After TRC poked me about it yesterday I've done a bit more work on my 3d online epic game:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rx4yDHYSos0

That was really impressive. My only quibble was the effect of playing in a box - could you colour the walls sky blue?

Also, I guess the only other technical question would be getting two people to access the data simultaneously if that is at all possible. Otherwise I guess you would be doing the same as Vassal and sending a file back and forth ?

The brown box is just a test map, it'll eventually be much nicer looking.

Yes, two (or more) players will be able to play at once, seeing each other's moves in realtime.

looking good. How are you handling the 3d rotation? Homeworld style?

I've played a lot of vassal (downside to living in the middle of nowhere) and the main thing that bugs me is the not-very-random dice no. generator, to the point where Dave and I used our own dice. THe main problem was that the result seemed too dependent on the previous roll, so that we actually started changing our playstyle (ooh, that's a 6, I'll activate these next as I'll probably get a 1 so I don't mind if they fail). Any thoughts on that?

Looks like you have an excellent handle on dragging with measurement, which is my only other main beef with Vassal. Though I will miss Dave's absolutely amazing Vassal driving skills..

The camera is controlled fairly simply; moving the cursor to the edges of the screen moves the view, and if you hold ctrl and move to the edge it rotates the camera. It's intuitive and quickly becomes second nature.

The random number generator I'm using should be truly random.

I have the measurement on moving units, but I'm also going to add a tape-measure mode where you can measure any distance you like.

ooh, very nice. Will it be freeware or are you thinking about charging, if so, how much?

freeware.

even more awesome thanks for taking the time to do this ZC!

Looks promising

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I envision that the best way to play it will be with skype or something running in the background so you can talk directly. You can send text messages through the game, but speech through skype or similar is probably much more sensible.

Hm.. i bet my english sounds like a unholy mix of Oxford and American Englisch together with a fair bit of German accend
I'm far more used to write and read english than to speak it

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I reckon with skype it'd play about as fast as normal epic, with typing a lot slower, but still doable

Maybe
How do you rotate models? I reccomend pressing a key (or right mouse-button as i guess you would do anyway to select and move a model) and rolling the mouse-wheel.

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Currently you have to rotate the camera to rotate them, which is very awkward, and I'll definitely add a better option.

One of the reasons I put the units on circular bases was to reduce the need for rotation. Only War Engines will really need to.

I've only ever played Vassal with Skype, my typing is too slow and it makes things clunky. Game time was slightly longer than real life, due to the fiddly measuring and models, but this software looks like it will get around that very nicely.

Really Random (TM) random no. generator gets a big thumbs up from me