avm1979
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Posted
2010-11-20 01:25:21 » |
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You can see the trailer here (fractalsoftworks.com). -------------------------------------- Hi guys. My first post here, I was referred by the good folks over at the LWJGL forums  I want to tell you about a (needless to say, Java) game I'm working on - Starfarer. A little blurb to set the mood: Two hundred years ago, the galaxy was ravaged by war. The story of Starfarer concerns a sector left largely untouched by the flames. Humanity has been slowly slipping into anarchy, and few outposts of civilization remain - it is a time of frequent conflict, rampant piracy, and shifting allegiances. A time of great profit for the few traders able to ply the old trading routes. A time of great danger and greater opportunity. It's a single-player, sandbox-style sci-fi roleplaying game. You explore the different star systems, build up your character and your fleet, establish outposts or trade, and engage in lots and lots of fleet actions. It's been in development for about a year, and a beta version will be out in the coming months. Here's a link to our site, with lots more info about the game and a bunch of screenshots: http://fractalsoftworks.comAnd here's a screenshot just to get you started:   If it looks like something you're interested in, consider following our RSS feed. We'll be posting regular updates ... well, as regular as it can get while still making progress on the game proper  Thank you!
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Nate
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Reply #1 - Posted
2010-11-20 02:48:40 » |
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Looks very cool. Any chance you'll post video?
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avm1979
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Reply #2 - Posted
2010-11-20 03:21:25 » |
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Yep, for sure. Actually working on it - hopefully it'll be ready in a week or two.
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Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!
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CommanderKeith
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Reply #3 - Posted
2010-11-20 06:31:38 » |
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Lovely backgrounds, how did you make them?
Also the particles/glow/bloom effects look great, how are you rendering them?
Looking forward to the a demo, great job!
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noblemaster
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Reply #4 - Posted
2010-11-20 09:55:19 » |
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Looks very nice! 
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avm1979
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Reply #5 - Posted
2010-11-20 15:59:08 » |
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Lovely backgrounds, how did you make them?
That's the Orion nebula, courtesy of NASA from this gallery - all public domain stuff! There was some fancy photoshop work involved to make it fit in with the rest of the game, the details of which I'm not familiar with  The image is pretty big (2048x2048) so randomly offsetting it, especially at a lower resolution, gives some variety for free. Also the particles/glow/bloom effects look great, how are you rendering them?
Most of the particle stuff is using glBlendFunc(GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL_ONE), with various textured-quad particles - so it's what you'd expect in that regard. One thing that works well almost across the board is a particle that's bright in the middle, and doesn't just use a super-smooth linear/quadratic transparency dropoff towards the edges. Like a small bright particle superimposed on a large dim particle. You get a more nuanced look with fewer quads. YMMV, though, since so much of it was just tweaking the relative sizes of things until it "looked right". Not quite sure what you mean by glow/bloom... the ship engine glows? Those were actually pretty tricky to get, and ended up nothing like what I thought when I first approached them. The "heated metal" look around the nozzles is just a particle at the base of the engine flame. The actual flame is where the real fun is. The base for it is a scrolling, tiling texture that looks kind of like a sine wave with a reflection around the X axis, really rather non-descript. That's rendered a bunch of times, going from short and wide to thin and narrow. There's yet another pass to render a flame-shaped dim outline that you can't even make out specifically, but that makes the overall flame look much smoother. Looking forward to the a demo, great job!
Looks very nice!  Thank you!
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Captain Awesome
Junior Devvie   Medals: 2
Hi
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Reply #6 - Posted
2010-11-20 18:47:06 » |
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Looks cool. Btw I love sandbox and rpg games so I can't wait to try it out 
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avm1979
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Reply #8 - Posted
2010-11-21 19:48:16 » |
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Looks cool. Btw I love sandbox and rpg games so I can't wait to try it out  Thanks! Looking forward to releasing more than just screenshots. Ahhh, that. Thanks for the link - never knew the details, and that's a nice simple explaination. Seems like an awful lot of trouble if one is not already using shaders, though the results are impressive. I thought you might have generated them somehow.
I wish. Tried that, using noise etc, and the end result was passable, but not in the same ballpark as the stuff created by the big bang  Here's what that looked like btw:  The above is just perlin noise for the blue bg, with the same noise matrix used to affect the probability of generating stars. The nice thing was you can generate it on the fly, but pretty much have to use FBOs for performance, and that means putting in fallback pbuffer code when FBOs aren't available, and that was just a big pain. Could of course just generate and then save it, but then it's no longer dynamic... When I saw the NASA stuff, though, it was pretty clear I should just stop going down that path. Until that point, I thought the above looked kind of good 
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Eli Delventhal
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Reply #9 - Posted
2010-11-21 19:57:59 » |
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The game looks beautiful - the style kind of reminds me of Master of Orion II except actually pretty. The premise also seems like it could be awesome; really looking forward to this one.
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Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!
