My first milestone for Project Venice was to make a chat system. With that complete, it is time to make my next goal. Project Venice is heavily data driven and makes use of HTML to interact with that data. An entirely form based game isn't going to cut it in 2014. So, there will be a 'window to the world'.
With this feature, you'll be able see the solar systems (only one in the prototype) and ships. I am going to use Unity for this part of the project. I was tempted to go HTML5, but Unity is better (quicker) to prototype with. Basically, the Unity web app will use Socket.IO (web sockets) to get data from the server. So all of the locations in the solar system will be displayed in the Unity window. It'll be an isometric view, so think birds-eye but at an angle.
Not only will locations be view-able, but you'll be able to see starship traffic between them. This traffic will all be caused by player activities. The main goal of this feature is to let players have a visible effect on the game world. So if a new trade route develops, you'll be able to see traffic increase between the locations. We need to crawl before we walk, so the goal here is to just have planets showing up and for the app to be integrated into the webpage.
