Whew, it’s TOUGH man! I burned down all my resources and time to crunch this last tech out. It seems trivial, but now I can drop AI generated art items. This means tens of thousands items will be going in. It taxed me, took me weeks… But there’s nothing stopping me from adding story missions, random encounters and equipment in now. I’m gonna take a breather… This was quite taxing to make.

I finished finished DOTS/ECS tech which is parallel processing and neigh impossible to do.

Now I’m on victory’s road making randomized items/randomized encounters.

Have a celebration song:

My friend SHERIFF BUFORD #1 mastery world Dr. Mundo in League of Legends knows his deep cuts! In cancel culture, we digging deep cuts! This one reminds me of Cowboy Bebop lounge style which is EXACTLY the Bounty Hunter style Pulp Fiction crossed with humor of the Intergalactic Bounty Hunter universe anthology…. IGBH came before Cowboy Bebop, but I never published it. So its weird IGBH was before and comes after in Starfighter General. Enjoy celebration jazz rock pulp music.

Ok, so the employees were false alarms, they didn’t help, and I upscoped in a way that was optimistically expecting em. I downscoped, and soon I will have random items/random encounters/leveling in. I’m finishing off literally the last small bug before I start massively databasing in items. Starfighter General is a large game, and will have millions of art pieces in it many of which will be items, but not this Tucan on a Discoball planet, this is just for fun.

I have a boss that had a team of 5 spend half a decade making a masterpiece,and when we finished, he didn’t want to publish it to make the team money and push updates… Can you encourage him? This is no marketing scam. This is for real.

We were going to keep updating it with more hand made levels, random levels, original loot, monsters, quests, multiplayer, kingdom conquest etc… But Dave just became discouraged when after being ripped off by MTV/Shockwave/Defy Media then later Apple, he didn’t think Steam would be nice either. Please leave a comment here or on the youtube encouraging Dave to release it. This is no marketing stunt. This is five years of my life working hard for a guy to not want to release our game. I think Dave is in a dark place now after being ripped off by MTV and Apple computers. I know Steam/Valve are good guys, so cheer the guy up man, tell him the game might sell or you’d like a copy. I’ll give free keys out to people who encourage Dave if and when he ever comes around and publishes it.

Hello, Throne and Crown deserved a solid trailer.

Only 4.99$ on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1811780/Throne_And_Crown/?beta=0

Only 4.99$ on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1811780/Throne_And_Crown/?beta=0

I’ll give free steam keys to everyone who says a nice word of encouragement to David to release this game.

Game is like Gauntlet 2 from Arcade, jazzed up:

Can you leave a comment to encourage my boss to put this on steam? I’ll give you a free steamkey for saying something nice if he does take your advice and releases it.

I need help convincing my boss to release the game, I tried to push him all year to launch and I feel like the bridge is burnt. My only recourse is to petition the community. Maybe you can convince the man he did a good job. My heart is wrenched because we toiled 3 years in a team of 5 and I think this game is awesome, but he doesn’t want to release because every other game portal ripped us off.

An older version of this game got 4 million plays on Shockwave and they promised my company $0.25 a play. This older version did not have random rares, leveling, town, quests, hero power moves, etc. MTV/Shockwave/Defy media did not pay us what should have been around 1,000,000$ My boss was discouraged that they ripped us off as well as ‘another Big Tech that you can’t speak against’ doing something similar.

My boss is in such despair. He had a team of 5 work really hard work for three years to make this game, but since Big Tech isn’t honoring their contracts with indie, he thinks Steam/Valve will be no different. Can you please leave a comment to encourage my boss? His name is David. I think he’s one of the best user interface guys in the world.

I can do a better quality video if you want. This one was filmed on a potato.

My boss doesn’t think we’d ever make money on this game so he refuses to publish, he has such a negative attitude, he doesn’t know Steam gamers may like this.

When I asked if Unity DOTS had a bug, they told me what I was trying to do was impossible. Official Unity devs acknowledged the bug, but random hiveminders would not let it go that what I was doing was completely impossible. So the next day I prayed and we did it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJkNxhC_m8k

If you don’t want to watch an hour long video of all sorts of fun conversations and various warp permutations, check out this short, like watching warp out the side of the ship.

If you want to see a bunch of discouraging naysayers, check this out: https://old.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/z6hyel/can_someone_take_a_look_at_this_weirdness_im/

Never let em tell you what you can’t do. Just pray and you can achieve anything!

