Posts Tagged ‘trekwar’

Trekwar shipdesigner

Monday, October 13th, 2008

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:

Goddamn memory leak

Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008

Still havent been able to localize that damn memory leak in the Trekwar client. At least the server  has no leaks :) and can run for days only using around 15-20 MB of memory (galaxy with 10’000 sectors):

The client however will crash after about 10 ticks if the galaxy is really big. Have stared at the code for hours, with no result. I’m going to have to start some methodical and very tedious debugging to get this thing fixed :(

Asteroids! IN SPACE!

Wednesday, July 16th, 2008

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.

Programming in Austria

Sunday, June 15th, 2008

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:
Trekwar System View

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 :)

Trekwar galaxy map with asteroid belts and fleet movements

Long weekend, of debugging..

Monday, May 12th, 2008

The last week I have been finishing up the online registration system for Nidarosilder, a local ferret show here in Trondheim that we are attending  in early September.


The system runs on jsp and postgresql and allows user to register, then they receive a password they use to log in. When logged in they enter their name and other info, and can add up to 20 ferrets. Also my friend Anne who organizes the show has a admin page where she can see all users/ferrets, and sorted displays to make it easier to set up the different classes for the show.

Seeing that the ferret system was ready thursday, I got to spend most of this long weekend (Dont have to work monday 12th because of some religion thingy) on my Startrek game.

I debugged the Research system, and had some problems with the object serialization between the server and the client (ObjectOutputStream.writeUnshared() only writes the ROOT object unshared.. I learned that the hard way). I also made the client show a counter that counts to next game turn, a animation that shows while downloading map data, I implemented the Order system, and now it is possible to move a starship.
Below you can see a federation fleet moving to sector 3:7 (the yellow dots show the path) :)

Thursday 22. I will be going to Austria with the people from work, so maybe then I will have the time to implement the build system when there =)

Research done

Wednesday, January 30th, 2008

Today I completely finished the research system of my Star Trek game Trekwar.

Well, I still have to crawl trough memory alpha to get images for all the 65 technologies in the game. but all the code and the GUI is complete:
Trekwar Research view

Next I will make the client download and display the new map / research view each time the server starts a new turn.

After that I will be working on the order system, and doing either the build order system (creating new buildings on planets), or the fleet order system (moving starships, giving attack/colonize orders, etc..). Still LOTS to do, and it feels good to have Research out of the way.

Back from sweden

Monday, January 28th, 2008

I was in Åre Sweden this weekend, on a company excursion by Betradar (where I’m starting work Friday).
Cabin, Sweden

They had rented a large cabin (250 m2), and around 20′ish employees hang out there from Friday to Sunday. I got to meet some of my soon to be coworkers, and I made some progress on my Star Trek Game (Which has kinda been stuck in development hell for the last two years).

Unlike some of my previous code that I have written, coming back to Trekwars (second rewrite I might add) was very pleasant, good planning and Object Oriented Design seems to have paid off :)

I was able to implement the tick/turn system, and did some GUI work on the galaxy view, and halfway implemented the system view and research view. I also worked a bit on the order system, so given a few more hours of development I think I could actually move fleets of ships around :D

Still much work to be done until the game is anywhere near playable

  • Starship pathing algorithm and order system
  • Server data limiting (The client receives a big map ‘the galaxy’ from the server, currently it sends EVERYTHING, but this will have to be changed so that users cant cheat by reading “secret” data. Also by making a custom user copy the server will enable fog of war, and “distort” information in far away areas where sensor strength/resolution is low)
  • Sensor coverage algorithm (got it worked out on paper somewhere)
  • Planet Build systems (halfway done)
  • Combat resolution (ship to ship + ground combat)
  • Colonization and Starbases + Listening posts construction
  • Social tools (ingame mail + chat)
  • Natural phenomena (black holes, neutron stars, nebula, wormholes, etc..)

It was really fun working on the game again, and hopefully I wont shelve it for so long again. Here are some screenshots showing the GUI stuff done this weekend.

Galaxy view – shows the map with systems and starships
Trekwar galaxy

Star system map – Shows details about a star system, panel to build new structures/ships is not implemented yet. BTW those are temporary planet pictures that I drew in ms paint with my laptop touchpad this weekend, I actually think they are kind of cute :)
Trekwar system

Research View – Only just started this, so it just show your current research tree err.. stack :)
Trekwar research