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Hi All. You may possibly have noticed that things have been pretty dead around here for a bit. . .  The old Clash team members have all moved on to other pursuits. For me, the time came when I just needed a lot more time for RL, and also more of a chance to Play games rather than design them.
Clash, as it exists now, has tens of thousands of lines of code, and a Lot of novel features that you don’t see much in games produced by the industry. I won’t jump on that soap-box here because overviews of the unique stuff in Clash is easily available on the web site and in overview threads here on the forum.
I still get emails from people willing to work on Clash, but never enough at the same time to jump-start the project back to life. I decided to start this thread so that people that are interested in moving Clash forward could post here, and find out how a new team could be constructed. Another possibility would be to put the current codebase on sourceforge and see if that can get more people involved. The teams’ previous agreement didn’t allow for complete open source operation although we’ve always been semi-open-source. I could provide a little bit of assistance in getting the project off the ground again. Laurent also was working on coding until a new job took away most of his Clash time, but he might also be willing to serve as a resource.
If you’re an interested lurker, or long-time team member who would like to re-engage, this is your place to speak up! The code base, collection of graphics, etc. are available to be turned over to a nucleus of a new team. Please include what your skills are and the amount of time that you might be able to contribute. The most important skills are coding in Java, and graphical art, but there's room for a wide variety of contributions.
I wish you the best of luck. I’d still love to play a more-developed version of Clash!
Best of Luck!
Mark
PS I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all the prior Clash team memebers for their work and dedication over the years. We really did a lot together!
Last edited by Mark_Everson on 03-09-2007 at 16:20
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Prince
Louisiana
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Oct 1999
time: 16:39
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Well, I've been swamped with RL for quite a while, but I'm certainly still interested in Clash's development and I've been checking back from time to time just in case something got started again. In fact, I need an update of the latest version of the code, so please send that to my hotmail account Mark (or Laurent) whenever you see this message.
As for getting the project running again, I still say we need to work on grabbing people's attention again, and you do that by eye-catching visuals - just like the pro's do...
You release screenshots showing sexy graphics and people will notice them more than they notice you talking about the game. I mean we're developing this game in 2007, but the graphics in Clash look like a game developed in 1997 - at best. People that see these new sexy screenshots will likely look into the features, which needs to be a fairly simplified bullet list, not pages and pages of models with endless fields of equations. Once you've grabbed their attention like that, they'll likely play the demo and hopefully some of the people that do that are the 'talented modder' types that are rather prevalent in the Civ community - and more than likely there will be a few who also know Java and are willing to code for Clash.
Since the begining Clash has run under the "add new features constantly - that'll draw them in" philosophy. Now that we've got this current lull, at the very least, let's try something different...
Two different approaches follow, though they can also be combined.
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Option 1
The two biggest "ugly" things about Clash right now are the graphic tiles themselves and the windows interface. The Windows interface is ugly, period. What I mean by 'the graphic tiles themselves' is that the small size of the tiles limit the artistic quality that can be attained by any artist, so they definitely need to be of a larger size. In addition, the lack of transition artwork makes the map look blocky - not sexy.
Both problems involve some coding, but going fullscreen and building our own interfaces is more difficult and time consuming than fixing the tiles, so that should be done first (in fact, I'd put off doing our own interfaces as long as we can, but the windows look can be minimized somewhat - see next paragraph). This would require a single coder and artist at minimum, with the artist's work obviously redrawing the terrain set and creating the transition tiles while the coder's work being to put a "tilesize" block in the scenario.xml (so that we can easily change sizes later if needed, and so that different scenarios can use wildly different tilesets) and fixing the code to use it. When it comes to doing units, it would also be nice to have them animated instead of static - more of that sexy appeal.
I had an interface proposal which outlined the design of many of Clashes windows as well as a full proposal on minimizing the windows look of Clash a little more. I don't recall if I ever did post the thing and I can't seem to find that document now unfortunately. It was a fairly detailed thing, but the point about minimizing the windows look is to get rid of all the windows except the main window and the popup windows as well as the toolbar (the menu can either go or stay). Then you draw directly to the main window and move all the needed functions to buttons around the drawing area on the main window.
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Option 2
Another approach I've been thinking of is perhaps pooling some money together and hiring someone to do the coding, sort of like I did with the world map. We could even make a PayPal account and allow people to donate to Clash's development. It's something to think about anyway, and I'd be willing to go along with that approach if we can get enough people together putting in on a regular basis. If you're interested in going that route, Mark/Laurent, send an email between us three and we can discuss some numbers.
Last edited by alms66 on 09-11-2007 at 00:26
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Prince
Louisiana
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Oct 1999
time: 16:39
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Option 3
Do a total conversion mod of Civ4. The game is very moddable and Clash could possibly achieve more that way since there's a more readily available workforce in the modding community.
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Hi All:
On things to change in CIV. . . Civ 4 AI is much better than the prior versions thanks to Blake etc, but could certainly still use a lot of work. Any of the areas that cause micromanagement like the pop-rushing model would be other candidates to my mind.
Best,
Mark
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Prince
Louisiana
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Oct 1999
time: 16:39
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Honestly, I hadn't looked into where and what to change at all, I was just throwing the idea out there as one option we could use to keep Clash going. If we're not getting enough interest here, maybe we can do so in Civ4's modding community is about as far as I'd gotten with the idea.
The way I see it though, we can take civ4 and strip out as much of civ as possible, then use Clash's code to rebuild the game or we could decide what we believe is fundamental to Clash design and try to incorporate those designs into the civ4 game. To put it another way, we can try to use as little of civ as possible or we can try to use as much of civ as possible. Once we'd decide which of those approaches to take, then we could decide where to start with this.
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