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Design update - May 2006

Posted: Sat May 20, 2006 1:32 am
by Aquitaine
Hi everybody,

It's been several months since the design team gave any indication that we were, er, still here, so I thought I'd bring you all up to date on what's been going on.

After the very preliminary space discussions we had on the design board, the FreeOrion admin team has been working out some fundamental aspects of the space combat engine that we want to start working on. In many ways, these are very simple issues, but they've taken pages and pages of email to puzzle through simply because there are so many options open to us. Play MOO2, MOO3, GalCiv, GalCiv2, Empire at War, Total War, et cetera, and you'll get the idea - all trying to do roughly the same thing (tactical fun in a strategy game) but their different approaches are night and day.

We're getting to a point now where I hope to be developing an updated space combat design doc with some things set in stone. I think, when you see it (which could still be a few weeks off, depending on a lot of variables) you will wonder how it could possibly have taken us so long to arrive at what may seem like very basic conclusions. The reason for this is that, up until now, the public has had considerable, if not complete influence over the development of FreeOrion. The public review process has served us very well. But this topic is simply so large and so polarizing that we wanted to establish a framework from which the public review(s) will start. Without going into detail yet, a close analogy would be that we'd settled on an engine similar to GalCiv2 and we don't want to spend our time now debating why we weren't doing something more like Birth of the Federation or MOO3. (We haven't settled on that. just an analogy!)

At any rate, I do apologize for our protracted absence. But with any luck, this will hopefully be a busy summer for us!