Release v0.8

Despite some recent setbacks another milestone has come to a close in exactly one year after previous one. There are slightly fewer new game features but a number of features got fully functional (instead of being stubbed) and under the hood there are lot of improvements.

Download Stareater v0.8

New game features:

• Star system policies - colonies are managed indirectly by picking a policy for whole star system.
• Galaxy scan range - other player ships are only visible within certain distance from owned colonies and starships.
• Fuel mechanic - a resource pool used by ships traveling away from owned colonies. Going further away uses up more fuel and if too much is used the economy is penalized.
• Fleet pathfinding - ships can be sent more then one starlane "hop" away and they'll automatically pick the fastest route.

 Reworked game features:

• Map generator - now actually tries to balance planet sizes and traits instead of placing them purely randomly. There is a lot more planet traits and a star type affects planets. Map preview shows star system quality.
• Colonization - generalized with interstellar migration. Both use same population transporters and automated management logic (routing, loading and unloading).
• Catalyzer (space monster) - retreats from battle after tainting a star.

Under the hood improvements:

• Nestable GUI elements - allows for more complex user interface. 
• Galaxy map GUI - mostly replaced with game engine GUI. Removed Winforms toolbar. Made graphics for new interface elements (end turn button, scan range toggle, toolbar replacement buttons, policy cycle button).
• Tooltips - hovering a mouse over certain UI elements reveals more information about it.
• Reworked text rendering - big texts are not blurry any more but small text are bit less crisp. In general characters to display graphics pipeline is more sensible now.
• Small tweaks to tech tree.
• Fixed issues running under mono on Linux.
• Fixed lockup when a player is attacked at undefended system.

Nailing down a thing

Real life has been really busy past few months and I've been tackling very nasty issue in the Stareater so that's why there has been such long time from last update. The project is still going and version 0.8 will soon be published. The nastiness of rendering text is finished (for now) but the real life will remain busy so "soon" will be probably somewhere this month.

Preview release v0.7.4

A long awaited tooltips are here, you can finally find out what is what and fleets can now find shortest path on their own.

Download Stareater 0.7.4

Tooltips look small on the screen and trivial to the player but that simplicity hides quite a lot of complexity under the hood. First of all positioning a tooltip is mildly complex, it is tied to both mouse position and originating GUI component placement, it must be moved horizontally in order to not be clipped by the edges of a window and moved below a cursor if it wouldn't fit above. That two dimenstions but there is a matter of depth, tooltips should be above regular UI components and not block mouse events on them. I went a step further with this one to lay the groundwork for pop-up windows so this is more complex than it need to be for now. And then there is the time dimension, a tooltip appears after a small delay but not if a mouse has moved away in the mean time. All four dimensions are simple to moderately complex on their own and look trivial to a user but they have to work in tandem without hiccup and that's where true complexity arises and where a robust GUI framework pays off.

For now tooltips can be added only to in-engine GUI elements so old WinForms that sorely need explanation can't benefit from them. But that will eventually be solved through ongoing process of conversion to new GUI framework. On top of that I'm trying to work out something better for text rendering. As you can see on the image above, it is not very sharp and there are some stray dots. I'm prototyping SDF based solution for half a year already but it still needs more time in the oven. Naive approach is not very practical and doesn't produce very good results, more advanced approach that promises awesome results takes time to implement, mainly due to how uncooperative (and archaic) font manipulation in standard .Net is. I've only recently solved the hurdle of getting a list of lines and curves out of letters so I can proceed with porting aforementioned advanced SDF method from C to C# but it has also opened a new avenue to explore. I can make a somewhat simpler method that sacrifices the quality of result for a speed of prototyping. In any case I hope to sort out text rendering before the summer vacation.

Ship pathfinding is another big feature in this version, allowing your fleets to automatically pick the quickest path over the starlane network. This greatly helps colony ships and other population transporters that are by default automated. Previously they'd just plot a direct course to a destination and in early game that could result in 200 turn journey unless a player didn't override the route. This feature doesn't necessarily limit the movement to the starlane network because starlanes add to the speed rather than multiply it, much like a conveyor belt. When you get to faster star drives pathfinding will likely give you a path that is partially or wholly off lane and there is a way (ctrl+click) to force direct flight anyway.

Here I took some time to refactor transport automation code and and some parts of fleet command code. Previously automation code was quite messy to read, figure out what is going on and where and why it's not working properly. Now it's one third shorter and ten times more readable. There are still some issue but they will be much easier to correct then with the old code.

And finally there are three more small changes made in this version: biology is merged with chemistry, fuel production is increased and ships can be sent even if you don't produce enough fuel. While testing transport automation I've found fuel mechanic to be too restrictive, it is supposed to prevent you from sending a large fleets deep into enemy territory, not to prevent you from colonizing neighboring star. So now you can freely send a fleet on the long journey if you are OK with economic penalty instead of outright being blocked from doing that. Base fuel production is increased 2.5 times and I'm inclined to increase it further so a homeworld could support at least a few colonization fleets for free but I'll will wait for now to see how that will mesh with technology balance. Speaking of which I found it hard to come up with 24 (8 tiers, up to 3 items each) biology technologies that are distinct enough and since chemistry was a bit sparse too, I've decided to merge the two. This unfortunately means removal of UKSA, an organization specialized in biology.

Preview release v0.7.3

Another Stareater release is here, bringing completed map generator and various improvements.

