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[quantum]

1.17 claims to be up to date even though you have 1.19 out.

1.19 is great, new stuff works perfectly. But the old clicking bug is still there, this time i came across it while playing the last part of the tutorial.
It'd also be nice if you could have either a window at the bottom giving planet stats like in Dyson, or a very small delay for planet stats when hovering the mouse, right now it takes too long to find out detailed planet info.

Yes there was another bug in 1.17 concerning the updater. It should all work since version 1.18. I will change the user interface in the next version and was thinking about how to best visualize the planet information. We'll see how that will work out Thanks for the feedback.

I actually recommended that he post it up here.

Hey Alex! Thanks for passing by and confirm what i said.

i got some criticism concerning the absence of a java webstarter on the javagaming forums and fixed that. You can find the link to the webstarter in the first post. Two things: first you will loading a php file. As i'm not in control of the server i can't set the mime-type for jnlp files correctly so i had to do some php magic. Second, and more important: the webstarter version will create a directory quandum in your home folder where maps, bots, game recordings and logs files will be downloaded and saved to. Everything you create with quantum will be stored there. i'll add a "Uninstall" button to the webstarter version which will remove the directory. I couldn't come up with a better solution. Thanks to markus.borbely for pointing me in the right direction.

This is an experimental build. I tested it as much as i could but there could be still some bugs, fixing everything for the webstarter was quite tedious . If you encounter problems please post the content of the file log.txt here.

Thanks a lot for all the feedback!

[mildmojo]

Nifty game.  Very similar to Galcon, and insanely difficult. =)

Reminds me a little of Liquid War, too.

The web start is nice; quick & easy startup.

It would be nice if the planet stats popups were more accessible.  Maybe reduce the popup delay just a smidge.  And it would be nice if they'd flip over to the other side of the planet instead of appearing offscreen.

[quantum]

i'll add a delay option when i rework the in-game "menu" today. There you will be able to set the delay in milliseconds. and i'll fix the offscreen bug. thanks for the feedback!

[quantum]

To facilitate match making i implemented a simple IRC client that automatically connects to the APIStudios irc server and joins the channel #quantum. This has a nice side effect. You have to chose a nickname before you start multiplayer. In case this nickname is already used on the irc server it will be extended with underlines until it is unique. It also allows for a bit of a community feeling as you can now also chat with people playing quantum. I could not yet fix the in game menu as well as the planet status popup. I hope to find the time tomorrow. I also plan on including a simple mechanism so you can share your maps easily in game. Also, Johannes, commander in chief of APIStudios, offered me that he'd host a couple of game servers so people having problems with firewalls can still play against each other. For the new features simply update your version to version 1.21 or invoke the webstarter which will do all the magic.

Let the online games begin!

[Kegluneq]

So I've been messing around with the ally system a lot, and I just can't figure out how it works. At first I thought it was that clicking the right symbol was prohibited, it was the mark of the other player and you can't change it, and that the left side was your own ally/foe status to that player. So I click the left symbol to ally myself with the red bot, but I still attacked him when I moved to his planet, and he still attacked my planet. So how does this alliance system work? I've only tested with bots so far, no one else to help me test on a multiplayer game

[quantum]

alliances are only established if both players agree on being friends. as you guessed the bots don't engage in alliances ( yet ). the feature is only really usefull in multiplayer mode. i hope to see some more people joining the server due to the irc chat addition. might take a while. or it happens never :p

[quantum]

I just released version 1.22. I fixed a couple of things mainly related to the gui. You can now also save the recording any time during the game and have different snapshots. This comes in handy if you encounter a bug and game over never happens. I also added an option to control how long it takes before the planet status is shown when hovering over a planet. Apart from that i fixed a couple of bugs which are not really interesting

[quantum]

I was a bit lazy with keeping the changelog up to date so i'll just post what happened since 1.18 and is now available in 1.23:

• Fixed a bug in the game server. Clients didn't get notified in the game lobby if the server closed
• Added capability to save the game to file for later replay and analysis. This works in single as well as in multiplayer mode
• Added an option to control the delay until a planets status gets shown
• Added irc chat capabilities for easier match making and finding other players. We are hosted by apistudios so i also added their #idle channel as an optional channel to be used in quantum
• Redid a few parts of the gui nobody will probably notice. The ingame menu is now a proper dialog
• Added the ability to upload and download maps to and from the server. This should facilitate the exchange of maps
• Some code refactoring in preparation for going open source ( which will not happen until march )

Try out the new version, create and share maps and play some epic online battles with your friends. everything is in place now I consider this the release candidate. I'll probably not add sound in the near future. Apart from that everything should work out for you the player.

