Sounds excellent Mike, things really seem to be coming along! I will getthis downloaded, but on my current dial up it takes forever! Getting broadband soon.

Quick question, would I be able to mod the game so that ships have absolutely no "maximum range"? I don't think any vessel should be able to fly around within it's own borders indefinitely, then expend fuel when it leaves them. Personally, I think the minor course corrections to ensure you stop off at a starbase within your own borders as you travel between sections of your own space would add a great sense of realism.

Still, sounds excellent, good work.

Mike suggested I post in the forums instead of bug him by email, so here I am

I don't have any observations that haven't already been said for the most part. I'm in love with it. The only thing that jumps out at me is I think I'd like the scroll wheel to zoom in/out instead of up/down the galactic map, and on a related note, having the mouse on the side of the screen should probably move the galactic map too instead of having to use the slider bars.

Beyond that, the whole interface is slightly different than BOTF. There's another project, a German one, which uses an interface pretty similar to the original BOTF (I don't have the link handy but Wikipedia does) and I must say I prefer Supremacy over them all. It keeps the spirit of the original but its pushing it in to the future era of Windows Vista, versus the old Fischer-Price Win 95/XP look. Something about it is just plain pretty.

Functionality wise, I have zero bugs and anomalies to report. It was fast, and pretty, and the functions you said would work did work. (Those that I tried any way)

Keep up the good work!

I didn't mean to say you were bugging me Ringold . Just that the game is still early in development, so it's not too late to drop in on the forums and have some say in the final features.

Nevertheless, I appreciate the kind words . However, I can guarantee you that there's some things that don't work perfectly, but that's what the prereleases are for--you guys can help me figure out where I screwed up .

Small bug i found.

When using clean 17th version. I started the game fine and i went to build a shipyard then windturbines. They build but they didnt show in structures window, i then clicked turn a few more times and still nothing, i was gona quit and post this but when i was at main menu i saw load so i loaded game and lo and behold the structures appeared this time.

Also the sound effect when clicking on turn is too long, can it be alot shorter please?

Oh and 1 more small critisim is that the the smaller text on galaxy screen on left panel is hard to read as letters are touching each other practically. Is there anyway to force spacing from one letter to the next so theres a gap between letters?

Also if possible force the music to play 75% instead of 100% volume, as its a bit loud for my taking and music shouldnt be so bold in games it should gently accompany the gameplay so i usually have music in games 50% but 75% might do.

That or have a options screen with adjustable volumes for effects, music.

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Also i notice the build que doesnt work. I think it did when i started the game about 10 mins ago but not now possibly due to load or somit i duno. I will check if it happens in a new game so if it works in new game ill post if not and still doesnt work ill just not post about it as if i dont post about it u will know it doesnt work.



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Hmm other system i have works as in shows build que with whats been built so tryed somit on sol and just built normal building instead of just ships and lo and behold build que works. Just doesnt inclued ships in the que. Which is weird.

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Btw i love the asteroid animations. Looks cool.

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Resources used and cpu usage. When minimized while typing on forum and uploading this small pic. Incase you wanted feedback of usage. Turn 48 im on btw.

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Btw i duno if it was dicussed but are you planning on any features like a rename a ship. For instance if i wanted my new destroyer to be called U.S.S Loanshark or somit could i do that? Would make it more personal.

Weird, I'll look into it.

Well, you have everything you need to change that yourself. If you find something better, feel free to send it my way.

Don't I wish. I spent hours trying to find a way to increase the font spacing, to no avail. Maybe someone could edit the font.

I find it fairly soft, but you'll eventually be able to control the volume levels.

Yeah, it's on the never-ending "to do" list.

Ships have a separate queue, and I believe that's been in the BotF2 specs for as long as I've been here. You can see the 2x Colony Ships in the shipbuilding queue in the screenshot you posted.

Yeah, I like those too .

Yeah, I'll have ship names and you'll be able to rename ships.

