Entian

Hello, I have not given up, there are just other priorities in my life. In fact the next version is almost done! It has missiles (and more), but no collision between ships yet, sorry. I will try to release it in the coming weeks, there are just some finishing touches I want to take care of before.

Hello, "active development" is probably not the appropriate term, since I have last committed in March and the latest release is from last May. I have been busy with commissioned project work recently, but it is still on my mind almost every day, so it isn't abandoned in that sense. I want to put out at least one major update this year. Feel free to create a fork for multiplayer and if you need any assistance or have questions, let me know. If it works out great, we can merge it back upstream. Krisztián

Thank you! It is in the plans, although I did not have much time for development lately, so I cannot promise it will come soon. I have some changes already done for the next version (touchscreen controls and some important fixes for broken rendering on certain machines and more music tracks), which can be expected soon, but collision is not included yet. I do have some ideas for a solution that might work decently enough and would be fast enough for the browser, if that works out, I could push it out in the next months.

I have updated the game to 0.4.5. There is a new mission with a new playable fighter, and I've done lots of performance optimizations on the engine (preparing for an upcoming version playable on mobile phones)

Hello, I've played the game for a while (lost track of time, which is good :)), and I love it! Really nice work, keep it up! Here are the things I noticed: - only some resources are visible at the top bar, while the game has more. Workforce and maintenance would be nice to see as well, for example in a "free/all" format. For example if you have 50 workforce available and 47 allocated, it could say: "Workforce: 3/50 🚹" (I didn't find if the still available workforce (or even the total allocated one) is displayed anywhere at all, so I always added up the allocated ones every time to see how much I have left, which is quite tedious, and also the total maintenance is not visible on the research screen, while in some cases it would be useful. Also when I first saw the icon for the maintenance resource, I was confused what it was, because I couldn't find it in the top bar like the other resources) - I agree with Odk, I didn't find anywhere what benefits do ship upgrades give me. Is it firepower, accuracy, speed? The only stats that are visible are hull, cost, and number of weapons, which all seem to remain the same regardless of upgrades (up to level 26), and the fleet strength also remains the same after upgrades. So it's difficult to decide whether to save research points for the terraforming (which gives a clear benefit) or use them for upgrades. - small/medium/large weapon shots look almost the same, I couldn't really distinguish them. Would be nice if they had different colors, so I can see which of my weapons hit/do damage (right away, without the need to check the detailed statistics afterwards - which are nevertheless really nice). Would be even better if the colors would be different by empire, so I could see which are from the enemy and which are from my ships. - basic game loop and balance: I really liked the game loop (planning the next move, allocating the resources properly, executing the action and reaping the rewards). I think the balance of the actions could use a little work, after a short while I just settled for expand and explore, and ignored exploit and exterminate completely, because they seem to grant significantly less benefit. Expand helps me become more powerful right away, while explore gives me the long term advantage with the civics. At the same time, exploit gives me things that I get anyway even if I don't do anything just go grab a coffee while the game runs, while for exterminate the threat reduction is really minuscule and disappears quickly. With those I just don't feel like I'm progressing at all. Also, for expanding it would be nice if I could select the specific sector, not just the empire I want to attack (at least I couldn't figure out how to do that) I hope some of this feedback is useful. Good luck with the game, I will keep an eye on it!

@Milton No, I'm saying "there are awesome free music resources available you can find with an afternoon of search". Awesome is more inclusive than "on the level of Morricone and Vangelis". It's more like "of surprisingly good quality, despite being free". When I was looking for sound effects for my game, I stumbled upon a lot of music that was far better than I would have imagined is available for free to use. If I were to hear a cut of Bush Week or The Water and the Well or Crux from Nihilore in a game, my first thought wouldn't be that they got it for free, but rather that this game has awesome music. Maybe I am just too easily impressed (these are just examples I could find now in about 15 minutes and which I could imagine as ambient music for a game like this)

