Star Ruler

[Gargantou]

Thanks for the replies, am I to assume that all fleet management is fully manual with no option of delegation of command then? I always view as much possibility(optional ofcourse) for automation as possible is a great way to ease newcomers to the genre into the game, since it allows'em to start managing the easier parts and then move onto the harders!Regardless, I will be keeping my eye on this title in the coming months!

[Firgof]

A fleet will constantly have a commander of it. If a commander dies or becomes unable to command the fleet by becoming disabled, another ship will take up the mantle of Fleet Leader until there are no other ships which can become a Fleet Commander (which means that your fleet was either reduced to 1 ship or all ships were destroyed/disabled/captured)I agree on the automation front. We don't want the game to be totally automated of course. we want players to have a 'hands on' experience with the game, but we certainly want to ease the pains that come with intergalactic system management when the management is very micro in places.

[TranZen]

There is a game play teaser video out!http://forums.blind-mind.com/index.php?topic=184.0

[SolCommand]

Now that's what I call a bunch of ships Nice

[sscadmin]

I guess you might have to have a decent system to play this one, there was a lot of units on the screen

[Firgof]

Pentium 4's with hyperthreading support can play the game in a decent sized galaxy, actually.We're trying to get the game to run as fast as possible on all sorts of hardware configurations so that we don't leave anyone out in the cold.

[sscadmin]

Firgof if you had to gauge Star Ruler's overall progress do you have a percentage of completeness?Doing QA on a 4x game has to be a daunting task all in itself. I think the balancing has to be the hardest part of QA testing for a 4x game because there is so many different aspects of the game you have to balance to make the game even depending on the direction the player chooses to try to win with.

[Firgof]

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Firgof if you had to gauge Star Ruler's overall progress do you have a percentage of completeness?
Hm. Well, firstly, I'm going to make the discrimination between 'features that will be in the game's release' and 'features that the game will wind up having'. Star Ruler is going to ship out as a pretty strong competitor we feel to any other 4X out there but there's a lot of areas to the game which we just haven't had the time or the manpower to implement before release (ground combat with assisted orbital bombardment, etc.) -- that said, we'll be adding those features in after Star Ruler's release. The game won't be 'incomplete' without them, we feel, but we will certainly add to the game's value over time with new features being added over the coming months even past release; eventually, a few years down the line, we'd even like to release an open source version of the game to the community and even compete openly with our own fanbase on upgrading and balancing the game. :PSo, let's talk turkey. With that discrimination made, what I'm looking at is 'number of base features we have' versus 'how many base features we have agreed we'd very strongly like and/or need to have by launch'. What is currently not yet fully implemented in the game is:*
Race Customization (the base stuff is in, but it's inaccessible to the player and not fully-featured yet)* AI making their own ship designs (currently, they only upgrade existing designs that we give them)* Multiplayer(we're doing a full rewrite and are currently underway on that as we feel the older system was just too slow and difficult to code for and upgrade over time; don't worry though, this is just the 'netcode'. The rest of the game is already ready to do multiplayer, we just have to get a server to transmit that information in a timely fashion)* The Scenario Editor (not even yet begun, really, this may be 'near-missing' release)* Support for Multiple Playable Galaxies in the same game (this is a -wanted- feature, not a necessity; we'll be putting it in sometime, whether it's before release or not is speculative)* The Full, First, Terrakin Shipset (we've got about 30% of it into the game but all that's left with the rest of the models is to simply UV wrap and then create a texture for them; the base models are both done and optimized for everything but the space station set of parts)* Other Ship Sets (though we don't have even base models for them, we know these are definitely something we're going to either try and have in before release or, the moment we get any money after the release, hire a modeler and texturer to put in the other ship sets as it -can- get confusing in close-range-combat as to 'whose ships are whose', despite the differences in icon colors and so forth)* Interstellar Phenomenae (we're still working out how to implement these without creating a lot of lag and with easily apparent gameplay elements)* The AI editing for Ship AI in the Blueprints window (this is another -strong- want as, though not essential to gameplay, it takes a lot of burden off the player's shoulders; everything it would do could be done manually but where's the fun in having to zoom over and tell your Repair Tug to repair your Capital Ship when you could just have it go 'oh, I should repair that' by itself and other such scenarios?)* Higher-level-control (Games that are beyond the original scope of the game [150 systems] are pretty much only unmanageable because we don't have a form of high-level automation and control. This is next on our list of 'things to do' and will likely include the 'War Front' system and related systems (such as the Colony Management system and the Idle Orders system)).So, with all that said: I'd say we're definitely approaching or beyond 70% and we expect to at the very least be at 90~% by Release even if we get slammed by a lot of game crashing bugs and other such inconveniences along the way; we've given ourselves a bit of leeway there just in case because, after all, we're only really a two-man team (of course, our beta testers help out by giving us more eyes and hands on the game).
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Doing QA on a 4x game has to be a daunting task all in itself. I think the balancing has to be the hardest part of QA testing for a 4x game because there is so many different aspects of the game you have to balance to make the game even depending on the direction the player chooses to try to win with.
Thankfully, my job is fairly easy on the balancing aspect as the game itself is pretty smartly balanced. Of course we're about to add a couple of new things which could upset the balance of the game tremendously so we need to look closely at those as we add them. Still, the most abuse-able portions of the game (namely, the ship designing system, research system, and the diplomacy system) are all fairly self-balancing -- this is in large part due to how we have set up those areas of the game (diminishing returns, etc.). I do, of course, have to play the game a lot and try to abuse that balance but with more than a year's experience playing the game I think I know most of its ins and outs at this point. I know how to make effective designs and min/max component space (especially how to squeeze those extra digits out of a design) but nothing 'game balance upsetting'. The most difficult part of the game to balance at the moment is the Flak system. It's one of the only area DoT weapons in the game and it gets more powerful the larger a ship is -- this effectively means that, to a Huge ship, where Tiny ships are "swat-able" ships to a Medium, a Huge can swat Mediums. So we have to make sure that such a ship can't be invincible but also make it an effective weapons system -- but not so effective that there's never a reason to not just have one aboard.Stuff like that is what I make sure works and works in a fun and competitive way.