Download Stareater v0.7.3

Stareater map generator works in three phases: star placement, wormhole placement and filling up star system. Until now only first two phases were implemented while the final one was a stub (minimal implementation to keep systems non-empty). Implementation of the final phase brought with it more goodies in areas outside map generator. Planet and star traits are reworked, internally they are now two different things, planet traits are dead simple (a planet either has or doesn't have certain trait) while star traits have complex behaviors like temporary duration and the ability to place and remove traits from planets. There are a lot also more planet traits now: toxic (less food), radioactive, three levels of irradiated, two for atmosphere, two for magnetosphere (reduces radiation level), three for gravity, three for mineral abundance and two for temperature. All of them implemented and working. You can even get greenhouse effect if a planet has dense atmosphere and host star radiation level increases.

Map review is also updated to show the difference between map quality settings. Player can choose between various levels of early game map quality (environment selector) and various levels of late game quality (potential selector). Star system potentials are depicted with the size of darker outer circle and starting environments with brighter inner circle.

Other improvements are:

• Catalyzer space monsters are tiny bit smarter now, they fly off after tainting a star with "catalyzed" trait.
• Catalyzers now actually do attempt to taint the star. There was a bug that spawned them without necessary equipment.
• Fixed a crash when removig a ship design.
• Fixed game freeze when the player is attacked at undefended system (ie. when catalyzer shows up).
• The game is tested on Linux, made to run with mono on Linux and code is tweaked to compile in MonoDevelop. It's not tested on Mac but it should work there too.

Preview release v0.7.2

New year brings new Stareater release. There are a few but big changes this time around.

Download Stareater v0.7.2

Also I owe you progress report from the last release. I thought about writing in-depth post detailing how drawing scanner range circles works first but now I don't think I'll be done with it any time soon. New stuff in v0.7.1:

• Star system policies change how colony management is done. Filling building queue and setting investment slider on colonies is managed by setting system-wide policy. Hopefully this will reduce meaningless micromanagement and allow to see on a glance what is happening where. Policies are basically predefined building queues and investment presets which can be switched with a single cycle button. For now there are two policies: develop and exploit. "Develop" focuses on building up colonies, leaving minimal resources for ship construction while "exploit" is the opposite, giving most of resources to space projects and small amount to colony infrastructure improvement. Policies are mindful about excess resources, if you have fully developed colonies is a system with "develop" policy industry points from internal development would spill over to space projects, effectively giving the benefit of "exploit" policy. Future idea is to add "defend" policy which boosts planetary defenses but sacrifices economy.
• Interstellar scan range limits how far away you can see from your star systems. Nothing ground braking from player perspective but drawing those round edges turned out to be a major undertaking. I find it strange that solution to this problem is not well documented or easy to find on the net. The best I could find are brute force solutions that involve drawing screen sized image in memory and I don't want to assume player's GPU will have that much texture memory. In any case I've worked out much more efficient solution.
• Toggle button made in the game's GUI engine for showing and hiding scan range.

v0.7.2 highlights:

• Fuel serves a purpose of both movement range and command points in Master of Orion 2. If you played MoO 2 this may sound like a strange marriage but stick with me. Travel distance is not limited to a fixed number of light years but the limit arises from the available fuel points. Each ship size consumes a certain number of fuel points and consumption rises exponentially with the distance from friendly stars. And I really mean exponentially, it doubles for each light year of distance. The idea is to allow smaller fleets and scouts to travel deeper into hostile territory than big front line fleets. To make matters simpler there is no stock piling of fuel points, the amount you get per turn is either used or lost to the void. Think of it more like how much fuel can be produced on demand then how many canisters you produce. I may rename it to "supply capacity" or something like that to remove potential confusion. And final thing about this feature, in case your navy ends up consuming more fuel than available, economic penalty will be imposed, similar to going into negative with command points in MoO 2.
• Interstellar migration allows developed colonies to jump start new colonies and comes with unexpected baggage: transport automation. Unlike MoO 2 transport ships are not invisible abstraction but ships as real as military ones. Their movement and passengers are automated but player can override it as he sees fit. Or at least will be so, for now the player can manage movement but has to leave the passengers to the automation. Passengers will try to disembark on a planet that accepts immigrants and embark from planets that are too full.
• Reworked colonization reuses transport ships, both migration and colonization is done with the same kind of ships with the difference being that upon colonization some ships land and get converted to factories.
• Multilayer GUI, reworked mouse handling and slider element are continual effort to phase out WinForms GUI. With those additions I managed to replace star and colony management panel, it's not a looker at the moment but it will be easier to improve the old one.

Release v0.7

Another big milestone came to a close. Thanks to the effort in last milestone this one has considerably more new features and content.

Download Stareater v0.7

Major features of the milestone: 

• Torpedoes are area of effect missiles which can reach targets over long distance. They are actually combination of two features, splash damage which can hit multiple units in a tile and a missile as a board piece.
• New GUI implemented entirely in the game's graphics engine which will gradually replace WinForms and make user interface look and behave as the rest of the game.
• Victory condition is not a stub any more. Players now have to reach stareater's "brain" star and use it to eject (send to normal space) stars in order to earn victory points. Points are awarded to players owning colonies around ejected star, not necessarily to the player who performed ejection.
• Organizations now have each have affinity for a certain technology field, giving a player one tier for free.
• Early game technologies (tiers 0-3) are now researchable and do have in-game effect where implementation permits.
• Intro animation is an example of engine's animation system. Previous animations like selected ship in combat are converted to new system which automates animation handling and simplifies tying scene objects with animation effects.

Minor features of the milestone:

• Autosave that saves a game after every turn.
• Interplanetary migration and colony desirability score which makes people move from crowded to less populated colonies in the system, making smaller colonies grow quicker.
• Hostile planet maintenance will make a player choose planets to colonize more carefully since colonies on hostile planet have to be supported by the rest of the empire.
• Save game preview will let you tell at the glance which save game belongs to which game.
• Space combat camera allows you to zoom and pan combat map just like galaxy map.

