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Aethelwulffe
USA
1782 Posts |
 Posted - 16 Apr 2010 : 20:44:18
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Exactly.
While version Beta 8 is in the works tonight working on some RPG stuff, B7 is a pretty darn good VECTOR version. If you knew about this problem...well, bug reports ARE nice  |
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Aethelwulffe
USA
1782 Posts |
Posted - 20 Apr 2010 : 04:59:56
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Version Beta 11, officially called "New Horizons"...
MAJOR GREAT IMROPVEMENTS!
Previous versions would take about 55 seconds to load. This version takes about 20 seconds. The executable itself now handles compiled resources in a different fashion. As yet more resources are also exported as external files, the load speed will continue to improve. As this is such a drastic update, playtesting reports would be appreciated more than usual. i have play-tested it some at this point, and I am sure multiplayer and some new features are all working nicely. I will be removing the IPX network feature next...and I don't believe it will be missed. |
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Aethelwulffe
USA
1782 Posts |
Posted - 26 Apr 2010 : 04:14:29
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Here is what the game does:
Play space combat with custom or pre-made scenarios, solo or multiplayer.
Play a solo RPG campaign. In Campaign mode, you can travel by ship to any system/planet in the frontier, and land there or on space stations. You can salvage destroyed ships, buy and sell cargo and possessions, customize or even build a new ship etc. You can buy and use any standard SF equipment (only weapons, defenses, medkit, and a few other things finished, still need scanners and lots of very small equipment). You can currently rent an Explorer and drive it around. You can roam the countryside endlessly. No matter how far you go, terrain will be created for your wandering pleasure. This terrain will ALWAYS be identical/repeatable every visit You can lift off from (or in your ship's shuttle), travel to different planets in the frontier.
CAMPAIGN MODE GAME "room" ORGANIZATION
Utility Level:
Character sheet- (room name= Charactersheet) This is where you start the campaign mode, creating, loading, examining characters. You can return to it by using the <HOME> key during play, then return to your game. NOTES: The interface still needs work and playtesting. The background should be replaced by background elements that are located on the screen to fit the screen's resolution. Character inventory should be displayed as well.
Starmap- (room name= room_navigation) During play, use the <END> key to reach it. This shows all the stars in the Frontier. NOTES: This will be developed into a guide with system information pop-ups and diagrams. It will also be a "travel log" showing where you have been, what trade goods prices are in that location, and any quest info you have gained.
Top Level:
System Nav Screen- (room name= room_system_nav) This screen displayes the Star system the character is currently in, as well as the character's ship location. Also displayed are "Jump Vectors" to nearby systems. In this screen, the player can manuver his ship to a planet in the system, or (if he has enough fuel) head out on a jump vector to another star. NOTES: Depending on the character's "location", when this room starts, it will create the appropriate star in the room. The star then creates instances of the object called "planetpip" and scales them as well as giving them the names and other variables they need. When the ship collides with the planetpip object at an appropriate speed, the planetpip will set variables to create a room with the appropriate planet and or stations, and runs a script to create ships that are in the area of that planet. The screen then shifts to the environs of that particular planet.
Second Level:
Planetary environs- (room name= room_Battle) This screen is where space battles are fought in the campaign mode. There will typically be a planet or free-orbit station in this room, and random ships will be created here. Different planets have different possible combinations of ship factions (Civillian, UPF, Pirate, or Sathar) present and in differing proportions. You are not likely to see Pirates around Gran Quivera, and you are not likely to see UPF at Volturnus...though it could happen.
Third Level:
Third Level consists of objects that you contact in room_Battle to go to different location, the following are objects, not themselves rooms
Stations-
Darkworld Station and Planeron: (no rooms yet) These are currenly just enemy stations. They won't shoot at a civilian ship unless attacked, but they will probably launch pirate ships which will attack you. They need to be modified so that under some conditions (especially if the character turns pirate) you can visit them. They currently do not have rooms "in" the station, and you cannot dock with them.
UPF Civillian Station: (room name= room_Clarion_Station and others) You can dock with this station by slowing down and keeping your ship in contact with it for a couple of seconds. It will take it's name from the nearest planet, but has no random content, or other differentiation depending on it's location as yet. Content will have to be added to it to make it interesting. When you exit the station, it knows what planet environs to put you in. At the station you can go to a bar (nothing really to do there yet), an exchange to buy and sell cargo (just started working on that, functions, but crude) a ship construction center (also crude but functional) a central concourse (boring, but looks pretty neat as a start), and the dock where your ship is at. Elevators/doors still need work here, as two methods or room transition are used. Currenly some doors require you to stand in front of them for a period of time and then they ask you if you want to "leave the area". I need to make it so the character enters a doorway or airlock and the transition is instant, maybe with a little animation.
