Beta Galactic Artifact - Release B

[Wolfsclaw]

Out of pure lazyness, I didn't read all the posts above me, so please ignore me if this has been stated already : I have been playing this for about 2-3 hours now (mostly online) and it's ADDICTING as hell - awesome that a game with such simple graphics can get you addicted like that.
However, one thing that is deeply frustrating (at least for me ) is, when the server restarts because ONE player has found his artifact (btw, do all search the same one?) - last time i had most of my stuff on level 7-10, i was cruising through universe, then -boom- server restart. I ... don't really know what would be better; maybe the server should just leave a message to all users "user x has come in as first to find his artifact!" and the server should always reset after 2 hours maybe, and at the end there would be a highscore with the five (or so) fastest players to complete the game; to ensure each "winner" gets to play on the game, it (server) would just give him a second ship, starting from zero; eventually with good skill you might be able to join in the highscore twice! If you're fast enough that is... At least in my opinion that would be less depressing for the fellow players that weren't fast enough.

Another thing that has been mentioned enough is the chat feature... thumbs up! It's really what is most missing. But surely it will get implemented soon enough And maybe, just a feature suggestion, would it be possible for each player to use an avatar? Either one that is implemented in the game and can be chosen at the beginning or one that can be imported with .png files or such that have to have a standardized size... don't know though if your server would handle that. After all, it's not that important and just an idea. Another idea would be rare items on some planets that can be lifted up only... by 2 ships (or more)! That would mean people would have to cooperate and meet at a specific planet to lift the "huge" item up which then can be sold for lots of money to a civilization and the money would then be divided up between the players who helped it. Maybe, while on the route with the item to a civilized planet, one player could control the 2 ships (which would be one dot, actually) and the other one... don't know, point the radar at things Maybe not too realistic, but most probably fun (if one player just plays stupid, the other could just quit the transport and the item would thus be lost), esp. with a chat feature ("Move to the Industrialists! They pay good!" - "Nah i'm going there!") But maybe that's a bit too stupid for this serious game, i'm just doing mind games here

 

[TrevorBradley]

Considering the user base, internationalization makes perfect sense. I will endeavour to do this, if people are willing to do the translation! I can start extracting the text for Release C, but the option to choose a different language I'll have to work into the game options. I'll make it happen.

I have strong bias against English even though it's my native language. It isn't really a language, just a mongrel of all the best words of other languages put together. The original middle and old English is dreadful to try to read (worse than German! . I think there's a joke: "English takes other languages into a back alley and beats them up for loose vocabulary." I'm surprised my language sounds cool to any non-native speaker. I think I'll credit my wife for choosing such awesome artifact names

The game is *not* easy for beginners, and I'd recommend playing several single player games before jumping into the multiplayer. I wrote the manual (yes in English.. ) to try to help people get off the ground. I do think there needs to be some fine tuning in the early game so that things go faster. At the moment I'm seeing three distinct phases of the game: Upgrading your ship, the "Shopping run" to get the very best artifacts, and then the final search. The first phase is taking way to long, and the last phase is way too short.

Fuel and drive upgrades are critical to getting to the other side of the galaxy. At the moment it really is best to ignore the quest until you ship is nearly or completely upgraded. There should also be a multiplayer game mode ("easy mode") where the ships are max upgraded from the start.

Automapping has been suggested several times. I'm leaning toward it now, but implementation may not be easy. I'll add it on my to do list.

Sector scrolling can be done right now, either CTRL + Num Keypad or click drag with the mouse. Hopefully you've not been zooming in/out... that would drive me mad too.. I believe that's what you were referring to.


Leaving the black "unmarked" area of space *can* give you new information (though it's likely you'll know it already), but finding new information inside the black space is more valuable. The best use of leaving the black area to venture into the red area is to go on an artifact "shopping run" to get valuable artifacts to use closer to the artifact.

You will get the same information from the same alien star with the same artifact. Once you're down to the last 20 sectors or so, the game gets trickier and you usually have to hunt manually.

I did consider "Bookmarks" for recently visited aliens, but usually you want to move forward into the unknown, not backward into the known. Though having some place to sell a recently found artifact might be helpful. F1, F2, F3 for most recently visited Ancient, Industrialist, Futurist, much like hitting the home key?