Thanks for taking the time to test the demo and post feedback. It really helps to have more than one pair of eyes .

Ok its repeatable the missing structures in sol system.

1. Start new game.
2. Build wind turbines then shipyard.

None of these show up after completion in structures screen.

Might be start of game and sol only bug i duno.

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Also noticed a tiny glitch on buttons when clicked they make a box of tiny dots around the button u clicked. As shown in followin screenie on the Shipyard button.

Well I'll be damned... I can't believe I missed that. Must have happened after I redesigned the structures screen. Cheers, mate. I'll fix it for the next release.

No problem mate.

Here's a patch for the structure list problem.

The dotted border around the tabs is something I need to fix in a lot of places. I just have to make it so the controls aren't focusable.

Fixed.

Btw i noticed the growth rate of system (overall growth rate) differs from total combined planets growth rate.

Sol 3.8% growth rate
11% growth rate tho if you count all the planets individual rates up.

Growth rate of a system is calculated by taking the individual growth rate of each planet, multiplying it by the ratio of the planet's max population over the system's total max population and then adding the resulting values. I believe this is the mathematically correct way to do it.

Out of curiosity.. Regarding resource usage as Skeeter mentioned (and I get the same on turn 2, 179,532K, 8-10% usage), with that sort of CPU usage, and the fact I can still see spinning planets next to my firefox window, I'm thinking the game isn't being accelerated by the graphics card. Is that the case? I ask because animations would be the only thing I would think that would be eating resources during a players turn, and because every game I can think of takes total control of the graphics subsystem, making this little browser-on-top-of-game view impossible. I guess I'm just asking how it works? If battles are going to be graphically done (which I don't know if they are, havent seen it mentioned in my skimming of posts yet), will a software-rendered solution handle it?

On another note, I never had that problem where structures would be built and not show up. I started a game, queued a Wind Turbine, and next turn, it was on the list and giving me the +35 energy. Thought I'd mention that in case it's significant to your bug-crushing.

The glitch with the structures list only occurs if you don't change the selected sector on the galaxy grid or the selected colony in the system screen between when you queue the item and when it finished building. Anyway, I've confirmed and fixed the bug for the next release.

Ringold, to answer your question, the interface for Supremacy uses the Windows Presentation Foundation (formerly code named "Avalon"), which is the new graphics and UI subsystem developed for Windows Vista. All rendering is done by the WPF library, which uses Direct3D under the hood. Depending on the capabilities of your video card, most if not all of the drawing operations should be hardware accelerated. However, WPF applications are designed to integrate smoothly with the desktop experience, which explains why you can see the planets rendering behind your Firefox window. Unlike most games, which take exclusive control of the full screen, Supremacy runs in a window. It just happens to be a borderless, maximized window.

The future 3D combat subsystem is another matter. I can't use the WPF for that, so I'll have to host a 3D engine inside of the game. At the moment, I'm hoping to develop an engine based on the XNA Framework. But the combat system will be fully 3D and hardware accelerated, assuming I can find some programmers with 3D graphics experience to help me .

Awesome work Mike, it's coming along fantastically. It looks great, feels great, and is clean and fast as you could wish for. A couple of minor points -

- The population of Sol reads maximum 190 on the Galactic map, but still the starting population of 85 in the system view.

- I encountered a system with just two Gas Giants in it, no colonizable worlds.

- I was momentarily confused by the delay in a ship build, only to realise I had insufficient Raw Materials. Would it be possible to implement a 'Raw Materials shortage' warning popup..?


Merely Cosmetic Aspects

- The Planets. Other than Venus being smaller than it should, and red, the planet scaling overall seems to be off. Huge planets like Jupiter etc should be as they are - massive, but I reckon it would better with the other planet types, large and medium rocky inner worlds, should be much smaller by comparison. A more realistic visual scale difference would grant a greater sense of authenticity, whilst retaining the intrigue of what each system has to offer when you first encounter it, rather than an initial shock of the monster planets that you find in each system.