Planets-
Gas Giants- (no rooms) You can crash into them orbit them, and some ships with atmospheric engines can even enter their atmosphere, but you can't land on them.
Terrestrial Planets (various rooms)- Terrestrial planets can be landed on by flying over them at a speed of less than 4, and slowing to a near stop. Currenlty, each planet has only one landing zone. Eventually, you will be able to land at a choice of landing zones (different towns/settings) or even anywhere in the random terrain.
Fourth Level:
Landing Zones- (various rooms) These are rooms where the character's ship can land. Eventually it will be a wider choice, but currently is consists of the docking room for the space staion, and one room on each planet. Some of the landing zones are "populated" with buildings, others are incomplete or completely empty. Hakosoar has an extended multi-room landing zone, with seperate rooms for buildings, and a "beach" area where you might find some test enemies to fight. The beach are is the location you can leave to go into random countryside on Hako.
There are two types of landing zones: Rural and Urban.
Fifth Level:
Rural Terrain- (room name= room_Randomterrain) Each planet has a script for it's random terrain, specifying what terrain tiles and objects to use for that planet, or area of a planet. The random seed is set to a factor of the landing zone's location number and the x/y grid value of the direction the character is from the landing zone. Rural terrain will be a hodgepodge of trees, rocks, critters etc... The terrain script can be set for special circumstances. If the character is on a quest and has certain variables (PUZZLE1-20) at certain values, encounters can be created in the script to support the storyline. The terrain can also be "mapped" so as to use differnt variables depending on the location. On Volturnus, for example, if your character's GRID_Y value is greater than 2, you will enter the Bacharanda Forest. Up North you will run into lava fields. NOTE: only a bit of customization has been done, and just for testing purposes.
Urban Terrain- (room name= room_Randomcity) Functions same as above, but creates a smallish city block with buildings. I am working on this currently. The doors in buildings are supposed to appear in random locations, and the script may not be complete enough to work (I am tweaking with it and have not tested since tweaking). I still need to create random store contents so that the character can wander about for hours searching for somewhere to buy vitasalt pills. Urban rooms (like rural ones) will need random encounters, special rooms at certain locations, and random NPC's wandering the streets. We will also need random vehicle traffic, and perhaps overhead monorails and aircars flying overhead.
Notes: Eventually, ships and air vehicles will scale down as they raise in altitude, and we will be able to fly over randomterrain or even use some vehicles (like the monorail) to take characters to specific locations without the intervening "travel" (add cutscenes here).
....next editon of "how the game works" will concern how objects/object parents interact, as well as how things like combat, inventory objects, vehicle driving, car rentals, cargo etc... all work.
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Terl Obar
USA
898 Posts |
Posted - 26 Apr 2010 : 19:36:36
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Art, this would be a good item to place on the wiki. You could create a top level New Horizons Video Game page and then link in all the instruction and descriptions in child pages. That way you can edit as needed to keep it up to date and cross link things as well.
And I did get your message about the repository and I'm working on it. |
To err is human, to really screw things up you need a computer.
Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network |
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Aethelwulffe
USA
1782 Posts |
Posted - 26 Apr 2010 : 20:45:13
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You are right. I need to do that and dedicate some real time to the Wiki.
Nifty thing about GM8: Version, update patches and all that are handled internally now. You just export the chunks you worked on. It still needs external version logging I think, but this cuts file size way down. That really helps being that neither of our servers are speed demons on the upload. |
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Aethelwulffe
USA
1782 Posts |
Posted - 12 Jul 2010 : 17:30:40
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OK,
Looks like some minimum content has been made for all 26 inhabited Frontier Worlds. There are some 120 different planets, and all the inhabited worlds have endless terrain (meaning you can travel forever on them)with each and every area you enter being unique. I am adding some new stuff like different types of merchants, random enemies out in the hinterlands, and some nice contributed/conceived mini scenarios. I still want to include a random lair system for entering buildings, complexes, caves, ships etc... but things are looking really nice these days!. July 13th version B-40 will be uploaded right before I go on vacation to California. |
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Aethelwulffe
USA
1782 Posts |
Posted - 08 Aug 2010 : 22:14:24
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OK OK OK OK...finally posted an update.
We have a new look, and some contributions in this update (Beta 60). It's playable, and the manual if far more complete. The downside is that it went from being a 30 meg download to a 50+. More good news is that the network is now running better (which is irrelevant when 30 people are downloading stuff all at once!) |
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Mane Man
United Kingdom
36 Posts |
Posted - 09 Aug 2010 : 16:18:17
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Nice new look fellow!
