I noticed lordtarl's post in the General Chat forum and realized it's been a while since Jig or I released anything tangible to play with. It's not much, but I've uploaded a test of the new Galaxy Map for Star Trek: Supremacy. Note that this is just a test of the map itself, and it does not represent what the rest of the main galaxy screen will look like. The system/planet view is temporarily located at the top-left corner of the screen so you can view the planets in each system. Obviously, this is not where the planet/system view will be located in the actual game. Blah, blah, blah, disclaimer, blah.

In order to run the test, you will need the following components:
Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2
Microsoft .NET Framework v2.0
Microsoft WinFX Runtime Components Beta 2*

(*) If you previously installed the January 2006 CTP of the WinFX RC in order to play the original Supremacy, you will need to uninstall those components before you install Beta 2 of the WinFX RC. Note that once you do this, you will no longer be able to play the original Supremacy game.

Link to Download: http://www.armadafleetcommand.com/botf/strobel/GalaxyMapTest.zip

If you download this, please post some brief feedback. I'm interested to hear people like it, and about how it performs on various system configurations.

Oh yes, and when you want to exit, right-click anywhere to bring up the context menu, and click the "Menu" button.

Cheers,
Mike

Sadly it crashes before it even loads.

gav tried this last night mate he got a kernel error

Do you have all of the prerequisites installed? And are you running the SupremacyClient.exe file (the one with the UFP logo for the icon, not SupremacyClient.vshost.exe)?

You must have Beta 2 of the WinFX Runtime Components installed.

I've downloaded the program (Thanks about mirroring it, MStrobel ) and it does work. It must be that you guys haven't got all the prerequisites.

I have noticed one problem though. When I right-click and bring up the screen menu, if I click on the Menu button, the program crashes. It isn't a random crash either, coz i've tried it a few times and it happens every time.

...

Guys, if you want to download it, i'd recommend using the armadafleetcommand.com mirror. I have a 2 meg broadband connection, but when I first tried the original link, I got random download crashes and it was incredibly slow at downloading. (4kb/s!)

I've just tried the link again and it is downloading ok, (60kb/s) but the armadafleetcommand link seems more stable and is definitely faster. (230kb/s)

Well, are you sure it's crashing, Mattress? Clicking "Menu" should just quit you out. It doesn't actually take you to a menu yet.

Fine then, it's "quitting out".

I click the button, I see my desktop. That's a crash in my book.

I can't seem to get Microsoft WinFX Runtime components beta 2 installed. I already had Java 2 runtime environment. Do I have to uninstall that one to get the microsoft version running, or is something else wrong?

I had to uninstall ALL previous versions of it - but the program did that for me automatically. Is it not doing that for you, Centurion?

WARNING - If you uninstall the previous version, then you WON'T be able to play the older version of Supremacy that MStrobel released a few months ago on the site!

Just to highlight what MStrobel said in the first post:



Oh, and I did a quick edit of MStrobel's post to show my recommendation.

It doesn't as Java isn't Microsoft

I'll uninstall it and see what happens.

Misread your post.

Anyways, I thought the Microsoft version was simply an update...

I've got the J2SE SDK and runtime environments installed, and I've never had any problems installing the WinFX RC. Is there a particular error message you're getting? I'm pretty sure it requires Windows XP SP2, so make sure you have that.

Not realy. It says: "Setup could not download all of the nescessary files." I have no clue why not and it doesn't state so either. Have my firewall disabled and enough space left on my hard disk. Any other clues?

I've emailed you the .exe download from Microsoft, Centurion. I don't know if the .exe downloads other files or not, but if these are the files that you are having problems with, I don't think I can help you.

Anyways, make sure your spam box hasn't targetted me.

Grimmedbythereapernew@yahoo.co.uk

Edit - I got your email, Centurion. I'm sending another zip file as type this. It might help, it might not. Pray that it does...

There is a redistributable installer available for the WinFX RC that does not attempt to download any other files. Give it a try:

WinFX RC for x86
WinFX RC for x64

That does it!
Thanks, mstrobel!

Galactic screen looks very good! I dont have any other words for it . Just one suggestion that may be improved. They didn't do it in BotF and I found it very irritating. Make it so that the screen scolls when you hit the edge of the screen with the mouse. It works way better than the double-click a sector idea which it has now.

Otherwise, nice work!

VarDin, I experimented with an autoscroll feature like the one you described back when I was working on the original Supremacy. It seemed to annoy more people than it pleased. You can scroll with the arrow keys on the keyboard, scroll (vertically) with your mouse wheel, and you can use the scrollbars as well. I may experiment with autoscrolling again, depending on how much demand there is for such a feature.

