Hi, I'm new here!

[HanClinto]

Howdy! As you might have guessed from the topic, I only found out about this game yesterday. I was browsing Roguelikes on Wikipedia and saw a link to this game, and thought I'd check it out as it's in a genre that I'm a huge fan of.

What can I say? I played it 'till almost 3:00 AM last night -- it's a great game! George, you've done a wonderful job with this game. I'm really impressed!

Games in this genre have always been a huge interest of mine. I started with them in Escape Velocity back on my parent's old Macintosh, and from there I started trying to learn to program my own multiplayer version of the game for the PC. I learned some Delphi, then eventually VB5/6 in my quest to make my game, along the way playing some Subspace as well.

I got pretty far with programming my game (this was back in high school). A friend bought me a domain and hosted it for me, and you can still find the old site up on the Wayback Machine -- you may find it interesting. It taught me things like graphics programming (started out moving picture boxes around the form, then moved to the VB drawing routines, then to BitBlt, and then eventually to DirectX 5), network programming, geometry (sin/cos/radians/etc), and a little bit of how to run and develop software.

By the time I got to my 3rd or 4th complete rewrite of the game, it was looking really good. I worked hard during the summer to release a version with some good progress and then went off to college. My dad called me from home to let me know he'd reformatted my drive by accident and lost all of my data. That was pretty heart-wrenching, and I now keep *several* offsite backups of all my important work.

Now that I'm out of college, am married, and have a little more experience under my belt, I've gotten back into game programming. Last year I started rewriting Air Locked just for kicks to try out some ideas I had about skill-based minigames. One such game was a welding game where you have to manage the flame and wirefeed to patch armor that's damaged from combat. Of course you can pay someone else to do it in the game for you, but if you're low on cash or you want to make some extra money, you can play this minigame and work as a welder. I did get so far as to have a playable version of the minigame -- if anyone's interested, I would love to hear y'alls feedback of it:
http://www.includingjudas.com/clint/AirLockedDemo.zip

It's written in C# and uses SDL for its graphics imaging. Nothing fantastic, but I'm interested in hearing what you all have to say about it.



But enough about my game. Transcendence is incredibly well done! The modding capabilities/community really remind me of Escape Velocity (that's a compliment). I love how I feel like I'm playing a mix of EV and Nethack when playing Transcendence though -- it's a wonderful mix of genre!

I'm still having plenty of yasds (yet-another-stupid-deaths) in this game though -- my first game got to the point of being able to handily win through the entire Arena Maximus without having to retry any of the guys, and then I started experimenting with barrels that I had bought.

Yup. You guessed it -- radioactive paste. *sigh*. So I'm going to die in 3 minutes, and I have nothing in my inventory that can help me, and noone will let me dock to get help. What do I do? I die.

So I continue and avoid using that paste, and now I get further than I ever have before and guess what? I dock with a radioactive derelict. "aaaaaugh!" So I still don't have any more barrels that will help me, nor any un-id'd ROM patches. But I remember someone who said that they were there to help the needy -- the Sisters of Domina! I bet they would let me dock! So I hurridly jump back through the stargates back 2 or 3 systems and finally find the Sisters. Guess what? They let me dock, and they offer aid for anything else (especially after I give them 20,000 credits or so), but they don't do *anything* for my radiation. Kaboom. But I can't go back and try anything else either, because going through the stargates killed my old game. Augh! There goes a fantastic game down the crapper. Ah well. Such is the life with roguelikes. So I've restarted and am playing through another randomly-generated system (I love what you've done with this, George -- it's fantastic), and while it's extremely thin on money (no place to get escort jobs until 3 or 4 systems into it), there's lots of new content that I didn't see in my first game.

Sorry for the long, rambling post -- but I just wanted to introduce myself and say "Great stuff!".

I've been reading some of the posts about Multiplayer Transcendence (since that's exactly what I've been trying to program for the past 11 years or so), and I know exactly what George is talking about -- it's a very tough thing to make a good multiplayer game. I don't know if I'll ever get around to finishing it, but if I do continue to work on it in the future, it now has a new "older brother" game that it looks up to for insipiration, that game being Transcendence.

Thanks for the great game, George! Cheers!

--clint

[Yugi]

Hi, HanClinto, and welcome to the board
It appears you really like Transcendence. You should get around to maiking mods. Once your mods are complete, they can be hosted free at the_holy_thom's modsite, for everyone to download and enjoy. The URL is http://transcendencemods.er1.be/index.html.

