Author
|
Topic: A star control 1 remake that may actually get finished (Read 38528 times)
|
Shiver
Guest
|
an sc1 remake might be better if it allowed more than 1 on 1 combat to spice things up and remove the brutality of bad ship combos.
Ignore him. Stick to the formula. Anyway, the only truly bad ship combo in SC1 is Yehat vs Spathi.
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Dragon
Frungy champion
 Offline
Posts: 86
|
I'm posting an update as I've change direction slightly since my last post. I've made no fundamental changes to the gameplay: this is still a straight SC1 remake. I have decided (now that I've haven't got a deadline  ) to add a bit of polish. This comes through as two design decisions:
The first is that I'm modeling each of the races for the pilot window animations - I was going to leave them out but I might have a use for them afterwards.
The second change is that the entire gameplay is being written in SmallTalk. This makes is very easy to write as SmallTalk is an utterly awesome language for scripting. This will also make it very easy to mod as all the code will be available whilst the game is running and it's possible to change it and immediately see the result. It's hard to stress how useful/powerful this is unless you've actually used SmallTalk. The downside is that I'm writing my own (VM'less) implementation. I've a couple of reasons why I'm not using an existing implementation but mostly it's just because I want to write it myself. Fortunately it's a very well thought out, simple language.
And seeing as I promised I wouldn't post unless I had something to show. Here's a non-mocked up screenshot of a Vux Intruder vs an Earthling Cruiser.
and a link to the hi-res version (120KB). [EDIT] Aaagh, the image was sized down anyway...
Happy Days!
|
|
|
|
« Last Edit: January 17, 2009, 01:30:06 pm by Dragon »
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
|
|
Draxas
Enlightened
Offline
Gender: 
Posts: 1044
|
To say nothing of the fact that that screenshot looks pretty snazzy. Nice work.
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
|
|
Dragon
Frungy champion
Offline
Posts: 86
|
Thanks for that 
While I'm not familiar with SmallTalk, easy modability is a big plus.
To put my lecture hat on (and those who don't like coding can safely ignore the rest):
SmallTalk comes from the Lisp branch of the programming tree so it's quite different to the COBOL inspired languages (C++, BASIC, Pascal, Java and friends).
Once one gets over the initial WTF stage it's actually incredibly well thought out and consistent. Absolutely everything is an object and there are only six keywords. To grab an example straight off Wikipedia, an if 'statement' looks like this:
result := a > b
ifTrue:[ 'greater' ]
ifFalse:[ 'less' ]
Looking at "a > b", it's evaulated as a Boolean (which is an object, there are not primitives) and it is either going to be True or False. Both of which are subclasses of Boolean. The magic is that Boolean has two abstract functions (virtual functions for the C++ers): ifTrue and ifFalse.
The True class overrides ifFalse to do nothing and ifTrue to evaluate the block of code passed to it. The False class does the opposite.
So here "ifTrue:[ 'greater' ]" passes the block closure (ie: chunk of code) to the ifTrue function on - for example - an instance of the True class. ifTrue will ask the block ( [ ] ) to evaluate itselt and then assign (:=) that result to "result".
The code in the block 'greater' (yup, 'greater' is the whole block of code) just returns the string "greater". Remember the code 'greater' is not executed until ifTrue evaluates it. The quotes around greater is SmallTalk for string and block closures always return their last line of code. In this case we only have one line so it returns a string.
Bizarre until you get you head around it...
...and it's safe to look again 
|
|
|
|
« Last Edit: January 17, 2009, 11:47:52 pm by Dragon »
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
Cedric6014
Enlightened
Offline
Gender:
Posts: 701
|
Dammit, looks like this site is broken. if you go to retroremakes.com, it explains why.
Dragon, is there somethign I'm missing here? Is there another way to look at the thread?
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Lachie Dazdarian
Zebranky food
Offline
Gender:
Posts: 35
|
I like almost all of them, but ever since I saw your design of the Cruiser I had a problem with it. I don't know. I just think the front part should be done differently and the cockpit (blue window) redesigned. These are 3D models? Are they 3D models in the very engine or 2D sprites?
Also, I'm not sure I like the stars in the previous screenshot.
BTW, how do you plan to draw the cockpits? Plain pixel art skill or 3D models?
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
Cedric6014
Enlightened
Offline
Gender:
Posts: 701
|
I reckon the umgah could do with a bit more work. It needs a bit more weight at the back.
I love everything else though, great work
|
|
|
|
« Last Edit: January 19, 2009, 12:59:54 am by Cedric6014 »
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
SuddenDeath
Frungy champion
Offline
Gender:
Posts: 96
from Sunstrike's image pack
|
Just 2 minor complaints/suggestions:
Shofixti - seems a bit... too grey? Perhaps it could use a few of the details from the old ship...
Chenjesu - the original Broodhome had a bunch of blue 'needles' on the back side which looked really cool...
These are your ideas though, so feel free to ignore me 
But what I can say in general - I LOVE these! Great job! 
Oh, and one more thing - what does the Mmrnmhrm Y-wing look like? Have you made it yet?
|
|
|
|
« Last Edit: January 19, 2009, 03:59:11 pm by SuddenDeath »
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
. What I was vaguely alluding to is that everything will be released under (at least) the LGPL and the gameplay should be scriptable. It's the scriptability which is giving me issues at the moment though but if it works then anyone can (fairly easily) make changes.
