First of all, it crashes ever 2 minutes. Apparently relates to the music checkbox. I stopped using it and had it playing in the background by some music program, no biggy.

But from the video I saw, the Mac version has more options, and makes more… sense.

Is this what I'm supposed to see?

Also, resizing the window messes up the chat and view colonies buttons.

Anyway, all I (barely) manage to do is move the camera and start colonies. They don't appear in the show colonies button. I have no idea how to make a ship. Also I have to look at one planet from really really close just to have a chance to right-click it and start a colony. It's almost always a single pixel.

Basically, I doubt you worked on the Windows version seriously.

Now if only all those options did stuff! It is certainly not done, but it is beyond a simple GUI mock up (the undo menu for example does work, and so does redo). The image displayed is generated (in less than a second) by the functions and layers listed, but you can't really edit them to a reasonable extent yet.

Thanks for reading. Come back when we have some real news. There will be interesting news in not too long. Maybe in a few weeks, maybe less.

For now, some random thoughts to keep interest in the project:
It would be possible to have layers in the planet data that reflect mood thus effecting the music.
We can have binary (and more) star systems with planets in both types or orbits (around the stars and around the barycenter (center of mass of the stars)). The current orbit system can handle this just fine, but some changes elsewhere would be needed. Don't go looking for a 2 star 2 moon eclipse screen shot tho, its very unlikely!
The economy will have shipping prices, tariffs, embargoes and such. Thus all the resources will have varied prices in different locations.
Weather and seasons on a planet can effect combat stats, resource production, and other things. For example, food could get expensive during drought or harsh winters, mining can become expensive in wet seasons, population growth can slow or even reverse when conditions suck. Very small forces can have a bonus vs. Large armies in the dark (night or arctic circle in the winter, maybe even when its really cloudy) for stealth reasons.
The hierarchical AI will allow ships to act on their own and in group effectively at the same time, as well as group of groups etc. The level of individualism for ships and groups for various factors will be player set along with priorities for ships and groups.
The blind growing tech tree will allow open the possibility of discovering a never before seen technology. Once discovered, it could be kept secret, but using it in the presence of others makes them more likely to discover it.
Using technologies a lot can increase their bonuses to things that use them.
Player will be able to set up extensive treaties, as well as actions triggered by their violations and other triggers.
With the cost of controlling planets increasing with the size of your nation, the quality of planets will be more important than their quantity. The higher quality planets will reside closer to the center of the galaxy usually. Thus, a player can ether engage in heavy PVP there, or spend more time exploring the rest of the galaxy to find valuable resource rich planets.

Hey there. I'm very interested in your project. I am a writer/designer
and have written for one semi sci-fi themed MMO and a full sci-fi MMO.
One of which I still have my writings saved.

I program little to none, but seeing as your are using REALbasic it
doesn't look to different than BLITZbasic that I have piddled with.
Again I have tinkered in 3ds max but nothing really came of it, but I
know the basic interface and functions.

About a month ago I started designing my own game that is very similar
to this and would like to merge some ideas or if anything just put them
out there. My version was most likely going to be done in BLITZ with a
2D gui that had no combat; I was trying to go for a EVE online feel with
nothing but heavy economy and strategy.

Anyway before I start to ramble I would love to be considered for joining.
-Billy

As you probably know, running a server takes money. As you also probably know, we have spent a lot of time on FG and will continue to do so. Because of this, eventually Fragmented Galaxy will need to generate some income. I posting this here on the public forums, because the players are greatly effected by how payments work. We are fully open to suggestions at this point.

I do have some ideas for how it could work.

I think it is important to not charge people until we have a game that is stable enough that it will not lose their data, and will be available most of the time. Once this point is reached, I think it is a good time to start accepting donations, but not nagging or anything.

Once the game is pretty much fully featured and onto a fast server, it will be time to evaluate a payment scheme. If donations have not reached the volume we want, something new will be needed. I personally think it is valuable to let people play for free. It greatly boots the user base for one thing. The question is then: what would be different for paying customers? Restricting non paying players in some way makes the game unfair, and adding some non game play effecting difference would also not be good as it singles out non paying players, and often offers too little incentive to pay.

