Beta Galactic Artifact - Release B

[jook2oh]

...I can beat it in 8 to 15 minutes now...

:blink: HOW? My best was 28 Minutes in Single Player *sniff*


LOL, did I mention for the last half of the game I'm stuck at 13 to 15 frames per second... SLOOOOW. I think its all that speed-cubing I did (Rubik's Cube). Or maybe its his clever numpad setup, you know, blinding speed of fingers. And I know I can't be the fastest here, cause someone out there (everyone in fact) has better frame-rate, so they can play even faster.

Another Crazy Fusion_Power Idea: A BLACK HOLE in the middle of the Galaxy!

That was actually his daughters suggestion... unless... you are his daughter? :huh: No, couldn't be.

 

[fusion_power]

Another Crazy Fusion_Power Idea: A BLACK HOLE in the middle of the Galaxy!

That was actually his daughters suggestion... unless... you are his daughter? :huh: No, couldn't be.

Not that I know... :lol:
Well, I didn't read this so I thought it was an good Idea of me, however, I hope Trevor Bradley likes the Idea at all. And which father could deny his daughter anything?

 

[Tobriand]

A thought to make it possible to grab information early rather than later:

Add an element of wormhole. Wormholes take you some random place, but are generally two way.

The trick to making them productive early would be information of the variety "suchandsuch a wormhole will take you closer to the artifact". Possibly just how big a clue you're given in that vein would have to be determined by, I'd guess, both the size of the artifact traded, and probably how upgraded your ship is - although it's the kind of information that is always useful. For instance, if you know wormhole X will take you closer to the artifact, then even if it takes you somewhere relatively close, it eliminates an area of half the distance between start and finish point of the wormhole journey around your starting position, which could be quite a chunk of the star map.

Other options for wormhole related information would be "X wormhole takes a ship in Y direction" or "X wormhole exits at Y distance from the start", neither of which are that useful on their own, but might be in conjunction with normal area-narrowing information.

Anyway, it's a thought. It might allow *some* progress from early on without upgrading, though of course, you'd still need about ~5 or six on both speed and efficiency; not such a big tank though, certainly, and 5 or 6 is only 3 or 4 $$$ artifacts, where 10 is much more, especially on two stats...

 

[Wolfsclaw]

Trevor, there's a strange bug i've been encountering about three times when trying to play an online game (see screenshot, thats what it looks like) - is the server just down (if so, could you bring it up again? ) or this an actual game bug?

edit: Also, i just won the game on the server (it works again) but it doesn't restart as always. There's nothing left to do though...

 

[TrevorBradley]

Trevor, there's a strange bug i've been encountering about three times when trying to play an online game (see screenshot, thats what it looks like) - is the server just down (if so, could you bring it up again? ) or this an actual game bug?

edit: Also, i just won the game on the server (it works again) but it doesn't restart as always. There's nothing left to do though...

First thing's first this morning. This is what happens when the server hangs, but doesn't crash properly. I saw this within 12 hours of the game first being released, and watched the server closely since then, but it hadn't happened again. Thankfully the server only died about 30 minutes ago.

I've now restarted the server (and fixed a tiny bug in my strftime log function, %m is Month, not minute!). I also recompiled it with the debug code on and ran it through gdb (being sure to ignore SIGPIPEs and running "set height 0", both can hang or crash the program if not run on gdb beforehand). If the server hangs again, I should be able to tell exactly what function routine it's blocking on (my guess is captain name selection).

Now can you give me a bit more detail about how you won a game on the server when it had apparently hung? I get that last bit of "GALACTIC ARTIFACT" from the main screen consistently if the server has hung and can't log in at all. Did the game start sometimes? (This might help me defeat this bug!)

Or.... *looks closer at the logs*... it could be the Crypto routines. Looks like at about 11am (about 2 hours ago) some of the transmissions to my server were getting garbled. It didn't happen in the previous 24 hours. I wonder if this is the cause...

EDIT: Looking even closer at the logs (and I wish I had fixed this timestamp bug earlier), it looks like one of two things happened: The server froze for at least a minute and then started up again and a whole bunch of data arrived at once (some of which was corrupted). Or my ISP held up connectivity for at least 50 seconds. Based on the freezing I've seen so far, I'm going to guess the former.

