Is this planet randomly/procedurally generated? If so, that's pretty damn good!

It is, but I made use of the excellent procedural texture generators in PovRay. So I can only take praise for finding good parameter sets and making use of the options that PovRay offers. It wasn't easy though, and I like this planet very much too.

Almost everything in this project will be procedurally generated. It's cool to make whole worlds from a single numeric seed. Almost. At least I can dream of that

Thank you for the feedback

In another forum I got some suggestions for adding atmosphere and flavor by descriptive texts and I tried that. I've added a short "welcome" type text blurb under the headline, with a message from the station crew.

Also a bigger text area giving your own impression of the station.

Click for full size

(Ack, I think "pools" should rather be "puddles" there in the text. I thought I had changed that before taking the screenshot, but apparently I didn't.)

I think I'll change the "inhabitants" label to "population".

Some of my first shots, just getting used to it.

I like this one pretty much

so I ask everyone have you had this problems? how do you go about dodging this obstacle? and if and when you call it quits?

Yes, I had this too. I'd like to make RPG/dungeon explorer crossovers, but in a peaceful fashion, that is without combat. And it's really difficult in this genre to make a game interesting without combat. Also, I have a space exploration project going, that is meant to be peaceful too, and at the moment not very thrilling.

Usually I then try to spawn discussions in forums, explaining the problems of the projects and hoping for good ideas. If there come ideas I can work some more on my projects, otherwise I just park them. My graphics and code is pretty old fashion anyways so it doesn't matter if the projects will be finished this or next year.

It happens that a project is hibernating several years until I get new ideas and pick up working on it. So I guess I haven't found the point yet where to stop a project and call it a failure - one I have sorted out though, because the code became so complex that it became very hard to maintain, and it seemed futile to spend a lot of time on repairing a project that was not very special anyways. I could re-use parts of that project though for later work, so it's been ok.

A late idea of mine is to search someone who is very good at creating ideas and visions and team up with him/her. But my way of working on projects in short runs of a few weeks and then turning to something else, to come back to the project after months or years of doing something else, is just not suitable for teamwork. So I haven't really tried that yet. But there are people who have a lot of ideas, so teaming up with someone like that should be an option if you are stuck with a project, due to lack of ideas.

I've updated the first posting with a few screenshots, showing the parts of the project which already work. The resource gathering screen is work in progress though, the lower part where the available gathering drones ought to be shown is still to be implemented. Also besides metals and gases, the other resources are not calculated yet.

Once the space miner part is developed more, this screen will only be available if the players ship has the right sensors and probes, and is close enough to the planet to actually prone it for resources.

At the moment all screens are accessible right away to check if the planet creation code is working correctly and produces believable results for the resources.


Edit: A little bit of progress - I finally had some free time and worked on the so-long-not-getting-along-with projected space station UI. I finished an outline of the very first space station screen, the general information panel. It sure will be fleshed out over time, but well, this is how it looks right now:

Click for full size

I wonder how to make the portraits - there should be different races of aliens, and drawing portraits is really not a talent of mine.

Space Merchants: Conquerors looks great on those screenshots for sure. I wish I could do that too. Maybe some day

I hope to pick up work on Solarex again soon. Today I finally integrated the improved earthlike planet image and with some luck I'll be able to continue work, although the next two weeks I'll be pretty busy with other things it seems.

I'll need to figure out a little price simulation for goods, so that trading will be interesting, but not without risks for the careless.

Project is on halt currently because I've been busy with this:

http://www.funkelwerk.de/forum/index.php?topic=240.0

I think in a while I'll pick up the space miner part again. Need to work on a space station UI and I'm pretty clueless about that - it's a real roadblock currently.

Basically it needs to serve these 4 purposes:

- buy/sell goods
- upgrade ship equipment, buy new ship
- sell prospected information about resources to companies
- browse news, take missions (if there will be missions)

I guess I'll need a kind of generic "space station" screen that has icons or such to open the 4 detail screens.

The next release will include a bugfix for Mac OS X, there are display problems with the tabular system view. Also a better random number generator for testing if it will produce better systems, the current generator might not be "random" enough. But most likely the difference will be small.

Replacing the favicon should be easy, I'll look into that.

The validation results worry me a bit. I must admit I had not used the validators since long, but I did not expect so much problems, because most of the CSS and HTML comes from the Joomla templates and the editor component included there. I'll look into that, but I don't have much hope that I can substantially improve it, my html and CSS skills are only good for simple tasks.

The logo at the top left has too much contrast? Too colorful? That's something I can fix

Thanks for the feedback, seems there is plenty of work left.