A visible, travelling ship is on my to-do list.

By the time you could afford a "drone ship" to collect artifacts, you wouldn't need it anymore. As I said in the manual and several times here, the main commodity of the game is information and there comes a point after which cash doesn't mean anything anymore.

I'm glad you're enjoying the game, even if it is a bit tricky. Please keep sending in ideas!

 

[GuSec]

SO NICE! This game can really turn into something, so hang in there developing art!
I would love to chose my own nick in the game though, and chat a little winning-speech with those slow loosers in between games...

 

[TrevorBradley]

OK guys, I need to get on with the rest of my day... I'll keep an eye on the server to see if it crashes again (if it does, send me an email on the feedback form on the website). If it does, I'm going to recompile it with debug code on, and run it through gdb. I'm suspecting it's getting stuck in an infinite loop somewhere, perhaps in choosing a captain name.. gdb will tell me where it is. My coder spidey sense wants to blame C++ Maps (hashtables), but I'm not certain.

 

[Klaus]

Hey Trevor, kudos for developing a game for the Pandora, that, according to the responses, seems to be really good. Unfortunately I was not able to test it (yet) as Arch Linux does not seem to deliver svgalib (could that really be?!?), and your game dynamically links against it. I'll try to build svgalib from sources and test it later. It looks really interesting!

On a different topic, you don't seem to follow the licenses of the libraries you use. SDL (and all the SDL extensions, I guess) are under LGPL. I don't know the licenses for the other libraries from the top of my head, but I guess most are LGPL, or BSD-like like zLib.
As you statically link against SDL, you program has to released either under the LGPL or the GPL. Even if you decide against releasing your sources and only provide dynamically linked binaries, which is fine, it's your work, you'd still have to provide the LGPL for the libraries you include in your download. And probably some other libraries at least require credit.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to be picky, but I think it's best to get the stupid legal stuff out of the way early on. It only takes one disgruntled guy to cause a lot of trouble, which could easily be avoided.

Now let's see if I could get svgalib to compile and play our game...

 

[TrevorBradley]

Hey Trevor, kudos for developing a game for the Pandora, that, according to the responses, seems to be really good. Unfortunately I was not able to test it (yet) as Arch Linux does not seem to deliver svgalib (could that really be?!?), and your game dynamically links against it. I'll try to build svgalib from sources and test it later. It looks really interesting!

On a different topic, you don't seem to follow the licenses of the libraries you use. SDL (and all the SDL extensions, I guess) are under LGPL. I don't know the licenses for the other libraries from the top of my head, but I guess most are LGPL, or BSD-like like zLib.
As you statically link against SDL, you program has to released either under the LGPL or the GPL. Even if you decide against releasing your sources and only provide dynamically linked binaries, which is fine, it's your work, you'd still have to provide the LGPL for the libraries you include in your download. And probably some other libraries at least require credit.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to be picky, but I think it's best to get the stupid legal stuff out of the way early on. It only takes one disgruntled guy to cause a lot of trouble, which could easily be avoided.

Now let's see if I could get svgalib to compile and play our game...

Two weeks ago I was dealing with users who were having issues getting sdl_gfx to compile, so I decided to go
the static route. I did in fact credit SDL, SDL_gfx, SpriG, SDL_ttf, SDL_mixer, SDL_image (um, I think that's all of them) in my included game manual.

I have no fundamental issue with releasing an open source game under the GPL, but I have some technical issues with releasing this particular game under the GPL or another open source variant.

1) I have some concerns how the sound licensed from soundsnap would work in a GPL release (if someone can point me to a list of sound effects licensed under creative commons, please do!)

2) The aforementioned issues with users unable to play the game on linux because of missing or uncompiled libraries. It would be helpful to know how to help them out without lumping in the SDL.

3) This is the big one: At present, anyone who had a copy of the game source would be able to cheat and cheat badly. The location of the artifact is transmitted to the computer before each game, and I have my own cheat codes (taken out of this release) that show the location of the final artifact. I could more than easily change the source with two lines of code and trounce everyone playing the game without looking at my server logs.

The solution to #3 is to put more burden on the server, something I was going to do anyways. Rather than transmit the position of the final artifact at the start of the game, the client would need to query the server and ask for more information. If it were only that, it might be OK, but it gets worse and worse as it goes along.