I'm not sure if I'll be able to diagnose this until gdb catches it again. Last uptime was about 47 hours. Keep playing and try to freeze that server!

 

[TrevorBradley]

After playing the game, it would be good if ailians didn't hail you if you don't have anything to sell, espetilly early in the game where its hard to tell what a planet has on it. Also, it would be good if this would run full screen.

It's critical to be able to talk to aliens anyways for three reasons:

1) Need to know where they are when you do need to sell stuff.
2) Need to buy upgrades when you have cash on hand
3) Need to buy fuel.

It will run full screen... once we have Pandoras... I've got a few options for Windows/Linux... drop the screen resolution to 800x600 and black bar the top and bottom (dunno if this works for LCD's... the only one I own is my HDTV on my HTPC. Or I can change the actual game res. In theory this is fine except I've plotted out the real estate very carefully assuming a fixed 800x480 screen. The biggest problem though is the frame rate is bad enough as it is for weaker computers that expanding the galaxy from 480x480 would be brutal. I need to optimize my graphics code before I can consider this.

lol i played a game where this guy started right next to the artifact. He was afk so I went and swooped it up. I really didn't know it was there i just wanted to fly right next to him and I won. There should be an option for minimum distance from the artifact.

Artifact position is presently random. Think Joker from Dark Knight random. It's "fair" in that sense.

100% fair for all players in any given game might involve putting all the players in the same starting spot (or close enough), which I've considered as an option.

A thought to make it possible to grab information early rather than later:

Add an element of wormhole. Wormholes take you some random place, but are generally two way.

The trick to making them productive early would be information of the variety "suchandsuch a wormhole will take you closer to the artifact". Possibly just how big a clue you're given in that vein would have to be determined by, I'd guess, both the size of the artifact traded, and probably how upgraded your ship is - although it's the kind of information that is always useful. For instance, if you know wormhole X will take you closer to the artifact, then even if it takes you somewhere relatively close, it eliminates an area of half the distance between start and finish point of the wormhole journey around your starting position, which could be quite a chunk of the star map.

Other options for wormhole related information would be "X wormhole takes a ship in Y direction" or "X wormhole exits at Y distance from the start", neither of which are that useful on their own, but might be in conjunction with normal area-narrowing information.

Anyway, it's a thought. It might allow *some* progress from early on without upgrading, though of course, you'd still need about ~5 or six on both speed and efficiency; not such a big tank though, certainly, and 5 or 6 is only 3 or 4 $$$ artifacts, where 10 is much more, especially on two stats...

This works well for the first piece of information, but then falls apart.

Let me think about that a bit more.

It's a trade off between ship upgrades and an expensive "immediate transport" and would need to be fine tined.

I'm shying away from it because I'm uncertain if it would actually add anything to the game, and it smells of feature creep (which would be the death of this game if left to run wild), but I'll give it some more consideration...

Wormholes might be detected by the (as yet unimplemented) computer though... Hmm....

LOL, did I mention for the last half of the game I'm stuck at 13 to 15 frames per second... SLOOOOW. I think its all that speed-cubing I did (Rubik's Cube). Or maybe its his clever numpad setup, you know, blinding speed of fingers. And I know I can't be the fastest here, cause someone out there (everyone in fact) has better frame-rate, so they can play even faster.

What's the speed/graphics card on your computer? I managed to fix all the massive slowdowns my wife had on her Sempron 2500+, but I've got many slower computers throughout the house. The slowdown in fps should only be during panning and zooming, and possibly if the screen is all red. It *shouldn't* slow down when just sitting there though...

I may pass out a debug variant that allows you to check how many frames are being used to render certain components. I know that at one point the message pane slowed everything down on two computers only, but then I couldn't reproduce it. (By any chance is the slowdown when messages scroll down the screen?)

I don't know how the game is coded but maybe the ships could start only in a region with at least a special number of Artifacts and matching Alien Planets in range

My buddy had the Idea to hide the $$ and $$$ Artifacts at the beginning of the game so you can't easily get a big hint so early in the game. There could be an little update system to find the better artifacts only with upgrading your ship sensors or so but I don't know if the game would be too hard if we only have the small Artifacts at the beginning. It's again all a matter of testing and Game Balance.

