Lol, yay, I'm back! I've suffered from a lack of computer/lack of obedient computer, so please excuse my absence.

From what it looks like, it's been decided upon that the graphics are going to be FFT-esque, which is what I had hoped from the start. I really liked the graphics there, they told the story well enough (although the story and gameplay was rather disappointing), but I'm seeing some odd loopholes in battle (which O haven't read yet). So, IMHO, we oughta quit worrying about which FF was the best, etc. because that it something that can be moved to the General Discussion boards. Here, we need to decide upon the way the game is going to be played. So... uh... how, then? We need to, for sure, use the 3D world to increase the 3D level of gaming; that is, make it to where if the game lost its 3D world, it would actually detriment from gameplay.

I know that FoI is a pretty relaxed project, but I feel obligated to point this out...

Conventional project management says that having these things decided is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for a complete project/implementation plan. It also says that the plan is created before any work on the implementation of the plan (the actual work work part of the project) is started.

Obviously no project is perfect and FoI is not a conventional project anyways. Nevertheless, I think that the creation of the game will continue to suffer due to backtracking and impromptu planning (due to lack of an agreed upon plan).

I was really drawn to FoI because of it having a charter (and hence a little organization). Rather ironically the charter (as of version 2.01) seems to (explicitly and implicity) state that plans and schedules are not important ("The Fate of Io Project is always changing", "I don't hold people to deadlines or quotas of any kind").

I think it's great that the project exists for fun only. I wouldn't want to be involved with any project that berated volunteer members for missing deadlines (especially if the members were not involved in the creation of those deadlines). However, rather counterintuitively, a project cannot be much fun unless it is reasonably under control and making some sort of progress.

I mean in no way to belittle the efforts put into FoI so far. I can tell that much time has been put into creating the material that is housed on the fateofio.org server. FoI's story is the most complete of any large-scale independent RPG currently in development (as far as I can tell). I only suggest investigating the possibility of more in-depth project planning and scheduling in order to save rework and frustration down the road (i.e. 3D models become useless if the game is implemented in 2D and (more or less) vice-versa).

Yeah, I actually wrote an e-mail about this to Dev a few days ago. Ironically, later that day he started restructuring the FoI tree, updating character bios, etc. I don't know if I sparked or helped spark that, but I was pleased and excited to see it. :)

The basic upshot of what I wrote was similar to what some of you are saying: While it's great that we're doing this for fun, we still need to get some fundamentals pretty much set in stone, and then add a little more structure to the development process, if we really plan to take this project past the formative stages to completion.

As it stands now, we get little things done here and there, sporadically. On occasion, we toy with something bigger and more fundamental, like the graphics format, but we rarely arrive at any conclusion. We've had over a year to get these foundational decisions out of the way, yet they still present roadblocks to any substantial progress. I'm proud to be a (small) part of this project, and I enjoy being involved, but it seems that we generally lack focus.

I can't claim to know the ultimate solution, though I have some suggestions which might help...

• An organized chat could be quite productive, as long as we address specific topics.

• We could make a lot more use of Tasks, in order to let everyone know exactly what's been done, what we're working on, and what still needs to be done.

• Certain sections - particularly music and illustration - could make great use of "theme/character of the week/month".

Any other or better ideas?

(Sorry for going further off-topic. :-p)

I'm available any day and most times except saturdays and sundays and tuesday thursday night. That's my work schedule. OR after 9:30 my time (EST) any night. I do need advance warning of like a week or so?

I don't agree with JCore in that the game should be made in 2D... we want a 3D game that is actually playable in 3D. If we attempt a 2D game in 3D we'll end up doing something very awful, i.e. the Legend of Aidyn (whatever it was called)... that game was a horrible experience, and I don't want to see a great story like this blown off in a stupid gameplay steup. I still maintain that the characters should be drawn as sprites interacting in a 3D, grid-based world (but in hexes). The grid should not only work on 1 level (ground), but it should include height. This will allow for more puzzles, and will allow Delloran to make full use of his flight ability. I've not seen a game, fully-playable with that sort of graphics system (FFT used it but it lacked height and you only saw it in battles and cutscenes). A vast, hex-based world in 3D would look pretty cool, at least in my opinion. If we are to make a 2D game, then let's not go so far as to put in 3D graphics; imagine what would have happened if FF7-9 had attempted a 3D world with 3D characters instead of having drawn backgrounds. We're working with even less resourcesthan they had. Those games were not played in 3D, they were 2D game with poor 3D graphics, and the world was drawn. Aside from that, drawing sprites would make things much more simple, and yet the world would be in 3D, the sprites moving through it. This is also not a battle-based game; it is very puzzle-based. Adding a third dimension would increase the depth of these puzzles, perhaps to the point where the characters would face a puzzle the size of a building and the shape of a cube; thus, they would have to think on three different levels, and make full use of their characters' skills and abilities. And there's my next two cents.

(Note: lol, I'm having to edit and re-edit because each time I go through it, I see my point may be missed.)

Heh, I'm not involved in NetBSD development so I don't know if anything is happening yet on this or not. I guess I could search through the mailing lists sometime, but...I don't think that it's really a big priority for NetBSD developers or users right now.

I sort of just threw that in for kicks. I have other systems that I could do testing on, and many 3D engines do a decent job in software mode on my machine. It would be pretty dumb for me to campaign against 3D just because my machine doesn't support 3D hardware acceleration (hey, it's a $15 ATI Xpert 2000 anyway).

Personally, I like 2-D sprites in a 3-D world (FFT, Xenogears, Grandia) better than 3-D characters, so if we do 3-D at all, that'd be my vote. In which case, a hex-based grid would be fine with me too, except that I think such a system is probably more suited to turn-based combat...

I think its more of a matter of how long do we want to wait to see this game complete. I think some people still don't realise how long it will take if this game were in 3D. If we don't really care about this game being complete or not and are just using it to enhance our skills or consider it a hobby then I say go for 3D. But if we are really serious about getting this game out then we should go 2D. Like i mentioned before we should make the game 2D with fmv's, that way people can choose the working in 3D or 2D. This is also alot more reasonable then creating the entire game in 3D