Really, that's no excuse. I was planning on sending more complex game information anyways with a later revision. But it is a fundamental issue with an open source multiplayer games I can't wrap my head around. If something like Battlefield 2 were released as open source, what would prevent you from modifying the game to cheat? (I know people do this anyways)

Should I pull my binaries now until I get this sorted out? I really don't want to violate the GPL. I could really use some advice and packaging help making sure the game is above board.

I now also have strong concerns about the "repackaged" german version I read about earlier today at today.openpandora.org.

Good luck on getting svgalib working on arch!

 

[TrevorBradley]

graphics.... graphics.... graphics... what kind of graphics do you need?

I'll have to get the people who want to do graphics co-ordinated. I already got a nice email from Pat Ferguson (who works with Ruckage on all of his GP2X games), and sent him a bunch of info. It would be nice if that panned out.

In brief, I'm looking for graphics for:

Cargo Items
Cargo Hold
Ship Cursor
Travelling Ship
Game Cursor
Better iconography for ship radar
Talking Alien Animation
Finding Artifact Animation
Better Star Graphicsw
Better Galaxy background

I'd actually love to challenge someone to come up with a new Galaxy Background. It's the 4320x4320 graphic that is sliced up to make the galaxy something prettier that just a bunch of stars. I'm quite impressed with how it turned out (never could have done it right without my graphics tablet), but I know it could be done more professionally. Look for the large jpg files in the Sheets directory to piece out how it was put together.

Basically I'm trying to make this without the stars

If anyone is keen to take that on, I'll pass on a photoshop psd file, or the stars as a png layer to draw underneath. (I've just confused everyone who has never used Photoshop or GIMP...

 

[bencoder]

Hi trevor, thanks for your work. Similar to klaus i'm getting a vgalib problem, the old version worked fine (with the export fix).
This is the error:

./GalacticArtifact0234: error while loading shared libraries: libvga.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

that's on Ubuntu 8.10

 

[TrevorBradley]

I came up with some ship cursors in my previous post, but I don't have an image hoster. I could email them to you? I can get them even more refined and way more just give the word.

Edit: That Milkyway picture do you just want that without stars?

Note that the ship cursors would take a while to implement. Presently they're done as 20x20px SDL graphics primivites. If it's the cursor I'd need to animate it. If it were a ship I'd need to render it travelling at the correct angle, and I believe having a large sheet of sprites pre-rendered at fixed angles would be better than using rotozoom.

Look for Galaxy4320.jpg in Sheets... you'll get exactly what I'm thinking of. I have a PSD with 4320 and a layers of stars overtop. The stars *I* render, the galaxy graphic goes underneath it.

The smaller images aren't just scaled, the brightness is different as the stars themselves become brighter, but I can work with that.

I believe my galaxy isn't quite blue enough, though why the galaxy appears white-blue at a distance puzzles me. Most of the light from the galaxy comes from smaller white-yellow-orange stars. (which is why the galaxy looks like it's glowing rather than having individual stars shining through). But having the colours closer to that of other barred spirals in the sky would be good.

Send me a message on the website's feedback page, I'll send you an email address, and get you a like to that psd file.

Hi trevor, thanks for your work. Similar to klaus i'm getting a vgalib problem, the old version worked fine (with the export fix).
This is the error:

./GalacticArtifact0234: error while loading shared libraries: libvga.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

that's on Ubuntu 8.10

That's strange... I ran it on my Asus EEE running Ubuntu EEE 8.04 and didn't have any issues... but I did load SDL with Synaptic. That might be a fast solution.

My linux dev machine/server is Slackware. I'm used to rolling *everything* by hand... Looking forward to ridding myself of dependancy hell later this year and transition to Ubuntu after 13 years of Slackware.

I'm really uncertain about how to package binaries now with the GPL concern.

 

[bencoder]

hmm well I dev with sdl so I definitely have all the sdl libs.

I figured the gpl issues wouldn't matter so much once an actual pandora exists and you can compile against the pandora libs? or are you planning on this being fully cross platform even when the pandora is done?

 

[TrevorBradley]

hmm well I dev with sdl so I definitely have all the sdl libs.

I figured the gpl issues wouldn't matter so much once an actual pandora exists and you can compile against the pandora libs? or are you planning on this being fully cross platform even when the pandora is done?

