Terraforming scraped? It must be some kind of mistake

I didn't see the terraform option in the game so I thought it wasn't going in, and then there were the water structures that made worlds more habitable, so I put the two together and thought this is the new terraform, queue-able and all,

That terraforming system is awesome, and much more realistic, I like it! One question comes to mind though, how does it work when an already inhabited system falls under your control, it shouldn't adjust the population cap to your race immediately, firstly because if you're the Cardis and the conquered system was Andorian then Andoria would become hostile to you, thus dropping the population cap, and wiping out most of the population, which is neither realistic nor sensible.

Also what build projects will you get then, ones that suit your race, or ones that suit the inhabitants? Maybe it depends on how evil you are, hehe.

I think there needs to be some kind of exception for this. Or maybe there is already.

what I'd like to know in that case is the exact canon number for race population divided by planet size for "Arctic" and "Desert" races in Star Trek. I mean, they may feel more accustomed to class P,K or H planets, but I doubt such a planet bears enough resources to feed as much people as a same-sized class M planet would for humans. Got what I mean?

It has to be said though that if you were to perform any of these projects, you would lose the building benefits - for instance, transforming an Oceanic planet would mean losing your Aquaculture Centre and its' +50 food bonus, Strings.

That's a point, Mike - when you "build" the terraforming projects, would these planet type-specific structures be automatically scrapped, or would you have to scrap them later on? It would be useless to keep them in the system, especailly if you can recover some of the materials used to build them in the first place. This would also need to take into account the number of planets of each type as well, otherwise if it was automatic then you would end up scrapping the structure and have to build it again for the unterraformed planet.

Strings, in the editor, you have to set the Homeworld type of each individual species, if you remember what I said in my PM about the races and factions representing the species and Empires. This is how the game would know which way the planet would need to shift during each terraforming project.

Mike, I know you haven't thought about the random events yet, but are you going to include climate shifts as a random event? If so, you would need to ensure these preferences are taken into account when it decides whether the shift is a good or bad one.

I've submitted the two items to Codeplex.

I think strings is compiling a skeleton document of some kind on the subject.

Is colonization now an instant thing with the colony ships? makes any new colony ship above level I a bit redundant doesn't it?, bar the fact it will be faster etc.

Regards Wolfe

So anyway it took me 1 minute 42 seconds to run turn one on a tiny. If it means anything the first minute of that was processing diplomatic relations.

I built this PC myself from parts. (A box, a mother board, Athelon 64 2.21 GHz, 1.5 GB Ram, Nividia GeForce 6600 GT video card....) and it runs XP.

It was fun to build but takes time. If I would rather be building ships right now where do I look to get the best deal on a good (already put together) PC for this kind of Game? I used CNET back before I started to build my own. Any other suggestions?

Whilst you're right, Fox, we're trying to keep in the spirit of BOTF, which is a game not entirely based on reality.

The planet types had different buildings that made them unique. If we start mixing and matching the buildings the planets would then start to lose that uniqueness.

Still, i'm going to implement a Deuterium-producing structure for Oceanic worlds (That will require more tech and energy but produce less Deuterium than the current Gas Giant requiring one) so we could easily just make that the unique structure, but then again it won't be all that special then will it?

The issue of how realistic that we make the game would apply to your outer-rim planets as well, Fox. We could make it so realistic that outer-rim planets can never be terraformed, or we could make it so there are limits - one terraform only for instance. This is all up to Mike though, as he will be the one that ultimately decides if it will be in or not - and whether it is actually programmable in the first place. And if he did implement it, we would then need to define "outer-rim" planets...

Working fine now. Cheers for that.

The game looks really good, well done! Having a lot of fun dominating the galaxy, though I fully know getting the AI to work will take a while.

Guys, i've noticed a minor mistake in the game with one of the image files. I've already told Mike and it'll be fixed in the next update, but if you're one of those people who like a perfect game ( ) then here's how to fix it. It really is a minor issue and I doubt you'll notice it anyways.

One of the minor races currently do not have an image set. This race is the Teplans, but the image for that race IS in the game. What has gone wrong is that the image file is named "teplan.jpg" instead of "teplans.jpg". I know, tiny little mistake, but a mistake nonetheless.

The image is contained in Supremacy/Resources/Images/Races. Just right-click rename the file and add on the "s" and it will be fixed.

...