Yes, the game would benefit from an good scoring system. Not even the finder of the price can win but maybe there are game modes where you have to make the most money, finding the most artifacts (of a special type) and so on. Could bring much more fun into the game.

Another Crazy Fusion_Power Idea: A BLACK HOLE in the middle of the Galaxy! At least the Size of the smallest sector and every ship that comes to close (surrounding 8 Sectors) are really in Trouble. This also is a nice obstacle for the advanced players if they decide to travel straight through the galaxy center to reach the Artifact in the opposite corner of the Galaxy or want to farm all the many Stars in the Center of the Galaxy for easy money.
The gravity of the hole could effect the ships in a certain range around the hole, maybe they need more fuel to pass the area or the course is effected. I think a good galaxy needs a mean big black hole in the Center! ^_^

I've considered a "seeded start", but it's easy to find *one* alien star, but finding many would require some work. I could have my server crunch through the galaxy and find 100 good starting points, and just shuffle between them, no-one would know it wasn't as randomized). (Crunching through the galaxy in a linear search with no graphics or text output takes at least an hour of 100% CPU usage on a fast machine).

The starts with Release B are still WAY better than the true random of Release A. That bad algorithm is still used for artifacts though, to make things frustrating in the end game (in fact, forcing a bad location for the artifact might solve one of my problems earlier... Hmm)

Only small artifacts would cripple the early game. It's not until you find a decent artifact that your ship upgrades can accelerate forward. I have started to consider Pirates sending false $$$ signals, as these are desirable in the late game but hard to find in the early game. Would slow some people down.

The scoring system would also encourage people to cash in some artifacts early. Simple scoring was going to be 100 points for excluding 8/9ths of the galaxy (and another 100 points for excluding 64/81sts, etc. Would let people take an early lead. Other things such as money, distance to artifact at end of game, bonus points for victory could be added as well.

The only thing I'd thought of using the black hole for was falling into it, losing the game instantly, and earning an Achievement for doing so. Going to hold off on other features until the rest of the game is solid though. Feature creep could easily kill the game.

Great game!
My suggestion for the graphic part is to develop a GUI (I don't know the precise meaning of this word and so I can't say if it already has one).
The actual interface is too DOS like. I know that you can like it, but a lot of people would like and be more captured by a modern style...
Maybe you can release two versions.
However thank you

Hi giovanni. Glad you like the game.

I'm uncertain what a more "GUI" like game would look like. I've tried adding the mouse interface to move away from the all keyboard interface (very common in old DOS games). I've also mentioned in the manual that the entire right side of the screen needs to be reworked, though I'm working out what that would look like.

In developing games like this that are unlike other games, getting the game to work rather than look pretty is most important. The shiny graphics can be added on to the game frame at a later date. The game is still an alpha and has a very long way to go before completion.

(I recall watching the "Making of Spore" video. They developed dozens of simulations that looked like primitive dos games before they could actually begin coding the real thing.)

... in other news, I've gone from being desperate for graphics aid to being overwhelmed by it.

right, well then. ops. i wasted time putting this together then...
if you don't like it, oh well, i like the spinning grid thingy though (used c++ opengl for that)





Hi Monkey. I *do* like your work. It's just received offers of help from a number of different artists and want to keep a consistent look and feel for the game. It's hard to turn Pat's work down as he's worked on many completed GP2x games in the past, and what I've seen so far is very impressive.

That kind of work is never wasted. Hold on to it, it may still come in handy someday!

 

[Wolfsclaw]

Yep, I came back about 30min later into the game after i had the server-crash-bug, then it was apparently working alright again, there also were two other players. So i starting playing the game, until I found the artifact - It said "x has won the game" or so and then i expected the restart message, but instead there was nothing. Found out at least one of the other players had also found the artifact way before (well, that's what i guessed) and were just goofing around in the galaxy, with nothing to do. What we did was meet up in the middle (btw it lags in the middle with all the stars visible - it's okay for my speedy PC, but i wouldn't know about the pandora!) and flew around for a little fun, then I quit.

