New SWC Engine

[southwestcoders]

I sort of stumbled across this website when I was looking around for an RTS Engine forum to ask some questions on.

Basically we're looking at putting one together ourselves, but are a little lacking in the creative department. We've got both a credit system and GC system in place as well as a turn system started (15 minute timeout). Our goal is to put something together like Kings of Chaos and/or Swirve's Utopia browser based/text based/turn based online game with a little bit of a twist that will help give participating members more to do than the sites I've mentioned.

If you look at our website (Southwest Coders), you can click on the RTS Engine link to learn more about what's already been built and installed. We need ideas, though, on how to stay with the same layout of the site (including color theme) that will catch the attention of a handful of visitors in a fly-by audience. The site was just started Oct 2, 2007 completely from scratch and has already been through three (3) layout redesigns, a number of mass changes and site updates. I think now it's at a stand still point where I need to start really putting more time into this engine.

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Right now we're not necessary looking for signups because the engine itself is incomplete (the components, however, are complete - but more needs to be added). There's no currently set theme for the RTS engine as of yet so as you could probably imagine, we're wide open for any plot ideas.

[southwestcoders]

Oh, that was the other thing I forgot to mention. Would anyone happen to know what KoC is using for their game engine? I know Star Gate Wars is set up identically to that website, just a different theme. KoC is written in PHP and its filenames/page locations come across as being "homemade" or self-built - but I could be wrong. PHP-based, though, I would assume it being open source somewhere out there. Just haven't been able to locate something along those lines without having to pay $50.00 for a look-alike.

[SwiftSpear]

Did you say you're planning a turn based strategy platform?

Doesn't that directly conflict with an RTS (REAL TIME Strategy) engine?

I don't really understand the scope of your project... are you building a browser based turn time strategy engine? or am I totally misunderstanding the concept and you're acctually working on a traditional client server RTS engine?

If you want an OS development tip, the best way of attracting attention is by clearly and accurately describing what you are offering/requesting so that interested people know what they are getting into

[southwestcoders]

Alright well it is web based (PHP/MySQL) and only certain parts of it are turn based (e.g. resources, credentials, GC, etc). But certain functions/features like launching an attack will trigger an alert for that user - for example, the site will change CSS styles (red border, etc) on the target's side (SWC member) to reflect an attack has been launched against them. They have 30 real-time seconds to counter it by disabling their attack using a code system (sort of like disarming a time bomb). However, this does require that they're online to catch it in time.

There are other things that will be done in real-time as well, "distinctly from turn-based characteristics." The credit system is simply that, a crediting system. It's not affected by turns that accumulate every 15 minutes. The only thing the engine timer will affect (up to this point) are the GC count for purchasing in-game items.

Users are able to redeem credits for assault tokens. Credits can be earned a different number of ways and are primarily designed to encourage more on-site activity (e.g. credits earned per forum post, submissions). Therefore, you aren't necessarily waiting for your turn. If you want to accumulate assault tokens, simply do something on the site to earn them (sort of like farming resources).

Additional resources and features to emphasize the strategic aspect of it will be integrated later. Basically for right now I'm trying to get an idea as to what people could be looking for in a browser based strategy game like this. If it's possible, coming up with something like KoC but getting away from waiting on a turn to pass (timer) before you're able to do anything - I understand that's where the boredom via repetition comes in. Once you've used up all your turns for something, you get bored looking at your resources and units and have nothing to do until the next turn passes and the user walks away for a few hours. I'm trying to avoid this with Southwest Coders RTS Engine which is why it's still the engine itself in development for which I haven't supplied a particular name for yet.

[AF]

imo thats far too complex. You have a turn based system. Don't kid yourself its anything else at the moment, afterall a turn based system isn't turned into a realtime engine by a forum and a guestbook, so why should yours?

I would estimate that 95% of all attacks will be when you're not online, makign the disarming system a little futile. I know when playing these types of games, if I'm attacked while I'm online I usually have the attacker sitting next to me or open in an IM convo anyway.

