Sounds good SerialKicked, good luck!

This sounds very interesting 😀

Also, you made some very solid plugins for those games which I used for hours. So your technical skills definately won't be the problem.

Is the universe limited in size, or is your PC hardware / technical limits the limit? Does it dynamically expand during gameplay or all pregenerated at game start?

Thanks,

Right now the universe has a hard-coded map. The final one being much larger than the one in the demo, or any X-universe map for that matter. I will include procedural map generation in the final release, or shortly after depending on how far behind schedule I am. The general format (star systems connected by lanes) lends itself quite well for this kind of generation.

I am thinking hard about the generation of sectors "on the fly" but I have yet to find a satisfactory solution that would allow the different factions to find and colonize this newly discovered space without killing the performances. I am thinking about using some layer system. Basically you'd initially get a galaxy (hard coded or not) and somewhere in it there's a wormhole leading to another one generated on discovery. So instead of having a bunch of new sectors in the already existing galaxy, killing the path-finding efficiency, you'd have several galaxies with a single (or very few) access point(s) making things more manageable has they could be handled more or less independently.

This is doable I think, but that's for later, I am not at this point right now. And there's the issue of graphical assets, I have a limited range of planets and suns and even by playing on colors and so on, new galaxies are likely to be extremely similar to the initial one.

All this rambling to say that I am thinking about it, but I have to get around the drawbacks and deal with higher priority items in my to-do list first 🙂

Cheers,

SK.

Sort of like the supergates in X3? 😉

It depends, so just in case, I am going to clarify 🙂

X3 map was on a single plane, a 2D grid. Crossing a 'normal' gate would send you in the adjacent sector. "Super" gates would send you to one (usually) very far away. But all in all, it's still a spot on the same grid. There's also the unfocussed jumpdrive, but it's kinda off topic ^^

The model I am thinking about is more akin to games like Master of Magic, or more recently Age of Wonders 3. Both games have an overworld and an underworld, fairly independent from one another and linked by a few caves. In U.G. you'd have your initial galaxy (a 2D grid) with a few wormholes / gates that would allow ships to travel to other galaxies (other 2D grids, independents from the first one). Those galaxies may or may not have additional gates toward new ones, be populated or not, small or not depending on the game's settings.

From a design perspective it kinda makes sense, galaxies are very far apart from one to another so it's not a big stretch to imagine you'd need a different method of transportation than usual to travel between them. And from a coding perspective, I can split the work and CPU cost into more manageable chunks than with a single map that expand indefinitely (also makes pathfinding and displaying a map easier).

Cheers,

SK.

Cool, that sounds like a very neat concept. At first I thought you meant something like EVE's instanced wormholes, but the whole "linked galaxy" idea is great. Keep up the good work! 🙂

auryx

I like it too 😉

Cool 🙂

Just note that even if It's planned for sure, this is not exactly high on the to-do list.

I still have to put actual missions in-game (hopefully directly generated from the game, like in pirate guild, instead of click-me-to-spawn-stuff-out-of-thin-air kind of missions), finish the user interface, add a decent diplomatic system and so on before really thinking about it.

edit // added link to a recent gameplay video in the first post.

I just published the version 0.7.0 Alpha of Unending Galaxy.

It's an extremely large release with tons of stuff, and I can't list everything here (especially as I have already done so on the official website) but in a nutshell:

• Diplomacy between factions with alliances, cease fires, bribery and more
• Heavily improved how factions handle their military fleets
• Military production depending on the economy, new shipyards.
• Proper solar systems with planetary colonies bringing bonuses (monetary, ship parts, manpower)
• Rebalanced the ships and weapons and added new ones
• A new faction (Neo-SPQR) and a new huge map (Galaxia).
• Faster navigation thanks to the new short range jumpdrives
• Much better performances and stability

As far as I can tell the game is stable, and performances are pretty good (up to 15 to 20.000 game objects handled simultaneously). But given the amount of new feature and gameplay changes I can't promise it will work perfectly for everyone. A bug report system is included, though.

• Release Post
• Download Page

Unending Galaxy Beta 1 [0.8.0] has just been released !

This is a massive release compared to the last alpha. I'd suggest you to check our release post on the official website. The changelog is here.