Besides this warp tech, I have parallel processing DOTS/ECS to get 100x as many things rendered on screen, and a new networking technique that allows for no real cap on action players in the same zone… We’re in a different dimension here man, enjoy following along in the Starfighter General development arc: www.starfightergeneral.com

I want an update before Christmas that’s fun, and maybe drop a Gauntlet 2 style game with random loot and town on Steam called Dungeon Run, but I gotta convince my old boss to release it. It got 4 million plays before we upgraded it with town/random loot. Apple took it down because they didn’t like us personally same way like they are doing with Elon Musk.

There are 72 screens of Talent Trees:

I’m generating 1 million outer rim Star systems

I’m allowing you to go warp and see the systems whip past you.

Then in the new system, the star sky box is unique to your zone.

You can pick a new star system to go to by looking around you and choosing by color of star, like Master of Orion 2 had qualities of stars. Then aim there and hit warp!

This is fun, but A LOT OF WORK! If I get this done by Christmas then January I should get multiplayer in, then I can focus on quest contents and more items, etc.

I wanted a patch that was just more random encounters, random loot and leveling

Employees coming on board made me get more ambitious tho they are tentative.

I mostly made a talent tree. It’s 72 screens big, comparably to Path of Exile. I want to post images, but I also do not want to spoil it.

I’m giving a stab at a proc gen outer ring galaxy today.

If I can generate an outer ring galaxy(designed for player’s first levels), then I need to simulate 64 bit space,and add warp.

If I can’t proc gen the galaxy, I’ll reel my ambitious back to random encounters/equipment/leveling.

Leveling up gives +1 Cosmic Talent and +1 Potentia Talent

A cosmic talent allows you to transverse the cosmos of talents to get bonuses to your character, ship, encounter fortune, favor with alien races, and even rare space wizardry of various forms: Abyssal Horror, Ancient Relic, regular Space Wizardry, High Tech Space Wizardry, Mutant Power Wizardry, Psionics, The Acumen Parthen Projection (psionics aided by next gen neurlink), and there’s so many space wizardy I forget em all.. Anyway, look at the partial talent tree background… The actual Table is 9×8 full screens or 72 screens large! Here’s just a snippet so I don’t spoil it, fog of war is applied so you can only see so far out. I have all 72 screens background done with polish to be applied…But check it out now, my funk soul brethren and soul sistas:

That’s about 4.5 screens of the total of 72 screens or 15,360×9720 pixel image. Saturdays I take off for rest. Sunday I want the nodes populated, and maybe by Monday have it enabled so on level up, you can get your talent point and potentia point. 100 Triderium turns a potentia into a talent point.

This game handles like the best handling space shooter of all time: Xwing vs Tiefighter, but under the hood, people are calling it Space Dungeons and Dragons… The game is all in the stats, and growing up a huge fleet then unlocking arcana to bend the rules and take over the star sectors in the galaxy. Power up your clash base now by pressing the play button. Your clash base directly helps you bring more power into the MMO prime dimension. Be prepared…

Many of you know Diablo 2’s influenced game Path of Exile and their Talent Tree:

Basically it is a big grid you move around as you level at your choosing to get powerups of your liking.  

To make leveling more fun, I am being influenced by Path of Exile that was Influenced by Diablo 2 and making one for Starfighter General today and tomorrow… It will help me encapsulate the game’s powerup structure for other things like items and power gating boss battles.

I started laying out the directions people may travel almost randomly by adding in many roles a space farer could maybe enjoy:(please endure my humble sketch)

Then I remembered I have an elemental chart I want to run with from Battlemon:

So I’ll try and align each vocation along the axis of the elemental chart.

I have 400,000 ai art images and about 10,000 free art images, by which I can make the background look really cosmic and neet.   I’ll do it like a puzzle by seeing what power ups I want, then surround the background faded cosmos and stars with images similar to that. 

Though I have enough to finish already: Creativity is unlocking itself from many angles:

1) I can position the vocations based on their alignment, say totalitarian warlord might be corrupt,joker may be chaos, drifter wind, animal empath nature, etc.

2) I have a list of about 100 power ups, and I could maybe organize it with them or get some more vocations.

3) AI art is good for creativity too.

Long story short, I’m working on a Talent Tree like Path of Exile.  I want it at least 3×3 full screens wide,but no limits.  This is looking good to have a final design by tomorrow and partial implementation.  Again.  I chose to do this first to put a nice frame on the over all power ups and power levels ascribed to and plateauing (aka beat stronger monsters because of x/y/z power like any rpg), and for leveling to have a better sense of achievement… Leveling is designed 20 min,60min, 2 hr, then 4 hr intervals for a while, so it’s like a break time and feeling of accomplishment, it’s good to give a player a look up to see where to get ahead.