 

[TrevorBradley]

Yep, I came back about 30min later into the game after i had the server-crash-bug, then it was apparently working alright again, there also were two other players. So i starting playing the game, until I found the artifact - It said "x has won the game" or so and then i expected the restart message, but instead there was nothing. Found out at least one of the other players had also found the artifact way before (well, that's what i guessed) and were just goofing around in the galaxy, with nothing to do. What we did was meet up in the middle (btw it lags in the middle with all the stars visible - it's okay for my speedy PC, but i wouldn't know about the pandora!) and flew around for a little fun, then I quit.

Yeah that was me. All i remember is that your name was stanley and there were like 5 people in the middle of the galaxy and then it all froze and you were standing still. Me thinks the time you quit was the time it froze. I was still going around and you were still there stopped just off the middle.


Ugh, not having proper log times is killer here. I see somebody (player 7) playing around at the center of the galaxy, but I can't piece together the time line.

The server is obviously hanging for a finite amount of time. If you see that happen again, hop on the website and use the feedback form and send me a message with the time and timezome you saw it in, as well as your player name. If I can catch it in the act, I should be able to tell where it's getting stuck.

..... in other news... the Ancient Artifacts are now completely named! All hail my wife!

 

[TrevorBradley]

6:24 gmt-5 attempt to travel to a star and the screen starts flashing and my fuel is going down with me seemingly going nowhere. star travel is approx. 21 ly away. Name is Duke. have to zoom out to make it stop wasting my fuel. This also allows me to get to the destination. I am using the mouse to travel. I think it may have something to do with how you can click to go to a neighboring sector.

Here's my logs around that time:

CODE
2009/01/25 15:22:56 [ID# 0] (68.53.235.222) >> SHIP 1.927 0.588 -17.002 13.781 9 10 6 7 10 7
2009/01/25 15:22:56 << SHIP 0 1.927 0.588 -17.002 13.781 9 10 6 7 10 7
2009/01/25 15:23:10 [ID# 0] (68.53.235.222) >> PLUN 69521274
2009/01/25 15:23:10 << PLUN 69521274
2009/01/25 15:23:12 << BROA Server online for 2h30m.
2009/01/25 15:23:14 [ID# 0] (68.53.235.222) >> SHIP -17.002 13.781 -7.139 -5.626 10 10 6 7 10 7
2009/01/25 15:23:14 << SHIP 0 -17.002 13.781 -7.139 -5.626 10 10 6 7 10 7
2009/01/25 15:24:49 [ID# 0] (68.53.235.222) >> SHIP -7.139 -5.626 -1.420 -10.559 10 10 6 7 10 10
2009/01/25 15:24:49 << SHIP 0 -7.139 -5.626 -1.420 -10.559 10 10 6 7 10 10
2009/01/25 15:26:05 [ID# 0] (68.53.235.222) >> SHIP -1.420 -10.559 16.581 22.264 10 10 10 8 10 10
2009/01/25 15:26:05 << SHIP 0 -1.420 -10.559 16.581 22.264 10 10 10 8 10 10
2009/01/25 15:26:06 [ID# 0] (68.53.235.222) >> PLUN 66606102
2009/01/25 15:26:06 << PLUN 66606102
2009/01/25 15:26:10 [ID# 0] (68.53.235.222) >> SHIP 16.581 22.264 -8.304 -13.370 10 10 10 8 10 10
2009/01/25 15:26:10 << SHIP 0 16.581 22.264 -8.304 -13.370 10 10 10 8 10 10
2009/01/25 15:26:10 [ID# 0] (68.53.235.222) >> PLUN 67820139
2009/01/25 15:26:10 << PLUN 67820139
2009/01/25 15:26:14 [ID# 0] (68.53.235.222) >> SHIP -8.304 -13.370 5.102 -13.009 10 10 10 8 10 10
2009/01/25 15:26:14 << SHIP 0 -8.304 -13.370 5.102 -13.009 10 10 10 8 10 10
2009/01/25 15:26:14 [ID# 0] (68.53.235.222) >> PLUN 67163067
2009/01/25 15:26:14 << PLUN 67163067
2009/01/25 15:26:19 [ID# 0] (68.53.235.222) >> SHIP 5.102 -13.009 -15.449 13.703 10 10 10 8 10 10
2009/01/25 15:26:19 << SHIP 0 5.102 -13.009 -15.449 13.703 10 10 10 8 10 10
2009/01/25 15:26:19 [ID# 0] (68.53.235.222) >> PLUN 69984432
2009/01/25 15:26:19 << PLUN 69984432
2009/01/25 15:26:22 [ID# 0] (68.53.235.222) >> SHIP -15.449 13.703 8.105 1.449 10 10 10 8 10 10
2009/01/25 15:26:22 << SHIP 0 -15.449 13.703 8.105 1.449 10 10 10 8 10 10
2009/01/25 15:26:23 [ID# 0] (68.53.235.222) >> PLUN 63877095
2009/01/25 15:26:23 << PLUN 63877095