If you want graphics for Transcendence, you can get them at Dvlenk6's graphics site at http://dvlenk6.blackraven3d.com/dvlenk6 ... index.html. He also makes you graphics for free, but he is currently tied up for a week or so, as he's rather busy with other people's requests.

You can join the Unofficial Transcendence Forums as well, which has been round for a lot longer and has many more members, though this forum is little more active. The URL for that is http://s8.invisionfree.com/Transcendenc ... hp?act=idx.

There is also another Transcendence website called Transcendi, which is slowly building an archive of Transcendence info. You can reach it at http://transcend.roxr.com/.

I hope some of this helps, and if you need any help with the game feel free to ask anyone on this or the other boards [/url]

[HanClinto]

Thanks for the great welcome!

Those sites for the Transendence graphics are wonderful. I remember when programming my game I started out using graphics that I ripped out of a Subspace mod's data files. Eventually a couple of people modeled and rendered ships for me, but those graphics there are fantastic! I really like your Daimajin ship up there -- that one is very cool.

So Transendence graphics are on 18 degree increments? I did mine on 9 degree increments, mostly because that's how Subspace did it, but I'm glad for that extra resolution -- it makes it really hard to aim not being able to turn in smaller increments.

I was having fun reading through the Transendence data files last night -- I eventually grepped for "radiation" and found out what I should have been doing to ID all of those stupid barrels -- buy some cheap radiation-proof armor and apply all of my barrels to that one to ID them first.

It's hard not having any ?oID (scrolls of identification) for Transendence yet, but ah well. I'm sure that will come later, and George has plans for that.

It's a good idea what you're saying about me possibly getting into mods. I'm starting to wonder if I shouldn't try and work Air Locked so that mods from Transendence could be imported (I doubt they could be used natively) into Air Locked so that people could play multiplayer with all of the very well-balanced ships and weapons that there are in Transcendence. I'm not going to work on this any time soon, but I'm just thinking and dreaming out loud.

Cheers!

--clint

[the_holy_thom]

Hi Clint! Nice choice of avatar

In future, when you get irradiated, dock at a Korolov or a Commonwealth station, and you will be decontaminated for the low low price of 250 credits!

There are similar things to the ?oID - The Rowena Roms. They disply information on weapons in shops, leaving it less down to guesswork, and telling you if that shiny weapon is in fact worth paying 30,000 credits for.

[HanClinto]

Thanks for the welcome, Thom!

Aaaah -- that's quite a good tip about the commonwealth station. Thanks! It's been confusing (but fun!) for me to learn what all the different station types are and who does what. I appreciate the spoiler -- I don't think I would have found that otherwise.


Aaaah, that makes sense about the Rowena Roms -- I found one of them (volume 1) that game, but wasn't sure exactly what it had done more than what I already knew. Thanks!

Those don't work on the barrels though, do they? Those just have to be discovered by trial-and-error?

--clint

[Yugi]

Those don't work on the barrels though, do they? Those just have to be discovered by trial-and-error?

Yes, they do. Unless of course you've already found out what they are, or they were already labeled.

[HanClinto]

By the way, here are some screen shots from the test minigame I was writing for Air Locked. Basically you left-click to turn on the flame, and right-click to turn on the wire feed. Metal welds better when it's hot, but be careful not to get it too hot or you'll blow a hole in the thing you're trying to repair! You can heat metal up to red-hot and keep it there for a while to smooth it out if you want to get your smoothness rating up some. I realize there are problems with the statistics generated, but like I said, it was just a simple alpha version.





You can tell how hot the metal is by how red it is, and you can tell how thick the metal is by how light it is. Metal that's too thick is almost white, and a nice gray sheen is what you're going for.

It takes a fair bit of processing power to recalculate and redraw the entire sheet of metal pixel-by-pixel every time (because it has to blend the colors for temperature and thickness), and in later alpha versions that I was working on I was even adding a third factor for weld quality, where if you tried to add metal when it was too cold it would clump and be a poorer quality patch.

So if you guys play around with it, I'm interested in hearing feedback! Of course I wouldn't mind if George used any of this in his game, so he can try it without fear of corrupting his own game ideas.

Cheers!

--clint

[Vasdema]

Howdy mate. Welcome to the forums.

As well as the stations, decon gel will also cure your radioactivity. Of course, you can only find it... in yet another of those unidentified barrels.

[Yugi]

That looks like a good game, It definetely looks worth trying

Oh, HanClinto, I forgot to mention that there are forums for both the Modsite and the Graphics site.

[Atheist_Chuck]

Uh oh...the Transcendi link is no longer working......

[Yugi]

How come you said that here?
I haven't tried it in a while.