Bah, wasted to much time today on fixing some last minute bugs, and made a new one so had to redeploy stuff to the server and restart all the games.

But the 15 servers (for 15 testers) seems to be running fine on the server, but then again they are all on pause at the moment

I didn't have the time to make a release of the client today, but I'll get on that tomorrow and the download url will be emailed to all the testers (I've already sent out server port number, username and passwords) at around 16-18 GMT.

The client requires java to be installed, so if anyone doesn't have that, it can be downloaded from Java.com.


The servers will be running for 10 days, so by tomorrow you will have 9 days to play the scenario (about 3-6 hours of play time).. The last 3 are only required if you want to beat General Chang, Lursa and Gowron are much easier

Please use this thread to discuss the Pre-Alpha, for other stuff use any of the other Trekwar threads

Q: The screen/game is very small
A: It is set to 1024x768 by default, if your screen has a higher resolution just resize the window (note, if you resize after connecting, the main map wont resize until you restart the client). Also you can move the system/fleet boxes and all windows around, their position will be remembered.

Q: The game just keeps flashing the white loading screen, or the loading screen does not disappear, what do I do?
A: that was probably caused if you was doing something like drag and drop just when the countdown hit 0, that can cause a freeze. Use the task manager to kill the client, and just start it again

Q: How do you start the game on Linux?
A: Crap, forgot to add a shell script for starting the client. While in the Trekwar directory it can be started with the command:
java -classpath '.:lib/*' org.aakretech.trekwar2.client.Client


TIP: If java asks you to give the game permission to use the network, you should say yes

TIP: The music can be disabled (also the sound) by editing the properties.xml file, just chance "true" to "false" in the "music-enabled" line

Hey man, no problem on the Linux thingy.. The game looks nice and the soundtrack is awesome. Will play it tomorrow after work

Just one thing though.. If I start the game as root (sudo) it all behaves as expected. If I'll do it as a normal user, I can't shut it down. When I click Yes to confirm the exit a stack trace is printed on the console. http://pastebin.com/U7bBtGNi

Also, I'm getting some exception printed on the console when starting the game (right after Music and SFX loaded). http://pastebin.com/k7ZnNk09

These are not big problems and may be only on my setup (Ubuntu 10.10). Will look into these issues more deeper tomorrow, maybe I'm causing them..

Cheers

The second one (regarding the music and sfx) should not be cause problem.. I'll look at it while making the sound settings in the game (enable/disable, adjust volume)

As for the second exception (when quitting).
It would be great if you can create an empty file called "allfilenames.txt" in the trekwar base directory (the one with client.bat and english.txt), and see if there is any difference.
I removed that file before compressing and uploading the client, it is used for caching images, so that it will load all images on startup. Maybe I'll remove that feature, not sure if it really does any good.

Actually it seems to be the other way around lol That file was already there (it's contents http://pastebin.com/tWt79SpG )

I've deleted it and now the closing problem seems to be fixed. That was fast

Played around 60 turns last night. My first impressions:

The way fleet orders work is.. hmm, unintuitive at first. It passed quite a few turns before I could move fleets. I had to go read the instructions in the wiki to figure it out. That's not very good IMO. The orders icon is not very descriptive, and its placement isn't obvious.

Colonization is kind of weird. Takes some turns but you're not notified of what's happening. As I didn't see anything happening, I was always getting the "system already being colonized" message when clicking the colonization icon again.

Turns go by way too fast IMO. In 30 seconds you don't have the time to know what you're doing unless you're familiarized with the game already. There should be a pause button - for testing at least. It's hard to test stuff, unless you just don't want to / don't care to play the scenario (for the goals). The research and ships design windows should pause the game?
Sometimes I have the feeling some turns are skipped, but that might be just a feeling.

I didn't design a single ship. There was no time for that, and I didn't really know what I was researching - no time to read the descriptions. Just selecting techs when research was idle, in a balanced way because it seemed the way that would unlock stuff. Not much fun, I must say. Might as well be automatic.

Research seemed a bit too fast. I got to tech level 4~5. I unlocked some buildings, but I didn't know they would be unlocked - only by checking the colony screen did I know about them.
The reports window showing up in each new turn could be nice (showing these new unlocked buildings), but that would probably eat up more of the turn's time.