[Straker]

Firgof,I'd like to thank you for your wonderful insight behind the workings of this game.

[Firgof]

Not at all. I enjoy talking about the game. :)If anything I said brought up questions, by all means, do ask.

[Firgof]

[hsimg]http://blind-mind.com/gallery/albums/userpics/srwallshot1.png[/hsimg]Today we got our planet rings finally in. It does highlight our need to grab better atmospheric textures and ground textures; we'll be investigating that as we approach release.As before, I am more than willing to answer any questions anyone has about the game should anyone have anything.

[sscadmin]

Firgof can't remember if this has been asked. But in that screenshot you can see other stars/planets. Can you go to them or are they a back drop only?And the important one about your new graphics for the rings... can we fly through them?

[Firgof]

Yes, you can go to any star, planet, asteroid, moon, and whatever else lurks in the generated galaxy.And yeah, you -can- go through the rings but at the moment you won't get 'rock spray' like you ought to. I'll add that to my list of 'potential feature improvements'.

[sscadmin]

Firgof I was looking at the trailer again. What space effects will effect your ship when playing? Meaning will gravity have a role in the game, nebula's and other anomalies?And in the trailer you see a huge amount of ships what is in place to help manage all these possible ships in the game. Because you see just ships everywhere and then you can go to the individual ship. Just trying to get a grip on management of all the resources in the game.

[Firgof]

Oh wow, sorry Darkone. I somehow missed your post three times!
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What space effects will effect your ship when playing? Meaning will gravity have a role in the game, nebula's and other anomalies?
We will have anomalies in the game; I'm not sure if any of them will have gravity. We're pretty sure we're going to have black holes at the last, but I can't really -guarantee- that'll be in 1.0. If it's not in the initial release, it will very likely be in not too much longer after release.
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you see a huge amount of ships what is in place to help manage all these possible ships in the game. Because you see just ships everywhere and then you can go to the individual ship. Just trying to get a grip on management of all the resources in the game.
There's a lot of systems in play, really. Fleet grouping, Number hot-keying, 'select all combat ships'/'select all civilian ships'. We let you specify in your ship blueprints what newly built ships of particular classes' jobs should be ("You're a fuel tanker, you follow fleets around and top their fuel supplies up; stay out of combat and when you need fuel for your tank, grab it from nearby stations or planets"). We allow for system-level controls (click on a System, right click on another System and select "Assault". The ships in the first system which you have tagged to do 'Military' actions will then proceed to the other system and Assault it. We'll likely have 'select by type'. We don't want you left 'out in the cold' by any means, left to manage a whole Empire with management solutions built for controlling squads and regiments in other titles.So on and so on. We have a lot of meat in that area of the game, and with good reason. Effectively controlling ships and so forth on such scales is a pretty tough job! Without innovative solutions to management, Star Ruler simply wouldn't be possible at the scale we're building it and our testers help us daily with tweaking those management systems.

[sscadmin]

So will Star Ruler have similar functionality to some of the RPG's that I have played were you can assign behavior or tactics for your captains/generals to follow so you lessen the management aspect on the player? I do like the simpleness of your explanation of clicking on a system and telling all assets to attack another system. That makes managing so much easier and not having to dive into that system and select all and then move them. I'm sure getting feedback reports on all the status of all your units activities play a large part as well so you can process all this info coming in. Is the feedback on engagements and movements highlighted in any way?

[Firgof]

You're more assigning behaviors and tactics to the blueprint of the ship; so every ship that comes off the line built off that 'model' will perform similarly unless you override their defaults with new commands. And we're thinking of working on a Report In feature which enables you to get periodic updates from your Fleets when they encounter enemies when entering a system, are having a hard time, are giving the enemy a hard time, or are heavily damaged/need supplies soon; that sort of stuff.

[Firgof]

Star Ruler is now available for Pre-Order through GamersGate.Whenever you pre-order the game, you should receive a serial key; if you include that serial when you apply to the beta we will prefer you when we draw from our next wave. However, due to the volume of testers applying, it's not a guarantee.EDIT: Got a report from someone who purchased from GamersGate that said they did not receive a key. If you did not receive a key, e-mail GamersGate or me (firgof@blind-mind.com) and we will get it worked out.

[Stardreamer]

It's only £13.08? That's an amazingly low price! I'd have thought you'd be up near full RRP for this - happy days. One question, though. Will it be available to buy from anywhere else? Ok, two questions. Can we Luddites still look forward to a shiny box and DVD or will it be digital download only?

[Firgof]

(We as a studio dislike the high price of games in the current market, so we figure since we'd like a lower price on the game if we were buying it we'd make the game price lower. )We're doing our best to make the game available on as many digital distribution sites as possible. I can't comment further than that other than we'd like to be on Impulse, Steam, and D2D in addition to GamersGate and wouldn't mind being on Desura and Matrix Games as well.Unfortunately, we'll be digital distrib. only because we can't afford the money it would take to manufacture the box, manual, and discs and the shelf space we'd need to actually sell the game.