Good luck to you

Yeah goodluck, ill be keeping an eye on this

How do you plan on making it? Mod or from scratch?

EotFS actually sounds very similar to a civ5 mod i was planning.

What engine are you using?

That sounds awesome. Have never heard of Fading Suns before. Sadly, I know nothing about programming .... but I know about games, so I can help test when you get things up and running, or juist in general if you need any input.

Will it be multiplayer only, like Dom3 is more or less (the AI is gruesome)? Will you have AI?

I am intruiged by what you have shown of EotFS.

I read the Wiki entry, which failed to say whether the game was for MP or SP, but the Gamespot review from 1997 seems to indicate that it is SP. Is that review accurate? In other words: Does it suffer from the same abysmal AI that Dom3 and Star Chamber suffer from?

Where can I get a copy, do you think, over here in Germany, to test it out and learn more?

thank you

I would have it based on a series of ships/satellites in orbit that reveal the FOW based on their position.  This could be a tricky one to work out, but it would provide an additional strategic element.  Knowledge is power, and it could be just as important to keep your opponent in check with his spy satellite network as well as his ground forces.

I love Dominions and tried a bit of EotFS once, so this project looks interesting to me.

I found EotFS hard to get into, though, because there lacked a story/tutorial to get into the world and learning all that's needed. I know Dominions lacks one too, but at least the concept is easy to grasp and some players may know some of the various mythologies and be at east with parts of the world.

As for drawing, do you talk about painting-like or drawing smaller things like 2D units?

"Warring Suns" isn't a good name for a game. There already is a "Titans of Steel: Warring Suns" game, so your game will be almost impossible to find with a search engines. This is a very bad thing for an open source game.

Also, what about the open source part? Do you plan to make a forum, upload the source code somewhere etc.?

P.S. I liked the idea behind Emperor of the Fading Suns, but it had so much micromanagement... It was more fun to read the manual and AAR than to play it I didn't finish even one game in the end.

I don't think anything about Dominions 3 is easy. It is one of the most unfriendly games to new players ever. I even had to write a multi page tutorial just to help get friends into it (and these are gaming vets).

The drawing is basically just the 2D unit sprites like you can see in the screenshots. Probably 32x32's or 64x64's.

Ellestar, I've known about Titans of Steel:Warring Suns ever since that guy made the background and it's really only a minor obstacle. The second this actually has a public release it will very likely be one of the top three results on search engines as ToS;WS is not only obscure, but also old and inactive.

Regardless, we were already searching for new names and we started brainstorming starting at the post below.

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=56342.msg1307294#msg1307294

The main problem here is that there are a few gameplay mechanics that need to be figured out before the name is chosen, because these mechanics can radically change the feeling and background of the game.

Ad-Infinitum is a very different project that I've known about since before I started this. However, BrodieBrodie (the author of Ad-Infinitum) never responded to any of my requests to work together and it looks like we actually have very different games.

i must say, after going through the dwarf fortress forum, and regardless, this project looks very promising.

so keep it up!

With this level of complex, the first source you need to research into are websites design. the web design field, although relatively new, has reached a good understanding of how to arrange mass quantity of info on the screen. that being said, my example starts to follow this method. but, and its a big but, i really didnt research or took as too long to think the overall design, so it is still very far from becoming at the level of being a good mass info screen.

what i did was seperating the units and buildings into diffrent tabs. this way they are as easily reachable while getting each their respected space. so when you click on the buildings tab, it will look exactly like the unit tab, but with diffrent info ofcourse.

instead of showing the game icon in the unit description, it is much better to show the unit in a more dramatic angle. this gives much more "personality" and realism to the unit and helps color interest in the screen.

keep in mind that i barely touched the visual aspect of the screen, i just arranged it a bit diffrently, as i believe that before any actuall graphical design begins, the info arrangment of the screen needs to gets sorted first.

now that i look at it, it would be more logical to switch between the "buildings queue" and the available slots...

Thanks for the mockup burningpet!

I did web design/web sites for a short while and I used to use a lot of nice clean drop down menus to organize information. Then I found out that that anything not on the front page might as well have been invisible to people. No matter how many times I'd reorganize the menus, their names and contents people still were just awful at finding information. After making HUD's in Garry's Mod that used a tab based organization system and I kept encountering the same trend of people calling tabs "confusing". If it wasn't on the main screen it might as well not exist.

I should be able to expect more out of a turn based strategy player, but I'm just scared of it happening again.

Here's the one screen option themed similarly (might have to click on it):

I'm less concerned about players  being lost by either of these two options. Both of them are fairly straightforward, with the two tab panel being a little less complex. I have faith that players can figure out both options. The question is, is the increased simplicity of the two tab option worth the extra clicking between them?

As far as minimizing the text, almost everything already has tooltips and I don't really know how much more I can dumb it down. I could use images in places of the words for the unit stats, but that's not really helping anything.