Moribundus

Hmm, I guess you're right. Certificate signing can protect you from man-in-the-middle attacks, but not from phishing. Since my phishing domain name is not the same as the domain name of the site I'm trying to fake, browsers shouldn't complain. Sneaky.

I believe SSL provides means of determining whether site is genuine or not. The site's certificate has to be signed by some certification authority. If it is self signed (which should not be the case of banks, eshops, etc.) or signed by unknown (or distrusted) CA, most browsers will complain and warn the user. In addition if the certificates have changed since the last visit, browsers will also warn the user of a possible phishing or man in the middle attack. And I got 7 out of 10, my grammar sucks and this SSL related question got me too.

I just saw few Potter movies with czech dubbing, so I don't recognize half of the names but I'm surprised that the list is so long. It reminds of the last book it The Witcher series (Andrzej Sapkowski - Wiezdmin), where Sapkowski slowly finishes off almost every major character in the story including Geralt himself. But Wiedzmin is fantasy for mature audience, whilst Harry Potter is supposed to be read by kids. Chmm...

This was exactly my point And so far it seems you won't have any problems running my game(s) since most of you have better hardware than me

or maybe some instructional videos

Well, since I'm slowly starting to work on the engine's renderer, I wonder what kinds of graphics cards you people have. It wouldn't be of much use if the engine ran only on my hardware configuration It is possible to write fallback shaders for some older cards or maybe some more complex system for detecting hardware capabilities like the one Startopia has, but it takes time, which can be spend on coding other things. It'd be nice to know that certain generations of graphic cards can be safely ruled out (without angering the players). There is also a nice utility caled OpenGL Extension Viewer, which can be found at the following address http://www.softpedia.com/get/Programming/Other-Programming-Files/OpenGL-Extension-Viewer.shtml. It lets you know of the features your card has and also can perform some simple benchmarks. Results can also be exported into an XML file, which you can mail me (you can use my sourceforge email address - just click the link in my sig, i'm the only developer so far). You don't have to do this, but it'll be very helpful (or you can post the name of your card here and I can look it up in some database). By the way, Terra is being currently developed on my AMD Sempron 2600+, 1 GB RAM and GeForce 7600GS (full dx9/ogl2.0). And I hope to have some kind of alpha/pre-alpha demo by the end of summer

Looks more like a permanent shutdown to me.

That's some serious stuff you have over there. Why is that school so overcrowded in the first place? Maybe they should be concerned more over this, rather than over hugging children Hmm, or maybe it's the first phase of some kind of alien brain washing invasion.

Have you tried using one or more characters/units as decoys? I don't know the exact formula, but the manual says something about using decoys to distract the local garrison and allowing the real agents to work unnoticed. I think it also mentions something about not sending too many units on a covert mission (crowd of armed weirdos draws too much attention). Sending two experienced characters as decoys and a bunch of commandos/less experienced chars might do the trick. At least it worked for me most of the time.

Rebellion is a unique mix of both genres (RTS and TBS) and the way it treats turns is imho result of this design decision (what we'll never know is whether this was because of aiming at broader audience or design experiments). And I think Rebellion was so badly accepted mainly because of this. Being a hybrid it could not obviously compete wit either of theses genres on their own turf. So the reviewers, who expected a RTS, were disappointed and so we the others, who expected RTS. And the rest was either delighted or frustrated by minor design flaws like clumsy UI (why?), bad AI (we all know) and so on. The behaviour of the pause button was quite common in older RTS games. You could freeze time in the game, but you couldn't give out orders (maybe because designers thought it would slow the game down?). Rebellion unfortunately behaves exactly like this even in the strategic view which ironically resembles most TBS. Hacking the game binaries is possible, but it would costs more time than it's worth. And if you had the code, well, you'd be probably screwed anyway, because I doubt anyone would be able to compile it today. We don't even know if it was made using MSVC in the first place (Watcom C was popular for games in the 90s) and besides I doubt anyone has a copy of DirectX 3 SDK or what version Rebellion uses. Sorry to disappoint you Still, our best bet is to make our own game

Hello and welcome, Hamster. It's wonderful to see that this game has such a great and active community even almost ten years after it's release, isn't it?

