Been quiet on the blog for a while, I should probably update it! Here’s a screenshot of the port UI with the ability to purchase ships. All of the text and stats can be tweaked by admins on-the-fly. Everything is piped down from the server, which stores everything in a NoSQL database. It’s very slick!
 

Spent a few hours today working with the inhouse PreAlpha testers finding bugs. Probably crashed a good two dozen times throughout the course of the test, so we’ve got our work cut out for us to work out these bugs. Stay tuned though, because this Alpha train ain’t stoppin!

Here’s a nice video update of the game so far. Very ugly projectiles, sorry about that. We were stress testing how many particles we could have on screen (something like 100,000). Anyway, here’s a video of the game!

This week we have had some issues with our web host. There was hardware failure on their end and the backups that they had were not of SQL. As such, the latest backup of posts that I had on my machine was from February. Because of this issue, we’ve lost nearly 5 months of posts on the forums. We’re looking at transferring to another host, but that’s around ~$150 to get all setup again. Bad news for us. The good news is that all of the Alpha signups have been backed up, and the other sites had daily backups so we’ve had no issues with content being lost there! Not 100% on the wiki, but everything looks in check so far.

Most of the posts on the forums are already written down for us Developers. As such, any ideas that have been posted should be retained. If you notice that something you posted that you really want implemented is missing, feel free to post it again. I apologize for the inconvenience. Wish we weren’t all poor college students! Nice things cost lots of money though, so that’s for the future. Depending on how our host resolves this issue, we may start up another kickstarter to get funds for a new server.

This does not affect development in any way and you should be expecting Alpha right around the corner!

Hey guys. Haven’t been keeping up with the blog so much these past few weeks. We have been coding a lot and getting a ton done on the code. You might think that the less posts there are here, the more dead this project seems. But it’s the opposite! Means I’m spending more time working on pushing everything out.

Here’s a cool screenshot that shows some of the new improvements. We’ve implemented some new ships, awesome HUD updates, loads of serverside stuff, health, NPCs, ports… I really don’t know where to start. Should be more frequent on here as we roll incrementally closer to Alpha!

So in a game like this, the bottom line is that you compete with players. Basically, you want to kill the sh*t out of everybody. So that’s exactly what you can do now.

And the best part about this is that bullets are handled serverside, so latency will not matter nearly as much as in *that other game* and bullets will show up 100% of the time**

** Freecon is not responsible for your internet sucking.

And without further adieu, here’s your screenshot.

Hey guys, so Ilaan and I spent all day getting warping to work. Mostly works now. Bit buggy, but we’re going to fix that. Here are some screenshots. Don’t mind that the 2nd one I’m outside of the system, that’s because we currently don’t adjust the clients position on warp. So because systems are variable sized, you can end up outside accidentally. It works though! YESSSSS! Only took 20k lines of code.

 
I also update the sprites on the minimap for planets. What do you think about that?

I’ll upload a video tomorrow. That’s a lot more impressive! One more screenshot if you hit the break. Continue reading →

Added a few finishing touches to the minimap, or radar, depending on which you prefer. Subject to change (that’s a bit too blue for my taste) but it’s very helpful and it adds a bit of polish to the game. For a pre-alpha game, it’s feeling pretty good graphically. Can’t wait to finish coding this HDR lighting engine. But that might be next year too.

Until then, check out these puppies.

Here’s a video update on some of the new networking as well.

I’ve made a graph detailing the lines of code that our project (It’s no longer just a game…) has built up over the past 8-9 months. This project started about a year ago, exactly. But the codebase that we use now wasn’t adopted until about August 24th (My birthday!)

I just did a code count counting .cs file (C# files), here’s the total number of lines of code that our project uses. This is our code and open source code that we make use of.

140994 Lines of Code

Now not all of that is our code, so lets cut that really quick. Client is 26325 lines, Server is 22387 lines. Total that is, by our hands;

48712 Lines of Code

Lets break that down really quick, we’ve been working on the game since… Code that we ACTUALLY use (not learning code) started around the end of August. For awesome sakes, lets use my birthday on August 24th. That’s 263 days. Lets check that code in lines per day.

185.2167300380228 Lines of code per day

Here’s a graph to better represent this data. (Click it for better size)

Overall, that’s around… 300 lines of code per day since we’ve begun with the client and server. (when you do the math over time with fractions, you’ll get the real number)

Made good headway today with polishing off some of the last bits of networking. Load of bugs to fix, but this is it. The mechanics are in place. Hundreds of hours, 10s of thousands of lines of code, all poured into this. So I present to you some screenshots!