No succession. I can't hope to dethrone Crusader Kings II so I won't even try. Instead I'll play to the game's strengths. The campaign follows the life of one person, that's kind of the major selling point and I think players will be happy with it. Fortunately for me, this is sci-fi, so your character can live for thousands of years. You not only see your empire grow and spread, but also you see your emperor gain traits, experience, titles and scars over the hundreds of years of leadership.

If you're disappointed by the lack of succession, think of it this way : in the end game you will get to lead a guy with most of his body replaced many times over with cloned organs and the finest cybernetic parts, and with upwards of two thousand years of political and command experience.

As an aside, for this reason I was thinking of removing assassinations from the game because if there is a chance, no matter how minuscule, that a player's campaign would end based on a dice roll, that would be bad design. Assassinations will probably make it into the game, it's just they'll never be able to kill the player character, just severely cripple him granting penalties until replacement organs are regrown in vats.

Oh my, old school space game. With sliders and weapon slots and ship design / construction. I welcome any indie foray into space strategies with open arms. I'll be watching this closely.

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So you from what I have seen are developping in C# / openGl ? This seems a strange choice ! As you cannot port your game to XBox if you don't use XNA/DIrectX, and there are no really existing engine using C#/Opengl !? What was motivating your choice ?

I really like C#, coding and debugging is much faster for me in it than, say, C++. For graphics and audio I made use of an SFML .NET binding which fits all my requirements; SFML uses OpenGL. I do not see XBox as a valid platform for a grand strategy game so lack of DirectX is not a concern.

I'm a programmer but if you need some ships models maybe I can help. But it seems that this is not the important thing, as they are shown very small !

I appreciate the offer but as you correctly guess ships are not the main problem here. What I need are things such as interface and status icons, images of different planets, GUI elements, images for different species and different buildings (with 120 buildings in the game and rising, it's becoming increasingly difficult to come up with even abstract graphics / symbols). Oh and the square blocky font has been replaced ages ago so don't worry about that either.

Your hint about screenshots has been duly acknowledged  .

Thanks for your interest, I haven't been on the forums for a while.

Progress is being made, space battles and bombardment were implemented, but eventually they took too much of a focus. I got a semi-decent scripting engine up and running and then realized I could have saved myself a lot of trouble by simply plugging in an existing language. So currently I am in process of adding Lua functionality to the engine. Would have had it ages ago, but there are bills to be paid..

@Klatter121
Both your ideas are quite consistent with the game. If you want to move your character anywhere on the map his entire fleet goes with him, including his honor guard called The Emperor's Own that function as elite guards/bodyguards/invasion infantry but tend to cost more than a fleet of battlecruisers. As for cyborg type characters, implants already give you boosts in stats, and with proper Cybernetics skill/tech you can replace everything but the brain.

@nihilocrat
Unfortunately I've decided to scrap the tactical battle system, for now. The promised art assets fizzled out, but I can render my own in Max - good enough for programmer art. It's kind of my fault - if I had something substantial to show to people, I'm sure I'd already have plenty of offers for help.

I have used both free version and the full version of Unity. At work I use Pro, so as I became proficient with it I installed the free version at my home to have around.

As all engines, it comes with its good sides and its bad sides. What it is meant to do, it does superbly - it has 3d scenes and 3d rendering with all the bells and whistles. It is well-documented, and most importantly, has a large user base. It has excellent plug-in support so you can usually avoid inventing the wheel (but then, plug-ins are pro only). It has a good asset store that helps you easily buy or sell premade assets. It has a nice GameObject/Component system, object hierarchy etc. which are great for 3d and fast prototyping.

