[GAME] EmptyEpsilon

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  • image

    Multiply! 

    Also working on the AI code. Which is still a bit of a mess. But now the AI ships avoid flying into black holes.
  • Added jumpdrive/warpdrive selection during server creation. So now you can choose which you have (or let it depend on the ship type)

    Stations can now send out supply drops to waypoints. Which contain a refreshment of missiles and stuff. (You can still request unlimited amounts of these, so I still need some 'currency' system to prevent abuse)
    These supplies are dropped of at waypoints that the "comms" (now called relay) station sets up. Making that role much more important, as you need to plan ahead.

    And finally, AI no longer flies into stations getting stuck. (They still fly into mine&asteroid fields)
  • Got to play a little bit this weekend with a few friends. Will have to check out the new updates. 

    You could make it where the supply drops can only happen after X amount of minutes has passed since the last one. 
  • I actually opted for a reputation system right now. You slowly get reputation points, as well as reputation points for killing enemy ships.

    You can opt to spend these points on different things. This gives more choices, which adds in gameplay value. A timer would simply end up to be "send out a supply drop as soon as the timer has ended". Now the captain has to make a choice. Spend much reputation on supply drops, or dock with a station to get supplies much cheaper.

    Also added a button&dialog to the GameMaster screen, where you  can retrofit ships. Allowing the GM to change ships on the fly. This cannot change beam-weapons yet, but it can modify other aspects of the ship.


    Finally. I had a crash this morning during testing. Not being able to reproduce it yet. But I have a gameplay session planned on Thursday evening. So I hope to find it before that.
  • image

    Setting up the session of yesterday evening. 

    Looked pretty cool in the dark:
    image
    You could see more then on the photo. But phone cameras are just bad in the dark.


    Anyhow, the play session went pretty good. Only network problem we had was lag due to bad wireless. The Relay station (old Comms) is way more fun to play then Comms in artemis. Especially now that I limited the long range radar to 25km by default, which means the relay station has a whole different view. As he always knows where the stations are, and the stations can get out of radar range.
    And when you send out a few ships on scouting as relay, you suddenly have a lot to manage. As I was playing relay (to see how it would work, as it had the most changes compared to the other stations), I managed to safe the game by ordering a supply drop at the right moment. Saving our asses when we ran out of energy.

    In turn, helms and science are now the most boring jobs. Helms really needs some more maneuvering options during combat. As right now he can just fly into combat, nothing else.


    I'm fixing up a small bug today that I noticed yesterday regarding to reputation. And I'm adding some speed&range information to helms&weapons, as they where confused about "what is 5km?"
    But I'm very happy that the network code works now.


    Few other things we noticed:
    * Sounds suck, and there are still bugs and problems with the sound effects.
    * AI ships still can get stuck on stations. Not sure if I can fix this before your session Kwadroke. Causes problems with supply drops and support ships sadly enough.
    * Clients do not seem to disconnect when the server is closed. Pretty sure I introduced this with the fixed network code. Not that important, but can cause confusion.
    * Changing camera angles for the 3D view is a bit confusing as the camera moves to the new location in an odd way.
    * Everything is unbalanced. Nukes are really powerful, while homing missiles do to little damage. The strikeship enemies are quite strong as the move in so fast, and can take out stations quickly before you know it because of this.
    * You do not get any indication if the part of the ship you are trying to use is damaged or without power. Only engineering knows this, which can be confusing. We had engineering turning off impulse power, at which point the helms officer was confused about the fact that he could no longer fly. And when we sustained heavy damage and multiple systems where down, then you really don't know if the game is fucking up or your ship is damaged.
    * Lore is lacking. Not my strong side. Except for the Ghost faction nothing else is really written yet. (The background story of the ghost faction is cool however. Got to thank a colleague for that)
  • In case anyone is wondering. I'm still working on this.

    Progress has been good. I've implemented nebula's, which are pretty much a core mechanic, as they block long range radar. Enemy ships will try to follow you inside the nebula, but they only know your last position unless they come within short range radar range (5km)

    I also added warp jammers, not in any of the scenarios right now, but they block the use of warp and jump drives in a certain range. They can be destroyed.

