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[Paul Eres]

I'm happy you guys recognize the danger of overcomplicating it & are proceeding cautiously, good to hear.

As for making a living on it and selling this particular one, sure, it could work if you gave it some work. The main things that would need to be improved are game length (multiple areas), interface, and graphics/sound/polish. But that's the easy (albeit time-consuming) part of making a game, you've already done the hard part.

As for making a living doing this, I don't see why not. Of course it depends on what degree of living you are comfortable with, it's fairly easy to make *some* money, but difficult to make a livable amount. As an example ID makes around $250 a month if I just sit and do nothing at all and don't advertise or anything. Not enough to live on (unless you're in a third-world country), but I can see that if I had multiple games selling at once it might eventually add up.

[agentd00nut]

"our planet glitch is probably the batcher running out of space in the vertex arrays for triangles and forcing a flush to the screen early, before the stencil buffer's set up. So the stencil phase misses those asteroids out. Something like that."

Im gonna take that as "theres too much shit on the screen" XD.  <--- doesn't make video games.  Although i would like to one day, guess thats what college is for.

but yea i agree with rink, you guys could make a little bit of money off this once it's done.  Def. not enough to live off of, not even close, but maybe a couple bills or something, still nice.

Out of curiosity when could we expect the next version?  Just a rough guesstimate cause I'm pretty excited to see what you guys do with it.

[Alex May]

We'll be releasing new versions regularly over the next four months.

The moneymaking comment was just off-hand really and doesn't necessarily apply to Dyson. There's tons of things we could be doing but just to be one's own boss on a commercial game project where you have total control is the goal.

Any idea why Vista would be giving me a DEP error and crashing during initialization? And then not allowing me to change DEP settings on the exe? Sorry I can't provide more information about the crash than that, but that's really all that's happening. Program start, crash.

Sorry shudmeyer, I'd never heard of DEP until just now when I googled it. I'll have a look at the details in the morning; I'm hitting the sack now.

I have no idea why this is happening to be honest. The solutions around the web don't sound too convincing either - it sounds like MS really screwed this DEP stuff up. I'll keep looking, but I don't recommend turning it off or anything, seems to realy screw the system up and stop other things working etc.

[Melly]

Solution to all your Vista problems:

Go back to XP.

[agentd00nut]

Hey i didn't mean any offense or anything sorry about that.

But i can't wait for the next version, I'm gonna keep playing around with what i can.  Right now I'm trying to balance sort of a "speed" game, where trees grow faster, and units move and kill quicker.  The really big games can take up to an hour to play and i just thought it'd be neat to get a speed game working.

One question i did have though, does the CPU computer get any bonus to how many units they create?  because it seems like no matter what i do, they always just have a MASSIVE amount of units before me.  Like I'll have maybe 100 total, and then they'll send 2 armies at me like 70-80 units large.  This happens more in the larger games but i can't seem to figure it out.

[Alex May]

No offense taken at all mate. The AI thing, not sure. Possibly they're just capable of moving units around at a faster rate than you or I; they "think" every few seconds or so if I recall correctly, and usually this "thinking" means moving a whole bunch of units around.

[Paul Eres]

Actually I found the opposite -- I always outnumbered the enemies, and I actually never lost a single asteroid the first time I played. Maybe my experiences with 'expanding quickly' in Civilization helped.

[agentd00nut]

Well in the original game, yea i never really lost anything but I'm talking about in my edited version with about 2X the asteroids.  If you wanna try it out to see what i mean then just backup the settings.xml, and replace the first section with this.