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SwampChicken
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Reply #10 - Posted
2010-11-22 01:52:45 » |
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Could someone post some screenshots in here? (the main site is blocked for me)
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avm1979
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Reply #11 - Posted
2010-11-22 04:05:43 » |
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The game looks beautiful - the style kind of reminds me of Master of Orion II except actually pretty. The premise also seems like it could be awesome; really looking forward to this one.
Thanks!  MOO2 is definitely a big influence. Going for less big-picture strategic and more focused on a single fleet, though. Could someone post some screenshots in here? (the main site is blocked for me)
Weird, any idea why? If you PM me your email I can send you a zip w/ the screenshots.
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OverKill
Junior Devvie  
Java games rock!
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Reply #12 - Posted
2010-11-22 11:18:51 » |
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Looks and reads very nicely. And yes, it really does remind me of Master of Orion II and Galactic Civilizations II. Which is a GOOD thing! And if it runs on *nix systems, all the better (GCII does not really). I would LOVE to play it.
Keep up the great work!
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avm1979
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Reply #13 - Posted
2010-12-06 17:08:09 » |
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Well, we finally finished the trailer! You can see it here (fractalsoftworks.com). And if it runs on *nix systems, all the better
It'll definitely run on Linux - I've been testing it out every so often on a Ubuntu box (one with an embedded graphics card, no less) and everything works just fine, thanks to LWJGL. The lack of a dedicated video card is... well, it's not nearly as bad as I expected 
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kappa
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Reply #14 - Posted
2010-12-06 18:59:21 » |
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Wow looks great, even better in motion. (can't say the same about the choice of the trailer music  ) I'm going to flex some showcase moderator discretion here and move this to the Featured Games Section. The level of polish already shines through, games like this come along rarely  Will be reviewed once released. FEATURED.
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avm1979
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Reply #15 - Posted
2010-12-06 20:38:52 » |
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Thank you, this just made my day! I'll update the original post once the alpha is available for download, or there's something else noteworthy enough 
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CyanPrime
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Reply #16 - Posted
2010-12-06 20:43:10 » |
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Looks great, but it's got a bad name. I thought it said starfarter at first >_>
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Eli Delventhal
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Reply #17 - Posted
2010-12-06 21:54:28 » |
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Ha ha, I like the name, but that's a funny thing to read. 
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appel
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Reply #18 - Posted
2010-12-08 01:45:13 » |
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Awesome graphics. I love the realism of the beams, how the shields react with the environment and being pummeled, planets rotate and its atmosphere, hows damage can be dealt to different areas of the ships hull , gun rotation and recoil, and every single graphical detail that is in there, the particle effects on the explosions, projectiles and exhaust is super. The artwork on the sprites is awesome. Hard work comes to mind 
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avm1979
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Reply #19 - Posted
2010-12-09 01:59:07 » |
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Whoa, I'm amazed you picked all that out of the trailer. Thank you! I think for most of these, I was working on and thinking, "I wonder if anyone is even going to notice" 
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Eli Delventhal
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Reply #20 - Posted
2010-12-09 05:01:59 » |
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Awesome graphics. I love the realism of the beams, how the shields react with the environment and being pummeled, planets rotate and its atmosphere, hows damage can be dealt to different areas of the ships hull , gun rotation and recoil, and every single graphical detail that is in there, the particle effects on the explosions, projectiles and exhaust is super. The artwork on the sprites is awesome. Hard work comes to mind  It is indeed bloody gorgeous. Seriously pretty. Awesome. Inspiring. This is what Master of Orion combat should have been...
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CommanderKeith
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Reply #21 - Posted
2010-12-09 05:45:14 » |
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Wow! Very cool trailer. You should send it to lucasarts and get hired The classical music, the real galaxy in the background, the battle, i love it!
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OverKill
Junior Devvie  
Java games rock!
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Reply #22 - Posted
2010-12-09 08:37:52 » |
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Who0ot! That trailer rocked! You are far to brutal, teasing us like this! Some extra exclamation marks for good measure: !!!!!
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avm1979
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Reply #23 - Posted
2010-12-09 21:55:26 » |
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Thank you guys! I'm going to bottle up this shot of extra-added motivation for a rainy day. 
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Eli Delventhal
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Reply #24 - Posted
2010-12-09 21:57:20 » |
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PS awesome use of parallax.
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SimonH
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Reply #25 - Posted
2010-12-10 00:50:23 » |
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Er, have you been preempted?
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People make games and games make people
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avm1979
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Reply #27 - Posted
2010-12-11 16:08:38 » |
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That 'r' makes all the difference, right? Right???  PS awesome use of parallax.
Glad you like it! That took an embarassing amount of time to get working just right.
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avm1979
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Reply #28 - Posted
2011-01-20 03:37:59 » |
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Wanted to tell you guys that I've put up a video with some more in-game footage. And lots of explosions. You can check it out here.
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SwampChicken
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Reply #29 - Posted
2011-01-20 04:22:42 » |
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Can I make a suggestion? How about stating that the game is written in java in your blogs & youtube video, (and maybe add a 'java' tag or two...)
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