Hi there,

I started this about a year ago, on and off as my life and job allows. I was inspired by a game I was playing (Star Supremacy) which was badly done and I was curious as to how you would do it. My gaming background was always games like this and I used to run and code a MUD years ago. C2 offered me the graphical client development software that would allow me to explore this and make it look pretty.

So the aim of the game is to

* replicate something like EVONY, IMPERION, TRAVIAN in space

* strategic combat, but no realtime tactical combat

* persistent universe, scaled for about 10K players, about 200 active simultaneously

* capable of winning by combat leadership OR commercial leadership (with zero combat)

* needs no more than 15 minutes a day... but benefits from more

Technical features

* a C2 client that primarily constructs queries to the game database and presents data from the database. Mostly static but interactive.

* token based, time and ip locked security

* ajax interaction with server. I declined to use webrtc as this is a web game not mobile, and I knew how to scale AJAX better than webrtc. I might change that when ORTC gets adopted.

* 3 parts, client, REST server interaction, and a custom server engine+MYSQL. The server engine is currently written in PERL. Some things are just better done outside C2. Why Perl.. well I know that well. It could be PHP bits are, and if things get busy I can code aspects in C if I want. So far, I think I'll be delighted if I exceed my current performance limitations.

Technically the status of the game is that I have most of the core features done. Life is so busy it's hard to keep the progress going but I'd thought I'd show it off anyway. C2 is a hugely powerful engine for this sort of front end. My aim is to keep the client under 5% CPU at all time and as it's strategy rather than action, FPS is not a problem. I would love a better editor and IDE but functionality is fine.

I hope to keep plugging away at this and get it released for beta over the Summer period (perhaps way too optimistic). I'll keep you informed and in the loop. I've setup a website as a placeholder but hopefully i'll start adding info once I feel more confident.

http://www.nebulawars.eu

Some images... most of the art is public domain but some is not. If I am going to go public, I'll have to hire someone to reskin the design. That's not a problem, all screens are procedurally generated.

and I guess that the vast bulk of mobile games earn ZERO, webgames are a bit better it seems. The apple and google stores (and increasingly windows) are so large that most apps will never be listed in the top100. so it's not really fair to ask someone to contribute work (coders, artists, etc) with the illusion of future payments when there is little.

As someone else said.. put the effort in first.. show that you're credible, then you might get support.

alternatively be honest, and say it's a learning experience for everyone involved, it's for a good cause, or it's just you and your friends.

PS: I look around elance. the price of hiring a piece of work to be done is relatively low. if you can't afford that.. then you probably can't afford to be in the game.

R

looks impressive. I've not really got time to playtest, but best of luck with this.

i'd love to see a video clip of the game beyond images.. it might entice more player testers

R

thanks!!

thanks ... so what you're saying is that if I convert it to JS DATE format (even prior to the function), then I can use JS date subtraction to accurately identify time differences (even with funny things like leap years and different month lengths?)

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4944 ... javascript

var diff = Math.abs(new Date(dateStr1.replace(/-/g,'/'))- new Date(dateStr2.replace(/-/g,'/')));

which should turn "2011-02-07 15:13:06" into new Date('2011/02/07 15:13:06'), which is a format the Date constructor can comprehend.

R

Hi,

I was wondering if anyone could show me how to use the browser.execJS function to convert a MySQL timestamp into seconds? Simple expressions I'm good on, but this one is not so straightforward (at least to me).

So basically, I'd like to pass a timestamp as text (YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss) and receive seconds back.

My intention is to find the time difference between two timestamps. So alternatively, if simpler, if might be easier to pass two timestamps and get the answer in seconds (timeA - timeB).

I hope someone can help.

Thanks

R

you need a plugin to get the system time.... though it would be easier to pull it from a server if you had one... it'd also mean that it couldn't be tweaked to earn more money by just changing phone clock time.

uggh... hated it. the draggable boxes behaved inconsistently and got confused.. disappeared etc.

I'm not a game designer or anything like that, but I suspect if you are going to put together an active portfolio website then it better be polished!!! or else you are advertising that you have poor design skills - especially re UI and in this case no testing.

well define the object as a sprite.. then add the sine behaviour, and change the movement to being vertical.

then using layers, put it behind another object so that it is not visible when it is "down" and then it pokes up.

feck it... what's 40 minutes of my life... most of which was getting a snowball.

here's a capx with the functionality you want.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/cnd9hqgc6zvxo ... .capx?dl=0

it's not pretty and a bunch of hacks to get the gravity effect in.. but proof.. is possible.

total of 4 events but that includes 2 events for the aiming cursor

Hi Whiffer

http://www.whiffersniffers.com/home/gam ... all-fight/

So I think what you want to do is to have a size scaling effect for when they go further into the depth of the screen.

I don't think this is a physics effect (it might be) but as you can only have one snowball at a time, i'd see it more as a custom effect for each snowball.. you could do something every tick. based on time and given start velocity and angle, you can then do a simple calculation of where everything is in x/y/z.

once you have worked out the distance into the screen the snowball has gone... you could say something like size = size * (1-100/distance). when distance = 100, size = 0. then the image will keep shrinking as you move it along the screen.

I suspect it would take no more than 2-3 events to do it.

you could do it with a loop.. sorry.. syntax may be slightly wrong

for all text_objects

create shadow_object (text_object.x +2, text_object.y+10))

set shadow_object.text to text_objects.txt

that way all the text objects of the same type will have a shadown... if you've used 150 different text objects... ooops...