So what sort of an attack is it? Why would putting in a code disarm the attack?


Web based strategy games should be based around simple goals with complexity built ontop, not the other way around. You need a proper goal for the entire game that the user can follow, a storyline even, otherwise they wont even know what it is they're playing which is a marketing disaster of epic proportions.


As I understand it a realtime strategy game is not possible using php because fo the very nature of php. It would require a hefty dose of ajax/java/flash.


So credits == money? Why not call it the currency system or the money system instead? Its far less misleading?

<visits the site via google/>

Ok this doesn't look like a real time strategy at all, its extremely misleading.

From what I see this is a forum/site add on rather than a game, intended for forum goers etc.


So I ask you. Will people be able to play the game without intereacting outside the game via posting and participating in your websites community?

Our goal is to put something together like Kings of Chaos and/or Swirve's Utopia browser based/text based/turn based online game with a little bit of a twist that will help give participating members more to do than the sites I've mentioned.

99.9999% of all the people who will come across you will not have a clue what those 2 things are, never mind that they're websites or games.


I think your site layout issue is the least of your problems and you have a major issue with knowing what you're actually doing. This shows up in that I cannot dtermine the exact role or purpose of your website as a whole. Is ti any coincidence the paypal buttons stands out like a giant flashing billboard in a desert wasteland?

btw your articles don't work, a database error perhaps? Actually looking t your entire website I come away having been given nothing.

There is no value enticing me to come back or even stay very long, and if you do not offer me any value from your website you cant expect me or anyone else to give you anything back in return either via word of mouth or in increased traffic or advice.

A website can look amazing but offer no value and thus receives no traffic, whereas a tatty web page drawn up in notepad in a minute can attract thousands per hour if it contains something people want.

[southwestcoders]

I'm in the middle of updating a few things if you don't mind. The ultimate goal is to give them something to do.

[Argh]

So, basically, it's a game design that tries to keep people focused on your website as much as possible, and you're going to ad-serve them to generate revenue.

That's a plan.

The main thing I see here, though, is that I'm having real problems visualizing how it'll be fun.

Episodic-play games where turns generate according to a fixed measure (for example, Kapilands) have a very specific type of audience- strategic gamers, who generally want to play out their turns when it's convenient for them to do so. While there's that "boredom factor", where people walk away because they've done everything they can do within a given timeframe... that's a very specific type of play.

They're still "real-time" games- all games of that kind used a fixed time interval (Spring's just happens to be about 5 times a second).

However, you're basically talking about building something which is turn-based, but where the timing on turns relies on a number of formulae and player actions. This won't be fair for all players, and while it could possibly lead to the revenue-generation opportunities you're hoping for, I think your approach will just piss people off. I've already thought up several easy ways to exploit it and generate lots more tokens than anybody could reasonably get, and I'm sure that people will figure out many others. You'll be up to your neck in security issues.

The only difference between real-time and turn-based is whether or not a clock forces new updates. Kapilands is "real time" in every real sense as Spring- the issue is the speed of the simulation.

If you want to keep people glued to your 'site... I'd suggest a game design that has strategic elements with a long time-limit, and tactical elements with a short time-limit and nice graphics using Flash. Allow players to play the strategic game, the tactical game, or both. If the tactical game is interesting, then you can keep people playing that while waiting for strategic turns to occur. And, unlike what you're proposing, it wouldn't lead to constant exploit attempts.

I actually wrote up a game design that does all of this awhile ago, I just haven't done anything with it, because I've been working with Spring. If you wanna see it, I could go back and dig it up, and provide it under LGPL...

[southwestcoders]

By the way, I doubt seriously it matters whether or not it's a turn based or real time strategy. The terminology in and of itself really has nothing to do with putting together a browser based game written in PHP/MySQL.

Leave off on the whole turn based vs. RTS thing and call it browser based. I can throw in a timer into a real time strategy example and it'll be turn based, so what's that got to do with anything? That doesn't really help in the way of plots, ideas, etc.