I dont know if this has already been suggested, but this gave me an idea that being able to integrate prisoners to learn the location of certain characters or planets in the outer rim they might have would be a good idea. Like some kind of "safer" espionage mission? At least from the interrogator's point of view

If that's what you do when doctor hits you in the knee (at least that's what the dictionary told me)..I suppose we call it "reflex" in czech Well, our projects will overlap partially when I'll be making the engine for 3D battles (which unfortunately is the last thing on my to-do list - strategy parts and reinventing the wheel first). I'm sure I'll have a lot to ask you by then. So far it looks like Terra will turn out into modders heaven...in-game editors for almost anything and so on. I want more free time, damn

I can't be of much assistance either as I'm focused mainly on 3d graphics and C++ too, but still... Besides if you need some inspiration for the designing process, you might check out Terra (link is in my sig I hope) and it's design doc. I agree with nordwind, renting a coder isn't good idea, unless you have someone to sponsor (or at least regularly donate to) your project. Without this, you might end up without money and with unfinished chunks of code nobody understands (except of the coder who left when you ran out of money). Best of luck.

XNA? Microsoft game development platform only for C#, seems like you're lucky Keep us informed. PS: Nice blog on gamedev.net

Nice, nice. But there's still so much to be done. Btw. do you have some kind of basic audio system in the game? It might be cool to hear all the laser turrets shooting

Yes, but I'm using rebellion's real-time turn system, where one day/turn is the smallest indivisible time interval, so for game's simplicity I assume that ship travels from planet to planet one whole day (it's actually few hours, but we don't have them in the game). Hmm, but in "reality" this would probably have the same effect, both fleets enter hyperspace and miss each other (and defender bashes his head against a wall, since he left his colony unprotected ). I'm not sure I understand your problem exactly. Why not use simple grid formation like rebellion? The problem of course might occur if there would be already fleet "standing" in the entrance position and thus blocking the incoming fleet (accidentaly filling some spaces in the grid, which the computer wouldn't be aware of).

Well, all I've been doing for last few years is basically reading about game development and doing my own experiments. I checked my school's library and they have the whole graphics and game programming gems series (it's bloody expensive, but excellent source of information) and they let me borrow it home And I already have some code snippets I made some time ago (like math library and other support classes) so I'm not starting this from scratch. Basically what needs to be done for the first pre-alpha release is to build basic UI libs and implement lua support for the game logic and interface scripting. That won't be too hard I hope. And yes, I think I have some idea how to implement some things, but on the other hand there are certain aspects (like AI, audio or networking), with which I have no experience. With the third-party 3D engine...maybe I'll use it for space battles, the strateg view has some special requirements on the rendering engine. I'm glad you like the idea with the disease I'd like to make some deeper, complex story, but it's not of the highest importance now.

Wow, now that's a brilliant idea...it might solve some of my own problems with placement of jump nodes for subspace/hyperspace routes. If we said that jump nodes could be present only in outer systems (eg. because it's far away from all gravity wells), then it would be easy to blockade the whole system just by controlling all the outer systems with jump nodes. Selecting arrival point for reinforcements wouldn't be necesary, since we can imagine the battlefield as a sphere (or a box) and reinforcements would simply arrive somewhere near the borders, depending on which side they're coming from -> thus reinforcements could possibly surround enemy, or cut him off. This way could be also done retreating from a battle. A fleet would have to first get to the border of a battlefield and then jump away (either using jump node or by leaving to the nearest outer system). If we said that a jump would takle at least one day (from planet to planet), we could then limit reinforcements only to fleets that wait ready for being called in as reinforcements (only fleets that didn't do any jump today can serve as reinforcements). In this one-day-jump model there is another problem - what if both attacker and the defender decide to attack each other at the same time..they would just swap places (defender would jump to outer system and the attacker would jump to the inner system). Hmm, maybe it should be up to the defender of that system to be more careful. Oh and I like the UI you suggested, def

Ok, the design document is finally translated. It turned out to be quite a monster If you have any ideas, comments, suggestions, questions or special wishes, feel free to post them here. I already dug through most of the older topics, but I could have forgotten to include something.