Thus I propose a multi server system. We offer a free server tuned to allow very few ships (3-8 or so), and control over very few planets. We might even adjust some other things to keep the CPU and band width lower such as lowering update rates and such. Basically tho, it would be a full version of the game, but scaled to load the servers less, and limit players sooner. It would also probably have a more limited non growing tech tree so new players just joining the check out the game could catch up pretty quick. We would then offer a pro paid server that allows nations to grow much larger and more powerful. It will be tuned for long term play, and have a much higher server load per player because of the higher colonized planet and ship counts. Paying players could play of the pro server, as well as the free one. We could also offer a server resembling the free one tuning wise, but only for paying players. Probably the free server would get by far the most players, and cost the most to host, but the other servers could pay for it, and when the system gets overloaded, or the server costs get too high, we can do stuff to the free server like adjust the tuning and update rates, without feeling like we are preventing people from getting their money's worth. The free server (or a clone of it) would also make a very good high load testing/beta server.

Please post your thoughts on the subject here, so we can make sure our players are as happy as possible when the time to collect money comes (not gonna be soon).

(Developers, as far as what we do with the money, see the Dev forum. I'll make a post there soon.)

Se you in a while!

The HUD is also going well. I finished up the frame management that handles all the objects. Now I need to install Tristan's editor, and get scripting working. That's about it really, tho getting scripting fully functional will be lots of work. Once the HUD is up and running, we will have to add features like the edit field Matt has been working on, scroll bars, data handling tools and lots of other stuff. It is going to be a long and hard process, but it is well defined and certainly within our abilities.

Soon we will be fixing up the content in the game play section as well.

On another note, we finally came up with and agreed upon a ground combat system. Basically it will allow you to put your nations borders where ever you want, and various settings will determine of there is war or peace where theirs overlap. Scattered across the planet, created by players, are facilities, which extract resources and hold your population. In war zones, the facilities are contested and control can slowly be transferred.

Enjoy!

-Tristan

Matt has been carefully breaking up the project into a series of Ages which will be released as we add features, as well as documenting the features they will have. This basically provides a development plan.

I have been working on the Planet Tool which will allow anyone to design and algorithms for procedurally generated planets. These designs will then be exported, and used in game, though the planet tool could have lots of other uses (like making high resolution movies of planets evolving over time, generating premade planets with varying LODs for other games, landscape texture generation etc.)

Currently the planet tool is just a GUI that does not really do anything, but I have finished coding the multiple undo/redo engine, and am working on the data export/import setup. The planet app is going to use an improved sampling system, with hierarchical layers which should allow many more layers without hurting speed too much. This means things will look good at high zooms. Scattered trees can be placed on forest edges for example. Another neat is past sampling. Because the planet is 4D (changes over time) you can simply sample the past and use it in the functions. This means you could have a HabitatForest layer which you sample at different times to get the forest age. This allows neat things like environmental latency around events (Vegetation takes time to recover and adapt). When combined with impacts, droughts, fires, ice ages, etc it could be really neat, but that level of complexity might be too slow for real time in game stuff (but still fun in the planet tool!). Also of note are planet condition properties such as season, solar input, mass etc. which can be used to effect planets so their content matches the planet's placement and properties in game.

That's all for now!

Here is a shot of our HUD in full screen with the Main Menu up. As you can see, the menu is clearly not done, but at least it works! The window background is also slightly transparent so you can see a star shining through. The buttons now have up and down graphics, so they look pushed in when you click them.

Here is a small section of an in progress render. Currently the rendering process is very slow because it does everything at the maximum resolution everywhere, and uses a crummy slow 4D noise function. I finally got the layer management system organized enough to easily add rainfall and temperature layers to help keep the forests and deserts separate. Also, I have plans to do clever things like skip spending most of the time deciding to not render vegetation foe every under water pixel, and to vary the sample rates depending on the rate of change and visibility. This should boost speed by several times, and make all the edges sharper. With the current system, low sample rate (really fast) renders look great except for the edges, so this change should help a lot. I also touched up the texture positioning and scaling system so they should tile correctly when sections of the texture are rendered separately at arbitrary sizes. Also, it supports textures of arbitrary resolution and size, so the tile edges don't need to line up which hides the tiled artifacts pretty well.