- (Small issue) The planet animations, and the asteroids, look gorgeous, but I'm not 100% sold on the moon graphic abover each one. Either they're too big, or they're too prevalent, in that every planet seems to have one. I think I can get away with saying it as I think I originally suggested that format displaying moons, but I'm not sure now. Perhaps it's too late, but maybe it would be easier on the eye to have a single, simple icon in the system to indicate that colonizable moons are present, and the number of them.

Also, with the moons above each planet it precludes the possibility of showing bonus icons, such as Food, Energy, Raw Materials and Deuterium, over the specific planet where the bonus can be found, as in Botf1. These are just thoughts...

- I found a two Volcanic planets positioned in the far reaches of a system, coming after the Arctic worlds.

- LOVE the waypoints, and everything else..

Yes Dafedz, you did come up with the Moon displaying system - I think I was the person who first showed your mockup to Mike though.

I hadn't thought of the Moon vs bonus space problem. That's something that we're going to need to sort out. The only alternative that I can think of is to rejig it so we can use the space under the Planets as well. We could then use this space to display either the Moons or the bonuses.

I agree about there being too many Moons, but I believe this is a matter that is already on MStrobels to-do list. He certainly knows about the number-of-Moons-above-Earth problem, anyway.

As for the Gas Giants without habitable Planets problem, this is something that was (Briefly) discussed on the forums. Having Gas Giants on their own is more realistic, afterall, not every Star would have rocky Planets - in fact, it should be a possibility that some Stars don't have any Planets at all!

Part of the spirit of the game is exploration, afterall. It isn't particularly interesting if you *know* that a Star WILL have at least one Planet around it...

Gas Giants will actually have a use this time round as well. They are the primary source of Deuterium in the game, and will be a vital source of fuel for ships outside your borders.

And as for the Volcanic Planets beyond Arctic Planets, this is a matter that i'm surprised at. We discussed this quite a long time ago and we came up with the idea of habitable zones within a system, and the like. This is perhaps something that MStrobel has either not yet implemented, or something has gone wrong with the system.

I don't remember the exact number, but the starting population is somewhere in the neighborhood of 30-40% of the maximum population. Or are you saying that the current population reading in the System Screen doesn't update to reflect the population growth?

Yep, and it's also possible (though highly unlikely) that you will encouter a system with no worlds at all, and just a star. Not every system in the game is colonizable. It's all based on probability.

I've been meaning to do this. I was thinking I could modify the ship queue so that the a resource level would be displayed in red instead of beige if there is a shortage of that resource. Or I could be a bit more verbose. But yes, I'm aware of the issue, and I agree that something needs to be done.

The planets were actually smaller to begin with. I ended up going back and tweaking them so that the smaller planets were slightly larger and the larger planets were slightly smaller (closing the gap in sizes for all non-gas giants). I did this because the textures on the smaller planets were difficult to make out, and combined with the lighting, I just didn't like the way they looked.

I seem to remember suggesting this idea a while back and getting shot down. I'm okay with the idea. The prevalence of moons could also be tweaked, as I'm sure you're aware, as you helped me originally come up with the probability tables for them . So we have a few different options that we can toss around.

I had this thought as well, and I came up with the alternative of displaying bonuses as overlays in the bottom-left and bottom-right corners of each planet. They'd have to be small, but I wouldn't mind as long as I had some nice icons. There's also a lot that we could do with tooltips. Sweet, wonderful tooltips.

Yeah... as it stands, the galaxy generator figures out the planet size first (based on distance from star), and then figures out planet type based on the planet size. I may have to go back and rewrite some of that code so the planet distributions are a bit more sensible. Oh well.

Thanks, me too .

Thanks for that!

In case I'm not the only person who isn't a computer-science major yet still is interested in what's going on behind the scenes (even if I don't necessarily understand the finer points), and wonder what wonders Mike can bring us with this XNA of which he speaks:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_XNA
http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/XNA/default.aspx

Bottom line: Looks like it lets guys like Mike make a (great) game without a team and the budget that a developer like Gabe Newell could command.

