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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Designing Performance
Game Design, StarportLaser turrets are cool. Unfortunately the stuff that makes them cool is the stuff that cause huge performance hits. The problem is they can collide with things and they are rotated which can be slow. This can cause us to do tons of calculations between frames, checking for collisions, doing rotation [...]
Asteroid Belts
Game Design, StarportMy latest and greatest idea that i intend to implement straightaway is asteroid belts! This is only the first part of a broad change to star system geographies intended to increase realism and make deep space combat more interesting.
Right now there are few obstacles in space. This makes tactics a bit boring as the edge [...]
Peering into the memory pool
Development, StarportMy last post titled garbage week proved to be prophetic. Aaron(Toonces) and I spent all week figuring out why starport was chewing through so much memory. It turns out, we haven’t a clue. On the brighterside we’ve mostly fixed the problem. We can only speculate on what it was… We turned off sound and disabled [...]
Garbage Week
Development, Starport, UpcomingThe Starport client appears to be leaking so now that the email stuff is done I will tackle the leaks. That way we all can enjoy at least 12 uninterrupted hours of starport without rebooting our machines.
For the developers out there, I’m using visual studio 2005 and it comes with a built-in leak detector which makes things [...]
Starport Page on Facebook
News, StarportI just wanted to let everyone know that the we’ve setup a Starport: Galactic Empires page on Facebook. So everyone who’s on Facebook go ahead and check it out and become a fan. You can also publish it to your profile if you like using the “share” button and your friends may see it on [...]