Edit: Updated image!

I have successfully sampled the surface of a sphere travailing along the 4th dimension through a smoothed noise field. It is currently very slow, and has a few tiny flaws, but it will be improved. Maybe I will make a 4D optimization on the N dimensional noise field.

My texture mixing code works too, so things will be getting interesting.

Details about the meaning of this will follow, but for now, just know that we are working on stuff.

Tristan has made a great collection of graphics which we will be using. It is all going very well.

Erm.
So there is this game I loved to play called "Fanta Scape". It was a Tactical RTS, and I loved it!
Only glitch was that you had to check the monster-positions when the (randomly-generated) map loads, so that you don't accidentally have "impossible" scenarios with monsters on islands (because characters can't swim :).
Anyways, so this game is cool, and you control units.

Now Square Enix clones this, and releases Final Fantasy VII for the DS!
A complete clone, with graphical, storyline, AI, element-types, and item-equipping additions.
But still a complete clone!

Oh yeah, and I was saying this because I think both games suck because there is no community in either of them (not multiplayer :).
However, I absolutely love the gameplay! It is unimaginable (if you haven't already played)!
Yet without community, I won't play.
I like players, not AI.
Hmm, though I think I'll test the Final Fantasy VII AI this afternoon. Some games have really friendly NPCs :)

Edit: The AI is really good :(

I also have been trying to squeeze the zooming bugs out of the 3D view, but they seem to prefer spreading and moving to coming out. Some stuff fixed, more stuff broken. That's how it goes…

Instead of calling it default view say galaxy view.

The music is good but when it gets to the end it should be scraped slightly and used as a battle theme tune.

Where it says your player name next to it should be Number of colonies.

Other suggestions include using planet-icons, and colony-ships :)
We also need a guide for how to make a colony.

Thanks timjag :)

Now that we have a bug list, it is time to fix them. I have patched most of those bugs I think, but some have been harder than others, and many are still left. The planet viewing bug has been particularly annoying. I have known for quite some time that my rendering system was only hacked to get star viewing to work, and it was no done right. In that system, there was no way to get planet viewing to work. To fix this, I just restructured the whole rendering system. Planet viewing now works, but I'm sure I broke many other things. Eventually I will patch up these bugs, and it should work again. When thats done, I will move on to making the planets look nicer, and forcing the background stars to render right (they currently get clipped for being too far away) when zoomed in.

I also got user names to no longer be case sensitive, and at least some non ASCII characters work in them now, but they somehow get converted into other characters when sent to the server. Some more work is needed to fix that.

This is a long way out, but will hopefully get done eventually.

Now that is good and all, but when applied to my new hierarchical fleet plan, things get very interesting very quickly. You get incredibly customizable AI that can quickly be applied through little more than drag and drop. What we are looking at is not just fleet or ship AI, but team work across all scales, as well as independence. One example is task specific automatic formation changes, as well as the option for ships decide to break formation in groups to perform tasks in smaller groups completely on their own. All of this will be fully customizable, but easy to customize quickly and very quick to use. Even with a few preset AIs and formations, literally unlimited combinations are possible. I just really hope this all works, because it is going to be so great if it does. I'm so excited I had to post something. Details will be made available when the rest of the developers and I approve the plan, and answer a few questions. Lots of other documents will also be made available soon.

Thanks in advance,

-Conor-

You will need to create a new account. Try out all the new things! Right click stuff in the 3D view, play with the chat, control-shift click controls in the windows.

One idea I particularly like is bureaucracy as a stat. Basically, the more stuff you control (mainly planets and large colonies), the more it costs to hold your empire together and govern it all. After a particular point, planets low in resources stop being beneficial to take because they cost more to govern than the resources collected are worth. This forces players to seek out the best planets and battle for them while protecting new players. (The other options also cause this benefit)

Anyway, our resource system considers labor a resource. Labor can be harvested from a population in a colony, and is very expensive to ship (commute or what ever). So what determines the price of extraction? The cost of living, and how much taxes you can get away with collecting. So we should make an equation that describes the cost of extracting labor from a colony. We can have food prices in there as a value, and population, military size (as a percent of the population), the land area, and some other things. For now we can use something simply, but we will need an equation when it comes time to implement the economy.

