Mirage Source

STARJUMPER

* Story

Humanity has always looked up at the stars, partly in awe, and partly in desire to explore and conquer this vast frontier.
The steps into space were small at first. But over the decades, as our planet slowly failed us, all nations united in an effort to free humanity from the bounds of its mother planet. Great leaps in technology were made, and over the course of a half a century, mankind began his true journey among the stars.

Now, two centuries later, the cause of unity and co-operation that drove mankind into the cosmo's is all but forgotten. Again, greed, power, and conflict rule our species. Three main factions emerged.



* Gameplay

StarJumper in a unique experiance, allowing you to explore the cosmo's, and live the life of an intergalactic pilot. Many different choices are yours to make, and many things to do in the vast universe. You may engage in polotics, trade, battle, or simply exploration. Pick a faction, and head out into the cosmo's for the adventure of a lifetime!

* Factions

United Worlds-The United Worlds government can be traced to the beginning of mankind's venture into the cosmo's. Born from the alliance of Earth that helped us escape our dying planet, this fair and free democracy thrives.

Tulsar Empire-The Tulsar Empire was created after a political faction in the U.W. government, angry with their party having little say as a minority, split from the U.W.
They began a war against the U.W., and eventually lost, retreating beyond the borders of U.W. space, and built a strong faction of their own, waiting for the day to strike back at the U.W.

Argon Republic-The Argon republic becan as nothing more then scattered colonies deep in then unexplored space, colonists who drove deep into space for the technology at the time.
Slowly these worlds began to work together, and in time the Argon Republic was born. Little is known about them, as they usually shun contact with the other governments, and their motives and goals remain a mystery.

Other Factions- There are other factions scattered across the known universe, and you may find yourself meeting them in your travels.


* Explore the Universe

Fresh out of the academy, and a pocket of credits, you finally buy your own starship!
Your first ship wont be spectacular, but in time as you build wealth, you will buy newer, better ships.
Fly through the stars, exploring star systems, planets, and all the mysteries of the universe.
If you have a Warp Core, and warp cells, you can jump to any point in the known universe, if you know the coordinates. Becareful though, as jumping into the middle of a star or ion storm will be fatal!


* Combat, and death

The universe can be a tough place, and those who enter it unprepared will not fare well. Pirates, enemy governments, and more await, so always be prepared.
Keep your ship up to date with the newest and best in weaponry, hull's, and sheilds, and hone your skills in ship vs ship dogfights.
Dangerous starbases and cities lie outside governed regions, and a laster pistol or ion rifle might save your life from some bounty hunter or local gang, or even enemy faction's you may come across.
Should you die, all is not lost.
Upon first leaving the academy, you recieve your first DNA Sampling, and will be cloned anew. Nano implants in your body relay information to your DNA storage site, so your memories remain intact.
Many of these stations can be found, though some places can be spendy.

* Skills

There are key skills that you learned in the acedemy to help you make your place in the universal economy, or simply to keep yourself alive.
Engineering-Those skilled in engineering can create many peices of technology and equipment, for personal use, or for sale to others. Build small parts, weaponry, and learn enough, you may find yourself building ships and even starbase's! A tough skill to advance in, but in the end, it can be EXTREMELY profitble.

Mechanic-Mechanics is an easy skill to learn and progress in, though it requires work to master. Mechanics allows you to repair damage to your ship, remain damaged items and equipment, and identify equipment that is unknown or its abilities undetirmined.

Computing-Computing is one of the hardest skills to excell in, but it can reap rewards in various and unexpected ways. Program enginer's components to be functional, program nanobots, and at higher levels program neccesary computing systems for newly built starships. Skilled Computers may also be able to hack into computer systems, finding who knows what kind of data.

Chemistry-Chemistry is one of the more abstract specialized skills, but its uses are needed across the skill spectrum. Chemists create important chemicals used in everything from creating base acids and other chemicals, to durable starship plating alloy's.


* Colonization and planetary combat

There are many uncolonized planets among the stars, just waiting for someone to claim them. Structures built on planets are contructed real time and graphically represented on the planet, so you can soo your colony grow.

-Structures-
Biodome-Biodomes are the FIRST structure you must build on a planet to begin colinization. Each biodome can hold a maximum of 10 colonists. Colonists can be found looking for work in most Starbases and Cities, and are deposited onto the planet.

