To all SSC Station occupants
Thank you for the donations over the past year (2024), it is much appreciated. I am still trying to figure out how to migrate the forums to another community software (probably phpbb) but in the meantime I have updated the forum software to the latest version. SSC has been around a while so their is some very long time members here still using the site, thanks for making SSC home and sorry I haven't been as vocal as I should be in the forums I will try to improve my posting frequency.
Thank you again to all of the members that do take the time to donate a little, it helps keep this station functioning on the outer reaches of space.
-D1-
Another update from Mak, more on the blog. http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/03/28/return-of-the-hack/
Welladay… it turns out the Intel HD5000 ‘hack’ is no longer a hack!
After doing a lot of tweaks/fixes/adjustments to the Mac OSX build (which is now running exactly as the Windows build was – huzzah!) – I return to the happy green pastures of Windows 7 to find that 666 won’t even get past initialising OpenGL… and when I fixed that – Dom was rendering total gibberish on screen!
Small update from Mak on his blog. http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/04/26/ping/
Ping…
Published on April 26, 2014, by Mak - Posted in Dev, General 0
Just a ‘keep alive’ update – I’ve been working on the behaviours a lot of late, but also Real World stuff has taken centre stage.
That said, I’ve implemented the scenario I mentioned at the end of the previous post;
… you could drop into a defended stations local space, and begin docking – then another flock appears and attacks the station… what do you do? Dock and hope? Run? Defend the station? Join the attack?
So now we have some decent ‘us vs them’ squadrons capable of defending and attacking specific targets. I’ll detail it more when I get some video footage to show it in action.
Update on Mak blog about his ebook for the game. http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/05/09/pong-book-one-on-the-way-finally/
Not much Dom related this blog – other than to say the final, finalmost, nearly penultimately final redraft of Book One – Insurmountable Odds – is complete. I’m now wrapping up ‘meta-book’ stuff, so re-establishing the timeline (which is a challenge against a plot spanning 25 millenia!), making things consistent, cross-referencing everything, etc.
The plot is done, the cover is done, and most importantly the spell-checking is done
Another final narrative pass to beef up character and scene descriptions, and then I’m done. Phew!
At the moment the plan is to e-publish on Amazon, iBooks and Google Play Books – and anything else I think makes a viable platform. I’m still torn over the ‘DRM’ issue. I personally hate it. But, the aim is to try and raise funds for developing Dominium the game. So making it easy to slap a DRM-free copy somewhere that means no revenue doesn’t appeal… but I know everyone else hates it…
Interesting update from Maksw on his blog http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/06/06/ui-ui-2/ read the rest their.
Hi folks!
This week has been pretty good Dom Dev wise – after last weekends ‘status review’ I found the greatest issue when trying to toddle around in Dom is the navigation.
Despite all the tech being good enough to make use of – the UI for things like the Galaxy Map and the Nav-Com was pretty much ‘Rapid Application Development’ – and bolted together to “make it look like it worked†to give me something to show. Not that it’s poor code – but it all falls far short of the mark for a “Usable navigation systemâ€.
Part 2 and a big blog from Maksw about the game map http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/06/13/stellar-cartography-part-2/ he ha also spit it into two so these of a more technical minded have some thing to read and the rest of us can look at the pictures.
Ok, there hasn’t been a Part 1 – really – and ‘Stellar Cartography’ is from Star Trek, and no – I won’t be using that name in the game – it’s just for the blog and continuing the UI,UI post of last week
So, it’s been an up and down week – it looks like my mystery illness is not quite done with me and it’s flared up a couple of times – the last nearly took me off my feet (literally) – but back on increased med’s and all is well again.
Anyway – personal woe’s aside – progress! This past week, any spare minutes I have (which is not much) have been spent on the Galaxy Map, in my quest to turn it from the original ‘make it look like it works’ to shiny new, production oriented ‘it works’ code. A spot of refactoring here, and some bug-hunting deep within the 666 engine has resulted in exactly what I wanted to achieve! Hurrah!
