m.a@stars wrote on Sun, 04 February 2007 13:58

Funny you should mention that, as I've been building something very much like this for the past few months, including "normal" as well as "globular" and "spiral" galaxies. I'm outputting just the XY file and one "main" Planet Report (both plaintext for easy interfacing) and am working on adding the initial ships and a "clumping" generator.

Are you going to publish that code anywhere? My current code for generating universes is as boring as it could possibly be. having different options for universe styles would be pretty neat.

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Altruist wrote on Sun, 04 February 2007 12:22

Very good question! Especially when planning to make a clone/freestar version.

That's why I was curious. I'm wondering why everyone else still plays this game. I haven't really been able to get into the more advanced 4X games I've tried like I could get into Stars! I just figured I was a luddite.

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I think I've discovered Stars in 1998/99. The mix of a playable demo-version, tutorial, playing single-player vs AIs, hotseat vs friends, pbem via the net I thought and still think of as a great variety and approach to gaming. Additionally this very small game comes with the full ability to host games. That Stars can be played with the slowest, smallest, oldest computers I liked a lot, too.

The PBEM approach is something I've been struggling with. My current Stars! clone implementation is tied pretty heavily to a full time internet connection. I don't think this is a lot to ask given the pervasiveness of computers these days, but I've tried hard to resist the temptation of forcing clients to "make the moves on the server". I'm trying to keep it so you can play a turn for 10 minutes in the morning, 20 minutes at lunch, 30 minutes before bed and finally submit your turn to the server. There are some things that would be easier to do if the player were constantly talking to the server to organize their moves, but I think it would detract from the mindset of Stars!, i.e. nothing happens until you click submit.

On that note, I've been toying with the idea of 'shelfing' your turns. This would allow you to play your turn on one computer, shelf your turn to the server (not submit, just store it). Later in the day if you were on another computer with CraigStars!, you could connect to the server, receive your shelfed turn and continue playing, then reshelf it or submit it. For those nefarious individuals who sneak a game in at work every once in a while, this would be great (not that I am one of those people).

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b) Three major parts of the game * race design * development * tactical warfare Each of this parts can be split into several sub-areas and allow astonishing different approaches.

Nicely summarized.

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c) no unique 'best' way to play or to win This is another fundamental concept of Stars on which pretty much everything of the game is based and what makes it so replayable. There is no best race design. Apart from the fact that every race design needs to be customized for the specidic game settings, even then there is at least 1 counter to every great race design and that counter can be countered again. The same applies to ship designs.

This will be the hardest part to maintain I think. I'm hoping enough of the mechanics of the game have been exposed to make it easy to duplicate. The Freestars developers are amazing at staying consistent, so their code is a treasure trove of algorithms.

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e) variety contra limitations 16 ship designs, 10 base designs. This allows quite some variety. at the same time it's a limitation everybody has to take into account. And I believe this a great approach and compromise to variety and limitations. One of the side-benefits is that without this limitations micro-management could become unbearable. Another side-effect is that it adds another tact & strat feature on how to use those precious slots. That's what I call an innovative usage of memory-limitations.

This is an interesting point. My Stars! clone as well as Ken's have no inherent limitations on ship designs or base designs or fleet numbers or pretty much anything. The only limit is your system memory. (Which since they are written in C# is probably a fair limit, heh heh). I keep thinking I need to add in a configurable limit to this stuff, but it goes against my nature as a developer. I'll chock this up on the ol' mental todo list.

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Conclusion: It's year 2007 now. But I don't know of another game which has implemented the above features as well as Stars. There surely are some problems, especially with micro-management in big games but the biggest problem is probably that the game lost its Jeffs. And the idea to create an open-source Stars is important. I would like the first aim to be an identical version to the original Stars. From on there, options and changes could be implemented in a way that we always have one conservative main Stars-version being the consensus of the player community with several sub- and side-versions for specialized wishes and game-scenarios.

Agreed. Making the game 'modable' isn't quite as easy as I would like, and it adds a lot of complexity around areas where you could just hard code things. Still, I've been trying to make everything as configurable as possible, without getting into scripting and such. For example, you can configure the tech data values and numbers, but the effects certain techs make are still in code (a torpedo is a torpedo, a jammer jams torpedos, etc).

If the source is published though, anyone can go in and modify it after it's been released.

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sirgwain wrote on Mon, 05 February 2007 17:42

Are you going to publish that code anywhere? My current code for generating universes is as boring as it could possibly be.

Boring my code is not, most assuredly. Nor quite readable yet. The parts that aren't pure brute-force are experimental enough that I sometimes wonder why I managed to get them working so easily.

But yeah, my aim is to publish it, preferably soon, but I need to scrounge a few more hours (scattered among who knows how many days) to spit & polish. In some places even the comments need comments.

