Reminds me of Drawn to Life.

Oooh, reminds me of a pencil-and-paper game I used to play with my friends, a strategy game where players had rules on types of buildings, units and their abilities, but could style their buildings and units however they liked.

You might want to find some way of increasing the detail with which you can draw units, to give people more options. You'll also want to think about how units will attack each other graphically - find a way of making this look exciting!

This is the best idea I've seen declared for this contest so far, enough so that I'm wishing I'd thought of it myself. Make it work! :D

That was where I got my idea :>

Maybe soldiers could 'throw' their blocks at each other. COLOUR FIGHT! Needs balance though, don't want completely full canvas for the purpose of having more blocks to throw.

I was thinking of them throwing erasers at each other :P

As Devenger said, best idea entered so far. I do hope you finish enough of it.

That, sir, is pure win. Man, I wish I could erase my troubles in real life (i.e. Co-workers) this easily!

I want to erase my teachers...

Also, I want to design a few things :P

Time to draw a penis soldier.

Just.. Why? D:

I want to play this :D

Anyone got a better way I can transfer my pixel data? At the moment it's sending a table of 256 values (One for each pixel.)

Usermessages each time they change the data on an individual pixel, perhaps? Best way I could think of. Would be a hell of a lot faster than datastream.

Only downside is possible net buffer overflow.

Umm so how would you play this game? Is it just like a drawing game or do they battle?

They battle of course. I got a picture of a soldier in 3d.

awsome thanks. Just i can't picture what is happening.

Looks like you just painted it there with ms paint

Never the less, good luck with this... might be good.

Might?! You under estimate us.

Headstrong ftw :L

Clever. I like the concept.

You might want to reduce the information needed by each pixel... consider systems like having a set palette of colours so you can get many pixels into a single byte (say, 2^5 colours - 32 - might be enough, and would allow you to get two pixels into one Short value, in the same way spawnflags and things are sent as a number representing many 0/1 values).

Or you could have players select their own palette of colours, say 4 colours, and then be able to send just 4 RGB values alongside pixels of only 4 colour possibilities, for much greater efficiency with great numbers of pixels.

It will be tough. But for the last contest I created the illusion of lots of moving entities (potentially 30+) using clientside entities and usermessages, reducing network traffic 100-fold or more. I hope that proves you can achieve some pretty awesome things if you think around your problem hard enough.

You overestimate my vocabulary

I absolutely love it.

You could make a space themed army just by drawing spaceships and spaceports.
Against the other teams rainbow knights and castles.

How big can your drawings be?
How many pixels and stuff like that?

I'm just thinking that while it would be fun to make spacethemed and knight themed troops like the guy above suggested... it would take a few pixels to make them not look crap.

Well at the moment it's 16x16 pixels, but I will upgrade it to 64x64. :)

So it's basicly draw your own rts =p

Edited:

Maybe give them a option to how big they want it?

How many colors can we pick from?
Because I'd like these colors for my soldier,
Also will we be able to save our creations on our hard drive so we can move them from server to server?

This gamemode, if it works, will be the most free RTS ever.

THIS means we can be Stickman, Mario and Sonic Races... AT ONCE

So do the soldier abilities vary depending on how you draw them?

You will have to ask iRzilla for that information. I myself have no clue. :V

He seems to have disappered tonight, though.

No :P The soldiers all walk the same & fight the same. There will be different levels of soldiers like Level 1 & 2 & 3 etc..

A list of colors is:

You should allow them to make their own set of colors or give stats based on what color they use. Although you should make sure to make it percentage based so they don't fill their whole picture up with black.

Also please don't make white invisible, its an essential color!

Why not allow all colors? Like the tool menu does. Get one of those color boxes.

Because he will then have to submit 3 bytes per pixel to the server and back to the clients. On a 32x32 image, that's 1024 pixels, which is 3072 bytes of data. Considering a usermessage/concommand holds a maximum of 255 bytes, I would have thought that much data is far too much for a single 32x32 image.

Eh yeah.... I was so going to say that... "_"



Mario anyone?

Nice job, iRzilla. Looking good so far. Remember to get some gameplay down as well, though.

We are working on that.

Yay!

Good to hear. Mind posting a video when you have a presentable amount of stuff done?