I found Chang's fleet really close to my homeworld (3~4 sectors). I didn't find too many star systems though; found a few kind of far, maybe at turns 30~40.Fleet movement seemed kind of slow compared to research.

Shipbuilding wasn't very intuitive either. Dragging the ship icon is intuitive, but the icon not remaining in the Shipyard slot kind of confused me. Since the build queue is not updated right away, I thought shipbuilding was broken.

There's still a few problems with the UI, but I guess they're open bugs (window focus / on top, etc).
The graphs and bars in the colony window are not very clear. Or at all. The tooltips don't help much, for lack of context (troops...).
The floating windows sometimes are a pain.

A way to save your login settings would be nice, so that you don't have to type them every time you run the client.

I had signed up to play the Klingons, and I got the Federation instead...

---

I quit the game at turn 82, with 15 secs left, and 4 turns to complete research (BTW, it's still spelled reserach); reconnected, and was at turn 83, 19 secs left, still 4 turns to complete research...

Great feedback!

The fleet box and how to issue order might not be the most intuitive, you don't think the little icon of a cartoon rocket ship is descriptive? (Don't worry, it's only temporary).

When a fleet is colonizing it does say ("Colonizing: xx %") in the fleet box, but it's not extremely visible, and it does not show up until the turn after you've clicked the colonize button.

Yeah, turns might go a bit fast. But there is no rush, don't worry if you're keeping the shipdesigner open for as many turns you'd like. When playing the game it will naturally be longer turns (and a "next turn" button, for smaller games). Having something pause the game would be kinda hard to do in a multiplayer game.

Don't think any turns are skipped, but as you said about research staying the same from 82 to 83, might be because of the quick fix I did to have the server pause while you are logged out.

You're right of what you gain from research is not very prominently displayed (very small icons). I'm not happy with the research system at all, I want to redesign it to be more of a research tree where you research more specific techs.

You can build faster ships, I adjusted all research lvl 1-4 to require less research points, so after that it takes longer. Did this because there are not that many structures/components in the game yet, so that it would be more stuff to do at lower levels of technology.

Why do you think the floating windows are a pain?
Is it all of them, or are some particularly irritating?

Saving of login settings will of course be implemented for the next alpha version.

I'm lazy, so only made 1 single player scenario (Federation), sorry

Hehe, I guess it's a matter of getting used to, but figuring out that to give orders you have to click on an icon that doesn't look like a button but some kind of stat or bonus was not easy.

Must check again the colonizing thing. Maybe the starmap could display this too, with the square/sector/star being highlighted somehow - or maybe a (smallish) progress bar in the bottom.

My worry is that the early game is fundamental, and going by those first bunch of turns without doing anything OR doing things without really thinking about it/them is not very good IMO. It's true that at some point you start getting more free time, but that doesn't help with the early game.
Notice that this is a specific scenario. Someone playing for the first time in a "live" game... The End Turn button with a longer turn time would be ideal. Or having the first x turns be longer.

Floating windows, maybe it's because they're taking up space and I'm not sure of their use(fulness). Maybe also the focus bug. Mostly on a laptop though, I find them much better when playing with a mouse.

--

There are a few typos, not very important yet though. There's no time to waste taking notes, I remember a couple:
reserach (already mentioned)
ore/deuterium availiable

Planet specific buildings, they're not implemented yet, correct?

Is there anywhere in the system window where current/max population is displayed?

Fixed lots of typos already,
there are no planet specific buildings so far (there are some that are limited to one per planet (military base or whatever it's called)

The population is the pie chart in the system box (appears each time you click a starsystem). 100% (360 deg) means 30 billion people I think, so half a pie is a system that fits 15 billion people, etc..

Ok, checked the colonization % issue. You're right, I missed it. Does it depend on number and type of planets in the system?
Speaking of colonization, the way initial structures are placed in the system is not very good IMO - seems somewhat random. They should start with Terran planets if any, since they don't have any special building, and have lots of slots. You might get all slots of say a Volcanic planet occupied, denying you the ability to build its special building.
Also, not sure how pop is placed in planets. Upon colonization, it seemed that an Arctic or Oceanic planet got more pop than a Terran one. Seemed random/arbitrary? Not really sure if the total pop was a fixed amount or related to max pop in the system.

