Latest News - July 2nd, 2007

[adept]

Fans,

I know we intended to be in full dev mode in January but rejoice! We have the right dev team in place now and things are moving along much more briskly. In fact, at this rate we're liable to be ahead of my initial end-project goals for our two-year release schedule.

Things of note:
x. Tim, Grey and Finn are working hard and are gaining ground quickly. The community should feel very fortunate to have such talented programmers working on this project.
x. In just a couple of weeks they have assembled the base engine plus libs for: networking, scripting (LUA), ai, sound (SDL), and physics for orbital mechanics and combat.
x. The game is cross-platform (PC/Mac/Linux) from the start.
x. Planets are procedurally generated and we hope to have screenies up within a few weeks. I'd like to think we're not all that far behind the Infinity engine in terms of visual fidelity on a purely static planet rendering basis. But I'll let the screenies speak for themselves.

We're starting work on the game specific code now or things like system seed/randomization, nav AI, orbit-to-orbit path-finding (using various algorithms for combinations of shortest-time and least-fuel), system-to-system travel, and time-dilation/scaling/tracking. We anticipate having the basics for system generation and nav down within the next two weeks. Work on hooks for the larger scripting framework for interface design and implementation will follow shortly thereafter.

Schmendrick and I will continue to push forward on design docs and such in an effort to stay ahead of the coders. Wish us luck.

Go Team!

[shaddam]

congratulations, sounds like a great team, also the aimed platform independence is great!

maybe you can open a thread we open/todo programming/design/art stuff... helps to attract even more (specialized) volunteer workers... (like maybe me)

good luck!

[adept]

We'll be carving off several pieces that can be attacked by interns or part-timers like yourself. Expect a list of available mini-projects within the next few weeks. Interested would-be contributors can then submit a request to participate including their resume or some other proof they can play well with others.

Keep your eye on this forum for more updates coming soon.

[ktulu]

Awesome news, sounds like you guys are really up for it and willing to make this a quality project . Keep it up!

[ars68]

ya, good to hear this project is getting off the ground a lot better then what I thought
can't wait to see if I'm gonna be able to help anywhere else... not that I've really helped that much anyway somehow 'assistant brainstormer' doesn't sound like much of a helpful role to me for some reason