Great game! Some comments and suggestions: Thread - Solar War

I just picked this game up today, and I'm really enjoying it.

I really like the ship designing. You really get a lot of options to set your ships up the way you want to.
I like the crew management, but I wish it was easier to move officers between ships. I'd like to see better descriptions of what bonuses your crew is giving the ship. I assume higher numbers are better, but I'm not sure what these skills are actually doing.
I like that you have a nice big tech tree. It would be good if there was a better graphical representation of which techs lead to which (i.e. make it look more like a tree).

Miscellaneous things that would be nice to have:
Ability to multi-select ships and move them to different fleets
Ability to sort the full officer list by stat
Slider bars on the budget controls

Overall, awesome game! Keep up the good work!

As for moving officers between ships: Do you have some specific functionality in mind that you are looking for?

Skills: I've already written a section on skills and trait with affected attributes for the 1.00 Solarpedia, so that should help a bit.

The tech tree is a bit difficult to lay out nicely, though it's something I'd like to get around to now that I've finalized what's in there. For now, it's best to work in reverse, meaning to pick a tech you want to end up at and mouse over it to see the list of what you can research now to end up at your target tech some day.

I've got an automatically generated tree for development though, but it's not very nice to look at. Here's the current 1.00 one: Solar War 1.00 Tech Tree - Maybe I should just rearrange and clean up that one a bit and make it available as documentation with the game.

Thanks for the feedback and suggestions!

Cironian wrote: As for moving officers between ships: Do you have some specific functionality in mind that you are looking for?

Just an easy way to swap officers between ships would be great. For instance to swap the captains of ship A and B, I need to go to A, remove the captain, then go to B, put the captain that was in A there, and then go back to A and put the captain that was in B there. It's not the Worst Thing Ever, but it's a little more cumbersome than it has to be.

Cironian wrote: Skills: I've already written a section on skills and trait with affected attributes for the 1.00 Solarpedia, so that should help a bit.

Yes, that will help a lot actually!

Cironian wrote: The tech tree is a bit difficult to lay out nicely, though it's something I'd like to get around to now that I've finalized what's in there. For now, it's best to work in reverse, meaning to pick a tech you want to end up at and mouse over it to see the list of what you can research now to end up at your target tech some day. I've got an automatically generated tree for development though, but it's not very nice to look at. Here's the current 1.00 one: Solar War 1.00 Tech Tree - Maybe I should just rearrange and clean up that one a bit and make it available as documentation with the game.

I see what you mean. I guess you could make the tree more linear, like say the GalCiv2 tech tree, but that might take away from some of the flavor. Maybe you could add some stuff in the Solarpedia explaining what the different techs are (or maybe it's there and I missed it).

A couple other random things:
I ran into something while playing the campaign that might be a bug. I finished the colonize Mars quest, but then ran into the event where you get booted off of Mars. The colonize quest then popped up again. This didn't seem right to me (but maybe it was intended).

Modding: I so hope that a decent modding community pops up around this game, because it seems like it has the potential to make some awesome custom scenarios. I've only poked around a bit so far. Is there any way to mod custom solar system layouts or a custom tech tree?

Java: What are your thoughts about Java as a game development platform? If you had to start this game over, would you still use it?

The Mars base quest is supposed to pop back up if the Aliens just kick you off there. I'll think about disabling it for this special case though, as you'll likely have your hands full anyway in that situation.

Modding: Yes, the game is fully moddable. Absolutely everything about the tech tree can be edited from "[Solar War]\resource\gamedefs\techs.xml". If you, for instance, change what other techs one tech depends on it is also automatically moved to a more appropriate spot in the tech tree inside the game. (Techs are always at least one column to the right of all their requirements)

Most other stuff is also editable from that directory, including weapons, buildings, ship types, as well as the entire event scripting system.

I've got half-complete support for loading a mod directory too, I'll see about fully enabling that in time for 1.00

Solar System layout is stored in the save file, so you can already set up a custom scenario through that, but there's currently no way to adjust what the New Game button generates. I'm willing to open that up in some way if there is sufficient interest, I just didn't feel like bothering with it so far.

Java worked out very well for me, as this kind of game involves a ton of data processing on the complex, connected object structures that make up the game state information. It would be a lot less suited for an FPS game, but here I'd say it saved me a lot of work. This is as opposed to a more low-level language or a scripting language approach with a native core engine; obviously something like C# would have had basically the same advantages, but my Java skills are a lot better.

Just a little update: I just put in a swap mode for officer assignment.

If selected, you see all officers suitable for the position, as long as they are available for reassignment (i.e. they are not currently in the middle of Warp). If a two-way swap is possible, that happens immediately, otherwise you get a small message box, offering a one-way assignment instead.