Hi there.
I'm a programmer from Croatia and first of all, a Star Trek lover. ^^
TrashMan forced me to download a demo you've just released there and I was pleasantly surprised & impressed with the first touch quality look of the interface.
Graphics is precise and high resolution, there are no newbie glitches and it all looks quite professional and works fast.

Well, as I've said, I'm a developer myself so, if you have any need for any help there on that area, I could hop in and try to lend a hand there.

Great job guys. Good luck.

Hey there! Welcome to the site!

This is exactly the sort of thing we like to see - people taking the plunge and offering their help. The games are a community effort so the more people from the community that join in, the better.

The demo that you downloaded is a demo of Supremacy - which is being developed by MStrobel. Send him a PM/email detailing exactly what skills you have, or even send him a copy of some of your work.

MStrobel may be able to give you something to do that matches your skills then.

Again, welcome to the site.

Aye, if you have any experience in AI development or 3D tactical combat systems, then those are the areas in which I could use the most help.

I had to force him at gunpoint to D/L the demo, but once he tried it he started drilling me with questions :LOL:

This guy is an ace programmer - I've seen 2-3 of his past 3D engines so he could definately help there

hehehe...our little flock is growing. Soon, we shall be unstoppable!

Well, devatfullspeed, it appears you've been vouched for. You have any interest in working on a 3D tactical combat engine for the game? If you have any experience with managed Direct3D or XNA, that would be ideal. It could be a great excuse to familiarize yourself with the XNA Framework. However, if you're tied down to C++ and unmanaged D3D or OpenGL, I'm sure we could come up with a way to make an external combat engine interface with the rest of the game. Hell, I've been looking for an excuse to play around in C++/CLI. Creating a "bridge" might not be so bad...

Hi there, all.

Well, I don't have much time as Uni is pressing me down and pushing the air outta my lungs, but sure I can get some tens of hours for this.

Shortly, in the past I've been doing some 2D and 3D programming. Well, It was a long time ago while I was 15-18 years and when DirectX 7 and OpenGL 1.0 were top of the line.
ASM/C++ is what I know true and maybe I'm a bit old-school for you.
Well in the past 4 years I've been developing business software in .NET (C#).

Yes, I've downloaded XNA just a week ago, but didn't yet catch time to try it.
I presume Supremacy is being made using XNA?
I promise I'll tryout some XNA this weekend and the week to follow.

When I was planing on doing my game, I mean mine and TrashMans (we were the first in the community to actually start the BOTF2 idea) the plan was to use a fantastic Homeworld engine for tactical combat.
Yes it is pure C, but I think porting it shouldn't be much of a problem yet there.

I also think making it in C++ is a bit of a hassle today. .NET is and hope will fully be crossplatform trough Mono (1.1 already is!) so .NET would be the best choice there.
If you were to develop an old school game engine, well you should have started with SDL/OpenGL back then.

So, thanks for the invite. I will look into XNA and DirectX 9/10(CTP) and check my schedule to see if I have time to fully jump in.

Nice to meet you all.

Actually, the Supremacy core library is written entirely in C# for the .NET Framework 2.0. The graphical client is based on the .NET Framework 3.0 (.NET 2.0 + WinFX). It utilizes the Windows Presentation Foundation (formerly code named "Avalon"), and is written in C# and XAML.

So I'm glad to hear you have experience with C# . I was hoping to use XNA for the combat engine because it is also based on .NET and could therefore integrate well with the rest of the game. I'm not sure yet if it is possible to host an XNA game component inside of a WPF application, but at the very least, I would be able to instantiate it within the same application domain and communicate with it using events and delegates.

Sure.
Could you please say a word about WPF and what is the actual point of it.
I've installed WWF and all that UML code building looks at least odd to me.
I feel much more comfortable in pure code.

Maybe I'm wrong?

Is the nice interface you are using in Supremacy (seen in demo) a product of WPF? How did you set up a resolution perfectly matching my screen?
(1680x1050)

By the way, I do business software including web/intranets so I could jump in for an official site, forum and bug repoting system...
Have a host already.

The beauty of the WPF lies in a couple areas. First, you can build interfaces using a combination of an XML-based language called XAML and your traditional C# backend code. At first, this seems like a strange convention, but it's very well done, and I can't imagine going back to coding with Windows.Forms anymore. If you've worked with ASP.NET, the fundamentals are similar, but the split-code convention is taken to a whole new level (as it doesn't have to meet the restrictions imposed on web applications). Secondly, all elements/controls are completely separate from their visual appearance. They use control templates, usually defined in XAML, to define their appearance. This allows me to create fully customizable interfaces in the game (one for each empire) using standard Windows controls with custom templates applied. I can use a standard button in the UI, apply an LCARS template to it for the Federation interface, another template for the Klingon interface, etc. I can also take advantage of all the predefined layout management panels (like Grids) to make sure the interface scales nicely at any resolution (including widescreen resolutions).

So yes, the nice UI you see in the Supremacy demo is a product of the WPF .

As for a site, I'm not terribly good about updating the game's current site, and these forums work just fine (everyone involved with BotF2 already knows where they are). I use Microsoft Team Foundation Server for source control, which also creates a SharePoint site for the project, including discussion boards and bug tracking. It's actually pretty slick. I appreciate the offer of help on the web front, but I'm pretty well set for now.

No problem, sounds good.
May I ask what happened to core DirectX and how did you make the actual grid rendering?
=
I've checked a bit on the Net but it's a lot of info, tuts and videos to eat That's why I ask you to get a picture of it all.
Sorry if I'm boring.