[southwestcoders]

So, basically, it's a game design that tries to keep people focused on your website as much as possible, and you're going to ad-serve them to generate revenue.

That's a plan.

The main thing I see here, though, is that I'm having real problems visualizing how it'll be fun.

Episodic-play games where turns generate according to a fixed measure (for example, Kapilands) have a very specific type of audience- strategic gamers, who generally want to play out their turns when it's convenient for them to do so. While there's that "boredom factor", where people walk away because they've done everything they can do within a given timeframe... that's a very specific type of play.

They're still "real-time" games- all games of that kind used a fixed time interval (Spring's just happens to be about 5 times a second).

However, you're basically talking about building something which is turn-based, but where the timing on turns relies on a number of formulae and player actions. This won't be fair for all players, and while it could possibly lead to the revenue-generation opportunities you're hoping for, I think your approach will just piss people off. I've already thought up several easy ways to exploit it and generate lots more tokens than anybody could reasonably get, and I'm sure that people will figure out many others. You'll be up to your neck in security issues.

The only difference between real-time and turn-based is whether or not a clock forces new updates. Kapilands is "real time" in every real sense as Spring- the issue is the speed of the simulation.

If you want to keep people glued to your 'site... I'd suggest a game design that has strategic elements with a long time-limit, and tactical elements with a short time-limit and nice graphics using Flash. Allow players to play the strategic game, the tactical game, or both. If the tactical game is interesting, then you can keep people playing that while waiting for strategic turns to occur. And, unlike what you're proposing, it wouldn't lead to constant exploit attempts.

I actually wrote up a game design that does all of this awhile ago, I just haven't done anything with it, because I've been working with Spring. If you wanna see it, I could go back and dig it up, and provide it under LGPL...

I'd be happy to look at what you've got. With the example about the currently thought of attack system is making that real-time response available. If the targeted user is online, they'll know it the minute they move to the next page (maybe alerts will be timed for 1 min rather than 30 secs). That user then has the chance to respond in time or it'll "default" to the normal attacked-while-offline environment you would normally see in a turn-based setup.

Think about these MMORPGs online that employ organizations and organization cities that can be attacked. What's to prevent their cities from being attacked while they're offline? And yet they're RTS aren't they? This is along the lines of what I'm thinking off and if necessary, I can eliminate the whole timer system itself, like mentioned before, and leave off the whole "turn based" thing. Like I said, that's really now the point as much as it is coming up with what people are looking for and how to go about it code-wise.

Everything on the site was built by hand. No templates, no snippets, no pre-made source code - everything from scratch. I know the ins and outs of the entire site so in that regards it's really not that difficult at all to come up with a way to credit with on-site activity (for whoever was mentioning it being too difficult).

[Argh]

By the way, I doubt seriously it matters whether or not it's a turn based or real time strategy. The terminology in and of itself really has nothing to do with putting together a browser based game written in PHP/MySQL.

It matters a great deal, actually. You're in the game-design phase- you need to make a fun game. It's a fundamental decision.

True turn-based games do not move to another turn until all players have played, even if this "play" is a skip. E.G., games like Civilization.

There are lots of true turn-based browser games online, and they're usually very frustrating to play with people, because if they abandon without formally resigning, everybody is hosed until the server decides they've timed out, usually well over an hour.

You're building a time-based simulation, where the sim updates slowly. What I was arguing is that including a method whereby people could get more resources based on various "interactive" methods is a very bad idea. Especially if those resources essentially make it possible for players to accelerate their simulation as opposed to other players. Even if you put a hard-cap limit on the number of "tokens" they can get in a given time period, to put a reasonable upper limit on this, you're basically encouraging players to bounce around the website using a script or bot, just so that they can play at competitive levels. And people who don't will just be totally hosed- sounds like a great way to build and maintain a playerbase

What I'm basically saying is... if you want to keep people tied to the site, you need to have a better method- there has to be a compelling reason. Building a fairly simplistic simulation game where players run a simple economy, place tokens on a board, etc., isn't terribly hard to accomplish, given the tools available at this point. Which is why there are a bazillion of these games. And the vast majority suck.

