Sea Of Stars - development thread

[Sabranan]

ORIGINAL: Drybreeze
Thankyou. I will probably end up using your editing tool as editing txt files can be very laborious manually... I haven't used it yet, I'm afraid I'll break the XNA that it wants to update...

You know it does occur to me now that there's really no reason whatsoever to require .NET 4.6.1 when 4.0 would be fine and would make the app compatible with any standard Windows 8 or 10 installation out of the box. I only considered it at all at the very start of the project and it's just human instinct to build it on the latest version lol.

That would get rid of the large download requirement as long as users are at least at Windows 8. Windows 7 compatibility would require using 3.5 and that does create some issues so I won't go that far.

I'll do some testing I think then assuming it works nicely I'll publish a revision to target 4.0 instead.

[Drybreeze]

That would be awesome. Updating things like that makes me nervous.

[Drybreeze]

Rightyo then.

I've edited resources to differentiate between Raw and Manufactured, as originally suggested by Francoy and Japhet.

Getting away from the old-school bevel-button look, I decided to move to a simple crisp vector border... separating it from the icon's image itself with a black inner border.
In the below image you can see the top "Nuclear Reactor" and 3rd "Monopolic Capsules" is the old bevel-button look, and the ones below that are the new vector border look.



I tried using a green border to tie into the interface changes for raw resources, with a blue border to tie into the game's default text highlight colour for luxury resources... but it looked a bit too in-your-face for my taste... detracting from the colours of the icons themselves. It was clear to me that the borders needed to be nuetral.

I then altered them to a few shades of grey, and had to re-alter them since one of the greys was too close to the background colour in the lists... making the border vanish and the icons themselves simply appear "smaller"... so yeah. ... fail.

Finally I altered them to have raw resources as a dull grey, and luxury/colony manufactured resources as lighter grey... almost white. I feel this works... what do you think?



Icons at full size:

Icons display at this size when a "newly discovered resource" or a "colony has begun manufacture" dialogue appears.

Icons at actual in-game size:


Below is the complete list of resources and icons as they currently stand.
I'm considering adding a few more colony-manufactured resources, but this will pan out as I make edits to the research tech tree...


(Yes, I've already spotted the typo in "Nano-Encapsulated Fuels" and fixed it.)

I'm also considering replacing "Engineered Biomass" with a different colony-manufactured resources, since it plays little-to-no purpose in this mod... anything that it can achieve can be achieved with "Artificial Tissue", "Artificial Organs", "Engineered Organisms" and "Biomass". Suggestions on any additional colony-manufactured resources and how they could be used in technological advancements or research is very welcome.

Your thoughts?

[Drybreeze]

I will publish my notes for upgrade from time to time.
At particular points in editing I decide to "give it a test drive" and play my mod for awhile.

As I play I make note of improvements required, and alt-tab to immediately jot them in a TXT file I have open (along with other TXT's I'm editing at the time, such as resouce.txt, research.txt, components.txt etc.

30/04/16
- Change name of Disruptors research tree to a different weapon name
- Change weapon-fire graphic of Disruptors to something more realistic but differentiate it from lasers and torpedoes.
- Change weapon icon for Disruptors to something that is reminscent of the weapon-fire graphic.
- Nurf the Disruptor chain of weapons, they're WAY too powerful... make persuing lasers more attractive. Suggest making Disruptors rapid fire but low yield weapons.

05/05/16

- Edit Graviton weapon image to look like waves of distorted background image, stars distorting, something like that... waves, wifi style. Not a visible energy weapon but a sort of ... bending of the game image... can only be done with guess-work images in this version but it'll do, just use a typical star backdrop image.
- Design a few hypothetical base types... mining stations (light through miltary-grade), space ports, sensor platforms, impregnable hotel thingies, etc.
- Make things super expensive to build, so that a player really has to think a lot about where resources are coming from and how they're being spent.
- Make water a more valuable commodity - oxygen seems to be highly desired by bases and colonies which is perfect.
- Consider research technologies which make more efficient use (and therefore less demand for supplies) of oxygen and water in particular - recycling? Other heavily used resources also? Fuels in particular.
- Drastically reduce the fuel consumption costs of fission reactors. They're cheap and reliable for a reason. Fission is cheap for fuel but highly expensive to build, and so on up the food chain of reactors. Typically fuel is cheap cheap... it's the tech that costs.
- Drastically increase the desire for fuel consumption at bases and especially colonies. People need to run small motors, generators, etc. See if there's a way to limit or reduce demand of resources after a colony reaches a certain development level.

I post this to give you an insight into the devepment process, and the opportunity to add to it or remark on it if you wish.