Under the hood changes:

• Space combat messaging brings order to the multi-threaded world of space combat where game rules run in one thread, human facing interface in another and each AI in it's own. It also resolves some issues where AI vs AI could cause stack overflow.
• Fixed designs as opposed to predefined designs don't use highest component levels available, they have predefined levels and ignore player's technology levels so there is no more need for native organisms to have fake technologies.
• Command line arguments are primarily development convenience, allows for simplified project setup process (no need for copying or linking game data, default command line arguments already point to the folders of interest) and makes debugging release build easier.
• States without T4 is another development convenience but this one makes games more stable. It ensures that all data that should be saved in a file have saving, loading and copying logic (for read-only view while waiting turn to process or AI to finish) with minimal code overhead.

Preview release v0.6.6

Welcome migrants to more desirable world of tier 3 animations. I think I got it all in one sentence.

Download Stareater v0.6.6-alpha

In the last release animations were introduced but nothing new was done with them, only existing animations got rewritten. Now that foundation is used to create whole new intro animation when the game program is started.

Interesting thing about how it works under the hood is that specifying when and what happens with animation eerily looks like electric circuit schema. There are resistors (delays), parallel and series circuits, only batteries are missing. Here is a bit exaggerated figure (in reality parallel and series circuits are not physically connected but series "resistor" is big enough to simulate the effect):

One more feature from old CroVar version returned: interplanetary migration. Population from more populated worlds would move to less populated ones inside a star system. This is combined with planet desirability score. For now it's just a function of current and maximum population (less crowded is better) but when I implement more functions for formulas I'll add planet traits and technologies to influence it. I'm eagerly looking forward to a day when tooltips get implemented so I can show you how underlying "spreadsheet" works.

And as usual content update for release is 3rd tier of technologies. This bring along some new ship components, updated calculation formulas and brand new colony construction project: soil enrichment. Upon completion it gives a planet the "fertile" trait which is a new thing buildings can do now.

Preview release v0.6.5

New update, finally. In fact a bombastic one! One with splash damage torpedoes and navigable combat map.

Download Stareater v0.6.5-alpha

 Missiles were already present in the Stareater but they were technically limited ammunition beams. Torpedoes are true "fly over there" missiles and they have Expanse inspired look :). They also pack a splash damage which hurts multiple ships in a stack and multiple stacks in the same location. For this to happen stack health has been expanded a bit, now there are armor and shield points for a unit on top of the stack and armor and shield points for the reminder of a stack. Splash damage hits both top and reminder of a stack if the splash is big enough. Once the stack's top unit is destroyed a new top unit will not start with full shields and armor but with what was an average of the stack. Additionally splash damage treats chance to hit a bit differently then direct attacks (like beams and old missiles), torpedoes who are the sole users of splash damage (for now) have two attack kinds: direct and splash. If attacker wins chance to hit roll then top of the target stack is struck with direct attack, otherwise the top is struck with splash damage. So the top of the target stack is always hurt but the difference is by how much. If the splash is big enough (maximum number of targets a splash can affect) then the rest of the stack gets splash damage proportional to number of affected units. And if stack is smaller then splash size then other enemy stacks get splash damage too.

Splash damage is one part of torpedo implementation, the other part is, well, the projectile itself. Launching a torpedo will show a projectile on the map and over turns it will close in to the target. For now it's as simple as that, you can't target torpedo stack and attempt to destroy it before it destroys you but there is a plan to rework how combatants and projectiles are handled under the hood which will make such feature possible if it turns out to be necessary.

For now under the hood changes revolved around certain AI vs AI (or AI vs natives because natives are just different AI under the hood) behavior. Previously the communication between an AI player and the space combat controller (part that decides who is on the move and when a battle is over) was synchronous. Controller would call AI function for playing a unit, AI would then call controller function for a move it chose, controller would call again call AI to play a unit and so on. Once the battle got resolved controller's function would exit and return to AI's function which called, it would exit too and return to controller's function which called it and so on until whole call stack gets unrolled. If something goes wrong and I have to debug it, I'd see kilometer long call stack with a lot of repeating uninteresting entries and if there are too many units this synchronous communication would overflow the stack crash the game. Asynchronous communication, as anything multi-threaded, is bit more complicated but solves those issues and allows AIs to process the battle independently. Also it makes enforcing some move validity checks easier.

There is no new content in this release but I've compensated that by adding zoom and pan to combat map. Now you can zoom in and read unit numbers :). I've also improved how animations work and refactored selected unit pulsing animation to use it so for now this visually changes absolutely nothing but as previous additions in this release, allows for more goodies in the future.

Finally, sorry for delayed release, real life got really busy. The situation will remain like that for a few more months but I'll will continue to work on this game.

Preview release v0.6.4

Now that holidays are over it's time to get back to work. And what a better way to kick off a new year by doing something crazy: own GUI engine.

Download Stareater v0.6.4-alpha

Making own mouse and keyboard event handling, element positioning, drawing variable length borders, state handling, positioning text and images inside elements and many more gotchas sound like a lot of complicated work. But when you look at the project code you'd see good deal of that already implemented. Turn number on galaxy map and bombardment buttons in postcombat bombardment are the most prominent examples, galaxy map scrolling and interaction is a subtle one which also uses most of aforementioned features. So it was mostly a matter of restructuring already existing code and thinking through some details. And think it through I did, after all, I've abandoned very first Stareater incarnation due to GUI logic getting too complicated. Since then I've seen a lot of GUI code, both in use and details under the hood. I saw a lot of interesting approaches and a lot of bad realizations.