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So I guess a moderator decided to move this to the Freestars forum . . . I was hoping that by having information on it in two places would help bring more people in that might want to work on the project. I think it would actually be better if we had this in The Bar . . .

ken-reed: I ended up downloading Visual Web Developer Express Edition--at least, that's what it calls it in-program. It originally said it's Visual Studio Express, so I'm really hoping this means I downloaded the right thing. It was 370 mb to download, didn't take as long as I thought, but the installation took over two hours

Anyway, I had already downloaded the Nova files last week, so I opened up your Nova .Net.sln file. Immediately it presented me with about 10 errors . . . I just clicked through them, and now it looks like it's loaded . . . kind of. Over on the right it says ComponentEditor [unavailable], ControlLibrary [unavailable], Nova Common [unavailable], etc, and when I open each of them it shows "The project file cannot be loaded."

Basically, I'm pretty confused.

But, some good news:
I've created some text for diplomacy, all put into Word files. It should make diplomatic dealings much easier. Just show me where/how to input the text . . .

And I've also had a lot more thoughts about how to improve micromanagement. Again, I'd need to figure out how to do that too . . .

[Updated on: Mon, 05 February 2007 17:21]

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Iconian wrote on Mon, 05 February 2007 17:19

ken-reed: I ended up downloading Visual Web Developer Express Edition--at least, that's what it calls it in-program. It originally said it's Visual Studio Express, so I'm really hoping this means I downloaded the right thing. It was 370 mb to download, didn't take as long as I thought, but the installation took over two hours Anyway, I had already downloaded the Nova files last week, so I opened up your Nova .Net.sln file. Immediately it presented me with about 10 errors . . . I just clicked through them, and now it looks like it's loaded . . . kind of. Over on the right it says ComponentEditor [unavailable], ControlLibrary [unavailable], Nova Common [unavailable], etc, and when I open each of them it shows "The project file cannot be loaded." Basically, I'm pretty confused.

I'm not Ken, but I can answer this for you. You need to get Visual C# 2005 Express, not the web developer edition. You can download and install it from here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/visualcsharp/downl oad/

The reason it seemed to work for you is because it was loading the solution just fine, but it didn't know how to load the project files (ComponentEditor, ControlLibrary, etc), so they were unavailable.

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[Updated on: Mon, 05 February 2007 19:24]

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Iconian wrote on Tue, 06 February 2007 01:19

So, should I just get rid of the web developer edition, or is there a good reason to keep it?

It seems to share a whole lot of things with the rest of the suite, so at least the install times get significantly shortened, and perhaps the downloads too.

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[Updated on: Tue, 06 February 2007 04:20]

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I picked the MS tools because, well, basically they are free (a stupid comment but bear with me) I did not want anyone to have to spend money to work on Nova. This is "fun" ... not work.

Yes, you can go the the MS website and "download". I just found it was easier to pop around to my local shop and buy a magazine that had it on the CD that was stuck on the front cover.

Oh well. Having said that, if you want to play with Nova you will need Visual Studio C# Express as a minimum (it also works fine with the professional Visual Studio). If you want to read the documentation you will also need Visual Studio Express Web as well (I recommend it ... if you cannot read the blurb you will be stuck). They are all free ... you don't have to pay a penny (or should that be a cent?)

Also, I'm here. If you have problems just send me an e-mail (I'm "on the move" at the moment so it might be a day or two before I can reply).

Ken

I'm here to help. Just ask

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Nova is still in the queue at SourceForge waiting to be "processed".

SourceForge says it's been there for 3 days but it seems much longer than that to me

Oh well, work is getting a bit less stressful so I'll start working on Nova again until SourceForge makes the project available. See the "to do" list on my homepage if you are interested on what I'm doing next:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/ken-reed/Ken/ToDo.htm

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ken-reed wrote on Tue, 06 February 2007 20:08

See the "to do" list on my homepage if you are interested on what I'm doing next: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/ken-reed/Ken/ToDo.htm

Hm. A rather long and interesting list.

But you'll need to scratch the idea about zero-fuel fleets being denied Waypoints. Any engine can travel at Warp1 using no fuel and even refueling itself, plus Ramscoops can travel fairly fast using no fuel and refueling themselves too.

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But you'll need to scratch the idea about zero-fuel fleets being denied Waypoints.

I'm not convinced It's time for Nova to diverge from Stars! If you have no fuel then you are not going anywhere. You can have this argument with your car - I don't need to be involved. If you can figure out how to keep your car going at even 1 mph when it's tank is empty let me know

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Stars! engines did evolve into what they are now, so you may unknowingly take a step back there. Free of charge, simple to scoop and weightless fuel was added later. That was made in order to improve its playability.

In early versions of Stars! the fuel was like 4th mineral.

Anyway ... who thinks like "cool **NEW** groundbreaking FEATURE: fleets without fuel get stuck"?

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Well, I am on the train to work today so, back to Nova.

I would like SourceForge to be faster ... I want to move on.

So much to learn ... so little time.

Ken

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ken-reed wrote on Tue, 06 February 2007 21:18

If you can figure out how to keep your car going at even 1 mph when it's tank is empty let me know

I hear that for some cars, especially volkswagon bugs, you can always get out and push. Maybe that would work for Stars!

