Fate of Nations

[SS]

For any newbies that might have popped in, Fate of Nations is going to be the best browser-based game there ever was. If it ever gets completed. :mellow:

This post is where I'm going to explain my plan for how to get it completed, and whether you're on the team or not, please give feedback on whether you think this is a good plan.
If you are on the team, just a reminder that this is in the public area, so DON'T TALK ABOUT TOP SECRET STUFF!

The plan for Fate is quite simple, and it involves getting a big sword and cutting it up. :sword:


No, really. I'm proposing we split Fate of Nations into four seperate projects/modules. Two of the projects we keep internal to the team, whilst the other two we consider making open-source.

The two internal projects being the bits that will make Fate unique:

Fate-World - everything related to ensuring the gameworld is rich and interesting: the races, nations, histories and so on.

Fate-Mechanics - functions and formulae relating to how things interact. The quantitive attributes of nations and units, etc.

These two projects will remain secret to prevent people from stealing our great ideas, and we can continue(/start) to use Fyrefryst for them.
(Although Fate-Mechanics will eventually need converting into something Fate-Engine can read, but that shouldn't be difficult and we'll approach that bridge once we're about to cross it.)

The two external projects being what will allow Fate to exist as a game are:

Fate-Interface - The visuals and controls that allows a player to actually play the game. This may actually end up as multiple sub-projects - eg: a regular HTML/JS interface, a Flash interface, possibly even a Windows app interface.

Fate-Engine - a relatively generic game engine that sits between any Fate-Interface version and Fate-Mechanics (or any set of game mechanics) and the database, and does fancy processing stuff.

The reason for open-sourcing these later two bits, is that it might allow us to get development help from other people without having to worry about fully trusting them as a team member (and also might help enable other good games to be developed), and it also shows how much work is or isn't being done, and so on.

Why seperate Interface and Engine? Because it then doesn't require that both are worked on simultaneously, and allows us to use any user interface, or even offer multiple interfaces.
Fate-Engine will be a web service written in ColdFusion (because writing web services in CF is easier than falling off a slippery log) and then Fate-Interface(s) can be written in anything that can read web services - which means CF, PHP, Flash, JavaScript/AJAX, C#, or whatever.


Once we've got these four easy projects complete, we'll bind everything together into a single solid experience, and then the hard part starts - testing and balancing. But by that time we'll hopefully have plenty of momentum and that wont faze us at all.



So, that's my idea - let me know your feelings...

[smi256]

I feel bad about being too simple a programmer to help... :unsure:  

[matt_the_shark]

I feel bad about not being a programmer, period.

I could definitely help out with the fate world, though, if you are still willing to put people in...

it sounds good, though, I remember when we started this thing way back when we really started hating koc.  I put forth the hostage idea, I remember it!  Though I hear that you guys didn't take on that one.

[Hornet]

Hmm, odd... I know I replied to this yesterday...  :blink:

Anyway, as I think I said, if you're going to go The Way of the Source, then just base it around Wesnoth.

I'm not sure I like the idea though... we'd be unlikely to get any decent developers by doing it, and then once we'd finally finished it on our own and were finally starting to become noticed, it'd still be GPL, and it'd be ripped off left, right and centre.  Or, someone'll fork it, and we'll have a divided development team.

I'd suggest keeping it as we are, otherwise we'll lose control of it to people with more time.   AJAX is an excellent plan though - I've been slowly teaching myself at work, so might be able to help there, depending on how complex it becomes.

(And I'm sure I said something else, but can't remember it at all.  :blink:)

[SS]

I feel bad about being too simple a programmer to help... :unsure:

You could always take it as an opportunity to extend your skills...

I could definitely help out with the fate world, though, if you are still willing to put people in...

I'm not certain on the exact state of things, but I'll post here once I've figured out what we need people-wise.

...

I did consider just using an existing game engine, but decided that it's probable that it would need so much modding as to make it easier to start from scratch.

With regards to source/licensing... fair points, although there's more open-source licenses than GPL; but if you source is in any way public some people would try ripping it regardless.
(I assume though that you are agreeing with the having the distinct engine/interface modues?)

Decent developers... it's hard to say; there are plenty of good CF developers out there, though not sure how many would be interested.
I think it's worth probing to see how many people might be interested in helping, irrespecting of what we do source-wise - more developers would be helpful.

Thinking about it, I think it's probably definitely worth staying closed for the immediate future - we can also open up closed source in future, but can't close open source.

The core AJAX stuff is simple, once you get it working then it is essentially nothing more than JavaScript - the hard part is thinking asynchronously and catering for not being able to have specific returns from functions.