On Friday Malcolm and Sam are coming over to do some Unity VR coding. If all goes well we’ll probably continue this on alternate Fridays going forward.
I’ve spent some time over the last few days getting the VR area in the basement straightened out and appropriate development tools loaded on the machines around the house.
I did realized earlier this week that I had created a stripe set on the VR system using WD green drives that had been booted out of the upstairs machine’s stripe set with parity because they don’t play nice as part of an array. I wound up pulling everything off of them, breaking the set and reformatting them as individual drives…a bit of a pain, but necessary.
At this point things should be pretty well set up and I’m looking forward to seeing what we can get done.
Digging into the unity engine this weekend. Reading and watching some YouTube videos. Looks like it uses dependency injection pretty extensively with a rather slick UI wrapped around things.
I’ve gone through enough to see how a basic set of objects gets created and scripted in the UI interactively. I’m now on the hunt for methods for creating templates for objects and then creating instances of those objects programmatically. I’d like to be able to modify the geometry on the fly as well, but that isn’t really needed immediately.
I’m thinking of wrapping together a small wargame that draws its inspiration from stellar conquest. Same basic structure but with no copyrighted material pulled over. The system level combat also likely wants to be automatically resolved to make offline, turn based play smoother. The player is the general/admiral directing overall strategy. The in-system combat is handled locally and the player only sees the end result.
Far more reading and experimentation to be done. I also need to be able to bolt in much more complex C# code on the back-end to implement the rules management (or push that to the PHP code on the server perhaps and make this all pull together. Should be an interesting run.
I’ve been realizing that if I want to find people to play boardgames with, I need to be looking at somewhat less heavyweight games than the stuff I played in college with friends who had also been playing for years
. I just picked up a copy of Federation Commander which is a lighter weight take on Star Fleet Battles. Hoping this will make it possible to setup some gaming and perhaps work up to the more complex Star Trek themed games (and others). I’ve got a broader library, but many of the games I loved years ago are now far out of print. We’ll see what the new year brings…hoping to find time and an opponent or two…
I have the Klingon Border version on order but from a slower source (this one was available with Amazon Prime so quick). I think that the Klingon/Federation match up is a little less complex and expect that will make for a better introductory scenario once it arrives.
I’ve now got a largely up to date star fleet battles set. I need to clear the table in the basement and run some battles through to refresh my memory of the rules and make sure I’m good with the current state of the game. Once that’s done I really need to find opponents…there’s a facebook feed for that so hopefully I’ll find someone in the local area.
While I’ve been doing flooring work on the house, I’ve also been buying Star Fleet Battles and Federation and Empire game parts to update my 25 year old set. These used to be produced by Task Force Games but it appears the original company went away and the division that produced the star trek games lived on as Amarillo Design Bureau with the old series license and game designs.
Back in high school and college we had a great time killing starships on the tabletop. That got pushed to the back burner after graduation as I lost access to the groups I had played with and found my life getting much busier. Now that we’re empty nest parents, I’m hoping to find folks to play with in the area and get back into things a bit.
Federation and Empire is a game I’ve owned (back to the first version called Federation Space) since school but never found the time to place. I’ve updated my set and would love to find the opportunity to run through some strategic Star Trek combat sometime.
At this point I’m filling in the ‘New Worlds‘ modules and then just need to get the current version of the New Ship modules and Omega to be complete. I’m certainly enjoying reading through the new stuff…quite a few changes and a good bit of new material to play with. I am very interested to see what they did with Omega as this should all be new to me…working with the trade-off between material that would be useful in a near future game and stuff that I’ve never seen but find interesting…
I’ve long had a fondness for hex-grid based board wargames. Most of the companies I remember from when I was in college and actively playing are now long gone. Now that I’m an empty nester I’m looking at what is out there, what I can do and updates that are available.
Continue reading Board wargames still in print… →
Another grey day, but so far no rain
Definitely thinking about RPG stuff. Not sure I’ll find the time any time soon, but hoping to get to some gaming sites and discussions perhaps.
Thoughts and Considerations…
