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Wyrmsun

Posted: Sun Sep 14, 2014 3:22 pm
by Andrettin
Hello folks,

I am working on an open-source RTS game called Wyrmsun. Why am I posting this here? Because it has not only usual RTS gameplay, but also a turn-based "grand strategy mode", which might interest you. In this mode, production and diplomacy are handled in a grand strategy map, while battles are resolved through a tactical map.

Here are a couple of screenshots of the game's grand strategy mode:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/173 ... reen02.png
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/173 ... reen03.png

At present, production and diplomacy are still somewhat basic. There are only two resources (gold and lumber), and diplomacy is limited to declaring war and making peace. To obtain resources, it is only needed to control a province which contains a resource-producing tile (gold mine for gold and forest tiles for lumber). Nevertheless, I intend to deepen these aspects of the grand strategy mode eventually.

Thanks for you attention =)

Re: Wyrmsun

Posted: Sat Sep 20, 2014 8:26 am
by Earymgn
Pictures looks nice and I think you did a good job so far. I would appriciate some minor updates here.
When did you startend with your game-developing?

Re: Wyrmsun

Posted: Sat Sep 20, 2014 5:00 pm
by Andrettin
Earymgn wrote:Pictures looks nice and I think you did a good job so far. I would appriciate some minor updates here.
When did you startend with your game-developing?
Thanks! =) I started developing the game about a year ago. The RTS engine itself has been undergoing development for more than a decade, though (the code for the grand strategy mode I had to create from scratch).

Re: Wyrmsun

Posted: Sat Sep 20, 2014 9:56 pm
by Trilarion
Hi Andrettin,

I also like to hear about other open strategy projects. Of course I wish you all the best with it. From the screenshots it looks quite advanced already.

I also see that you use Lua and a cross-plattform game library. If you haven't done so - one could create an installer for Windows including the executable and all game data conviently with something like InnoSetup. People (using Windows) usually prefer it over a zip file (say the download numbers).

Also I thought about things all open source strategy games could share and two things come to my mind immediately: artwork (see for example open source artwork from Veneteaou (terrain set) and programming of artificial intelligence (which is a tough topic by itself).

Re: Wyrmsun

Posted: Sun Sep 21, 2014 9:13 am
by Andrettin
Trilarion wrote:Hi Andrettin,

I also like to hear about other open strategy projects. Of course I wish you all the best with it. From the screenshots it looks quite advanced already.

I also see that you use Lua and a cross-plattform game library. If you haven't done so - one could create an installer for Windows including the executable and all game data conviently with something like InnoSetup. People (using Windows) usually prefer it over a zip file (say the download numbers).

Also I thought about things all open source strategy games could share and two things come to my mind immediately: artwork (see for example open source artwork from Veneteaou (terrain set) and programming of artificial intelligence (which is a tough topic by itself).
Hey Trilarion,

Thanks for your nice words!

The idea of having an installer is very good. I had thought of doing something like that, but I didn't know how to do it. I downloaded InnoSetup now and installed it, hopefully I will be able to properly setup an installer soon. I wonder if it is possible to create a patcher with InnoSetup.

I agree that the artwork and artificial intelligence programming are something that could be shared between open source projects (in fact, in the first stages of the grand strategy mode for the game, I was using Veneteaou's excellent artwork - which I asked him if he would be ok with releasing them under the GPLv2 - and only later on I commissioned artwork that was more akin to the style of the rest of the game's graphics). I'm not sure if the Wyrmsun grand strategy graphics would be useful for ImpRemake though, since the style is somewhat different from the Imperialism one, and since you are using 80x80 rather than 64x64 tiles (maybe the borders and city graphics could be useful however, at least as placeholders).

Re: Wyrmsun

Posted: Mon Sep 22, 2014 9:51 am
by Trilarion
Unfortunately I believe that InnoSetup doesn't do patches. It however doesn't change the start menu entry, removes all old program files (store user data in the user folder) and installs automatically to the same directory and updates the uninstaller. But you always have to deploy the full application. This will make incremental patches difficult.

The alternative might be NSIS which seems to be more complex but also more powerful (see also this plugin).

As for artwork: I now think about releasing it under several licenses at the same time as to make sharing between open source projects easier. I thought that GPLv2 is better suited for code than for artwork and therefore went the CC BY SA way. Maybe I should insist on a double licensing as early as possible. Anyway I want for each artwork file or file set to have a small record (in a text file) about the license and the creator - so it is easier to contact the original creator to sort out licensing issues. And I also strive for publishing the "raw versions" of the artwork, i.e. high resolution tiles with layers etc. ... Let's see how it plays out. For example resources images could be another potential shared object.

Re: Wyrmsun

Posted: Mon Sep 22, 2014 1:50 pm
by Andrettin
Trilarion wrote: As for artwork: I now think about releasing it under several licenses at the same time as to make sharing between open source projects easier. I thought that GPLv2 is better suited for code than for artwork and therefore went the CC BY SA way. Maybe I should insist on a double licensing as early as possible. Anyway I want for each artwork file or file set to have a small record (in a text file) about the license and the creator - so it is easier to contact the original creator to sort out licensing issues. And I also strive for publishing the "raw versions" of the artwork, i.e. high resolution tiles with layers etc. ... Let's see how it plays out. For example resources images could be another potential shared object.
In regards to crediting, what I did in Wyrmsun was including the names of the authors of the graphical and audio files in the game's credits themselves, as well as within a "credits.txt" file in both /graphics/ and /sounds/ folders, which detailed which person made which particular file.

You might be right that CC-BY-SA is a better alternative to content licensing, but in the case of Wyrmsun given that I included content from other games (such as Battle for Wesnoth and Aleona's Tales) which had their content released under the GPLv2 as well, having everything under the GPLv2 seemed like the better choice in this case. If any of the Wyrmsun graphics would be useful to you, but you would need them to be licensed under the CC-BY-SA license, I could contact the artists to ask them if it is ok to release those graphics under that license.

Sharing resource graphics sounds like a nice idea (although the ones in Wyrmsun might be a bit too small for ImpRemake).

When I am able to devote more attention to the development of the grand strategy mode, one idea I had was adding a timber->lumber->furniture production chain, with each province demanding a bit of furniture per turn, and giving gold when "buying" the furniture. This would provide an alternative to mining for gold income, and would make lumber more useful (since it is only used for one-off actions, like training a unit or researching an upgrade, in the late game players tend to have huge stocks of lumber that don't serve much use).

Re: Wyrmsun

Posted: Tue Dec 23, 2014 2:24 pm
by Andrettin
An update on this. The next version of the game will include a grand strategy map for Earth, with historical germanic factions warring against each other:

Image