Moribundus

Wonderful, congrats Rob.

The whole Star Wars universe is GL's intellectual property (or Lucasfilm's), so anything based on it and made without explicit permission of GL (or LF) is a derivative work and thus is a copyright infringement. Including that guy's photo collection, this website and all fan projects and mods. One would hope to see some commom sense applied here, but apparently fans are just a figures in the budget of the big guys. As long as the potential financial loss caused by you (which includes possible income from fan's activity if done by GL) is lower than the cost of lawyer sending you a cease and desist letter, you're safe. Otherwise you should expect some love letters. Bah.

Make sure you converted the file to the "LF-only" (Unix-like) format before cutting and pasting (I forgot to mention the most important part ). You should have no problems finding it in menus. I believe PSPad also has some king of hex mode (it displays characters as numbers in hexadecimal base), so you can use that mode to check how your text really looks like. If you see two characters at the end of each line, it's wrong. Also make sure lines end with LN (ascii 0x0A) and not CR (ascii 0x0D). hth

Geometry shaders require extra processing time during rendering and newer graphics cards. I believe that the usual way of doing this is having multiple models stored in video memory and simply swapping them as needed. Also sprites are often used for models that are really far away (see Total War). These low detail models could be automatically generated at the start of the game, but this needs some decent algorithm. And as for triangle nubers..imho LOD tries to hide invisible details. So that shapes or curves that are rendered into one pixel (or otherwise indistinguishable) are merged together, detail "popping" is undesired artifact after all.

I must admit that the idea intrigues me. I have recently played two older turn based games (silent storm and temple of elemental evil) and was suprised how fun they were. However I agree with Max that it would have to be executed really well to work. I'd probably try to draw inspiration from desktop/miniature games. Axis and Allies aren't the best example since it doesn't focus on tactical aspect, but eg. Warhammer might do it. There are also some miniature space combat games, but I don't recall any names right now. Just some ideas: -you don't have to use square (hexa, etc.) grid as a play board. Eg. in Warhammer or Warzone units can move by a certain amount of inches in any direction during their turn. No grid required. This could be applied easily to space (unless you want 2d battles). -simplify the reality somehow - let's say ships can move and fire during their turn, some ships (corvettes?) could move-fire-move, others could only move-fire, fire-fire or something like that etc. -ships could have some kind or area of control. if an enemy ship enters this area, the first ship could have a free shot at it. -etc. Just keep in mind that turn based games need a lot of prototyping and tweaking until they feel "right". Anyway if you decide to further explore this area, I'd also love to hear more about it

Hi, it's not always possible to make wine do exactly what you want it to do (in this case run rebellion flawlessly). If it doesn't work for you, I'd recommend trying VirtualBox or other emulator. You might want to check out this wiki page. Hope that helps.

There might be an alternative approach. Prepare your text in a text editor (capable of converting end-of-line sequences) and then cut & paste it to the rebed. Try PSPad. It's free and should have the required functionality. Hope that helps.