Also checked the pie charts, now I understand what they mean. The gray area is max pop (I don't think the numbers match those in the wiki though?), and then there's green and blue - not sure what green is.

Floating windows being irritating, here's part of the reason

There's a display issue with Growth Rate in some systems. I'll try to pinpoint it.

This is just to confirm some of Iceman's observations. I understand that for testing purposes, the turn rate is very fast. I'm used to 5 a day! No doubt there is a lot of blind groping here to figure things out, but once you get the knack, you can start doing stuff pretty quick. I'm up to turn 300+, and have about 1/4 of the area scouted out now. I've built a few ships, done some asteroid mining, colonised a few systems. Very few problems as far as hangups- the first time I ordered to mine an asteroid it did so.
Some orders need to be confirmed during the same turn, but don't show until the next, such as mining, and colonising. took me a bit to realise that colonising actually converts the colony ship to colony buildings (or an I wrong?) It is rather odd that there is a random building generation, as such. But it works at this point.

I have a few more opinions, but will elaborate later.

Theres a problem. I quitted at turn 179 and logged back in and it was turn 1791 something...



Also on the civilian yes/no information, it says civilain lasers and sensors are not civilian.

Currently it's just based on the number of colonization modules in the colony ship, each module == 10% per turn.. so 1 module takes 10 turns.. 2 modules take 5 turns.


Good idea, currently I just did it the fastest way (put all structures no the first planet(s) it finds. Added to todo list.


Currently the type (1, 2 or 3) + the number of colonization modules defines how many people the system get.. the populations gets distributed across all planets (since each planet has it's own growth rate). But I see now there is a mistake in the code, and it's set a bit lower that I intended. But didn't notice it when playing the scenario myself.. Did you think starting populations were to low? Added it to the todo list, going to look over it

Nah, wiki is not that updated.. going to set it to update automatically in a while. blue = current population. green slice = system has growth. red slice = system has starvation.

Yeah, I know (fleetbox + systembox) is pushed to front at new turns. Going to fix it


That's not a display issue, have you ever seen a more accurate growth rate? (Number is not formated, added to the todo list)

Yeah the ship status (which is not very visible) is not updated with the current order always, so there is just the audio confirmation that the ship started the order (it's on my todo list).

Loosing the colonyship when colonizing is very standard (civilization, birth of the federation), and in star trek they've mentioned that colonists cannibalize the ships when starting a new colony. You get some assured structures (farms, deuterium planet, factories, power). For each colonization module you get 1 extra random structure (factory, farm, power, or small chance of a shipyard).

Really? that's strange You exited the client normally? or did it happen after the client froze or something?

Tell me if it happens again.. I'll look at the log file, but the feature to pause the game when nobody is logged in is just added for this test, so either way it should not be a problem later on

Just for reference, I unlocked the Oberth by turn ~60, had 25% of the map explored by turn 100~120, had 5 colonies by turn ~130.
After turn 120 or so things settled down and there wasn't much to do so turn rate was more or less fine. I wasn't building much in my systems though, and tried designing my first ship; the clock running made it a "nervous" kind of thing, while experimenting with power generation/consumption and keeping an eye on research status. Having pre-built designs (with the lowest level specs possible) for each class could help a bit - some people don't like / don't care for ship design.

The only hang up I experienced was when dragging right at turn end, which the tutorial advises against

That is a good idea, either having the design be done automatically and use the best parts available or that the designs are added when the techs have been discovered.

But then people who did not design ships would be at a great disadvantage. Maybe ships would need to be given base stats (attack, shields, armor, speed).. And have fever slots, so that ship designing was not designing ships from the ground up, but customizing enhancing existing ships.


dragging at the end of turn is a recipe for disaster

It could be interesting to have colonization time depend on system size, and planet types. A system with 1 Oceanic planet and one with 11 planets of several types taking both 10 turns to colonize is kind of odd.
You could even make it so that the tech matrix (the Bio branch more specifically) would make terraforming each planet type faster.
Say you would start with Terran planets being instantaneous, Oceanic and Jungle taking one turn (or also be instantaneous), Desert two turns (or one), etc. To colonize/terraform a given system, you'd add these partial times together for each planet in the system, and you'd have colonization time. Then you could have say Bio 3 reduce 1 turn from Desert planets, Bio 5 1 turn from Arctic and/or Volcanic, etc. That would also strengthen the role of the tech matrix.
Not sure if multiple colony ships can work on the same system, but it could be a way to reduce colonization time.