You were playing by yourself, right near the center of the galaxy..

I think it's a client issue though, I don't see anything funky in the logs. Possibly something to do with the mouse.

There were old issues where the cursor went missing and you had to zoom in/out again to make it work (The Babababa bug), but I believed I fixed that. Was it the message panel on the right that started flashing red? That's that same Babababa bug.

 

[Klaus]

I only had about an hour to toy with my PC today, as I had a lot of work to do. Even though there are svgalib-packages in AUR, I couldn't get them to compile. My attempts do it manually where also futile. Why is svgalib even needed? I guess it's a dependency for your build of SDL, but hardly anyone would really need it. Arch does not offer a SPriG-package, but it's sure as hell easier to build than svgalib, so dynamically linked binaries would be very welcome!
As there seem to be a lot of Archers here, if new binaries come out and you have problems getting SPriG to work, I most likely could create a PKGBUILD for you. All the SDL_...-Packages are available via pacman.

 

[TrevorBradley]

I'm not sure why it requires svgalib either.. though my machine is slackware and appears to have compiled certain libs (SDL_gfx) in some really ass-backward way. It's possible my static compile was done in a really broken way too (see the dev forum for my confused post there.)

If some of the arch folks, or the 64-bit folks had an SDL dev environment, and would be willing to just compile the code rather than distributing it on me, I'd be happy to loan out the code for a bit so we could have a binary more people could use.

Same goes for OSX. I've had several requests for an OSX binary.

EDIT: I do have an -lvga in my static compile, but everything seems to freak out if it's not compiled in there. I could try to compile that in staticly as well, but I seem to have really messed up the static compile (from a compiler and GPL perspective) and probably should go for a dynamic compile again next time.

 

[jook2oh]

...want to keep a consistent look and feel for the game...

Ok. Everyone can feel free to rip off any idea I had, if you make it better, we all benefit.

What's the speed/graphics card on your computer?

1.4 ghz Pentium 4, 200 MFLOPS, 90 MIPS (really really bad)
384MB ram, RDRAM (rambus), 400mhz
GeForce4 Ti 4200, 64 MB ram, AGP 4X, GPU Clock 250 mhz, Memory 513 mhz
Windows XP

 

[jook2oh]

I actually found a bug:

If you start on an alien planet, and before you zoom in, then try to buy fuel (pressing the fuel up button a few times very quickly; it freezes solid.
I use the Windows XP version

(It was 12:25 am PST, I didn't see my name)
(I tried again (after multiple relogins), and was able to duplicate it at 12:30 am PST, I didn't see my name though.)


On another note, I got some (more) suggestions. They are good ones, so try to read it all.

1) In the beginning, you are slow, but not so very slow that it cripples you. However, it is a large galaxy, like 40 million stars, and I was thinking, maybe at level 10, its too fast. So what about cutting us back on the speed abit. Now I know what your thinking, but come on, 40 million stars. Why would you ever need to cross more than a small part of that in search of more stars to scan?