Ok, here are my two cents. First all of the mentioned games (EAW, Sins, Rebellion and FreeOrion) are basically 2D games and IMHO it doesn't matter whether you use 2D or 3D camera as long as you honor some basic GUI/HCI rules - GUI should be well-arranged, and intuitive, requiring as little clicks/key shortcuts/hand movements as possible, shouldn't be confusing to the user and must be easy to pick up (=intuitive). I'll talk about 2D space (like in those games), although some ideas could be easily translated into fully 3D galaxy (and some ideas might require 3D glasses ) if anyone's interested. Let's start from the start - we have a view of the galaxy. What do we want to display? Systems (Rebellion, FreeOrion) or planets (the other games)? How are the systems connected - by lines or are they just placed in space somewhere (also lines could be easily translated to 3D, while lines would require a bit more expensive hardware ) Displaying is pretty straightforward, imho the best would be to squeeze as much info about a sector/planet into it's icon. I really liked the "star" highlighting in Rebellion, so I would probably use it as well (colour of a system icon indicates its alegiance and loyalty/industry/etc). Might as well display small icons near the system (like EAW or Sins). The icon might have some highlight effect (display more info when the mouse was over), but we don't want the player to exercise his muscles much so this shouldn't be a pivotal element of out GUI . If we want to use 3D camera and find it too confusing, we can always carefully restrict it's movement. The tricky part is interaction with our galaxy map. We want to reduce the number of clicks required for each operation so it'd would be probably best to abuse drag & drop mechanism a little. There are basically two kinds of objects we can interact with - ships and agents. Ship movement: This might be simple drag & drop (like in original Reb.) encountering enemy fleet leads to battle simple. At least if we use the system=planet model, otherwise it's a bit problematic. Out fleet is hidden in a system, which means we have to open some kind of window with that system (1 click ) - I kinda like the system view in FreeOrion (http://www.optisch-edel.de/fo/screenshots/galaxymap.jpg) although there are no ships on the screenshot, however targetting a new planet would require us to "open" another system to see it's planets, which is another click and another window obstructing the view, that's bad. How to do it? Here are some possible scenarios. - We could have a small transparent popup window with planets appears above a system when mouse hovers above it for a while. So we could grab a ship, move it over the target system, wait (ouch ouch, players are impatient) until the popup appears and drop the ship over it's destination. However if we moved the mouse over several system and popup timeout would be set too low, many annoying popup windows would be spawned, which wouldn't be too good. - If we chose to display planets and sectors like on this screenshot (http://img.gamespot.com/gamespot/images/2006/037/reviews/925349_20060207_screen001.jpg - is it galciv?)w e could easily drag our fleets onto any planet we like. problems with galaxy visibility could be solved by utilizing zoomable system (Sins) which would from a certain zoom level display only systems (and hide planets). Agent interaction: This is a slightly bigger problem than ship movement, because agents (and missions) do not target entire planets, but other agents, ships (and planets). One possible solution (at least what I could think of right now) would be to redefine the system of agents/missions and use them more like Total War series does. Eg. we have an diplomat - if he's on a planet and is active, he automatically conducts diplomacy/incite uprising missions. The same system could work for spies (espionage). Recruiting could also work by dragging onto a planet. Question is what to do with other characters... Perhaps a little dialog box. Let's say we drag a researcher over a planet and a small dialog box (or a popup menu) pops up and lets us choose what kind of research should this character conduct. Or we could drag him onto a specific production facility (but that would require him to already be in that system or an extra click). Officers could be promoted by dragging onto ships/fleets/ground units (although unpromoting would be unintuitive). Sabotage/abduction/rescue missions would have to be done with the help of that popup menu (unless someone has a better idea) So these are my ideas, I'm looking forward to your feedback, especially from future players

I have a Q6600 myself and I'm very fond of it. It's a perfect toy, especially for a developer It's true that AMD/ATI have better brice/performance than NVIDIA cards, but their drivers on non-windows platforms are terrible (although getting better). This doesn't concern majority of people, but if you want (or must have) a bit more exotic system it's much safer with NVIDIA.

Sorry I got a bit carried away. Check out the other threads. Something similar is already being discussed I believe.

And what was this about then? Honestly and truthfully? Rubbish. You might try getting job in a PR department of Bethesda, you'd fit in quite well. So much for portability, this will reduce your Reb2 to Vista only. What do you need DX10 for, anyway? Volumetric particles? Procedurally generated ships? Procedural particle systems? Can't think of much more. And physics in space (in a SW settings)? You should probably do less talking and more reading.

This really sucks, the same thing happened to me with different game (and it wasn't even mine ) The best is probably to buy a new drive as well. Hmm, shouldn't LA send you a replacement disc or something like that?

Getting sound working on linux requires some extra packages, I'm not sure which though. Anyway it seems that even jlgui is broken in some way (as mute as a fish), probably something with my java libs . Reb2 produces no debugging output, thows no exceptions and plays no sound.

Not entirely true. You have many mobile games not written in Java (eg. games for Symbian, Windows phones). Also name me "a top engine still supporting Java". Does your Bethesda (using Gamebryo) write games in Java? Or LucasArts? Valve? iD soft? Crytek? StarDock (sins)? Electronic Arts? Get real. You must have misunderstood me. I was talking about Java (not) being useful in a portfolio if you'd want to apply for a job in the game industry. I mean you've already been looking for a summer job in the industry, haven't you. 90% of ads (for a programming position) require you to have x years of C++ programming experience. The only exception is mobile games development of course (J2ME ), but I suppose that's not what you meant by mentioning LucasArts or Bethesda. About you choice of language: it all gets down to what you are trying to achieve. If you want to make casual game, Swing is ok. If you want a game that can stand toe-to-toe with games like Sins or EAW, then Swing is not the best choice. If you don't know how to write for multiple platforms (C:\not working, case insensitive names, etc.), then portability is just an empty word. So don't get me started on portability.

