Recent Posts

Ahh, that sucks. Heard you guys were having a rough time over there.   You have the sympathies of everyone here, for what it's worth. Best of luck with it all.

I hate fires.  http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_wildfires

I'm about three blocks away from one of the evacuation areas.

Site was down for about 60 hours just now. Apparently some random internet loser decided to prove their supreme lack of machismo, skill, ethics, brains, etc. by launching an unprovoked DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack against my server. Hope it was good for you too, man.

If it happens again, I'm going to track him down to his (parent's) house and then let the dingo loose.

Sorry for any inconvenience, all!

Both of these suggestions are excellent and would probably save some headaches in the future.

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.

Looks like a nice general way to implement some of the graphics features I've thought about but never implemented (suns, black holes, ...other stuff).   I'll keep it in mind.

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.

No worries.

Sorry for the late reply. Thanks Chris

Hey udm, good to see you around again.

I'll consider selling the game on Impulse if Stardock will consider responding to my emails.   Well, one email, dated November 2008. Probably just got overlooked in the general email flood.

Hmm, I notice they've made it a lot clearer how to get onto their platform since I last looked. Intriguing. Thanks for the prod! I'll put it on my to-do list. Watch this space, and all that.

By the way: I should point out that Impulse does have DRM in some games. Their own DRM, "Goo", requires a serial key and online activation; and they allow other DRM in their store too, including SecuROM. Just FYI.

If DRM is an issue, I'd suggest that your friends simply buy direct from me. Same price, same game, 100% DRM-free, they can re-download at any time, and a larger percentage of the sale price goes to support the development of current and potential future games.

I'm not planning any retail boxed version, since physical distribution is a can of worms which I'd rather not open just yet. Unless a particularly sweet opportunity presents itself.

A print-on-demand boxed version (or at least printed CDs, sans box) sold via the internet is a less distant possibility, but requires that I spend time preparing the artwork and setting it up. I'm not aware of any huge demand for a boxed version, so the cost/benefit ratio of doing so doesn't seem hugely appealing. As long as that remains true, I'm not likely to release one.

On the other hand, if it's demonstrated to me that a significant number of people would prefer a boxed version, and would be willing to pay an extra premium for it given the manufacturing cost overhead, then I'll bump it up my priority list.