On the other hand, Unity is completely unsuitable for 2d stuff out of the box (there are plug-ins that mitigate this but they cost money and require Pro licence). If Unity doesn't know how to do something, it cannot do it. There are some unintuitive and undocumented things about how it works that WILL require a learning curve of a few months. New versions are sometimes prone to crashing. It has a bit of a rigid asset pipeline - it pre-compresses everything for you and you need to use some of its own protocols to load-unload assets dynamically . There are some weird import/reimport rituals you have to go through occasionally. MonoDevelop is a horribly unstable tool (on Windows) and inferior to Visual Studio Express in almost every way (meaning, if you choose to develop in UnityScript or on a Mac you are stuck with an inferior IDE).

At the end of the day, it will help you deploy one codebase to multiple platforms, and it works

Maybe this fact will help you see my opinion of Unity: I am a lone wolf developer. When I want to make a 2d game, I stick to my own framework, work in C# or maybe C++, and wouldn't dream of touching Unity. However, when I want to make a 3d game or prototype, maybe something third-person, or something similar, I fire up Unity of my own volition. Because I know that's what it does best and its physics etc. are a great help so you can just jump in there. But on the other hand, if I had to deploy a 2d game to multiple platforms, some of them handheld and had money I'd know I can get back, I'd get Unity Pro, get a sprite manager plug in, and code it in Unity for ease of deployment. So it definitely has its strengths and depending on what you want from it, it can be an invaluable tool. But it can also make you pull your hair out in frustration until you learn all of its little quirks.

I have no experience with Union so I will refrain from commenting there.

I hope that this helps.

Add towns and stuff, make it an open-world game where you fight monsters and do quests or something I don't know.

Do anything but throw it out. Make a bunch of people, let them define themselves by their boundaries, allow them to cross over and have wars start, maybe even lead revolutions where their colors change. Then make one of them playable and you have a pretty great game.

Oh I am definitely making a game out of it, and it will most likely be a strategy (the world does not need another open world RPG, well at least not one made by me, it's not my specialty and it would suck). The thing is I am afraid it will stumble into Europa Universalis level of complexity (most of my games usually do, I have no idea how) and collapse under its own weight.

Well, just horsing around with the editor gave me several ideas (changing territory boundaries, detection of sea straights and narrows, archipelagos). I'll make some diplomacy and units and we'll see how it goes from there.

So, I have this, um, thing. Territories with borders and countries. Generated procedurally for now.

I have no idea what to do with it.

[would]

Oh yeah. That city... those graphics... I would play that. With

looping in the background.

thanks for your feedback, and work a little bit on your english.

This is technically my first attempt at pixel art.



The sprites are meant for a 2x scale so the game would look something like this:

[doesn't]

But anyway, to stay on topic, Ctrl+K,C and Ctrl+K,U should do what you want, like Mikademus said.

preferably one that doesn't involve chords

And you're totally right about those nested comments. Ugh.

Going on a tangent here. Code commenting needs some love. Commenting and uncommenting multiple lines or blocks of code is so universal that it should, in my opinion, be as implemented into the IDE as, say, smart tabbing and untabbing.

I know there is already a button that comments/uncomments selected blocks, but until we evolve a third arm exclusively for the mouse it would be nice if the feature was default-mapped onto a readily accessible keyboard shortcut, preferably one that doesn't involve chords, or pressing five modifier keys at once.

Did some testing with delicious pathfinding and Bezier curves.



Now to plug it into the game proper so fleets know their way around.

What about the sun thing? I'm pretty sure the Bible says the sun circles around the earth and not the other way round.

I find a much more humorous example in that passage about a basin in front of the temple in Jerusalem having a diameter of 10 cubits and a circumference of 30 cubits.

i.e. according to Bible pi is exactly 3.0.

I stopped the moment 'bathing' was mentioned.

Maybe you should give it a go. It's... probably not what you think it is.

Just wanted to get this out of the way :

care to elucidate the whole reason there's no missing link?

Can't speak for him but I would like to elucidate the missing link fallacy for you as I consider myself competent to do so.

