After that I got a lifetime subscription for Star Trek Online, which kinda turned me off MMO’s altogether :)

I’ve been playing a couple of the SWTOR beta weekends and got early access 6 days before release, and I’ve made it to level 30 so far (think there are around 10-20 lvl 50′s on my server (Scepter of Ragnos)).

And so far I must say… SWTOR is fucking awesome!

Riding a shuttle between two areas of the map

If you just gave me the game and let me play the first 10 levels (Starting planet), I would be 99% sure the game was made by Bioware. Unlike for example WOW where you just accept quest, go kill/collect and return, the quests in SWTOR are really amazing. The quest chains make up wonderful stories in classic Bioware style (Baldurs Gate, Neverwinter Nights, KOTOR, Dragon Age), and you can very often choose different ways to do the quest. The NPC voice acting also adds to your total immersion in the stories.

The class quest, which is a long quest line that follows your character between level 1 and 50, is absolutely brilliant, I’m playing as a Bounty Hunter and the story is comparable to a really good single player RPG. Also the companion system is great, and you get a really close connection to your characters, much more so than in KOTOR / Mass Effect.

Me and my kickass companion Mako

So far I can only judge the lvl 1-30 part of the bounty hunter class quest, but I’ve heard the other classes (which have totally different class quests) are equally good. So I’ll probably be making alts just to play the story lines.

The instances I’ve been in so far are all good, like the quests you can also affect how the instance unfolds by choosing dark side / light side.

I’m playing as a Bounty Hunter Bodyguard (healer), and the healing mechanic is really good, each time you use a healing ability you gain heat and you need to keep your heat level low and not overheat to be able to heal. This means you can heal forever if you manage your heat properly, but dealing with big damage spikes is a bit hectic (but very doable).

The graphics are really nice, although some people complain it’s too cartoony (mostly WOW fanboys it seems, which is ironic beyond belief). I’m glad the graphics is not realistic (skyrim, age of conan), I don’t think that would be a good look for this game.

I'm trying to be a ruthless bounty hunter, but Mako with her big puppy eyes makes it hard at times

So far I haven’t experienced a single disconnect (saw 2 lag spikes during 1 beta weekend, that lasted about 5 seconds), so for me the launch has been close to perfect. I came across 1 bug in a class quest, but the forum had a workaround.

I’m really looking forward to seeing what the end game is like.

To sum it all up in one sentence, “I’ve played many MMO’s, but I would say this is the first MMORPG I’ve played”

I really like the game so far, tt’s basically the same as Fallout 3 (not a complaint), and I like the story and setting so far. I do miss the 50′s music, but I listen to the Fallout 3 soundtrack almost daily anyhow

Seems like since I got Veronica the game has started to freeze up when trying to close it. But other than that it has been very stable and bug free.

I did however notice a strange bug with Veronica once I logged in.. She kept grinning for the entire session. It started to really creep me out:

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:(

Deuterium and maintenance has been added to the menu bar, and fuel to the temporary fleet box

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.

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

old screenshot ( 0.2.X )

new screenshot (0.3.1)

Next up is implementing the new Shipdesigner system.

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

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:

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.