I'll have to check it more thoroughly, and report back.



The shipyard, hmmm. IMO it should be only basic structures. Can't recall the cost of the shipyard, but I think it would take 20+ turns to build on a recently colonized system. Seems a bit overpowered.



Can we use this already? I'll have to check. That'd be a blessing!

BTW, going with Torkani's screencap (happened to me too), it might be a good idea to have an indication of when a fleet can be stranded with no fuel - checking available fuel against distance to one of your systems.
BTW2, audio in my case at least is not a very reliable way of signaling things. I tend to have sound off, at work for obvious reasons, and even at home because the kids make a whole lot of noise and I can't turn _them_ off...

I plan to add a visual "range indicator" so you can see the range of your ships easily. So far it's just displayed as text in the fleet box

This would probably almost remove the ship design part from the game. That's why I was suggesting using the lowest level of components. Someone who wouldn't want to design their own ships would kind of be at a disadvantage.
OTOH, there could be an option in the design screen (or even a game setup option,agreed by all players) for auto-designing, but keeping these low level designs as the base designs.



Yeah, that would probably be better. At least the warp core and power generator could be "hard-wired" to the hull.



Yeah, but I wasn't exactly paying attention to the counter, it's a distracting factor...

I made a quick sketchup of a more "classic" turn based UI, and would love to hear any comments by you who have played the game so far:

This is how it currently looks:



This is the mockup of an alternative UI. The top menu bar is smaller (buttons moved to the bottom interface). This new proposal replaces the fleet box and the system box.



In this particular mockup a fleet is selected, the buttons at the top of the bottom UI ("9" and "2") indicates other fleets in the system.. If the sector with the fleets also had a starsystem, there would also be a "star" button next to the buttons for other fleets, that would allow the new interface to show information about starsystems as well as fleets.

Most important info is bigger text, and at top.. (Fleet name, speed, range, and current orders). Buttons for actions (move, invade, cloak, etc..) are more prominent and descriptive.
A own area for fleet details (number of ships, firepower and defense info (needed to compare to other/enemy fleets), is added.. Most important info would be at the top, and more details below (possibly through scrolling).

Ships display a little bit like before (but XP/level/rank icon is gone, so is number of crew). By clicking a ship you would get the info on that ship in the area that in this mockup holds the fleet info (the box to the right of the list of ships). Moving ships to other fleets would be drag-drop the ship to another fleet button.

Buttons from top menu bar was moved down, and the minimap is always visible.

Would this be an improvement? any comments? =)

I think it looks a lot better!
The deuterium and ore global values are gone, is that intended?

---

Some more comments:

There are 2 tooltips missing for stats of buildings in the system control window (systemcontrol_food and systemcontrol_groundcombat).
Also, end turn clears the image and stats of the currently selected building, which is very annoying.
And the display area for Special Buildings is kind of short.
Is there a point for production buildings being called xxx 1? Still more levels to be added, or something that was ditched?

typos:
planets -> planet's
charcaters -> characters

The system window for asteroid belts is missing the asteroid icon.

What is Minimap\Population supposed to try to convey? It's confusing.

It seems when you colonize two systems that are adjacent, one of them gets sensor strength +15 and the other -1.

Built a tanker ship to refuel my scout which was stranded. When it got there, there was no refuel option. So I joined them in the same fleet. I had to "tow" the scout back to one of my systems, because fuel was not split between the ships, and there was no way to refuel the scout.

The game froze when I tried to split the fuel (clicking everywhere), while the fleets were en route to my system. Not sure of the exact reason, I don't think it was end of turn though.

The total research value displayed in the research window doesn't seem to be correct. In my game it reads 456 (59 from faction bonuses), and my total is actually 491 (I added all the outputs of all my colonies, the _net_ outputs). The outputs of colonies (as displayed in the system control window) do not factor in any faction bonuses AFAICT (each lab is producing 50 RPs), so the difference is quite large (397 to 491).

Yes, not sure a global number is needed/relevant.
Instead the ore/deuterium might just become more prominent in the new system view (that might replace system box).