Drone Bay-Drone bays house Drones, offensive and defensive robots built for planetary combat. Each drone bay can house up to 20 drones.

Drone Factory-Drone factories produce drones for you, which can either be kept on your ship or deposited on your colonies.

Extractor-Extractors continuosly harvest resources from the planet. Each planet has a main resource type, which these collect for you during production.

Ion Cannon-Ion cannons are large weapons placed on planets for defence. They fire upon ships illegally entering your planet, and can help during drone attacks to try and destroy the attacking ship.

Repair Station-Repair stations will recharge your ship's power levels, and repair your ships damage. The more you have on a planet, the more repair drones and more benefit you will recieve during production.

Research Station-Research stations help when trying to research new technologies. However, they are production heavy, meaning that instead of getting your resources/cash/drones from the planet, you'd have to spend all ticks on research for that round of production. For this reason dedicating a colony to research station is very helpful.

-Colony Combat-
Colonies under the control of others can be attacked via drones held on your starship, while defended via drones stored on the planet. There are several different attack types.

* Asssault

Assualts are basic attacks, where your drones try to inflict losses onto the drones guarding the planet. This attack type is usually a precursor to one of the other specialized attacks, trying to weaken enemy colony defences before attacking with a specialized attack.

* Raid

Raids are designed to steal a production tick's worth of resources from a planet. Each succesfull attack will steal credits/resources/drones while using up one of the planets stored production ticks. However this requires a close approach to the colony, and installed ion cannons will take shots at your ship, so it can be profitable, but dangerous.

* Tactical

Tactical attacks are aimed at killing population, which means less gains when the owner of the colony attempts to use production ticks. You may even pick up a few colonists, those who would rather work for you then die at the hands of your drones. Tactical attacks, however, focus on population, so while you will not inflict drone casualties, you will still lose drones in the attack.

Cute idea, needs better GFX.

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Very nice, although you could use some better text alignment code.

The spaceship really blends into the background though, and needs to more highlights and contrast compared to the background.

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This obviously uses some engine that's based off MS in one way or another. Why is it in non-ms? People should realize.

Non-ms is typically for vbGORE and engine's made from scratch and such.

Anyways, the game looks boring. It just looks like Space Invaders: Multiplayer Edition.

And yeah, I didn't even notice the ship off rip. >.>

You just generally don't like space games though. -shrug-

Moved. Non-MS, as Matt said, is for things like vbGore or just completely different sources.

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Sounds like an interesting game, but there isn't too much to show from that screen shot Though I assume you just blew up another space craft, and can land on that planet

Have any demo videos? Or an ETA for a public release?

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That screen shot reminds me of a game called, "Inner Space"

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I am a professional software developer in Salt Lake City, UT.

I thought non MS meant specifically non Mirage, my mistake.

And I know the screenie doesnt show alot, its just the only one I currently had lying around.
Currently I'm heavily in scripting things, like the system for colinization of planets and attacking enemy colonies.
Starjumper is a little mix of RTS/RPG.

There is a "tick" system for planets. I'm thinking maybe 1 an hour, or every few hours, havent decided yet.
Each planet keeps track of its own stored ticks, which you can then use for production, depending what you have built on that planet. All buildings when built show up on planet realtime, so you can see your colony grow.

And besides that, there will be a system of government implemented(to what degree I havent decided)
Wrecked ships and abandonded civilizations to explore, large capitol cities and starbases to find work, gamble, shop.

Will be a number of factions besides the starting to you can join at any time, if conditions are right, and each faction has an opinion of you, determining what should happen when you come across other factins.

Also will be a large "Engineering"(crafting) system, mnany research capabilities, and more.
There will be plenty to do

And no ETA yet. I'll have a limited beta eventually to give some stress testing to some of the systems, but I dont have a estimate yet of release

Sounds good so far. Just curious how much you've implemented thus far?

I've got the tick system working, about half the custom menu's.
Finished the building system and networth stuff, finished the base battle system for attacking colonies, now am giving it tweaks for each of the 4 different types of attack.
Am partially through the research system.

GFX is probably around 65-75% compiled.
Some mapping for test purposes only as I test/debug my scripts.