Also, I only have two days of school left. Things are going to get really moving soon.

Expect a new client supporting minimal ground combat soon. Expect a client supporting much more interesting ground combat in a few weeks. Also quite soon we will be posting lots of documentation pages on this site. We currently have 12 such pages written and they will have their content checked be approved to public display soon.

If you want details, what I fixed in the client in the lat two days:

1. Fixed random rolling of the camera when switching the focus
2. Smoother focus changing
3. Focus stays completely centered when orbiting
4. Fixed a nil object exception in the ground combat GUI
5. Fixed a networking bug
6. Reorganized the client's code in an intelligent way
7. Speed up solar system zooms
8. Fixed the default view button (and zooming out)
9. And some other stuff I can't remember at the moment.

Other stuff done recently:

• Experiments with OpenGL
• Documentation of lots of stuff (Economy, GUI etc.)
• Set up an IRC room (there is a link on the main page)

Then when I try to continue:

FG-CLIENT caused an invalid page fault in
module <unknown> at 0084:00000001.
Registers:
EAX=00000000 CS=0177 EIP=00000001 EFLGS=00010202
EBX=00000292 SS=017f ESP=0083fb34 EBP=0083fd94
ECX=00000000 DS=017f ESI=00000000 FS=311f
EDX=00000000 ES=017f EDI=00000000 GS=0000
Bytes at CS:EIP:
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 16 00 1a 08 65 04 70 00 65
Stack dump:
00464116 00000000 fb48fd94 00000292 00000000 000088ae bff842b1 00000001 00000000 00000000 00274bff 001e5000 011d1750 00000000 00000000 00000000

Anybody have an idea as to what happened?

Hope you enjoy, but don't expect many more models since we still have lots of work to do to get our first release out. Here is a link: Pics

BTW: I just got my drivers' license too!

Now that school is out, I can finally start drawing up plans for mode interfaces!

Now I can starting d(e)riving around some Ground Combat formulae!

How many solar systems should the galaxy start-off with?
(I recommend three, just so that we can have players starting diplomat arguments over territory in new systems, whenever the galaxy is expanded/new systems added.)

Later on, initial colonization could be based on random variables, or even on a colony ship, or a choice between random-location and getting a colony ship (if you know someone in the game, or are a new player and want to start on a relatively unpopulated planet).

Also, what was everyone's opinion on colonization of moons?

So, yes, I have been doing something, and no, it is not what I was planning to do, or the most urgent task. A little bit of it should help me finish up the ground combat though, which is the current goal.

Here is a link to some slightly out of date versions of what I have been doing: http://fg.98115.net:4520/~max/DatabaseGraphics_2008_05_24/

Edit: I updated the development page accordingly.

As far as a release estimate, I can not provide a time as I don't know how much work it will be, or how much time I will have for FG. I can say that it wont be this weekend, and it will probably happen before fall. Other than that, I would predict a minimal build with a ground combat interface will be up for the public in late May, and a somewhat fun release possibly in June (I get out of school in mid June).

When looking more long term, I would expect a lot of progress this summer as the pieces that we already have being to fall together. Expect to see the music in game along with the ground combat, 3D galaxy, and maybe even an economy. We might even get some nice looking planets, and the basic ship design tools done by the end of the summer. After the progress we will make over summer, we will likely be ready to start building content such as models of ships and weapons, other graphics, technologies, stats etc. All that stuff is a long way out, but the path to it is clear, and we are heading the right way at an accelerating pace.

It's fun to see, that galaxy, but to play, will make my day.

Oh yeah :)
Times 6.67

Haha.

Edit: I guess that's only funny in Canada, where "weight" is notated, F_g.