Glad you like the new galaxy map .

The galaxy map looks great, but it is quite slow with my machine (1,3Ghz, 256 RAM).

Will there be a possibility to zoom out, like in BOTF?

Keep on the good work,
whoelse

It works well on my machine (Pentium 4, 3.21Ghz, 1Gb RAM) so if you're having problems, it might be that MStrobel will have to figure out some specs for the program.

Are there any particular areas where it is slow though? Loading? Moving around the map? Selecting sectors? Right-click menu?

If there are particular areas causing problems, he might be able to optimise it in future versions of something.

I hope so, otherwise ther would be a lit of people with problems.

To describe it more carefully:

The loading takes quite a time, but I have no idea what it should be like.

And I really feel a delay if I select a star system until I get the information (especially the first time). This gets much worse if I have anything running beside the galaxy map, and since I have my machine for more than 5 years in this configuration I know what I normally can run in the background without effecting the system performance, but I have never seen such a drastic deterioration.

What about scrolling around the galaxy map? How is your performance there? There isn't a lot I can do about the loading time--the time it takes to render the map depends a lot on your video card and CPU.

It is normal for there to be a slight delay the first time you click on a new star system and the first time the pop-up menu loads. What kind of a delay are you seeing? It should only be a fraction of a second after the first time. If it's much longer, I may be forced to offer a "lower quality" rendering mode without 3D rotating planets for people with older system configurations.

Why do you have to have rendered Planets? It would probably make the program load a lot faster if you used simple .gif or even .avi models instead.

Ok, the image would be lower quality, but we could still make it look pretty good. And all that extra processing power can be spent on other things then...

No problem there, only a very small delay, but to small to be annoying
I thought so. But it is also not too bad, as long as I have nothing else running (that would normally blame the RAMs).
The first time I would say it takes about 3 seconds, afterwards it takes about half a second.

So, if the actual game is not too much slower, I think there is no reason to change anything.

Otherwise it would just be a reason to get a new PC.

I can't imagine the full game being much slower, so hopefully performance won't become an issue. Thanks for the feedback--this is the kind of stuff I need to know .

Also, in case anyone is wondering, I have modified the text rendering so that long star names can be displayed as two lines of text. This will prevent names from extending beyond the edges of a sector and potentially overlapping with the name of another star. It's not fixed in the download, but it'll be fixed the next time I release a demo.

Well I have not ran into any game speed issues on any of the computers I have tested the map or the game on after the last updates. The response time in the game is pretty great. Here are the system specs on a few computers I have played the game on.

Notebook Computer
CPU Intel M 1.7 740
FSB 533
MEMORY 512MB
VIDEO: Nvidia Gforce 6200 128MB
AUDIO Realtek HD
O.S. WindowsXP SP2

---

Desktop Computer

AMD 2800+ Briton
FSB 400
MEMORY 1GB
VIDEO: Nvidia Gforce 5500 256MB
AUDIO Nforce
O.S. WindowsXP SP2

---

Desktop Computer

AMD64x2 4800+
FBS 1000MHz Hyper Transport (2000 MT/s)
MEMORY: 3GB
VIDEO: Nvidia Gforce 7950GX2
AUDIO: Creative Sound Blaster Audigy2 ZS
O.S. Dual boot WindowsXP SP2/Windows Vista

Glad to hear it ran well on those configurations, Valcoren. Although, if it didn't run well on that last configuration, I would be very concerned . Thanks for the feedback .

LOL! agreed..

I'm impressed star map. just a thought, and I find this more as eye detouring then a complaint when viewing the star systems. you can see the names of other systems in the background.

Also I came a crossed a system that only had a moon in system. Are you planning on making moons habitable?

Are you sure it wasn't a small barren planet? Moons are properties of planets, and they can't exist without planets.

I'm not sure what you mean by seeing other system names in the background. If you're referring to the translucent nature of the planet/system view, then don't worry about that. The grid won't be visible behind that panel in the game itself.

I dont think is was a planet it did not look like a L class imag. it looked like it pulled a moom image, but since the map is random I have not came a cross it again since..

yes I was speaking of the translucent background. good to hear that it will not be like that in game play.

I've made some changes to the galaxy map code in an effort to improve performance. I'd like to hear some feedback from people (like whoelse) that experienced a noticable delay between when they clicked on a star system and when the planets were displayed. Hopefully the delay has decreased.

Click to Download

Note: there may still be a delay the first time you click on a star system, but each subsequent selection should be fairly instantaneous.