Further development

I thought I'd give this game a little rest after an intensive 7DRL week, but as it happens, I've already done some improvements and experiments.

1. The suns now animate (flicker) in real time. This was a tiny patch but it looks nice IMO.

2. There are now transition effects to view level changes similar to the old FreeBASIC version. I first implemented them in Unicodetiles.js with a simple example, then put them into Infiniverse, noticed it didn't work, fixed it and voila! I think they really make the game much nicer.

3. I started experimenting with multiplayer. I didn't think I would do this yet, but couldn't resist the temptation, so I setup node.js with the socket.io module, hacked for around two hours and suddenly I had working multiplayer movement. Meaning X number of players can join and see others move around and even different view levels / locations are handled correctly.

Now even though it appears very stable (node.js is awesome!) it's a long way from being an actual multiplayer game as NPCs, collectables and missiles are not synced. In fact, the server is under 100 lines of code and acts mostly as a message courier, so it is also trivial to cheat. To make it properly, I'd need to put the server to play the game. That's going to be a big task, and also make the server more heavy.

Anyway, the latest dev version (with the new effects) is available for testing online @ here.
Strictly speaking, it does contain the multiplayer bits, but I don't yet have a server running constantly.

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7DRL Success

Cross-posted from 7drl.org

Moments ago, I announced Infiniverse as a success in r.g.r.a. There wasn’t really time for balancing, so the game might be very hard and dull or very easy and dull. But I’m still happy about what I achieved in these 7 days. And the game is somewhat complete experience with a goal, ending, quite nice looks, and lots of places to visit.

Highlights of the last day’s development are shops in space station (pictured above) and combat AI. I’ll probably write a more detailed post-mortem later, but now I’m taking a pause from this.

Play the game online @ http://dev.infiniverse-game.com/7drl/
Or download and play offline from: https://github.com/tapio/infiniverse/zipball/7drl

The versions linked above are the challenge versions and are frozen. I shall continue development and might make radical changes such as moving to real-time in preparation of multiplayer version etc, but that won’t affect the 7drl version.

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7DRL Status Report 2

(Cross-posted to 7drl.org)

Pic: here

What have I achieved since the previous update (about 1,5 days ago):

Square tiles – e.g. stars are now round instead of ellipses in the solar system view

NPCs – there are now space ships wandering in the universe, although there is no interacting with them yet (they do show up on sensors though)

Torpedos – can be launched and they move but targeting interface is missing

Early space stations – can we visited, but there’s nothing interesting there yet

Basic ground level generator – working, but not very interesting

More work on the planet aerial view generator – still not close to satisfactory

Sensor tweaks – contacts now sorted by distance; sensors need to be manually used and there are three working scanning modes (celestial bodies, artificial objects and combined closest ones)

Other UI tweaks


Less than three days left. Much work still to do.

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7DRL Status Report

See pic: here

The development of the JS version is on going. About 2 and a half (full) days have passed and I’m making progress. I had forgotten how complex the universe generation in the old FreeBASIC version is and as such porting it has been exhaustive. I’m on the side of victory though, as I now have mostly working galaxy, starmap and solar system generators, and the basis of planet generator in place. What remains in the universe side is space stations, most of the planet aerial views as well as surface detail level.

In order to keep myself entertained (because the porting work is not always so fun), I have implemented some gameplay elements and a user interface. So almost everything you see in the picture above is actually functional (not a mock-up), and the ship can run out of energy, for example. There is even more features under several animated submenus that are closed in the image. However, it is not yet polished and will receive tweaks and additions.

Apart from finishing the universe, big features I still need to implement include: enemies and NPCs, homing torpedos and combat in general, economy (ship upgrade shopping, resource/”item” gathering and possibly trading) as well as the main quest.

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Unicodetiles.js

Since using external libraries and pre-existing stuff is allowed in 7DRL challenge, I've been rewriting the core of the Infiniverse.js prototype as a character based tile engine. It doesn't have Infiniverse specific stuff such as nebulae generator, but it's more like a JavaScript implementation of a generic text display, with some roguelike examples.

It'll still receive some tweaks before the challenge, but I've already announced it to the public so that possibly other people could use it also for their games. More detailed explanation is at Roguetemple forums or at the project's website

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Rising from ashes?

So this has been dead for quite some time. Last autumn, I had a some DNS problems which took the website out for a while, but I wasn't in a hurry to fix it since, there's nothing going on. However, that is about to change.

As I've told before, me abandoning FreeBASIC coding in favor of C++ as well as web technologies has been rather fatal for Infiniverse. However, a few months back I did some HTML5/JavaScript experiments that produced something similar to the "noisedemo" techdemo, see picture below. It is very rough, proof of concept, but has potential.



Sadly further development was sidelined due to other projects, but now when I was thinking about what to do in the annual 7 Day Roguelike Challenge, I remembered this again.

I'm not going into details here yet, but unless something unexpected happens, by March 18th there should be some form of Infiniverse with actual gameplay elements and a goal, playable inside the browser.

Now the most hardest part is to wait until the challenge start (March 10th). :)

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