The variables that I use are:

x, y, z coordinates of destination
x, y, z coordinates of spaceship
x, y, z component-velocities of spaceship

My assumptions are:

speed of destination is negligible
initial speed of spaceship is greater than zero
travelling the distance d (see diagram) will not affect the angle between the spaceship and its destination
the spaceship's velocity is tangential (same direction) as its "front", so that if it sped-up, the direction would not change
the guns of the spaceship are facing 90 degrees away from the direction of its velocity (thus, guns are mounted on the side, top, or belly of the spaceship, facing away from the spaceship's centre of gravity)
the spaceships engines are at the spaceship's centre of gravity
torque can be altered instantaneously (can be changed later)
no acceleration due to gravity
the distance between the spaceship and destination is much, much greater than ((360 degrees / maximum turn rate in degrees per second) * speed of spaceship in units per second) / 2(pie)

rem change in angle required = angle between spaceship's direction and direction of destination, + 90 degrees (because spaceship is pointed towards the centre of the arc that it turned in)

My most important assumption:
Either:
1)the direction of the spaceship's velocity is perpendicular to the direction of the destination
or
2)there is a way to derive a spherical trajectory using a 2D circle trajectory plus a required change in the z-axis (if assumption 1 is false)

My end-product is:

The spaceship rotates for one second so that it is now moving sideways through space
The spaceship is pointed towards the centre of a circle, where 2(pie)*radius = perimeter = (360 degrees / maximum turn rate in degrees per second) * speed of spaceship in units per second
The spaceship turns for time = change in angle required / maximum turn rate in degrees per second
The spaceship is still pointed towards the centre of the circle, and its top, side, or belly is facing the destination.
The spaceship is moving towards the destination, but not really
for example, if the spaceship is travelling in the direction of +x, and the destination requires it travel in the directions -x, -y, -z, then:
1) the spaceship can turn in a circle, correcting its direction of movement to -x, -y
2) the spaceship can turn in a circle, correcting its direction of movement to +x, -y, -z
3) the spaceship can turn in a spherical trajectory (see important assumptions 1 and 2)
4) the spaceship can undergo two maneouvres!!! The first arc will correct x and y vectors, and the second arc will be a circle tangent to the z-axis

Number 3 is too hard for me to program, since I've never learned spherical vectors.
Number 4 will make the spaceship look it is doing the loop-de-loop (silly).

Rem Speed remains constant throughout the entire process.
I have some trigonometry (angles) and time variables mapped out in my head (spaceship turns during the second before it begins its arc).
Unfortunately, I don't know Craig's equations for the displacement of a spaceship when given a circular trajectory (with radius and acceleration and location of circle's centre given).

Help!

Here is a diagram of what I have so far:

The spaceship is in blue, pointing in the direction of the vertice of the blue arrow.
remember that because the destination is so far away, θ1 = θ2
green line is the distance the spaceship travels while turning (and NOT accelerating)
in total, the spaceship travels 270 degrees - θ1 (270 degrees is an arbitrary value based on the spaceships initial direction)
note: if the guns were on the left-hand side of the spaceship, then the spaceship would turn in a circle to the right 180 degrees - θ1
once the required turn is complete, the spaceship stops accelerating, and is travelling towards its destination (if θ1 = θ2).
circle radius (red) = ((360 degrees / maximum turn rate in degrees per second) * speed of spaceship in units per second) / 2(pie)
Remember that this only accounts for x and y directions (or x and z, or y and z).
I cannot due spherical coordinates, so I need help!

I like this method of movement because when the spaceship wants to dodge a projectile fired from the destination (say it is targetting a ship) then the spaceship is in the optimal direction to thrust forwards and dodge this shot (like in the game Asteroids, you have to turn away from an asteroid before dodging).

That was a heck of a post, and I didn't even start any trigonometry.
I'm starting to see that Fragmented Galaxy is a large-scale project.

…

How did you know?

They timed me out on the survey-response questions :(

I need to send my Student ID Card now.

I updated the development page by the way.

Also, I roughed out a good solid framework for implementing in game help using a wiki so it will be easy for the many developers, and even players if/when/where we let them. It is basically a web site, so you can view it in game, or with a web browser. I got a nice javascript written (my first attempt to do any javascript) that will allow it to include stats from our server. We don't have any data to display through it yet though. It will be in the next client release. I will try to get something usable up this week so we can start adding content.

