A star control 1 remake that may actually get finished

[Death 999]

That's why I program in java. Not good for everything, of course... but that's one headache you largely avoid.

[Alen]

its good for me (windows xp with nvidia ge-force 6800)

[mminasi]

Say, Dragon -- I know you're a busy guy, but may I ask, are you re-implementing the original PC version or the Sega version (or some other one)?

I ask because I still play SC1 when I can and I really like being able to create my own custom missions -- for example, I've got to add a VUX or two to VUX Encounter or it's too easy.  Will that feature be there?

Many thanks for your hard work, let me add my voice to the grateful throng.  Best of luck on the rest of the coding!

[Dragon]

Yup, a scenario editor is in - even if no one else needs it I still do.  I've never played the Sega version, only the DOS one and the very broken C64 one.  I'm remaking the DOS version but with tweaks and balancing of my own.

The bad news is that I'm too busy at the office to get much of anything done at the moment.  We had a deadline on the 1 May which has become somewhat... fluid.  And the amount of work is going the wrong way.  Ah well, eventually it'll all be done.  Eventually.

[Dragon]

remembers about the starmaps I'm meant to be making

No stress there.  I haven't had a decent block of time to get any more work on this done in ages.  I'm still pottering around with the UI but SC proper is basically paused until that's done.  *sad face*.

[Alen]

Sounds like a load of fun Dragon, maybe you can use your new found ability's to convince your boss to let you program at work. 

[fluffy_banana]

This looks pretty awesome, I've got to say. I'm very impressed by the art direction (you've successfully managed to translate that 'colourful Star Control sprite' look into 3D). Not sure if you said somewhere, but were you planning on including networked multiplayer (for the full game and/or melee)?

[Dragon]

Yay!  Back again.  Foreign parts are nice and all but it's good to have intertubes once more.

Thanks fluffy, to answer your question: I don't plan to add networking anytime soon. Not before release anyway, I've asked a friend to look into it but he hasn't had a chance yet.  Incidently, the release is still paused for the time-being but I have - at least - got some more work done on the code base.  Just general house cleaning stuff though.

[Alen]

Well at least its still moving forward! 

[Zeracles]

Anyway, I was actually posting here because I didn't want to bump my thread.  There might possibly be another SC related project to get excited about.  Array!  It's a small part of the reason why SC:R has been crawling.  I'm also doing the coding on it although they share a common codebase which minimises my work.  Others are doing the real work with game design and graphics, I'm just the code monkey.  A tiny ray of hope is that things at the office have slowed down and I have (unintentionally) got quite a lot of SC related stuff done these past three days.

And that's enough teasing now.  *gives thread back*

Don't worry, we're now in the correct thread for teasing . . .

I decided that the fractal distributions aren't really the thing for these starmaps, though I'd still like to work them into this generator at some point. What I ended up doing instead was a tool for creating three-dimensional structures made of discrete points. The available structures are single points, gaussians, hard-edged spheres, sheets / discs and filaments. Their properties (density, scale size, position) are input via a text file (called ``structureproperties") with the format listed in the code.

With the different kinds of structures, there is actually a point to having three dimensions - a cluster and a disc are the same in two dimensions, but different in three.

Quick example


From the top. The clusters are gaussian.


From the side one can see the disc through the centre. Its thickness, radius and orientation (normal vector direction) are all set by numbers in the input file. The line of points from top to bottom is a filament of points stretching between the starting points of the players.


This oblique view shows the arrangement of the eight clusters, four on either side of the disc.

There are 589 stars in this map - a zoom button on the UI would be handy The point positions for this map are here, and the contents of the input file containing its properties are here.

And if that's any indication, it'll be . . . a while before I get to doing the DT/MST thing; I'm giving a seminar soon and need to scrape together some results

EDIT: fixed image link after mucking with it to downsize it in the new forum

[Alen]

Looks pretty cool Zeracles, good luck with your seminar.

[Dragon]

Cool, thanks Zeracles.  It took a look at your code and I was wondering about matlab.  Does it have enumeration functionality?  If it does it would be nice to get rid of the magic numbers (if structuretype==2 etc...) because I found I kept forgetting which structure was which.  Also an idle question:  what does the . in front of a mathematical operator do (e.g. .* and .^)?  And.  Priorities.  Which is more important: presenting your results at a seminar or generating awesome Star Control maps?  Thought so

I've updated the Star Viewer slightly.  It expects a CSV file (with headings now), you can find two examples in the Particles directory: Stars.csv and Structure.csv.  Structure.csv is the 589 stars Zeracles just posted.  Enjoy, it's not that big a change visually but there is a lot of code which has been updated for robustness and elegance (more on that later).