My ultimate aim is to use DWU platform to make a mod that is a good approximation of a game I want to develop.
I intend to crowd-source funding to build it, using the mod itself as a sort of psuedo-demo... alongside a bunch of non-interactive peripheral that I have already made (although it's somewhat dated due to the length of time it has taken me to reach this point).

Below is two sample-image pages of the "manual" of sorts that I have mostly produced for the stand-alone version of Sea Of Stars (which I'm now trying to morph into a DWU mod purely to make elements of SoS interactive and experiment with aspects like balance and elements). It's landscape A4, so each of the images you see (a few of many pages I've built for this thing) are designed to be folded in half, so you're looking at a double-page spread... or a left and right page simultaneously....


The main game interface showing a player's empire stars along with their individual spheres of influence... the idea behind this game is to make it compatible with 3d applications (for example Oculus Rift) so that a player could see their entire galaxy in 3d, giving an incredible sense of depth and scale. Ironically I was fantasizing about making a game capable of that LONG before technology like that actually existed, so now it's especially exciting for me since the technology is readily available and on the cusp of being truly main-stream).


This part discusses how the game would show a player a world they've selected and are "editing" in some way, or simply viewing. It talks about what other worlds obit it, what system it's in, what information is available to the player, infrastructure on the planet, resource lode of the planet, and so on. As you can see, it uses the same image for an ocean planet as the "Sea Of Stars" mod banner... a 3d render of a world I created with clouds casting shadows, etc. I intend to produce similar images for the mod as "landscape" images. Every single world in Sea Of Stars has a portrait image like this which gives the player a true sense of what the world is at a glance... giving them the feel of being in orbit around it, seeing it's atmosphere, whether it has rings, green life, clouds, craters, meteoric bombardments, etc.


This double-page spread talks about the messages interface, and how a player interacts with other empires. Empires being selected displays known-information about the empire (including player notes), and a location of homeworld, closest known world, or point of first-contact (in that order of priority) if known. Every contact is a real world player in a perpetual galaxy where thousands can play simultaneously.


These pages talk about the attack system, and how fleets combat and what the different icons mean. Combat is undertaken by calculating attacks and defenses of opposing fleets with randomised fluctuations per attack and defense in a roll-playing simulation down the line until both fleets have had all vessels in their fleet attack the opposite fleet once per turn, alternating turns. In this way, turn by turn, the two fleets are worn down until one either routes according to player-set-conditions, or is destroyed... whether either fleets' owner players are actually online or not.


So this give you an idea of where I'm coming from making this mod.
I hope to bring almost a whole new game to the game, using DWU engine and within the boundaries the natural programing of this game presents. By doing so I aim to move one step closer to releasing what I hope will be a truly amazing game... something I've wanted to build for a very long time now and which has a great deal detail put into it already.

[Shark7]

ORIGINAL: Drybreeze



I tried using a green border to tie into the interface changes for raw resources, with a blue border to tie into the game's default text highlight colour for luxury resources... but it looked a bit too in-your-face for my taste... detracting from the colours of the icons themselves. It was clear to me that the borders needed to be nuetral.

I then altered them to a few shades of grey, and had to re-alter them since one of the greys was too close to the background colour in the lists... making the border vanish and the icons themselves simply appear "smaller"... so yeah. ... fail.

Finally I altered them to have raw resources as a dull grey, and luxury/colony manufactured resources as lighter grey... almost white. I feel this works... what do you think?

As a person who is challenged in seeing differing shades of colors (not color blind), basically I can see no difference when you use just shades of grey.

Might I suggest the following:

Strategic: Yellow borders
Luxury: Red Borders
Manufactured: Blue borders

By doing them in such obviously differentiated colors, most people should be able to tell the difference between them. The different shades of grey on such a small scale really do tend to all look the same, while using the primary colors makes each type vastly different from the others.

[Hattori Hanzo]

so the manual pages we have seen above will be part of the manual of your new game, right ?

[phi6]

Looks and sounds amazing! And very interesting that you're using DWU as a kind of test bed for your own game mechanics. This makes me think: Are you making a kind of spiritual 3D successor for DWU? If so, that's very exciting.

One request from me, can you upload higher quality images of your manual above? I'd love to see them up close in more detail and be able to read the text as well.

Now this thread is getting more and more interesting!

[Drybreeze]

ORIGINAL: Shark7

As a person who is challenged in seeing differing shades of colors (not color blind), basically I can see no difference when you use just shades of grey.

Might I suggest the following:

Strategic: Yellow borders
Luxury: Red Borders
Manufactured: Blue borders

By doing them in such obviously differentiated colors, most people should be able to tell the difference between them. The different shades of grey on such a small scale really do tend to all look the same, while using the primary colors makes each type vastly different from the others.