[quantum]

I just released update 1.26. This is mainly a bug fix update. The following stuff has been fixed:

• gui transitions were wrong, e.g. clicking back in create will go back to main menu instead of join menu
• fixed that creatures don't obey the chain in the tutorial. problem was in boid behaviour code
• fixed resource regrowth bug. update order was not correct had to introduce another cycle
• fixed creatures going to infinity bug. boid behaviour was incorrect geometrically. normalization was missing
• added light path lines so one can immediatly grasp the whole path network of the map without getting to distracted
• fixed bug in game menu related to escape and save dialog
• fixed udp broadcast bug for lan network discovery, interval timer was not started due to new code in last release. note to self: do some regression testing from now on...

Still open is the occasional bug where clicking on a planet will not select it. i'm not yet sure why that happens.

[Kegluneq]

Much better, paths look nice too!

[quantum]

i released version 1.27 today. this update includes sound effects and music. the next release will include some more polish of the ui as well as a mechanism to control the strength of the bots. feedback is very welcome!

[quantum]

Again a minor update ( 1.28 ):

    * Fixed a bug in the sound module responsible for latency
    * Changed the start screen a little. Thanks to Thylian for the suggestion!
    * Fixed some other minor things like labels and so on

[Kegluneq]

Played 1.27 a few days ago, but this thread disappeared, so sorry for the late reply.
New sound effects adds a nice touch to it. But the game can experience some bad slowing down once things really get started. And then of course pausing brought it back up to speed. I never ran into this problem with Dyson, which is just as epic and large-scale.
I think it's just because Java is not known for it's speed, so you might wanna look into finding someway to speed things up.

[quantum]

hi,

there might be performancd issues at times. those should only arise with creature count > 3000 on a machine with medium specs ( eg. i run it on a amd 64 3500+ just fine ). why pausing the game will bring it up to speed again is a bit beyond me. if you hit f1 ingame you can see what takes how much tijme. if you ever find the time please send me a save game as well as those stats. i'll work on performance issues sometime next week. a few things can be done better.

thanks for the reply.

[quantum]

well, i couldn't help but fix the performance issues. you can update to version 1.29. this is as much performance as i can get out of it. the glow needs some care now but it's not all that bad. i'd still be interested in your system specs.

[Kegluneq]

I don't think it has anything to do with the glow, since I turned that off and it didn't help at all. It's probably just too many objects at once, I did have at least 1,500 creatures on one planet and my opponent was doing better than me. (I play a little defensively)

Windows XP Professional
Version 2002
Service Pack 2
Intel Pentium 4 CPU 2.4 GHz
640 MB of RAM

Latest Java updates too as I'm a java programmer myself.

[quantum]

the glow was my number one target as i had to draw the scene twice for it which cost quite a lot when there were thousands of creatures in the scene. that's fixed now, the glow is done in a single pass. also, if your graphics card does not support glsl that's a problem too: on glsl cards i use a special instancing shader that accelerates drawing the creatures. the fallback uses opengl matrix push/pop operations which are rather costly. also, i can't do batch rendering in the fallback ( except when you zoom out far enough, then th creatures are rendered as single dot ). that's one bottleneck. the other one is doing the simulation of the creatures. that part is directly related to the number of creatures. on my machine ( amd64 3500 ) it eats up 7ms per frame. for a target framerate of 60fps that's half my time budget. There's no allocations in the simulation code so the garbage collector will not kick in. as quantum has to be deterministic on all plattforms i use fpstrict which, according to my measurements does not have any noticeable impact on client vms. i fooled around with fixed point representations in earlier version but those were slower than fpstrict on the client vm by a factor of 8. on the server vm it was equally fast. given that almost all people will have only a client vm installed i chose the fpstrict option.

if you press f1 during a battle all the timings and simulation numbers will be shown. also, the currently used memory as well as the total memory of the vm will be shown. you will notice that it fluctuates a little which is due to jogl ( java opengl binding ) doing some direct buffer allocations. those do not harm performance and there's nothing i could do about them anyways.

if you have any tips for me i'd be happy to investigate them. i guess the perceived "epicness" of dyson and quantum match but quantum allows for quite a bit more creatures. this is clearly a shortcoming on the part of quantum which i might fix by some new game elements.

in closing: i'd be very happy if you could give me the timing information you get in game by pressing f1 as well as the brand of your graphics card. also, i'm sorry for the long post. i thought you as a developer yourself would appreciate a more in depth explanation of quantum's performance bottlenecks.

thanks for the feedback!

[quantum]

i resolved the last few memory leaks in quantum and threw out the 1.30 update. i now consider it officially done as i start on a new project. quantum was a preliminary test of some of the technologies involved and wheter a massive rts is feasable in java. from the graphics one wouldn't think that there's a lot going on beneath the hood but quantum actually is a full featured rts and simulating many thousands of those creatures takes quite some effort. i also finally made it open source (lgpl). you can find the source code at

http://code.google.com/p/quantum-game/

i might throw out some updates from time to time in case any bugs turn up. thanks for all the feedback and maybe the sourcecode is helpful to some of you.

[Kegluneq]

Congratulations and good work! Maybe I can learn a few things from that source code there.