I’ve yet to test the system performs to an acceptable level with a fully populated galactic database of 200,000 stars, but it’s set up with that in mind. This has all been ‘under-the-hood’ work, so little has changed visually – though I may do a little video to show WIP. I’ve yet to plumb the System Map back in – but I have plans which mean that is now a separate UI element so it’ll need refactoring out of the present Galaxy Map code anyway. I’m not sure how many of you are interested in the ‘techy’ elements involved even though this is a Dev Blog post, so I’ve decided to split “Tech Talk†into a separate section of each post – so you only have to read it if you really want to
And look at the pictures
Part 3 http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/06/20/stellar-cartography-part-3/
This is a trickle update - very little ‘visible’ has happened this week – that I’m prepared to show yet
A lot of re-factoring under the hood – so now the old “make it work†Galaxy Map is no more, and we have a nice extensible UI framework which allows me to throw up the Galaxy Map, then a Star System Map, and then a Planetary System Map using the same code, and user interactions so it all flows nicely, and will look rather nifty in action.
Making it modular means that now – as you fly about – you can bring up just the Planetary System where you are, or the Star System you are in so you don’t have to plough through the entire galaxy just to find a moon in-system.
Piggy backing off the back of the maps, is the Auto Pilot – which can then plot it’s waypoints and routes in the map for you to see.
The map will – in the future – show you your mining rigs, Observers, bases, stations and vessels in your fleet(s), allowing instant “point and click†interaction – almost RTS style.
Info panels can be invoked which show details on the current/selected system/object – and also a ‘quick look’ on the current economy and trade prices for a system, so will be able to plan your trade routes all from one spot if you choose.
I’ve got to tie the Star System map into the Galaxy Map (so it’s invoked at the right point, with the right star system) and then I’m going to “prettify†the UI framework a little – so it doesn’t look quite so “programmer-artâ€
Fingers crossed – maybe next weekend there will be a video showing some of this in action!
Yes lets see a video :good:
couple of updates more on the map http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/06/27/stellar-cartography-part-4/ read the rest on the blog.
Ok, no video – let’s get that out of the way
Sorry!
Reason : refactoring. I wanted to use the same code for rendering stars and planets for both the game scene and the map system – as they can then leverage the same data and setup code. That bit is still WIP and not ready to demo. But, it is going well and is tres awesome – from my perspective at least
For those who don’t code – refactoring is a process by which you take something which “works†and then break it in numerous interesting and challenging ways by taking bits out and putting them somewhere else with the aim of being able to use them in multiple places, then rewriting other bits to use the bits now they are somewhere else. This is largely done by a) considered design and planning and b) compiling the code and fixing the errors. It’s a bit like taking a car engine apart, and then putting it back together and hoping it starts first time… you have all the same bits, but…
And one about the UI http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/06/28/tip-toe-through-the-ui/
Being up at stupid o’clock in the morning (4am), I find myself plugging away at Dom and the UI again. For morale’s sake – I decided to do a brain dump in the blog
UI is something I normally push back down in a project’s lifecycle. Get the design / look feel down “stylistically†as early as possible – but never, ever – under any circumstances ever begin implementing it “for real†until the project is just heading towards Alpha.
Why?
Because stuff changes. And those changes impact everything when it comes to UI. The project feature set changes (we realise “A†cannot be done, or “B†can be, but has more/less features – which can mean more UI or less UI, or removing UI entirely, or changing the UI/UX “flow†of screens, or how the user interacts with it). Or the UI itself changes – and all that nice code you wrote is now pretty much worthless. (This happens far too often on a game – UI Designers please take note
).
Check out the full post on the blog. http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/07/05/shadows-of-dominium/
This past week – I’ve taken a “Mental Holiday†from UI, Maps et al. My subconcious (being a nearly separate personality in it’s own right it seems) decided that ‘Shadows’ were the order of the week.