    Added system damage to CPU ships, as this was previously for player ships only.

    Did quite a few updates to the GM screen. Hope to test this tomorrow, where I have a play session with hopefully a full crew and me as GM.
    The GM now can send messages globally (shown on the main screen). But also open a chat-comms channel to player ships for role-play reasons.
    The GM can also retro-fit ships, allowing the GM to change most aspects of player and CPU ships.

    Also, updated the lore a bit. No more spacecows and sheeple.

    Finally, I added a "waves" scenario, which simply gives you an endless supply of enemies to fight, in waves. First wave you'll fight a single fighter for example, second one, you'll fight 2 cruisers, but in the 10 wave you'll fight a lot of enemies.

    (And, our 5 touch screen console setup is all milled and assembled, just needs some more paint. As most of them only have a single layer right now. I'll post some photos in 2 days I hope)
  • I've been watching the commits to GitHub and played with it a little yesterday. 
    I'm liking the updates to the Lore so far. 

    Any updates on the daily builds that were mentioned in the issue tracker on GitHub?
  • I always have to laugh when I see the death screen. Reminds me of the old atari days! Everything is looking good thus far. Hard part will be getting others to try it out due to having to compile it sadly.
  • Pre-build versions for windows and OSX!

    Build with git version:
    2d2687829fcfe1070be130c4977795b9da063bbc
  • +1 To your internets good sir.
  • Ok, just back from our game session.

    First off. Forgot to take pictures.

    Second off, we started about 2 hours late due to shitty network issues, the wireless network was worthless in the room we picked, causing nothing but connection problems (and 500ms ping times).

    So we gathered together a wired networked (pretty much stealing all the network cables in the office). Causing a huge wire mess on the floor. BUT, that did solve all problems and caused the game to run like a charm.

    The game is AWESOME with touchscreens. So, expensive, but awesome.

    On the game round itself, due to the time already lost, a shortage of network cables, I didn't do a GM round. But we played the "waves" scenario. Which was a lot of fun, as it prepares the players with a few easy waves so everybody knows what to do when the stronger enemies hit.

    Did have a few problems/things that could use improvement. First off, the only combat maneuver that was effective was the "turn around" the other moves simply didn't cover enough distance to be effective.
    Next, the AI did a few stupid things. Like not changing target when it clearly should have, causing a big slow ship trying to turn around instead of firing at the ships in front of it.

    Other good news. Our relay officer (comms for Artemis) had TONS of fun. By setting waypoints and commanding small friendly ships to waypoints he suddenly had a lot to do. From distracting enemies, to setting up "human shields" and more offensive power for big enemies. The waypoint system really works great, but can use some refinement.
  • How long did it take to play through the "Waves" scenario? Sounds like something I would run to get people used to it at events.
  • No idea, didn't really time it. The Waves scenario never really ends, unless you lose the two stations that you have. The first wave is just a single fighter heading for your stations. So you really have time to get the handle on your ship before anything "bad" happens.

    They only noticed in wave 3 that the weapons officer didn't know that he had to put the shields up. As he thought the orders for "enable shields" was intended for the engineering officer. I was just sitting back and laughing at the fact that they forgot to enable the shields.

    I think the difficulty curve could be a bit higher. I think we stopped (by blowing up the friendly stations with nukes and a self-destruct) after wave 7. But the crew would have been able to handle that just fine. But this was also partially due to some AI related problems, causing the Dreadnought to be bit of an easy target. (which I'm fixing right now)

    But I am thinking about a tutorial scenario, where you just quickly learn the ropes of the game. The latest version also has some tooltips explaining the controls for helms/weapons and engineering when the game is paused. So that also helps. (Still need to do science and relay)

    Bonus photo:
    We didn't set them up like that, they where more in a circle. But after the game we quickly put them like this so they take up less room.
  • I've been trying to cross compile EE on Linux to make Windows Binaries, but I've ran into some problems. I've been trying to figure out how to get SFML 2.2 to work with mingw
    Here's one of the errors
    /usr/bin/i686-w64-mingw32-ld: cannot find -lsfml-window-d

    daid: how did you get SFML 2.2 to work with mingw?


