Yay, tomorrow Star Trek Online goes into open beta 
I’ve played around a bit in the closed beta, and so far I’m impressed, the space combat is fun and action packed, and the Ground combat is a bit like World of Warcraft, only more action, more interesting quests (no grinding, while waiting for drops) and the Fleet actions (Large open instances) were pretty awesome
I’ll miss my Andorian captain, who was wiped with all the other closed beta characters today:(
I decided to add Deuterium as a resource in Trekwar, it can be collected from nebulas or by owning star systems that have gas giants in them. Ships also now need deuterium to move, and can run out of gas if you don’t plan your logistics.
Deuterium and maintenance has been added to the menu bar, and fuel to the temporary fleet box
I finally got around to implement the new ship system for the Trekwar game.
Ships are no longer static objects with fixed attributes (weapon, shields, armor, etc..).
All ships are no based on a specific hull, which has some base armor and crap, + X number of slots you can put equiptment in. Below is the starting ship of all factions in the game:
If you noticed that this is the design of a Maquis raider, give yourself a cookie!
I got lot of Starship components to add, and so far I’ve just added ‘Warp Core’, ‘Colonization module’, ‘armor’, ‘beam emitters’ (phasers) and ‘Shield emitters’.
One new thing I implemented today was ship speeds. Unlike in Civilizzation / Birth of the Federation, where units can only move 1 or 2 tiles each turn. Ships in Trekwar can have a speed of 1.0 (which lets it always move 1 tile each turn) or 0.7 like the colonization ship in the screenshot below:
The upper most ship is a scoutship with a speed of 1.0
The lower ship is a colonization ship with a speed of 0.7, that means when it starts moving it will generate 0.7 movement points.. this is not enough to move a full tile. The next turn it generates 0.7 more and then gets 1.4 movement points.. It can the move 1 tile, and has 0.4 movement points “to spare”.. On the third turn in this example it gets 1.1 movement points and can move again..
Ships with a speed below 1.0 will occationally “miss” a movement while moving a distance. Ships with speeds greater than 1.0 will occationally move 2 (or maybe even 3) tiles in a single turn.
Recently much of my spare time programming has gone to giving the Trekwar client a graphical overhaul.
Now I’ve managed to get most of what I broke, working again (Research and Starsystem Control), and I’ve added a glasspane that shows up and prevents the clicking of buttons (and thus creating a weird state of the client) while each tick is being processed by the server.
Currently the test galaxy is 100×100 tiles and takes about 0.5 seconds to load to client
Unlike the previous version of the game, it is now possible to have many windows active on top of the actual game map.
The system box (far left of the screen) has been changed to display more information, and next up is a complete redesign of the fleet box.
But before making the new fleet box and fleet management system, I’ll have to do some major rewrite of the internal ship system and logic, to support user created ship classes.
I’m looking forward to 8-10 hours of pure java and logic.. There is only so much Swing a man can take
Since I fixed that annoying memory leak, I’ve been working on updating the graphical client of the trekwar game. Instead of having the map as a own internal window, the map is now always shown. I also made a new menu in Photoshop (thank Thor for photoshop tutorials 
)
old screenshot ( 0.2.X )
new screenshot (0.3.1)
Next up is implementing the new Shipdesigner system.
Until quite recently I had lots of the stuff I need to do in a simple text file, but I tried out like 5-8 Task list, todo lists, project management applications and stuff like that. Until I finally found the thing I was looking for.
ToDoList is a brilliant program, with ALL the futures I wanted and then some.
What I was looking for was a nice tree-based task manager where each task could have a cost (time), and a progress indicator. Also storing notes is a must. The software also have lots of other features (allocating tasks to users, task statuses, categories, start and due dates, recurrence, etc…
I simply use it as a tree to keep track of tasks I need to do for a given project. Here is a screenshot of the application where I’ve added lots of task for the Trekwar2 game. I think this application is a GREAT tool for programmers, unfortunately it is only available for windows.
You can download the program for free from abstractspoon.com
I recently had a good idea for my Star Trek game, this would also solve the problem with some factions having very few ships designs, and might even allow me to add more factions (Ferengi, Dominion, Kazon, borg?), seeing that finding and balancing enough ship classes for each faction was the biggest problem with adding more factions.
It might even make it possible to add some more exotic factions (Xindi, Gorn, Breen, Son’a, Tholian, Vidiian, Hirogen, Tzenkethi or maybe even the Terran Empire
Instead of just having 4-5 static ship classes where all ships made of this class are identical, one could have a little star ship designer where you fit a hull with the components you want (warp drive, impulse drive, phasers, torpedo launchers, sensors, fusion reactors, shield emitters, armor, cloaking devices, troop transports, colonization and terraforming tools).
This means I will have to do some re-designing the next time I have time to work on the game (wont be that much, only implemented 2 ship classes so far)
According to my superior mspaint skills, the interface will look like this:
So, seeing that I don’t have to work for a couple of weeks at least, I’ve been working on my Star Trek game
I’ve been doing lots of GUI stuff and UI enhancing lately and the game now looks a bit more attractive, I will probably post some screenshots of the changes to the user interface next week, for now I’ll show off the asteroids system.
This is the first version, a simple non-transparent image drawn in mspaint on my laptop
The second version had transparent background and there where 5 different tiles.
This is the final version, each tile that is part of an asteroid field generates an image using from 2-10 transparent images from 10 base-tiles. This causes LOTS of unique tiles, and it allows the size of the asteroid belt to visually indicate how many resources the field has. This also makes it possible for asteroid fields to shrink little by little as they are mined.
I downloaded a new Java tool today, called VisualVM which was released (version 1.0) yesterday and is going to ship with the SUN JDK starting with JDK 6 release 7.
This is a tool that allows you to view information about the java programs currently running on your computer (or a remote computer). It does not seem to provide as much information as JConsole or JManage, but it still gives the most essential information. Besides the tool is still pretty new (version 1.0), so I’m sure we will see lots of improvement in the near future.
Monitoring provides basic information about uptime, memory usage, threads and some other stuff:
The application also has a rudimentary profiler which allows you to see which methods are using cpu cycles, and which objects are hogging all the memory,
The program can also do a heap dump, allowing you to see the size and number of instances of each class. You can also inspect each and every object to view it’s variables and references:
The profiling part was pretty simple and would benefit from more work, but overall I’m pretty sure this tool(even though a bit low on features/information in it’s current state) will be a big hit, and a good entry to profiling and application management to many people.
A very nice feature I did not take a screenshot of is a visual timeline view of all the threads and which state they are in, very smooth The software is also suppose to let you view core dumps, but did not get a chance to test this feature tonight.
I’ve had this post as a Draft ever since I came back from Austria (which is a weird-ass country by the way), mainly due to the fact that I managed to change ssh port on my server without changing the firewall
So I finally connected a keyboard and screen and set everything up the way they was, which meant I could commit the changes I did to the Trekwar game to the server, and get them on this computer and grab some screen shots.
Friday
It is now possible to move your fleets around the map, Client allows you to press the tile the fleet should move to and then tells the server to move the ships.
Saturyday
Fixed a bug where the local copy of the move orders where not updated properly, implemented the starsystem controll window:
Sunday
Implemented build orders, now possible to build structures on planets. Queue not implemented yet.
Airplane
On the airplane back home I implemented the asteroid belts (high-altitude programming is fun).
Notice the beautiful asteroids drawn in mspaint on my laptop’s touch pad
