Looking for testers - Galaxy Empire

I have just put up a new release of the game engine and I am looking for a few testers to help with debugging the multiplayer code. Click the link below to get the autoupdater for the game. If you have used any DB Software programs, it should work fine the first time.

NOTE : This game does NOT use the FL game engine, it is being written from scratch.

Click here to visit the AU thread

Hehehe, not a problem, it's for in-game. I need to get the jittering problem cleared up when players see other players in the systems. The code I am writing by myself so I don't need anyone to look at that, I have that part fully covered.

If anyone wants to contribute test models, all are welcome. They will be used for testing only unless you want it included in the final game. The final version game will most likely be at least a year or two from now.

Galaxy Empire is a full 3D space and FPS simulator. It is similar to a game called Freelancer made by Digital Anvil/Microsoft. The game has been in development for over a year now and now contains many of the features I had been wanting.

* Examples include asteroid fields containing 10,000 asteroids.
* Thousands of plants and trees randomly placed across the surface of a planet.
* Server-side markets, this includes persistant items which when sold to a base remain in the base's inventory. These can be bought by anyone docking there.
* 3D rooms are also functional, each separate room on a base can have it's own 3D model.
* FPS style planet surfaces. For now it is simply limited to exploration but later own it will contain a full-blown first person handling such as fighting, vehicle support and building creation by the players.
* Fully programmable graphics engine, everything is stored in plain text scripts (INI files).
* A scripted FX animation engine including weapon effects and static effects.
* Support for up to 512 star systems.
* Support for up to 256 players online.
* Uses standard DX models for the 3D objects in-game, this means most 3D modeller programs can export to a working model for the game.
* Supports every image format that DX supports including TGA, BMP, PNG, JPG etc.
* Full HUD implementation with triggerable hit boxes.
* System to system jump gate support.
* Fog-of-war style exploration, you don't get to see the system on your starmap until you visit it.
* Full multiplayer gaming, single-player style gaming will eventually be implemented as story-line missions.
* Supports both cube-mapped and sphere-mapped skyboxes.
* Has full handling of texture sliding.
* The script engine already supports over 500 commands for building the game universe. There will be a few thousand by the time the game is complete.
* Mouse controlled handling is used for moving and targetting.

Installation of Galaxy Empire (as asked for by BP)

Galaxy Empire does not use the normal method of creating your game install, GE uses an auto-updater. For those who don't know what this is, let me give you a brief description....

- An auto-updater AUTOMATICALLY installs the necessary files to run a program.
- A regular full download (IE a zip or rar file) requires you to download the entire game every time, plus you have to manually install it

- An auto-updater only downloads new content, saving me tons of bandwidth
- A full download will cost me the full size of the file every time somebody downloads it, plus you still have to manually install it

- An auto-updater auto-starts the game for you after installing the new files
- A download as said before, manual installation and manually starting the program

So from your perspective, once you have used the auto-updater to install the game, you only have to wait a few seconds to begin playing the game. Updates are generally once a month and if nothing has changed, it will take approx. 2 seconds to scan your files then start the game.

A new version has been uploaded that will gracefully exit if any problems are detected in the startup. Also the GE Setup program has been added back in for those creating a new account.

Anyone tried it from here?

Here is a tech demo at 1 year of development..

Click here to watch the video

Yes, it's still open for testing. It should work on both XP and Win 7, it has been tested on both XP and Vista already.

The updater for GE does not have a cancel button yet. It was inspired by the updater I made for FL but it doesn't use the same code. I will add one later on. The current download is around 140 megs. Once that is installed all updates only download stuff that has changed, not the entire game.

We have had one of the worst storms in 5 years come through and my internet has been real flaky since then. I will also check to see if my IP changed since I completely lost inet for 2 days. It is hardcoded until I build a global server proggy...

I live in the midsouth, Memphis TN to be precise. They finally got everyone's power restored yesterday. Those storms have been huge for the past 2 weeks, at least they are circling us atm instead of nailing us. Feel sorry for the Texans, it hasn't stopped for them.

I checked my IP, it is the same that is stored in the game, so u should be able to connect. Make sure u always use the AU to activate the game, that way u will always have the latest version.