I've looked for existing solution I could use but they were either one of bad realizations or couldn't smoothly integrate with C# and OpenTK. Still, I have to give credit for an effort to Gwen.Net, a port of C++ library to C# with OpenTK. It's easy to integrate and emulates WinForms quite well. And that's the problem, I want to get rid of WinForm's look and feel. Gwen's skinning support looked very convoluted, you had to look through code to figure out which pixels on texture did what and documentation is practically nonexistent. Also I'd like to work with more modern layout mechanisms, something where it's easy to say "put this button at the bottom right corner" and have a framework calculate exact (x, y) coordinates and update them when window resizes. Something like GUI framework in Unity Engine and Android framework. WinForms is very limited in that area and from what I managed to dig out from Gwen.Net the situation is not much better there either. So I rolled my own framework and replaced old end turn button. Visually it needs more time in the oven but that's a challenge for another time and it would be an issue with any GUI framework, all of them expect you to bring your own artwork.

Core game feature in this release is colony maintenance, bad planet traits increase maintenance cost per population and it's payed up by whole nation. If maintenance cost is greater then 50% of nation's productivity then colonies in the worst shape will suffer population loss. Reason for including this mechanic is to make bad planets less desirable since they are going to put a burden on all of your colonies, to make star "catalysis"(afflicted by stareater's native organisms) bigger problem for a player and to make terraforming and building up more desirable. This also gives me an opportunity to fill some gaps in tech tree :).

Finally, another tier of technologies has been worked over and again it took more time then expected. In fact it took more time then making new GUI framework. Reason this time around is that I decided to make few changes to the tech tree: to remove limited use technologies. In Master of Orion 2 when you research new type of armor all previous types become obsolete. New ships are automatically built with the best armor and there is no trade-off between lower and higher tier armor. In Master of Orion 1 there was some nominal trade-off, lower level tech costs less and takes less space but even then I rarely went more then one tier below highest available. Something similar was in old concept of Stareater tech tree plus the fact that techs in Stareater can be upgraded with more science investment. I don't think it would play well "dead end" techs. Why would you invest a lot in an item that would go obsolete. In case of armors I've removed all techs that unlock particular armor type and replaced them with two techs: one which unlocks new types of armor material as you level it up and other which improves armor quality (level within armor type). Ditto for reactor technologies, reactor type tech and reactor level tech instead of one tech for each type. For computers, sensors and interstellar drives I'd make a mix of cumulative upgrades and special abilities. Quantum computer would increase instead of replace electronic computer bonus, lidar would add up to radar bonus and provide "telescope" ability for increased detection strength in a narrow cone, inerstellar drives would have unique movement abilities, etc. Thrusters are still one foot in old concept and one foot in new one, there will be less thruster types and upgrading them will provide some economic bonuses like lower space lift penalty due to gravity and increased migration capacity.

This left a few holes in a tech tree and by moving few items around I might go back to originally planes 7 tiers per field. Physics is still cramped full for 8 tiers while biology and sociology are very sparse, sometimes having only one item in a tier. Work on tech tree is still in progress, I hope to fill the gaps with techs for missing features (trade treaties, espionage, fuel range) and end up having 3 items in every tier in 7 tier model.

Preview release v0.6.3

In September you got two releases so October ended up without a Stareater release but don't worry, more sweet stuff got in this month! The main feature of this release is the promised one, stareater brain and ability to control it.

Download Stareater v0.6.3-alpha

Stareater brain is located in a special star system, it's loosely a homeworld of native lifeforms and the player controlling the system can use stareater itself to influence the map. For now control consists of selecting which star to remove from the map. No joke. Once a star is out, players owning colonies there receive victory points depending on the population and turn number. People on those colonies as presumed to be successful at leaving confines of the Stareater and returning to normal universe. This is the canonical way to end the game and I hope a fun one since you'll have to balance between working toward victory condition and not weakening yourself too much in the process. In this version you can just park a single scout ship at stareater's brain and eject any star but in future it won't be so easy, natives will object to your presence, you'll need adequate equipment to control the brain, you'll have to master it or take chances and risk unpleasant accidents. And I will not skip a chance to make sabotage something to fear.

Also I hope to dispel the imperative that there can be only one winner. Anyone who manages to leave from stareater has achieved something, there is second and third place. Stareater is not the game about beating others into submission through various means. No, it's a game about both good and bad human sides. While there will be incentives to go for the first place alone, forming alliances and sharing victory points will be also have it's place.

That future has to come one step at the time and and few additional steps taken this time are tier 1 technologies, a group of development projects unlockable by researching first level of a research field. That's 18 more technologies that have at ingame effect. Adding more content proved to be more tricky then I've expected, as every other programmer I've underestimated the task thinking it would be no more then one day of work. For most items it was a simple data entry update but some technologies required adding a bit more code and all of that requires testing. There is nothing more embarrassing than game crashing due to misspelled or overlooked data entry. Having more content also uncovered some GUI issues like missing scrollbar in ship designer, no "shields" category in library and wrong list item overflowing behavior, also in library (it produced additional columns instead of becoming scrollable single column list). Writing descriptions also takes non-trivial amount of time and I've not even started to replace placeholder icons. Domed apple was supposed to be icond for hydroponic farms but I just used it everywhere.

The idea for v0.7 is to have 3 tiers of technologies (including 0th) polished as much as possible. This means development costs and levels could be considered real, technologies should give intended bonuses and unlock and level up respective pieces of equipment. Those pieces of equipment also should have real cost and effects. Exceptions are technologies which require game mechanics which are not yet implemented (fuel range, espionage, ...). So far doing this really made the game shape up, removing "test drive" which made map movement trivial was huge plus, ship designs now look more legitimate, early game space travel feels more like early game and it also uncovered an issue with natives. It was a known issue which I tried to postpone because solving it was a small feature rather than bugfix. Predefined designes for players which take into account player's technology levels had to be separated from predefined designs for native lifeforms which have to have particular equipment of particular level irregardless of native's "technology".