Maybe you looked too much to the dark side, hehe? Btw. I can confirm now that SF's SVN services are still terribly slow :-/

Hmm, I didn't try to upload any code yet, but you can at least choose between CVS and Subversion now.

Thanks for the support I hope I'll translate the rest of the design doc soon, so that you guys will have at least something to look at I have to admit it's more exhausting than I've thought. I have also uploaded two pictures on the web space... http://terrastrategy.sourceforge.net/virtualstarmap.jpg - this a screenshot of VirtualStarMap, my older project displaying stars around Sol in range of 50 light years. This will probably be the dataset for the game. http://terrastrategy.sourceforge.net/heavy-fighter.jpg - and this is render of my school project. It's not finished yet though (cocpit needs to be finished and it also needs better textures and more details). It's some king of a heavy-fighter. I call him bobcat for no reason This will probably be my first in game model. I'm also working on a game editor (another school project - maybe I'll even get my degree for this game ) What slow resources do you have in mind? So far it seems fine. Although I'd rather have it on my own server, it's probably the best thing I can get now. Edit: I have removed the links and the files, since they are no longer relevant (and present on the web.)

It's half past eleven in my timezone, I didn't expect anyone to read this topic so soon No, seriously, it's not a joke I completely forgot the about the fool's day though.

Let me bring you some good news. My project (Terra Reconstructed) just got approved on SourceForge.net Allow me to explain a bit. Everyone knows about the current situation. There's no Rebellion 2 and there probably never will be any. The only things we have (apart from great community ) are Total Conversions, which cannot overcome the hardcoded limitations of old Rebellion, and various mods for other games, that are limited by the game's modability (you can usually just change units and user interface). This is where Terra kicks in. For the past month I've been working in my spare time on a design document for a space strategy game with elements very similar to those in Rebellion, that could provide a suitable modable platform for creating a Rebellion2 TC. The basic part of the design doc is now finished and the project has officially started (the date of birth is 2007-03-30, 17:05). A little FAQ first... Why new project? Because I'm not George Lucas and besides I'd like to create a little dream myself. Why did I choose SourceForge and open software? Since the program will be licenced under GNU GPL. This licence allows for additional modification of the software (under the condition that the modification is released under the same licence). This basically means, that the Rebellion 2 TC can also make additional changes to the program core making it more to the modders liking without the need for any hacking or reverse engineering. System used at SourceForge.net also allows others to continue this project in the case I would find myself without spare time or get killed by bus or something like that. And of course SourceForge.net makes it easier to find a bunch of additional developers. GNU GPL licence also allows me to use other already made GPL libraries/engines. So basically it means that the project has much bigger chance of completion that other hobby/solo projects. What language will be used? What platform will it run on? The main engine will be made in C++, game logic will be scripted in Lua (or Python). This will allow even the strategic part to be customizable. It will use SDL library and OpenGL, beacause of great portability. Terra is therefore supposed to run on every major platform (WinXX/Linux/xxBSD/Mac OS X). Maybe I'll write windows specific part, so that SDL won't be used and DirectX (for input and sound) will be used instead. No DirectX10 though. What are those silly unpronounceable words in the english design document? Those are czech words The design document isn't fully translated yet. Eh, maybe I should upload this into the official documentation too... Project's webpage: http://sourceforge.net/projects/terrastrategy/ Design document is located in the documentation section (http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=48706&group_id=192796) The website for the project is also planned it's address will be terrastrategy.sourceforge.net Well, read through the design document and tell me what you think. If you think something is unbalanced, too complex, too simple, missing feature, etc. don't keep it to ourselves If you want to give me a helping hand, you're welcome (and correction of the dd is welcome too). I hope this makes you day brighter