as you mention because of firewalls, the game is designed for multiplayer but it has not progressed far enough yet as a project to have a front end coded (I make games inside out) so sadly it just doesnt have a fullscreen mode yet. I will change this when I write a pre-launch server listing game room type affair which I am hoping to do this week. >>How about a chinese fishing junk or a kon tiki raft! I'm not sure I know what a kon tiki raft is, is that one of the cannoe type things you get where there is a float extended to one side? A junk is an almost certain probability eventually as it fits the theme of the secondary project I want to make out of this game, but the first few boat models will be styalisticcally similar to the ones I have done already otherwise the multiplayer races might look a bit odd. |
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| I can't imagine how you came to cancel this project; it looked like it was doing fine. I just downloaded it, went to your forum while I was there, and saw your cancellation post. Not sure whether to install it or not now. What a great pity. |
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| It is a shame as some of the ideas I had for it I thought where going to be quite good, but interviewing testers demonstrated that whilst the game has some nice technical features it doesn't appeal to a wide audience as a game genre and as it required multiplayer to even be remotely interesting any attempt to build up a user base would be a case of flogging a dead horse. I have an important project consuming my development time at the moment and after that is done I dont see myself being able to return to this, so I figured it was best to just cancel it and save people the bother of logging on and looking for people to race - when the odds of finding someone where tens of thousands to one. I'll leave it online so people can play over LAN, but other than that I dont see it developing as a viable multiplayer experience. |
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| something like this has to appeal to the sailing community, or to the active sailor in all of us... there is a big virtual sailing audience that would be willing to partake in the experience... and there is also a large number of wannabee sailors who would also enjoy the chance of sailing a racing yacht without getting their feet wet... ...at least that is my opinion. but in order for you to succeed with this, you really are going to have to know a bit about actual sailing... enough to make your sim/game appealing and challenging to real sailors especially... i think many of em would jump at the chance of racing each other if this were the case... also, if possible, you might consider... for single player activities, a sailing school... a qualification race... racing against ai skippers... yeap... something like this can easily spiral outta control and become a major project... ... but i think it would be worthwhile, if you decided to rethink it and pursue it. --Mike |
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| Let boring people in their sheds make their own in-game replicas of their boats or other people's famous boats and sail them with their boring friends and you'll sell thousands. See Flight/Train Simulator for proof of spoddy buying power. |
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| Oh I know the odd thing about sailing, seeing as I have a "shed" metaphorically speaking, with a 28ft motor sailor in it. The problem is exactly as Warpy says, sailing is dull. There's a few very realistic sailing and sail racing sims out there already which are way better than I could hope to write so I tried to see if there was interest in a more gameplay & interactivity orientated sailing game, there was interest but just not enough to warrant making a multiplayer game of it. It did pretty good for something that was only ever a tech demo anyway, and I had a few really enjoyable races with Joe Public. :) |
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| The problem is exactly as Warpy says, sailing is dull. well... i guess if you feel that way... then your right, maybe ya really shouldn't be wasting your time making a sailing sim in the first place... i truly believe you've gotta have some interest in the type game you're doing in order for it to even come to completion, much less be an enjoyable game to play... plus, i don't think that was was Warpy was saying actually... i think he was saying that if you let the vicarious sailors make their own boats, then they will come... ahhh... it's your project... don't let me try and convince you to do something that your really not interested in... good luck in your next one... --Mike |
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| Yeah, I was saying that absolute anal attention to detail will attract that group of people that likes that sort of thing, but if you're not interested in that, and I really don't blame you, fair enough. You know what hasn't been done though - a sailing game where you control the sailors on a boat, and not the boat itself through abstracted controls. It could be an interesting strategy/puzzle game, or a fun co-op game with VoIP involved. |
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| "Worse things happen at sea" was a good puzzle/strategy type game on the Speccy - you had to stop the boat from sinking by pumping out water in different rooms. Ripe for a remake of somesort, maybe. P.S. What is VoIP? :P |
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| Becky, just mailed you with some thoughts on all this and few other things. Might be suitable for general consumption here later, but I'm leaving you the choice at this stage! Let me know what you think. |
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