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[Keita]

Posting to watch

[Lap]

If any of you have problems please post at minimum your operating system and video card. More information like CPU might also be helpful. Screenshots of the error will probably help too.

I'm going to have to assume that most of these problems are with the engine (which itself is still in Beta) and the more information I can give the developers the more likely they will be able to fix it.

Though this game is technically compatible with Mac and Linux, I have only released a Windows binary at this time. Sorry for now. If you're really interested and you're a mac or linux user shoot me a PM and I'll try to get up a more compatible version for you.

Here's another darkened interface with a different styled map.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Servant Corps]

Is this tech demo playable?

EDIT: Also, looking at the thread of Imperial Offices, yeah, I'd suggest having the Imperial Eye serve as counterintelligence for Rebel spies; in fact, it'd might be a good idea to create an entire backstory about the Rebels that the Imperial Fleet, Stigmata Garrison, and Imperial Eye are facing off against. You do need an external enemy to justify the existence of the Senate after all.

EDIT2: Oh, sod it.

Every Church must have a dark schism, and the Old Empire is no exception. The Old Empire was the offshoot of the Church formed by the Prophet-Patriarch who conquered the Sol System on behalf of the Pancreator. After the Prophet-Patriarch's death though, the Old Empire threatened to implode into a civil war over the fate of the Empire.

On one side of the civil war were the Stigmatans (named after their leader, Patriarch Stigmata) who believed that the Prophet-Partiarch had openly appointed Stigmata  to rule over the Empire after him. The Stigmatans believed that the Empire is fundamentally a property of the Patriarch and that therefore the Church shall exercise both temporal and religious powers.

On the other side of the civil war were the Imperium, who believed that the Prophet-Partiarchy have created a 'division' between the religious "Partiarchy" and the temporal "Emperorship": both would theoretically share power over the Empire. Patriarch Stigmata was outnumbered, outmanned, and outgunned: while the Prophet-Patriarch was extremely popular with the masses, local elites preferred some measure of autonomy and feared the idea of a dictatorial theocracy minimizing their role in the Old Empire. Patriarch Stigmata was slain by the Imperium forces in the Battle of Byzantium, and the victorous Imperium forces declared that the civil war was over.

But the ideas the Stigmatans themselves survived, and became the rallying call of rebels throughout the Old Empire. Though the Imperial Eye believe that the Stigmatans present a united front against the Imperium, with even a secret line of Partiarchs that manage every single Stigmatan cell, in reality, today's Stigmatans are only rebels who seek to gain legitimacy by appealing to the legacy of the Prophet-Patriarch against that of the Old Empire. If the Stigmatans succeed in overthrowing the Old Empire, they would more than likely fight among themselves for control over the Partiarchy. Still, the various Stigmatans cells work together (because if they don't, they would more than likely be destroyed); Stigmatan cells that have already "liberated" planets from the Old Empire would send in spies and military assistance to help other Stigmata cells.

[Lap]

Tech demo is "playable" as in you can screw around with it. It's not a game with a goal. It's a little sandbox to try out the mechanics. The main goals were just to find out about how it runs on different computers and how some of the mechanics work.

Looks like the release has failed on both fronts as I have almost no information from the people who haven't been able to get it working and similarly, little/no feedback on the current implementation itself.

[Lap]

Update:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

-Added basic AI for armies.

AI armies can move either randomly or towards nearby enemies.

-Added in automatic creation of threats (AKA the barbarians or AI horde)

Game can look through all available traits and make a hostile AI faction semi randomly. There's 8 different categories that determine their units, behavior, strength, etc. One time players might get a zombie horde that likes to attack the most populated areas, the next game a super skynet style robot fleet might just rampage galactic shipping. Threats will grow in power as the game progresses. Some have leaders and their own homeworlds, others don't.

-Implemented global threat settings.

The probabilities of having a threat appear, how many can be active at once, and a whole lot of other stuff can be set each game.