2) For the multiplayer (I think it might have been mentioned before) maybe you could give the 9 main sectors (all the way zoomed out) each their own winning artifact, then you have to find them 1 by 1, when you get a hint, its for the sector you are in when you ask for the hint. Now this is a pretty big addition, but if you make it say, "You cannot search here until you find your sectors artifact first" (aka: the sector you were in when you got the first clue) then you don't have to code 9 separate red-zones. So the multiplayer has 9, or even the first two depths, which makes 81 winning artifacts, before the game is finished. Keep in mind its a big galaxy anyway you look at it, so having 9 or even 81 artifacts isn't that many, especially when the server might eventually host as many as ten people at once. Plus, when you go to a new sector to search for another winning artifact, you get to stay fully upgraded.

I know its alot to read... and alot to take in... and alot to code... but maybe, just maybe, Its actually pure gold. Or maybe its all hogwash. lol, you decide.

 

[fusion_power]

The biggest problem though is the frame rate is bad enough as it is for weaker computers that expanding the galaxy from 480x480 would be brutal. I need to optimize my graphics code before I can consider this.

You really should optimize the Code for a propper running onto the Pandora. I usualy had good playable FPS onto my 1,1GHz Machine until I reached the Center of the Galaxy. My 9+ macho poser Radar displayed a incredible huge ammount of Alien Planets and Artifacts nearby and my Framerate doped to nealy zero. ^_^ I wonder what eats all the performance? The "graphics" can't be the reason I think, maybe The transparent 360° Radar causes some heavy CPU load?
I hope this game will run at the Pandora with standard Clockrate. Star Control II also runs fine at the GP2X at 200MHz...OK, I know that SC2 doesn't has 40 Million Stars included. :lol:


I want to remember onto my Idea with additional Artifact types. They bring no Information but a wider spread of different selling values. And Each Alien Race could pay a good price for the "neutral" Artifacts...and these pieces could have aditional graphics different from the Main Artifacts... Only 3 Types of Objects per Alien Race are a little bit too less for my taste. ^_^

 

[TrevorBradley]

I actually found a bug:

If you start on an alien planet, and before you zoom in, then try to buy fuel (pressing the fuel up button a few times very quickly; it freezes solid.
I use the Windows XP version

(It was 12:25 am PST, I didn't see my name)
(I tried again (after multiple relogins), and was able to duplicate it at 12:30 am PST, I didn't see my name though.)

On another note, I got some (more) suggestions. They are good ones, so try to read it all.

1) In the beginning, you are slow, but not so very slow that it cripples you. However, it is a large galaxy, like 40 million stars, and I was thinking, maybe at level 10, its too fast. So what about cutting us back on the speed abit. Now I know what your thinking, but come on, 40 million stars. Why would you ever need to cross more than a small part of that in search of more stars to scan?

2) For the multiplayer (I think it might have been mentioned before) maybe you could give the 9 main sectors (all the way zoomed out) each their own winning artifact, then you have to find them 1 by 1, when you get a hint, its for the sector you are in when you ask for the hint. Now this is a pretty big addition, but if you make it say, "You cannot search here until you find your sectors artifact first" (aka: the sector you were in when you got the first clue) then you don't have to code 9 separate red-zones. So the multiplayer has 9, or even the first two depths, which makes 81 winning artifacts, before the game is finished. Keep in mind its a big galaxy anyway you look at it, so having 9 or even 81 artifacts isn't that many, especially when the server might eventually host as many as ten people at once. Plus, when you go to a new sector to search for another winning artifact, you get to stay fully upgraded.

I know its alot to read... and alot to take in... and alot to code... but maybe, just maybe, Its actually pure gold. Or maybe its all hogwash. lol, you decide.



Bug Report. That was identical to the bug that was first reported in the forums just after Release B came out, but I was never able to reproduce.... *test test test*... I can reproduce it and should be able to fix it for Release C. Thanks Monkey!!!

1) I concur absolutely. It fits in with my discussion above about slowing things down in the late game. You should need to refuel at least twice, if not more to cross the galaxy. This will be part of the game tuning I'll be looking into for a future release (perhaps C, but I'm wary of changing more than one thing at once)

2) I had actually considered multiple artifacts in the on paper prototype months ago, but these other artifacts were minor artifacts that would be super versions of some of the ugprades (super speed or radar, for instance. You would use your right or left buttons on the back of the pandora to toggle between different information for different artifacts. But the upgrades I had were powerful enough and I decided to drop this. However I am finding the "return to zero" a bit frustrating and it would be nifty to go hunting for several artifacts. I'll give multi-artifacts some serious thought... if it makes things more fun (instead of equal fun) I'll find a way to do it.

