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Home » Stars! Clones, Extensions, Modding » FreeStars » Don't Let the Stars Fade Away
Re: Don't Let the Stars Fade Away Mon, 05 February 2007 12:10 Go to previous messageGo to previous message
sirgwain is currently offline sirgwain

 
Senior Chief Petty Officer

Messages: 86
Registered: March 2004
Location: Tucson
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). Smile

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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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