-Added extremely basic experience gain for units.

-Vastly improved player messages

They can now contain more information relevant to the current galaxy, other players and ongoing situations.

-Basic voting

Can now vote on issues and have each factions voting power determined by the event. If an event wants to give votes based on how many cities you have it can. An event can use essentially anything it wants to determine voting power.

Unfortunately, I'm being help up not on art, or on the coding itself, but on the following design decisions. Take a look and see if you have any ideas.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

-Air Units - How should they work?

Most armies will move one space at a time. How should air units work? Should they just be like normal units with more movement points? Should they be special units that attach to certain armies? Should they be more abstract? Should they automatically attack things in range of their region?

-Experience - Who gets it and why?

Should you get experience for each hit on you? Each hit YOU make? Each hit YOU attempt? Killing an enemy unit? Just being in combat? Should all units in an army just split EXP gained fairly?

-How/where are wormholes opened? Are they all already opened? Are the planets already discovered?

This one is a massive problem that was discussed previously. Lots of good ideas, but each option is so game & code changing that there just isn't enough to sway me in any direction yet.

-The Church - Does it have it's own planet or is it so pervasive that it is abstracted into every planet?

I somewhat fear giving the church it's own planet or area as that means some players are more free to ignore them as they aren't close enough to matter.

Army Creation- How are the actual Army "leaders" created?

Just hit a button and you get one for free? Are they made in factories like most other units? Are they purchased from a seperate pool of leaders? Do these leaders themselves have any traits or are they just ways to organize troops?

Technology - How is anything researched?

Point based at labs? Slider based on money per turn? Something else?

Retreating - How/When do units retreat?

[Servant Corps]

So the Tech Demo is actually progressing smoothly...can I have access to the Tech Demo itself?

...also abstract the Church. The Church wants power (religious power to be precise), and giving it its own planet would lessen this power, for the reason you just said. It would increase the Church's temporal powers, but at the cost that it becomes little more than a regular empire, to be beaten up by the other Houses whenever the Houses fall to the latest "heresy fad".

[Lap]

As the title says, the tech demo has been out for a while. Links on the forums.

[Lap]

I spent some time getting back into Crimelike, but I was still able to make some progress here.

A new project follower named Tormodino was very helpful over the past few days in helping me with some design decisions. There's still plenty to work out, but I now have plenty more to code before needing to stop.

Looking at the same plain white UI for so long I took a detour from the mechanics I was coding and decided to experiment with some of burningpet's UI mockups. Oddly enough the code to make the vastly superior looking UI's is faster and less complex than the previous plan one because of all the rounded edges.

Here's the UI I was playing around with:



This might not be the final UI, but for now it certainly looks better and gets me thinking of how to better code these different styles.

Other updates:

-Air Combat - Air units can attack two regions away from their targets. They also move before all other units so you will almost be guaranteed to hit your targets before they move. Air combat only has one attack phase before the aircraft need to return back to their airfields, unlike all other forms of combat which can last indefinitely. Air units have their own special type of armies that cannot contain land units.

-Implemented three new units (fighter, dive bomber, strategic bomber).

-Air patrols - Aircraft can be given in order in which they will automatically intercept enemy aircraft in any nearby friendly/allied province.

-Improved zooming and scrolling. Even smoother and now with actual bounds to keep you from losing the map.

[Lap]

I recently added in a combat effects system that allows the creation of extremely flexible terrain modifiers and leader traits.

Example combat effect:
"Forest" +10% defense of all defenders. -1 mobility for all ground units.

Since terrain effects and leader traits use the same system, I could stick this combat effect on a leader and call it something like "Cautious".

Things that can be controlled:

-When the effect comes into play ("when attacking", "when the province is radioactive")
-Which units it targets (You can target as broadly like "all ground units" or as specific as "Units with trait X")
-How it effects them (Can add to or multiply any stat or attack)

I also spent a couple of hours and made a working in game relationship viewer. Apparently, it only took 3 minutes to learn how framebuffers work, which was time very efficiently spent. The rendering is even faster now, but some older machines might not support framebuffers so it's quite the tradeoff.

