Empyrean:Main

From Superluminon

Contents 1 General Overview 2 Story & Setting Content Overview 2.1 Prologue 2.2 Technologies 2.3 Factions 3 Gameplay Overview 3.1 Player Character 3.2 Ships 3.2.1 Ship Types 3.3 Cities 3.4 Combat 3.5 Movement 3.6 Map 3.6.1 World Map 3.6.2 HUD Map 4 Technical Overview 4.1 Engine 4.1.1 Game Manager 4.1.2 Event System 4.1.3 Configuration System 5 Graphics Overview 5.1 3D Engine 5.1.1 Ship Effects 5.2 Procedural Effects Engine

General Overview

The game takes place in an evolving setting that is influenced by the player. Political alliances change and technologies advance as the player commits actions. It will feature a 3D-world top-down view of the world and player, which they will be able to interact with inside and outside their skyship.

Story & Setting Content Overview

Empyrean takes place in a world re-discovering their surroundings as the people of this world enter a second period of Enlightenment and begin to understand the true science underlying the nature around them. They have developed a means with which to utilize an ancient power known as 'scintillae' that, if communicated with in the correct manner, can control the very forces of nature. It is only then will they understand the true nature of the science around them.

Prologue

It has long been believed that the scintillae were simply a mysterious magic, imbued within all matter. In our greatest cities we have massive temples dedicated to the worship and communion of scintillaean spirits. Yet this superstitious view of the nature of scintillae is outdated and even preposterous in our modern world. Now, with tools of science more powerful than any before, we stand at the brink of probing the deepest mysteries of the scintillae with great scientific rigor!

The scintillae have long been regarded as spirits of an Ancient World. The exact origin of these myths is not known but recent discoveries suggest a most shocking truth: that we are not the first intelligent race to inhabit this planet. Indeed, the scintillae are perhaps the product or even evolution of an older race of beings—not gods but masters of Science and Art the likes of which are nigh-incomprehensible to us. Our own stumbling steps in taming the power of the Atom pale in comparison to what these ancient philosopher-craftsmen must have achieved. What brought about an end to their civilization is in the realm of conjecture, but I and many others believe that scintillae were involved in that cataclysm as well. There is, as of now, only preliminary evidence to these claims; you will of course take them with that caveat, no matter what the sensationalist tabloids make of all this when they discover what I have said, which they surely will.

The power of the scintillae is such that they appear to have greatly reshaped the very Earth after the downfall of these Ancients prior to the development of the civilizations of Greece or Syria, and as such evidence of their civilization is only now being uncovered by the latest in excavation technology and the most skilled paleo-archaeologists. We have found little and understand even less, yet hope remains for the discovery of another Inscription of Rashid that will allow us complete understanding. I wish to stress now that nothing we have found directly corroborates any myth or legend of those who think scintillae are mere spirits or magical beings. You are all learned men and I am sure you understand how impoverished their vision is. As our understanding grows, I am confident that we will find there is far more to this fascinating phenomenon than our churchgoing brethren have credited or suspected.

Indeed such understanding will be difficult to come by even with a miracle on our side. Our fragmentary studies reveal contradictions in all places. The nature of the scintillae is like nothing else. They are part construct, part organ, part species, part creature and indeed even part spirit, if our studies are to be believed, which at this point they might not be. What we can conjecture is that they hold great secrets waiting to reveal great power: power that we could use to further science and all of Mankind more than ever before. Unlocking the secrets of the scintillae will lead us to our future and destiny as Mankind.

- Prefatory Speech by Professor K. Arthur Bromwell at the World Symposium on the Scintillary Sciences, 1953

Technologies

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Key technologies in the Aerodrive universe include: Scintillae, Aeronautical and Analytical Engines, and Nuclear & Steam Power.

See main article: Empyrean:Technologies

Factions

Current factions include British, French, Germans, United States, and various Pirate and Religious factions, as well as later on, the Soviet Union.

See main article: Empyrean:Factions

Gameplay Overview

Player Character

The PC will have an avatar that can exit the ship once it has landed or berthed, and will be able to navigate the world's terrain and cities. Gameplay should focus roughly 50% on the player, and 50% airborne ... blah, need more ideas on this.

Ships

Ownership:

• Buy them
• Outfit & Customize them
  • Customize appearance, to a degree
• Own multiple ships
• Fly them in fleets
• Keep them in hangars

Ship Types

Basic sky-ship types (dreadnought, battleship, cargo airship, mono/bi/triplane-- based on number of aerodrive coils, not wings-- etc.)

Cities

Cities will be appear detailed and, due to the ubiquitous nature of air travel, docking platforms around points of interest will be used to dock the player's craft to an area. This is because aeronautical engine propulsion technology is precise enough to allow for such landings.

Combat

Combat will involve certain Real-Time Strategy elements. This is a divergence from Escape Velocity, from which Aerodrive is inspired from. The reason for this is that ships in this game have stats very similar to those in RTS games, however, the main difference between an RTS and Escape Velocity was the interface. Improve the interface, and battles could become more complex yet intuitive.