My next round of updates will include a few more building updates - i've added in the Aquatic Deuterium Plant and removed the Oceanic planet requirement for the standard Deuterium plant - i've also given industry costs to some more of the buildings and changed the build and energy costs of the Dilithium structures so that they are now more uniform. (They varied wildly because most of them are made up )

I've also started to add in the minor race ships, written more building descriptions, updated more of the building images, changed the image links of the facilities so that they point to the first structure of that class to make future image modding easier, and added in the descriptions for the facilities yet again. This part is still glitching whenever I download updated Supremacy files and copy-and-paste my updated files back into the game - Mike, where are the descriptions for the facilities (Not the buildings, the production buildings like Hydroponic farms) saved so I know i'm saving a copy of the right files?

Every time I do this, I save the contents of the Data and Strings folders - do I need to save anything else?

You shouldn't need to save the Strings folder anymore. All tech object descriptions (buildings, facilities, etc) are now stored "Resources\Data\Text.sdf". It's a database file, so it's not human-readable, but if you include it you should be fine.

@Matress i'm in process of collecting new race images for Supremacy so fare 60 is done, once finshed i ll let you know! (spell cheker teplan-teplans)




@Mike, few questions about diplomacy and AI

1. Empires will offer gifts and money to minor races to join in membership, i presume minor empires will demand more and more as they expand...

what about when they reach full expansion ratio? Is it, a little bit unreal for big mini empires with own fleets (15 star systems or more) to

sign membership threaty at that size? Maybe is better, once they ll reach full potential they would behave like major empires refusing to

negotiate membership threaty but they are still open for trade and war pacts?


2. Minors will expand through colonisation, what about conquering? Are they going to fight wars between themselves with the possibility of taking
each other star system?


3. What about war between major power and minor? Is there any possibility for Breen to conquer Sol system? If answer is "yes", what about when Breen reachs expansion limit? Instead of conquering it will bomb till total anhilation?

4. If the answer is "yes" for some of this questions, it' s clear we need colony and tranport ships, outposts and starbases for expandable minors.
Different models for each minor is out of question but we can easily bypass such obstacle making all minors to use same mesh for transport ship,colony ship and so on...


Transport and colony ship and stations will be grey textured for easy distinguishing between minors and majors...example :

TRANPORT SHIP



COLONY SHIP



This is only proposal

Yeah, those are nice models - although they somehow look influenced by Battlestar galactica to me...not that that is a bad thing.

...

Mike, I've noticed three more things about Supremacy.

1) People have mentioned this before, but this is the first time i've noticed it. The drop-down options on the game options screen are appearing behind the selections themselves.



2) The problem with being able to see the minor races in unexplored sectors is kind of still there:



3) If you press alt, the cursor changes to the normal windows cursor. If you click on anywhere in the game though, the cursor changes back. I'm not sure if that is a bug or intentional.

I also loaded up a huge map (Dense everything, many minors) and it took 1 minute 28 seconds to load the game.

However, it took a very long time to process turn one - I lost count after four minutes. The game took an especially long time to process "Processing Diplomatic Exchanges" "PostTurnOperations", and "Downloading Updated Game State From Game Server". Hopefully that'll help you id the slow performing parts of the game.

@matress: That issue with the game options screen is sporadic, and I don't think it's a glitch with Supremacy. But either way, I might have a solution, so I'll work it in to the next release.

I've already identified a couple choke points in galaxy generation and turn processing, which should drastically reduce turn processing time in larger galaxy sizes. Even so, it's still far too long, and I'm going to work on improving it further this weekend.

You're right Mike, the problem does seem sporadic- at the time I tested Supremacy and it happened three times in a row, but I just tested it again and it's now working fine.

I know you're working on making the game faster, but 6400 star systems really is a lot of data for any computer to handle. If you feel you can't make it any faster after you've finished these updates then don't worry about it. You could always just put a tooltip warning about slow processing or something...

I agree with Matress. 6400 star systems is way too many for my mind to comprehend too. Lol. So it is alright if the turn processing can't be improved any more. You could put a warning like, "Huge Map recommended for high-performance PCs" or something like that. I wonder how many ships and how long will one game on a huge map be...it's totally mind-numbing!

But all in all, looks like good progress! This is one wonderful development team!

Thank you very much, sir!

Excellant Job so far!
I wonder are you going to keep Construction Ships or will Transport ships replace them?

Also Will you be able to add tech levels to the Game?

Thanks for your time

MJT

Hey guys, just thought i'd mention the editor is a brilliant peice of technology. Really makes the game much easier to modify in the future. I've already managed to put in my own race, faction and system pretty easily, with individual planet graphics too. Its lookin really good!

Is it possible to put editor more logging. It tells me nothing to look problem System.BadImageFormatException

well, bad image format is quite enough IMHO. check what format other pics in the editor have and then the presumably wrong format of your new one and simply convert. should work .