SpaceSimCentral

That station looks rather....familiar.

Yup seen the same model in couple of other games it one you can buy then use in you own game.

@MV2000 - [url]http://3drt.com/store/environments/norad-space-stations.html[/url] 3DRT's stuff is ace - game-ready, all I did was export them and bang. Sorted. I'm rather taken with these [url]http://3drt.com/store/environments/sci-fi-environments/sci-fi-techlabs-orion-construction-kit.html[/url] which I may well use for the PCG ship and station interiors to make it look a bit spiffy. When time permits though  Cheers yet again for the catch Pinback

Another blog update from Maksw.[url]http://dominium.maksw.com/2013/12/13/steady-course/[/url] read the full one on the blog. No weekly update last week, and a bare minimum one this week – not due to lack of progress, but lack of time.I’ve been plugging away at the new Auto-pilot, which has involved some intricate work with n-point splines and a lot of experimental research. I want a hybrid system where the Auto-pilot will follow a smooth course from A to C, avoiding B – yet still be velocity based so it can react to moving objects (asteroids, pirates, missiles et al). Achieving this ain’t so easy

New player ship model. [url]http://dominium.maksw.com/2013/12/27/tiny-update/[/url] Just a weeny update with some screenshots I just posted – click here.I’ve sourced another great model which I’m planning to be your ‘default’ ship when choosing to start the game as a ‘Jack of All Trades’. It’s modular and can be upgraded with various add-ons as you progress (if you choose to keep the ship!). It’s shown fully kitted out in these screenshots – four engine pods, atmospheric stabilisers, exploration and mining equipment, and of course a full compliment of weaponry Malsw how about showing the new player ship in technical drawing format ie top, side, front, back ect as you can't see much in the screen shots.

Little update about Dom [url]http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/01/18/humdrum-new-year/[/url] Well – without moaning too much – so far it’s been a naff 2014 I’ve done very little on Dom since before Christmas – with my dastardly plans put on hold by a bad back taking hold of my life – which is still wreaking havoc on home/paid work to this day.Still – I’ve had plenty of time for ‘thinking’ about Dom Such as ;Making an in-game ship/station viewer to test markup, rigging, effects, collisionRethinking engine flares (again)Volumetric techniques for ring systems / nebulae / solar flares / cometsIncorporating the totally awesome RigzSoft TimelineFX Particle system for effectsGetting the new Autopilot behaviour to navigate around static obstaclesA customisable (ie. moddable) modular weapons system Hope the back feeling better Mak.

The procedurally generated deck system is really cool man. Same goes for the hard point system. I like where you are going with this. I've always wanted to play a really good space sim where my ship was something I could interact with internally. You would be able to fight for control of your ship, deck by deck. Or beam over and commandeer someone else vessel. Very cool.  So what engine are you using? Hope your back is feeling better.

Cheers codemachineman (and cheers Pinback - as ever ) I can't wait to bring all these elements together and put some polish onto them. The prospect of repelling boarders is just too much... The engine is my own - C/C++ and OpenGL, and cross platform. Compared to using off-the-shelf engines the going is slower, but the rewards are greater. Hopefully  As soon as I can carry my laptop again during my commute, Dom Dev will resume!

Update from Mak [url]http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/03/05/normal-service-resuming-slowly/[/url] more on the blog Hi all Without belabouring the point – although far from ‘back to normal’ my back is improving – I can at last carry my laptop with me on my commute, so work is resuming!So – it’s been a while since the last update I made to whine about my back…In the meantime, I’ve been pursuing Intel and Apple about a graphics driver bug that exists with the Intel HD 5000 Windows 7 drivers, which means doing any serious graphics work on my Mac Air is utterly impossible. As it’s an Intel driver, running Intel hardware under Windows (my Mac Air is bootcamped), I approached Intel first.They said it’s an Apple Support issue. This is going to be a rant btw, so feel free to skip on a bit I challenged them – wanting to know why Apple should support Intel software and hardware. I also supplied source code for a tutorial available on the web that demonstrated the issue, and pointed out it only fails using the Windows 7 drivers from Intel, the tutorial worked fine under OSX. They went quiet. For months. 

Looks like Mak is having a run of back luck [url]http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/03/16/the-tribble-with-troubles/[/url] The Tribble with Troubles…Published on March 16, 2014, by Mak - Posted in Dev, General, News 0Ah, what a week (or so)… my back is still knackered consequently I can’t get back into the ‘run’ of things Dom-dev-wise due to the constant pain. My main dev-pc has ‘died’ with an SSD failure (only discovered after months of running checkdisk every launch, suspecting malware/virus and re-installing Windows7 twice, and resorting to Windows8 out of desperation). Plus Age of Ascent pops onto Kickstarter and will (quite rightly) get funded, delivering everything I want Dom to be… sigh. Maybe should consider taking a break from the game and I would not be too concerned with what others are doing as Dominium still has a feature set the other don't have.

Another update from Mak, more on the blog. [url]http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/03/28/return-of-the-hack/[/url] 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.[url]http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/04/26/ping/[/url] Ping…Published on April 26, 2014, by Mak - Posted in Dev, General 0Just 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. [url]http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/05/09/pong-book-one-on-the-way-finally/[/url] 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 [url]http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/06/06/ui-ui-2/[/url] 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 system”. 

Part 2 and a big blog from Maksw about the game map [url]http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/06/13/stellar-cartography-part-2/[/url] 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 [url]http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/06/20/stellar-cartography-part-3/[/url] 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-art” 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 [url]http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/06/27/stellar-cartography-part-4/[/url] 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 [url]http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/06/28/tip-toe-through-the-ui/[/url] 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. [url]http://dominium.maksw.com/2014/07/05/shadows-of-dominium/[/url] 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/[/url] 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 “broken”. 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/[/url] Back to the MapPublished on July 18, 2014, by Mak - Posted in Design, Dev, General 0[/url] – 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/[/url] 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!  Hope he goes with some self illumination on the ships ie ship lights as Star Trek TMP or Babylon 5.