Re: What to do with Xconq

["Ari Rabkin" <asrabkin at twcny dot rr dot com>]

I discovered xconq a few years back, and have been playing intermittently
(on macs) ever since.  With the new MP code, I expect I'll be playing even
more.

[...]

> * Confusion between game and game engine.  Xconq the program is really
> an engine for strategy games.  Game modules are the games.  Valve
> doesn't call their effort "the Half-Life module for Quake" - it's a
> game in its own right.  By being forced into the framework of a single
> generic program, the games lose some of their identity and interest,
> while the C/tcl-level programming gets harder and harder, to the point
> that interested programmers can't figure out how to work on it.

    I don't claim to understand the xconq sources very well, but it seems
to me that as features are added to allow more complicated games, the
xconq code gets FAR more complicated.  "Clumping" game design features
into "packages" might help--i.e., a Civ-2 package, an RTS package, etc.
This would reduce the overwhelmig number of GDL constructs available;
if all the constructs needed for 7 different genres of games are added,
deciding which you need becomes daunting.

> * Too many unfinished games.  Players and game designers never really
> get to see what the system might be capable of.  (``Finishing'' a game
> might mean anything from providing polished graphics to writing better
> AI support.)

    true.

> * Unfinished subsystems.  Agreements, standing orders, morale, the
> list goes on.  They take up space, make the code more complicated,
> but don't do anybody any good.

    And the ones that do work need to be better documented.

> * Too far behind state of the art.  Gamers who know about Xconq admire
> it as an open-source game that is comparable to early 90s games, but
> then they go back to playing Starcraft.  Xconq doesn't have to match
> the latest extravaganza, but it needs to be close behind and stay
> there.  Note that that this doesn't necessarily mean graphics -
> Nethack is still very popular without fancy graphics.  (It's also much
> more complicated than Jay Fenlason's original 1984 version - gameplay
> has evolved considerably.)

    Perhaps, but a lot of my favorite games are over 5 years old.

> * Genre confusion.  These days, strategy games fall into several
> subcategories - historical wargames (TOAW), complex simulations (Civ),
> real-time (*arcraft), and maybe strategic RPG (HOMM 3).  Xconq doesn't
> offer strong support for any of these genres, instead falling into a
> mushy middle of simple-ish turn-based games.

    I have noticed that all xconq games seem alike.  This isn't good:
the player should have to act and think differently in each game, not
just exploit the same strategies.

> * Uninteresting games.  As someone here commented a while back, too
> many of the games in the library are experiments or demos.  They're
> not very engaging - I myself go through the motions of testing them,
> but I don't find myself wanting to play them all the way to the end.

     I think this is the core of the problem: the game engine doesn't
let designers do quite what they want, and so they get discouraged and
go off and play Civ2.

[...]


> OK, so one solution is to give up and go do something else.  But so
> far there's no other strategy game or game engine that I would rather
> work on (FreeCiv is perhaps the closest).  So it seems best to take
> the existing code base and work it over.  Here are some things we
> should do:

    I think this is not coincidence--Civilization-style games are
worth a close inspection:  They also involve building units and
fighting wars.  We should carefully inspect why people play Civ2,
and not xconq.  My suspicions on this are
    1)    Historical interest.  A major attractant to Civ2 is the
existance of historical mod-packs and scenarios--xconq should be able
to support the same sorts of things.
    2)    Civilization is more than a war game; there is the dimension
of economics, science, and city management.  Civ nations are not always
at war or in (like the sides in some xconq games) perpetual alliance.
Xconq is able to do science and economics to some extent with the "advanced
city" code, but diplomacy is still a giant gap.

    3)    Graphics: I don't think this is the biggest thing, but everyone
notices them to some extent, and they do convey an impression of the game.
They don't need to be really fancy--something like the Civ-2 graphics might
be a good idea.  Multicolored, but unanimated.  They don't need to be 3-d
rendered, just well-drawn.  Anyone know any graphics types?

> * Define the game/engine separation better.  Building different
> programs is probably going overboard, but for instance one could
> imagine that the new game choice sets the entire look-and-feel of the
> game, not just units and terrain.

