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.

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.)

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.

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…

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.