Comments - reiti.net

Robo Miner is up for voting in steam Greenlight, always happy about new votes to make it to steam :-)

open in steam: Indie123.com

or directlink to web:

Steamcommunity.com

Thanks for your comment! I loved K240 as well and still keep an emulator for that game alone - it was a main reason to make "Age of Asteroids" so it will be inspired heavily by this old classic :-)

Thank you for the video, I really enjoyed watching it! It also gave me a good idea about where I should really add some more UI clues for the player. It's aaaall in the process :D

Actually many of the features are actually working but lots of them are deactivated in the demo or are completely unbalanced at the moment. Thanks again for reviewing ;-)

I've already located the problem and it should be solved in the next update (0.1.5 coming soon) - thanks for helping!

drop me an email at office@reiti.net please - very curious already about the error n hopefully I can find it fast :-)

Everyone having troubles, please get a newer version, you always find the newest versions at:

Ageofasteroids.com

The newer versions come with an auto-updater!

can you give me further information of any messages you get or your system configuration? would help me a lot :-) thanks!

There is also a IndieGOGO Campaign running - pledge or share it please!

Indiegogo.com

There is a timing bug in this version, which does occur on some machines. This bug will be fixed in a follow up version of the alpha demo.

If it happens to you that the game crashes when you click "resume" or when switching between asteroid/tactical view - you are a victim of this bug - sorry. Next version will have this fixed - pre-alpha :-)

do you have a DX10 Graphic Card? (i've forgotten to re-engage the error reporting thing .. shame on me..)

Feel free to review it :-) - hopefully everything runs smooth and you like to experiment because there is currently no tutorial (or whatsoever) inside. .. something I should get sorted for the official alpha version

I am working on a detailed gameplay video, so everyone will get a good insight in current version state to shorten the waiting time for the alpha :-)

There are some things I consider as a must-have for any public alpha so I have to get those things sorten out first.

not planed - the game uses directX, so I don't know if this will run on Mac. sorry

Multiplayer Mode is planned!

Thank you - I will put videos of new features during development of the pre-alpha version. The goal is to have a playable alpha version for the audience :-)

Thank you - I still hope I can hire a real artist in the future for better models/textures - not satisfied with that by now

There is a lot of math involved but actually with a good amount of optimization it works pretty well. Because it is real time some large bombs may even deform the asteroid on impact, that's why I kept on the real time approach :-)
I am curious about the first alpha version and performance on different systems

I actually didn't expect to see birthday wishes here :-D Thanks anyway!

This engine is mostly custom build atm just relying on some basic features of XNA. This is mostly because of the way I can optimize different tasks and - lets see how far I can go with that :-)

Right in the moment I am playing around with incooperating bump mapping on the asteroids .. not satisfied yet.

Also I plan to do more work with the dynamic lighting, as you can see all the explosions and lasers do not reflect on the surface. I have an idea how to accomplish that, but need to play around with that first. Will provide videos, as soon as I have something to show

Trivia: Because of the Ship-AI the engagers will cloud above surface buildings.

In the case of multi-slot ships (ie. equipped with blaster AND bombs) the ship will primarily use their bombs and during reloading time will attack enemy ships (if there are any)

You will be able to set an asteroid as target and also the approaching vector - so from which direction the missiles will come at the target.

Asteroid Missiles are not very accurate - they will hit the surface of an asteroid, but the exact point of the impact will be uncontrolable

Trivia: If you enter building mode, you will see a fully lit asteroid, so you can better place your colony even when your current construction site is on the dark side of the asteroid.

Each asteroid will rotate - if an asteroid has a very fast natural rotation speed, you may not be able to land on it or start a colony - there may be technology for that problem ...

Trivia: The game features textures and Glow Maps to give a distinct look and feel of the game and also to transport the athmosphere of space. Which is dark and silent.

Trivia: In Age of Asteroids Space Ships are parked in underground hangars. To get inand/or out of this undergroud, they use Hangar Access Modules, which act as an elevator and also an airdock, because in underground, there is also maintaince done.

Trivia: The solar modules will re-orient themselfs to always face the sun.

The general layout of the user interface is still subject to change and there is still a lot to do

Trivia: Each asteroid is dynamically generated and therefore does not feature any plane surfaces. That's why there is no building grid or such things. The possible build spots are calculated in real time and they try do make a uniform distance of each module.

This looks a bit weird when it comes to towers (multi-level-module-stacks) because they will point in different directions .. in real this would be of no problem, because there is no gravity .. it just looks bad, so maybe there will some sort of pivot in the future, to makje towers look more uniform

To be honest, a real space battle needs explosions, even when they would not look like this in real space, a viewer just expect them, like seen in Star Wars Movies and such things.

So even, when the fireballs in space are not that realistic .. they has to be there

The system calculates Real Time Shadows with the goal to make the asteroid look more real, than with simple lighting. For this reason, I looked and watched several image material from NASA how asteroids look.

In the future, I plan to implement bump mapping as well to make it look even better. My wish is to get artists for doing much better textures, but this is something to be considered for the future

Trivia: In an early prototype the space-ship AI was much more intelligent in terms of enemy hunting, it actually used real time calculated movement prediction. UNfortunately this prohibited the game from using a lot of units - so the current AI is a bit simpler.

But the general idea was to make the space fights look real and give a good athmosphere - I think it works pretty well, what do you think? Do you like the look?

You can see the missiles dissapear at the "horizon" - just overlook it for now, they will be longer visible in the final version :-)

funny, that it shows the frame with "indestructable buildings" .. that's actually just for this video and has no big role in the actual game :-)