First bug report:
I landed on Gran Quivera, and I met up with my first NPC (named "Terl Obar" BTW, does this mean that I shall encounter a Parriah and a Shadow Shack as well?). Back on topic, I had landed, then moved out of the landing barrier enclosures. I could not see the NPC when he introduced himself, but later (after joining) he moved out of the landing pad barriers and then I could see him. That was a bit confusing to say the least.
Second bug report: I just exited a mercantile in Gran Quivera (Port Loren I assume)and I saw a hoverbike that was stopped half-way atop another car. Most of the time they stop properly, but sometimes they go a bit too far. The rest of the vehicles seem to behave. On a side note, the vehicle sounds for the Air-car are quite nice, but some of the ground vehicles are annoying. The hovercraft might sound better with a nice whooshing of air instead.
Non-bug input:
I have a lot of trouble chasing down the hulks of ships I find/destroy to salvage them. Often they are just traveling too fast to catch before they exit the screen. Perhaps there might be some sort of option to catch up with them (as tractor beams are probably out of the question). Perhaps instead or in addition to this, It would be nice to be able to find asteroids to mine in the solar system view. Mayhap a ring of asteroids in orbit? Maybe just some hidden spots on the screen where you can encounter some asteroids or random ship encounters away from planets? I understand that ships might have too high of a relative speed in interplanetary space to interact meaningfully, but an "endless" area in which to search or fight would be really nice.
On the same note, some mining equipment, or perhaps some specialized exploration equipment would be a fun addition in which to mine or explore those minor planets and asteroids. I would also like to be able to jump to off-chart systems to do the same.
Noticeable improvements in this version: The character sheet, main screen, ship outfitting dock, and goods exchange are all far far better. I like the changes to the inventory display and lots of other stuff too. Everything looks much more professional. The cities are much more interesting (though still a bit bland "out in town") and have a far greater variety of looks and styles.
Notes on my play (in case it helps).
I havn't found any way to make money by collecting items from random encounters on the planet, or any missions (I assume that is still in the works, as there is nothing in the documentation to support such functions. I can't figure out if it is possible to sell items to a merchant.
If a bad guy dies in water, his weapon seems to float on top, even if he sinks below the surface. I think this is perhaps a good thing for me!
I made my first money by picking up salvage after a space-station shot a pirate assault scout. I used that to buy a cheap cargo, which I sold at a loss (i wasn't paying attention to the exchange rate!). I have noticed that prices are different in different places.
After selling at a loss, I used the credit to buy better engines for my Research scout. I figured out how to re-name her as well. I could then catch up to ship debris much quicker, and started making a lot more money. About the third time I upgraded my ship, I came back to the dock and found out I had an Assault Scout! I guess my ship got too big for the old frame.
I sold my ship after playing for about 3 hours. I backed up my character save file, for which I was grateful. I bought a ship with no atmospheric capability, but also did not buy a shuttle for it. I tried to land at first, and blew up on the planet. After restoring my save file from the backup, I then looked at the documentation, discovered I needed to hit "L" while in orbit. I did that and it told me I needed to dock with a space station or send out a distress call. I found no way of doing that without a shuttle. I restored again, and then bought a shuttlecraft for my ship. Afterwards, i could launch it to land on the planet or to dock.
After working all that out, I concentrated on buying engines and cargo space. That let me catch up with salvage created by fights I came upon, with room to hold all the salvage. It was a good scheme. I later increased my radar and energy sensor range until I could tell what was going on anywhere on the map. I made quite a lot of cash until I got greedy and tried to salvage some ships while there was a pirate frigate still in the area. I was chasing down the cargo when the frigate's missiles caught up with me and ended my career. I had not backed up my file for a while, and found no way to dock once I was in the "escape pod". I assumed at that point that my character was really dead. |
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Aethelwulffe
USA
1782 Posts |
Posted - 11 Aug 2010 : 07:38:10
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Thanks Bro!
That helped.
I am adding some new stuff and fixing a little bo-bo in the legacy code as well. Apparently, after some re-arrangement of object indexes, when a Sathar ship or pirate ship got destroyed that did NOT have a Gauss screen, the ship would try to delete the gauss screen without it being there, and the program looked for the first object index and deleted it. Previously, that object might have been the sound module, so it went un-noticed, but now it defaulted to the ship controller object. That meant that you didn't get the victory screen, and you couldn't use the backspace button to go to the main menu or use the home key to re-start the battle.
