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[Eric Blank]

I'm loving the look of this so far. Are you able to generate planets which lack liquid water or an atmosphere, too?

Also, is there any chance of uploading a copy of the most recent version?

[cerapa]

Oh, I can most certainly upload a copy. Linky Don't forget to mess around with the init file. Move the view by dragging, click on a star to open a list of planets, then click on a planet, wait for it to go to 100% and press again. While in planet view, you can zoom in and out with the mousewheel.
EDIT: Note that this particular version works only on 64 bit windows. I can swap out the compiler for a 32 bit one and switch out the DLL's if it doesn't work on your computer.


Currently all planets have at least some water. By which I mean theoretically it can generate planets with so little water that there is none. The generation is really quite primitive at the moment, and atmosphere has not been added, nor am I sure that I will add it. I certainly want to differentiate different planets more, but making some planets pure garbage just causes noise for the player to ignore. But I will see how it goes.

[Eric Blank]

Awesome!

The linked file works on the computer I'm currently on. I quickly ran into a crash/freeze issue, though: I selected a star, clicked a planet, and it immediately jumped to 100% (I notice others take 3-10 seconds to generate) and when I click again, the program freezes.

Here's what the console spat out and an image of the program at the time. Selected are the star and planet in question.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Is there a bug output file or anything else I can provide for you?

[cerapa]

Nah, that isn't necessary, that's a known bug. Glad you pointed it out to me again though, I've been putting off fixing it for some reason. You see, sometimes it just so happens that the RNG decides that the size of a planet happens to be zero. This obviously causes a problem. It tries to generate a texture for the planets surface, but it cannot create a 0 sized texture, so the texture gets left as a nullpointer, and the program crashes when I tell it to draw the nonexistant texture.

EDIT: And now fixed. Typing up this post took longer than the fix. Planets now have a minimum size of 10.
EDIT2: And this just made me realize that I am for some reason holding a large piece of planet generation in the star system class. I decided how I want things divided a while back, and this is not a part of that division.

[Retropunch]

This looks really awesome - I've been wanting to do a 4x game myself but decided to go down the RL route instead. I love what you've done with terrain generation, and the noise for the star maps looks great. I've beta tested and had the pleasure of knowing a few devs that have worked on actual money making 4xs, so I've got a few ideas rolling around which I just thought I'd share.

Two things that I'd really ask you to consider strongly:

Although I know this is very early days, one thing that leads to the absolute downfall of 4x games is a clunky interface. GUI development is arduous, but I'd really recommend investing a heck of a lot of time in it (along with tooltips and manuals) as nothing is makes a game like a 4x (a game with lots of clicking and menus) worse than a dodgy interface.

Secondly, I'd really recommend working stuff up really slowly and making sure each feature is solid, rather than going scattershot. You look to have quite a lot of resources and tech levels and stuff, and while that can be good, a 4x game can be fun with just a few resources, some basic +/- buildings and a few types of troops. I know it sounds common sense, but it's way better to have something concise and really playable than a sprawling mass of 3/4 done systems and unexplained features which so often tends to happen with 4x games.

Just some thoughts which I'm sure you've already thought of, but just thought I'd share as it'd be great to see a really procedural 4x game!

[cerapa]

Although I know this is very early days, one thing that leads to the absolute downfall of 4x games is a clunky interface. GUI development is arduous, but I'd really recommend investing a heck of a lot of time in it (along with tooltips and manuals) as nothing is makes a game like a 4x (a game with lots of clicking and menus) worse than a dodgy interface.

I agree. The GUI makes or breaks a game. Most of the actual work I have been doing has been back-end stuff to make the GUI easier to make. Sadly it is still the worst part of making this. GUI making is just...really goddamn boring. Mostly just trivial stuff that requires a bunch of code.

Secondly, I'd really recommend working stuff up really slowly and making sure each feature is solid, rather than going scattershot. You look to have quite a lot of resources and tech levels and stuff, and while that can be good, a 4x game can be fun with just a few resources, some basic +/- buildings and a few types of troops. I know it sounds common sense, but it's way better to have something concise and really playable than a sprawling mass of 3/4 done systems and unexplained features which so often tends to happen with 4x games.

Can't really work on most of the systems separately, since they should ideally be intertwined, cept for the combat and stuff of course. The general design in my head does keep shifting towards them being simpler, but I do feel like this is the trap I am most likely to fall into. I will have to try to keep this in mind.

[cerapa]

Apparently setting the seed number to be too high breaks some things. Meh, I'm sure 60000000 planets will suffice.

Got the region display running. Shows up in the lower-right corner when you click on a region. And just as a test of tooltips, holding your mouse still for half a second will display the regionID of the particular region you are hovering the mouse over.

[cerapa]

I'm back to working on this.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Messing around with resource distribution. I decided that overcomplicating matters was stupid, so every region gets exactly one resource, and at least for the time being, water will no longer be treated as a place that can be colonized. Right now I need to write the bit of code that populates the planetary list of resources from the universe list.

EDIT: Now have a rudimentary system for assigning resources to planets. Theres a bunch of "basic" resources and a ton of "exotic" ones. The first couple of resource slots are always basic, but the remainder are exotic ones. Ideally a lot of resources should be familiar to you on every planet, but some will also be exclusive to the planet or exceptionally rare.

[DreamThorn]

You're back!

What's that orange square in the middle of the reddish zone?

[cerapa]

There's also one on the top left(looks brownish for some reason though...).

It's just a debug thing I left on. I use Voronoi diagrams for determining what regions get what resource, and those orange dots are the points that make the Voronoi cells.

[Azkanan]

Cerapa has been sending me bits and bobs of this over the last few months. Didn't realise he was holed up in here, haha, rock on mate!

[Gentlefish]

WOOP PTW

[lemmily]

yay, you're back to this! 

[cerapa]

So during the past few days I have made it so that you don't need to wait for the planet image to be fully generated to go into the planet view. It just gets made in front of your eyes.

I also chased a bug that wasn't a bug.

And Fixed a bug where the FPS counter caused a crash.(which I also wrote about on the rage thread)

And now have found an annoying bug, where SDL_CreateTextureFromSurface() refuses to work. Sometimes. For reasons unknown to me. It seems to have something to do with timing, because during a certain configuration of writing debug messages to the console, creating the planet image resulted in the game crashing every single time(but only when the game wasn't fullscreen...?). Now it just happens randomly, I think? Because it seems to have dissapeared. This thing is the worst. I'm guessing it will pop up again at some random point and I will blame it on something else instead and spend a day fixing the wrong thing.

[_DivideByZero_]

Are civilizations going to start off at the same point as the player, or will they be randomly generated as well? (or perhaps generated around your borders?).

If there are a lot of planets, it might be tricky to simulate all those civs sprouting up if your planet maps are large as well.