Well that must be a very difficult condition to live with Shark7. Your feedback is valuable and noted.

I don't want to use primaries because I still want to use different colours for components as well, in fact even types of components - for example red for weapons, blue for shields, green for armour (but not gaudy colours). So, yeah... I'll have to come up with another system. 3 of the ideas that come to mind are:

1) Move the dog-ear from the top-left to the top-right, bottom-left, and bottom-right to differentiate, while maintaining nuetral border colours; or

2) Get away from coloured borders altogether and have for example a coloured strip along their top or bottom edges, separated from the main icon image to avoid the colour-distraction issue. It's important to have the main icon image as recognisable as possible due to how small the game makes them, and the main way to do that is with colour differences... big, bold, undiluted colour differences. That means that differentiation has to take a second place seat... it's FAR more important that a player can identify the resource/component at a glance than it is to recognise what type it is. After all any decently experienced player will know exactly what type it is if they know what the resource or component is, so in fact differentiation of type is almost unrequired... certainly not worth upsetting the recognisability of the icon itself over.

3) Releasing more than one set of resource image folders, and a player can CHOOSE their colour scheme. It'd be simple enough to do... either have two different entire mods, or just specific image folders that players can rename/remove to suit themselves.

All of the above options are easy enough to do, and there's enough demand from you guys for different colours between resource types to make it worthwhile to do.

ORIGINAL: Hattori Hanzo

so the manual pages we have seen above will be part of the manual of your new game, right ?

That is correct. I stress that this is a work in progress that I began many years ago and have worked on in my own time. It is now at a point where I want to program a demo and/or an alpha... every part of it is designed... all it needs now is actual coding as well as a swathe of rolled out images to suit templates I've built... for example more planets like the blue ocean planet you see in the sea-of-stars banner in this thread, and in one of the double-page-spreads shown in my last post. I have built a desert planet, a barren moon, an asteroid, and an asteroid field all to levels I'm happy with. But as you can imagine there is a lot left. It is something that I will do as part of the actual game's development.

ORIGINAL: phi6

Looks and sounds amazing! And very interesting that you're using DWU as a kind of test bed for your own game mechanics. This makes me think: Are you making a kind of spiritual 3D successor for DWU? If so, that's very exciting.

One request from me, can you upload higher quality images of your manual above? I'd love to see them up close in more detail and be able to read the text as well.

Now this thread is getting more and more interesting!

Well thank you again Phi6! I'm not making a spiritual 3D successor for DWU, however there are certain parallels.
Basically what's happened is this:
1) One day I had a brain storm about the type of game I'd love to play.
2) Designed it out, and began building graphics for it.
3) Finished designing it in minute detail (from tech trees to combat resolution), and produced templates and many instances of virtually every aspect of it.
4) Designed and drew up the manual you saw a couple of pages from in the above post... it's about 30% completed and is intended to be a really slick glossy printed A4 landscape manual that ships with the game (as well as PDF of course). In my opinion physical proper manuals are super sexy and worth paying premium for a boxed game to get.
5) Reached a road block due to not being able to program an Alpha myself, nor have the funds to pay a programming team (yet).
6) Crowd-sourcing became a real possibility, but to do that I think it would be a good idea to have some sort of functioning demo.
7) Browsed through every space-simulation game until I found DWU which not only has a resource and tech system similar in detail to what I want to bring to Sea Of Stars, but also allows modding.

It's not a sequel to DWU, I'm simply using the moddability of it to play with aspects such as UI readability, tech trees that are believable and in depth, and as a next "half step" towards building an Alpha. Once I have a successful mod of SoS on the DWU platform I will launch a crowd-sourcing bid, and post everything I have on it, including the mod, the brochure, the entire plan.

I don't want to turn this thread into a focus on the new game... this is a mod development thread. However if you want I will post up one of the above pages in full-size PDF so that you can read through it - pick a page and I'll upload it as an attachment.

Thanks for your interest guys it's really flattering.

Meanwhile let's make a seriously cool mod for DWU.

[Drybreeze]

I have come up with a solution for icons I think works, as far as differentiating between raw resources, luxury/manufactured resources, components, and so on... I've created the below image to compare the old with the new styles of icons for your viewing pleasure. [:D]

Below you can see the new style of icons (both components and resources) in the top group, and the original style in the lower group.

Also I've shown the resources required to manufacture each component as they're currently set up in components.txt
As you can see, many similar techs use identical resources, just in different quantities. I've also tried to make the resource make up of each component seems common sense. Not scientifically perfect, sure, but sensible enough for most players to be able to intuitively get a sense of what's going on and what resources are required for what types of tech.



