Merry Blitzmas!
StarportWell it’s two days til Christmas and Starport still isn’t finished! Corbomite has yet to be implemented as a ship equipment type. But the ship module system is up and running. I’m happy with the way it’s turning out even though some of the community has complained about Surface Missiles and Neutron Plating being a little too powerful, among others. Well, that’s why the dynamic pricing was introduced simultaneously… as a way to balance the power of certain modules by making them more expensive. To finish off the module system, I intend to make modules tradable between players, sellable at starports, and visible to others (possibly graphically but certainly in the info profiles).
Some of the re-bang galaxies have been made inactive in order to increase competition on the others. Some of the permaverses will probably come on hard times soon as well.
Blitzkrieg season 1 continues along until March 2010. We’re still working out some issues with this new game type, but so far interest has been high and we’ve had some nice games. CaffCoder, who was spearheading the Blitzkrieg galaxy type development has left the team for a while. But this gives me time to fix up some of the bugs and polish the experience.
I’m also working on compatibility issues to move Starport better into the new millennium. We will be upgrading the Starport code to offer better support for the lastest operating systems and video hardware.
After that we can get to some of the more fun-factor features that we want to get in there, including surveillance satellites, colonial shipyards, and… corbomite!
Major Patch Upcoming: Ship Modification and Economy
StarportI’m currently working on a patch that will allow for a lot more configurability in ship types. Captains will be able to pick and choose up to six add-on modules for their ship. The modules will do things like increase cargo capacity, top speed, steering, thrusting, warp fuel efficiency, and additional weapons. So it will be possible to have a Dreamsower with six steering modules for great handling, or a Sethdar Cruiser with vulture missiles, for example.
To go along with this change and to help balance it, the general economy of the galaxy will be changing too. Prices for ships, hardware, and ship add-on modules will be floating rather than fixed. For example, the price of the Imperial Starship will not always be 1.5 million credits. Instead it could get as high as 100 million credits. The price will depend on how frequently players are buying that particular item. Thus, if an item is useful and becomes popular, its price will go up accordingly.
Look for this patch before the end of August.
CaffCoder is adding voice-overs to the Blitzkrieg galaxy so that you don’t have to look down at the chat to be informed of certain events like 1 minute remaining game! We also fixed a bug where promotion dollars were unlimited for the buyers. The promo bonusses were supposed to end after your first $50.00.
-Toonces
Blitzkrieg, Autopilot, and the Future
Game Design, StarportRight now CaffCoder is hard at work finishing up the Blitzkrieg galaxy so that we can release it for real in a week or two. The players seem to really like this new casual galaxy that happens in discrete 20-minute game sessions. I personally like the fact that teams are chosen randomly and the rankings list ranks by team performance.
Thanks to Gothic-or-Punk for reporting a bug that Mr. CaffCoder overlooked in his implementation of the /spectate mode for players who want to be in the galaxy to observe but not compete on a team (or those who get automatically dropped from their team for inactivity). We look forward to a bug free release version of this exciting new Permaverse before July is out. Thanks to all the players who participated in the beta testing and for their suggestions and bug reports!
I’m currently working on improving the autopilot functioning for ships. This will allow the autopilot to traverse systems with asteroid belts without getting stuck. Players will also be able to set multi-point go-to commands by holding down the shift key while clicking, which will cause a new way-point to be added on to the autopilot path instead of replacing the old destination. This autopilotting will help the travel of the computer-controlled NPC ships as well.
On the horizon, we have several large areas of improvement we hope to get into as soon as possible. These are: Ship customization (to create a much greater range of possibility in ship construction), colonial shipyards as an upgrade to the weapons factory allowing colonies to build ships, more and wider variety of artifacts, and better looking interface screens.
As always, thanks for your continued interest in Starport, and your comments are always welcome.
Aaron
The Ides of April
StarportTax day and I had to file an extension because Uncle Sam wants a grand or two more than I have right now. Buy some more tokens, we need your support!
One of the bigger problems with the galaxies has been inflation in the economy and lack of game balance. By inflation I mean the fact that after a galaxy reaches the age of two months or so, and many colonies have reached developed status where they are producing lots of money, the value of credits plummets due to the over-supply. This causes the prices of things like ships and hardware (which are fixed at an absolute value) to be irrelevant in terms of game balance. Another words, everyone has the best ships and weapons. Now, this can be fun, as is seen in the Classic style galaxies, but, it probably makes for a more interesting game if all of the ships and hardware have a use.
So in order to help figure this out we plan to introduce fluctuating prices for ships and hardware, kind of like what was done for the price of shields at ports. The more people buying up a certain type of ship or hardware, the higher the price will go (the starbases will actually produce these items in their inventory over time and the price will be based on the supply of each item). The prices will be rounded off to the nearest 5,000 for simplicity. This way, not only will the economy become a bit more realistic, we’ll be able to see exactly which ships and weapons are being used the most and we can think about improving the cheaper items.
If nothing can stop the build up of money supply, we may ultimately need to institute a scaled income tax that would tax the richer players over time.
I’m also working on a gambling game that can be played in any port. The game will be pretty simple but it will have a galaxy-wide jackpot so you can make some pretty good money if you get lucky. The odds are designed to be in favor of the house over the long-term though, so it will hopefully act as something of a money sink.
