Outpost Minigames

[Fenrisul]

So - it hit me the other day.  Its realllly f***ing hard to think of something related to the Outpost environment that would make for "Fun" and "Simple" like a mini-game.  Infact almost impossible.

OPU's been kind of dull of late and I dont like it  :huh:
I suggest some of us coder-types start pumping out some minigames.  If you have an idea for a Outpost minigame that doesn't require coding an entire RTS engine; post it here.  If you make content for it; post it here.  Hopefully with a few ideas flying around a hybrid of one or two of them will make sense and any artistic/theoretical creations that people post will be maliable enough to integrate with other projects.

In the process of brainstorming I pretty much have said "Forget the full 3D approach" for now.  I don't have the time atm- and most probably don't have the skill to produce "Quality" 3D media (no offense ).  I think using what we've got (Outpost 2 art assets/sprites basically) to create some interesting stuff.  

I made a few macros ala photochop to convert OP2's palleted art with shadows and such to a 32bit bitmap to be more easily integrated into modern engines (in my case Shockwave)

This has been the result so far:
http://www.razaelstree.com/op_mini/viewer2.html

Its not much - but the scripting system is sound and buildings/objects can be spawned with various properties; and all hold unique scripts to later detail things like animation (the vortex is demonstrating that; which is actually 2 objects moving at two seperate frame rates), Armor, and anything else I need.  I will be forming this base into some kind of mini-game; not sure exactly what yet, but don't expect a full RTS.  Think more along the lines of the Outpost: Colony Search that we all know and love (but prettier).

Again - start posting minigame ideas; it'll help me and hopefully anyone else who steps up to trying to make somethin.  (/me prods garretboast)
As with all my other work; I will be posting all of my resources as they reach a 'complete' state for others to use.

[Leviathan]

Nice work man

Well my main idea for a Outpost game that I would love to see is a large multiplayer Outpost web based game where each user controls a colony and is all in the same game. Like "Colony Wars" and "Outpost Online" hope/hoped to be.

[Sirbomber]

When I first saw this, I thought of OPU/OP2 Mario Party, and was both intrigued and afraid at the same time.

[Hooman]

Wow, that runs at such a snail's pace on my computer. I was getting 1 frame every 1-2 seconds. It was unbearable. Plus it was really dark and stayed that way. Was it supposed to fade in or something? Because it never seemed to make it all the way.

Plus, I read the note about some scrolling issue, and noticed it was scrolling. Right clicking had no effect other than to add about 10 seconds of lag waiting for the menu to pop up, and then it just went back to it's slow, dim, scrolling.
 

[Arklon]

Wow, that runs at such a snail's pace on my computer. I was getting 1 frame every 1-2 seconds. It was unbearable. Plus it was really dark and stayed that way. Was it supposed to fade in or something? Because it never seemed to make it all the way.

Plus, I read the note about some scrolling issue, and noticed it was scrolling. Right clicking had no effect other than to add about 10 seconds of lag waiting for the menu to pop up, and then it just went back to it's slow, dim, scrolling.

He's using 3D terrain (though you can't see it right now because it's flat), that's probably the reason for the slowness.

[gpgarrettboast]

Wow, that runs at such a snail's pace on my computer. I was getting 1 frame every 1-2 seconds. It was unbearable. Plus it was really dark and stayed that way. Was it supposed to fade in or something? Because it never seemed to make it all the way.

Actually the reasoning for the lag is because your Shockwave player is currently set to use software rendering instead of opengl/directx. If you set it to otherwise (by right-clicking and then setting the appropriate mode), it should function correctly. (The best time to do this is while it's loading so the lag is not in affecting the browser at that point. Otherwise you'll be waiting a while for the menu to pop up)

[Fenrisul]

There is an EXE stand-alone build of all this as well;  I'll release that when it gets a bit more polished; however the difference between developing for EXE and web-content is pretty big; not in terms of difficultly, but rather what is capable of happening in an EXE (such as click and drag mouse scroll rather than map edge).  I really want to pick a medium and stick with it just for the sake of standardizing.

*edit*
_highly_ advise OpenGL over D3D.   Direct3D will probably blue-screen you after ~10 minutes.

[BlackBox]

Not too bad. And especially impressed that it worked as well as it did for me. I use Linux, and the way for me to run this was:

1. Install the Windows version of Firefox in Wine
2. Install the Adobe Shockwave plugin (in the windows firefox.. had to do this since Adobe doesn't have a Linux version of Shockwave)
3. Go to the page, right click on the applet, wait 10 minutes for the menu to pop up about 3d renderers, and switch to OpenGL (yes, I still have the DirectX option... but OpenGL is faster for me anyway -- Wine has some DirectX support, basically a wrapper to OpenGL since there is no such thing as DirectX on Linux).

There were a couple of glitches I noticed.. some times the top part of the vortex would be beneath the column (and the vortex is completely missing the cloud at the bottom where it touches the ground).

Scrolling was kinda messed up too (it kept scrolling to the upper left corner of the map when it was first loaded and I had to click repeatedly to make it stop, then I could scroll normally). Hard to say if that is a bug in the applet though or my weird setup (Firefox and shockwave in Wine).