So, taking a grateful break from UI work, I decided to dive into ‘pretty’ work as a diversion. It’s been a while since I tinkered with the rendering code, and this has long been ‘on the list’ – so I didn’t need much self-persuasion!
WARNING : This wanders off into techy-talk
Another entry about shadows http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/07/10/out-of-the-shadows/
Ahhh. Shadows. Fixed.
It was “me†– but in the weirdest, most odd manner.
WARNING! Techy Talk! Move on for the pictures…
It seems my matrix multiplication code (working just fine and dandy for the past x years) seems to be “brokenâ€. I finally tracked the problem down by shifting all the matrix multiplication code into the vertex shader, and letting the GPU do the job for me and voila… shadows appeared in all the right places.
Couple of more update
Big one about the map, navigation and FTL drive. http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/07/18/back-to-the-map/
Back to the Map
Published on July 18, 2014, by Mak - Posted in Design, Dev, General 0
So – I integrated Shadows into Dom – and they don’t work. Something in the render path is basically chucking a curve ball into it and knocking it for six. I did my best with the time available, but I’ve had to park it for now.
I decided to turn back to the Map, and made some massive (and long needed) performance improvements to the underlying DEX (Data EXchange) layer that sits on top of the SQLite databases. With 10,000 stars in the test galaxy, suddenly everything became ‘real-time’ again when applying filters to the map. Huzzah, etc.
Next, I started on visualising the routes that the NavCom would calculate when you choose a destination, based on the currently selected drive system.
Despite my best efforts – it seems I’ve written code-poison. I can’t figure out why the algorithm is failing – it constantly gets locked into picking the same two stars in a route, despite being told to ignore any star it’s previously picked.
Anyway – I knocked the following up to detail how the drive systems will work, with their various pro’s and con’s – and how they will impact the players choices as they ply their trade or explore the galaxy. I have to get some of this out of my head and down into ‘print’ at some point!
So – we’re into “Design†and “Tech†land here… and this is a huuge post – feel free to bail if you wish!
And one about shadows with a video. http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/07/19/stale-shadows/
Right – FRAPSgate is driving me nuts. For some reason I cannot capture anything rendered within Dominium – but can record everything else. I suspect the issue I’m having with Shadows at the minute is also the cause of FRAPS being unable to acquire the OpenGL render buffer in time to capture the frame.
So – I’ve knocked up this video I captured a couple of weeks ago when I first got Shadowing working – at least then you get to see some goodness in it’s early form!
Work has progressed beyond this – it all looks a lot better at the moment, especially with the lighting model and normal mapping fixes I spotted whilst honing the shadowing code in the uber-shader.
Anyway. Less waffle. More video!
Enjoy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aInTuZwAHwc
Hope he goes with some self illumination on the ships ie ship lights as Star Trek TMP or Babylon 5.
Been about 4 updates to Dominiums blog about different aspects of the game along with a couple of WIP videos. http://dominium.maksw.com/devlog/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZPDrEE_8ak
Another blog update from Mak http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/08/15/shadow-rings/
A mini-update this week I’m afraid…
I returned to integrating Shadow Mapping, and finally resolved a couple of the ‘daft’ issues I was seeing. I can now render the Planetary scene into a shadow map and cast shadows onto the planet from it’s ring system. But, there’s a but… the quality is – frankly – poor. I’m not happy with it at all – despite using a 2048×2048 shadow map, the quality in scene is dire. So, I need to do some digging about.
For those interested in the techie side – the plans I came up with for implementing shadow mapping in Dom are already known (surprise) and are detailed here much better than I have time to do! I also figured out how to apply shadows at various levels of details – and it turns out that’s called ‘Cascade Shadow Mapping‘. So, at least someone else who can do it better has been here before, and kind enough to put up ‘lessons learned’
But, it paves the way for the local scene (ship to ship/station) shadow mapping at least!
