So it's based in just the one solar system? Looks interesting Pinback, worth keeping an eye on methinks

Nice engine that this game is using, I will have this game in the list on the next update. Nice find Pinback 🙂

Actually, Geraldine, it looks like he's got much more than just one solar system in mind...

http://britonia-game.com/?p=482

Galaxy Generation and Asteroid rings? He's aiming very high indeed! Let's hope he gets this fascinating project to a playable Alpha within the next twelve months - I'm already foaming at the mouth over that gorgeous planetary engine!

Yeah this piece was a nice read:

I liked this post also about the ship thrusters: http://britonia-game.com/?p=436

Hi everyone,

Obviously this is my first time on your forums. I received a message from darkone about the thread, and thought I'd check it out. Hopefully you can see all the information about Britonia on my site, so I wont introduce it again, but if you have any questions then just ask.

The little break has lasted a wee bit longer than I originally intended (family, work and a side project). Luckily the side project is a week or two away from completion than it'll be back to Britonia. Just to answer the previous question though, the game will be set in a procedural galaxy. I don't consider this quite as unrealistic as many people perceive it to be (perhaps for 1 programmer) because the game is based on procedural generation. Originally it was only to be one star system, so maybe that's where the confusion came from (in the very beginning it was a medieval trading sim).

I did start the galaxy gen and asteroid belts those many months ago, and as I said the distances between objects were to scale. Hopefully it wont be too hard to dig into my code again 🙂

I'll leave it there for now. Great site and I enjoyed finding this thread.

br,

John

Excellent looking project Lintfordpickle reminds me a lot of Sundog but on a bigger scale. 😀

I take it from the vids that you intend to have seamless space to planet landings, will the player be able to get out of the ship and move around on the ground. ❓

Also how do you intend to get from one star system to another ie will it be a free jump or some sort of jump gates. ❓

Like the idea of only having four factions in the game but will we see any aliens or it all humans. ❓

Hi Pinback,

You are correct about the seamless plantary landings, and they are actually one of the things that is currently in and working 🙂 but I don't plan on letting the player get out of the ship (at least not in the sense of walking around; you'll obviously be able to visit cities like frontier Elite II which is just a set of menu screens with a bulletin board, shop etc).

The method for getting from one star system to another will be free jumping, based on the engine size and amount of fuel, nothing fancy here. I basically just shape the game as I remember some of my older favorites, and for some reason I dislike relying on jumpgates. Plus the way the star systems are generated, it should be easy to re-generate the star system based on the new seed when jumping while playing a warp animation, so technically this is also working (as I currently generate the star system from a seed anyway). The jump gates might actually complicate things more..

As for the factions, I planned on just human factions as inevitably it's going to be down to me to model the ships and stations and well, it's probably best if I leave it at that 🙂

If you follow the example of Pioneer/Infinity and make the game easy for others to contribute then people will start adding models,music ,sound effects ect.

The player won't be able to blindly warp without previous knowledge of the sector or least some type of star map downloaded/purchased and used for the jump?

I agree, people are always willing to donate some time to a game they want to see make the finish line and all it costs you is adding their names to the credits most times. Plus modeling and sound duties do take away the precious time used to tweak the core game and its engine, which in the end is the most important piece.

Oh lintfordpickle, you never did say which engine you are using or whether its home made? Is it the Outerra?

@Pinback, Yes that would be a great way to overcome the problem of (me) modeling and doing the sounds. I was looking last week at embedding lua into the engine aswell, so writing and executing scripts should be no problem (i.e. for the end-user to to things too). Obviously need to decide which engine functions get exposed, but it opens a lot of possibilities, and should also improve the speed of testing. I seemed to spend a lot of time just tweaking/compiling and flying around.

@Darkone,

I guess you mean purchased in the game? Then the plan was actually to just have a star-map (on the ship or where-ever) with a list of locations and fuel requirements (based on distance and mass). I found a document which details how elite did it.

It is written in C# and uses the XNA framework (managed directx wrapper). At the minute the 'engine' (not really an engine, more of a library) was written by myself. A lot of the inspiration came from infinity, as well as a lot of the ideas for how to implement specific features (i.e. after reading Ysaneye's article about asteroid belts I had to give it a try myself).

Talking about Infinity any plans to copy that awesome feature where you can pick a star to fly to from the view screen with out going into the galaxy map.

Also do you intend to base the galaxy map on the real galaxy or just a made up one.

Wow talking this much about Britonia gets me excited to get back into it.

Yes, the clickable stars in the sky box which surrounds the ship is actually not that difficult. You render all the stars (points) into 6 textures to draw around the ship (skybox), but keep the points in memory so you can do mouse ray intersections to discover which point was 'clicked' on. Once you have this you can use that's points coordinates in galaxy space or whatever (i.e. integer space) to generate the star system which the player 'warps' to.

As long as you maintain the seed when generating the galaxy and star point positions, you'll always generate the same places.

About the shape of the galaxy though, I haven't started that yet. Ysaneye mentioned he was using various density functions to shape the galaxy and produce arms/spirals but at the minute I just have psuedo-random messiness. Honestly this would be planning a little further ahead of where I actually am, as there are many areas I have to clean up and in some cases even re-write (e.g XNA 4 was released a few months ago and it introduced many breaking changes).

Lintfordpickle looks like your website is down is your blog the official site now?

Looks like it is still down, at least for me. I couldn't get any pages from that site to load.

Hi,

Yes, unfortunately the subscription was up for renewal - but I've decided to go for an ASP.net host so I can start hosting score-boards and services for some of my other XNA games.

I have temporarily uploaded all the articles to this wordpress blog:

http://britonia.wordpress.com/

but once I get a new site sorted out I'll post back here.

-John

Thanks for the heads up lintfordpickle, was hoping that Britonia Horizons wasn't abandoned.

Thanks! Good to see it's still around 🙂