So, after a hiatus of ~6 months and toying around with other ideas, I sat down and started in earnest on Starship Command 2.
If you're not familiar with Starship Command (the first), it is a "persistent-world, massively single-player, real-time tactical starship simulator wrapped in an AI-driven 4X game". Essentially, you play as a starship captain and trade, colonize, and fight while the AI empires expand and react to what happens in the galaxy.
Starship Command 2 aims to be a much expanded, and more in-line with the original vision for the game. Rebuilt in a much more powerful engine, already the galaxy size has increased from 500 sectors to 6,000, 12,000, even 100,000 sectors! The original seven hand-crafted empires have been expanded to included hundreds (or possibly thousands) of computer-generated empires that have their own unique race and language. The only limit is the power of your computer.
With that in mind, the game runs and is developed on a Q9550, GTX750 and 6GBs of RAM. Good, but not a powerhouse. But is also tested on a Dell Venue Pro 8 (1.8GHz Atom, 2GBs of RAM) which runs it excellently!
As of now, the alpha build will let you colonize and trade. Ship combat and mission are in the works. And actually the hull creation is currently working:
In fact, you can expect a build of the ship previewer to fly around the random ships in the near future!
As another note, Starship Command 2 aims to be 100% moddable, the planets, sectors, galaxies, hulls, technologies, commodities, empires, languages, races, GUI, are all based on editable JSON files.
Here is what the config file that made these hulls looks like:
{
"pointList":[
{"IsEmpty":false,"X":13.0,"Y":32.0},
{"IsEmpty":false,"X":13.0,"Y":46.0},
{"IsEmpty":false,"X":11.0,"Y":46.0},
{"IsEmpty":false,"X":10.0,"Y":50.0},
{"IsEmpty":false,"X":9.0,"Y":54.0},
{"IsEmpty":false,"X":6.0,"Y":54.0},
{"IsEmpty":false,"X":4.0,"Y":54.0},
{"IsEmpty":false,"X":2.0,"Y":49.0},
{"IsEmpty":false,"X":0.0,"Y":46.0},
{"IsEmpty":false,"X":0.0,"Y":39.0},
{"IsEmpty":false,"X":0.0,"Y":32.0},
{"IsEmpty":false,"X":1.0,"Y":25.0},
{"IsEmpty":false,"X":2.0,"Y":17.0},
{"IsEmpty":false,"X":3.0,"Y":8.0},
{"IsEmpty":false,"X":4.0,"Y":0.0},
{"IsEmpty":false,"X":8.0,"Y":0.0},
{"IsEmpty":false,"X":10.0,"Y":2.0},
{"IsEmpty":false,"X":10.0,"Y":8.0},
{"IsEmpty":false,"X":10.0,"Y":17.0},
{"IsEmpty":false,"X":12.0,"Y":32.0}
],
"xJitter":2,
"yJitter":3.5,
"xSkew":0.1,
"ySkew":0.1,
"minFocus":1,
"maxFocus":3,
"symmetrical":true,
"weaponFrequency":1,
"minEngines":2,
"maxEngines":6
}So, to wrap it up Starship Command 2 is in the works! I plan to have it at the same feature-level as the first within six months. And you can expect new builds to show up here!
As a final note, I'm developing this solo in my free time, so if you have feedback (good or bad), request, anything! Drop me a line, it'll mean a lot.
Thanks
