The MD Design Document

[RonHiler]

We need a thread to discuss the Design Document, so this would be it If you have anything to say about the DD, feel free to post it here. I will also be posting news relating to the DD, such as when new versions go up.

Unfortunately I have to start it off with a little bit of bad news. I had to add a 25th milestone to the overall milestone list. Pix willl no doubt be coming on and yelling at me for feature creeping And he'll have a point. The overall milestone list is supposed to be locked in stone with Version 1.0 of the DD for that very reason.

In defense, I have to cite that the addition was again something I had always meant to have in the game, and in fact, it is necessary for playing (what I added to the list was the leader screen design and implementation). It was a major oversight that this wasn't added in the first version of the DD. I thought we had in all the major steps, but I totally overlooked that screen for some reason (note that M19 and M20 deal with data FOR that screen, but there is no actual milestone that sets the screen up, so the new milestone was inserted at M19 and the rest were moved down one).

So, my apologies. We're now up to 25 milestones that take us from version 0.00 to 1.00. I HOPE I've not missed anything else major like that, and that we really are locked now. I honestly can't think of anything else that was missed.

[RonHiler]

Alright, the DD version 3 has been uploaded. I changed it to a pdf, because it really just doesn't work as an html very well. Hopefully everyone in this day and age can read a pdf through their web browser.

[Shane Christopher]

Had a bit of a gander through this the other day. Doesn't look there's been much feature creep yet

You must have spent longer writing it out then you have coding so far though

[Strike]

You must have spent longer writing it out then you have coding so far though

At this point, that sounds liek a Good Thing to me

[Shane Christopher]

At this point, that sounds liek a Good Thing to me

True. I wasn't complaining about it. I know myself how bad it can be to diverge off down an odd path on a project. My final year project half way through was something completely different to what I originally wanted to I scrapped it and redid the entire thing. Only code I kept was the interface and some of the world builder code.

[RonHiler]

The first version of the DD took me about three weeks of solid work to write. I was on vacation for part of that, so there was no distracting work stuff to get in the way. Subsequent versions have taken a few hours here and there. I'd say at this point the game has had more coding time than the DD has writing time, but maybe not by too much.

As much as I dislike the idea of design documents for games, MD has, in my opinion, fully evolved in ideas to the game I want it to be (thanks in no small measure to everyone's suggestions and advice over the years). That being the case, the DD isn't restricting us the way I thought it might (if we had DDed MD at the start, it would be a whole different (and to be honest, not as good) a game). I think MD as a concept has reached a point where having a full game layout is much more to our benefit, and carries very little of the disadvantages a DD usually has.

I'm finding the DD *really* helpful, in actual fact. Another aspect of the DD that I thought might be a negative is that in presenting the entire project as one big document, that it would be soul-crushing in terms of looking at the vast amount of work sitting there. But actually, the overall milestone list has done just the opposite, I can totally see us getting to the end of milestone 25 and having a finished game.

It helps that I'm a totally different programmer than I was when MD first started. The original MD was a procedural program. I used character arrays, and had no clue what an STL was It's almost hard to believe the program got as far as it did with some of my old programming practices (we were at the equivelent of our DD's Milestone 16 working on M17, minus M11, which is pretty amazing to me, heh.)

Those things that we are locking out of the game because they aren't in the DD probably will get done once we hit the end. Things like an xml driven interface, a TCP based server/client model (or maybe peer to peer) for insta-play, and so on. Ideas we come up with as we go, but can't be put in because they are, in fact, feature creep kind of things.

[Shane Christopher]

I've always been a fan of the original idea for this game. I came here from another game that tried to do something similiar but failed due to lack of time from pretty much everyone involved. I can't wait to see the game form before our eyes into something actually playable. It seems a lot more structured to us on the outside of the programming circle as well which is always good for team morale

It seems like the DD idea is working well for MD. Maybe sovereignty will benefit from the same procedure too once MD is finished.

[RonHiler]

It seems like the DD idea is working well for MD. Maybe sovereignty will benefit from the same procedure too once MD is finished.

