Thats a 14*14 grid formation, each node containing a single ship. It is placed inside a parent formation which contains it and a single other ship just behind the front grid. Basic thrust control AI is working so the ships 'try' to stay in formation by both attempting to fly toward their designated formation positions (shown in blue) as well as thrusting to match the velocity of their formation position. With a significant mass and limited thrusting power, there is a limit to what accelerations the ships can follow. Pictured here are the ships after the formation has exceeded their maximum acceleration by stopping and turning rapidly, just before all the ships regain formation.

As the battle simulator can run fine in slower than real time (this fleet of 197 ships did manage to run in real time though), it is possible to simulate and render battles of essentially unlimited scale. It might take a long time, but it could model (and render to a video) a battle of hundreds of formations and thousands of ships. I ran a little test with 40000 ships and it seemed to work (But it ran really slow as expected). 250000 ships works, but is really slow. One million ships did not work (Out of memory error)

I've been doing quite a bit on both the editor and battle simulator recently. With a bit more progress on the editor, and some more AI, we will be starting to have a real game.

Discuss here.

Fragmented Galaxy has been an extraordinarily poorly focused and organized project. I know this, and it is mostly my fault. Also, I don't really mind. For me it has always been an impulse based project. I felt doing ground combat first would allow us to quickly get a functional game out. Without ground combat, there would be no resources, and thus no economy, ships, or game. Well, I went and made planets for a while instead.

Anyway, the plan for ground combat, which will be the source of all resources and ship production, really hasn't been designed to a point where I feel I can implement it. The designs just seem to gain complexity, and I'm unsure of how big of portion of the game screwing with ground combat stuff should be. Originally the plan was to make is super simple, but the idea of significance between different parts of planets was introduced, and things got messy. On that front the project has basically stalled.

Now, on a different topic: Why do I work on this project? The concept for Fragmented Galaxy (aside from the unrefined ground combat ideas) seems very elegant from my perspective as a programmer. It has a very simple yet powerful and realistic economic system, very powerful political system based on some simple building blocks, a rather different and clever technology/research approach, an truly clever and powerful AI setup integrated with the fleet design which mirrors the ship design system. All of these are built on simple principles that are combine either through a hierarchical structure, networking or both. From the programming perspective Fragmented Galaxy is in some cases a worst case game (massively server side, computational expensive, realtime), but those are issues related to computational load. As far as basic implementation and design, Fragmented Galaxy is just a collection of fundamentally beautiful algorithms. This is why I'm still here, 3 years into the project.

And, as to why the project always gets sidetracked: I'm just here to play with clever algorithms. When I started generating planets, I ventured into the realm of procedural terrain generation, high end rendering, graphics card programming, and now the Python programming language. Any of these areas could happily consume years of my life, and I expect them to do so. As far as Fragmented Galaxy goes though, none of these are really very important to the game.

And that leads me back to a new idea. I'm going to want to get to play with those clever AI, ship and fleet design ideas sometime, and ground combat just isn't seeming very interesting at the moment. Thus, I came up with the idea of making a fleet battle game. Basically you would be given a fixed budget to make a fleet, and battle another fleet made with that budget (or potentially a different budget as a handicap). This could start without fleets, just with single ships, and fleets could be added later. Saving fleet/ship designs (including AI settings) out to files for sharing would allow a single player campaign (which could serve as a tutorial) of preset opponent fleets and corresponding budgets (you could score based on budget used, or losses taken, or both, or simply win/lose). We could allow players to battle their own fleets, battle over the network (Lan) or online, and we could host official tournaments (submit your fleet, battles run server side)

This would be a pure strategy and design game with no realtime aspects. Simply make your fleet (or select one you already made), and press go. Potentially realtime or turn based modes could be added where you could send in backup waves or something like that.

This entire system could be kept intact, but imported into Fragmented Galaxy to allow you to use your same fleets in the MMORTS. The only issue I see is with techs; not all nations in Fragmented Galaxy will have the same techs, and none will have the exact same development status on the techs. It is only an issue with integrating the fleet battling game with FG, and thus I'm not going to worry about it now.

Anyway, I now have an idea that will let me play with the AI, ship and fleet stuff, and make an interesting game that does not have serious hosting issues. It might happen sometime.

Again, it is just a planet viewer, with just one planet.

Basic testing shows that it does run on Mac, Windows and Linux, though there are some rather ugly graphical bugs in some cases, possibly on all Windows and Linux computers.

It is just a planet viewer, with just one planet, but it does actually connect to the server and do a few other things you don't see.

I have been working on everything, and making pretty good all around progress. I'm looking to have a solid cross platform release of the planet viewer with login and maybe chat built in done by the end of the year. The server is far enough for this, but needs to be a bit more stable. The client can already login, so its mainly a matter of getting the user interface done, and getting a release put together. Once thats done, I'll work toward getting ground combat designed and implemented.

Here is a Large Screen Shot

Eventually I will set up an image gallery system that is much more functional with ratings, comments, tags, various sorting options, and better support for viewing and downloading very large images. When this is done (it's a low priority compared to making the game work) I'll offer up some more nice high quality renderings from the client.

There are also lots more new screen shots.

Along with the new client, I designed a new server architecture, which I think will work much better. I have finished the basic architecture, and done some basic testing of it. Everything seems to work well, though there are some features missing as far as automatic crash recovery and distributed processing across multiple servers (basic multi-core support should already work, and the database server can be on another machine), but I think everything else major is solid.