I’m hoping to fix up the autopilot to better deal with asteroid belts soon, too.
The Caffeinated Coder is working on improving the Blitzkrieg style game. The idea is to have a game that lasts more like 30 minutes than the previous setting of 4 hours. The game will feature a central planet or two that players fight for control over. These planets will give a lot of experience per second so they will be the main way to win the game. Players will get a lot of cash so they can concentrate on fighting.
GALACTIC OVERLORD TOONCES
What we’re working on
StarportRight now I’m making a couple changes to the duel system. Someone posted on the forums a desire to have a more formal 1v1 system since this is a popular form of competition between players. I said that’s what the duel system is supposed to be for and people suggested that the amount of shields in duels be raised and the ability to use hardware allowed. So these changes are being implemented. Will this make the duel system more popular? We’ll see…
The caffeinated coder is working on what we hope will allow us to make January 2009 Starport Token Buyer Appreciation month. More specifically it’s a system where you can refer other players who are making their first admiral tokens purchase. Every player will receive a promotional code that they can tell to another player and get a bonus of 40% of the tokens the other player purchases, up to the first fifty dollars that person spends. Since we’ll probably consider everyone a first-time buyer when the system comes online, it will be like an appreciation month 
Next up I’m hoping to balance some aspects of the economy by potentially making ship and hardware prices variable, introduce some sort of more advanced system of ship customization so that players can create more variety in the choices of ship to use, and probably introduce some new types of hardware that can be deployed.
Aaron
Window Mode
StarportWe will be adding an option to the game to allow players to run the game in windowed mode instead of full-screen if so desired. This should help support more players with different monitor types.
The asteroid belts are soon to come as well.
Memory issues
Development, News, StarportWe found some memory issues that we cleaned up and will be patching in hopefully today. Some people were using up tons of memory while running the game and freezing up. We should have that fixed now.
CaffCoder
Fun stuff
Game Design, Starport, UpcomingI’m excited as I type this post. We are working on pulling servers statistics into a sql database onto the webserver. What that means is that (the website will start crashing periodically :)) we can build tables of stuff like characters with the top 10 experience across all galaxies. Or, for example, the people with the most npc kills or colony captures across all galaxies. No more will you be limited to comparing yourself to players in your galaxy. Sql will make the data accessable, searchable and sortable. Also for the rebang players it will immortalize your achivement of the win of that bang of the server.
Those are the lofty goals, it will likely start small with stuff like experience, rep and the stuff you currently see in most player’s profiles. The tables will expand from there. I’m hoping this will lower the instances of multi-accounting by making you more attached to your character. More scoreboards will mean more ways to compete and play starport and we’ll be looking for input as we develop this and it will be an ongoing process of us adding things to it as the game matures.
I’m currently working with Lovecraft to get this ball rolling and will happily update you with our progress.
Tim
Alt-tab and Windows key crashing
Development, StarportI’ve noticed a couple of big threads on the forums about crashes when alt-tabbing. I’ve added some more robustness to our render and how we handle the loss of focus. I fixed the visual bug that occurs when you alt-tab on the login screen and the buttons stop drawing. I also fixed an alt-tab crash.
I can’t promise this will fix all the alt-tab crashes but hopefully it lowers the rate at which they occur. If you get a Starport crash:
1) Look for a thread that is related to what you were doing when you crashed, if its a bad bug there’s probably already a thread
2) Post your crash (the more posts we get the more serious we treat an issue).
3) Include what you were doing when it crashed, what OS you run, what video card you run, and most importantly the full text of any error message that you got. Other things like ram/processor type/processor speed are good too but the stuff I listed above is a must have.
I’ll hopefully be getting back to looking at performance of the lasers soon. Crashes take presidence over performance.
Tim
Crashing and Patching
Development, News, StarportI felt the need to justify all the latest crashing and patching.
Some people noticed that when you fired the fusion blast it would crash the Starport client. We recently got rid of the FusionBlast.tga as well as many other art files. They are now all inside sprites.bmm. The reason we did this was to improve loading times. Now when the game launches instead of pulling in all the individual tga files it reads 1 big file. We also precalculate lots of things on the tgas and store the precalculated data in sprites.bmm. This is usually referred to as “data cooking”. This drastically decreased our loading times. We had to patch sprites.bmm in slowly because it was 50 some megs of data and we didn’t to have a 50 meg patch. The problem started occurring when we removed the old data files from the install. If you had an older install that had been patched you still had all the old data files (the patcher can but does not erase files it mostly just changes them). Thats why some of you were experiencing the problem and some were not. We couldn’t figure out what was going on for awhile because we have all the art assets in our project folders. So when the game tries to load the art files it would work for us.
As as side effect of the fix to this issue, we now store compressed copies of most of the art in the game. This does increase our memory footprint a bit but hopefully I can use it to speed up and stabilize our “alt-tab” recovery times. So if you have issues with alt-tabbing hopefully we can make that better.
So enjoy the faster load times and we apologize for the crashing. It should all be fixed now, if not I look forward to your flames :).
Tim AKA CaffCoder