That game will be released for Windows and Linux (and OSX, if I can find someone to help me compile it). It will be released for Pandora if I can port it. I still have serious concerns about the Pandora's capability, but I think there's a lot more efficiency to squeeze out of my code. I'll need a Pandora first (and I'm in the last 1000 pre-orders, so it may be a while), and I may have to spend a while learning NEON and learning about the floating point math of the Pandora.

 

[TrevorBradley]

I came up with some ship cursors in my previous post, but I don't have an image hoster. I could email them to you? I can get them even more refined and way more just give the word.

Edit: That Milkyway picture do you just want that without stars?

[attachmentid=351]

keaft, that's really impressive. I'm still going to need to colour code the ships. *And* pre-rotate them in photoshop. And likely have frames to animate that engine effect.

Hmm, maybe I should rotate a tiny image around a star when not travelling, and have a larger image while moving?

Hold off for a bit as I still don't actually have ship icons that are loaded from an image base, that's easily a week away. Also, the size of the icons is critical, as the pandora's screen is tiny and the dpi is huge... tiny icons don't scale well so we need to get the sizes just right.

 

[jook2oh]

Ok. A few things.

1: The frame-rate drops to one third as high when my whole screen is red. Could you make a "large map red-zone toggle" key or something like that?

2: Could only the person who got the artifact be reset, and everyone else just gets the artifact location re-randomized?

3: Can there be an "Online Scoreboard" option in the menu?

I'm downloading the new beta and will test it as soon as posible (with only a 56K Modem at home it is not fun to download :rolleyes: )

Oh yeah, most of the download size is the mp3s. Maybe a "No Music" version, or replace the mp3s with midi files.

 

[TrevorBradley]

If you'll notice on the top middle of each of the ships there is a space were i left just for the purpose of coloring them. I'll try to rotate them. You want them 90 degrees, 45 degrees, or what? But for now It's sleepy time.

I'm not sure yet. What I should try to do is replace my existing drawn cursors with bitted graphics, and determine from there what I need. I'm not trying to diminish your enthusiasm, but hold off a week at least while I work out the details...

I also really need some kind of a break between Release B and the next push of development. I am not in the best of health and while this has all been very exciting, it's also been rather exhausting...

 

[TrevorBradley]

1: The frame-rate drops to one third as high when my whole screen is red. Could you make a "large map red-zone toggle" key or something like that?

That is a bit odd. What are the specs of the machine you're running it on?

When I was simply drawing layer upon layer I had some bad FPS lag with a lot of bits of information. I've done *extensive* amounts of mathematical programming to ensure that as much of that information as possible is discarded (Remember my voice in release A "This information is redundant", "This information superceedes old information". And if the screen is all red it should be really really fast, skipping any drawing whatsoever.

I'm assuming it would be too much to describe or draw the information you'd gathered. Do you get the slowdowns even in a remote region, say after using an expensive futurist artifact in the far corner of the map?

2: Could only the person who got the artifact be reset, and everyone else just gets the artifact location re-randomized?

3: Can there be an "Online Scoreboard" option in the menu?

Oh yeah, most of the download size is the mp3s. Maybe a "No Music" version, or replace the mp3s with midi files.



2: I figured there weren't going to be enough players to pull this off. What does the winner do while everyone else finishes? Once that person wins it's going to be obvious where the artifact is (assuming everyone's computer is upgraded).

My solution to this is to actually attempt to match players of similar skill, so that people aren't totally outclassed (as is common in many RTS games.. Starcraft frequently annoyed me because I was so frequently outclassed, and I stopped playing)

3: Scoreboard is coming! Release C or beyond, not sure which yet.

Many games like this separate their music packs from the game itself. That's quite possible here. I have to admit I'm a bit biased. We've had high speed internet for 12 years on this part of the planet, the idea of a 33MB download being an issue sounds a bit 20th century to me. (particularly when people are talking about getting 16 and 32GB cards for their Pandora). I do apologize if my upstream speed isn't what it should be though.. I'll have to check demand... 75 downloads in a day.. that's about 2.4 gigs upstream.. that might tax things a bit. I'll have to host it elsewhere if demand picks up.

