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Other Games > Pulsar 4x
Development Progress - February 2016 LEAPYEAR EDITION!
Rod-Serling:
Excluding merges, 4 authors have pushed 192 commits to master and 197 commits to all branches. On ECS-Crossover, 510 files have changed and there have been 194,791 additions and 551,674 deletions.
As you can tell, development really picked up this month. Despite that graph, we haven't started slowing down again, we're actually going faster than ever. A few months ago Knitieli developed the new Crossplatform UI, which has proven to be easy to work with and flexible. We're still missing significant progress on the UI side due to a lack of developers. Late this month, new developers firefly2442 and nuvan have joined us. Both are experienced UI designers/developers. They're still getting warmed up to the Crossplatform UI library we're using, but early mock ups are looking pretty good.
On the gameplay side, things are also moving quickly. se5a is developing tools to help us expand our game data quickly, while I've been working on implementing game logic features. We've made progress in network serialization and data-hiding to prevent multiplayer cheating. We've implemented Gravitational survey points and an early pathfinding system. Jump Point generation is in the beginning stages of implementation. expected to be completed within the next week. The library side of the Event Log has also been born and made significant progress.
On the master branch side of things, Nathan_ continues work, and believes that a new alpha version may be out soon™ish.
Overall, I'm very hopeful for the future of this project yet. Feature progress on the Library has really started to hit a good stride, the things on the UI side are looking up as well.
Now there might be a few things about this post that catch your eye.
Firstly, we've had 551,674 deletions and only 194,791 additions. Does this mean we're still gutting Pulsar? Absolutely not. We've lost no features this month. Most of the removals are old, non-functional code that was commented out, or code in different libraries that was completely depreciated and no longer in use. We do continue to refactor some internal parts of Aurora, which lead to sometimes significant improvements in maintainability and reduces line count, but this isn't our main goal currently.
Also, did I say something about multiplayer? Yes I did. Multiplayer support is on the table for Pulsar. It is in no way a focus. We've strived to design Pulsar in a way that multiplayer support can be easily added later, so sometimes we take certain multiplayer considerations into the design at this early stage even for single-player implementation. We do not plan to support multiplayer in Pulsar 4X 1.0 Maybe for 1.1 ;)
Additionally, with the recent surge in Aurora popularity due to the recent Let's Play series, we've been asked if Pulsar was "approved" by Steve, the creator of Aurora. While we have a forum section here (on his website), I personally reached out to Steve to ensure we had his blessing. Steve returned my message with some concerns about Pulsar. His current stance was that he "Neither approves, nor disapproves" of Pulsar. We have had internal discussions on ways we can address Steve's concerns and we are planning on making changes in Pulsar in order to best respect Steve's wishes. One of the largest changes is the overall direction Pulsar is going to take. We've been planning for months to make Pulsar mostly an Aurora clone. We're now looking at different options we can take to differentiate us from Aurora, both in the UI and in gameplay mechanics. While Pulsar will still feel like an "Aurora-like game" it wont be a C# copy.
TheDeadlyShoe:
What sort of changes were you thinking of making to differentiate it from Aurora? Obviously, it's still based on jump points... :^)
It would probably help if it had totally different <Spoilers>
And different minerals/resources?
Rod-Serling:
It is still based on jump points. Our Galaxy Generation will be significantly different, along with how we connect jump points. We're hoping to produce more... sane... jump point galaxy maps. In addition, we are tossing around the idea of implementing a ship component that allows travel to physically close systems with a time delay. Like a "Hyperdrive" or warp drive. Our systems have actual coordinates in our galaxy, so the further away you try to go, the longer it would take.
Additionally I personally plan on applying some re-balances. The minimum time advancement will be brought down to 1 second, and "Auto Turns" will be the default norm, and "Pause" will be the special case. Beam weapon range would increase.
On the UI side, we'll likely stick with a aurora-format at first, but aggressively introduce design and usability enhancements.
While these changes are limited at first, in the long-run as the differences build on each other they will make Pulsar into its own game. Once we have a very good stable base with comparable features to aurora, we will more aggressively introduce changes. New spoilers, and features, possibly new technology and new gameplay mechanics (I've really wanted to try my hand at a Mass Effect style Heat management during combat) will be developed. We really don't have any extremely hard plans at the moment for this.
Sheb:
Out of curiosity, can you tell us what are Steve's concerns, or is that something you'd rather keep private?
alex_brunius:
I would be very interested in seeing more details from Pulsar into the low tech area, from where we are today with rockets and crude ion engines and fleshing out non/pre TN techs more.
You could for example imagine requiring you to make your first small slow explorations out to other sol system bodies before you discover all TN materials and can fully work with them and convert your society.
It always felt like a natural part that was missing, skipped over or hand-waved away for me.
Lots of cool story options also from discovering TN techs at alien wrecks or sites at other solar bodies once you start to explore them in more detail and build up crude small colonies with maybe just a few hundred inhabitants. And from a more "real" or plausible spacerace between several factions of same race.
Early manned spacecraft could ofcourse be exceptionally expensive, guzzle huge amounts of fuel/resources to get into orbit and once there be very unreliable. All fun stuff :)
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