That said… I think the goal of any MMO is to make the player look like he can build toward something: A better base, save up for a capital ship, gain a bigger fleet, control a star system, have an alliance, etc…  Always be looking for something better, and the player will feel what they are doing matters and they’ll want to keep playing.

Also I cannonized some of the space magic:

Mutant Powers: Magmenos-Potentia

Space Wizardry: Choro-Veneficus

High tech space tech likemagic: Prochori-Tech

Ancient Space Relic Arch: Leipsano-Chorology

Abysmal horror arch: Chaodo-Frikology

Time Space Archeceology: Chrono-Chorology

Dimensional Magic: Diasti-Magea

Insanity Projection Magic: Parestisi-Provoli

Miracles: Theology

Friends with animals: Empathia Animus

Gladiatorial Summoner: Servus Vocator

We’re still aiming for an ambitious patch next one in the next weeks: https://www.starfightergeneral.com/2022/11/ambitious-patch-coming/

Yet, we got a couple people on board that can work parallel with me and quite possibly get the galaxy done as well!

I’m not sure how big we want the galaxy… In my mind, I want to out do Elite Dangerous’ 400 billion star systems, and with proc gen, lets be honest, that’s just a number. You could make as many star systems as there are limitations in your random seed tech. If I’m lazy and don’t spend a few hours upgrading it, we could make 340282346638528859811704183484516925440 star systems… It’s not an exercise in anything relevant, just gamesmanship… It’s why Xbox did not sell XBOX2 to compete with Playstation 3, but made it Xbox360… (imagine grandparents buying for their kids,’Why by a 2 when I could buy a 3?’) Anyway, digressing…

I have a few choices when proc genning the galaxy, and I didn’t think through it since I wasn’t on that path, but when you have a team, you can travel many paths at once. Let’s logically look at the proc gen design of Starfighter General. There’s nothing in here, players can’t know, and no spoilers coming.

First Options of Design to look at:

If the galaxy is 10s of trillions of star systems, and I have 10,000 players, that means each player has about one in a billion chance to run across another player in a system…. Like you’d never see someone unless I made hub town systems, summoner/beacons to gather players, or a radar to see player activity…. Suboptimal

If the galaxy is too small, there won’t be anywhere to explore, you’d get bored of lack of stuff to look at.

Maybe I want to aim the galaxy size with the premise that you’ll see another player 1 in 100 randomly if the player base is 10,000. I just looked up World of Warcraft and they try and finangle it so each server only has 10,000. I have no cap on players in mine, so WOW has 1,000,000 concurrent players often, and I’ll have about 10 servers, my upper best case scenerio is 500,000 players per server. This would mean randomly players would see each other 1/2 per sector instead of 1/100, but this is not exactly right… Due to bell curve distribution of players not going to cruddy zones, a loner could probably find a system 1 in 20 no one there if desired. So yeah, all those numbers sound good if my premise is to want 1 in 100 to find a player randomly if player base is 10,000.

10,000 * 100= a nice cool boring 1million star systems for our first spit ball estimate

There’s one other reason I do no want quadrillions of star systems… While it costs no memory to create the system, I am allowing players to destroy/alter systems. Even store keepers and NPCS will be growing or shrinking their business or if they get too rich, building a fleet to cause trouble or guard stuff. So there’s a long term memory cost in each system though they require nothing to start. So lets do an estimate on memory costs, for this is the biggest thing with proc gen maps that change, in any genre, not just space.

My server… lets say has a capacity for 50 GB,not huge, maybe move servers if I can’t get it higher, but for starters,its there, def want 1 tb server disk,right? Yeah, lets go with 1 tb since this is a long run game and some hosting solution can drop 400$ on a 1 tb ssd forme, that’s silly if they can’t. Heck there’s a Sabrent 8 TB SSD going for only 2,000$. Alright, going to design around that guy, say we have 8 TB to work with… and I can ask my server team for custom solutions too, but we just spitballing here.

So we have 8 TB and a million systems. This means we can divide the million systems from the 8 trillion storage to get our storage per system, so you drop a trillion to a billion to a millon. So we have 8 meg to store info for each system… And to be honest, that sounds fair. 8 meg a system is more than enough to store CIvilization/Master of Orion style localized data for armies/fleets/economy per system. Great, so 1 million systems looks good on paper! Dr. Evil would approve I guess.

So we did some game design in this blog, I’m going back to coding.