I just tried the new galaxy map, but I have to say that I could not feel a big difference between the 2 versions.
IMO the initial delay after the first click stayed about the same but after that the delay got a little smaller.

So if I just click on one system, then I have to wait for about 15sec (the PC is calculating something, altough the star system has already appeared onscreen) and from then on everything runs quite smoothly.

I hope the game is developing well, because I can't wait to move my Warbirds on this beautiful map.

whoelse

The initial delay is caused by your the game loading and caching all of the planet textures and atmospheres. It *should* be doing that when the game starts, but it doesn't seem to work that way. Oh well. As long as each subsequent click isn't too laggy, then I think I'll just declare victory and move on .

Only thing i find wrong with it is that its increased my excitment levels quite a bit again

Since I had to reformat my computer, i'm installing the WinFX Runtime components again. Once that's done, i'll test the update, MStrobel.

You might want to think about editing your first post and including the update in that. I only noticed your update post because I went back a page, and I imagine there will be people who won't think of doing that.

*Edit - my god! The improvement is unbelieveable, MStrobel! it now takes about 6 seconds for the program to load initially, and every system click - including the first one - is now instantaneous!

You've definitely solved the loading problems with this update!

Nice one!

Sweet. Initial post link updated.

Just tried this and it works perfectly on my system:

A64 3800 X2
1 Gb DDR 400
GeForce 6200
Dual 1280x1024 Displays


Worked at lightning speed and looks great! I can't wait for the full release!

I am quite pleased with it and had no problems viewing it at all. (I followed the instructions to the letter)
It did seem just a tish slow loading, but, that's no biggie.
Now, being the nitpicker I am, I was wondering if Star systems that are KNOWN to have inhabitants will be set up that way? Or at least the planets be as they are suppose to be, such as Class M.
I noticed that Sigma Iotia only had 5 planets (suppose to have And that Sigma Iotia II should be Class M and inhabited.
I thought the Moons were a nice touch as well, but unsure as to whether a class M should have any more than 2. Seems like overkill to me. Just an opinion, nothing more.
Well, there's my whopping two cents worth!

Thanks for the feedback, jadriel. At the moment, there are no populations anywhere in the galaxy. This test is only intended to test my galaxy grid control and view the star and planet distributions. The number and sizes of moons are based on probabilities defined in a table, so those can (and will) be tweaked at some point in the future.

Cheers,
Mike

Looks Great and it worked fine looking forward to the game release

I Must have winfx
It looks good
respect

I have a Athlon 1600+
GForce ti200
512 ddr
win sp2
Sound Blaster 5.1
fsb 200mhz

Thank you, kind sirs .

Hi

It looks good..

My system:
MSI kt6v-lsr
Geforce fx5600
AMD Barton 2500+
768 ddr Ram (512+256)

Win XP sp2 1280x960

8O works well

Tested out the map...

Here are my thoughts/observations/suggestions:

First of all, it looks really good at this stage!

1. I think it would be a nice touch to animate the stars in the "system window" were you can see the planets. The planets rotate very nicely.
2. Along the same lines, might be very cool to add a little animation to the asteroid fields for that extra touch.
3. In the main starfield, I think some nebulae should take up more than one sector. I think that would make the map look better. I don't know if this is possible or not while making it look clean and sharp.
4. The moon graphics... it's awesome that we have moons on some planets. With that said, I think it would be good to have several moon "types" as all moons do not look like ours. Jupiter's moons all are very unique! Perhaps the moons can be smaller versions of some of the planets (icy moons, terran moons, volcanic, etc...).
5. I felt the map was too crowded. I feel as though increasing the map size and letting the star density decrease accordingly would be good.

I'd be more than happy to discuss these with you in further detail.

Thanks!

I can look into this. The problem is, I'm not much of an artist, and I have little knowledge of the 3D graphics effects that would be necessary to make this look very good. I agree that the static images seem out of place next to the rotating planets.
One step ahead of you. I have a 256-frame animation of the asteroid field (courtesy of the FreeOrion project), but I need to figure out the best way to display it. I'll need to maintain transparency, so I'm not sure if there are any video formats that I can use. I may have to come up with a sprite-based animation system for this. For the moment, it's on the back burner.
Yes, I agree this would be a nice feature, but it makes things much easier if celestial bodies only take up one sector. I've heard this suggestion before, and I haven't ruled it out entirely, but I'm not making any promises either .
Having different moon environments would be a nice feature, but it would be too costly to the size of the game state. Right now, I can pack the number and sizes of moons into a single value for each planet. To have multiple environments for each moon, I'd have to represent each moon as an individual entity in the universe with a few different properties. When you consider that a universe may have hundreds of star systems, with several planets, each of which with the potential for up to 5 moons, you can see how the amount of space required to store that information would grow very quickly. I'm already trying very hard to reduce the amount of information stored in the game state so that each client won't have to download a ton of new data during each turn (which would slow turn processing down considerably for multiplayer games). The other nice aspect to the current implementation of moons is that once colonized, they yield a max population increase that is the same for every race in the game. If you had moon environments, then those would have to be taken into consideration along with each race's environmental preferences, which needlessly complicates matters. I think this is one instance in which realism needs to be compromised for the sake of gameplay. As you said, just having moons at all is an improvement.

As for different shapes of moons, Matress_of_Evil made this same suggestion, and I haven't ruled it out. I tend to think that uniform moon shapes makes the moon display cleaner. It's not really meant to be a realistic representation of the moons. It's more of a "tally" that quickly tells you how many moons a planet has, and what their sizes are (which affects the population potential).
I have this feeling as well. The galaxy generators aren't finalized, and I need to go back and tweak them a bit. For the moment, though, I'm just satisfied that they work.

Thanks for the constructive feedback. If you have any other comments or suggestions, please feel free to post them.