Book wise, I’ve moved onto chapter 5 now in the ‘pre-proof’ revision. So far I’m making minor edits and blazing ahead – but it’s still scary how many tiny and repetitive flaws make there way past even 20 very careful ‘self reads’! I’m glad to have some help at last
In other news – the tiny “other game project†is progressing well, it’s such a simple idea that even 10 minutes coding has a major impact on it, and it’s shaping up really well. I’ve got someone else lending a hand on this one, so it may actually get completed this year…
Fascinating Wip video and blog about getting down onto the planets. http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/09/03/wake-up-maggy/
In an idle moment, I found myself browsing youtube (the saner parts) and looking at ‘planetary rendering’… having recently worked on the Celestial Bodies in Dom it ‘set the scene’ for my browsing. The youtube videos show such fantastic work being done, with various techniques at play… and I actually have some full-time, solid dev-days I can set aside… I wonder…
I gave myself a goal. A single, full-time day to do a prototype ‘infinitely tessellating spherical renderer’ (called Maggy), just to see how well my past thinking would gel with my plans. I also decided to do a ‘dev video diary’ (of sorts).
The result is quite long (10min!) and feel free to skip through, as it’s fairly dry on the visuals – but if you’re interested in the techy stuff, this is hopefully worthy of a watch!
Another video about the wip of the terrain engine http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/09/08/more-maggy/
Part four out about planets. http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/09/24/making-noise-with-maggy/
couple of more update from Mak http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/09/30/another-ping/
My brain is fritzed by the vis-testing fiasco I’m experiencing with Maggy. I’ve spent a week straight doing ‘what it should’ and almost getting it right, then some patch disappears under my camera’s virtual nose when it shouldn’t, and I start venting.
And part five http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/10/02/maggy-can-see/
Mak seems to knocking these update out. :good:
part 6 of maggy http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/10/07/progress-ping/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBl4VYptcZg
A pre Alpha road map for the game. http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/10/10/pre-alpha-roadmap-released/
Pre-Alpha Roadmap Released
Published on October 10, 2014, by Mak - Posted in General, News, Roadmap 0
For better or for worse, I’ve put up my intended plan for an early alpha. This is subject to being largely untrue! But, hopefully it will show things are moving along, with luck!
It’s available from the site menu “Roadmapâ€, and there’s a widget on the right with the overall progress shown. But, you can take a peek from here
I’ve also created one for Insurmountable Odds, for those interested.
Sadly the plugin I’m using doesn’t adopt the site theme, and there’s no way I can find to put in a “link back†to the main site, but it will do for now.
And, in a planning/organisation-fest of epic proportion, I have now also finally created a public Trello board for the “I Wants†that are driving the game Alpha at the moment!
Check it out here!
And finally a quick look at planet terrain http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/10/11/ground-control/
Slow and steady, don't see why it couldn't be done for end of next year. Thats only if the devs don't get to play all these new space games coming out 🙂 Been a while since we have seen maksw around.
Hey Pinback/DarkOne et al...
Yeh I'm still skulking in the sidelines 😉 if I could I'd hire Pinback as my PR Officer! He's been doing a grand job of shunting my blog updates up here!
I'm still aiming to get something to show off the SCC space station Sol did - do you know if anyone else has used it btw? It'd be cool if someone has. Speaking of which - has anyone heard from Sol of late? I've not heard anything from him for 6 months or more... I hope he's ok?
Have you tried to PM SOL?
Quick question, well more of a suggestion for you about traveling, at the moment I am playing SP2 and have been impressed by the number of different methods you can use to get around the universe ie jump gates, wormholes, rift ways or just turn your engines on and go.
The suggestion is this, that Dominium should have both a Jump gate network for smaller ship to use and bigger ships would be able to form their own jump points as well as using the jump gates if their jump drive was damaged
The jumpgate network would be limited in scope but it would take the player further and also it would also give the player an incentive to get a bigger ship so they can get out and explore the galaxy.