It's a matter of weighing the pros and cons. To be sure, DDs do have some significant pros to them (there are a lot of people that feel no project should ever be started without a full high level and low level DD in place). They prevent feature creep (when properly used), they serve to keep a working team in synch so everyone understands exactly what the product is they are working on. They help with focus via the milestone lists, and they can help out with determining time frames and budgets.

All very good things.

The one disadvantage they have, in my view, is they lock you into a very specific game. Why is that a bad thing? Because, in my opinion, games need time to evolve to their full potential.

All you have to do is think about the game that MD was when we first started. If I had locked into a DD at the start, it would be a different game. No espionage, no leaders, a VERY primitive city system, and so on and so forth. I mean it would have been OKAY, but not great. Certainly not the game design we have now. Which in my opinion is going to be one pretty goddam awesome game.

I don't think it's possible to create a game to it's full potential on the very first try. Which is exactly what a DD asks you to do.

To be honest, I'm not 100% sure what all I want to do with Sov. I have ideas and concepts. There are certain things I know I want, but others are still a bit hazy. So it would be difficult for me to write out a full DD for Sov at this point. It would require I make a lot of split decisions that I would rather allow to percolate, both in my brain and in you guys' brains. It locks out all feedback, and I become a dictator, saying "the game will be THIS way and no other". To some extent I have to do that (as per Dr. Brooks' essay from "The Mythical Man Month") as the project lead, but I do like to get all possible feedback before a final decision is made, and a DD would preclude that.

Now, does that mean I cannot start coding Sov? For some, the answer is "yes". But I just don't know that that is really true. I coded quite a bit for Sov based on what I knew we needed at that point. A multithreaded UDP based IOCP sever/client system, an autopatcher, a system to dynamically load world cells on the fly, a packet system for communication between the server and clients, and so on.

And while I was coding those, we threw around a lot of ideas about how the game would play, many good ideas (and perhaps a few bad ones) were incorporated into the design. For Sov, that process is not over yet, in my mind anyway.

[RonHiler]

Heya guys,

Sorry to have been a bit quiet lately. I have been trying to get a new release of the DDO character planner out for about a week now, and it's a pretty big update (there's a level cap increase in this one). So it's taken a bit of time.

Anyway, I have not neglected MD completely during this time. I've actually done a fair bit of work on the DD, writing section for Race Design and World Building. I'm not really done with either section yet, though pretty close for Race Design.

There's one bit I've become less than happy with. The race blurb I took from the original version of the game, it goes like this:

“The ___ race slowly claw their way from the primordial ooze to sentience. Much to their amazement, the ___ discover one of them, ___, is immortal. In awe of this characteristic, he is named ___ ___ of the ___. On the day of his coronation, ___ vows to lead his people to world domination.”

It's really just there to make sure your titles and names and stuff sound okay to you. But the thing I don't like about it is that it mentions immortality. I'd like to downplay the whole "leaders are immortal" thing (even though that is basically true, they don't die of old age, though they can be killed). To me it breaks the immersion of the game by introducing a silly concept with no explanation. It's okay that their immortal, as long as it's not shoved in your face like that. Not to mention the entire thing is not really all that well written. I'm trying to figure out a good way to reword the whole blurb thing to acheive the same effect but to get some of the cheese out of it.

Anyway, it's probably not such a good thing that I'm writing parts of the DD right before I code them. Which is one reason I'm trying to nail down as much of the world building routines as I can with this version (world building is the subject of milestones 5 and 6). I probably won't finish all of it, but at least we'll have a good start on it.

Not sure when I'll be done, it kind of depends on how available my time is (as always, heh). I'll get it posted pretty soon, I'm sure. Once I really get into writing on it, it doesn't take all that long to do. It's the research part that takes the longest

[Shane Christopher]

You can have a look at the code I used for the world builder in my Java project. It was quick, only took a couple of seconds to create a passably realistic world, obviously not as detailed as we'd like, I assume we'll be having rainfall calculations and the like to make ours more realistic but the basics are there. I used the continent system like I outlined to you on here, what, two years ago?

I'll email you the code involved if you want to have a look at it. I won't say it's perfect but it created nice enough worlds for my simulator.