So anyway, have fun testing this new shinny release, please report any bugs you find and know that more cool stuff is coming down the road!

1000 code commits

The project hits another milestone, this time one of existential kind. Code repository now counts 1000 commits!

For those who don't know, in software for tracking file versions (VCS - version control system), a commit is a single version increment. VCS when hosted on the internet or corporate network allows collaboration among multiple individuals who work simultaneously on potentially same files. Even for one man teams it offers a benefit of jumping to older versions and recovering files when an unfortunate disaster destroys a computer or when something gets deleted accidentally. In case of Stareater VCS mostly tracks changes in code files but sometimes it has to deal with binary files like images.

Long development not only brought multiple rewrites of the game but also saw multiple versioning systems. Hopefully whole history from the first system was retained in the current one. First iteration (WhyNot) was not tracked by any VCS but the second iteration was tracked with SVN on Google Project Hosting (GPH) about half way through. SVN was first VCS I learned to work with and it was a bit clunky. It worked well when there were ordinary file creations, deletions and updates. File renaming would pose it a problem and folder renaming would freak it out and require delicate order of operations to get it through. The project was only 53 commits in when a friend told me about Mercurial (or Hg as it was frequently referred) and that GPH can seamlessly convert SVN repository to Hg. This VCS was easier to work with, renaming was not a headache anymore which was proven 77 commits later when the time came for the second rewrite where, among other things, whole file structure got reworked.

It served me well for 283 more commits when Google announced they'll retire their Project Hosting. They were slowly killing the service by first removing very useful "Updates" page (code changes and issue reports overview) and later on preventing upload of new releases in "Downloads" page until in 2015 they informed their user to find an alternative. That's when GitHub got plenty of new users and I with Stareater was one of them. It's very similar to Hg in how it works conceptually but in practice I had to go outside my comfort zone: I had to learn command line.

With all shortcomings SVN had a good GUI client and Windows Explorer integration. GUI for Hg was on similar level too but Git client despite looking similar didn't click with me. One provided by GitHub was and still is, to put it mildly, a garbage. It has custom non-WinForms interface, uses unreasonable amount of resources (probably just to run fancy interface) and one "Sync" button mentality which only works in trivial cases. Fortunately in the mean time I learned to use Git from command line on the job (the real one) and I started to use "Open in Git shell" button as often as "Sync". And that's where the project is now, 582 commits on GitHub and 1000 commits in total. I hope to see version 1.0 in less then 2000 commits :).

Preview release v0.6.2

You got a real treat, two releases in a month! In this one organizations finally have a purpose (they give you boost in a research field) and starting technologies have a description and an in-game effect.

Download Stareater v0.6.2-alpha

In Stareater story there are multiple alternate universes and in some of them humanity tries to send manned mission to Mars on spacecraft propelled by nuclear engine (think of project Orion). For certain reason the Stareater pulls them in his pocket universe and those lucky enough to end up near habitable planet form a colony. Some of those colonists were pulled from universe where NASA launched the ship and others were from other universes where some other organization was leading the space race for Mars.

When starting a game player picks which organization has sent the people he is going to lead. Each organization brings technologies from the first level of one of the research fields which means that player will not have to pay prototyping cost for those technologies and will advance faster through that field (research cost decreases with level). For now there are 7 organizations to pick from:

• NASA - North American Space Agency. Specializes in sociology which will allow them to grow their colonies faster and get more out of them.
• ESA - European Space Agency. Specializes in physics which translates to more advanced weapons and impact blocking shields.
• JAXA - Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. Masters of mechanics, have higher industry output and more special equipment for starships.
• CNSA - China National Space Administration. Specializes in chemistry, meaning better mining efficiency, more advanced armor types and longer ship range.
• SSSR - Soviet space program. Specializes in energetics which brings more advanced reactor types and impact absorbing shields.
• ISRO - Indian Space Research Organisation. Masters of mathematics who sport more advanced interstellar drives and stealth technologies.
• UKSA - UK Space Agency. Masters of biology who can get more out of their planets and improve their habitability faster.

It's still work in progress, mind you but that's how I hope the game will play out. I could write in similar length about starting technologies but I'll save that material for later. Writing blog posts ends up taking up a lot of time. On this one I've been working for almost full week and the topic is an event from two weeks ago. And the project is about to hit a pretty talk-worthy milestone, a 1000th code commit so yeah I better start in advance :).

Plan for 0.7 features

As promised, the feature list planned for next milestone, after two features are already done :). This milestone will more deliberately follow a way of working which emerged in the previous one: one under the hood change, one feature implementation and then preview release. On top of that I'll try to add more meat to the game and work toward establishing similar rhythm of implementing systems and adding game content.

Features planned for 0.7:

• Save game preview, a small thumbnail image of a game state in a save game list. This one is already implemented and you can see it in action in previous release.
• Organization traits. Previously a player could pick an organization he is going play as but it was not reflected in gameplay, every organization was virtually the same. With this feature each organization will have a preferred research field and it will advance faster within that field. It's not as groundbreaking as MoO II racial traits but I hope to design research in a such a way that each field would promote different play style. Also already implemented but will be included in next release.
• Stareater brain is going to be a special star system, kind of like Orion system in MoO series but with more prominent importance. Controlling this system will grant owner an ability to control whole stareater and work toward victory condition: leaving stareater's pocket space.
• Colony maintenance is a comeback for a feature before last rewrite but with more time in the oven. Each hostile planet trait will incure certain maintenance fee per population which is going to be payed by whole nation, not just that particular colony. It's similar how Sword of the Stars handled hostile planets and discouraged too fast expansion. Additionally global maintenance system is a groundwork for future mechanics (like espionage).
• Population migration is another feature comeback but this one is as simple as it sounds. As colony gets more crowded people will try to migrate to more roomy places. I may complicate it with planet habitability being a factor in migration desirability but for now I'll limit migration range to planets in a star system. In some future version I might add interstellar migration.
• Area of effect weapons are going to be weapons which damage all units in a tile. Top unit of a target stack will receive full damage while other units in the area are will get reduced "splash" damage. Another feature I'll try to push with this feature are torpedoes, missiles which travel on the map like ships do in order to reach target and can be shoot down.

