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[Hythlodaeus]

Thank you, although you can vote for many games. All of the games if you wish, but I understand

I actually wasn't aware of that. Fair enough. Will vote for you then.

I'd like to see this turn into a commercial project so I don't see how that's possible. Also, there's some progress being made on the Linux port. Let's hope for the best!

Actually it's perfectly possible to sell an open-source game. All you have to do is to license the art and gamedata as proprietary, and keep the engine open-source. Just look at Doom 3, for instance. It's Free Software, but you still have to buy the game, because the art isn't licensed as free.

[Eigen]

I'd like to see this turn into a commercial project so I don't see how that's possible. Also, there's some progress being made on the Linux port. Let's hope for the best!

Actually it's perfectly possible to sell an open-source game. All you have to do is to license the art as proprietary and keep the engine open-source. Just look at Doom 3, for instance. It's Free Software, but you still have to buy the game, because the art isn't licensed as free.

You're right, it's probably a question of picking the correct licences but I'm not really home with those matters. It still wouldn't stop someone from releasing the game as their own to unknowing people. And what if someones re-draws all of the art assets so that none of my work is in there? But I'll definitely look into this sort of option. Thanks for the pointer

Yes, Doom 3 is now open-sourced but it wasn't when it was first released. That would've been a mad move by id. And the reason they can now get away with it is that while it still generates revenue it's no longer their flagship title. The tech is out-dated (in AAA standards) anyway.

[Hythlodaeus]

You're right, it's probably a question of picking the correct licences but I'm not really home with those matters. And it still wouldn't stop someone from releasing the game as their own to unknowing people.

Actually it would. They really can't compile/run the game without art+level data can't they? And even if they were able to, people like that can be very easily taken down. Adam Saltsman, the author of Canabalt open-sourced his game, and admitted there were massive advantages to it. Check it out:

http://blog.semisecretsoftware.com/open-sourcing-your-game-while-its-still-popul

Yes, Doom 3 is now open-sourced but it wasn't when it was first released. That would've been a mad move by id. And the reason they can now get away with it is that while it still generates revenue it's no longer their flagship title. The tech is out-dated (in AAA standards) anyway.

Ah, not at all, believe me. If it was up to Carmack (and he admitted it himself), he would open-source his games from day one. The reason it doesn't happen is because iD isn't exactly an independent company anymore, and he usually has to go through a long bureaucratic proccess, in order to get permission to release the source code of his games under a Free Software license. Again, releasing a game's engine source has no influence whatsoever on how good or bad it will sell. Your game wont get pirated more easily because of that. And you will benefit from the advantages of simply having other people to make ports for you, have the community automatically troubleshoot bugs and submit code improvements to you, as well as helping other indie developers by providing them with a solid engine platform to modify and learn upon.

[Eigen]

Good points you make there and the blog entry you linked was an excellent read. Thanks for that. I'll give this whole thing a good think.

[Hythlodaeus]

Good points you make there and the blog entry you linked was an excellent read. Thanks for that. I'll give this whole thing a good think.

And thank you for considering my suggestion. I know that initially this might seem more troublesome than it's worth, especially when it comes to picking licenses, but regarding independent game development, I believe sharing resources and code is the best way to inspire others to innovate, while making it easier for them to learn.

Licence-wise, I usually prefer Free Software licenses, although not everyone agrees with this view. The most popular ones are the GPL (Doom 3 uses it), the MIT (Canabalt uses this one) and the 3-point BSD. Both MIT and BSD are completely unrestrictive, whereas the GPL enforces the sharing of any modifications made to the licensed code. Alternatively, you can also pick a simple non-free open-source license, though it might discourage others to use your engine to make their own games (since it means they wouldn't be able to sell it).

Art and other game data, is fairly easy to license, since all you have to do is to write a small paragraph saying that all artwork and IP related assets are the exclusive property of the author and may not be sold, shared, or used for other purposes without his/her permission.

I wish you the best luck, and I hope you decide to share the source. Additionally, if you pick a Free Software license, I can guarantee you at least some coverage on a few Free Software blogs/communities I frequently write for.

Oh, and I already voted for you on indiedb, by the way.

[Eigen]

Thanks for the vote. And it's always great to read what people more experienced than you have to say about certain topics. I admit I haven't been much interested in the whole licence stuff but there's no excuse not to know these things, especially these days.