In this relationship viewer you can select a faction and then see all the active treaties. I guess I could allow for multiple factions to have their relations displayed at once, but it gets very messy, very fast.

Like most things I make, it's functional first, pretty later. I plan to let you enter diplomatic treaties and view faction statistics from this window later as well. All the question marks will be replaced with custom faction images later. This whole thing is dynamically created and therefore can support any number of factions.

[RedKing]

One thing about the Church: One problem that I had with EotFS (and which I swear to God, actually worked in one of the demos I downloaded but not in the final release??) was that the factionalism within the Church never worked, because:

1. The game started with ALL priests and churches in the Orthodox sect. Hence, the potential for intra-Church politics never materialized unless you deliberately started making all your planets follow a different sect.

2. There was no game effect from having the Patriarchy controlled by a different sect.


Now, as I said, in one of the demos I downloaded before I bought the game, the Church actually was split up. Each house backed a different sect, so the balance of power could be tipped pretty easily, and the Church wound up functioning as a microcosm of the struggle between the five Noble Houses. And....IIRC, each sect had different preferences in what techs they would proscribe. Like, the Eskatonics were the most permissive, the Avestites the least permissive, the Incarnates tended to allow "conventional weapons" but not exotic stuff like Plague Artillery, and Sanctuary Aeon tended to proscribe weapons, but not non-weapon related technologies.

IIRC, the pairings were:

Li Halan = Orthodox
Hazat = Avestites
Decados = Eskatonics
Hawkwood = Sanctuary Aeon
al-Malik = Incarnates

I believe the Church would even "un-proscribe" techs sometimes after a change of control (for instance, an Avestite patriarch being replaced with an Eskatonic one might suddenly see a bunch of techs suddenly allowed again).

There was a ton of in-game strategy potential there, for instance even though the Decados were generally in poor relations with the Church anyways, it was in their interest to push for an Eskatonic Patriarch, because their resource base favored a tech tree heavy in bioengineering and a number of typically proscribed techs.

[leparsell]

Hey,

I'm a big fan of EFS, and having recently rediscovered it after playing elemental.  I can't program, but was wondering what things you are looking for right now on the project.  I'd be happy to write, design, or whatever you need done.  There really just isn't any game even remotely like this out there.

Thanks for taking this subject up!

[Lap]

Have you found the forums at http://76.26.38.52/forum/ ? There is plenty of ways to help and lots of ideas that need feedback.

[Areyar]

interesting. ambitious project.

[Lap]

I feel like this project has been featured in a blog or something recently. I can't explain the sudden burst of enthusiasm and new members. Where before we maybe had one or two people occasionally dropping by the forums, now we have frequently have four or so active members contributing all sorts of stuff.

Burningpet started to create new maps and units and somehow we roped in another master artist, Davion.

Both of them have been producing amazing work.

Burningpet's Units:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Burningpet's map experiments

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Burningpet's Quick Faction Icons

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

An example of how really quick faction icons can be created so that players have a wide array to choose from. We can easily make dozens in a few hours.

Some UI experiments

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Burningpet


Davion

Davion's Animated Planets

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I've also released a 40mb soundtrack which we're picking through and improving. Take a listen (http://192.168.0.120/forum/index.php?topic=79.0)

In addition to all this eye candy we've also had Tormodino and Leparsell, both newcomers, posting pages of new ideas and feedback.

As if that wasn't enough, another new member, Ming has volunteered to help out and improve some UI code, meaning I'm no longer entirely alone on the coding side!

It's really coming together! 

[burningpet]

hey, my favourite, the commando isnt here:



we could really use more people doing units art, now that we are getting into the mechanical units like tanks, spacecrafts and naval.