Moved EVERYTHING to my new website!

I have moved all the development and everything and such to my new website! Please go there for further updates!

http://www.tcgm.gatecrafters.net

See you there!

StarGen v2 and GalDisplay WIP

Quickdate (Star System Permutation Generator)

So hi. I've finished my random star system generator. It currently spits out enough information for me to render out a galaxy map (will do that tomorrow, I think), but I ran the possible number of different star system names through a combinations calculator. This is the number it spit out:

33900

GOOD LUCK SEEING ALL THOSE SYSTEMS IN ONE GAME!

And even better is the fact that for every single name added to the StarNames.txt file (you'll see this in the tech demo), 12 more system possibilities are added!

FotP Star Name Generator WIP

VERY, VERY WIP Star Name Generator.

Quickdate (Terraforming)

Terraforming will be a feature in FOTP! You'll be able to take nearly inhospitable planets and turn them into colonies. Their population and some other stuff will depend on their Life Suitability Index (LSI) which will be calculated using stuff. And things. And magic cat videos.

Star Suitability Stuff

So, my previous post dealt with the ability of the engine to generate and render star systems, both in the star system itself and the galaxy map. This post is a list of the star types, how many planets they can have, what suitability those planets are and what the mineral suitability is.

NOTE: These are definitely subject to chance, especially if someone with more sciency knowledge of stars and their planets corrects me.

Quickdate (Galaxy Generation and Planet Count)

Hey All,

I know you haven't heard from me in a while. Still here. Anyways, the little amount of work I got done on FOTP during these last couple of months involved galaxy generation (creating a galaxy's worth of random generating planets) and saving these to files.

So.....

The results from the numerous tests I've run basically say this;
1. Galaxies can contain up to 1 million planetary entries before lagging.
2. A 10,000 planet galaxy (using all the numerous fields I have now for generation) takes around 10 seconds to generate.
3. Any given solar system takes under a second to load up and display, no lag.
4. Each solar system takes up around 250kbs (I save them to text files for further loading).

So yeah, kind of ridiculous. Either way, the galaxy is going to be a LOT more populated.

Quickdate (Quick Update)

So, before I head off to school this morning, I just wanted to post something.

Except now that I'm in the blogspot interface, I can't remember what.

Oh yeah! It's highly likely that heavy development of FotP will not begin until summer starts for me, a time when I will have (hopefully) unlimited amounts of time! That's only 7 Mondays away. Either way, a classmate and I are currently creating a game called GlueWheast for chemistry, and as such, my game dev'ing time is taken up by that. The assignment is due in 2 weeks though, so don't worry about it cutting into FotP. Either way, it's great coding practice for me, gives me a break from FotP, and I'm also training myself to use the ClassGUI system. You'd think that since I created it, I'd automatically know how to use it; wrong on all accounts! I have created many breakthrough systems inside spurts of insomnia and deliriousness! None of which I knew how to use until I tried truly implementing them into a game, of course.

Enough rambling, stay tuned!

ClassGUI Engine Finished!

The major thing which has been holding me up this entire time has been my desire to create a class-based GUI engine, and get it damn near perfect. I've finally done so. I can begin working on the other code areas of the game. I've been looking into making the planet curve on the horizon, so that it looks real.

Flight of the Precursors Tech Demo v1!

Out Now!

Download Here!

Star System WIP Video

Beginnings of the Story

The Sa-Matra was destroyed in 2158 by Zelnick Rezal, your father, the Hero of the Alliance of Free Stars. He and your mother, Talana Iriel, quickly married and had a child afterwards. Zelnick and Talana are retired, and have left their legacy to you; Jamy Rezal, captain of the first Earth starship blended with Precursor technology, the Procyon. It is July 16th, 2180, and the Procyon is finally completed. Her maiden voyage is to take place in under an hour, and everything needed is on board. Her crew is the most capable the Alliance can muster, and is a feat of engineering to behold. The Chmmr on Earth Starbase are a little restless, and cannot explain it; they feel a disturbance in the force, but this is not going to delay the launch. You say goodbye to your parents, who wish you luck; you transport over to the Procyon.

