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Technical Design and Engine Configuration

-=Damasca: The Conflicted Kingdoms=- ::Technical Design and Engine configuration:: -Program Goals- The aim here is to create an MMORPG game package. It consists of programs related to editing, running the game, and starting a game server.

-General design- The game is comprised mainly of a 2d tiled environment, with objects that sit there on top of that, and entities which can be scripted to do different things. Hopefully, entities can be drawn as 3d polygons or as 2d sprites. Failing polygons, only sprites will be done. However, the game must include 3d effects such as particles and lighting effects.

-Programs needed- Executable Game: Runs the collective results of the Editors and Server programs. This will be built around the other programs, rather than vice versa. Main Editor: Creates the necessary files the Game uses to create the world. The editor is comprised of several utilities such as a map editor, tile grabber, music grabber, entity maker, and 3d effect manager.

3d Effect Editor: Mainly used for creation and control of particle effects and lighting effects. The output of this program can be used by the Main Editor or Animation Editor.

Animation Editor: This allows for creation of special animation files by assembling 3d polygons and 2d sprites onto one plane to create animation. The output of this program can be used by the Main Editor in entities.

Server Program: This allows a person to start an online server for the game. It can be configured to look for maps, scripts, tiles, music and whatsuch in any folder within the main Game folder. It should be very user-friendly, as opposed to more professional server programs which rely on technical prowess. The server program manages connections and accounts, as well as serverside tasks called upon by scripts and entities.

Remote Administrative Control(RAC): This will connect to the server address specified by the user. It has to also use a special account on the server, to prevent malicious abuse and such. Every Administrative person needs such an account. With this tool, a person can assume administrative duties that allow him to modify the environment or accounts, depending on what permission level his account is set to. The lowest level is for policing skills like updating the server cache of one or more maps and scripts, as well as warping other players to different locations, or disconnecting players. The highest level allows a person to modify or ban accounts.

-Graphical restrictions- For compatibility with other video cards, graphics should restrict to 256x256 sized images at most. By default, the engine should use gif and png images. It recognizes RGB 255,0,255 as automatically transparent. The engine will run in a 16-32 bit palette mode.

-Scripting details- The scripting for the Engine will ultimately be an extremely flexible knock-off of C++, except with game-specific commands. You can edit entities in the map editor and script them, or create pre-script files to be called on so you don't have several copies of the same script running around here and there.

-Player configuration- The player is run by a most-likely massive pre-script that deals with movement, magic and technique, weapons, and interaction with other players. This script is server-side except while offline. It's quite handy if you want to change the way the player works. Players are animated through special files made of sprites put together on one plane to create the illusion of many different positions and redraws, when in fact there are only a few simple pieces. These animations are controlled by scripting.