Code:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<DysonSettings version="0.1">
  <category name="game">
    <int name="EnemyFactionsMin" value="6" min="0" max="6" />
    <int name="EnemyFactionsMax" value="12" min="0" max="12" />
    <int name="beltradius" value="2750" min="0" max="5750" />
    <int name="beltwidth" value="4500" min="0" max="4500" />
    <int name="asteroids" value="80" min="0" max="80" />
    <int name="MinAsteroidSeparation" value="1200" min="0" max="1100" />
    <int name="StartingSeedlings" value="15" min="0" max="15" />
    <int name="StartingSeedlingsPlayer" value="20" min="0" max="15" />
    <int name="MaxAsteroidNeighbourDist" value="3800" min="0" max="3500" />

As you can see nothing to special, just made it have more enemys and more asteroids.  *i used to play with like 140ish asteroids, but games took forever so i reduced it, you can make it whatever you want though.  Also if your wondering why i made the beltradius value smaller, its so the asteroids are closer to the center, aka you don't have to zoom out as far to see everything going on.

But yea like that they always seem to have a ton more units than me... I think a cool thing for a final version or something would be a replay feature, where you can watch the entire battle but able to see all the asteroids, i've always enjoyed seeing the exact moment when you make a mistake that loses the game but when you were playing you didn't realize it until 20 minutes later, and its just cool t watch battles unfold in like 6X speed =p

*edit*
Hey i was just curios, would you care if i put a post explaining what all the different options do, i think i have most of them figured out, and it might encourage people to play around with it more if they didn't have to figure it out... If not thats fine. *Of course im talking about the stuff in settings.xml*

[Krux]

I tryed Dyson with Mono on Linux. But I got a System.NotSupportedException
it is not The first exception i got, but it is the first one i can't handle.
I even compiled TAO for Linux to get it to work. It would be very cool, if you could handle it.

Code:

$ mono Dyson.exe

Unhandled Exception: System.TypeInitializationException: An exception was thrown by the type initializer for Wuwei.Core.CRC ---> System.NotSupportedException: CodePage 1252 not supported
  at System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding (Int32 codePage) [0x00000]
  at Wuwei.Core.CRC..cctor () [0x00000] --- End of inner exception stack trace ---

  at Wuwei.Filing.TextureLoader.Load (System.String filename) [0x00000]
  at Wuwei.Drawing.BitmapFont.ParsePages (System.String path, System.Xml.XmlNode PagesNode) [0x00000]
  at Wuwei.Drawing.BitmapFont..ctor (System.String Filename) [0x00000]
  at ProcGenGame.Game.Go () [0x00000]
  at ProcGenGame.Game.Main () [0x00000]

[Mirefrost00]

I love this game!  Great amounts of fun, slowly amassing several fleets with which to wrecking-ball through the enemy (while they do the same to me, leading to scrambling to pin their armada down in one spot and devour them).  It is that process of accumulation which inspired a few ideas I developed at work today.  These would address a few of the issues mentioned by other posters, without adding buildings or waypoints.  Might be a pain to code, though... :D

No. 1 - All asteroids owned can rally all friends from adjacent asteroids by the push of a button over in the same window as the "Plant" button.  Asteroids hosting fleets of 100+ can reach two places out, and fleets of 200+ can reach three.  You might highlight the affected asteroids when hovering the mouse over the button.  This would expedite the mustering of a fleet, whether to attack or defend, without dragging eight different groups.

No. 2 - Fleets of 300+ intercept & drag into combat 1 out of every 3 foes traveling past their asteroid, fleets of 400 catch 2/3, and 500+ will catch everything.  These abilities could be aggregate for fleets adjacent to one another, so that a 300+ and a 400+ would catch everything passing between.  Thus, no walls or turrets needed.  Static defenses left behind on an asteroid would be a bit redundant when new fighters are spawned progressively as they are.

No. 3 - 500+, the maximum on any asteroid, and what I term an armada of its own, might continually bombard nearby enemy asteroids at little or no expense.  Not planet-killing stuff, but enough to whittle away at the enemy force.

That's my bid, anyway.  Nothing too drastic, appearance or concept-wise, but a few subtleties.  Thanks for making Dyson!