Ask all the questions you want--I'll do my best to give you answers, but as you've noticed, there's a lot of info out there, and it's all still fairly new to me too.

I created a custom WPF control (all programmatic in C#) to display the galaxy grid, handle related input, and do sector-by-sector scrolling. If you want to install the new Windows SDK for .NET 3.0 and the Visual Studio Orcas Extensions, I can provide you with a snapshot of the source code. The UI code is kind of a mess at the moment...almost embarassingly so...but it'll give you an idea of how this stuff works.

DirectX still exists and is still likely to be used by most game studios. XNA replaced the Managed DirectX library that used to ship with the DirectX SDK. The WPF's composition engine is based on Direct3D, so almost all drawing operations are fully hardware accelerated (assuming the hardware supports them). All the graphics are scalable vector-based geometry that get tessellated into 3D geometry under the hood. It's pretty damned cool.

I have a little AI experience in school. Far more theoretical than practical. Would that be helpful? (Intellegent Agent, Expert System, Artificial Personality)

Pardon me ,
I'm not trying to get off topic, but I want to learn all this program stuff you all keep talking about. Just someone point me in the right direction and toward the "learn this for Dummies" section!

I'm trying to learn CSS right now, but it is not making much sence to me..

Well can you programm neural networks and use LISP?

OK, I'll install it today.

Btw, make sure you update the project to work with UTF-8. I've tried localization to Croatian, but it fails to render diachritics.

Winterhawk: It's great if you want to learn programming. Just be aware that it is not exactly a straightforward proposition. You'll have to learn the fundamentals first, which will be the same in pretty much any programming language. Specifically, you'll want to focus on the concepts of Object-Oriented Programming and Object-Oriented Design. You'll have to learn the individual languages that you wish to use. You'll also need a primer on some of the basics of Computer Science (common algorithms and whatnot). I have a rather large collection of e-Books, so I'll see if I can dig some up for you.

sblewett, you probably have about the same level of theoretical experience that I do. I think I may create a wiki for this game, and we could discuss AI ideas on there.

devatfullspeed, do you know of a way to convert an entire solution? I'm not sure what encoding VS2005 uses by default? I would hope it's UTF-8, though I'm afraid it may not be. However, if I have to convert the solution, it would take a while to do as individual files (there are a lot of files).

I think it should be done by just editing application configuration file. Maybe a problem rizes from the font you are using out there, but fonts can be made i hope.
If the font supports it, then it is just a matter of editing configuration.

I thought you were referring to the source code files, not the application itself. The application should definitely be unicode.

I'd assume you'd put the wiki on your supremecy site? I'm eager to help. And I've a few ideas after watching/playing the original game.

If you need someone to beta-read it for you, let me know.

Hmm maybe the font doesn't have our characters. Please provide me with the font list which you use so maybe a friend of mine, designer can upgrade.

Maybe we can find unicode versions of the fonts used.

The game uses three font families, all from Bitstream: Square 721, Swiss 721, and Swiss 911.

Be interested myself in the AI wiki, though i'am currently stuck doing genetic algorithms at the moment, not much help on the AI front i've got some experience in the other fields and to be honest i should brush up

Regards Wolfe

Well atm translations can use English only chars ))

Btw I'm extensively testing XNA. In a week or so I will have a firm grasp of it.

I'm curious as to what you are doing and/or refering to in learning these technologies. Are there tutorials you are looking at? What projects are you creating to test the technologies?

Probably my biggest handicap in learning languages is figuring out where to start and coming up with a problem that I actually care to work on so that I'll actually do it as opposed to postponing it endlessly.

Well, I would lie if I would say it's an easy go, but it's not as hard as you might think.
You need to start slowly because when learning programming, learning basics and theory must not be skipped, otherwise you can't progress,

You should start by reading 2-3 books on general programming, then 5-10 books on advanced topics and technology and tehniques you are interested in.

I'm fully versed in C++ and VB. For my job, I am drowned in SQL scripts and write/debug them (along with VB code) daily. I've also done more LISP than I care for, as well as doing straight C, Java, HTML/XHTML, and possibly one or two things I'm missing. To cap it all, I have a BS in Computer Science.

However, attempting to adjust to new languages seem to be more challenging for me than I'd really like to admit. I find technical resources such as MSDN insufficient in learning new things and I really require a good simplified resource to get my bearings before I can branch out into more technical sources. This was the problem I had while learning LISP. I found the definitions confusing, and I often needed to re-read 20, 30 times and ask outside help to get a firm grasp on things. For example, I learned most of my OpenGL from an online website that had very simple tutorials that went step by step in the code, as opposed to simply stating a general overview and giving technical definitions of the functions. I think the website was Xene or something (I can look it up after lunch).

Great. Sounds you could shift fast. Well, I also find resources on DirectX, especially managed, rather scarse...

Azhdeen, most of what I know about working with the WPF is based on the documentation and samples that ship with the Windows SDK. There are also some cool video tutorials on MSDN Channel9.

Managed DX resources are rather scarce. Fortunately, the new APIs for XNA are pretty intuitive. There's also a couple projects out there to look at (like Xna5D) with full source available.

http://nehe.gamedev.net/

Very awesome OpenGL source for learning how to program OpenGL applications. This was way better than anything from my text book, Nate Robbins, or some of the other popular sources. My OpenGL class, in general, sucked and I didn't learn very much from it. Suffice it to say that I was able to program a very sweet-looking Rubix Cube with lighting, multiple textures, dimensions, translation, zoom, but all I could do was rotate the entire cube; I never managed to figure out how to rotate just a single side.

PM me some of the sources you use to learn these technologies. I'd like to look at them when I get the chance (I don't know when that will be, though).