New Horizons

What this is:



this is a space-shooter-trade-explore space mmorpg.

Currently the really basic stuff is done, and the more advanced tasks are starting.



Rough background story. (I’m sorry for my not so good translation talent)


  • The Earth in the year 2200 finally managed to develop space trace so far, that it was possible to colonize other planets. Over 200 Years several colonies were founded, with the main purpose to harvest ressources for further expansion into the unknown parts of the universe.


  • Large corporations started to colonize resource rich planets, to support the increasing human space fleet. Due to high unemployment (caused by massive population growth on Earth) there were always many willing to sign up for this colonies.


  • Around 40 years later the upper layers followed, dreaming of a luxurious life in alien environments.


  • However due to increasing distances to the earth, the relationships grew colder over time, and the first colonies openly proposed to fight for independence. Around 250 years after the founding of the first colonies, the first revolution started, supported by the military wich itself wanted more power and freedom as well. The earth tried to suppress the revolution, and created a union of the colonies by that, that managed to free themselves from the earth government.


  • Because the independence was the only common target for the colonies, soon after the independence their union scatted, and many larger and smaller fractions formed. Some of those are controlled by a large corporation, this mainly happened on the resource harvesting colonies. But here are also civil fractions, mostly formed out of former holiday planets.


  • But the militia was also very fragile. There were parts that still stood loyal to the earth and others that supported one of the colonies in the fight for freedom. Some of those later started to follow the civil fractions, while others follows the corporations. Then there were also a part, that decided to leave any official militia, and work as a solder.


  • Over the years, in which the different forms of ruling formed, another fraction started to exist. The trade-alliance, consisting of mixed groups from all colonies and from earth, that saw their chance to create a tradenetwork between the different quarreling fractions.


  • Since a few years, rumors are growing that pirates spread into the known parts of the universe. Supposedly they originate from a secret prison-astroid, where over centuries the most dangerously individuals were deported.



    *The earth is today mostly isolated from the other fractions, and only very few outsiders still have contact to the populations. The trade-alliance is the only fractions that managed to have a stable relation to the earth.





    —older part—





    For the moment I cannot show much more than a simple video.



    Please note all calculations are done on a server roughly 500km away from me, and the events are all network synchronzied. Fps is limited to 10 by the recording tool.

    The ship in the video flies far faster than normal, it’s more like half FTLdrive speed. so you can get a better felling for the distance and size relations.



    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8QuNzAwm8w



    (the old post seems to have vanished so I created a new one)
4 Likes

Cool :o Looking great!

pretty damn amazing, i can only dream of having a project at that stage, is it open source at all? :slight_smile:

Btw, i forgot to mention, the small planet behind the stargate is actually in the level, if you have like 2 spare minutes you could actually fly to it :wink:



About the open source, I can say by now that not everything will be open source, however some of the modules used will be.

Looks Really good, how long have you been working on it?

Well I started with java 2,5 years ago, after I was sick of the problems with gmod (lua+sourcengine sandbox)

then after a half year I had a bad designed prototype.

When jme3 was I imideatly jumped on it, and redesigend everything

after 0,7years networkcode was complete,

then I neede around a half year for object synchronization and eventsystem and inserting String pooling and writing a own jbulletimplementation. (norman had not finished his one by then, also since the server is designed to run on only one cpu and without threads, I have no synchronization overhead in mine(this can bring around 10-20% performance, of course it is different if you render meanwhile a frame ^^ so I suggest to just use his)

(this could go faster, but I finished 13class and then moved on to study, wich is really time eating) and currently it’s not only my work, as I started to work with Luther together latly, (our concepts are 100% compatible so we thought why

not) He currently is working on a widget based fast gui system for the game (this might be one of the opensource possibilities, as it will really help everyone)





also this fiwi tut in uni sucks, thats why I’m so bored to write this wall of letters^^

That’s awesome! I’ll definitely keep an eye on this project.

EmpirePhoenix said:
this can bring around 10-20% performance, of course it is different if you render meanwhile a frame ^^

Did you try using the built-in physics with the null renderer of the latest builds? In theory it should not stress the cpu more than native bullet does, excluding of course the updateGeometric() call, which could be disabled in application and replaced by using getPhysicsLocation() in your app if you dont depend on it server-side. You'd get all improvements to the implementation for free and could contribute your own improvements if you switched to "native jme" :) But I can really understand if you dont want to move from what you have created until now, it really looks great already :).

Cheers,
Normen

I started with Java3D in 2005 for the first prototype and came to jme in 2009. Since then i focused development to have o good looking client. Since Empire and me teamed up, i’m basically working on GUI,DB and other Client related things. We hope to get a shooter-prototype online this year, this will be hard but possible. I think the time we both spend is 1-2 man-years (2-4 with knowledge-building in 3D-development).

Since the video is really low quality(, and with my current internet I couldn’t bear to wait longer to upload) here a picture from the ship.

Also i improved the Astroidfield since the last one, it is several times larger now but still better optimized(less polygons).



You may need to open it in a seperate tab, to see it in full hd :wink:

Awesome work man! We’re starting to see quite a few neat looking pictures being submitted to the forum. I’ll have to find a proper solution for a public gallery soon.

Testing the new database based material/model/skin system.







Useing:

Bloom for astroid blue crystal glow, need still adjustment for the station tho.

Parallaxmapping on asteroids

Normalmapping on asteroids

Glowmap on asteroids

2 Likes

Wow there are a lot of objects!!!

Are you using LoD, billboards, both?



good work!

Well in fact nothing at all , just plain meshes without lod (however 80 astroids make one mesh)

Including lod is the next step i plan

Really?

How many fps do you got?



On a side note, the ship looks a lot better now!

64

I also suspect the shader power of my graficcard is currently the limiting factor

Just wanted to say, this is not dead, just a picture of the planetary vegetation engine. (Red cubes are placeholders)



http://i.imgur.com/8omVq.jpg

6 Likes

Hehe, cool. When I read some of your posts I already said in the team chat “Empire seems to be down to the planet level” :wink: Cool to see you’re still on it!

Yep, still alive and getting the level editor on planet scale to work (todo integrate vegetation on Biome map basis, also a nice looking distant fog to hide where the terrain is not loaded. (or a ultra low lod level for distant terrain))



http://aurora42.de/jamwiki-1.2/uploads/en/2012/4/developers_island-29073748.png

3 Likes

Do you generate planetary locations procedurally or are there fixed locations where you can land/interact?