Re: Introductions

[Henningsen <vnaavkn02@sneakemail.com>]

Two thoughts on your planned game:

1. I think it would be a good idea to use fixed time slices as described in
the Gamasutra article "Instant Replay: ..." by Patrick Dickinson (July 13,
2001). This makes it possible to exactly reproduce a game based on the input
history, which is a relatively small data set. Specifically, in a P2P
setting like you envision, I think it would be quite possible with todays
machines to have every player's game progress reproduced (and thus verified)
by 2 neighboring players. Together with a server based trust ranking, I
think this would solve most of the cheating issues. Better than other
solutions open to open-source developers, anyway. 

2. As for the isometric view, I think it is outdated as far as the rendering
goes, and one might as well do 3D. However, the main advantage of isometric
games, which is not outdated yet, is that they are *grid-based*. If you want
to make a game like AoE, where large numbers of units move across the
landscape without getting stuck on trees and buildings or separating from
their group, I think a grid-based map is the way to go. Meaning that your
map is made of little squares and every square is either open or blocked.
This makes it possible to do very fast and efficient pathfinding, and most
of what passes for AI today is based on pathfinding. If you don't have
excellent pathfinding, your MOBs will act so dumb that the game will suck.

Good luck,
Peter Henningsen