Update from the blog. http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/10/22/prototype-lancer-mkii/
Howdy… not much on the dev front this past few weeks due to RLAWL (Real Life And Work Life) getting the upper hand. However, I decided to dabble in a spot of 3D modelling, as I haven’t had my hand in for a number of years. This fighter has been tootling around my sub-concious for a couple of decades(!) and it’s about time it saw the light.
Excuse the pastel colour scheme – default colours in the modelling package I’m afraid
Yet to be finished, or textured.
This baby is a Lancer MkII, the super-tooled follow on from the original Lancers which helped build the Sulranian Empire back in the day. Currently in heavy active service throughout the Tactical wing of the Imperial Navy.
Hi Pinback - I've got Sol's email address, having had him make quite a few superb models for me in the past - but I've not heard anything for a while, even his own website is dormant. I'll try PM'ing him through SSC though.
As for Dom's 'drive technology' - any and all 🙂 largely dependent on your location in the galaxy / which civilisation you are "in" - so one civlisation may have a wormhole gate network, another doesn't. Various FTL drives will exist, each with pro's and con's, again depending on the race/tech level of the civilisation you are in. Naval ships in the Sulranian Empire are trialing 'wormhole-on-demand' systems as we speak...
Highlighting one point you made though - which I wanted Dom to do from day one - is to allow you to point your ship in any direction, and say 'Engage!'. You can fly wherever you like, no waypoints or targets needed, and provided your ship can handle it. You can even fly outside of the galaxy... though there may not be much point... or might there... 😉
New blog update and hope you are feeling better Maksw. http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/11/19/off-the-scanner/
One major achievement I made was to finally track down and nail the shadow caster matrix issue I left lying around. As a recap, I was having to compute this matrix on the GPU in the vertex shader for every vertex in the model being rendered, purely because ‘the same matrix math’ on CPU in my own code was producing lots of horse crap. This matrix only needs computing once per model, and then handing it to the GPU shader. So, this ‘bug’ meant a bucket-load of extra workload on the GPU for no good reason. By methodically reverse engineering it on the CPU side, I finally tracked down what was going wrong. My matrix multiplication order is the reverse of the OpenGL matrix multiplication order. As matrix multiplication is non-commutative (A x B != B x A), even though my code read identical to the code running in the shader, my code was producing the completely wrong result. So, fix = goodness.
I also added a check to the scanner so it can identify planets with ring systems – which now get a diagonal yellow line through them once scanned. This made testing the planetary / ring system shadow mapping a tad easier (as I kept forgetting which planets had ring systems and kept jumping about trying to find one) but also lead to a ‘nice-to-have’ feature for the player in the UI!
So – not much dev there (about 3 hours of normal-speed dev I’d say, but over nearly 3 days!) – but good dev never-the-less. I need to pick up my pace before next week!
In other news, Chapter 5 of Insurmountable Odds is back from proofing – and I’ve begun rolling the edits in. Only 9 more chapters to proof! After mulling over my proof readers suggestion for some considerable time, I am going to take her advice and break the chapters up into much smaller chapters once it’s all done. As long as I can preserve the pacing (and she’s made a number of good calls on where to break) then I’m happy. Hopefully you will be too
I’d say at this pace it’ll be the latter half of 2015 before I e-publish, but we’ll see.
Right, signing off, brain out of gear, and tomorrow I intend to hit the Dev PC a bit harder and sort out all aspects of shadow mapping in Dom (dedicated maps for Stations, and maps for near/mid/far objects in local space).
Small update about a new ship. http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/12/21/new-gem-corp-cruiser/
A new contribution from PixelDad, fully textured to boot. Shamefully I can’t grab an in-game screenshot due to the half-finished shadow-mapping integration, but here it is in the model viewer looking fairly beefy!
Equipped with five double-barrel plasma turrets by default, with an optional four rear mounts for other toys, as well as a high powered energy lance on the rear ventral section. This beast is designed for long range recon missions, and is capable of standing up for itself if the need arises.
Nice lets see a turn table vid Maksw.