[agentd00nut]

I love this game!  Great amounts of fun, slowly amassing several fleets with which to wrecking-ball through the enemy (while they do the same to me, leading to scrambling to pin their armada down in one spot and devour them).  It is that process of accumulation which inspired a few ideas I developed at work today.  These would address a few of the issues mentioned by other posters, without adding buildings or waypoints.  Might be a pain to code, though... :D

No. 1 - All asteroids owned can rally all friends from adjacent asteroids by the push of a button over in the same window as the "Plant" button.  Asteroids hosting fleets of 100+ can reach two places out, and fleets of 200+ can reach three.  You might highlight the affected asteroids when hovering the mouse over the button.  This would expedite the mustering of a fleet, whether to attack or defend, without dragging eight different groups.

No. 2 - Fleets of 300+ intercept & drag into combat 1 out of every 3 foes traveling past their asteroid, fleets of 400 catch 2/3, and 500+ will catch everything.  These abilities could be aggregate for fleets adjacent to one another, so that a 300+ and a 400+ would catch everything passing between.  Thus, no walls or turrets needed.  Static defenses left behind on an asteroid would be a bit redundant when new fighters are spawned progressively as they are.

No. 3 - 500+, the maximum on any asteroid, and what I term an armada of its own, might continually bombard nearby enemy asteroids at little or no expense.  Not planet-killing stuff, but enough to whittle away at the enemy force.

That's my bid, anyway.  Nothing too drastic, appearance or concept-wise, but a few subtleties.  Thanks for making Dyson!

I don't get what you meant in number one where asteroids hosting fleets of 100+ can reach so far etc.  That should be an option for any asteroid IMO.  And i sort of liked the idea of essentially losing the effectiveness of static defenses.  While it may seem kinda like "oh well thats dumb" it does 2 things.  It forces a player to really go "Is it worth the 10-15-whatever# units it is to build this defense, or should i take them and plant a tree or take over another asteroid?" Like it is now with the trees.  "Do i want to sacrifice 10 units for a lot more later" ESPECIALLY at the beginning of the game.  I actually played a game where i used my first 20 to build 2 new trees, 3 seconds later i got invaded and lost =p, so it adds a lot of risk / reward to the game.  The second thing i like about permanent fixtures is, at this point of the game development, where you can go to any asteroid.  It would help defend against any army going for an asteroid like 10-15 jumps away from where all the "action" is happening.  Which is quite annoying, only because you have no idea WHAT asteroid the army is heading to so you gotta just watch and watch and watch until you are like "FINALLY!" when they attack =p.

I was playing today in my "fast" mode that i made *i wanna use that term lightly cause i didn't really do much work, about 20 seconds of it actually*.  Which was lots of fun, a lot bigger battles ensue and it went back and forth but i finally won.  But theres something i do wish i could do.  When you attack an asteroid it would be great if you could force your units to only burrow into the asteroid through a certain tunnel.  I was attacking an asteroid with 4 fully grown trees, and instead of just going down one tunnel, my units destroyed each tree to get to the center.  If there was a way to pick which tree to attack it would be AWESOME.  *You could do it where you click and drag on an asteroid with a battle going on when your zoomed in and then just drag over the tree and release maybe?*

Anyways if you guys say its ok i'll put up the "speed" version i made so other people don't have to reinvent the wheel =p.

[Alex May]

I tryed Dyson with Mono on Linux. But I got a System.NotSupportedException
it is not The first exception i got, but it is the first one i can't handle.
I even compiled TAO for Linux to get it to work. It would be very cool, if you could handle it.