    I don't have any issues getting it to work on Linux. In-fact I setup a Vagrant virtual machine to build it for Debian Jessie i386. Here's the Vagrantfile: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kwadroke/linux-scripts/master/vagrant/bridgesims/EmptyEpsilon/Vagrantfile.debian-x86
  • You need to extract the windows SFML release one level below EmptyEpsilon.

    So for example:
    /home/daid/EmptyEpsilon/
    /home/daid/SFML-2.2/

    Then it should work. Note that you need to use the proper release for the mingw compiler you're using (which can be tricky).


    And. We had a large play session yesterday evening. Some of our production staff got word about the simulator, and visited us. So I suddenly had 6 new players. Additional to the crew of 4 I already thought I would have. So lots of players.

    So, I've been playing the GM. Which was fun, few minor problems in that screen. But corrected those already. The GM screen really allows you to make things interesting. I could really tweak difficulty on the fly by giving some enemies some more shields. Adding some extra enemies, and doing some fancy tactics.

    We had the main screen on 100% front view all the time. Which was interesting, and worked really well. I highly recommend this if you have a full crew.


    Just updated the network code a bit, which I hope will result in a view for the players. As closeby objects should update more frequent now then distant objects.
  • Ok. I knew where to put it, but, didn't realize I needed the Windows release. I was trying to compile from source.

    Still wanting to get a crew together sometime in the near future to play.
  • edited February 2015
    Added the Windows release (MinGW (DW2)) and now building Windows versions.
    Thanks for the info. 
    I'm also working on a Vagrant VM file to test building and allow other people to easily build EE from a VM.
  • edited February 2015
    It's building for Windows, but, not able to run it. 
    Having some "procedure entry point" issues with libstdc++-6.dll. I've grabbed the DLLs from mingw32 from the Linux box. Also tried to use the one that was packaged up on the website from the 15th with similar issues.
  • Think I figured out the issue. I was using the wrong version of the Windows SFML. 
  • Hey guys! Found this when looking for screenshots of the sim, as more people are interested. I'm one of the people from the office that started the project with Daid (although he did do most of the coding, as I generally can't be arsed to code when i'm done for the day).

    I'm still planning to write more fluff and some lore this weekend, so we can make the enemy / friendly ships a bit more interesting (or at least, more interesting than just a callsign).
  • Started to put up a website for the game:

    Still very empty, but does has some screenshots.
  • Just found your project. I used to host a number of Artemis games but our group found that there was quite a bit lacking. For a title that has gained a reasonable amount of popularity, it is still surprising that the development pace is so slow.

    I'm looking forward to building EmptyEpsilon and giving it a try.
  • Just fixed the build, my mistake.

    We're currently looking to deploy our hardware&software setup at a LARP event. We're asking a tiny bit of money for it, so we can buy more 3D models for the game.

    I really want this station pack:

    But the guy who made those, also has a lot of other nice models:
  • Updated original post with the new website.
  • I ended up rolling back a couple revs in order to build. I was able to get everything built, but couldn't quite get it to run. I'll try again tonight with the most recent changes.

    Those are some pretty sweet models. Do you have a PayPal for donations?
  • Would you be opposed to merging some minor changes to be more friendly to a Visual Studio build? I've got SeriousProton building with the VC++ compiler right now. Looking at EmptyEpsilon right now.
  • I'm just targeting the gcc compiler (mingw for windows). Which is a lot easier to keep the platform independence running for me.

    I'm willing to accept patches, if they are not too invasive. As I don't think I'm doing that much gcc specific.

    As for donations, I think I'll put up a donate button soon. But before that I want the website to be a bit more filled and downloads available.
  • I've put up the donation link as well as pre-build downloads at:
  • Many thanks for that donation!

    Bought the station models. Now there can be different size stations, just look at this monster:

    (Still need to work out more details, but the models are visible already)
  • I'm trying to donate, but I can't seem to submit because I don't live in the UK (I'm in the US). I don't have a PayPal account. Is there another way to access the donation site?
    Sorry I don't do a whole lot on PayPal, especially internationally.
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