Hmm, your Resources class seems to reference files by their absolute path Font swFont = Font.createFont(Font.TRUETYPE_FONT, new File("C:/Program Files/" + "/Anachronism Games/Rebellion2/rebellion2" + "/gamefiles/fonts/Starjedi.ttf")); seems like you forgot to change the path when you included that font in you gamefiles. Anyway, I'd be careful about hardcoding game resources (among other things), unless you want to give modders a hard time.

Oh, you mean axception as a game event. My apologies then, I thought you were talking about the language construct And why aren't you helping mine? I could use some help as well

Speaking of efficiency, did you know that many game developers completely disable exceptions during compilation (in C++) due to the extra amount of code they require? There are some things the compiler does for you when you throw an exception (like stack trace) you have to take into account when judging their efficiency. I'm not saying they're useless, just that they are more useful than effective.

IMHO Java won't do you much good, since no company I know of uses it for game development. AFAIK the only thing closest is Obsidian and they used C# .NET for their NWN2 tools. Game development is still mainly about C++ and this probably won't change anytime soon. Java for XBox? PS3? Just a friendly advice

Just to let you guys know this project is still alive, even though I have very little free time. I'm working on my thesis and I also have some difficult courses I can't skip Computability, complexity, algebra and other fun stuff. If all goes right, I'll get my degree this semester and could move onto more interesting stuff (like high-level algebra, etc. ) This is the last screenshot of my font rendering system. Supports pseudo-html formatting, utf8, rendering from ttf fonts and other stuff. The background is drawn using a pixmap gui renderer (all data driven). http://www.fi.muni.cz/~xmoracek/terra/screens/fonts7.png

This will be probably a bit off topic, but I think you're making the same mistake Rebellion devs did - you're abusing the framework too much. Win32API in their case, Java in yours. Don't. You're trying to make a game, not a new demo application for some kind of Java SDK. Also you don't have to clone the game with all it's faults. Are you trying to create a sequel or a remake (why call it Rebelion 2 then)? To your question: 1) what would prevent the imprisoned character from trying to escape (ok, the jailor )? But I meant that let's you imprison Vader and send him on a long jump. But he can still wipe out the ship's crew the second day of his incarceration and then just wait to emerge out of hyperspace and escape. 2) what about making espionage missions reveal not only inbound, but also (recently) outbound ships for a given system? If you played Frontier you might know what I have in mind. First you let your target get away, then find out where he went, grab a faster ship, get there before he does and wait for him to come out of hyperspace (and do what you came to do). I would personally shun the idea of free travel in hyperspace and go for a graph of travel routes like E mentioned in your another thread. This would also effectively solve this jailer exploit

java -jar [file] This command actually invokes the JRE on the specified .jar file. You might however have this command associated with the jar files as a default action. David, perhaps you should consider releasing source and binary build (jar) separately next time (and include some kind of readme so that non-programmers may play your game). So far the archive is twice as big as it could be, because all game artwork is duplicated (/build/classes/rebellion2/* and /dist/Reb2.jar/rebellion2/*). And I have also few bugs for you: planet info widget opens behind Coruscant (z-ordered) clicking on the personnel tab fires up the planet's pop up menu

martin@vembloud:~/Downloads/Reb2/dist$ java -jar Reb2.jar Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException at javax.swing.ImageIcon.<init>(ImageIcon.java:138) at rebellion2.game.state.Resources.getImage(Resources.java:104) at rebellion2.game.state.Resources.getImages(Resources.java:93) at rebellion2.game.state.Resources.initGameMedia(Resources.java:35) at rebellion2.game.main.Rebellion2.<init>(Rebellion2.java:23) at rebellion2.game.main.Rebellion2.main(Rebellion2.java:32) Zip files store their contents in a case sensitive way, which is also how Unix-like systems treat filenames (Planet1.png is not the same file as planet1.png). The rest was working fine.

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/good_morning.png My internal clock is probably somewhere near Toronto (and drifting west ) This works for me too, however it brings a certain risk of missing the bus (or a lecture) I usually try to get out of the bed ASAP before I fall asleep again. Surprisingly no matter how wasted my day cycle is, I can almost always wake up just few minutes before my alarm clock starts ringing.

Wow, these look pretty good!

So far it's only me, but I'm still working on the fundamental parts of the engine. Basically features are added/changed on daily basis, so it's not the most stable development environment for more people Any help is welcome, though. If you want to write stuff then Terra's background story needs some work (it was created in a hurry and still drags the "Jedis" along). Game mechanics probably also need a rethink to be a little simpler and to make more sense (especially colonies and structures). I can give you more info, if you're interested. And if you didn't, go check out Terra's site (link's in my sig).