Mission 1: Which media is needed?

[Michael Hartlef]

So what we need on resources could be:

1) Asteroid model -> we can use the one I made and see how it fits. It can be scaled but extra ones are made fast.
2) Shuttle model -> I suggest to use the shuttle that Kent made and is used for an enemy right now
3) Station 1 model -> Kent, can you work on station 1?
4) Station 2 model -> Kent, can you work on station 2?
5) Intercom transmission -> For the warning message about the incoming asteroids we can either use radio aka voice sound effects or I can try to create a little video message. First I will give you the plain radio voice and
later on when I found out who to display a video via MCI on a OpenGL window, I will create the video.

About music for this level, which kind of mood should it set?

[kryton9]

Mike I like how you planned everything out. One thing, should we just concentrate on getting the instant action game finished and while working on that, in our free time work on the mission media, or just concentrate on finishing the instant action game first then work on mission levels? I am up for either way, will see what you guys decide.

But I think we need the type of list you made Mike, it will really help in knowing where to work. Great idea!

[Petr Schreiber]

Hi Mike,

yes, your asteroid is perfect.
Shuttle model is no problem too, I just need kryton to tell me which shuttle is the starter one.

Regarding station models, I would like to make each easily memorable, but with some "normalised" parts, to be evident they are part of "Earth Universe Transport System ISO 9006" :D.

Mike - I have one idea about message displaying, as I have seen in other games. It would need to render just few frames of "speaking head" to bitmaps, then make texture stripe from it and I will animate it using UV map shift. While playing it I would add some graphic noise to look like difficult transmition, what do you think ?

Mood of the mission music... To not make you overloaded, what about making shorter ( 20 secs ) little themes for "surprise", "bad news", "victory" ? On the background there could be ambient music, from time to time interrupted by those short mini songs.

So my idea would be to create longer peaceful theme and stress theme which could be used in all missions according to their style.


Bye,
Petr

P.S. I tried to create mini song in demo of FL studio 6 using "FL Slayer" tool. It is out of rhytm and any other aesthetical scales, but to give you idea :D

[Michael Hartlef]

Kent, I thought these media types where needed for the core game. But of course, you can allways use placeholders first.

Petr, that animstrip is a good idea. That would also allow me to get the interlaced video effect done via batch processing and photoshop.

I can't wait to get back home and have some quite time to listen to your song. I like slayer, but usually use it for a good bass sound. When I have enough money, TOXIC and SLAYER 2 are on my wishlist. For guitar sounds, I culd allways try to play them myself as I have the equipment, but for a fast layout of a song, SLAYER is great.

Ok, a peacefull theme and a stressfull theme. Something trance like for the peacefull one and something RAMMSTEIN like for the stressfull one. I'll see what my composing genes are able to create. I'm still searc hing for that RAMMSTEIN sound, I love them and wanna be able to create something similar.

The idea about these short sequences are good, again I will try to come up with something.

[Petr Schreiber]

Hi,

don't expect much from my "music theme", it was just experiment.

Rammstein is good stuff, my brother has them in CD drive very frequently :)

kryton, I am maybe wrong, but I would try to work on mission oriented game now, we can use techniques and model learned / created from this work in instant action version later.


Bye,
Petr

[Michael Hartlef]

I had listened to your theme. Interesting, not bad at all. Try to work on it more.

[kryton9]

Good morning guys, well morning for me, evening for you guys.

Petr, yeagh gets into the music scene with an interesting sound. I like it, I am with Mike, work on it more. It has a neat feel to it and sound.

Guys, about the models, I want to redo mine as I want to really get into making models. But the shuttle's are named in order of the missions from the very early story idea in case you want to use them as placeholders for now.

Petr you and Mike brought up a good point, that is instant action game does reflect media from the mission game. For the models to have a neat common identifier as you mentioned. We will need a name as Star Trek has The Federation, Star Wars The Empire, etc.
Once we have the name, we need like a nice logo they would have. This is the nicest way to give that uniform look.

We should also at this time talk about the tech in our universe.
To get the ball rolling here is the way I envision the tech, am open and waiting to hear your guys thoughts as this will effect the design and look of things big time:

1. No transports like in Star Trek. More like Battlestar Gallactica, You need to shuttle up and down to go anywhere.
2. No holodeck
3. Intelligent Computer's with Star Trek like AI's maybe even an avatar based Ship Computer as in Andromeda or in Halo
4. Antigravity yes
5. for speed, do we use warp gates as in Babylon 5 or do the ships have that built in as in Star Trek? If built in, do we have a color scheme as they do in Star Trek, red blue or other nice color combos for the engines.

Then of course the civilization, is it a big brother government? Is it like Blade Runner, run by Big Corporations tied into government?
Is the government overall good or bad really?

Then of course logos to match the above. This will add that cool uniformity and give us material to use all over the place.

Just adding this as forgot, I love Rammstein!! If you guys have ever seen Neon Genesis Evangelion, the great anime series. Someone made a music video with incredible cut footage from the anime series to Engel from Rammstein. It is my all time favorite.
You can see it here:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3868293861670970475
Enjoy, I use this to pump me up all the time!!

[Petr Schreiber]

Hi,

thanks guys for positive comments on music, when I'll be home alone I will continue work on it.

kryton9, now I can see your model naming convention - clear and nice, I like it !
If you would be so nice and get to create new models, I think for example the level 1 "messenger" ship could have some logo on its body. Not so needed in action, but for cutscenes it would add nice realism touch.

But I like your design of ships, just one problem with the first one - when I showed it to someone he recognized StarTrek shuttle in it. This could be quite confusing.

With your numbered ideas I agree ! For hyper drive it seems to me more realistic to have some external mechanism to provide it, I doubt small messenger ship could have some wormhole generator in its body, it would be too expensive :)
So maybe some gates ( and not Billy :) ) or two big ships serving to others as provider of this service ? They could look quite rusty...

Regarding civilisation - Orwells 1984 world/society is too depriming for me, I like futuristic mess of Blade Runner ( I could watch it again and again and again :) ) It is pulsing world. But maybe Mike could have idea how New Berlin would work ? :) I think for our first game this is not so much important as it mostly takes place in space. It could be in more detail in sequel.


Thanks,
Petr

[kryton9]

I am open to anything. We'll see what Mike, Eros, Roberto and Catventure think.

Yes my new models will be different Petr. I like to see variety when we played instant action, my ships looked too much the same and I didn't like that. They looked ok in blender and wings3d, but seeing it in the game is different. What is nice now is I can just name the new models as the old ones and see them in the game while making them. so that is neat.