On Nov 9, 6:59 pm, wrote:
On Nov 7, 11:56 pm, BradGuth wrote:

How much of a 3D interactive orbital simulator does your game have
to work with?

It's not much of a game right now. I'm still testing interfaces at the
moment, but it is neither 3D nor is it a simulator. I do use orbits,
but only at the most abstracted level. (And they are not represented
graphically at all.)

I don't believe it'll sell to the general public. Seems boring and
otherwise kinda dull.


The design is a massively multiplayer "faster than real time" trade/
strategy browser game. Meaning that it could take real time weeks to
send a ship across the entire map. Right now the target is 1 hour to 5
minutes. Meaning that time in-game will pass at 1 hour for every 5
minutes in real time. (Or 12 days in game for every 1 in real time.)

Your game player would like die off before they get anywhere. Is that
part of the package deal? (death by game)


Right now I am investigating how large of a field of view I should
provide to the player. If you are interested, I have the largest
interface option on a publicly available web server at
wormspeaker.arvixe.com. It's going to be a browser game, so you don't
need to install anything, but you will need to make sure JavaScript is
turned on. As a warning, I did mention that this is the largest size
that I am testing, it shows an entire small sized (3x3) game map in a
single view so the map image is about 12 megs and the HTML is another
2. (It has about 32,500 stars/nexuses on the map and I expect should
be good for about 32 players. (The largest game map size I am shooting
for would be 17x17 and good for up to about 1000 simultaneous
players.)) Note, again this is an interface test, so there is no game
here, it's just a proof of concept on one of the interface sizes I am
testing and possible controls to navigate the map with.

If for some strange reason someone wanted to have a look, I'm
interested in the performance on different browsers and connection
speeds. It works fairly well on my 6 meg connection with Firefox and
Mozilla, but it still takes a minute or two to download the entire
map. (Internet Explorer doesn't handle png files (transparent or
otherwise) very well, so I have a gif version available for IE, but
it's just not up on the test server. So I would avoid navigating there
with IE, it'll probably just choke on it. Chrome handles everything
well except the download time on the png map image, it works fine on
my local host, but the long download time on the map seems to have
Chrome confused, so it does not show it at all over a live internet
connection.) Once I nail down the browser peculiarities and settle on
a good default view size I'll get down to the back-end programming.

You've got to be kidding. But then 99.9% of Usenet/newsgroups is all
about kidding to the max. Good luck with that game of yours.

~ BG