The damage system will be based on armor damage zones, instead of overall gauges, and a HUD element with a overhead blueprint of the player's ship will display the quadrants or zones of the ship that are being damaged. This will allow the player to use the armor on one side of their ship, then turn the ship and use cannons and armor on the other side, during battle, thus spreading out the damage.

For controls, see Empyrean:Controls#Combat

Movement

There will be inertia and momentum and drag on the player's sky-ship as they control the throttle and direction of flight.

Altitude (depth) is rather limited and automatic, and used primarily only for cinematic effect, for simplicity.

Map

World Map

The world map differs from the precedent set by the system map in Escape Velocity in that it displays a traditional map of countries and cities without discrete paths linking them together. Travel between cities and locations is hastened by a player's co-pilot (autopilot) and Aerodrive capabilities.

HUD Map

Along with a weather vane which tells the direction of the wind, the mini-map is circular and two options for appearance could be a spyglass over a map with muted colors along with marker flags, much as in fictional 'war rooms', or as a '40s-era radar screen, perhaps we could use both, the radar for when the player upgrades their ship or uses a more advanced ship. We still need to find a place for all the technology in this game. The spyglass or radar scope could be adjusted to work on 1 km, 3 km, 5 km, and 10 km scales, however, this could be subject to change to whatever scale is deemed appropriate once the game is under development.

Technical Overview

In order to keep the game portable between platforms, the python programming language will be used in the development of this game. There are many libraries that can also be compiled for use on any platform that could be used within a python game.

Engine

Main article about our sweet engine

Discuss engine related stuff

Game Manager

Vital part of the engine, acts as user front end.

Event System

heart of the engine and everything-handler with lots of subsystems

Configuration System

Reads Ship Configuration Files pertaining to individual ships within the game so that variables can be loaded into the system to allow for setting of ship rotation and speed and other game-related variables.

We will need to define a schema for ship files. Variables pertinent to gameplay can be used from the Escape Velocity Nova bible. http://www.ambrosiasw.com/news/upcoming/novabible.html

Will also eventually apply to locations, objects, and player information, as well as any other things where attributes must be stored.

Graphics Overview

3D Engine

There are several 3D rendering engines that use the python programming language. However, Python-Ogre offers some advantages over other engines, as well as some trade-offs. Ogre3D is a mature engine that has a large amount of community support behind it. It has decent documentation, is fast, flexible, portable between platforms, and has a decent number of tools.

Some drawbacks to using this engine, however, are that Ogre3D is complex, and Python-Ogre is a less mature project with less documentation behind it. Even more fundamentally, a 3D engine is more complex than a 2D sprite engine.

Originally this project was to use 2D sprite graphics, however, the number of images required for all the effects we wished to incorporate into the game would have made the game's size too large. We had to make a decision; make a game with less dynamic graphics effects, or put in the hard work necessary to implement a game within a modern 3D engine. Since this is to be a commercial game, it was decided that a more professional-- yet ambitious-- approach be undertaken.

Ship Effects

Animations and weather effects will alter the appearance of every ship in the game.

There will be different lighting effects for different times of day:

• Morning
• Noon
• Evening
• Night

As well as weather effects:

• Rain
• Snow
• Clouds/Contrails

Also, there needs to be animations and particle effects for specific ship events:

• Banking
• Firing weapons
• Engines (glows, steam)
• Running Lights
• Destruction (ship falls apart)

Procedural Effects Engine

Using the Python-Ogre library, as well as perhaps the libnoise library, we will render procedural effects.

The world will consist of points of procedural cloud and terrain data.

For now, in Cloud Engine R1, we simply require the following:

• Render particle systems in something resembling a cloud (the cloud model doesn't need to be procedural for now)
• Render scene onto pygame surface, with sprites in correct places
• Interface Python-Ogre with pygame so that player movement is consistent with world movement

In later versions, we will need:

• Particle shaders to be appropriate to cloud appearance
• Procedurally-generated clouds
• Large world with points corresponding to clouds
• Cloud movement and animation of cloud particle groups

Python-Ogre Links: http://python-ogre.org/ http://wiki.python-ogre.org/index.php/LinuxBuild http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2addons/viewforum.php?f=3 http://www.ogre3d.org/wiki/index.php/Using_PyGame_with_PyOgre -- Old

Cloud Links: -- Note, due to the use of particle systems, mere cloud billboards will not be necessary; instead, procedural models of cloud shapes will be used, to provide a more accurate simulation. http://www.cs.umbc.edu/~ebert/693/PChen3/paper.html -- A very good link with some good references. One notable paper is uploaded here.

Need to add libnoise links, as well as more links pertinent to 2D rendering of cloud textures

Also needs to be examined are:
* Volumetric texture effects
* Particle effects/systems
* Whether we should use ogre's built-in noise function, or the libnoise noise function. I'm leaning more towards porting libnoise using Boost to Python.