Solar Imperium 3 Development

End of the story

2011-12-28T22:29:00.000-08:00

I think it is now clear that I don't have enough time to work on this project anymore.

This is sad since I just finished the invasion code :)

There so much stuff remaining to do (alone):

- Writing a help file (Galaxypedia)

- Testing and balancing the code, QA

- Doing some creative artwork

- Developing facebook integration

- Translating to different languages

There is not a surprise that most of successful MMPOGs are developed

by companies and not by a single person over the years.

I will release the final version of the program on sourceforge in few days

and I will close the online games actually running on my own server.

If someone want to take the pilgrim staff and create a team to finish this

game I will be glad to join and do my part.

Anyway, I would like to thanks players who visited solarimperium.com

in the fast five years, I had to admit that the last two years were not really

interesting since I was developing a new version at very very slow pace.

Happy new year,

Yanick Bourbeau

ybourbeau at mrgtech.ca

Source code update

2011-10-15T13:10:00.000-07:00

I have updated the source code on the running server.

I will monitor for bugs and I would appreciate you report any issues at http://www.mrgtech.ca/support.

The source code and list of changes will be posted soon.

Back from vacation

2011-07-28T10:21:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone, I am back from vacation and I fixed the problem in my code preventing everyone to play :)

For the next two days I plan to implement missing features as well.

Game balancing and partial fixes

2011-06-11T20:55:00.000-07:00

I reseted the game again and I have made lot of changes in regard with game balancing:

Balancing:
- Planets cost much more to buy
- Tourism, ore and petroleum planets generate revenue based on demand, too much of a specific planet and you start to produce less credits.
- Inflation is a little bit higher

Bugs:
- Light cruisers production now work
- Population and credits growth were full of bugs, 2-3 hours worth of bugs fixed :)
- Bank can now loan you useful amount of money

As always, I welcome any feedbacks.

Solar Imperium 3.0 Alpha 3

2011-05-18T22:30:00.000-07:00

Tonight I reseted the game and fixed some obvious bugs. For example when I was reseting a game, the lottery jackpot was carried over to next game round. Anyone who bought just one lottery ticket got the entire jackpot.

There is a list of short things I have done (not counting bugs):

- Players who created an empire but have not played a single turn are eliminated after 24 hours.

- Players who created an empire and played few turns but not enough to get out of protection are elimited after 48 hours of no activity.

- I have redone all the ingame statistics system with the nice jqplot library.

- Nuclear warfare is now fully functionnal!

- Basic invasion code is in place, this is the next feature I wish to complete.

I hope you will like the changes.

Also, if you find some weird english sentences I will be grateful if you notice me about it. I really want to have a good english language dictionnary (gettext) for the game. (I am not a native english speaker). After that, I would be able to start writing the tutorial texts and general ingame documentation.

This is it for now, next version will include:

- Complete invasion code

- A working research tree

- Hall of fames / rankings and game completion (You know, after 30 days the game must reset)

And in some not-too-distant future, facebook integration :)

l8r, Yanick

Updates

2011-04-16T13:37:00.000-07:00

So much things to complete :)

For now there is a short list of things I changed in main game server code:

- You could actually die now (when population reach 0).
- Guerilla code completed (including event display).
- You can detach chat window.
- Chat window display how old messages are (days).
- Various fixes for CHROME browser.
- Games browser display a message when no game is available.
- Some aesthetics changes to games browser and game stats pages.

Things remaining to do:

- Auto-collapse empires who have not done a turn after 24 hours since it's creation. You know, to destroy zombies and gives space to real players.
- Missing calculations about galactic taxes and refunds.
- Invasion code.
- Nuclear warfare code.
- Fixing the mess with pie-charts.

Btw, I would like to thank people who posted bugs to bug tracker.

Fixing bugs

2011-04-07T07:06:00.000-07:00

I fixed some bugs and few things remains to be done. Also, the game looks rather odd with Chrome, I have to repair this too.