I don't mean to be a curmudgeon when it comes to adding new features. I'm just deathly aware of feature creep.. not only is it the death or major delay of any project, but circumstances around this game and my personal situation mean I have to focus hard on the critical features before worrying about extras. I'm actually amazed I've been able to work as much as I have on it.

Not to put too much detail, but my health is actually fairly bad at the moment. I'm not dying or anything, but I've been on disability for the past year and a half and this game has pretty much been written between the hours of midnight and 3am when the pain is so bad I couldn't sleep anyways and I need to head deep into that programmers zone where nothing around me (or in my case inside me) could distract me from an awesome puzzle like this one. (This is why I can occasionally be such a grump on the forums, my apologies if I've crossed your path in the past). The last month has been great, but my programming output from March to December of last year was practically zero, and for all I know I could be heading into another 9 month period where I can't code again. So deliberate, measured progress is my plan here.

Enough of that wishy washy stuff... lemme give you guys a bit of a teaser for Release C.

Those are the new cargo icons from Pat Ferguson. I'm really quite impressed with them. You should be able to catch the other new feature as well...

 

[fusion_power]

Very interesting Pic. You have a really impressive bunch of Money. I like the new Icons, I can imagine the entire GUI with these quality of Graphics. Are the Colours for each Race final? Chat feature is nice too, I hope there will be enough time to type and play. :rolleyes:

Oh, when I make suggestions, then it is not an order but only a way to give the developer Input. At the end, YOU decide, what you do with all the User-Input. It is a good way to prevent a project fom running out of Ideas. Maybe some of the suggestions lead to a Inspiration or another Idea that makes it into game?
My Idea of "neutral" artifacts just based onto the old RPG Addiction to find the best Items and make the most Money, especialy if you don't know what Item could be the next find. This always works and it's the reason why I still play Diablo 2.

 

[zear_]

I've been lurking on these boards for a longer time, but finally I decided to register just to post this comment

I've been a fan of Galactic Artifact since Release A and I guess it's time for me to share some ideas/remarks:
* Human colonies instead of alien races. I don't like the idea of alien creatures. I'm rather into the Elite series concept of human inhabited galaxy.
* Keeping the random generated player names. This feature is great and I like the anonymity it creates.
This way I can play the game without a feeling that someone already knows me as a good/bad player, or without feeling that I'm playing with someone, I have no chances competing with.
That would also prevent from spoiling the game's "atmosphere" with some stupid/vulgar players' names.

I would also like to share my strategy with you guys:
1) upgrade: radar 2, speed 2, cargo 2 (in random order, depending on which star systems do you visit first)
2) upgrade radar to max
3) search for $$$ and $$ artifacts on the bigger map using the maxed out radar
4) upgrade everything but cargo to max
5) gather information on artifact location and the final race

Also, upgrading the cargo to 3 in phase 5) might be useful, as you can keep each kind of artifact for the each race.

In the end I would like to thank the author for making such a great game, that sucked me in for many hours

PS. Sorry for my english

 

[Javacat]

I was just playing and had an odd problem that someone mentioned before. I went into the centre of the galaxy whilst it was red to do some shopping and when my ship got their I told it to go to one of the stars to sell some stuff and my ship started hoping between two stars on the screen, with my fuel going down. It eventually went to the star I wanted, but as you can see below my fuel had gone down to -9.53. My framerate more or less also died at the same time.

It was at about 16:15 and I'm on GMT.




Edit: it's just happened again. It's 16:25. This time my fuel went down to -52.40 before it finally went to the planet I told it to. My FPS had also dropped to about 7FPS according to the display.

edit 2: and again. I think it's only happening when I try to go to planets with Aliens on.

