Quantum (Dyson clone with multiplayer)

[dnz32]

Hi, I don't know if you are aware of it, but someone made a clone of the game in Java featuring multiplayer and some other nice things like game recording. It's called Quantum and can be found at http://apistudios.com/hosted/marzec/quantum/ (I just became aware of it because it was posted at http://www.happypenguin.org/news/ a while ago)

The hardware requirements are much higher though, I can't run it on my machine since I don't have the proper pixel shader support or so. Also it seems the developer just wanted to do this as a proof-of-concept, since in the forum he states he probably will not continue development on it. However he did put the sourcecode online ( http://code.google.com/p/quantum-game/ )

Just wanted to drop the note here so you know of it (and maybe can get back some features into the original game if you want to).

[Alex]

Ah he open-sourced it now? That's good, he said he might.

Yeah this guy contacted me to offer adding multiplayer to Dyson, and when I took too long to decide he went ahead and made his own. Really fast work, he's a nice guy too.

[totally]

Oh, wow! Nice concept, doesn't have any of the dyson's eye candy though.
Hah, couldn't get through tutorial level, 'dysons' don't respond to commands 

[glubbar]

Hey, I tried Quantum (what a boring name btw) and it looks pretty good!
Too bad this doesn't happen in Dyson eh?
He did some nice work there, although the design is not as appealing as Dyson. Hope to see the source someday.

[Alex]

To Dyson or Quantum? Quantum's is available linked above, and if you can be bothered you can get Dyson's source code from . It's quite rough and ready, I'm not proud of it, and the game isn't officially open source - not sure whether it's a good plan or not - so I don't advertise that it's out there. But there you go, if you want to take a look. We (the admins of that repository) have a bunch of unfinished and finished games, code and prototypes in there, which is another reason I don't tend to advertise it

edit: I have removed this link as the repo is now closed source.

[totally]

To Dyson or Quantum? Quantum's is available linked above, and if you can be bothered you can get Dyson's source code from http://deadrock-game.com/wuweigames/trunk/Dyson. It's quite rough and ready, I'm not proud of it, and the game isn't officially open source - not sure whether it's a good plan or not - so I don't advertise that it's out there. But there you go, if you want to take a look. We (the admins of that repository) have a bunch of unfinished and finished games, code and prototypes in there, which is another reason I don't tend to advertise it

Open source! What?! I thought you guys were heading commercial. I would totally buy a copy of a finished product with campaign, better AI, improved eyecandy and other goodies.

[marzec]

hi,

i'm the creator of quantum and i'm not entirely happy to see this advertisement for quantum on this forums. i wanted to stay away from here as it feels a bit like stealing which is not my intent. seeing this post i just had to drop by and tell you.

Also, i had a look at the dyson code. it's not all that bad in my opinion but i think multiplayer is pretty much out the window. As there's no equivalent to fpstrict (java) in c# and you are relying heavily on floating point arithmetic it would be hard to create a deterministic simulation on all sorts of cpus. furthermore the actual code simulating different GameEntities and manipulating the simulation is pretty much scattered around and it would be quite a big task to tie all that together into a manageable and networkable thing. However, i think dyson really does not need a multiplayer mode. My experiment with quantum didn't turn out to well. I know about 2 people that actually played it in multiplayer mode apart from my collegues at work which play it on a daily basis. i don't think it would be worth the hassle as you'd basically have to rewrite 80% of your code.

again, i'm sorry for the spam above and please feel free to delete this whole thread as i don't think this belongs here.

ciao,
mario

[Alex]

Not at all, man, it's not spam and I think it's perfectly OK for this thread to be here

I think the thing when writing games for multiplayer, is that you have to know that the thing will be multiplayer and code from the start with that in mind. The number of horror stories I've heard from people who've had to convert games to multiplayer just made me really not want to do that with Dyson.

Thanks for dropping by anyway, stick around if you like

[wogan]

Oh look, source code. I'm so doing an svn checkout before they change their minds, lol.

[glubbar]

Ah, I wasn't expecting Dyson to go open-source at all. I was referring to the multi player part. Sorry if I sounded ambiguous.
Anyway I'm way behind in the debate here, but it's good to see some creative activity behind these ingenuous programs.
And to tell the truth, multiplayer is not needed for Dyson in my opinion. Improvements and new features are probably the best to come.