The Alliance of Free Stars has spent the last 22 years rebuilding after the events of the Ur-Quan invasion, but Earth got back on it’s feet incredibly quickly. The new questions on everyone’s minds are “What are the rainbow worlds for? Why do they point toward the galactic core?” The Procyon is the first starship capable of reaching the inner sector, as all previous ships were torn asunder by the gravitational forces of the Galactic Singularity at the center of the Milky Way. The mission you now embark upon is to find the Precursors; to trace their path to the galactic core, to find them!

The Procyon slides out of space dock, ready to take on the universe. All is well until you enter Hyperspace. The second you do, however, you lose control of the ship! The Precursor circuits have taken over, and have plotted a new course! The Procyon is headed for the exact center of the sector!

Once you arrive there, nothing appears on sensors. The Precursor circuits have rescinded their control of the ship back to your crew, except for the engines. You appear to be adrift in space. There is no star here, there are no planets. The area of space is literally a dead zone. Your sensor officer pipes up; something is showing up on the sensors! It appears to be an endpoint of a quantum singularity; A wormhole has opened up! The wormhole envelops the Procyon, and you hurtle toward the center of the galaxy...

TO
BE
CONTINUED

Still Here

Alright, I know I haven't posted in a while. Don't scream vaporware! I still exist, and so does FotP. School got hectic, and I got sick a couple times. So, I haven't gotten much work done. However, what I did do it to write a parser for XML to direct in-game GUI elements. I hope, when complete, this will allow an unprecedented amount of control over the GUI. I've also been implementing the options engine, which does a lot of stuff. You can nearly control the entire game from the options menu, disabling secondary abilities, changing flare color, and more. There will also be a "TotalBiscuit" options mode, with everything you can possibly change in a list for you to modify. Because, you know, he LOVES options.

GUI WORKS!!!!

THE GUI WORKS!

Thanks to the helpful members of the GMC (Game Maker Community), the GUI problem has been solved!

For those who are programatically inclined, I forgot to initialize the variables that the for loops used in all the GUI scripts.

Anyways, here's a screenshot of the WIP Options menu:

Super Melee Camera

Just a quick update from me today; I have the camera system for the Super Melee gametype working. It zooms in and out according to how far away the ships are, and can support up to 8 ships!

Also, the blue screenshots problem has been confirmed as a Game Maker: Studio bug, and will be fixed soon. I hope.

 

GUI sucks

I am currently majorly stuck on a code block. The modular GUI (goo-ey) engine I have written is deciding to screw with me, only rendering some elements and crashing if I have too many. So... yeah. That's that. Still trying to crack the secret code. Just a little update!

Main Menu and Loading Screen WIP Video

Orz Nemesis WIP

The Orz Nemesis is fully modeled, I just need to texture it. I think it came out the best of any of the ships I've done so far.

Star System Random Generation

Just a quick update, but I don't have a screenshot for it.

I've begun work on the random generation code for solar systems. In the UQM, I believe (may be wrong) that all the solar systems are static, and do not randomly generate. Either way, FotP will have random generated star systems, based upon all the stuff we know about how star systems form (Goldilocks zone, suitability, solar radiation, etc). The code currently generates a star system, then saves it to a file for later reading.

I'm also contemplating adding in a "Ironman" option to the game, which is basically an autosave like the game XCOM: Enemy Unknown has; turning the game into a rougelike (you can't load a previous save if you screw something up). But like any option, it will be OPTIONAL.

Minimap, GUI, Screenshots

Hey! Haven't posted for a couple days. Anyways, I'm currently experimenting with dynamic, actively-created GUI (vs most games which use sprites for their GUI). The only thing it contains currently is a window with a title bar and a shadow. I've also implemented a screenshot system which takes a screenshot and puts it in the /Screenshots folder, however, it currently produces blue-shifted pictures for some reason. Anyways, the below image is taken from ingame, no windows snipping tool required!

Oh, and there's a minimap too.

Also, Dunii_Darkhand of the UQM forums has created a lot of terrain files for the game! The "terran" planet in the screenshot below is his doing.