The final game music itself is a bit up in the air, and I've heard no opinions on the new music for this release whatsoever (except for "Heaven Gate" that looped in the first release). It's obviously not objectionable, and I like it, I'm just not sure if anyone can find better. I'm not sure midi is up to the mood I'm looking for (and, for instance, I'm so used to the new ur-quan masters remix music that the old MOD files, as awesome as they are are starting to sound a bit dated.

If anyone's up for the task, take a hunt around soundclick.com... they've got some halfway decent creative commons music available. Perhaps someone else can find better (and I can mix it to a smaller size). I had considered using the orbit oggs from the UQM remix packs, but thought that would reinforce stereotypes about the game that are best left buried.

 

[jook2oh]

Graphic idea for: Finding Artifact Animation
Some kind of cool bluish grid on a sphere and a few "dots" (search parties) that each have a scan field. The last artifact would simply be a longer more detailed one (more search parties and more complex grid).
(Crude sketch, just to get the idea across)



Maybe make where the search parties go to scan and the starting place of the scans random. Also if the whole globe was rotating, or at an angle and rotating. Maybe ill post what that would look like later...

What are the specs of the machine you're running it on?

Umm, yeah... not good. 384MB ram, 1.4GHZ P4, Windows XP, 4200Ti 64mb ram.
I get around 33 FPS normally, but in the red zone 13 something.

 

[kidrdbz]

Okay, so my brother and I really enjoy your game, but we ran into a problem...

After about an hour my brother had the location of the artifact narrowed down to the bottom left corner. He kept narrowing it down, until it gave him an area that had no stars... He continued to narrow it down, until the entire map was eliminated from possibly having the artifact...

He was playing a local game using the Windows version.

 

[dentrado]

[...]

I have no fundamental issue with releasing an open source game under the GPL, but I have some technical issues with releasing this particular game under the GPL or another open source variant.

[...]

3) This is the big one: At present, anyone who had a copy of the game source would be able to cheat and cheat badly. The location of the artifact is transmitted to the computer before each game, and I have my own cheat codes (taken out of this release) that show the location of the final artifact. I could more than easily change the source with two lines of code and trounce everyone playing the game without looking at my server logs.

[...]

Wouldn't it be possible to use signed binaries, so that the server checks the binary and only the official signed binaries can log in to the server?

 

[dentrado]

Is there no way to continue the game after going to the menu? (pressing exit) I see only start local game, no continue. then i clicked (i don't remember on what) and then the game crashed, I was just about to find the artifact.

 

[fusion_power]

So, after some practise I've managed to find the artifact in 28 Minutes, my best so far. (It was near the center of the Galaxy so it was not to hard)
I think I can handle the controls better now. Numpad is very useful. The Pandora has enough Pads and buttons to handle the game also very well I think.
The gigantic .jpg file of the Galaxy could be a problem for the Pandora maybe. I don't know it tiling the Image would solve this problem.
I also suggest to use a "rule of 8" method for all game graphics. The Artifact cargo Icons are 30x something, values like 32x32 or 32x128 or 32x96 are far better to handle. (suggested from yuan works )
The game is already fun but more types of artifacts and more different prices would be very cool, maybe adding some special rare artifacts that bring always much money independent of which alien race you sell it?
And when each Alien Race has their unique Colour, the specific artifacts could get different graphics. As long the colour of the artifact shows the right Alien race. (Maybe just a coloured frame around individual artifact graphics?) That's just cosmetic I know but it could be look nice.
The name of the main price could be be displayed somewhere (optional) And with the big super duper Radar this artifact could be marked when you in range, so you save time in areas with the price and many other artifacts around. Useful if the price is in the galactic centre and the final small sector is overfilled with planets and artifacts

Question: are the Stars (and the places of the normal artifacts ) always random generated or do they always hacve fix positions? And do they always have a full unique name? In Star Control the Planets are usualy named by the Star they surrounding "Alpha-Persei 8" or so. Helps a little bit with the orientation in this game but maybe if doesn't matter for your game.

Is it possible to release small update files? I only have a 56K modem and without the Music or the Linux binary, the game would be small enough to download it by myself.

EDIT: I haven't tested Multiplayer yet. All Players are searching for the same main artifact right? Do they start in the (nearly) same distance from the Price? So everyone has to travel the same way to the price (in theory)? Or is it possible that some players are very close to the artifact at the start?