Also, generally speaking, I should have a lot more free time in about a month. I'm really excited about that is coming up in the near future for FG. The ground combat release is going to be great, and allow us to make much faster progress (more to work on at once). I can't wait to get started on planet generation, and I have some good (simple!) ideas for the (real time free market galactic) economy. When we have many (as many as we want, maybe millions) planets rendered in detailed 3D, a simply yet non limiting ground combat system, and a good economy, we will have a real fun game. Then we get to work on space combat which should be just as fun (and important) as the ground combat. Critical steps are being taken, plans are being laid; there is a great game in the makin', and it's going to get played.

So I spent this morning protesting, and got banned because I'm not allowed to protest.

Best Admin of The Year

Craig Macomber - 3 votes
Crazy C - 0 votes
Matt R - 0 votes
jiminy35 - 0 vote
tbg10101 - 0 votes

Congratulations Craig,
You are the Admin of The Year!

EDIT: ok, so it odes go back to orbiting if I double click on a specific object to orbit. This makes sense, but is unclear. I recommend changing the instructions so that people don't think they've messed up orbiting after they've used the shift-drag function.

I have also made some updates to the development page.

This will help to keep everything in one place.

What should we call it? FGopedia?

If you are asking, it's sort of like the Civilopedia from Civ 3.

Just thought I'd mention it. I went back to the forum topic (which is still there), and perused around some of the early posts (I hadn't joined at this point). Among one of the first posts I found this interesting snippet:

Thats about all I have to say on the issue of MMORPGs or 3D. I wish you luck.
This sounds like a very interesting project which I would like to succeed. I can not commit to working on this project, but I will be willing to contribute what I have, and possibly comply with all your feature requests for my networking setup when its ready.

This was the last part of Craig's first post. Seems like he became more involved than he first expected :)

The ground combat system has not had much news posted here. It is being developed by Matt, and he is doing an excellent job. Currently it looks functional and when the engine is ready, we can start the integration process.

In relation to the ground combat system, a diplomacy system is being developed, and it looks like it will also make an excellent trigger system so players can configure actions and reactions that will happen when they are offline (or online).

The technology system developed early on in the project has been brought to the surface and is being analyzed. It looks like it should meed our needs and allow as much complexity, realism and usability as we want.

No progress (as far as I know) on the economy simulator, but it is partly developed, and well organized.

Tristan has been doing a great job on the user interfaces. When we need them, he has some great looking buttons waiting for us.

We also have enough 3D models to do the basic 3D ship design and such when the time comes. We have a user interface design for the ship designer and builder mostly finished.

The music app works, and is ready to be combined with the engine when the engine starts generating the needed mood values. We have some nice music to play with it too.

I have figured out how to do planet generation and rendering with 3D terrain, oceans and lakes, vegetation (mostly 2D in the short run) and stuff like that. It will support deep zooming too.

I have designed (but not coded) a system for collision detection and faster rendering (by ignoring far away objects). This will be used for space combat, and allowing smooth zooms through large amounts of content (stars, planets etc.) the possibility of smoothly navigating from the surface of a planet (20 meters up or so) to the galaxy view, and back to another planet with no loading screens or teleports.

Overall, we have been making progress on many fronts. It may not look like too much, but when taken together, all the parts represent a lot of work. Once they start combining, the game itself will begin to grow very quickly.

In the near future look for a minimal statistical ground combat game. But, in not too much later, look for a 3D ground combat game with music, detailed planets, a fully functional realistic economy, large varieties of resources distributed throughout the 3D terrain, and a full galaxy smoothly integrated in 3D space. After that, (quite a while after) we will start the space combat capable releases.

I won't give a time frame for long term stuff (it would be very inaccurate), but I will say that if things go well, we could potentially get the first ground combat release out in a month or so (possibly less).

I just though you guys might want to know what is possible. The current galaxy has 100 stars managed in a very inefficient way, but eventually I will be able to increase that number greatly.

Phantom Afterburners

Side-View

This spaceship in the side-view picture appeared to be moving forwards.
I took this shot to see where on the hull's length the animation originated from.

I am not sure why this happened, but I am sure it is a simple bug, and is easily resolved.
I look forward to the day when Moderators and Admins have to sort through dozens of bug-reports per week, from players having connectivity problems :)
Thanks for reading about the phantom afterburners!