Edit: Used the validators, checked and had kind of a "Bleh" experience. The Editor component that comes with Joomla writes a lot of "additional" information into the html that it uses for it's own purposes, but which the validator does not like at all. Still there are real HTML bugs, but I do not like the fact that the editor produces such bogus HTML

Edit 2: The CSS validator error seems more related to the validator than my site, since I have no Java code there. But something must be bad still, so bad that it kills the validator

Listening to a louder-than-needed hard disk drive that almost hits the resonance frequency of the case ... maybe with the help of some fans.

I've been working on a new frontpage for my new website:

http://www.funkelwerk.de/

First time ever that I got a somewhat professionally looking website. Might not hold to truly professional standards, but I hope it'll be good enough not to scare visitors away so quickly

(Unless you're talking about hypertext or visual novels... ))

These form a graph structure, and are implicitely spatial, too, just possible in a high-dimensional space. You can always make 2D or 3D projections of such graphs.

Does it hurt?

Be honest.

It depends a bit. I had critiques like "Your game is too ugly to be played". That sure hurt. There are critiques like "It would be better if I would not have to click each tile, but could select a group". Such usually hurts less or not at all.

I think I'm very sensitive to critique. So I seldom ask, or carefully select the people whom I ask. But I'm aware that most kind of critique, including the "Your game is too ugly to be played" can be made into something helpful, once the hurt has dropped.

In regard to way to respond - the more you feel hurt, the better will be a short "Thank you for the feedback, I'll see how I can improve my project with your points". If you feel comfortable with the things said, it can be good to discuss. Defending leads to bad arguments, and it's really tricky to get that done in a good and postive style. Better be brief and friendly, if possible.

Maybe I'll make a breakthrough how to make combat-free, sandbox-like, dungeon exploration games interesting.

I think it looks a bit too hard now, but you could include light color mutations when the distance changes. Also, is this software-rendered or something like that? I liked the soft version more.

It's software rendered indeed. All views are pre-rendered with a raytracer and then just stitched together at runtime. This approach has quite some limitations, but I wanted to explore what is possible, and where the limits actually are.

I'll see if I can find some middle ground between the two options. Changing the light color with depth, I can't do that directly, but I could emulate the effect if needed. What kind of color change would you suggest?

Still working on my dungeon things, and I've been experimenting with the lighting. I made some bigger changes, and now I feel uncertain if I overdid it - the visible depth is greater now, but also saturation and overall contrast are stronger.

Before:



After:



What do you think, is that better, or is it overdone now?

Depends on the game. Games like chess or similar are not easier to their creators than they are to everyone else. Story-heavy games, or games that depend on other knowledge (level layouts, items placements, secret triggers) are quite likely easier for their creators than for other people because they know everything about them.

My personal challenge is to make a game that is thrilling for myself.

A bit too sterile looking, especially with single spiderweb in totally sterile environment. Those must be cleaning spiders.

I've been working on less sterile walls and floors. Some moss and algae seemed to fit to the idea of an undergound environment - unless it's somewhere in the south, then sand would be better I guess. I decided for a more humid enviroment and at least I have more interesting textures now.

Further decorative elements may or may not occur in this project since the graphics are really bloating the package size and want to limit it to the most essential things. I'll work on a small set of decorative elements, though, but I think due to the size problem most things need to be both, decorative and at the same time functional, to get the most out of it.

Edit: The gate is not meant to be made by spiders. It just looks like a spiderweb. There are no spiders ... the idea for the gate was that the player must solve a riddle to open it, and the riddle is related to spiders.

A bit too sterile looking, especially with single spiderweb in totally sterile environment. Those must be cleaning spiders.

Yes, there needs to be way more interesting details. Working on it, this is a very early work in progress. But it's a problem of the technology that I use I hope I can still create more lively environments finally.

Thanks for the feedback

Still working on a dungeon game. I needed doors or gates, and the idea of a spider web like spidergate crawled into my mind. Or something. At least I made such and they seem to fit well.

Front view:

Side view:

A pity they can't be as shiny as real spiderwebs with back light ...

You got to take the right vitamins. It's easy enough to say something has calcium and iron in it, when the calcium and iron aren't in a form that can be absorbed.

Calcium and iron are not vitamins in strict sense but minerals (or the use of the words is different in English ...)

Anyways. Multivitamins are good as support usually. If you eat a lot of vegetables and fruit in addition to some meat, you don't need them, and you also get some good minerals this way, too. Some studies show that multivitamins can prevent cancer as long as you do not have cancer yet, but they can also support the growth of tumors if you have cancer ... so it can be a double edged sword.

Try to take them in moderation and should be alright.

Edit: I should say, I'm no expert on that field. I just stated my personal view on the topic.