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Updated: 11/4/02
What is Freespace?The NameFreespace is simply the name I gave to this project before I had known of two other products on the market with the same name. Both were brought to my attention by other people who own or have played them, one is called Decent Freespace, and the other is just called Freespace. I'm hoping to come up with a new name for this project as it contains nothing related to either two programs. The reason why this project had been given the name of freespace was to express it's main abilities. One is you are in space a majority of the time, while you are free to conduct whatever business you wish and whatever the program can support.The PurposeThe point behind the project is simple. It is designed to help develop my C++, WinAPI/MFC, DirectX and any other programming skills that may come into play to push the project foward or give it features that I feel it needs. This is the primary purpose. The secondary purpose is a place where online friends may meet, chat and just play around sort of like a muck. Those of you who do not know what a muck is, it's a text based game where one may come to chat and/or mainly Role play with other characters that are part of a main central theme or smaller themes. The only difference between this and a muck is this is mainly a visual place for friends to be and is not designed to be a game or a place to role play out stories. This project is more of a free form of ideas, chat, and designs of 3d worlds. NOTE: Many of those that know what a muck is, when this project was explained to them they came to believe that this project was created for mucking in 3d and or a new client to do such. This is not the case. The project just happens to support the ability to connect to a muck so that one may keep in touch with a friend who can not run the project or does not wish too. One may, if one chooses so, to muck from within freespace and they will be given all the options that a standard client has; however, this is not the sole purpose of this project. For mucking, see the section on datascreens.Components of FreespaceProgressThe current progress of the project is barely breaching the point of the user interface and user command abilities. The console IS underconstruction and control of the datascreens is extremely limited. Space is not visually completed, nor is a user mapping system integrated yet. Freeworlds has not even reached the light of day for this project and will not until all user GUI & the space region is completed.The ConsoleThe console(which I believe id deserves credit for this as they were the first to invent a console for their 3d game engines, contact me if I'm wrong about this)which allows the user to change variables and settings of that current world or level. The console in freespace is slightly different, it is designed to give the user almost total control of their world and changing it. As happens with all projects certain plans and ideas ususally become omitted or changed, so we'll see what happens as time goes on. The console does support the ability to change certain user settings such as speed, sensitivity of your panning & pitch motions, changing the address of a datascreen as well as connecting and disconnecting from certain muck sites, and a few other smaller user and datascreen features.The DatascreenThe most important component in freespace. A Datascreen is a 2d screen that allows a user in 3d to manipulate or do tasks that require text or image manipulation. In otherwords, a datascreen is like a computer monitor in the real world except you never see the body of the datascreen as it is a virtual world. Datascreens support several basic features that will be built into the screen and give the user different abilities. The only currently supported Datascreens are the Textscreen which supports text displays, the mediascreen which supports images only for now, and the muckscreen which can be used to communicate with mucks. Hopefully soon in the future a script can be created to allow a user to create a custom datascreen wihtout having to be a programmer. A datascreen can be carried with the user or left behind; however, a screen left behind does not mean it is destroyed nor does it mean any actions upon the screen are stopped. A muckscreen for example will continue to recieve events if you were to leave it behind. There will be a set number of datascreens depending on your system resources to protect the system from eating too much memory to display or process that datascreen. All datascreens come with a built in "out-of-focus" ability which will shut off the display when a user is not using it to save processing memory to display it. A screen "out-of-focus" does not mean that the datascreen itself has been shut off or disconnect to whatever site it was connected too, it simply means it's display has been turned off like turning off a monitor.FreeWorldsJust as the name implies. Space can get boring, freeworlds is a way of creating worlds to drop down on and explore. How it will be done to send a world to a friend's computer or wired into freespace is unknown as of now. This is one of the several design ideas that will hopefully be implemented but may probably be dropped due to hardware limitations or other problems that may arise. A freeworld if brought into play would be a 3d world one could go down on and explore that a friend built or the user built in which a friend may visit. The greatest problem that comes with this is the textures and models and all the other details of a world that would have to be transfered from a user's computer to a friend's in order for a friend to visit. |
Console Concept Design |
Text Mapping |
Composite |
Windowed Mode{MuckScreen} |
MediaScreen |
Dual MuckScreens{Angle 1} |
Dual MuckScreens{Angle 2} |
Dual MuckScreens{Angle 3: Behind} |
Prototype Datascreen. |
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