The artist and I agreed that in order to successfully market this game, we'll need screenshots with final artwork and final layout, so as soon as he finishes the first race (Humans), we will start work on replacing the interface artwork. I will post a screenshot of each screen as they are completed, so expect to see professional-quality artwork soon!
The diplomacy screen is halfway done (implementation-wise, not artwork), and most of the framework for it is done as well. There will be various kinds of agreements:
Research (get bonus research points)
Trade (get bonus money)
Non-aggression
Alliance
War
And there are options to break (or make peace) any of the above agreements. There also two extra options: "Reconcile With" and "Increase Aggression with", where you can demand the other empire to either improve or hurt their relations with a specified empire. If their relations improved enough, they may get allied at your urging. Same as war if you urge it. But if their relationship is stronger than yours is, they may take offend at your urging and declare war on you instead.
If you fight an empire's fleet or system that you're not at war with, it will hurt your relationship.
Now, here's the details on the "other stuff". The artist has specified three certain shades of red that I can use to swap for the empire's color. So if your empire's color is blue, it will swap the red pixels to blue pixels, for example. I had to learn how to use a pixel shader in order to swap the color, but it's now working. Here's a screenshot, and a preview of one of his ship art (it's the smallest ship, 32x32):
Also, see that empire influence in the screenshot above? It will be gone soon. The reason is that I ran several games, and I've discovered that the stars are pretty spread far apart, and some systems start with only one planet, so your influence will not cover the other star systems in order to have your people migrate. So people that start with more than one planet in their system have an huge advantage over those that only have one planet. As a result, I will be overhauling the migration system so that instead of using empire influence (it will be there in background for AI processing however), it will check to see if your ships are adjacent to a system for more than one turn. If so, your people can migrate to that system. So I will be tweaking the code to allow for more than one empire in a star system at the same time. I will also tweak the color display of the name so it will show the different empires. For example, if a blue empire owns 3 out of 4 planets, and a red empire owns the last planet, it will show the name as 3/4 blue and 1/4 red.
If your empire is in a non-aggression or alliance treaty, you can have ships that's next to their star system without attacking them, and your people will be able to migrate there. Otherwise you'll attack automatically.
Next post should have screenshots of this in action, as well as diplomacy!
So your own population will migrate to an allied populations, no longer becoming your own? Or is this a way to slowly undermine an allied influence?
ReplyDeleteNo, each planet can only have one empire's population in it. But a system can have multiple planets, with each planet being owned by a different empire.
ReplyDeleteYou can win the game by killing everybody who's not allied with you. This is "Allied Victory" so you don't always want to undermine your ally.
So if you ally with everybody you win? :)
ReplyDeleteHeh, that's a good question :) I think maybe instead of just being allied, they actually turn over the control of their empire to you, allowing you to control their ships and stuff. The game ends when you have control of everything (or got rid of things you couldn't control) :) It'd mean defeat for that empire if they turn over the control, so it won't be something done lightly.
ReplyDeleteI contacted a dev of OpenMOO2 project, it turns out they are alive (project is still going). Just so you know...
ReplyDelete