Yes, It's very annoying It's on the todo list. The special buildings list is kinda short, probably going to try and find another way to highlight the "special" buildings, or rethink if such a distinction is really necessary. The idea is to add upgraded versions of buildings (better factories, better farms, etc..). Or maybe just have 1 basic farm/industry/power structure that scales with tech level. Don't know how much more fun 3 levels for farms will add to the game


It draws the circles for the stars, increasing the size of the circle depending on population of the starsystem.. But I think they are drawn much to big, so it's not very usable at the moment.. Not sure if I should keep that feature.


That's odd


Yeah, need to take a look at how refueling between fleet is handled. I don't think there is a way to move fuel from one fleet to another yet? What did you do to try and split the fuel?
If you make a ship with a cargo component and busard collectors, it can harvest the deuterium to it's cargo bay, from there it can only be turned into usable fuel with a deuterium plant. So you need to put move it from the cargo hold to a starsystem first. Maybe I need to add a component that allows refueling a fleet directly from the deuterium in a cargo component. OR add a way to move fuel between fleets. OR something else


*added to todo list*

Probably not. Right now, I think there's too much deuterium in the game (haven't used ore yet), systems produce a boatload of it by default. It almost looks irrelevant; deuterium silos, as such, also seem irrelevant. And so the display doesn't seem necessary. It might be a nice indicator, though, if deuterium production is lowered.



Hehe, yeah. Farms (food) are another thing that to me seem almost irrelevant - so far. I seem to rarely build them, the ones from colonization are more or less enough. And planet specific structures haven't been added yet - energy and food structures...
In fact, colony development seems too "easy". It seems I don't really need to build much stuff, and it _seems_ I can build labs left and right - besides industry for shipbuilding, it's what you clearly get some benefit out of. Some balancing might be in order?

Not sure if you're still using pop to run/activate the buildings? Haven't checked that yet. I don't think I've had problems manning all the buildings, which adds to the feeling that it's too easy to build stuff.
Also, pop growth doesn't seem to add up. If it is supposed to be a straight up % applied to the current population, I don't think it's correct. But it probably isn't - but if so, then the growth rate % displayed besides the pie chart is misleading.
As an example, a system that had 1.5% GR , with 1.60 pop, increased it to 1.65 and then to 1.70 - not 1.5%. Another system with much more pop only increased it by 0.20.

Still on pop, the SitRep report said for a given system that a colony had been established with 240 million pop and 19 troops.
- how does "millions" translate into pop in the game? Another colony, upon colonization, had 0.2 pop - is that equivalent to 200 million?
- are troops randomly created? 19 seems a odd number. If so, don't people know how to count when building the colony ships? Don't they know if they packed a Shipyard in the colonization module? BTW, a shipyard costs 6000, a farm 600...




I just clicked on everything I could It's also useful to check how robust the interface is.



Actually the tanker had deuterium tanks and they were full when it left the system. Lots of fuel. An order to move fuel to another ship would be nice - that's what I was expecting.
Like I said above, systems seem to produce too much deuterium. Since collecting deuterium is that gimmicky, I'm not sure it's worth it. You need a specific ship, with 2 specific components that have no other use, and you need to move the ship back to a system, for the deuterium to be usable. I'm guessing you need deuterium silos in the system too, with free space?

--

A thought about the research screen. What if when you complete researching a certain tech, the research screen would pop up at the beginning of the turn? So that you'd be able to notice it and start researching another one right away.

yeah, food is irrelevant, as population currently does nothing. But in the future population will be needed to access all the slots (be able to build all structures), or improve the structures output, or be required for troop production.
If I can't work in population to affect structures in a meaningful way, I might just remove farms as structures. Or have them just provide a growth bonus (and make population less important)


yeah, the growth rate for system is the AVERAGE growth rate, so it does not directly say how much population will increase per turn (as different planets have different growth rates and population). I'll try and make that more clear, or find a better indicator of system growth rate.



Populations are in billion, so 0.2 = 200 million.
the number of troops given to a newly colonized system is 5 + the number of planets + the number of bonus structures you got while colonizing



The deuterium tanks are only used for fuel for the ship, and can not carry fuel as cargo (Confusing, I'm going to change it)
Deuterium production might be lowered. The way it is now I guess it will only be useful at the mid to end of the game, when you have lots of huge galaxy class ships that uses lots of fuel.
I'll think about a UI for transferring fuel between ships. But so far it seems like it would be a bit messy/complicated when you have fleets with lots of ships.

