Back from vacation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.