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!

Another night of coding for the server… My god this is more complex than the client. But that’s a good thing. Means better MMO when the client is dumb. I’m really looking forward to getting an Alpha out around when school ends this year. Hop on vent with us devs and keep us company, it gets lonely when you’re at your keyboard for so long.

As you may or may not know, we’re planning for planets to have pretty views from inside the Colony Control Center (CCC). These views are high-definition, pre-generated images that will look really good. In the future, we’ll have all of the planets mapped out with buildings and other pretty stuff as you develop them. Not sure how we’re going to do that yet, but that’s the planet.

Here’s an early render of a planet. This took 3:30 seconds on a 2.93Ghz Core 2 Duo… at 480×320 resolution… So we’re going to need some beast machines to do this work.

High Res-ish (1024×768), took 17 minutes.

We’re currently working on getting everything together for Alpha still. Networking is almost done. Mel’Kaven is focusing on the other features required to make the game playable.

Making progress. Thanks for holding tight guys! Shouldn’t be too much longer.

Hey guys, just thought I’d surprise you with some Alpha Footage. You can see multiple things here, the boundaries of the map, the login system, the chat system, the help windows, missile tracking, explosions, collisions, multiple planets, and of course the glorious mothership. Just thought I’d give you a little something for being a wonderful community. We’ve come so far.

As we’ve been working on the initial Alpha release, we’ve realized “Er, we’re going to need a space port!”

So you may think that’s an easy fix. Just whip up a port right? Well none of us on the dev team are aspiring graphical artists… And even if we tried, it takes a lot of time to make quality work! That’s how Coterabeth, MilaySVK, and KarlGarnham got involved. They’re graphical artists that happen to have a knack for space-related stuff.

Here’s a bit of Karl’s work. He rendered a glorious ship for the game. We’re going to be using this as our initial ‘port’. Because it’s so large, we can use it as a mothership. The initial Alpha’s backstory will be that you’re in an isolated bit of the galaxy fighting a rival faction.

We’ve got a functioning login panel working now. Looks pretty too! The good news about this is it means Alpha is just right around the corner.