NEaB Today

We can see other ships!

garg — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 21:52:03 -0700

Long time since my last update. Well just to say I'm really a bit overloaded lately, anyhow I'm still working for Nebula Rider (as well as other things).

Nebula Rider can now (in our internal version) show other players on the maps, and you see them moving around. Yet you can't chat nor can't really interact with the others. At least it is a first step in the MMO direction. Other works have been done like a start to making the interface customizable (color wise yet). We will certainly offer customization and I was even thinking to let players decide where to place some stuff like maybe moving the HUD around or such.

You may ask now, when will we see all those? Well, the question is simple, the answer is not. Basically I'm reluctant to put an intermediate version which wouldn't offer that much more to you, anyhow I hope to update the preview version the coming week.

Along this, I'm talking with an artist to let you players have a customizable avatar face, (doable only once!) and that others will be able to see. And as the game may attract yet more people, I'm thinking about changing our old forum software for something new and maybe in house made. Reasons are that the current forums don't deal well with many sub categories, nor offer many features.

Missions done, now the dialogs

garg — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 03:45:20 -0700

The mission editor is finally working as it should. We can create missions and we can test them. Now how great they are are not anymore dependent on the editor but on us (either we lack some code or we lack the skills to use the code we have).

Next step is the dialog editor to allow to "talk" to some NPC which will unlock either additional missions or be part of the mission. This will allow to introduce more diversity and build a richer universe. As this is not the first dialog editor (due to the one I made for NEaB) I know how it should look like. Or at least I have some ideas. Doesn't mean it's all easy but at least it should be not that much complex... hopefully.

Once this piece is finished, we will certainly need some hand on the content writing... so if you feel interested please contact us!

Mission editor

garg — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 06:48:53 -0700

While Nasrudin works on the Inventory and try to create new kind of weapon and other ship pieces, I have been (very) busy working on the mission editor, which will allow admins to create missions directly from the game interface without any coding.

Even if this part is a lot of work, it will quiet certainly pay off at the end as any admin will be able to work on the missions / quests. The tool is also fully dynamic which means, as soon as we create a new ship behavior for example, the tool will spot it and allow you to use it.

Soon I will add the ability to save / load those missions and then Retor will be able to work on them to create the actual story.

After which I will work on the NPC which will allow some dialogs and based on the dialogs some new missions.

More and more flesh

garg — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 07:37:14 -0700

Things are going forward, and more and more tools are reaching what we could consider as usable tool. For example, the mission browser now will show past and current missions, allows to switch from one mission to the other and more. Also the target system (green arrow) will try to point you at the next thing you must do. New mission types have been implemented as well, and other small things are slowly improving too. Well overall I start to be really pleased with this project.

Now, as things are reaching some maturity we must choose how we will design the stories, either full coded, or via some admin tools. We didn't choose it yet, but we may end up having some sort of mix. What's clear is that players will not be able to create quests, and this for the simple reason that if we want to offer a good story we can't simply mix 200 or more different story lines. Sad news for those hoping to work like they was doing it in NEaB but as one main complain was the story quality we must do something better for this new game.

BTW just to give an impression of the code size, our code is growing slowly about 300 lines per day... and we have now 17131 lines of code.

Note: our ETA for the beta shifted a bit (due to personal holidays), count still 2 months before you will have some sort of playable game.

Success!

garg — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 00:46:37 -0700

Game state does indeed save! That means this huge show stopper has been bypassed, and we can now basically work on both the story and continue the work on the server side support. I'm really pleased this serialization issue has been fixed, as it would have been a real shame to not be able to save the game state and therefore stop the game due to something like that.

To celebrate this, I worked on more funny things like "system voice" which gives you hints about what happens (shields down, enemy destroyed etc...) however even something that simple in theory took some time as I encountered unexpected issues like lack of support for some MP3 settings. So we MUST use 44kHz sounds and not some less resource demanding one. Too bad.

Serialization

garg — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 06:32:15 -0700

As we are moving forward, one mandatory feature is the persistence of the game, which means, you can leave the world, and when you come back you should return with all the items and stuff you had last time you played... or at least, without losing all the progression.