[Hythlodaeus]

Thanks for the vote. And it's always great to read what people more experienced than you have to say about certain topics. I admit I haven't been much interested in the whole licence stuff but there's no excuse not to know these things, especially these days.

Well, I could spend the whole day ranting about the ethics of software licensing, but it's really up to you to pick your side, in the end. You can start by reading these:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_software

Hope it helps. If you have any questions (and you likely will), just ask.

[Eigen]

So, did Pioneers make it into the Top 100? You bet your sweet cheecks it did! Along with such awesome games as Renegade X, Hotline Miami, Kenshi and Dear Esther. I feel really honoured. Plus I'm really happy it's one of the few pixely graphics games in there. Huge thanks to everybody who voted.




Anyway, the second phase of the voting is now underway. I'm totally happy with just making the cut so I can't ask you to vote again but if you believe in the game it would be hugely appreciated.

[Hythlodaeus]

Voted. Good luck.

[makerimages]

Voted, hope you come up as the best.

[JobLeonard]

Can I... can I complain about a pet peeve? I love pixel graphics, and yours are really good. However, it really really bothers me when the engine displaying those graphics does so at sub-pixel precision, as it takes me out of the immersion. It draws my attention to the medium (the pixels) instead of what the pixels are conveying.

An example of pretty pixel graphics ruined (for me) by this is Super Smash Land.

So, in Pioneers it is also there. Not as blatant as in SSL, but for example when I move the cursor around, or see the ship sailing in in the intro it is visible. Looking at the smoke at the Inn I see smaller-than-pixel-size pixels.

Maybe it's a design choice by you, in which case I'll just consider it a difference in taste and live with it (and I am curious what the reasoning behind it would be). But if you hadn't given it any thought before: have you tried displaying pixels only at actual in-game resolution coordinates, to see the different aesthetic effect? A possible implementation could be to keep most of the engine as is, but to round off sprite coordinates to "whole numbers" of the pixel location in the display logic.

[Eigen]

I understand your annoyance and to be honest there's no valid reasoning for it. Usually it annoys me too but in this game these are very specific places where it's used so I can live with it. I know the objects are moving around in 1px space simply because that looks smoother with variable timestep. Same for the smoke particles. Since I have no alpha channel to play with I somehow thought 2px scale steps would be too jerky but I should try it out and see what's what. Sacrificing smoothness for graphical integrity would be worth something too, I guess. As for the mouse cursor that has never crossed my mind and would be a relatively easy fix to add.

Well, if I wanted to make this proper I would make the scale factor parametric so it could as well be 3 or whatever but most of my code has been hardcoded with 2 (already present in most calculations) so it'd take quite a lot of development time to divide everything back into components. Probably more time than I'm willing to spend on it. That's definitely a note to self to implement proper scaling in the "engine" should I ever re-use it. Then again, maybe implement it right now and use it properly from this point on and go over the old code when possible.

[Rumrusher]

I have to ask is there any use to any of the tools outside of the axe and weapons?
Because if so thanks for the heads up I could possibly avoid sinking money on those items on the next ship.
oh and will there be a chance to sell stuff outside of the gear you buy?

[JobLeonard]

For the record: I'm not saying your game is ruined by this, and like you said it only happens in certain limited areas so it's not very grating. But because the rest of the game gets the aesthetics so right it stands out. Then again, probably would be pain to get right, especially at this point in the project - hadn't thought of the 4 colour palette limitation.

If I read between the lines correctly your game is structured in such a way the 2px scaling is hardcoded into a lot of different places throughout the code, making it easy to miss a spot. Ouch. On the other hand, getting proper scaling in your engine with appropriately defined globals would increase the longevity of your game - high PPI displays seem to finally become popular, and in a few years that might become a problem if you stick to a hard coded 2 pixels-per-pixel.

As for the smoothness: you could still keep the sub-pixel precision in the motion logic, but round the actual display logic to whole pixels. Then the path would follow the same steps and probably stay fairly smooth-looking (humans are good at interpolating motion), but still jump from pixel to pixel to avoid breaking immersion.

[eigenbom]

voted gl!

[Eigen]

I have to ask is there any use to any of the tools outside of the axe and weapons?
Because if so thanks for the heads up I could possibly avoid sinking money on those items on the next ship.
oh and will there be a chance to sell stuff outside of the gear you buy?

Silly me, I should've removed the items that are actually duds ... like everythin except the axe
About selling: I'm thinking the Merchant might buy whatever artifacts or items of interest you bring back so that could be a sort of secondary source of income.