    I think rules, and particularly the combat model is more important
here: the "civilization[-2]" combat model is a good addition.  Perhaps
we should have one to allow exact emulation of those cardboard-counter
war games?  This would entail at most a reworking of the combat stregth
code added for the Civ game, and would allow xconq to leverage the
playtesting, research, etc that went into military baord games.

> * Use GDL more to enable and disable code modules that have been coded
> for specific games or classes of games.  This is starting to happen a
> little bit, because the idea of factoring everything in general ways
> was already breaking down.

    This is what I was trying to describe above: it would make GDL easier
to understand if things were grouped, and would allow designers to pull
code "off the shelf", as it were.  If there were code for, i.e., diplomacy,
that was standard and general, it would save a great deal of work.

> * Do more graphics.  The only games for which players don't care much
> about graphics are the established old-time Unix games (Nethack) and
> some very specialized historical wargames.  In both of these cases the
> gameplay is very deep, with years of refinement having gone into the
> rules (the opposite of the thrown-together-over-the-weekend Xconq
> module!)  The current state of the art is 3D in various forms; that's
> not necessary, but something on the order of CivCTP or RRT2 would be
> good; isometric, 8- to 16-bit color, canned animations of rendered 3D
> models.  This is closer than it seems; there is already a prototype
> isometric display in Xconq for instance.

    I find overhead views easier to work with, actually.  And 3d animation
is probably a waste of time.  It isn't, at least for me, a concern.

[...]
> * Add the capability to do real RTS games.  The machinery is 99%
> there, would be easy to finish the job.

    I don't think this is neccesarily a good idea: a GPL'ed RTS engine
would be kinda nifty, but I'm not sure xconq is the program for it:
among other things, all RTS's I've used use squares.  Come to think
of it, so do the civ games.

    Could the option of using squares be added to xconq without a lot
of work?

> * Focus on a handful of game modules, and finish them.  One or two in
> each Xconq-supported genre should be enough.  Do the graphics, make
> the AI good, etc.

    makes sense--perhaps raffle them off to managers so that there is
someone specifically dedicated to each game?  I know that ANE is the
personal creation of Hans Ronne, who also checked in a lot of code
specifically for it --and it is already very highly polished, despite
being the newest xconq game.  Kudos, Hans!

> * Design a "featured game" that is unique to Xconq.  It should be
> complex enough and deep enough to interest the jaded Starcraft or Civ
> player, and stress the engine's abilities.  I was tinkering with a
> "new standard" game last summer that features modern military
> strategy, but that's still too timid.  I'm now thinking of a campaign
> series, perhaps where you start out directing battles, and progress
> through scenarios on successively larger scales, or perhaps an SF
> game where you go from planet to planet.  What kind of a strategy
> game would capture *your* imagination and keep you at the machine
> all night?

    An interesting thought; perhaps try to combine features of multiple
genres?  Age of Empires is an attempt at a Civ RTS mix, and seems to be
a success.  Perhaps we should try something similar?  A "modern times"
civ game?  I can't say: but doing a combination of genres is something
xconq should be good at.

> Although this all sounds like a lot, the assumption here is that
> all the other random stuff would go on the backburner and only be
> revived if it's relevant to the new strategy.

    Doing a piece at a time might be practical,

> What does everybody think?  Is this something you want to work on?
> How about your friends?

    I'm not a very experienced programmer, but I'll have a go at
game design, if I can scrape together the time.

    I just had the following thought: with the Civ2 emulation
work already done, writing a small program to convert the many
Civ2 Gold scenarios to xconq-readable format.
    This would multiply many-fold the number of xconq games,
and would open a profitable avenue of advance: the Civ-2 engine,
I think, is not as accurate for detailed war sims as xconq, and is also
less customizable--siege weapons are easily done by xconq, but civ-2
doesn't allow weapons to be good at only one target.

    So perhaps we want an "xconq classic" module, a civ-2 module,
and a cardbard and paper, module, for those games with a thousand
pices of cardboard and a combat table or six.