Since I've already finished two the listed six features I may add more along the way but on the other hand there is plenty of non-feature improvements waiting to be done too. I seriously need to change GUI engine and that's a huge work. Fortunately it can be broken down to small manageable pieces but I still have to be careful with architecture. Then there are graphics. I'm working on procedural planet generator for minting high resolution cartoony planet images and it's progress is so-so. I have decent asteroid algorithm and rudimentary rock planet recipe which should work for Earth-like, Mars-like and Mercury-like planets. I'm still looking for good random stripe generator for gas giants and Venus-like could covered planets. For starships I've finally developed a tool which suites my style of drawing so there is an opportunity for updating existing ship graphics and include source code of images in version control instead of binary data. That's plenty of work to do, will see how much time and energy I'll have, my real life situation is about to get permanently changed.

Preview release v0.6.1

Features planed for 0.7 are... going to revealed later :). Actually I wanted to report on a new preview release packing new data engine and save game preview.

Download Stareater v0.6.1

Game preview is like a cherry on the top of data system rework. As the whole save format has been reworked, I've made save metadata more accessible. Previously the code had to read and parse whole save file to get save title and game turn number and when building list of saved games it had to do it for each file. Now it can read just first few lines from each file and read whole file only when actually loading a game. Preview data is also in those first few lines and it can contain whatever GUI needs to make preview image of the saved game. At the moment it contains turn number and star positions and colors but I can easily expand with occupied regions and power graphs or shrink it to just player colors for multiplayer games. That can wait because it requires more thinking what to show in preview since star dots on small map alone make too noisy image.

If you are really interested in feature list in upcoming milestone then you can take a peek at project's milestone task list. I promise to write more about it in next post :). Just one more thing about last post, I can't stress enough how important it was to change "state engine" to more native solution, I'll try a different angle at explaining it. Take a look at this image:

Previous solution contained a quite lot of "unclean" code meaning it was not fully supported by IDE (development environment) in some way or another. Engine for example was completely written in different programming language (T4) then the rest of the project (C#) and the nature of that language made it hard to write and debug. Instead of having IDE notifying me immediately when I wrote something wrong while writing the code I had to run the script in order to uncover simple type fellers and guess from cryptic error message where the problem is. Following script execution step by step was unsupported too and I had to resort to clumsy data dumping to find out where exactly the error is. At least that was the case in IDE I was using at the time, newer ones are a bit more helpful. Point of the engine was to generate C# code for data classes but it too had to happen through a bit more of T4 scripting in order to define which properties and behaviors particular class should have. Generated code should not be edited because T4 script would overwrite changes if retriggered so each kind of custom behavior has to supported by engine and used through class code generator script. In the end using all that generated code for big operations (copy, save, load) was relatively clean, there were some hoops to jump through in order to handle dependencies but nothing so dramatic.

New solution, as you can see from the picture is much much cleaner. Engine code is roughly equally in size as previous one but it's mostly nice and clean C#. There are few spots where a magic is used to generated code while application is running but it's kept to a minimum in both quantity and complexity. Even if something breaks there it's easy to debug. Data is now pure regular C#, no metaprogramming tricks. Well, class attributes have to have certain reflection attributes but let's pretend it's normal code, if nothing else it's very brief overhead. Now classes are free to have whatever constructor they need and set whatever property they want to default values and enjoy full IDE coding support in the mean time. This part was the biggest reason to change the engine and I'm happy with the result. Lastly, major operations are slightly simpler then before, there are still some hoops left but a little fewer this time. There, I'm done, hope this has convinced you :).

New state engine progress

Last major release went well, all in all. The game attracted a few curious persons and one was very generous with feedback. Some of the easier suggestions (turn count in the corner, special equipment limit in ship designer) are already implemented and other are added on to do list.

What is going to be done for next major release? This will be reviled in next post, I'm still working on the feature list and I've already started working on something. I'm weighing how much refactoring should I do because I really want to clean up some things but the downside of refactoring is that features doesn't get made during that time. So I've started new milestone to by refactoring the biggest thorn in the side. Now is the best time while there is no psychological pressure to work on polish, feels like I have all the time in the world and it's better to do breaking changes early with plenty of time to test them thoroughly. In last version I've been working on removing text template code generators but I had to keep state handling ones due to complexity and their time has come to an end.

In Stareater code game data is split in following categories:

• States - facts of the game world such as star positions, which planets are colonized and by whom, which technologies players have researched and so on.
• Orders - how players want to change the state. This includes building queues, technology development order, audience request and so on.
• Derivates - implications of states and orders. Population growth for example is calculated from colony's current population, population limit and "housing" building which converts industrial production to population.
• Statics - assortment of stuff in the game. Which technologies there are, kinds of ship equipment, kinds of buildings and so on.

When it comes to juggling data statics are simple, they are loaded once and that's it, derivates are recalculated when needed so they don't require much management either but states and orders have to be copied, saved to a file and loaded back. Ordinary mortal programmer would simply write functions for each operation in each data type. Maybe I would too if it's was a smaller project but in this one there are currently 20 state and order data types with total of 82 attributes (members/properties/fields). That's a lot of stuff keep in mind and remember to update when adding new features. So like every engineer I've decided to let computer do the bookkeeping for me and that's where T4 text template came to play. I'd simply list which attributes a type has and for each attribute it would generate logic for initialization, copying, saving and loading. It sound awesome in theory but T4 is hard to debug (at least was at the time) and there were always some edge cases which were hard to solve with general approach.

