Some ideas and suggestions on Defcon.

[daddygoestowork]

Hello everbody.

New poster here, although I have been keeping my eyes on Defcon for a while now and I also do enjoy uplink once in a while. Darwinia didn't struck home on me tho.

Anyways, I have a few suggestions for Darwinia that I think might benifit us gamers and IV.

I must say I really enjoy the way IV choses to do things, the way they design the GUI and their apporoach to game design in general is quite refreshing and nice. Details like ingame irc, multimonitor support and skinnable UI (oike in uplink) is really sweet. Given how they made uplink and darwinia I really hope they will keep this tradition of open-endedness and ease of use as they have done before.
For a lover of all things fallout and nukes in general i'm really looking forward to this game!

So anyways. on to the ideas.

* Skinnable GUI. Or atleast the ability to change colours. This could have a thematic approach. So far the Screenshots have all been in this very nice blueish colour, but what if you play the evil godless COMMUNISTS! Maybe it would be a nice idea to have a evil darkbloodredish color for your UI in this case. I would certainly like it Maybe some small changes to icons and other things like that to really get the feel on playing on the russian side. Provided they will keep the usa/Ussr approach. They might even play into the way the russians tend to be a bit more lowtech and gritty in their ways and extroplate that into their UI and have it changed a bit. Anyways, Some customisation in terms of colours/font size etc would be nice.

* The ability to manipulate/build your force.
Predisposed units is nice, however ut in the long run maybe the game will get a bit boring? I can see the possibility of always starting with the same amounts of units can get a bit boring, or maybe not at all. I would however thing that the ability to completley build/Deploy your own forces would be a bit to much of cheating and imbalanced, people getting 100x silos on one location etc, stuff like that.

I do however feel that some compromise of a predisposed force and an ability to slighty skew the numbers in your flavour would be sufficeint. Maybe have the choices from say having 50 subs and 75 bombers to 50 bombers and 75 subs, or any number inbetween. Say a intriger of numbers or points you are allowed to spend a litte random as you wish, but with a predetermined force as a base. This would probably allow for some more range in the way we extrapolate and make tactics and suit our own fetishes a bit more I tend to love Subs for example and would gladly sacrifice a few bombers for a bit more subs, some other player might feel the opposite way.


* Multiplayer ladders/contests.
Since this game primary will be a multiplayer game, with all of us just itching to blow eachother up I assume there is some intrest in having similar contests/laddergames/championships such as Diablo 2 has. We coul d have a few leauges or something of that sort, nothing to serious but in all fairness, It would be cool to battle out who is the best nuker of them all. With the scorebased system that Defcon has there's no problem determining the' winner' after all.

Granted, this might not be anything IV has to do anything about. Since we have ingame irc (thank you!) I'm sure us fans will work out the details for this pretty fast on our own if the intrest is there.


*Multimonitor support

I realize this is asking alot and it might just be completely unessecary. I however do run 2 screens and i would really enjoy seeing something like the mulitmonitor support that was in uplink in Defcon. This could range from streching out the game to something like having a semi Modal GUI where one monitor would simply be the whole map and whatnot and the other monitor would have the ingame irc, commandconsole, buttons.etc...
pretty sweet to see the whole action on one big screen.
Granted, the UI seems pretty minimalistic and slick as it is, i dont think it will actually be a problem.

Hmm.
well that's it for now. I thought I had more ideas but apparently not.

Glad to be here and glad to see this game come alive!

cheers

/dgtw

[martin]

I like the skinning idea. It would be cool to just go to the menu and load one of your custom skins ingame.

hey - i've found my russian skin base

http://free-textures.got3d.com/architectural/free-rusty-metal-textures/images/free-rusty-metal-texture-017.jpg

[Virulent Virus]

I think all of these are good ideas... since DEFCON itself is (supposedly, but knowing IV, don't count on it) soon to be released, maybe IV won't have time to write such features in. Maybe, like they did with Uplink, they'll release the source code so we can mod the game, and add whatever features we want.

All of this is pure speculation, of course. But we can always hope!

[Dreadlord]

but what if you play the evil godless COMMUNISTS!

comrade, please watch your tongue Remember, not only NATO guys like yourself can be found here... Let us be politically correct and blow each other only in Defcon, not in real life

but... I would like to hear the answer to your question, since many games now have such feature like playing all sides of the conflict.

by the way, here is my humble question:

I saw on the screenshots that many cities are signed on the world map, but I fear that many Russian (or Soviet) cities will not be seen. please, mark our cities too, since it is a blowing-everybody game, our cities can also make difference

[daset]

but what if you play the evil godless COMMUNISTS!

Even better, make a pink skin for the queer, greedy america(sadly, I'm bashing my own nation).

[daddygoestowork]

Haha. Sorry for the politic remarks

I was merley playing into the sentiment and in the spirit of the cold war and the politic propaganda.

thanks for the positive remarks. Such neat little features would add a lot of nice detail and atmosphere i think. and would be nice to see.


cheers!

[Dreadlord]

We'll enjoy bashing each other with 100000 megaton nukes

[daddygoestowork]

Hey maybe it would also be cool with nationspecific weapons ?

Such as the tridentsubs of england and whatnot.

allow for some variety

[Babylon5]

Like in AOE or something you mean?

[Big RI Joe]

I can see I'll need to keep getting new keyboards while playing this puppy.....heeheehee

[thaimodz]

I agree to the original poster. Especially the skinnable GUI thing.

How much of copy protection on Defcon anyway? I think it should be kept like the other IV games. No check, no problem. (The crackers can ALWAYS get the pirated game to work online, seemingly.)

[xander]

I agree to the original poster. Especially the skinnable GUI thing.

How much of copy protection on Defcon anyway? I think it should be kept like the other IV games. No check, no problem. (The crackers can ALWAYS get the pirated game to work online, seemingly.)

That would be inline with other IV games... I don't see why they wouldn't do it.

xander

[Sfighrath]

Dreadlord, respect. I would like to play with you Red alliance will crash NATO...

Skinning is a good idea. But if you want to do it you have to write the game for skinning at the begin.

[squigian]

As the DEFCON meter counts down, new options should jump up in stylistic ways, culminating in two keys and a red button popping up for nukes.

Voice recognition! Silo 4, launch nuke at Beijing. Fighter 5, intercept enemy bomber 37.

As requested before, an all CPU mode so that you can watch global thermonuclear war pan out unaided.

Local maps (maybe the modding community could do this, or a map editor included?). By this, I mean being able to design small scale or imaginary maps. I want to play Ireland nuking England; I want to invade Texas from California! (This could make a good demo; say, England versus Scotland with only around 5 silos each and 20 units or so).

[daset]

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