Anywho, slated for the next release:
1. I have added a nifty new vehicle I call the "Hoverbug" for the obvious reasons.
2. I also added an infirmary to the space station. i have fixed some issues with changing from one character to another as well.
3. I also addressed a screen resolution issue. I fixed resolution for small screens long ago, but recently pumped up my screen resolution to max and found that I had a few problems with big screens (namely in rooms that need to display sidebar views). We are good up to 2880x1440 resolution right now, and I am trying to decide if supporting larger resolutions is worth it, or if I should just warn the player and offer to re-set their resolution temporarily.
4. I changed the scenario creator background to one that is drawn on the fly vs. a background image. Looks about the same, and uses less texture memory/file size.
5. Adding "Your dead" code. now it will play a bad guy victory march, then (hopefully) take you to the character sheet.
6. Added more code to non-coms that happen to be merchants. They should now turn to face you, talk to you a bit better etc... I havn't figured out how I want to work the "sell items" interface. I am tempted to just let you try to drop the item on the person you want to sell it to to start a dialog. Items that someone might buy now have a permanent price coded in.
7. Doors in the Station are now different. First, the north and south doors are just wrap-arounds that take you back north end to south end as you traverse the circle. Eventually, the size may expand, and there will be different sections of the main hallway that each have unique content. The five (out of six) active side elevator airlocks now take you to the spacer bar, your shuttle dock, Sick Bay, the commodities exchange, and the Shipyard bay. I will add a sixth as the airlock to ships that dock without using a shuttle (as indicated by Mane Man).
8. More text and display improvements have been made here and there.
9. Problems that come up with inventories (and whole characters) after loading a new character in mid-game are (hopefully) fixed.
10 Added more civilian freighter options, and adjusted scaling/HP etc...
The beat goes on. |
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Aethelwulffe
USA
1782 Posts |
Posted - 13 Aug 2010 : 06:25:57
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Version 2B70
Very functional. This is the first time I personally have "enjoyed" playing the RPG portion. Items are more functional. You can buy and sell. Interfaces and options are cleaned up so much I don't recognize them anymore. You can find random encounters to pick fights with in many places, conduct commerce, etc.
Things you might notice in this version:
1. You no longer have to shoot or click on the feet of a character to interact with them.
2. Resolutions up to 2880X1440 max proportions are fully supported (Large resolutions did not show inventory bar in some views previously). Larger x,y sizes will work for the most part, but some areas might have a problem viewing the side-bars in the random cityscapes.
3. Combat is fully functional, but weapon damage to vehicles is turned off for development testing purposes. This means you can rent a Rover, run around Hakosaur looking for Sathar to run over and they can't hurt you!
4. Stunned characters do not drop their active items yet, but dead characters do.
5. You can buy multiples of items. I havn't turned on a "move multiple items" function so that you can move a whole stack to a different inventory slot, but that will be soon.
6. Dropped items have names (descriptions) and no longer show "0" as their description.
7. You can now move used items that have a value less than 1 without them either being deleted or "re-charged" to full value.
8. Merchants can discuss anything in their stock with you. Other folks can converse on other subjects important on the Frontier.
9. No non-combatants except for the humans currently move out of your way (development state).
10. People you are talking to now face the character. Merchants pay more attention to you.
11. Robots are starting to appear (other than Bender).
12. Enemies are now far more accurate than before. Your character can get stunned or die.
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Aethelwulffe
USA
1782 Posts |
Posted - 21 Aug 2010 : 06:34:57
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Version 2B80
Decided to make sure I am updating and archiving every tenth saved version.
New Things:
New link to a separate manual in .pdf:
http://starfrontiers.org/thefrontier/download/Frontier%20Survival%20Manual.pdf
1. Hopefully, very large and fairly small screens(800x600, certainly 1024/768) can use this version. The recent changes to help the really big resolutions apparently trashed some things for small resolutions, so I just completely changed some parts of the game.
2. Scenario editor might be easier to use for small screens (adjusted the pan feature).
3. Jumps between solar systems are now done in a rather different way, as has the system nav screen. You now have a much larger play area on the system nav screen, a HUD display showing the various available jump vectors.
4. After a jump, approach vectors to the destination star will seem proportioned and accurate.
5. The Star Chart has completely re-worked and is now perfectly compliant with the original Alpha Dawn star chart.
6. Download is now smaller, thanks mostly to including only an .odt version of the manual. I have provided a link to a .pdf version of the manual, and it is both more complete and a more compact .pdf (4mb vs 7mb) as well. Total game package is 47.6mb |
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Star Frontiers: New Horizons development