Overall, I'd say, 40% progress, on a rough estimate.

Bout time somebody did a space style game. I'm in no way against the medieval theme, but because of the lack of resources to make a space game there obviously isn't many.

If I had the gfx resources i'd write a 2D space ship game, similar to EVE but not so complex, just something fun and different for the MS community.

Its taken hours of searching and editing to get resources, for sure.
I still havent been able to come up with space stations for space, nor misc. space objects (stellar clouds, quality asteroids, ect)

If you need any help or inspirations for the game, mine revolves completely around a tick system for cities and such. I have all of that coded. Right now I working on finishing the market system then adding walls.

Legacy of Aein is not action based though.

Um...hello? *points at sig*

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Dude, that was the first thing that popped into my mind when he said that. XD

Poor assrin

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I know, people always making fun of my name

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<3

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Gotten the planet production script done.
When using stored ticks on a planet, you get income and resources based on population and extractors built. Also your drone reserves are increased based on how many drone factories you have on that planet.
This is all multiplied by how many ticks your have stored on the planet.
Each planet has a resource type, either organic, mineral, or chemical, and you will get the resource type of the planet you are harvesting on. These basic resources can them be refined down to usable substances, or simply sold on the market.

Aside from that, I also have portions of your main computer(custom menu) completed, the tick system completed, all building scripts for planets also completed.

Next thing I plan on tackling is the different attack modes, and adding more to the main computer menu.

This is the test planet I have been testing everything on, just a little island in the corner.

I'm using 45x45 maps, so planets can potentionally have lots of landmass, equaling huge colonies.
However the Building Kits are expensive, so dont expect a huge colony to be cheap.
Also each planet only has one resource type, so if you want other resources, your going to have to have multiple colonies, or pay high prices for it on the open market.

Well it looks fun, i remember somebody doing a simillar project some years ago.. i hope you plan on making a better walking system.. so ships are more fun to fly..

And by the way, this is an eclipse game. .
But yeah hope you release soon, i wanna play.

Any suggestions?
I dont really know what I would with the walking system, for one, and secondly you move around as a player in capital cities and starbases, so, I dont know

Umm..Maybe theres a quest that this guy on land is too fast for your blasters, you'll have to go on foot and destroy him!

Idk.

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I think he was refering to the movement system in general. But for now I think I'll keep it, the only other thing I could think of was going to a pixel based movment, but I think that would be a horrendous spam of packets to the server.

As far as on foot, there will be plenty of quest for that as well. First of all, building and maintaining a colony is expensive, not something you can simply begin from the beginning. You'll have to do delivery runs, or asteroid mining, or other types of missions to gain cash. There will be full cities and starbases to explore on foot, shops to visit, shady buisness oppertunities, ect, it is not soley limited to flight and planetary building/battling.

If you are in a neutral starbase, you may just get into a laser pistol fight with members of the oposing faction, who knows.
But this is a multi faceted project, expect many paths of gameplay to be available.

Can we get an overview of the game Mechanics please?

It could potentially be kinda cool, although I'm a bit uncertain as to how its all going to fit together. As I understand it you fly around in space and land on planets, will you be able to shoot your ships guns? I vote you make the movement really slow then use SP or something as an afterburner heat level so you can make quick spurts ^.^

There is ship to ship combat of course. You can also fight on foot in space stations or wherever you encounter enemy players(I dont know how to make NPC's shoot, so workig on that)
The game mechanics, in general.
You explore the universe via your ship, and can colonize worlds to produce cash/resources/drones for you. You can attack other players colonies, from simple assaults to full seiges to try and take them over.
You can buy new ships, and there will be many many different equipments for the ships.

There is also engineering, a skill system allowing creation of different parts for ships, other technologies, even whole ships.
You land on capital planets and dock at starbases, and explore them on foot, visiting shops, talking with people for missions and such, ect.

You can set up coorperations(guilds) to further either your own or your Factions interest.
There will be a level of player government set up(still working out this)
And more.

Here is a pic of the current menu in progress working.

The coords section is blank because planets dont have coords, coords are used for hyperspace jumps, and you cant jump directly to a planet.

(I noticed it cut off the right edge of the pic for some reason, but on the bottom right its telling me what I got from my planet after hitting the production button)