I purposefully didn't mention inertia, because I'm in the niche that prefers reality over arcade style in this regard (remember, "fun" is always subjective: for me, breaking / getting slowed down a lot by some magical drag in the vacuum of space just breaks suspension of disbelief / immersion, however intuitive (= in line with the player's previous experiences) it might be. So I would rather use "fun for most players" in this case, which is indeed relevant for any game that needs to generate revenue - unless targeting a specific underserved niche) So I enjoy games with realistic inertia (like Endless Sky, Destination: Sol, Babylon 5: I've found her). This of course led to some level of mastery in this skill, so for me, it was easy to navigate, but I would have expected regular players not used to this finding it very difficult (as I did when I first played such games - I did find it just as fun back then, as I belong to this minority) In my own game (recently posted), I opted for keeping inertia realistic (no drag at all), but added flight assist (automatic thrust to eliminate any drift and to control spin) and speed limits to help out players who are not used to this, though for a lot of players it is still too hardcore I think (it is not "responsive", but more sim like, exactly what I find more fun), but only because it is a passion project and not intended to make money or reach a large audience. I would (will) make an arcade mode and/or mobile version with tweaked controls if the goal was revenue-generation. Tweaking /assisting the controls to be right with realistic inertia is definitely a challenge, maybe you can take a look at these examples (all are free - which kind of supports my point :D). In the current version, the velocities I am entering the gravity fields were always way too high to be affected by the gravity too much for example, like @Skeptron also mentioned. So depending on the target-audience and your goal with the game you can go any number of ways with this, I think the key is to make it a conscious decision of why you are doing it the way you do it and also make it clear to the (potential) audience. On the copyright issue, there are awesome free music resources available you can find with an afternoon of search, I definitely recommend switching it out before too many people know about your game.

I just finished it. Really cool, I love the accurate ratio of orbit sizes (given my interest/hobby in astronomy, things like these are a big plus for me), the atmosphere and the music! I didn't catch that auto-pilot hint, I only see it now among the screenshots, but I wouldn't have used it anyway, where's the fun in that? (this is not a suggestion to take it out, just my hardcore preference) Great job so far, will be interesting to see where this develops, good luck!

I have updated the game with the 0.4.4 release, bringing some polish and fixes and basic analytics integration just so that I can see if anybody else actually plays it The low training weapon fire rate and loud menu click sounds are fixed, too

@Skeptron Thanks! And good point! It was accidental (because of a wrongly placed audio compressor node), I fixed it, should be alright in 0.4.4, coming in a few days.

Thanks for the compliment and the feedback, @marcgfx! The targeting mechanic currently is the same as for classic space sims (like Freespace), but I plan to add auto-targeting and firing in the direction of the mouse as well in the future. The rate of fire is different for each weapon, but now that you mention it, for the training weapon it is indeed very low and only for obsolete reasons, so I raised it for the next version. The 4/sec of the basic weapon feels good to me as there is a specific class of weapons with high rate (8-10/sec) planned for the future for those who like that play style, the current gun is just the tier 1/starter weapon.

@inteja Thank you for the log! I will look into this and post an update if I might have a fix.

@inteja Thank you for the feedback! What browser have you used? I don't have a Mac available to test at the moment, but when I tested it quite a long time ago, there was a bug in Safari that caused similar symptoms to what you describe, while the game worked totally fine in Chrome (and in Opera, though terribly slowly). If it happens in all browsers, could you try to start the game (possibly in Chrome/Chromium) with the developer console open (cmd+shift+i in Chrome/Mac I believe) and send me what appears there before the game crashes? (try to get a screenshot before the freeze, or just take a photo of it with a phone if that is not possible)

@HeadClot Thank you! Good questions! Sorry if the answers turned out a bit long. 1. At the moment, only a single controller is supported. So if you have a throttle that is separate from your joystick, unfortunately there is no way to set it up (I plan to add support for this later). However, if you have a throttle axis built into your joystick (as with my Thrustmaster T.16000M) or have a HOTAS controller that is built as a single device, it should work. I have not yet added a way to change the default bindings from inside the game, so if it has a different mapping than my Thrustmaster, it will not work out of the box, but you can set it up if you download/clone the game, change the default joystick bindings in the config/settings.json file (can be opened with any text editor, joystick settings are at the very and, pretty straightforward - you will need the "forward" and "reverse" actions) and then start the game locally. You can find out which axis is your throttle by going here: http://luser.github.io/gamepadtest/. Axes start with 0 and are represented by the blue bars at the bottom. If you set up some good default bindings, you can send it to me along with your device info (the same as shown in the top at the linked page), so I can automatically set it up if that device is detected in a future version of the game. 2. I am using an entirely custom engine written from scratch, including for graphics (using the WebGL API directly). The graphics engine source files are js/modules/managed-gl.js and all the files in the js/modules/scene folder. I wrote it while learning WebGL, it is not the best/prettiest code and not as feature-rich as ThreeJS for example, but it is more optimized for some special things in this game. 3. Not in the near future. I don't have VR devices (or even a hardware that has enough performance for that) and the game has quite a lot of movement, even in 3D space, so as much as I know, it would not be a good candidate for VR because of motion-sickness.

Thank you Stephan! Although the engine is nowhere near something like Unity, or even smaller, single-platform engines. It is specialized only for 3D, 6-DOF space shooters. The upside of that is the game runs on hardware as bad as my low-spec phone (although I haven't implemented touch controls, and the game by design is desktop-focused), while the Unity WebGL games (even simpler ones) just crash in the middle of the loading phase.