To do that, we need to "serialize" the game status, which means, we need to transform all the game objects into something we can send back to the server, and store it, and then when you enter again, load it back, and restore the status of the whole thing.

Sad news for Silverlight programmers, serialization in Silverlight is quite limited... and doesn't actually fit our needs. So which options remain? Well, not many besides coding all the required facilities ourselves. And I can assure you it's not fun.

Hopefully, after this huge work, we will be able to keep your game status (with missions, system ships and more), otherwise the game will be... a failure. But as our prototypes seem to demonstrate, we should be able to code it, it's just matter of time.

Nebula will soon have some stories

garg — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 20:54:26 -0700

Nebula Rider (our coming title) is still under heavy development, and a lot of new code has been added. So far it wasn't a game besides from fighting some ships around, and we are currently pointing at our goal of adding stories, quests and missions. Not a small task as it should not kill the performances, and yet should be fun in the end. So I had to switch some code around, reorganize it from a prototype form to its more final form, and prepare new structures to handle the missions. So, you may not have seen much progress on the demo site (for those that found it), but be assured that under the curtains a lot is in preparation.

Another heavy area has been ships handled by the system. Before we had only a single "behavior" which was the attacks of the system ships. Now ships can act in different ways, and attack even other system ships if those 2 ships are in factions in wars. A rather current list of behaviors we have:
- Attack at will
- Travel from A to B
- Travel from A to B and loop
- Defend something
To be able to implement some of those, we had to increase a bit of the intelligence of the system ships to avoid collision against asteroids for example. Still not perfect but much better at least.

We may introduce more behaviors before the beta but currently our needs should be covered. What is lacking is the possibility for some behaviors to jump across star system as users can.

So stay tuned, and maybe next release will have some missions to fulfill... who knows.

I can speak!

garg — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 21:02:28 -0700

NebulaRider continues to gather most of my attention, we worked hard to make NebulaRider able to use00 multiple languages, and this without re-coding the game for each of those. So we will definitively support multiple languages at least as text.

Besides that a few additional changes have been made, for example system handled ships are able to avoid planet / star / asteroid collisions, the framework has been improved to facilitate the coding, and much more work.

Next step will be the implementation of the missions, and see how things works together.

Let me customize it please!

garg — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 11:21:40 -0700

Game features slowly appear in our code. Slowly as it's never as fast as I would wish or actually as the potential beta tester would like. Anyhow here is how it goes:

An initial galaxy is there, populated with 100 different star systems. You can trade different resources between the space stations as not all will offer the same prices. The cockpit has been re-coded to simplify our tasks, however it's still not up to par with what we would wish for its final look. Finally, the framework for the ship customization started, and we will soon implement options in our space stations to buy / sell ship parts.

On the side things, a loading screen has been implemented despite our "client" only currently being 600Kb and the loading is extremely fast, and finally, we checked and tried to improve performance on Linux, even if it's not top speed, at least it should be playable in the end.

So be assured we work as fast as possible to come with something playable, but still our plans are to be somewhat ready for a beta in 2 months and a week.

Tales of a space merchant game

garg — Fri, 28 May 2010 07:04:47 -0700

Nebula Rider (official name of the game to come) is progressing slowly. It's certainly not yet features complete, nor in any shape ready to be beta-tested. However the code size increase and with it the number of features implemented.

Just to give an idea, the real coding started 12th May, and 16 days later we do have 3800 lines of code which means a good average of 237 lines of code (counting weekends where I don't actually code).

Currently the game offers a smooth (on windows at least) experience, with plasma shoot, worm holes, space stations, planets and suns gravity attraction, asteroid fields, sounds and music. The initial stock exchange code is there, and you can buy and sell stuff... however each space station offer the same goods at the same price... which means => currently not much fun.

The graphical user interface is also taking shape, and is more and more complete.

ETA is still in about 2.5 months to really have a beta, so be patient, as much as us at least, and be assured we do our max to bring you a great new game.