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[Updated on: Wed, 07 February 2007 00:56]

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Iconian wrote on Wed, 07 February 2007 06:54

if a starship runs out of fuel, it shouldn't be able to move.

Newton's 1st Law of Motion disagrees with you. IOW: spaceships have Inertia.

But that's not the main point: A Warp Engine w/out fuel cannot fly Faster Than Light, but can still fly at the Speed of Light, IOW, 1ly per year.

Thirdly, if you spent a whole year traveling at Warp1, you have plenty of time to collect a few micrograms of fuel, even if your engine is not a Ramscoop.

Last but not least, if your race cannot cope with that kind of situation, it must by definition be unable to be called a "Spacefaring Species" and thus cannot be eligible to actually play Stars.

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Iconian wrote on Wed, 07 February 2007 06:54

It'd be cool if players could design not only the ship but also the hull the components go on--and really cool to go a step further and let players design the components themselves, based on subcomponents (wouldn't want to go much farther than that though). Hulls could also be much larger on the whole, with a small ship taking say 20 different components . . . it could work, you'd just need to program it all correctly . . .

It would indeed be nice, provided it could be done in some simple & relatively straightforward way, with econ/tech restrictions, sanity checks (some way to tell if the final design makes sense) and recipes for the more "standard" items / hulls...

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ken-reed wrote on Wed, 07 February 2007 03:18

It's time for Nova to diverge from Stars!

Your call, of course, but I'm not interested in "improvements" until we have the reasonably close clone 1st.

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If you have no fuel then you are not going anywhere. You can have this argument with your car - I don't need to be involved. If you can figure out how to keep your car going at even 1 mph when it's tank is empty let me know

1) Downslope. Or, in Sci-Fi terms: Gravity assist.

2) Over a flat terrain, with a XXV century engine, you bet "friction" is not going to be a concern. So: a handkerchief + some wind do the trick. Or, in Sci-Fi terms: Solar Sail.

3) My other car is a Millennium Falcon too. It eats Hydrogen, the single most abundant element in the Universe. Not damn likely I'm gonna get stuck somewhere w/out at least some fuel within reach.

4) This is Stars! not Detroit.

[Updated on: Wed, 07 February 2007 06:03]

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Iconian wrote on Wed, 07 February 2007 06:54

what I'd suggest is the creation of a component like a Space Dust Converter: it simply converts space dust into fuel, like the ramscoop engines. You can put it onto any ship you like, and it will convert a small amount of space dust around it into fuel.

Sounds interesting. Decoupling the fuel-gathering functions of normal Engines, kind of like a new twist on the Cheap Engines LRT. I wonder how would such a thing need to be balanced, though.

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You could make it so it only operates while the ship is stopped though.

That would clash with *all* the other fuel-generators in the Stars! universe, which always operate with the ship in motion (Ramscoops, W1 fuel-less travel) or regardless of motion (Fuel Xports, AM Generators)

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You could have different levels of propulsion give you converters of different efficiencies, too.

Much like the techtree for Ramscoops, but for normal Engines, too?

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These wouldn't be incredibly expensive, but enough so that those players who choose NOT to use such converters would save a bit of resources/minerals, though if their ships do run out of fuel they might have a big problem on their hands.

Indeed, Cheap Engines MK2.

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I'm not convinced Smile It's time for Nova to diverge from Stars! If you have no fuel then you are not going anywhere. You can have this argument with your car - I don't need to be involved. If you can figure out how to keep your car going at even 1 mph when it's tank is empty let me know Smile

sorry but it's funny.
Stars! Engines collect space dust when they travel and refuel themselves at free speed.

but I guess not all people are sci-fi savy to not looka at it as fantasy thing.

basically who would have imagined us to have flip phones back in times of horse transportations.

I guess an anti-matter engines like seen in Wingcommander capital ships and Dragoon fighter would not be soemthing impossible to realize. There is just a space "dust" collectors on front side of the ship and and engines behind.

Also the possible variations of propulsion systems are umm well.... I ams sure one can use gravity fields to drive around their ship.
Also would not be improbable to have a ship with no recognisable engines at all but would use the space rays to travel at speeds in excess of light speed without needing any fuel.

[Updated on: Wed, 07 February 2007 09:26]

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Neo the White wrote on Wed, 07 February 2007 15:31

I'd like to see some space continuum improvements to Stars! Where are black holes, novas, white dwarves, nebulas?

You mean eye-candy of rather objects with definite effects, much like wormholes?

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and planetary systems, with moons and more than one colonisable planets around the sun.

Your Colonial Governors don't (currently) have the Administrative Capacity to keep independent records of the many different planetary bodies orbiting each star of your sprawling Imperium.

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In other words, that's below the level of abstraction. Your individual systems could be one planet or 20, it doesn't have any affect to the game.

As for putting naturally/randomly occuring objects in, like black holes and asteroid fields and nebulae and non-planet stars.... maybe.

[Updated on: Wed, 07 February 2007 10:57]

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