Enjoy 🙂

(I might as well make this topic the official support topic on SSC, I updated the original post accordingly)

Hey SerialKicked

Loaded your beta up for a few minutes and just want to give some observations:

• I noticed that there was multiple copies of the entries for the resolution sizes in video configuration
• The tooltips for the menus seem to stay on the screen in some instances, for example run over them and then hover over 'Fleets'. Note they stay on the screen and its hard to get rid of them. (same thing happens with some of the dropdowns on some of the screens too)
• This is more of a question, on the shipyard where do my ships go when I don't give them a destination? I watch a lot of them go through the wormhole.
• Do structures get built automatically? Reason I ask I was finding it hard to build a shipyard in a distant section where I thought it would be good to have one since the ships could be deployed to the frontlines quicker am I missing something?

But right now the only thing that really messes up gameplay is the tip or popup windows not closing or not closing quick enough and it would be nice if we could move them and have maybe more than one open. Just some thoughts.

Hey, thanks for trying the game 🙂

I noticed that there was multiple copies of the entries for the resolution sizes in video configuration

Yeah that's bothering me too. That's what Windows tells me when I ask a list of available resolutions. I am trying to determine which ones to remove, but as I am not 100% sure it's consistent on all machines i'd rather keep them all until i figure it out properly. AFAIK it doesn't make a difference.

The tooltips for the menus seem to stay on the screen in some instances, for example run over them and then hover over 'Fleets'. Note they stay on the screen and its hard to get rid of them. (same thing happens with some of the dropdowns on some of the screens too)

Are you running the game with the "bloom" shader enabled ? It seems to be a side effect / bug of that mode, the UI has no time to check the mouse position often enough and the "I am out of the button, please remove tooltip" event never fires. I'll use an alternative method in next beta. Meanwhile, tooltips and/or bloom can be disabled in the options.

This is more of a question, on the shipyard where do my ships go when I don't give them a destination? I watch a lot of them go through the wormhole. Do structures get built automatically? Reason I ask I was finding it hard to build a shipyard in a distant section where I thought it would be good to have one since the ships could be deployed to the frontlines quicker am I missing something?

I assume you've used the default "start as an empire" scenario. In this scenario all managers are enabled by default, which in retrospect wasn't such a great idea, i wanted people not to feel overwhelmed by the amount of stuff to do, but it's getting confusing instead. Basically, apart from diplomacy everything runs itself (not as efficiently as would a player do as this tutorial demonstrate). So if you haven't touched the managers:

- Shipyards are used by the military manager and he will queue military ships automatically. Those ships will be set to automatically defend your territory (military role), as such they'll probably use a wormhole or their jumpdrive to fly away. However If you're sure it's a ship you built yourself it should move / idle in the sector (otherwise it's a bug. Next time i'll make sure they stay around the shipyard to make things easier).

- If the exploration and build manager (i must decouple those in next release) is enabled, yes, structures are built automatically to fill the "blanks". Sectors, depending on their content (if there's a planet/sun/asteroid belt or not) and location can only support some dock types. In instance, only the capital of each solar system can support a shipyard right now. To know what you can build in a sector, there's the "sector info panel' (third button on the left, or simply F3). Lone stars (without planets) are considered capital sectors as well.

If a sector has support for a shipyard, select one of your dock builder; order him to move at the desired location and use the construction button, a menu will popup listing all the stuff you can build.

(I updated the documentation last night, it's not 100% on par with the game yet but it should be very soon.)

Cheers,

SK.

Just played the game.

On my rig, some resolution settings cause the rendering to sort of glitch out (flickering, things not refreshing properly, etc) and I noticed that some unknown weapon types (not sure where they hail from) can cause game errors to occur.

For the rest, the game plays very nicely and I like it a lot!

@robske: Thanks for the input 🙂

If it's no bother to you, could you provide a bit more details ?

About the flickering, have you enabled the "bloom filter" ? That's the usual culprit when the display is freaking out (most noticeable being the planet on the background which is flickering).

The weapon issue is much weirder, especially as no one who beta tested the game reported on it yet. Normally, a bug report window should open when an unhandled exception occurs, if that happened I'd love to have a look at the report file that should be sitting in the installation folder. If not, that's even weirder. I'll test each weapon individually, it may be sound related as I had to somewhat rush SFX to get the game out on schedule.

@all:

I am working on an alternative flight model that will make stuff rotate properly, and give controls that are less shmup more spacesim (thrust+steering). They should be optional. I am also fixing the reported bugs so far.

That done we'll get to the piracy update.

@robske: Thanks for the input 🙂

 

If it's no bother to you, could you provide a bit more details ?

 

About the flickering, have you enabled the "bloom filter" ? That's the usual culprit when the display is freaking out (most noticeable being the planet on the background which is flickering).