So It was just a simple post to let you know I am working on remaining issues

Missing features to complete:

- Can actually die
- Invasion code
- Guerilla code

Stay tuned ...

Game reset and source code

2011-03-28T13:01:00.000-07:00

I restarted the game today because when I initially copied the game here, it was from my local test server and all values were out of balance. In Solar Imperium 3 you are not supposed to have values over few millions.

I also produced a source code snapshot for the adventurous who might want to install it on their servers.

http://www.solarimperium.com/downloads/solar30_source_28mars2011.zip

You can post any bugs to http://www.mrgtech.ca/support, it will really help me.

To play online, the link is still the same: http://www.solarimperium.com/alpha/

Btw, it was fun to see old players coming back to play on the alpha version :)

Updates and an humble request for help

2011-03-10T01:58:00.000-08:00

I was hoping to release the 3.0 before 2011 but I miscalculated how much hours a day can have. Here a list of missing things in the code:

- Guerilla , Nuclear warfare and invasion code
- Empires can get really down without ever collapsing (have to add a collapse check somewhere)
- Facebook integration

That's it for the code, everything else is working:

- Create / manage players with or without email verification at signup
- Administrative interface completed (Create games)
- Can join games as emperor/ess
- Can do turns with full economic calculations
- Covert operations
- Pirate raids
- Solar Bank
- Automatic food sold on market
- Supply production
- Research tree
- New command ship system
... and so on ... etc.

A incomplete product is better than no product. I have put a alpha version online if you want to try it:
http://www.solarimperium.com/alpha

You are free to test it and find and exploit bugs as long as you don't get root access to my server :)

If you find something that does not work as intended, please report it to me through this blog.

Request for help:

Once in a blue moon, a programmer have to bypass his ego and ask for help. I am working at part-part time on this project for something like five years. Along the years I had alot of fun debugging and developping this project with all sort of players around the world. I think this project start to be overwhelming for me and my already full coding schedule. If you want to help me complete this project here a list of things the game is currently needing:

- Real artwork made by someone with talent :)
- Research tree is not populated at all, someone want to define which researchs to add? A new feature of the research tree is that is now a real tree. You can set prerequire technologies to unlock better ones.
- No help file written so far / Galaxypedia.
- Tutorial pages are also empty.
- Maybe adding some programmers which may accelerate things? (PHP5, MySQL, JQuery).
- Someone who could fix all my spelling errors.
- Translators?
- Testers (Game logic, tweaking values, cross-browsers support)

By the way, this game is released for free under public license, I can put your name in a credits page but I cannot offer much more.

Anyway, time to sleep.

Yanick

Some random screenshot from my today's development.

Some screenshots

2010-12-30T05:02:00.000-08:00

I am currently working on the battle part but I still took some time for screenshot. More to come soon ...

Chat System

Diplomacy Screen


My First Turn

Lottery Screen


Manager Screen (Buy Planets and units)

Empire Preferences

Some Updates

2010-12-27T23:45:00.000-08:00

solarimperium.com is down for a week or two. This is due to domain hosting plan renewal from my old ISP which do not own the domain anymore :) It will be back soon but for now you can use http://imperium.mrgtech.ca

I will post some screenshots really soon (like today or tomorrow) about development. I evaluate the product to be 90% complete. I am still working on battles and covert operations but everything else is completed.

Images and Updates

2010-08-09T19:01:00.000-07:00

So far, the game development goes well. I am alone on the project but I can spare some hours scattered over the weeks to work on it. What is completed?

Administration panel
User registration and login
Joining a game, resigning from a game
Games statistics and browser

Currently working on the main part, doing at least a turn :)
I also removed the CRON requirement.

Created a blog about Solar Imperium 3 development

2010-08-09T18:56:00.001-07:00

I created a blog to upload development screenshots and updates for people who are interested in this kind of stuff.