Along with the basic architecture changes, I have now implicated a new networking protocol. It has basic error detection, and should be a solid base for the networking. There are a few details that are currently in need of optimization for high loads, but I will get that fixed soon. I still need to implement it on the client side in python too. (Edit After some testing, for small messages, my code is more than twice as fast as RealBasic's built in alternative, and about 11% faster for much larger messages. I also got it about half implemented on the python side)

Also, I should note that several developers other than me have been active recently working on various design and documentation tasks, as well as the ground combat system which will be ported to the new server, client and networking once finished.

I think that is it for now. No pretty new pretty pictures. I need to rig up a PHP script so I can easily update a gallery of new screen shots for all you (not very numerous) fans :)

On another note, the new FG Game server software got another critical piece finished today (start to finish it took about 15 minuets to make though). I just finished basic testing of our process manager, which currently does nothing but launch a few things. Eventually it will have also the job of detecting crashed and frozen parts of the server software, and trying to kill and relaunch them. For now it will launch the task manager, and any other things that need to get started, like the client communication servers which I will make shortly.

I also have been playing with planet appearance a bit. Nothing major though. Maybe I'll put up a new image and/or video soon.

I have just finished getting the full internal structure and the associated user interface for the ground combat app finished. This means that I can now place facilities on a planet, and a player or players can have full or partial control of each facility. I can apply various settings configurations to the facilities for each player, and edit the list of available configurations. While none of the configurations actually do anything, and there is no actual combat going on, we are getting closer.

Now I have to add some more settings to the configurations, and then make the actual combat happen (update the facility properties periodically to reflect growth, losses, conquest, etc.)

What this means for you? Ground combat game is one step closer! Also, as far as user interface complexity goes, note that the ground combat app is a development tool that controls all players at once, and is in no way trying to simplify anything. The game itself when released will be much more friendly.

For those of you who like numbers, this is all done through 7 separate windows, 4 of which can have multiple instances of open at once (See image).

It has been a while since the last update, and not very much has been done, but much planning has been done, and progress has started in what I see to be a very good direction. Here is the work in progress ground combat simulation app (GC App). Soon it will allow the user to set up facilities on a planet and fight over them.

Though I have to this point always avoided anything time line wise, I would like to say that this should actually be done soon. That means days or weeks, not months. I got about half of the remaining work done yesterday and today.

Once this works, the new server design will be implemented, the log in system will be ported over, and the GC App will be incorporated. Then the client app will be made from the GC App and then we will have a playable MMORTS! It will only be minimal ground combat at that point, but it will be a very solid base to build upon.

It will then be extended to add more features like national boarders, treaties and triggers, resources, technologies, a real time supply demand economy, and much more. This process will produce a fun and interesting MMORTS. Most of these features are independent of each other and thus can be tackled by different developers allowing for much faster progress. I would like to see this getting underway early this summer.

In addition to the game play improvements during this phase, the graphics and user interface will be moved over to OpenGL, and the planet will go from the current slow to generate low detail to a vastly improved immersive realtime experience complete with variable climate and weather, seasons, environmental sound, and deep zooming graphics detail. I can not provide a time frame for this, though I can say that a lot of work for it has already been done but is put on hold until the gameplay is further implemented.

As the ground combat game becomes more fun, it will hopefully pick up a user base which will allow us to tune it properly and be sure it is a fun and exciting part of FG. While this (unavoidably slow) tuning and refinement process is going on, the galaxy and solar system setup will be brought in allowing players to view other planets, and settle some of them. Then the existing physics and AI systems will be brought up to date to work with the new server, and ships will be added. Initially they will only do basic things such as be moved around, travel between solar systems, and investigate and colonize planets. This will be the final state of the development of ground combat. Once this is done, epic space battles!

I can not offer a time frame for epic space battles (I will wildly guess 2.3 years, end of summer 2 years from now), but a lot of work has already been done for them: the database system is pretty well designed; the AI engine is roughly coded; the physics engine has been tested and works with module and thruster based ships and my collision detection engine has been stress tested successfully and imported into the FG code base. It is not like we are starting from scratch; it is more like reassembling and extending.

Here is a planet. The texture is made using the old and slow method. I put in some of my improved code from the planet tool project though to make it faster. Notice how terrain and lines cross the seams without getting totally screwed up. I put a lot of work into making that work right!

The planet has lines on it. They properly follow the shortest paths between endpoints, meaning great circle routes. Also there are some little marker dots. Currently they are placed where you click, and demonstrate the mouse to 3D vector to texture implementation. Eventually it will be used for placing things like facilities, national boarders, and anything else you can click on the planet.

Basic drag navigation and scroll wheel zoom has been implemented and works well.

Where is this going you may ask?
The current goal is to create a ground combat game, which by itself should be somewhat fun, though slow paced and not overly interesting. Once this is done, it will be improved until there is a real economy, somewhat nice graphics, and basic diplomatic tools (setting peace vs. war with various players). Once that is done, work will continue to improve it, but we will also return to working on space combat. The first step of the space based game will be basic colonization of other planets. Once that works, ships, fleets and real space combat will be added. Then you will have ground and space combat. That is when FG will start to be really neat.

What does this mean to you? It means that FG will have spiffy cool graphics that use your graphics card to its potential (considering my graphics card is crap, that means little for me…). None of this 5 seconds to generate a crummy texture. On a decent card, it will make a good texture in less than 1/20th of a second.

I'm pretty delighted with this success and I will be proceeding straight to getting my render to texture code to let me produce textures with shaders. Things are going to get cool!