 

The weapon issue is much weirder, especially as no one who beta tested the game reported on it yet. Normally, a bug report window should open when an unhandled exception occurs, if that happened I'd love to have a look at the report file that should be sitting in the installation folder. If not, that's even weirder. I'll test each weapon individually, it may be sound related as I had to somewhat rush SFX to get the game out on schedule.

 

@all:

 

I am working on an alternative flight model that will make stuff rotate properly, and give controls that are less shmup more spacesim (thrust+steering). They should be optional. I am also fixing the reported bugs so far.

 

That done we'll get to the piracy update.

The flickering seems tied to the display settings (the multiple instances of resolutions listed). One of them doesn't trigger it (regardless of bloom or not). My system is an A10 6800K paired with a discrete gfx card (AMD Dual Graphics mode).

The other bug was weird indeed. The weirdest part of it was that you could not jettison the weapon and it would throw an error every time you tried to open up the ship info screen or any trading menu. I will provide the bug report when it occurs again.

Also, when the screen loses focus (like when you alt tab towards a browser screen in the background), the game still keeps registering the input you give it, which might lead to strange things happening. So far my hotfix to that was pressing esc (opening up the menu with save game option etc) to prevent it from doing anything silly in the game itself.

Then, are things like sector traders planned for early gameplay?

And just out of curiousity, in which coding language is the game coded?

Thanks for the additional details.

@Resolution. Oh, my fear about those multiple resolutions is founded, not everyone has the same results. To me (and a few others) it make no difference whatsoever, but in some cases it seems to be problematic. God, checking all the dozens of flag bits for each one of them (and what they mean) is going to be fun.

@weapon. The only explanation i have is that for some reason the weapon is pointing to some unattributed memory, or to some other ware which is not a weapon. Why it happens on your game is beyond me atm, weapon handling has been reliable for months now. Also with the thousands of ships in the galaxy it should constantly popup, not just occasionally. If it happens again, a savegame would be nice, if the game manage to save in this condition.

@input: Oversight on my part, it's a test build setting i use because I tend to have debug windows on top of the main form. Should be a build setting.

Then, are things like sector traders planned for early gameplay?

Solar system traders should appear for both the AI and the player soon, yes. Universe scale traders are more problematic from a performance standpoint, though.

And just out of curiousity, in which coding language is the game coded?

Delphi (object pascal) with the Firemonkey library for graphical output and the UI in general.

Yes, it's uncommon to say the least, but it's one of my favorite language.

Thanks for the additional details.

 

@Resolution. Oh, my fear about those multiple resolutions is founded, not everyone has the same results. To me (and a few others) it make no difference whatsoever, but in some cases it seems to be problematic. God, checking all the dozens of flag bits for each one of them (and what they mean) is going to be fun.

 

@weapon. The only explanation i have is that for some reason the weapon is pointing to some unattributed memory, or to some other ware which is not a weapon. Why it happens on your game is beyond me atm, weapon handling has been reliable for months now. Also with the thousands of ships in the galaxy it should constantly popup, not just occasionally. If it happens again, a savegame would be nice, if the game manage to save in this condition.

 

@input: Oversight on my part, it's a test build setting i use because I tend to have debug windows on top of the main form. Should be a build setting.

 

 

 

 

Solar system traders should appear for both the AI and the player soon, yes. Universe scale traders are more problematic from a performance standpoint, though.

 

 

 

 

Delphi (object pascal) with the Firemonkey library for graphical output and the UI in general.

Yes, it's uncommon to say the least, but it's one of my favorite language.

The game managed to save in that state strangely enough. I did a complete reinstall, so i lost that savegame. The error it would throw did point out to a memory reading error. So your guess in that direction could be correct. I am not sure myself why such a thing would occur. I've had 100% stable games running for quite some hours.

Solar System traders, or even just a single sector, would be great 🙂

Wow, well, object pascal is a language I liked working with too. So I don't find it strange 🙂 Lately I myself have mostly been busy with C#, but am looking into go (just the library support for games is still an issue for me there). 

Hey SerialKicked

You are correct I did have Bloom on and I will disable it and try playing it again and see if all the boxes respond right, because I know it was actually hampering my ability to play the game because the windows would stick around 🙂

Oh and like robske I have a A10-7850k (on board graphics) with a R7-250 running in dual graphics mode. Besides the windows the game ran quite smoothly and didn't see any real issues.

