[GAME] EmptyEpsilon

daid

@sunnyalan, building a whole crafting system, and ballancing it, is a lot of work and does not really suit what I want to build right now. So not going to happen at this time.

@kwadroke, hope to find time to search for the crash bug again. The self-destruct for 4/3 crew bug is fixed. Also added the models for the transport ships, but no scenario is using them yet. This does add 25 extra ship options to use. (5 different looks with 1 to 5 containers) But only basic stuff is added, did not set any real stats on them yet.

Also, in general, I'm getting emails that someone named "m.houet" is trying to transfer money trough paypal, but it keeps failing.

daid

And I will do a new build on friday. So you have the latest fixes.

kwadroke

@daid: Thanks.

Flea

Daid -
I added a few keys to the option.ini file, but it doesn't seem to be picking up the keystrokes, am I missing something?  I put one in as this:
SHIELDS_ENABLE_BUTTON_BUTTON_HOTKEY="Q"

Thanks! I await the update so we can have single players fighters protect our missile cruisers!

Also, would it be to hard to implement better damage control crews?  Like as a bonus during the game or they gain better ability as they survive ? Just an idea I had as I was taken out by two missile cruisers firing a lot of missiles at me.....

daid

SHIELDS_ENABLE_BUTTON_BUTTON_HOTKEY="Q"

I think it needs to be without quotes, so:

SHIELDS_ENABLE_BUTTON_BUTTON_HOTKEY=Q

Flea

Okay, I got it to work, however it doesn't seem to work on single player mode, which I would lend to because there is no shields button yet?  As the impulse setting for a key works in single player mode. 

thanks!

daid

exactly. key bindings only work when the button is visible

daid

New version is up. Note, I have not been able to find the crash bug yet. I've added extra tracing in my local version, so I hope to see the cause the next time it happens here. But I did not want to risk building this into the official version just yet.

kwadroke

Thanks for the build. Will be testing it out this weekend.

kwadroke

One thing I have noticed, and it's been going on for several build versions now, is that the Android version crashes for me when I choose "Start Server". (I just tap on it to see what happens.) I'm guessing that the server won't run on Android anyway. If that's the case you might want to add something to the Android build process that disables the "Start Server" button on the main screen. This isn't something that has to be fixed for my testing, but more for overall user experience.

Tested on Samsung Note 3, Android 4.4.2

Flea

Pleased to say I just tried the game on my droid turbo (android) and it works good, and I will confirm with Kwadroke that on my version of 4.4.4 the server selection crashes the application.
Almost got to test it with my crew, but sadly they have other obligations (what could be more important than team building spaceship simulators!!).

And the new build worked good, had to transfer my music and ship files over !

daid

I think the android crash is the same crash, just more "predictable" then the windows crash. So it happens more often...

Halaku

Is there any way to change the main screen to a first person view instead of third person?

Love the game by the way.

daid

While the main screen view currently cannot be put in first person view, there is also the "window" view, which does do first person. (but does not show a mini-map) and can be set into different view directions. If you have lots of large screens and computers, you could setup a full 360 view with those :-)

Halaku

Oh cool, thanks for the quick response. 

Flea

Daid - Any thoughts on adding a computer voice for warnings or things happening on the ship?  I can only think of artemis doing the overheat, but maybe for contacts in radar, say once they are identified as an enemy?  Or low shields, energy, etc.

Of course a way to turn them on and off for those that rather have silence!

kwadroke

We didn't get to test Sunday like I wanted. We did get to last night. Here's the results of our testing.

Client crashes every time on Windows 8.1 "Bing/Connected" 32bit Edition. (Artemis 2.2.0 also crashes but 2.1.5 doesn't on this machine) I updated the video drivers (Intel Atom integrated video) to the latest version (Sept 2015) but it's still doing it for both Artemis & EE. What's odd is that I can start an EE server fine on this machine. It's just the client that crashed.
I have 3 of these identical computers that I will be using for the convention so I need to get it working on these. Going to put Linux on a USB drives and test that on the same machines.

6/5 Player Crew game

Working great. Did see the Helm "see through the background while moving at Warp" bug, but other than that it works fine.

4/3 Player Crew game

• Can't scroll to zoom on Operations
  
• No Rep displayed
  
• Can't place Waypoints

These are things we noticed. Not really bugs, just what I felt was a lack of features. Not sure if these are on purpose or not but running this configuration makes things easier run when you don't have a full crew.