To insist on missing links means roughly this : you are an archaeologist from the year 3000, looking at the roof of the recently excavated Sistine Chapel. But a piece that happened to contain God's little pinky has fallen off. So you keep staring at the roof and saying "Gee, if there was that fifth finger there I would totally swear this was a masterpiece of Renaissance showing God reaching out to give the touch of life to Adam. However as it stands I see no pattern in this bunch of colors and lines."

Or, let's say you are an inspector arriving at the site of a plane crash, but the airplane exploded at high altitudes and scattered around a wide wooded area. Painstakingly you and your team work over several months and finally manage to piece together most of the airplane's skeleton. You find a good chunk of the left wing, two jet engines, the cockpit, several dozen seats, a lot of plating etc. The black box is retrieved and recounts the final seconds of the airplane's flight with high accuracy.

Then someone (who usually isn't a crash inspector, and is in fact very rarely connected to aeronautics at all) comes and says "But you haven't found the rear right wing fuel injector. You haven't found the tail. You haven't found jet engines 2 and 4. Therefore your theory that this wreck used to be an airplane is completely wrong. SHOW ME THE REAR RIGHT FUEL INJECTOR OR YOUR THEORY THAT THIS IS A CRASHED AIRPLANE IS COMPLETELY WRONG.

The point is, the amount of different SPECIES to have ever lived numbers in billions. There is no way every single transitory step between two species can ever be found. Even so, the fossil record is incredibly rich and where ever we can find fossils they are in complete agreement with the theory of evolution. The "missing link" between hominid fossils A and B was found and found again. But you know what that usually meant? That where there used to be ONE gap between fossils A and B, now there were suddenly TWO gaps, one between fossil A and the newly found missing link, and the other between the found link and fossil B. There will always be gaps until you can find the fossil of every individual that ever lived.

New TIGSource drinking game :

Drink when ever you see a K-ON! avatar.

Casualties will be in the thousands.

Not really code but a changelog, I think it qualifies.

Code:

- Split off blueprints from archetypes. Finally blueprints can be targeted by modifiers \o/
- Just remembered I haven't coded in modifiers yet FFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

@increpare, _Tommo_, Mikademus
For me at least, choosing a programming language to learn (or in this case improve upon), means investing time and resources into the language. A (primary) language choice will stick with you for years to come. Sure, it's not an exclusive thing, and I wager a lot of people here know more than 2 languages, but you gotta have a primary for a game you're working on.

To lock yourself into working with a language that might or might not suit your tastes or, say, ultimate business goals, just because it has a library or two that MIGHT help you with a single project, just seems counterintuitive to me.

Different strokes for different folks, I suppose.

I mean, I see how it could be a problem to plunge into a relatively unsupported language (such as the Haskell example) and then after investing a lot of effort realize there are no suitable libraries for it. But I assumed all the languages OP mentioned are fairly well endowed in the libraries/engines department (again, can't vouch for Python) so it would boil down to preference in this case.

Also +1 vote for unity as both a development and prototyping tool, but only if you want to make 3d games (loliver said it is a 3d project) . If you want to make sprite-heavy games don't go anywhere near Unity as it will chew your soul to and spit it out in tiny bits.

Choosing a language preference because of a library is probably not a good idea so you should choose a language first and then look for libraries, and it is pretty much guaranteed that you will find a library that suits your purposes.

As a rule of thumb, there is no "better" language. All languages have their weak points and their strong points. Pick what ever (mainstream) language you feel most comfortable with and, like I said, you can deal with libraries later (can't vouch for Python but both C# and C++ have more libraries of any kind than you can shake a keyboard at).

If you can stomach working in c++ it has by far the largest codebase and most libraries. It has also been the de facto AAA game development language for the past decade or two, so if you ever want to work as a programmer in a gamedev studio you will most likely need to know C++. I can't speak for Python, though.

Also I don't see why you would need to know Java in order to work with C#. Sure there are similarities, but you are effectively saying mastering C# would be tougher than mastering C++. That is... not the case, in my humble experience.

P.S. we are not better than you. We just have a bit more experience in drawing horrible pixelated sprites.