As you can also see, there are some resources which are very commonly required... in particular steel, hydrocarbons (plastics, rubbers, oils, etc), diamond, and copper (highly conductive metal for wiring). Occasionally I've replaced copper with gold for some items that require especially conductive materials, and are higher tech and therefore more expensive and sensitive. I have also used aluminium a lot (now that I've made it a common raw resource, replacing Bauxite) and it is used in a huge amount of tech, since it is a lightweight, relatively cheap metal... it makes sense that space craft would follow on from aviation in that less mass without compromising too much on structural strength would lead to the use of one of the galaxy's most commonly found lightweight metals.

Basic techs require readily-available resources (and usually in small quantities, making them cheap), intermediate tech requires less readily-available raw resources and in higher quantities (making them more expensive and slower to build), and advanced tech usually requires one or more colony-manufactured resources (which forces a player to either trade or do without the tech, if their own colonies have not begun manufacturing these resources yet). Obviously larger empires with many highly developed colonies will have a much greater chance of spawning these manufactured goods, and therefore be able to build the more advanced tech... which I think is a perfect system.

[Shark7]

The dog ears idea might be good, in that people that really are color blind should be able to see that.

My issue is with shades that are too similar. Understand that I see all the colors and they are all the color they are supposed to be. Where I run into a problem is with shades that are only 2-3 steps apart. For example, if two items are dark green and light green I have no problems, if two items are say medium green and a slightly lighter medium green, then they're going to look the same to me.

And greys are one of the worst, probably because there is so little difference between the shades (especially when you consider the tiny size of the UI icons in game).

When I look at the last group of icons you posted (your last post) I can clearly see that one is a darker dull grey, while the other set has a bright highlight on the upper left corner. Those aren't so bad.

Also, those lower ones with the highlight are actually a bit easier for me to see, probably because of the almost white highlight. It gives the icons an appearance of depth.

[Franky007]

How about using the upper left space this way:

[Hattori Hanzo]

In my opinion physical proper manuals are super sexy and worth paying premium for a boxed game to get.

it's also my opinion [:)]

[Hattori Hanzo]

I don't want to turn this thread into a focus on the new game...

this is a mod development thread.

However if you want I will post up one of the above pages in full-size PDF so that you can read through it - pick a page and I'll upload it as an attachment.

Thanks for your interest guys it's really flattering.

Meanwhile let's make a seriously cool mod for DWU.

both your project (mod and new game) are indeed very interesting.

I will follow both.

[Drybreeze]

@Shark7

I think the dog-ears work to differentiate in the majority of cases, while keeping it a subtle and clean interface. I'll experiment more with shade differences in a "hi-vis" mod version for visually impaired folks.

@Francoy

I did consider that, but haven't yet experimented with it much.
I will.

@ Hattori Hanzo

Thank you. The mod is coming along well, I aim to release something soon for testing for anyone that is interested (I won't release it publicly until it's as bug-free as possible).





Currently testing a few mod changes based on notes I've made from last night's game. While it was very playable, I was finding that passenger liners requiring Aesthetics (a luxury resource that no other mongrel wanted to trade with me no matter how suck-up I was) halted production of passenger liners, which in turn clogged up all my construction yards and ultimately brought the game to a halt.

I've fixed that, plus a few others as listed below:

30/04/16
- Change name of Disruptors research tree to a different weapon name
- Change weapon-fire graphic of Disruptors to something more realistic but differentiate it from lasers and torpedoes.
- Change weapon icon for Disruptors to something that is reminscent of the weapon-fire graphic.
- Nurf the Disruptor chain of weapons, they're WAY too powerful... make persuing lasers more attractive. Suggest making Disruptors rapid fire but low yield weapons.

05/05/16

- Edit Graviton weapon image to look like waves of distorted background image, stars distorting, something like that... waves, wifi style. Not a visible energy weapon but a sort of ... bending of the game image... can only be done with guess-work images in this version but it'll do, just use a typical star backdrop image.
- Design a few hypothetical base types... mining stations (light through miltary-grade), space ports, sensor platforms, impregnable hotel thingies, etc. (CURRENTLY TESTING LARGE DEFENSIVE MINING BASES - SO FAR THEY HOLD OFF A PIRATE CRUISER UNTIL THE SYSTEM FLEET ARRIVES)
- Make things super expensive to build, so that a player really has to think a lot about where resources are coming from and how they're being spent.
- Make water a more valuable commodity - oxygen seems to be highly desired by bases and colonies which is perfect.
- Consider research technologies which make more efficient use (and therefore less demand for supplies) of oxygen and water in particular - recycling? Other heavily used resources also? Fuels in particular.
- Drastically reduce the fuel consumption costs of fission reactors. They're cheap and reliable for a reason. Fission is cheap for fuel but highly expensive to build, and so on up the food chain of reactors. Typically fuel is cheap cheap... it's the tech that costs. (TESTING)
- Drastically increase the desire for fuel consumption at bases and especially colonies. People need to run small motors, generators, etc. See if there's a way to limit or reduce demand of resources after a colony reaches a certain development level. (TESTING)