A game that contains two very different games within different time-scales, however, or even different basic rulesets (true turn-based vs. real time) is not only possible, it's often been very successful in the marketplace. For example, X-COM is a game where events in the "overworld" occurred in real-time, but combat with the aliens occured in a true turn-based fashion. With a game design like that, you could have a really interesting and compelling product...

[southwestcoders]

Well that's part of the reasoning behind having a ranking system in place. It's a starting place for me to begin putting together not just a ranking system, but an "end-game" type *environment* when I get to that point. For the time being, it serves the necessity of having a ranking system.

I believe KoC tries to implement a little bit of this concept but have fallen short of the actual real-time aspect of it. They call it Ages, where right now they're approaching Age 8, but it's nothing more than time periods (in months) where they generate reports on accounts with the highest statistics.

Utopia on the other hand has kingdoms where you can build up your kingdom with your own resources, assistance, recon information about other kingdoms and plan skirmishes with other kingdoms online. This more or less relies on others to be actively playing as well, though.

Moving up the ladder, we could then give out plots (or storylines) of what's going on in the arena, world, whatever you want to call it and how individual players (not groups, organizations or kingdoms) are making significant changes to it - this hopefully will give individual players more playing power, but combined in a group, they would be slightly stifled to balance things out (1/4 efficiency of player per player so a group of 4 people would be the equal strength of 1 player alone - 8 players would be the strength of 2 players by themselves - main thing? combined resources).

Little skirmishes in-game can be definately turn based. One-on-one. But full fledged wars? My thoughts here now are players have to find them a group to be in and that group's leader must accept them (or invite them even). An alternative to using groups would be choosing sides (not races, but sides). If so, we may start out with just two sides for now (but maybe three total in the future). Users can then join a side as a single fighting unit (soldier) or can find them a group to enlist in, where the group can engage in combat as a grouped fighting unit (battalion). That group then can vote to participate as a single fighting force on the side they're on as a group in whatever major battle is taking place (could also be set up as plots).

That sounds like a better way to go about it. The overall theme of the game then would be "Being Prepared." And because nobody's perfect, I probably will be making modifications to the system, including where and how they can earn credits (not sure what I'm going to do with them now).

In light of the theme, though, you as an individual player are constantly getting yourself prepared for the future - so that when an event is activated (stories, minor events can be sent to players to read and/or for them to keep track of the likelihood of a major battle about to take place), everyone can jump in (or assemble and then jump in) to fight.

*phew* Alright, well how's about that for "turn based."

[imbaczek]

that's probably going to be offtopic, but if you guys care, please make it better than ogame and it's friends. ogame is probably the worst game I tried, ever.

if you don't know what I'm talking about, it's all for the better.

[southwestcoders]

The part I love about this whole thing (not that it's anything new or confined to this particular language) is just being able to build and test on my laptop and release bits and pieces/components or entire systems online.

[AF]

Look at it this way:

A multinational co-operation starts a physical real-time strategy game. What you do is you buy S cartridges and then use them to battle evil replicons.

People see the game and wonder what its meant to be. Finalyl the papers figure out what ti really is and everyone who tries it feels cheated.


What really is the game? Well the cartridges are boxes inside which are bars with which to battle the evil replicons, and the evil replicons can be found everywhere, even on your skin and floors and walls.

What they didn't tell you is the bars are made by dove, and the replicons are microscopic, sometimes known by their scientific names as ecoli, salmonella, or various other names.




What you advertise has to be clear and concise or people will feel cheated, or they'll feel lost and they'll give up.

So looking over the replies everyone else has given I worry there's a looming issue coming up that nobodies noticed. The game is for the website, but if you try to make the website survive primarily on the game then you have the two relying on the other and the whole thing falls apart, like the floor of the building relying on the floor above for support and vice versa, no matter how hard they rely on each other they're destined to fall to the ground.