Tried to test EE using Android on a X86 without a touchscreen. Game opened to title screen but could not select anything. Tried to create a options.ini to autoconnect, but either the game is locked or not reading the file. I tried putting it in the folders created in the filesystem, but no luck. Will test on my X86 Tablet to see if I can get past it or see if it locks up. I figure that the game is just locking since it's probably built for ARM. The client works fine on my phone.

daid

Android without a touchscreen is a no-go. As the android version is hard coded to use the touchscreen instead of a mouse.

The "look trough radar while warp" is a known bug, it's quite a lot of work to fix it. It's a fundamental issue.

For the crashes, I hope to add a crash-log to the next windows release. But I do have had great success with linux. I run a netboot setup at the office, means I only have to update/configure a single machine, everything else goes with it. But it does have some issues with newer machines that have UEFI boot.

daid

Version with crash logs is up. If this version crashes it will generate a "EmptyEpsilon.RPT" file. Which will help me in debugging where the crash comes from.

kwadroke

I think people are going to have some problems with that version if it's built off of the b59b013 commit of SeriousProton. See https://github.com/daid/EmptyEpsilon/issues/57

kwadroke

Yeah, that build is having the same issue I reported. You can't connect a client to a server. It just sits on "Connecting..."

daid

Removed that build, adding a new one. Stupid mistake. Always test what you change...

daid

"see through the background while moving at Warp"

I'm working on that bug right now. Does require me to change the whole way the radar is handled. So might introduce other smaller issues. But it's the only way to solve the fundamental problem why this is happening.

Gene

Scanning... Hair flying.... being ripped out....

Seriously - I think I was able to scan once, the rest of the time - forget it. I appears that sliders need to be moved to a randomly determined position and that position is critical (extremely hard to find). Maybe add some sort of logic to it?

Or... maybe I'm just doing it wrong. Hmmm...

Addendum:  Woke up this morning and realized how to solve the puzzle...  Much faster on the scans now.

I thought it might be cool to make their appearance random - maybe dependent on surrounding conditions? "Puzzle" every time strike me as a little too predictable. Gotta keep those science officers on their toes, after all!

ralphhogaboom

I had the opposite reaction - we just tested the game over the internet, and I was doing Science / Relay.

I cannot express how much joy the scanning screen gave me.

There is a skill to scanning in EE that I didn't realize was missing from Artemis until I experienced it. OMG, scanning in Science is just ... fun! it's challenging, and I only got about 1 out of every 3 or 4 ships scanned ahead of time. I got better at it - it's a skill. Something I can improve on, and it makes the science position significantly more interesting.

PLEASE do not change science. It's friggin' beautiful.

Gene

Was thinking about the window view. I don't know about multiple large screens, bur for something along the lines of a fighter I've seen used 17 and 19 inch screens for around $20. Now if I can compile EE for a raspberry Pi...

Also: See addendum about scanning above... just took a while to figure out what was going on.

daid

Ok, pushed the changes for the radar view warp/jump issue. I hope this doesn't break anything, as it's quite a large change to an important piece of code. I'll wait a while till Kwadroke did some tests before I do a new build, as he's usually good in catching early bugs :-)

Building for the Pi (or Pi2) won't be easy. You need to be able to compile SFML, which uses OpenGL, and the Pi does not support the full OpenGL stack that SFML uses. You might be able to do so with the changes for Android (as that also lacks a full OpenGL stack).

And you'll need to set the FEATURE_3D_RENDERING to 0 in featureDefs.h, cause else EE will not compile as it uses the full OpenGL stack.

Some day, I might tackle this myself. But today is not that day.

kwadroke

I'll have to test tomorrow night after work. 6 month wedding anniversary tonight, so I can't do it this evening.
Linux running on my virtual machine is showing white circles where the radar is supposed to be, but Windows running on a physical machine is displaying it fine. I'm guessing it's due to the way VirtualBox is handling OpenGL.

kwadroke

Strangely enough, it renders the radar fine using Wine in the Linux Virtual Machine, even if it is slow.

EDIT: I was able to get around this issue in Linux by using
export LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1

daid

Is the warp-effect working on the virtual machine? If that is working and the radar is not, then I think I know the cause. Should be fixable.