Developing and updating T4 based solution took me at least two months, in total making it almost 10% of effort since v0.5 rewrite. New system already took a month to develop but I'm confident it won't take much time to maintain. Firstly, it already works, secondly it's easier to work with since it's pure C# code. I also simplified data a bit in order to make it work, some relations were really complicated and required a certain unintuitive order of operations to get stuff done.

How does this new "state engine" works and why didn't I implement it first time around? In C# there is something called reflection and I tend to call it "dark magic". It allows you to get information about data types while the program is running, information such as which attributes a type has, how they are called in source code, which types does the type inherit, reading and writing values where you normally can't and many more. All of this comes at the price of quite slow performance. Also there is another form of "magic", so called expressions trees which basically let's you  create more program logic while the program is running. At first I was concerned whether it's a good idea (how fast is compilation, would antivirus freak out) but I've found out that Microsoft's own database access functions use so it's not something foreign to the world. The price is only a slowdown on first use (compilation actually), further uses work almost as fast as native code. New state engine uses both schools of magic, reflection for gathering data and build up engine and compiled expression trees to do the actual operations but I tried to keep them to a minimum since they don't make very readable code. It's much more readable then T4 templates, true, but still not self-explanatory on a first glance as normal C# code.

This engine didn't come out of a blue either, I've been experimenting with technology a year ago and developed a small prototype project to test out those "magics". Now that a new engine is made, there is some minor code cleanup is left to do, full removal of remaining T4 templates and verification if all state and order data types save and load properly. God, I need to automate this somehow but only thing that comes to mind is to make a test suite which would take another month of making features. Back to compiling feature list for the milestone, one thing is certain, organizations are going to have a tangible effect.

Release v0.6

New major project milestone is done, Stareater has officially reached version 0.6. A few new features got implemented but there was many bug and stability fixes and code quality improvements.

Download Stareater v0.6f1

Major features of the milestone: 

Diplomacy - players can now call for an audience and negotiate treaties. Although bare bones, players can switch between peace and war, combat respects those treaties (you can't attack or be attacked if you are not explicitly at war) and code is ready for more nuanced diplomacy.

Refitting - a staple of  Master of Orion 2, built ships can be retrofitted with new equipment. Player can explicitly set which design is going to be retrofitted to which design. Also when a technology improvement gets developed, refit orders will be automatically issued to applicable designs. For instance when you get laser level 2, all designs with level 1 laser will be marked for upgrade.

Semi-exclusive research - another staple of Master of Orion 2 but in a less severe form. When a player makes a breakthrough in a research field he/she will get all technologies from that breakthrough but will have to choose priorities. Technologies with higher priority will be cheaper to develop to higher levels.

Space monsters - trope from basically all space games but especially important in this game. Unlike other 4X games your main goal is not to be dominant force in the universe (though you can do it as bonus objective) but to get back to "the real" universe. Stareater is a pocket universe which keeps you trapped and it's filled with space faring creatures which help it consume stars. Those creatures don't hold any special grudge against you but they are not concerned with your welfare either, they'd gladly make a star brighter and let it irradiate all planets in the system. Unlocking their secrets will be the key for leaving Stareater.

Minor features of the milestone:

• Persistent ship damage - companion feature to refitting. Damage to ships in space combat persists after the combat and can be repaired at friendly star systems. Surplus repair points are used to retrofit ships.
• Postcombat bombardment - similar to Master of Orion 1 and 2, after a space combat is resolved, winner can bombard (and in future invade) undefended colonies by just clicking on them. Previously attacker had to remain in space combat, move ships over a target and command each ship individually.
• Weapon ammunition - some weapons like missiles and bombs now have limited ammunition in combat.
• Hot seat multiplayer - multiple human players can play the game on the same computer. Technically this was possible prior v0.6 but now it's tested and some rough edges are dealt with.
• Improved starlane generator - they now look more organic while ensuring whole map is connected and that each player has access to roughly similar part of the map.
• Active planet and star traits - companion feature to space monsters. Celestial body traits now can have more complex behaviors then just being and not being. "Catalyzed" star trait can spawn "irradiated" trait on planets in system and expire after a few turns.
• New rendering engine - not exactly a minor effort but from player's standpoint a less visible feature. Graphical objects are now handled in more organized manner, each scene simply lists where is what and underlying engine handles details like drawing order and draw state switching. Frame rate control has more options, from pushing GPU to work at max speed to battery conserving one. OpenGL version has been updated to 3.2 which allow easier use of shaders so there visual improvements too.

Under the hood changes:

• Map settings from last game are remembered
• Some of text templates are removed from code, replaced by different code structure
• More ship images
• More technologies which could end up in final game, not just for testing purpose

And more is to come. I'm tempted do to a lot more of under the hood changes, including better GUI library, restructured game data storage, add tests to prevent "f1" (hot fix 1) versions in future releases and so on. On the other hand I'd like to add more substance more quickly to finally get something really playable. I'll try my best to balance those too desires in next version.

Bombardment Mk II

Real life got me busy again, it has been a while since last update but the last feature for v0.6 is done. Bombardment can be performed after victorious space battle.

New bombardment kicks in when attacker is at undefended colonies. Be it after defeating defender's fleet in space battle or by simply there being no space defenses at all. Rules for in battle and out of battle bombardment are virtually the same: damage calculation, ammunition limits and turn limit are the same. This also means that ammunition and turns spent in space combat are not available in bombardment phase. In essence bombardment acts like simplified space combat without unit movement, any colony can be bombarded instantly with all ordinance without spending turns on travel.

