Future Project

As already announced a few months ago I am aiming to get a new development project up and running.
FL is pretty old and it makes not much sense developing something new for it.
That of course does not mean that Crossfire wont get further updates, fixes and most likely new content.

But the focus will drift away to a new project which I consider a serious challenge since Ive never really tried what I want to do now.
Developing a space sim/shooter from the scratch.
Well, thats actually not true because 18 years ago I developed an educational game but that simply was a different time and done in a meanwhile ancient coding language.

For what I intent to do now I will have much to learn (which is part of the challenge) and certainly the progress will be slow. Its going to be a step by step procedure.
I dont even really know yet in which direction this development will go. A final decision about it still has to be done.
And that is the reasion for this thread.

What would you prefer?
A game like Wing Commander?
A game like FL?
Maybe even a clone of FL just in a better game engine?

Discuss!

I have started the work on the basics so far... nothing is final and atm the structure reminds very much on FL.

Unity Web Player | Continuum

Atm it is not important to create fancy systems.
Most important at this point of the development is getting the fundamental parts of the game done. I have focused so far on building a user interface which has a logical structure in background, which is interactive and easy to use.
Also most important was to create logical structure on the different scenes and being able to make transitions between them either by using the UI or by interacting in the open game world. That is working pretty well already.
The Options menu still requires some more work. The ingame menu (esc) is not finished yet and I still need to include a savegame manager.
When that is done the game physics have to be set up correctly and the flight controls can be set up correctly. But that requires to know what kind of game you guys would want.

storyline is not even matter of topic
story scripting is hard to do... it already is in FL... and probably will be harder in other game engines
priority would have a sandbox environment (OpenSP)

and even then its alot of hard work
people which want to help can of course contact me via PM
but you guys will have to go through the same learning process like I do
probably people which have coding experience have an advantage since most of the coding stuff is done either in c# in javascript

in theory it should be possible to have a fallback to older shader models but actually i think it will just run fine with every dx10 or dx11 graphic card

no, not really
the biggest performance killer for the cpu probably is going to be the intro video
and ram also shouldnt be a big problem if we do clean work and destroy game objects that are not used.
the so far existing scenes (4 scenes) consume ~1% cpu performance and less than 100mb ram
eventhough these scenes are relative small and dont contain any complicated scripts yet I realy dont see a reason to expect an exploding resource demand

The link in the first post got updated with the latest changes.

• UI structure got an overhaul so it really can be applied to any scene available with only doing a minimal amount of settings
• In-game menu (open with "ESC") got recreated
  
  
  • security triggers added to prevent that the In-game menu can be closed while other overlaying menus (such as options) are open
  • Resume Game button or alternatively another hit on "ESC" to continue the game (if no other UI windows are open)
  • Pause function added to open In-game menu
  • first version of a Save Game and Load Game functionality added
• Additional HUD elements added and partly animated
• New UI structure supports an alternative UI Ingame menu for MP (when finally activated)
• New mouse cursor added
• Splash Screen added for the standalone version
• Support for all possible aspect ratios (5:4; 4:3; 16:9; 16:10; 3:2) -> UI will perfectly scale

step by step

Edit by

yes, Im sure.... javascript

yeah, that would be cool coz coding wise I suck
either that or I need more than one week to learn the language.

dunno what your dev environment looks like... for me unity installed visual studio 2015
when I create scripts they get opened in the studio and when I save them unity loads them directly into the project

New updated version is online.
Link in the first post.

Changes:

• Dust Particle System added to the space scene
• Auto typing scene description text added (e.g. "Planet Manhattan, New York System")
• Load Game and Save Game functions partly rewritten for better compatibility with current code standards
• Credits Menu added to the Main Menu (including masked scroll animation)
• Game Option Menu completely rebuild and restructured
  
  • new Audio Mixer created
  • all existing AudioSources categorized by Output
  • fully functional Audio Option Panel created
• Minor adjustments to the Start Menu structure
• Minor adjustments to the Project Structure