Master of Orion Tribute - a MOOII clone with future plans

[Istrebitel]

Greetings!

You mighta heard this story a lot of time. MOOII clone. Bla bla. Well, this time, it is for real and I am serious.

The goal is to remake a as-close-to-original clone as possible. Unfortunately, even the most veteran players have no clue about the actual espionage formula and other stuff is made based on assumptions and stuff, but i suppose it can be always later tweaked by means of comparison and statistics.

The reasons are:
1) To make this superb game open source, grow a community that would be modding and expanding the game further beyond the original, like Open TTD or JA 2.13 or similar communities grown around old and popular games that went opensource.
2) To enhance moo2 multiplayer gameplay by removing time-eating activities, simplifying the less interesting and most boring parts. For example, saving ship designs into files so no more need to redesign that basic laser BB for the hundredth time.
3) To enhance multiplayer even further by using adequate networking libraries (plans are to use Lighren), that would allow leaver reconnection after disconnect/crash, less lag etc
4) To open the game to any changes community wants. Interactive ground combat, 3d spaceship combat, more than 2 sides in a spaceship combat, ability to test out designs on a dummy, whatever you might think of can be real when you can code it by yourself and introduce into the game as an option that is absolutely easilly toggleable
5) multi-language support at its finest. Unless you rename a star, your opponent will perfectly see it in his language and you - in yours. Languages are switched on the fly and the game is already being built with considerations about language
6) Game stores almost everything in XML so anybody can modify whatever he wants, mods are easy as never before - you would be able to do them with your favourite notepad editor

I have my own plans, schemes and ideas on how to achive this huge sized goal, but so far i am doing this alone. If anyone would like to join in, i would gladly accept. Right now i have no website dedicated to the game yet, so i will provide my email for any questions and contact.

starsabre@gmail.com

I am writing this game using Microsoft XNA for graphics.
I plan to use Lighren for networking and FMOD for sound.

So far i am using print-screened graphics from MOOII but plans are to later use knowledge on game graphics format to read graphics directly from the LBX, to prevent the need of distributing copyrighted material and to prevent the need of manually recreating every sprite already made in the game.

As a buddy here on forums said, most people state they're doing a moo2 clone and then disappear providing no source code. Well, here it goes...

http://www.2shared.com/file/11148780/dd94858/MasterOfOrionTribute.html
Full source code (the .exe to run is at MasterOfOrionTribute\MasterOfOrionTributeGame\bin\x86\Debug folder)
Version 0.0.0.1

Main menu, basic MOOII GUI with buttons/popups/etc, map generator, ability to view stars, calculate distance between stars(f9/d), look at planets and stuff (omniscent turned on because no race generation yet). Not alot, but hey, i have just started some weeks ago! Next thing on the todo list will be the colony screen.

You will need Microsoft XNA redistributable and .Net Framework to run it (free download of Microsoft site), and XNA game studio and Visual Studio Express C# to open and edit it.

I am open to suggestions, offers, questions, whatever.

PS: As i have never before uploaded anything related to this project on the web, there might be a reference missing or some stuff. Please tell me if it spits errors and crashes on your PC and i will try to correct that asap.

[peterman]

http://openmoo2.org

Just released first public code under the GPL v2.0