Code:

$ mono Dyson.exe

Unhandled Exception: System.TypeInitializationException: An exception was thrown by the type initializer for Wuwei.Core.CRC ---> System.NotSupportedException: CodePage 1252 not supported
  at System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding (Int32 codePage) [0x00000]
  at Wuwei.Core.CRC..cctor () [0x00000] --- End of inner exception stack trace ---

  at Wuwei.Filing.TextureLoader.Load (System.String filename) [0x00000]
  at Wuwei.Drawing.BitmapFont.ParsePages (System.String path, System.Xml.XmlNode PagesNode) [0x00000]
  at Wuwei.Drawing.BitmapFont..ctor (System.String Filename) [0x00000]
  at ProcGenGame.Game.Go () [0x00000]
  at ProcGenGame.Game.Main () [0x00000]

Woo, thanks for trying to make it work in Linux. I've been trying to make Cottage Of Doom work on the Mac with little success. This exception sounds like something that can be fixed, but later on there might be problems with the calls I make to QueryPerformanceCounter in system32.dll.

I've removed the dependency on System.Encoding in the CRC code - should be OK, can't imagine needing to encode from characters outside the ascii range anyway. This will go out in the next release.

Hey i was just curios, would you care if i put a post explaining what all the different options do, i think i have most of them figured out, and it might encourage people to play around with it more if they didn't have to figure it out... If not thats fine. *Of course im talking about the stuff in settings.xml*

By all means do this - if you want to send it to me by PM first I can correct the meanings for you before you post it.

Just a heads up though: I'm actually rewriting the settings code to be more accessible, so the file format will change. I'm hoping to support loading in of different settings files and editing them in-game (or at least from the main menu). A.K.A. mods

[Clemens]

Wow, good job on this game! I really enjoyed the concept, once I got the hang of it.
Keep up the great work!

[agentd00nut]

Alright so this is the code with comments on what everything does in case you wanted to play around with it.  It's all been generously corrected by Haowan to be accurate.

