Calling All Good Programmers...

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is going to be introduced as a game of a yet unexploited niche in the online gaming sector

Could we get some more details? Everyone can say they have discovered an "unexploited niche". You might have, but based on statistics it's more likely that you believe you have, but haven't. This isn't described in your brief design document.

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The game will be released for free so all can enjoy it.

How are you going to pay for server and maintance related costs?

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Graphic Formats: Jpeg, Gif, Bitmap (Via OpenGl)

Why do you choose to support Gif? Png is seen as a better format in almost all regards.

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Video/Interactive Formats: Flash , Avi

Flash? It's going to take way more computing power than required, and it's going to be a big problem to integrate it with a D3D/OGL engine. Also have you considering stuff like licensing? I doubt Adobe will just let you create your own flash player. I haven't heard of a single serious game using flash, why would you?

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Sound Formats: MP3, Wave, Ogg, Midi

Have you accuired a license to use MP3?
When you talk about Ogg, I'm assuming you mean Ogg Vorbis. Why will you support both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis? Ogg Vorbis is better than MP3, in all respects, except that MP3 is more videly used. Are you going to use Midi for music, and Wave for what? Why do you need Wave, when you have Ogg Vorbis or MP3.

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Language: C++/VB6

There is a big difference between those languages, lots of design related choices can't be made until a language is chosen.

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Multiplayer Aspects: P2P, Server Connection

Are you going to use P2P for a multiplayer game? How many players are you going to support? (less than 6?) And don't you even care about cheating?

You very well describes the interface, in your design. You lack explanation of lots of more important things though, for instance will it be possible to go around without your ship? Do your ship belong to a single server, or will you join a new server every time? If you do how are you going to balance the levels, I mean a level 1 and a level 200 could join the same server. How are you going to make sure admins won't cheat? For instance they could start a server (admin only) with thousands of alien tech, take it all and then join another server. Or will admins only be members of the developing team? How does the whole server thing work? Will it be thousands of independent servers (like many FPS games), or few servers managed by the development team? How about combat, will you actually be able to attack other races, or are you just going to take the flag or conquer the hill? I think you need to clarify a lot of things about the actual gameplay.

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Could we get some more details? Everyone can say they have discovered an "unexploited niche". You might have, but based on statistics it's more likely that you believe you have, but haven't. This isn't described in your brief design document.

The niche I was talking about was a free to play game, was that of a deathmatch styled space shooter that was 2d and had graphics such as those used it classic scrollers like raptor and the like.

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How are you going to pay for server and maintance related costs?

I can see where your getting this from, Im not going into this project empty handed. Server costs are minimal for the type of game I want, merely database oriented. Revenue will be derived from premium options. This is not something to worry about.

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Why do you choose to support Gif? Png is seen as a better format in almost all regards.

Being honest I had overlooked Png, but both Gif/Png would play minimal parts within the project. With bitmap being used (especially if we were using a VB based engine). I choose to support it as a secondary feature and therfor its use would be in a need to use basis.

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Flash? It's going to take way more computing power than required, and it's going to be a big problem to integrate it with a D3D/OGL engine. Also have you considering stuff like licensing? I doubt Adobe will just let you create your own flash player. I haven't heard of a single serious game using flash, why would you?

Simply no, Avi would be the main format. Essentially Flash would be intergrated if needed. Avi would be necessary, flash maybe not. Licensing and other issues would be considered in any case.

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Have you accuired a license to use MP3? When you talk about Ogg, I'm assuming you mean Ogg Vorbis. Why will you support both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis? Ogg Vorbis is better than MP3, in all respects, except that MP3 is more videly used. Are you going to use Midi for music, and Wave for what? Why do you need Wave, when you have Ogg Vorbis or MP3.

Yet again these are possible sound formats that have been considered. Yes Ogg Vorbis was our main consideration, especially due to its freeform with a project such as this. Wave was looked to be used for sound effects mainly. It seemed suitable to use short high quality waves over other formats.

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There is a big difference between those languages, lots of design related choices can't be made until a language is chosen.

Yes, this is quite obvious. Being a independent project, I am open to how the programmers think they can make the project work. Im not going to say "It has to be VB, everything else is inferior". I want to explore all possible pathways first.

