campaign thoughts

[bionix]

Hello everybody,

i played glest for a while - it's just fun! very lovely game, but how others already said, we miss the campains.

i'd like to start a campain thought. not really the plan to create one, just to catch all ideas for an open end story line, all that gimmicks and items known by other rpg/srpg like starcraft, c&c, warcraft and so on.

in my oppinion the main problem is not to find a nice story itself, but to catch all the tricky border stuff like parallel ideas.
it's nearly easy to write a story, but complex games requires complex stories - for example parallel stories between different races/units at same time. just remembered the good old starcraft where 3 races fights their own story lines, and in some points the lines collapses together or not.

another interestening thing is, that a story doesn't life by a single hero, or a nice setup of heros/teachers etc. from a single race.

esp. for this problem i started THIS thread.

dear admin, if you feel that this thread doesnt match the develop threads, please move it to a better position :twisted:

[RainCT]

Bionix, the problem is not the story, the problem is that currently Glest don't support campaigns and I doesn't look like the developers will continue it's development.

[bionix]

that is just the half truth, isnt it? there's a hack to provide savegames, right? so you are able to save and load states. it's also possible to include lua based scripting etc., right?
so the basic idea is not wrong - even if the main team doesn't want to support that. maybe it moves to an own source fork of this project.

all basic elements, needed by campaigns exist: an ai (even if is not the best one), a main engine, load save stuff, and of course an api.

therefore some technical improvements has to be made, that is clear to everyone (ok, right now nobody want to implement that, but the collection of needed things would be fine, or not)

1. a scripting engine, use just existing ones like lua etc.
1.1. scripted camera modes (based on general scripting engine)
2. level/map based items and unit declaration (already done through the normal map declaration)
3. an engine for animations - but also this is done, because you just could load a scripted map and play this one (just like wc3)

of course, to support a real and nice campaing mode some other features has to be implemented like menu systems, player stats etc. but this is not the main point.

i think, the problem is not technical based. or am i wrong with that? could someone (which know details of lua script etc. more than me ) check what's possible? and of course, what's do be done to get scripting engines into glest?

[bionix]

... It doesn't look like the developers will continue it's development.

That's the awnser vanguard.
I know that for campaings and mods a story is basic. but without the neccessary tools to develop a campaign with all aspects of RTS/RPG it seems to be senseless.

therefore i wrote this stupid suggestion and thoughts. it's not on me to change the scripting engine, but it's required for intros/extro and of course campaign's itself. so you can't work around these pitfalls.