On top of this feature I've improved starlane generator so the map looks more organic and less like a crystal lattice. It was in rather a simple change, I've increased minimum angle between incident (coming out of a same star) lanes and decreased the number of extra lanes beyond the minimum required to connect all stars. It turned out that those extra lanes were major contributor for turning organic look to crystalline. Now, if 0% means minimum number of lanes to connect all stars and 100% means maximum lanes possible then new starlane density settings are as follows:

• Few - 20% (was 33%)
• Decent - 33% (was 50%)
• Many - 65% (was 100%)
• Maximal - 100%

Why stop on simple things when I can do complicated stuff too? Occasionally in maximum lanes setting there would be a few extra long lanes at the edge of the map, practically running along the whole edge. I've made an algorithm to remove them. It's something along the lines if a long lane was not there, find out if previously connected stars can still be reached via other lanes which are individually shorter and form a path which is not much longer then removed lane. Sounds simple but is a bit of a calculation intensive.

And now the plan is to fix a major bugs, polish a few things and finally release v0.6.

Preview release v0.5.5

Another preview build is ready. Took some time, again, but a lot of new goodies got included.

Download Stareater v0.5.5

The biggest addition is diplomacy mechanic. It was described in greater detail in previous blog post so I won't repeat myself. That leaves us with a number of under the hood improvements and new technologies. My "tech tree" draft is shaping up and I'd say it's developed enough to start adding it to the game. So far I've added two out of eight technology tiers and I plan to add third by the end of v0.6. It amounted to whooping 46 entries which naturally exposed an UI issue in library :).

Which brings us to under the hood changes. Aside from fixing panel scrollbar to show more then one screen of technologies, I got around unifying "name" and "description" localization tags into one generic "lang code". Now items (technologies, ship equipment, ...) have only one localization entry and name, description and future library entry are automatically obtained by applying appropriate prefix. Debugging has also been improved by passing around a file name of the file being loaded which made it possible to print which file has incorrect format. It sounds a bit strange to not have that already but the thing with Stareater is that the code is split in two parts: game rules (core) and user interface (UI). Core should know as little as possible about the world outside of game rules and that includes file management. Ideally UI part should provide all data sources (which don't have to be files) to the core. Now the problem is that core knows when the data is wrong but UI doesn't know when core is analyzing data and which file is being read at the moment. So I made that along with data stream there is a little tag with "source info" which for now contains the file name.

Another quality of life improvement for development is inclusion of texture atlas generator to UI code. Atlas is collection of smaller images (planets, ships, stars, ...) into a single image and up until now it was generated with external tool which had to be run manually every time there was a new image for a game. Now the game can automatically add the image and let me know which ones were not prepackaged so I can run the tool before publishing a release.

Then there were bug fixes, a concurrency issue between turn processing and read only view (UI when next turn is being calculated but player can still look around the map from previous turn) was fixed. NVidia bug is hopefully fixed, I'd need somebody to confirm that. For the moment I'm using unofficial homemade OpenTK build while OpenTK maintainers are preparing the official one which should be published this weekend.

Peace by deafult

Peace is now a default state, meaning diplomacy has been implemented. In other games in the genre, even if it is called peace, by default you are neither at peace nor at war with your neighbors. In Master of Orion for instance parties have to form a non-aggression pact in order to stop each other from engaging in combat. Without it you are free too attack each other and still enjoy trade treaties if neither side explicitly declares a war. Sure, an AI will automatically declare war every single time you attack it's ships (even if you let them retreat without casualties) but when AI attacks you it's "only" a friendly rub and you end up being rude for feeling offended.

Peace in the Stareater on the other hand assumes non-aggression pact. Picking on targets of opportunity (weak fleets, unprotected colonies) is strictly forbidden before formally declaring a war. Natives on the other hand don't respect human customs so they are always treated as enemies.

What is implemented at the moment is public relations screen where you can see your contacts with other players and see which treaties you have with them. From there you can call for an audience which will be held after hitting next turn. During the audience you can declare war or offer peace. For now this is it and AI will go along with whatever you ask of it. It will take some fleshing out but the idea for the future is to have "public opinion" feature where each civilization population holds an opinion about other civilizations. If opinion is too low then war can be declared and trade treaties will be harder to form. If opinion is very high then cease fire must be declared and war between those civilizations can't be declared again.

It was a bit boring to implement this feature, mostly due to sizable amount of GUI involved. It doesn't look much but there is quite a number of things inside the things. At the end it became interesting and I even did an extra mile to finish an old task of including undefended colonies to space combat check. There are not many tasks left in the backlog for v0.6, this milestone is going to conclude faster then I've anticipated.

Preview release v0.5.4

It's been a while since the last release and a lot of new stuff was added and polished.

Download Stareater v0.5.4

As usual details are covered in previous posts and here is a brief summary:

• Refit cost from one design to another factors in component difference. More similar designs cost less to refit.
• Missiles were introduced. They are basically an instant hit weapon like laser but with limited ammunition.
• Damage on ships persists after battle and can be repaired.
• Improved graphics engine. It's a bit more powerful and a lot less prone to human error.
• Last game map settings are remembered.
• Fixed a crash on when loading invalid settings file.
• Improved starlane distribution when generating a "galaxy" map.

There are two known issues. First one is crash on startup on Nvidia GPU with recent drivers. There is no easy way to fix it so it will stay for a while. If you do observe this crash, try to run Stareater on different GPU or on no GPU at all. Second one is occasional crash on new turn. I'm still figuring out how to solve it, it a though case of concurrency issue where a piece of data is used after expiry. But don't let it ruin your fun!