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Are you going to use P2P for a multiplayer game? How many players are you going to support? (less than 6?) And don't you even care about cheating?

I think not. You havent quite seen how this is too work. A main server will process all games currently being played and hosted. However these games will not be hosted on the main server. Thus freeing up precious server resources. Players host games from there own machines and depending on the capabilites of the machine and connection players can join. The game doesnt run with 100 people in a room or whatnot. It is played in battles between groups of players. Reducing lag and meaning having the biggest guns wont win the game for you. Cheating is a very important issue, just because a game is hosted of a players own computer doesnt mean the game will be defenceless against pak haks etc.

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You very well describes the interface, in your design. You lack explanation of lots of more important things though, for instance will it be possible to go around without your ship? Do your ship belong to a single server, or will you join a new server every time? If you do how are you going to balance the levels, I mean a level 1 and a level 200 could join the same server. How are you going to make sure admins won't cheat? For instance they could start a server (admin only) with thousands of alien tech, take it all and then join another server. Or will admins only be members of the developing team? How does the whole server thing work? Will it be thousands of independent servers (like many FPS games), or few servers managed by the development team? How about combat, will you actually be able to attack other races, or are you just going to take the flag or conquer the hill? I think you need to clarify a lot of things about the actual gameplay.

No. Simply put. The game is based around deathmatch styled combat with other players. Kills and victories award you exp and credits each which allow for bigger and better ship parts and ships themselves. Your account is all stored on a single server and when you login you access this server. You then join games hosted on other players servers through the main server. Also the server program itself is not for the players, its for the server admin. I thought this quite obvious. And the admins would not cheat, as they would be members of the developing team yes. Yes, yes! The server will work in a FPS way. Thats the wholepoint behind the design of the game. Attack other races? Please clarify.

This topic was posted for those who may be interested in a project like this, details can then be hammered out with those interested parties.

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Being honest I had overlooked Png, but both Gif/Png would play minimal parts within the project. With bitmap being used (especially if we were using a VB based engine). I choose to support it as a secondary feature and therfor its use would be in a need to use basis.

Why not always use png? It's smaller than bitmaps, supports alpha channels (though IIRC some forms of bmp do support alpha channels, though that's pretty uncommon), and is loss-less. There's no down-side to using it, unless you don't have an easy way to load it (which most major languages have).

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Yet again these are possible sound formats that have been considered. Yes Ogg Vorbis was our main consideration, especially due to its freeform with a project such as this. Wave was looked to be used for sound effects mainly. It seemed suitable to use short high quality waves over other formats.

I don't know whether it was just me or SDL (a library that I use to load/play sounds) or something, but a while back, I was starting using sound in my game and I tried out the .wav format. To my horror, the game ran at an abysmally slow rate. In despair, I cursed the sound gods until one of them took pitty on my and showed me the .ogg format. Lo and behold, my speed issues where a thing of the past.

Just thought I'd share with you my experience with .wav.

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Cheating is a very important issue, just because a game is hosted of a players own computer doesnt mean the game will be defenceless against pak haks etc.

Yes, it does. There is no way to determine what a player is doing on their own computer. No way. Don't even bother trying. If you go this way, you'll reduce costs (probably by quite a bit), but 95% of your user base will cheat. Remember that it only takes one hacker to get everyone cheating. Example A is Diablo one.

Best of luck ont he project.

Minor notes on formats.

In my openGL engine, I started with 32bit RGBA bmp images. Very easy to write the code for loading and cacheing, and any decent image editor will save in 32bpp format. The downside is that they're huge files compared to the same png, so you'll want to migrate to png at some point down the road. Don't bother with gif, unless you want to add it in as "bling" feature. If you wanted gif for it's animation ability, just make movie strips using the other formats (a verticle or horizontal set of frames, tiled one after another). Otherwise, you'll be limited to only 8bpp for your animated images.

freeimage.sourceforge.net is an excellent completely free unit for loading all major image formats.

Don't bother with mp3 support unless you have a good reason not to use ogg vorbis. Using the mp3 format isn't free, which is (AFAIK) why ogg was invented.

Bump. :)