Edit: Definitely one point off for MS though for XNA standing for XNA's Not Acronymed. GNU's Not Unix was plenty. Enough with the recursive acronyms, people

rofl, I wasn't aware of that one. I thought M-Dollar was above that sort of thing .

I DL'd the newest release and I got an identical error. I have changed , still using the same setup as before. I wish you guys weren't doing such a good job on this and I would not be bitting my nails off to try it out.

Keep up the excellent work!

Alright, mabus, this is a shot in the dark, but try applying this patch to the Nov 17 demo. It will disable the music. Dafedz had a problem with the music causing the demo to crash, and this worked for him. Maybe it will work for you, too. Just take the binaries out of this zip file and overwrite the ones in the demo folder.

wow the .net framework install takes forever...

ok all i can say is WOW HOLY SH*T THAT IS LOOKING GREAT.

i have finished uni for the year now, so let me know if you need anything.

I don't care about the forum rules regarding swearing, this quote stays .

No Go Bro! Still same error as before. I am going to take and install on another Computer I have and see what happens. Its a little slower than my new dual core , but , it still should run.

This is most likely just the gaming Gods telling me to take a brake and do something in real life for a change.

Until then....

Real life is overrated. If I had a life, this game would never get done.

What I mean is, when on the galactic screen the population reads as 190 (the maximum), but when switching to the system screen the figure changes to 85.



Yeh that's cool, now that I know it's not some kind of error. Nice touch - it makes sense.



The planets look great, but just too big. The gas giants are fine in scale, its just the rocky worlds need shrinking by comparison, but that's just my aesthetic opinion. If each size ratio was twice the size of the previous one it would look, well, better I reckon, and feel more authentic, ie Small is twice the size of Tiny, Medium is twice the size of Small, etc...


But all in all consider everything thus far a triumph...

[/b]

OK, I'll go fix that now .

The problem is, there isn't room to do that . Not without making the Tiny and Small planets so miniscule that you wouldn't be able to make them out. The scaling steps were originally greater, and I ended up closing the gap because the results didn't look good. I can't make the larger planets any bigger, because I'm already running into a scaling problem at 1024x768 in larger systems, where the entire set of planets has to be scaled down to fit.

Altering the frame of the planets section might give more room for scale.

Well, that would be a painfully obvious solution, wouldn't it? I think we can all agree, having seen what I am capable of, that I am *not* imcompetent. Therefore, if there is an obvious solution, I think it's safe to assume that I would have already thought of it, and that I must have my reasons for rejecting it .

In this case, altering the frame would not help because the problem is a lack of *horizontal* space. I really can't make the border any thinner horizontally, so resizing the frame would not and could not help the situation.

I am already investigating ways of reducing the footprint of the system stats text (perhaps making it collapsable), but my reasons for doing so were to alleviate the scaling problems that I am having already. If I manage to do that, increasing the steps in the planet scaling would only bring me right back where I started.

Also, I've been told on many occasions that I have a keen sense of aesthetics, and I can assure you that, although realistic, there is nothing aesthetically pleasing about clicking on a sector and seeing a few little pebbles of planets eclipsed by enormous gas giants. I've tried it, and it wasn't pretty.

Sorry if that came across as a bit harsh, but it's been a rough day .

No problem and i figured u might have thought about it but i had no way of knowing so hence the idea.

You could invent up a new system view that is radically different but is more revolutionary than the old botf style. Be mad and think out of the box to see what u want and how YOU want to display it. After all its ur game, basing it on old botf UI is nice but it doesnt have to be rock set to old botf style game as this is meant to be a new game.

So whatever works mate you just do it.

Personally im fine with the way it is. Tho to get more head room you could have moons over the planets/gas giants and have them rotate around the planet as in from behind, move to left of body then in front then right then back behind. Not much of a head room but might be enough. Plus wont look that bad i think.