[Hajo]

Long ago I had been working on a Elite II - Frontier clone. The project overall didn't succeed, but I had the galaxy and solar system generators mostly done, also a bit of the space flight and planet surface exploration parts.

Lately I was reminded of this, and I tried to revive parts of the old code. At the time being I have a procedural solar system and galactical map generator, and I'm working on some basics for a space miner game, like planet resources.

Project Site

http://sourceforge.net/projects/solarex/

Previews

Tabular system overview:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/solarex/screenshots/311573

Galactic map:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/solarex/screenshots/311605

Space station UI:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/solarex/screenshots/311575

Gallery:
http://sourceforge.net/apps/gallery/solarex/

Downloads

http://sourceforge.net/projects/solarex/files/

[Hajo]

There has been a whole lot of updates ... it's now close to becoming a game, but still a desktop stellar system generator mostly. I thought it might be a good idea to post an update here, still.

An introduction message and brief project overview:
[Link lost]

And, if you want to read about the development since 0.18rc:
[Link lost]

[Verious]

Looks like an interesting project. I like what you are doing with the character portraits.

[Hajo]

Thanks :)

It's an interesting project, indeed. Also quite educational, at least I have learned a lot about planets, metals and minerals while I did research for the resource generation algorithm.

The randomization for the portraits works quite well, at least for the alien races. We recognize human faces way too well though, so it didn't work so well for those. To do better, the new version now also has a variety of female faces, that seems to help.

Release 0.27:

I've added experimental support to save and load games. Only one save file yet, will be overwritten each time you save. Trying to load without a saved game will give an error, not sure what happens afterwards. It's pretty rough code still. Be good and save before you load :o)

The applet has to be signed to access your hard disk. The other option would be to package it as an application that needs to be downloaded and installed. If the security warning scares too many people I will consider going the application way.

It should write savegame to your home directory into a folder named ".solarex"

For Windows that would be:

C:\Documents and Settings\[yournamehere]\.solarex\save.txt

I hope that is alright.

Save and load are accessible from the new options panel (click the options button to open it). The system creation controls have been moved to the options panel. So the button panel at the bottom now just has the buttons remaining that will be available in the game later too.

Release 0.27a:

I've added a message popup to tell if saving the game was successful or not. Besides the message popup, the space station panels got a visual overhaul, and I've added female terranean portraits for variety. There is still a lot to do on the visual side, but it looks a bit more friendly now and also more consistent.

release 0.27b:

The ship accelerates and decelerates now, so the average travel time is now much shorter, particularly for long travels. It seems that I need to do more finetuning though, on short distances the ship moves quite fast.

[Link lost]

I had a strange hiccup with IE, where the game generated a totally different galaxy on startup, and even worse a new, different galaxy each time the galactic map was opened. After a reload the effect was gone, and I couldn't trigger it yet again. if you have such troubles too, try to clear the browser cache and reload the page with the applet.

[XMark]

Whoa... I just zoomed in all the way to a planet and realized that everything is at the right scale for a real solar system.

I'm not really up to learning the mechanics of the game itself yet (is this like Mass Effect 2's probing system combined with a mineral trading game?), but the whole solar system generation idea is really neat.

One minor thing though - using the mouse wheel up to zoom out and down to zoom in feels backwards to me. Is that just me?
_________________
Mark Hall
Abstract Productions
I PLAYS THE MUSIC THAT MAKES THE PEOPLES FALL DOWN!

[Hajo]

[Hajo]

I've been ill, so there wasn't so much progress. But I have something releaseworthy now again.

A further step towards the game it might become some day: Space bodies are now divided into "explored" and "unexplored" space bodies. Many planets of the inner sphere are explored already, but farther away the player will find more and more unexplored space bodies.

This opens up the option to explore them, and later sell the data about the planets - for example if you find a nice earthlike planet, the terranean government might be very interested in the coordinates, or if you find some planet rich in resources, mining companies might pay you a lot for that discovery - unless you decide to go mining yourself.

At the moment a planet counts as "explored" once the players ship arrived there - this will work at full effect only when the space flight feature is fully in place, too.

Also, the list of explored space bodies is not saved with the game data yet, but that will come soon.

Besides this, I sketched up a "ship info" panel, which is supposed to show information about the players current ship and equipment. About 50% or so done, enough to give an idea.

Version 0.28b:
[Link lost]

I forgot to say, that the "explorer mode" can be disabled in the options panel. If it is disabled, all planet data will be shown as in the former versions.

[Hajo]

It's been a long break but I want to try and pick up development again. I've released the project open source on Sourceforge and started to make a few "stars and nebulae" backdrop images which I want to include some day soon.

Project site on Sourceforge:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/solarex/

[Hajo]

The above mentioned backdrop images had already been included in the last release which I fiorgot to announce here, but at least this new release I want to announce here, too.

There is now a ship equipment shop in each space station and space port. Most of the equipment has no function yet, but the mechanics to buy and sell equipment are now there, and a second hyperjump drive will actually double the ships jump range.

The passenger cabins are useless unless there are actually some passengers who need transport, and the gathering drones do nothing yet either. Maybe in the next release, though.

Equipment shop preview

http://sourceforge.net/apps/gallery/solarex/index.php?g2_itemId=29&g2_imageViewsIndex=1


Download

http://sourceforge.net/projects/solarex/files/Solarex%200.31/

Changes in 0.31 since 0.30

- Ship equiment shops in space stations and space ports
- Payload of the ship is now shared between cargo and equipment
- XML style save games
- Hyperjumps only possible if drive range is larger than the distance.
- Radio links to space stations and space ports are now distinguished
better from being docked there.

Unfortunately the saved games from 0.30 won't load in 0.31. I'll try to avoid such breaks in the future, if the project is more of a game, at the moment a compatibility layer seemed to be too much effort.

[Verious]

Cool, it reminds me a little bit of the resource management in Outpost.

[Hajo]

I guess this is just because I'm so much behind with my game knowledge and experience :D

The idea to build a colony is often present when I work on Solarex, but I think it's a step too much for me. But I'd like it.

The former incarnation of Solarex which I had to abandon, had a personal scale (you could walk around in stations and your ship), and I had been trying to create cities for the planets too. But it was just too much detail, although I'd still try it again if I had hope to really get it done.

I think I was (and am) much inspired by "Sundog: The Frozen Legacy" which I had been playing ages ago, and which still amazes me in the scale, from personal level, visiting a bar and have some talk, to visiting a lot of stellar systems with your ship:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunDog:_Frozen_Legacy

But some space hopping and trading should be something I might get done some day :)