 

[TrevorBradley]

You really should optimize the Code for a propper running onto the Pandora. I usualy had good playable FPS onto my 1,1GHz Machine until I reached the Center of the Galaxy. My 9+ macho poser Radar displayed a incredible huge ammount of Alien Planets and Artifacts nearby and my Framerate doped to nealy zero. ^_^ I wonder what eats all the performance? The "graphics" can't be the reason I think, maybe The transparent 360° Radar causes some heavy CPU load?
I hope this game will run at the Pandora with standard Clockrate. Star Control II also runs fine at the GP2X at 200MHz...OK, I know that SC2 doesn't has 40 Million Stars included. :lol:

Yes, I should. I'm actually happy that people are getting decent fps most of the time on 1.1Ghz machines, it used to be much worse in Release A actually.

The graphics actually are a big problem, even though they're merely gfx primitives. There are 5000 pixel stars when zoomed out. 12,000 or so when zooming in towards the center. Radar is very slow, even on a faster machine "Mega radar" in the center of the galaxy is dreadfully slow. Both Radar and Information blit translucency over the existing star surface, and that could be quite slow for older machines. (But you're right, I don't quite intuitively grasp why it's so slow myself... maybe if I open the source someone will see an obvious flaw(s). More likely "Oh my Odin that's horrible, why did you do that THAT way?!?"

I do have much slower machines here for testing, including an 1.2Ghz Athlon and a 900Mhz Transmeta laptop (possibly will be slower than the Pandora as it has an ancient Radeon chipset for graphics, but I should be targeting for this... last I checked it was getting 0-1fps for Release A).

I've got a lot of optimization to do... fps optimization is likely a release all its own, I could easily spend weeks eeking out fps without adding any features. That's without even worrying about the floating point slowdowns and NEON I'll need to deal with once I have a Pandora in hand.

What I will do for now is reintroduce one of my cheat keys (F9) for the next release. It starts dumping the frame rate of various components of the graphics render process to stdout.txt... let's you know which bits are slower than others.

 

[TrevorBradley]

I was just playing and had an odd problem that someone mentioned before. I went into the centre of the galaxy whilst it was red to do some shopping and when my ship got their I told it to go to one of the stars to sell some stuff and my ship started hoping between two stars on the screen, with my fuel going down. It eventually went to the star I wanted, but as you can see below my fuel had gone down to -9.53. My framerate more or less also died at the same time.

Edit: it's just happened again. It's 16:25. This time my fuel went down to -52.40 before it finally went to the planet I told it to. My FPS had also dropped to about 7FPS according to the display.

edit 2: and again. I think it's only happening when I try to go to planets with Aliens on.

I think I've seen this once, and my wife has seen it a few times. Or at least she saw the ship approaching the planet from the wrong direction. It's new to me, I'd speculate it's new since Release A, but I'm not sure.

I don't *quite* have enough info to reproduce it, though looking at the sections of code where fuel drops should provide a clue (though traveling is the only thing that should lessen fuel)

It's unfair to ask you guys to play and test something like that, as it takes a while to get up to that stage. I think I'll release my pre-Release Alpha SVN for testing, with the cheats reenabled. It doesn't connect to the same server, and I'll possibly be restarting the alternate network server by hand like crazy, but this bug should be testable in single player mode. (Is anyone wanting to do testing on Linux or is everyone on Windows?)

I also might need Germans to test the new chat feature. I realized late last night that my keyboard buffer routine (using SDL_KEYDOWN events) might only work for English keyboards... I want to make sure that works correctly out of the box next week.

I've got two kids home today from school in a surprise teacher professional development day (one of whom is playing Fallout 3 on my Windows dev machine), and my wife is home sick from work, so I'm not sure how much coding I'll get done today...

EDIT: I had a look at the code that moves the ship, and I'm an idiot. I've put code in there to move the ship an extra distance if the frame_rate is lower (keeping ship speed consistent regardless of fps), but I didn't change the code that stops the ship at a certain radius from the destination star.... Your ship is overshooting the star over and over again because of this. The bug will show up on systems with low FPS and high speed upgrades.

I have this funny image in my head of a sleepy ship's captain overshooting the star. "Damn! I overshot it!" *thrusts in different direction* *falls asleep* "Damn! I overshot it again!".

I'll fix this for the next release.