Code:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<DysonSettings version="0.1">
  <category name="game">
    <int name="EnemyFactionsMin" value="6" min="0" max="6" />   The lowest # of cpu's loaded
    <int name="EnemyFactionsMax" value="12" min="0" max="12" />   Highest # of cpu's loaded (this has a hard limit equal to the height in pixels of the teams.png file in the resources dir - currently 10)
    <int name="beltradius" value="2750" min="0" max="5750" />   The distance the asteroids are from center of map
    <int name="beltwidth" value="4500" min="0" max="4500" />   This value sets the initial width of the belt - so the belt will extend half this distance beyond beltradius and half this distance towards the centre. It's the thickness of the belt itself.
    <int name="asteroids" value="80" min="0" max="80" />   # of Asteroids in map
    <int name="MinAsteroidSeparation" value="1200" min="0" max="1100" />   The min. that an asteroid can be next to another one. The game sprays the asteoirds around the ring described by beltradius and beltwidth. It then separates them until they're all at least this distance apart. Reducing this will result in a belt with asteroids closer together, but less evenly distributed.   
    <int name="StartingSeedlings" value="15" min="0" max="15" />   The # of seedlings CPU's start with
    <int name="StartingSeedlingsPlayer" value="20" min="0" max="15" />   # of seedlings player(s) start with
    <int name="MaxAsteroidNeighbourDist" value="3800" min="0" max="3500" />   This value sets the shortest distance at which asteroids can be connected in the pathfinding system. Reducing this can cause breaks in the belt.
  </category>
  <category name="structures">
    <int name="cost" value="10" min="0" max="10" /> # of seedlings trees cost *making it negative doesn't spawn seedlings*
    <int name="spawntime1" value="15" min="0" max="30" />   The time a level 1 tree takes to spawn a seedling
    <int name="spawntime2" value="11" min="0" max="22" />   Level 2 tree spawn time
    <int name="spawntime3" value="6" min="0" max="12" />   Level 3 tree spawn time
    <int name="spawntime4" value="1" min="0" max="3" />      Level 4 tree spawn time
    <int name="SoundVolume" value="25" min="0" max="20" />   Unsure. Probably just how loud the sound is played when seedling spawns the volume of the sound of the periodic tree fireworks. max 255
    <float name="GrowthRate1" value="0.4" min="0" max="0.2" /> Growth speed of a new level 4 tree
    <float name="GrowthRate2" value="9.02" min="0" max="0.1" /> Growth speed of a new level 1 tree
    <float name="GrowthRate3" value="0.014" min="0" max="0.1" /> Growth speed of a new level 2 tree
    <float name="GrowthRate4" value="0.008" min="0" max="0.1" /> Growth speed of a new level 3 tree
    <float name="MinimumAgentDamage" value="0.05" min="0" max="0.05" /> Min. damage a seedling does against a tree
    <float name="AgentStrengthDamage" value="0.1" min="0" max="0.1" />  Multiplier for agent strength value when attacking trees. Equation is (minimum + strength * multiplier)
    <float name="MinSoundTime" value="15" min="0" max="15" />   Periodic fireworks sound. min time between soundings
    <float name="MaxSoundTime" value="100" min="0" max="100" />   Max time between firework sounds
    <float name="AgeSquareFactor" value="0.5" min="0" max="0.5" />   This value increases the tree's resistance to attack depending on the squared value of its age. Increasing this will make older trees increasingly tougher.
  </category>
  <category name="agents">
    <int name="AttackSoundVolume" value="24" min="0" max="24" />   volume control
    <float name="MinimumSpeed" value="175" min="0" max="50" />   Min speed an agent(seedling) moves *Very little blue*
    <float name="MaximumSpeed" value="600" min="0" max="450" /> Max speed an agent moves *lots of blue*
    <float name="CheckForEnemiesTimer" value="1" min="0" max="1" /> Unsure, probably means seedlings check for enemies once a second. yep
    <float name="AttackRepeatTime" value="0.5" min="0" max="0.3" />   Unsure, How soon a seedling can fire after firing once? yep
    <float name="MinimumAgentDamage" value="0.01" min="0" max="0.05" />   Unsure, How much min damage a seedling does against another. yep, same as for agents vs trees
    <float name="MaximumAgentDamage" value="0.09" min="0" max="0.1" />   Unsure, max Seed -> Seed damage this is misnamed: the equation is same for vs trees (min + max * strength) should be called "multiplier"
    <float name="MinimumDesiredAltitude" value="50" min="0" max="50" />   Minimum orbiting distance when chilling at an asteroid
    <float name="MaximumDesiredAltitude" value="100" min="0" max="100" /> Max orbiting distance
    <float name="AttackAgentDistance" value="50" min="0" max="50" /> How far a seedlings laser can go
  </category>
  <category name="program">
    <int name="music" value="0" min="0" max="1" /> default music to on (1) or off (0) - this should be saved so the game remembers when you turn off the music
  </category>
  <category name="AI">
    <int name="Grace" value="500" min="0" max="500" /> This value in seconds will tick down until zero. Prior to its reaching zero, no grey seedlings will move.
    <float name="MinTick" value="5" min="0" max="5" />       Minimum time between AI "thoughts" - decreasing may make the game harder but may also screw with the AI
    <float name="MaxTick" value="12" min="0" max="12" />   Max of same
  </category>
  <category name="asteroids">
    <int name="volume" value="30" min="0" max="30" />   background sound max vol    <int name="conquervolume" value="64" min="0" max="64" />   Takeover sound vol
    <int name="maxtrees" value="6" min="0" max="60" />   How many trees can be on a single asteroid. *haowan, it's used, ive made 10 tree games before*
  </category>
  <category name="menu">
    <int name="sendvolume" value="0" min="0" max="20" /> More sound vol
    <float name="tooltipwait" value="0.2" min="0" max="0.25" /> the time it takes for the small asteroid box to appear
  </category>
</DysonSettings>

*Meant to say*

Also, this code is my fast / large game edited version so if you wanna give that a try just copy and paste it over the settings.xml *back up the original first* The comments shouldn't get in the way

[Alex May]

We've just launched http://www.dyson-game.com. Please have a look around and let us know if you have any feedback. Please also join the mailing list! And visit the forum!