Which brings you back to square one, the website needs content, and the game was supposed to fill that hole.


So to come back to the original point of the thread, the sites design and layout. imo it's too much text. There's a lot of repetitive text for example adding in the articles in the side menu, you already have a web page for that with identical content. That and the way its put it's easy to mistake for a google text advert.

I'm unsure what the banner has to-do with southwest coders at all.

I would also unlock the forums to the public. You want forum readers to sign up and contribute and they're not going to do that if you just tell them they're not allowed. If you want a user to invest time and effort into participating you need to pursuade them it's worth their while, that they're going to get something out of it, be it information, enjoyment, or content.

The menu item 'free original articles' would be better as just 'articles', and I would also consider resizing your side menus, at the moment they take up slightly more horizontal space than your actual content.


Change your search box on the right from 'search the web' to 'search this site' which is what it actually does.

Present a good direct path for users telling them exactly what your site does, make everything do exactly what it says and make it nice and clear, and keep things nice and simple. Emphasise the content of your site, and the value in it. As it is a lot of stuff looks like its written from an advertising point of view.

Is this a bible submission page!?!?!?!?!??
http://www.southwestcoders.com/king-james-intranet.php

I can imagine this sort of thing will be a huge turn off for most internet users. Unless the site is going to be geared towards this theme I'd remove it. That and the harsh words on discussion and anything that doesn't directl agree with that specific version of the bible is very intimidating, why not just link to the bible itself? This is just a recipe for trouble.

http://www.southwestcoders.com/debt-project.php
This would be better suited to a personal blog or a dedicated website.

Also your page source has google ad stuff but I dont see them anywhere?

There are also several other invisible divs on your page such as a hyper link underneath the image div and a title description too.


So to summarize what i would do:

• Remove pages that don't have content and onyl add them back in once content has arrived.
• Move the bible page to a dedicated site or remove it. Its a niche and anyone not in that niche is likely to pass judgement or be pushed away by it. It gives the impression you're hard liners from the bible belt of america.
• Increase the width of the website if you want to keep a fixed width format, or set it to a variable width format with a minimum size. The content should never be smaller than the menus
• Shift the debt project page somewhere else
• Move the donate button somewhere more appropriate
• Fix the google ads and the missing divs
• Put the title of the menu at the side as 'menu' and get rid of the underlined site navigation sub menu
• Rename Search the web to search this site or just search

And if you want to make money from your site, remember people dont just give you money for having a website. Traffic doesn't come out of thin air, you need to give people something or they wont keep coming back and you need to be patient and consistent about it. If you offer nothing people want, you won't get anything, be that advert revenue, donations, or popularity/traffic.

[southwestcoders]

*sigh*

can anyone spell abandon ship?

[Michilus_nimbus]

Enormous block of text

Exactly what I was thinking. Well, kind of. I had the Dove thing.

[Sefidel2]

The only really fast and easy way to do what you ask is with flashcom server, which is kick ass and supports plenty of 3d. that would allow you to have rts, without lag. it uses rtmp protocol to stream video/audio/code to and from clients nad servers. Its not exactly the most advanced graphically, but if you want a browser based game you need flash or java, and java will take you longer to develop. Also you are asking people who are programmers, which means we dont really know shit about it except for how to put it together.

[southwestcoders]

Alright well thanks anyways for the help guys. I'll just go with whatever SWC Engine turns out to be. If it's some form of complex turn based/RTS then great, if it turns out turn based only, fine...if it ends up as nothing more than some tic-tac-toe game then so be it.

'appreciate the input.

[smoth]

look at graal online, it was once just a java version of the legend of zelda, people could run around and just hack each other up all day. It was sprite based but I still wish I had the source to it.

[AF]

A javascript version yes.

A Java version no.

Just to be clear java != javascript. javascript runs inside a browser and is actually called ECMA script but everyone calls it java script because its part of the java runtime. proper Java runs on the desktop like a proper application, and it cna be launched using the browser with java webstart.