No problem... Glad to have helped.

I realize that some of the things I suggested were without thought to state size, complexity, etc. Just wanted to throw some things out there that I thought would be neat.

Curiously... as far as the moons go, how many values are you currently using to represent the moons as-is?

For the Nebulas, maybe one way to do it, and I'm no programming wiz, is to take a picture and divide it up into sections the size of sectors and assign that image to a respective sector in the map. I'm sure there'd probably be issues with sectors only having partial nebula image, though, and I'm not knowledgable enough to know how big of a problem that would be.

Looking forward to more progress!

It's hard to account for all of the complexities of game development. I always like to see people contribute ideas. Even if they're not workable, they sometimes spark debate, and every once in a while I get proven wrong about something. It's also good to see some activity in this forum. I'm much more motivated to work on the project when I think people are actually paying attention and breathing down my neck .

Good question. I actually had to go back and check . Currently, all moon data for a single planet is packed into a 16-bit unsigned short integer (2 bytes). The first three bits indicate the number of moons, and the bottom 10 bits indicate the size of each moon (2 bits per moon, up to 5 moons). If I wanted to store different shapes/variations of moons, I'd need another 2 bits per moon. That would require bumping the size up to a 32-bit unsigned integer. However, I might be able to use the excess bits to store some of the other data for the planet, which could potentially free up one or more of the existing variables. I'll have to play with some numbers, but maybe I can come up with something workable .

Well, splitting up the nebula visually isn't a problem. The catch is that it would affect how I generate a galaxy (instead of taking up one position/sector, it takes up a block of them). Another complication stems from the fact that I define a nebula in the same way that I define any other type of star. I treat it as a star system because it could potentially contain a rogue planet and therefore a colony. Treating them differently would break that model. I'll toss the notion around a bit and see if I can come up with a clever workaround. However, I'm wary of programming "special case" scenarios because they tend to interfere with the 'modability' of the game.

OK, so I did some calculations, and I came up with a way to support up to 4 different shapes/styles of moons *and* use 1 byte *less* than my original implementation. I crammed the type of planet, the size of the planet, the variation of the planet (1 of 3 different textures for each planet type), the number of moons, and the size and shape of each moon...all into a single 32-bit unsigned integer. It ain't pretty, but it works. Like I said, sometimes I get proven wrong .

Now I just need someone to come up with 4 different moon images for me.

I already posted a link to a *wierd* Moon pic from Nasa in the staff room, MStrobel.

Here It Is Again

I know the bottom half of the pic is cut off, but at 16x16 pixels, you CAN'T see that there is anything wrong with the image!

...

Could you send me the animation of the Asteroids, MStrobel? I might be able to solve the transparency issue for you, but I want to check it out first.

OK, I've implemented animated asteroids and 4 different shapes of moons. At the moment, the moon images aren't actually different shapes, but are different colors (grey, blueish, reddish, yellowish). Feel free to replace the images (located in Resources/Images/Planets/Moons) with your own. If you come up with some moon images that look good, feel free to post them.

You can download the updated version using the link in the original post.

Sweet! I will check out the new map. Did you make any other changes other than the moons/asteroids?

Whoops... this was actually from me. I didn't know I wasn't logged in.

I don't think there are any other changes that are visible.

The map is a work of art. You have singlehandedly given me new hope for a rebirth of the most played game in my colection. I salute you sir.

Lol welcome to the site blacksnake. The "anonymous" posting wasn't your fault - there's a glitch on the site that sometimes causes you to log out during posting, especially if there is a long time between you clicking the post reply and clicking the submit button, regardless of how long or short your post actually is. (Eg. going off and doing something else before coming back and clicking the post button)

You won't realise that the glitch has happened until you notice that your post has been submitted by someone called anonymous, however.

If you try to post a message without being logged in, you'll find the site will require you to log in - you can't post unless you're logged in first.

This glitch has happened to me several times in the past, which is why I know about it.

...

The worst has come to the worst with my computer, MStrobel, PC World are replacing the Hard Drive - so I can't check Supremacy for the file sizes that you need of the Moons and I can't install it on my old computer either. (I'm on my old computer at the moment)

Because of this fact, i've got a load of Moon pictures at 24x24 pixels. They can obviously be resized as necessary.

Here's the wierd Moon I posted at 24x24:



I can sort the glitchy bit out myself if necessary.

Here's some more pics:









Are they of any use to you MStrobel? If you want any more variation between the Moons, you could also rotate them 90 degress/flip the images as well. These altered images could then be used in the other sizes of Moons.

...

Again, welcome to the site, Blacksnake32v. Welcome to you too, EmwunGarand!

i think it would be better if someone able to work with graphicprograms, to try and redo them. They look a bit low-res, bit fake. Not that they look terrible, it's just that i think it's worth to make the moons look better. Mstrobel can ofcourse always use them before replacing them. Just my thoughs.

Thanks, EmwunGarand. I'm glad to hear you liked it .

Mattress, I think it'd be better if we stuck to different shapes of moons that are roughly the same color (gray, barren). See my earlier comments about different moon environments.

The images that i've posted were simply crops of images made by Nasa that I found. I wouldn't know where to begin to make one. I could have a go in Paint, but all you'd end up with is a grey blob of colour, not something that even remotely looked real.

The images were all pictures of Jupiter's Moons, if anyone was interested. These are the originals:

Jupiter's Moons

Jupiter's Moons 2

If you want coloured variations of the same moon though, this image might help, MStrobel:

Disco Moon

Got to say, I just looked the map over. no problem with install, I really do like this map..... Talk about realism! AWESOME!!! I WANT MORE PLEASE!

lol

Glad to hear you liked it, Winterhawk . Hopefully it won't be too much longer before you get to see more.