06/05/16

- Increase spawn rate of Food Stuffs by a lot. Perhaps replacing basic elements on oceanic and continental and marsh worlds that can be found commonly on other worlds (like aluminium, concrete, etc) (TESTING)
- Increase spawn rate of Uranium, even if it's only in really small percentages... there's far too few key strategic locations for it, and it's a really critical fuel early-game. (TESTING)
- Increase range of torpedos by about 50% and speed by about 15% (TESTING - This has resulted in ineffective torpedo fire due to stand-off tactics and damage-falloff rates meaning that by the time the torpedo reaches the end of it's trajectory it actually INCREASES the shield strength of the enemy. Yes that's right, a weapon can be used to make an enemy's shields GO UP... even higher than their maximum. No wonder I was finding it so hard to take down those damn pirate bases hahaha... FIXED NOW FACEPALM)
- Either remove Aesthetics as a component in passenger cargo bays, or create a low-tech version (low yield) that doesn't use it as a resource in construction. Passenger transports are being held up and congesting construction yards due to a lack of this resource for private-commissioned passenger liners and it's holding up the show. (TESTING - Functions much better, but I've left Aesthetics as a component of Massive Passenger Bays)
- Adjust Small Fuel Relay and Efficient Fuel Relay so there's an improvement to get Efficient Fuel Relay... (TESTING)
- Make Oxygen spawn far more frequently than it currently does... it's a really necessary resource and seems to be rare as hens teeth with the current settings... might need to begin reducing the spawn rate of other highly common resources like aluminium, concrete, and hydrocarbons. (TESTING)

[Drybreeze]

So... erm... got an issue.

Not a killer, due to eventually replacing Picard Era mod races with my own, but still... it'd be nice to know what's going on.

For some reason some techs are saying they're forbidden to some races.



Except that there's nothing in the research.txt that says so...



What's going on here please?
Is there something in races or race biases or something else that specifies techs, rather than techs specifying races...?
I'm a bit confused.

Any help from the battle-axes, gurus, and veterans would be much appreciamatated.

[Sabranan]

The races files have the 3 DisallowedResearchArea lines which could be causing that issue.

[Shark7]

Also you can set 'Allowed Races: X, Y, Z' for each project in the research file and restrict the tech to only certain races.

[ehsumrell1]

ORIGINAL: Drybreeze

So... erm... got an issue.

Not a killer, due to eventually replacing Picard Era mod races with my own, but still... it'd be nice to know what's going on.

For some reason some techs are saying they're forbidden to some races.



What's going on here please?
Is there something in races or race biases or something else that specifies techs, rather than techs specifying races...?
I'm a bit confused.

Any help from the battle-axes, gurus, and veterans would be much appreciamatated.

Drybreeze;

As both Sabranan and Shark7 both have stated correctly, if you are using certain data from our Picard Era
mod, please realize that the racial differences are what I designed into the mod. For example, the Borg have
a 'cutting beam' that is specific to them only. In addition, the Federation (and other races) use 'phasors'
whereas the Klingons and Romulans use 'disruptors'. So as you can see, there will be a need for you to
review each of the races carefully and in detail to get the results you may be seeking.
[:)]

ehsumrell1
DW Trek Team Lead Developer and Manager
DW Beta Test Team Member

[phi6]

Thanks for the reply, I'd love to see the high res PDF of the first manual page!

[Drybreeze]

Ah ok so it is in the race files somewhere ... that's good. I thought maybe like resource.txt, that the game had hard coding which somehow prevented particular component id's from being used by particular race id's or something random and annoying like that.

In that case, no problem since I'll get to the race files eventually... for now I'll just leave them the way they are and keep plodding through the research tree... it's coming along well now that I know what I'm doing with it.

@phi6:
Below is the PDF attachment of the first page I posted of the manual... it's a little dated now and I'll almost certainly re-do it, but it gives a bit of an idea of where it's all going... ultimately.



I had to zip it because the forums wont let me upload a PDF, but it's just the PDF zipped up. Sorry for the extra step of having to unzip it before you can view it.