Now excuse me if I am wrong and this already exists because I haven't played the game too much yet. Now when I go to the sector map and I pick an opposition sector it would be nice to maybe be able to tell my military units to come to this sector. Is there a way to do this that is quick?

Also I was thinking since you can automate ship construction and have a continuous feed of ships if you have the resources could there be an option to have like every other ship or every third ship gets grouped together so you can automate like a fleet process? So then you can just have fleets go to certain sectors and not always have to group them. I don't know just a thought, its kind of like a rally flag but with different labels to put it in simple terms.

Keep up the good work.

 @darkone:

Bloom is very hungry on the GPU and CPU. It's a filter taken out of the box from the library I use, so I am not sure what's going on exactly with it. It wasn't originally designed to make games, so I don't thing performances were a big concern to the developers writing it. I'll see what I can do nonetheless.

 

Now excuse me if I am wrong and this already exists because I haven't played the game too much yet. Now when I go to the sector map and I pick an opposition sector it would be nice to maybe be able to tell my military units to come to this sector. Is there a way to do this that is quick?

If the military manager is enabled (auto invade sectors), a fleet will be gathered, regroup in a neighboring sector of yours and invade the sector automatically. You can monitor the "automated" fleet in the fleet widget (top of the screen).

If you haven't, well it's time to learn about control groups 😉 You can select and add any military ship (or otherwise for that matter) to a control group ([ctrl]+number to set a group, [shift]+number to add). Control groups appear in the fleet widget. Once you have military ships in your control group, select it (number key, or click in the widget) and right click anywhere you want the ships to go.

You can also select one of your shipyards, prevent the military manager from using it, and order ships built there to reinforce one of your control group automatically.

That lead to your second question:

Also I was thinking since you can automate ship construction and have a continuous feed of ships if you have the resources could there be an option to have like every other ship or every third ship gets grouped together so you can automate like a fleet process? So then you can just have fleets go to certain sectors and not always have to group them. I don't know just a thought, its kind of like a rally flag but with different labels to put it in simple terms.

It's a good idea. You can already, sort of, do that by sending each on of them to a specific control group which is ordered to patrol a given location, but control groups are limited in numbers. I'll consider adding your option when I'm back to the war side of things in the beta process 🙂

@robske:

I am glad it's running fine now, even if i kinda "hope" you get that issue again so I can investigate it further, it's bugging me now ^^.

I was thinking about getting into C# too, garbage collection would have made my life so much easier in the early development. Maybe for another project with Unity.

Cheers,

SK.

 

 

@robske:

 

I am glad it's running fine now, even if i kinda "hope" you get that issue again so I can investigate it further, it's bugging me now ^^.

 

I was thinking about getting into C# too, garbage collection would have made my life so much easier in the early development. Maybe for another project with Unity.

 

 

Cheers,

SK.

Unity, oh heck no. Have had so many issues with games using unity. Memory management in unity is really shitty. Performance ditto. Its like 100 times worse (exaggerating a bit) than XNA, Monogame or SFML. The game I was coding ate 70% of a i5 2500K on unity. Same code ran through XNA/Monogame would eat just 2%. Its an astronimical difference. Its like coding a fucking RTS game in an inefficient manner in PHP or javascript. Its a recipe for disaster.

You're one of the few I met who doesn't swear by it. To be honest, I am not that surprised by the performance gap. Most Unity based games run badly on my computer (which is decent) despite having no feature that look that CPU/GPU hungry. It is a freaking huge layer between your code and the resulting binary, after all. And it's made to cater (in large part) to users who don't want to learn code, which probably doesn't help performance wise.

I'll check monogame, heard good things about it. Not that I really need a new library now that I have my own tools. But, hey, having alternatives is always a good thing.

Unity is more similar to scripting than really proper coding 🙂 Its kinda like making games with gamemaker. You can make tons of fun stuff with it real fast, but the performance is shitty to say the least 😉

Monogame has its issues here and there, but generally it builds upon the XNA framework and it is open source (meaning you can take a look what it does under the hood and alter that if need be). I know AI War is coded in C#/.NET using SlimDX. Not sure if that's being actively updated still, but SharpDX might be worth looking into too 😉

I published a 'nightly build' of the game. It features a new flight model using thrust and rotations. I think it works much better than the previous method.

The build itself is available here.

It's just the executable file, so it's rather small. You need to extract it in the Beta 1 installation folder. Will probably break savegames, so backup if needed.

DId anyone else get the NSIS Installer Integrity error?