I've also thrown in Goober just for the hell of it.  And he looks, um, well like Goober striding through a field stars really.  You can disable him by deleting or renaming Goober.DRG.  He's an old character a friend modelled to test skinned animation and looks like this (with the home grid):

And here's an extract from the Readme.txt for those who wanted to know what the controls are.  I think of them as Descent style but I suspect not many people remember Descent anymore.

Code: [Select]

Controls
--------
Esc Quit
C cycles through cameras.  Only the last camera is controllable.
WASD for normal movement.
QE roll left and right.
Mouse for Pitch and Yaw.
I to invert/un-invert Pitch.
Space rise.
Right-mouse fall.
Left-mouse or left-shift can be held for turbo movement.
F3 toggles rendering.
F4 Editor Mode
-- The following only in editor mode --
N Toggle normals
L Toggle lines
V Toggle vertices
G Toggle home grid
F Toggle faces
[ Shorter normals
] Longer normals
O Larger verticies
P Smaller verticies

Config.txt
----------
Resolution = XXX.  Any valid resolution in the form 640x480 or DESKTOP to use the desktops resolution.
Windowed = XXX.  TRUE or FALSE.
AspectRatio = XXX.  Any valid aspect ratio in the form 4:3.
Mode = XXX.  DX_HAL for hardware, DX_REF for software, DX_SW if you have an alternate software renderer installed.
Particles = XXX.  A CSV file containing points.  File must have headings: X,Y and optionally: Z,R,G,B,Radius,Intensity.

example:
Resolution = 640x480
Windowed = TRUE
AspectRatio = 4:3
Mode = DX_REF
Particles = Particles/Stars.csv

And then on the programming front I've been gearing up again.  Thanks in part to things winding down at the office and also to the Barbarian: Anvil of Death remix which is awesome music to code to.  Make sure you have loud responsive speakers and that your neighbours live far away.  Also Auf Wiedersehen Monty: Nuclear Fallout Edit if you can handle the bass.  I couldn't because my mouse starts sliding around my desk .  I'm not really pimping remix kwed it's just that I haven't abused my sound system in ages so I'm happy.

Anyway, what I've actually done, code wise, is cleaned up my file routines.  Some of them have been untouched since 2002 and it was time they moved from C to C++.  Incidentally the oldest file in this project is from 1998 and handles window creation (in Windows^TM).  I was an idiot back then, it's awful.  I've also made a lot of progress on the GUI side, particularly with presenting text.  It would have gone faster if I'd been a little less ambitious but now it'll allow for some wicked in game effects.  It also, ah..., became a semantically sensitive code editor.  Oops, that wasn't in the original design.  The internal representation and interaction between 3D objects has also been overhauled and is much more useable now.

So things are still ticking over but I'm still in the world of frameworks.  This good because it's shared with that other SC project; but bad because I don't have anything playable to show yet.  Heh, I'm enjoying this  .

[Zeracles]

Does it have enumeration functionality?  If it does it would be nice to get rid of the magic numbers (if structuretype==2 etc...) because I found I kept forgetting which structure was which.

I don't know . . . at risk of sounding stupid, what does enumeration mean in this context?

Also an idle question:  what does the . in front of a mathematical operator do (e.g. .* and .^)?

Nothing really, it's just the difference between element-wise and matrix operation. ``*" by itself means matrix multiplication, which people hardly ever use.

And.  Priorities.  Which is more important: presenting your results at a seminar or generating awesome Star Control maps?  Thought so

Hmm, awesome Star Control maps might be an elegant backup if my results aren't looking flash . . . maybe I can turn them into convincing imitations of the galaxy distribution?

[Angelfish]

I'm glad to see this project is actually still moving forward . Hopefully you'll have something playable out soon, I can't wait to play a better version of SC1!

Also, seeing all these starmaps generated, I can't help but wonder how the SC2 universe would be like, plotted in a 3D map. I don't think that's possible while keeping the original hyperspace distances, isn't it?

[Dragon]

An enumeration in C is basically substituting a word for a number eg:

Code: [Select]

enum StructureType
{
  SinglePoint = 1,
  Gaussian = 2,
};

if (structureType == Gaussian)
{
 ...
}

Old style Java does it slighltly differently and needs one to define a bunch of static variables instead.

Code: [Select]

public static final int SinglePoint = 1,
public static final int Gaussian = 2,

[EDIT] What were the chances of posting ontop of Angelfish.  I mean it's not like this thread moves that fast  .  I don't think it'd be possible either.  With some dedication it might be possible to approximate the gameplay but not with exact distances.