On a site note, all ships that are in a fleet will share deuterium, so if one ship runs out it will "borrow" from other ships in the same fleet.
I'd love for ships to NOT have deuterium, and just the fleet having it, but then I run into a problem when moving a ship from one fleet to another.. maybe it could be done and the ship just brings along the average amount (a small scoutship would bring along a little deuterium when moved to another fleet, but a huge tanker with lots of deuterium tanks would bring along lots).

Going to have to think a bit about how deuterium is handled.. If it's stored in ships or in fleets.


I'm definitely going to make it harder to miss researching stuff, either by flashing the research progress bar in red, or by a pop up.

Hey guys. I'm quite busy at work these few days, but in the weekend I'll play the game.

I just tried to run the game on linux again and I cannot connect (tried it in a windows VM and it works without problems). After I enter my details in the login frame, I get the following message box: "Error while trying to connect to server".

After I click OK, the following is printed to the console: http://pastebin.com/1pMwfup6

Any ideas on this?

Seems to be a problem with using the open jdk and pulse audio.

Solutions
1) Apply this patch (just copy the 4 files into the org/aakretech/trekwar2/client directory). See if that fixes the problem
patch: http://aakretech.com/tmp/soundsystem_patch.zip

2) If not then you might have to deactivate sound (change "sfx-enabled" to "false" in the properties.xml file)

3) Install the official sun jdk, and use this to run the game (you can download it to a directory like /home/jdk-1.6.0 then specify that java executable when starting the game:
/home/jdk-1.6.0-blabla/bin/java -classpath ..............

The first and third are good, except for the scale like already mentioned way before. But scale is not that important. The 2nd I don't like much. For the 1st, making #slots and #pop per planet type match could help though it would make the distinction between planet types less interesting.
Or you could introduce the more or less standard taxes to pay for fleet and building upkeep.



This would make building them in Terran planets more effective, which kind of makes sense. But growth rate bonuses are only useful until the planet reaches max pop.
Maybe they could increase system morale (too)? There's a bar for it, though I don't know how it impacts gameplay.



IIRC I was getting ~twice the GR listed, hence my comment. Seemed off. Anyway, it's not really important except for testing. An approximate figure is ok.



You could just display OR also display the expected pop increase for the system.



Wouldn't it be better to have colony ships create a fixed amount of troops? Or none at all. This is kind of weird, because some systems have up to 12 planets (which IMO is too much,too many slots per system), others have 2. Having random structures and pop is also weird.



Yeah,I know,but if you can refuel a ship from the cargo holds,why can't you from the fuel tanks?



And create a structure or something that allows higher deuterium production mid to late game. Making the Gas Giant structure mid/high level?



While at it, the Gray/blue/green blocks display for techs is kind of weird. I have to keep remembering which color corresponds to what's been researched and what's available..


--


Regarding missing turns, everytime I load the game I have the feeling I missed a few things. This time,I was pretty sure I had left a ship colonizing a system last night. When I logged in this morning, the system was colonized, and at first I didn't notice it, because the ship was still over the system. I was trying to find the colonize icon, and it wasn't there. I could swear I didn't have 2 colony ships there. It also seems that colonization increases 20% sometimes, instead of 10%.

Any chance to being able to drag the map with the mouse? Click and drag. The lateral slide bars are not very handy.

And the default names for fleets, shipyard xxx, they could probably be better.

It'd be nice if the turn report would popup at the beginning of the turn, when there's a message.

Ok, this is really strange. I'm playing in 2 different machines, and it feels like I'm playing 2 different games. When I log in on one machine, the fleets are not in the same position as they were when I logged out in the other. And it's not like they're in adjacent sectors, as if when a couple of turns are missed. It's completely different positions...

Can someone confirm?

Regarding a use for pop in the future, how about making colony ships cost pop? Your bug report says it's 20 pop per planet (should that be 200 [mill] / 0.2 [bill]?), it could be significant - I've seen colonies started with 440 pop or whatever (what the SitRep says). Of course, that would require them costing/generating a fixed amount of pop; troops should also be factored in (if they're made to cost pop as per your post) in the cost of colony ships, if they will keep carrying them.
While at it, when a colony ship is dismantled to create a colony, is its remaining deuterium added to the system's deuterium silos?