You should be creating your own giant fleets. Generally, you leave a lot of your planets undefended - or with minimal defences - in order to get a few gigantic fleets that can just crush your opposition - having more ships means you take less losses. If leaving your planets undefended worries you, you could try having medium-sized fleets scattered around near each other so they can reform into a gigantic fleet if necessary.

Also, are you remembering to upgrade your planets? It's a significant production boost.

Thinking about this a bit more, it might be a good idea to add a "Don't display this" option to rifts - so you can use rifts to handle complex density on some image you want to do interesting things. The most obvious example is a diagonal line that you want to be dense, which would be pretty annoying as a series of rectangles.

Suggestion: Allow us to embed arbitrary images (probably .bmp or .png) in maps, along with layering information (So we can say "Draw this over/under planets/ships"). Additionally, optional density - I guess we'll have to specify size as well. Might look something like this:

Code:

[entity]
icon="sun.png"
layer = top
density = true
xsize = 200
ysize = 200

You could also give no icon to just have an 'invisible barrier' sort of entity - could be useful when trying to match actual density with a nonrectangular image.

The two main servers are both stuck at the end-of-game screen, again. Looks like two players playing against a bunch of AI and each other, and then for some reason it didn't go back to the lobby after the match - possibly the two players couldn't figure out how to do that.

Might be a good idea to have servers auto-return to the lobby if nothing happens for a given timeout or something, to avoid this issue.

Also, AI players are reported as being one of the players in the game.

I have an exam and a major deadline on Friday. After that, I hope to take a weekend break and get some Inventive Dingo work of some kind done. This is my Honours year, so I'm not going to be truly free until sometime in November, but I'll try and squeeze little bits in when I get sick of iterating on my Honours project.

I know that pain all too well. In the middle of exams at the moment, too.

It'd be nice to get some MI gaming in at some point.

java.util.Vector.

Also, java.util.ArrayList, which does basically the same thing. There's a lot of redundancy in the Java API

I consider rifts distorting if they're too large a bug.

When I've got some time I'll split them up into smaller rifts. For now it plays the same, I believe, it's just a bit uglier than it should be.

I've played a full four-player game on Pac-Galactic (4) with three AI players, to the end, with ship speed on normal. Only took me a few hours.

It's scaled up by a factor of 25 from Pac-Man, just FYI. The planets are dots, the rifts are walls. If there was some sort of teleporter, I'd whack one at the ends of the hallways, but unfortunately there is no such thing. This took a fair while.

Two more maps. Pac-Galactic (2) and Pac-Galactic (4). Play the part of some sort of gigantic space-monster, in the form of a gigantic yellow circle-segment.

Pac-Galactic (2) is symmetric, and therefore fair. Pac-Galactic (4) is not symmetric, and I'm reasonably certain that two of the start positions are better than the other two. I won't 'fix' this, for obvious reasons.

EDIT: And a screenshot, clocking in at ~1.2 MB.

I believe there's a rift rendering bug going on in this screenshot. I've probably got corrupt data files or something.

http://www.byond.com/members/Jp/files/pac%2Dgalactic.png

Some sort of folder-based organising thing on the basis of author also seems in order. Maybe some way of indicating that maps are different versions of the same basic theme, too - so you'd select Milky Way, and then in the new 'version' dialog, you'd select 'Medium'.

Yeah, sure, go ahead.

I thought I'd give this newfangled custom map contraption a whirl, and here are some of the results, collected into one thread for the benefit of YOU, the customer!

To start with, Sanctuary (2) and Sanctuary (4), two and four player versions of the same concept. All players start in a very regular cluster of planets, quite dense, all easily conquerable - but their opponents are quite some way away. Minimum of three rounds in the two player version, minimum of four rounds in the four player version. The two-player version comes down to pure guesswork - where are your opponents ships stationed, where will they attack, and when? It's pretty much the heart of Mayhem Intergalactic, but may be too chancy for some people to stomach.

Sanctuary (4) is much more chaotic, because the addition of two extra players leads to far more "Oh dear, somebody just took my unprotected flank" moments. I'm considering putting a single planet - or cluster of planets - in the middle of Sanctuary (4). That wouldn't do for the two-player version, because whoever gets the centre planets will always be able to hold them, but with four players to take down anyone who shows signs of a lead, it could work much better. Thoughts?

EDIT: And some screenshots (About 1MB each):
Sanctuary (2):
http://www.byond.com/members/Jp/files/sanctuary%20%282%29.PNG

Sanctuary (4):
http://www.byond.com/members/Jp/files/sanctuary%20%284%29.PNG

They'd be generated server-side, like planet names.

You'll have to wait for Chris for the rest, though.

Sounds good. I'd play/will play.

Forum ID: Jp
Steam ID: Mister_Jp
In-game name: Jp
Country: Australia
Preferred colour: 1 - red, 2 - blue

What are the default values for baseproduction, nativesproduction, factoryproduction, startpriority, etc?

I imagine startpriority defaults to 0, baseproduction defaults to 5, and factoryproduction defaults to 3. Don't know about nativeproduction. Is it more complicated than that?

You're making an equilateral triangle.

A, B, and C are all an equal distance d from each other, and are all 500 distance from O. (At 0,0)

Angle AOB, BOC and COA are all 120 degrees, because they split a full rotation up into three equal parts.

So rotate A around the origin by 120 degrees and -120 degrees. The matrix for that is:

Code:

cos 120    -sin 120
sin 120   cos 120

and

Code:

cos -120    -sin -120
sin -120   cos -120

In numbers:

Code:

-0.5          -sqrt(3)/2
sqrt(2)/2   -0.5

and

Code:

-0.5    sqrt(3)/2
-sqrt(3)/2  -0.5

Do the matrix multiplication, the points you're looking for are:

(-250*sqrt(3), -250)
(250*sqrt(3), -250)

Or in decimals, roughly:

(-433, -250)
(433, 250)

I really should write some programs to rotate maps and the like.