If I read between the lines correctly your game is structured in such a way the 2px scaling is hardcoded into a lot of different places throughout the code, making it easy to miss a spot. Ouch.

Yeah, that's basically it. Most of the GUI widget sizes and positions are given 2x for example. Also wherever I translate from tile position to world/screen position (many-many places). Though it wouldn't be hard to miss because if I change the scale to 3 stuff that's wrong will be immidiately visible in the game. Just a lot of manual labour. I'm not keen on manual labour.

As for the smoothness: you could still keep the sub-pixel precision in the motion logic, but round the actual display logic to whole pixels. Then the path would follow the same steps and probably stay fairly smooth-looking (humans are good at interpolating motion), but still jump from pixel to pixel to avoid breaking immersion.

I think I tried something similar in the early stages of development and it just felt jerky. Might have to try it out again.

voted gl!

Got a funny comment on IndieDB today:

.../ THIS GAME IS DISGUSTING. A bunch of filthy white racialist colonizing land stealing scumbags brainwashing ppl to fight their filthy semite seedy shitty holy wars. Whites suck +999999999.

I'm not going to bother answering him directly but he does make a point. Stuff that happened in history is just one way of how things played out. I don't want to encourage the player to fight the tribes. Most likely they'll simply get killed by the warriors because the player party is rather small and easy to outnumber, unless everyone's got muskets.


On other subjects, it turned out players with ATI cards (with a specific recent driver I believe) get all sorts of glitchy graphics and even a BSOD on launch in one extreme case. That's just bad ... the latest Catalyst driver from December 3rd is supposed to fix those issues and I'm hoping someone will install them and get back to me with some good news.

[Drevlin]

.../ THIS GAME IS DISGUSTING. A bunch of filthy white racialist colonizing land stealing scumbags brainwashing ppl to fight their filthy semite seedy shitty holy wars. Whites suck +999999999.

I'm not going to bother answering him directly but he does make a point. Stuff that happened in history is just one way of how things played out. I don't want to encourage the player to fight the tribes. Most likely they'll simply get killed by the warriors because the player party is rather small and easy to outnumber, unless everyone's got muskets.

I like how you made a point starting from a rude comment by someone 
I voted for your game, by the way. Keep up the good work!

[Hythlodaeus]

.../ THIS GAME IS DISGUSTING. A bunch of filthy white racialist colonizing land stealing scumbags brainwashing ppl to fight their filthy semite seedy shitty holy wars. Whites suck +999999999.

That's an obvious joke / troll comment, man.

[JobLeonard]

Yeah, that's basically it. Most of the GUI widget sizes and positions are given 2x for example. Also wherever I translate from tile position to world/screen position (many-many places). Though it wouldn't be hard to miss because if I change the scale to 3 stuff that's wrong will be immidiately visible in the game. Just a lot of manual labour. I'm not keen on manual labour.

Why didn't you use a global or, if you use C/C++ a #DEFINE in those cases? Magic numbers will bite you in the ass in the long run, and you look like the kind of programmer who knows this.

I think I tried something similar in the early stages of development and it just felt jerky. Might have to try it out again.

Hmm... maybe movement should be slowed down a bit for lower res. Also, maybe different rounding methods (floor vs. proper rounding) have different results.

[Eigen]

Why didn't you use a global or, if you use C/C++ a #DEFINE in those cases? Magic numbers will bite you in the ass in the long run, and you look like the kind of programmer who knows this.

Yes, I should've known better but I didn't. It's because I didn't think I'd ever want to change the scaling when you can just up the resolution but seeing the retina screens on the new MacBook Pros I now see the error in my way. It just looks tiny on that. Other than that specific device/screen case I still don't see who'd want to scale it up (as of now). 2 is the most pleasent pixel scale to look at, at least to my eyes. After that it tends to get too blocky. It will start making sense once retina screen become commonplace on PCs though I don't think that will happen just yet. I think right now there's only a Samsung latptop with that screen type ...

That's an obvious joke / troll comment, man.

I know, I know, I'm just saying he does have a bit of a point in there even though it's easy to miss in his hysterically written post. People don't just write random stuff (usually), there's got to be a source of ignition in there somewhere. A thought that motivated that little piece of literature. I think it's important to understand that source.

I like how you made a point starting from a rude comment by someone  
I voted for your game, by the way. Keep up the good work!

Hah, thanks!