Posts Tagged ‘star trek’

Fedcon 2009

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

german-flag

Tomorrow I’m leaving for Bonn, Germany to attend my first ever Star Trek Convention, the convention is Fedcon, and I have no idea what I’m going to do there :)

Better have Summer Glau sign a Firefly dvd cover, don’t know why, but life is like playing Monkey Island.. you just do stuff because it’s there, and hope it will pay of later.

Either way it should be fun, maybe I’ll catch a glimpse of this swine flu that the media has been hyping the entire week.. Influenza kills like 1000 people in Norway each year.. 30’000 in the US, and a new influenza virus spreads across the planet every year without people yelling about a pan(dem)ic.

Comic Contest

Friday, April 24th, 2009

Cryptic Studios announced a “Create a comic” contest for Startrek online, with the chance to win a beta key.

My chances are pretty much 0,003%, but still, here’s my contribution to the contest:
wide_beam_erlend_aakre
(click for larger version)

The server

Friday, February 27th, 2009

My cute little server Defiant, where I run my webserver, database and trekwar server tests, deserves some recognition:

The server itself is a little aopen cube shuttle pc running fedora linux :)

defiant

The server is of course covered with Star Trek ships, a Robotech VF-1, oldschool Batman and a badger for good luck. The server is starting to get old 4-5 years, and if it where not for backups, I would frequently worry about hard drive failure. Before that happens, I hope it will reach the 1000 day uptime :)

Defiant uptime

2H or not 2H?

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009

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.
trekwar_deuterium

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

The need for speed

Saturday, February 7th, 2009

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:
trekwar_slots
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:

trekwar_race1

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.

Trekwar GUI updates

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009

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.

trekwar_feb09_01
Currently the test galaxy is 100×100 tiles and takes about 0.5 seconds to load to client

trekwar_feb09_02

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 :)

New header

Thursday, January 29th, 2009

I changed the old default wordpress header to something more personal :)

I made the new header with my drawing tablet, it started out as just my head.. but then I decided to add a Starfleet uniform, and then why not a little tribute to Evil Dead?

The path we choose

Wednesday, January 28th, 2009

Recently I’ve been continuing on my Star trek game, and doing part 2 of the GUI updates, I have to fix up the research view, as it was broken by the new UI.

I also made a new starship path system, and optimized some slow stuff in the drawMap() function

trekwar_path_old
old design – aka: stupid dot system

trekwar_path_new
new design – aka: ehm.. yellow lines?

After making the research view work again, it’s time to port the old starsystem administration UI into the new design. Followed by the new shipdesigner feature.

Bamboo!

Tuesday, November 25th, 2008


I recently bought a cheap drawing tablet, the Bamboo one from Wacom. So far I’m pretty pleased with the tablet and the software that came with it.

Here are some crappy images I made with the pencil and paintbrush tool:

New Trekwar GUI

Saturday, November 8th, 2008

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.