News

Second attempt... now with single-player!November 21st, 2014

Two months since last update? No kidding! So let's see what has changed. For starters, I added single-player mode, which should have been obvious choice from the start. Because you know, how should you get interested if you cannot get a proper introduction... Coming bundled with that, support for scripting has been added. You can now add your own functionality to your maps by writing some AngelScript. If you know some programming language, that should be easy... if not, well, it may be bit harder. You can always take a look at script of tutorial mission and find out for yourself!

Coming up next: shields for capital ships were added. I didn't wanted to have shields in game, but hey, some of you may want, so there they are. They don't really look that good, but maybe some nice animated texture can fix that? You try! I suck at that. Minor improvement is possibility to play .ogg music. No big deal. Though it isn't properly done, so there may be a wee lag when changing music. There were also few changes in file formats but since there is only one forum member, inactive too, there is no point going into details. Good news is that further changes to file formats should not render older files incompatible. There is also starfield generator, so you don't have to have huge background images to have nice looking stars. You can also look at script reference to see what you can access. That list will increase, just say what you want there!

So there's that. There is a "Tutorial" single player mission, so please hit download and give it a try. There is no real challenge involved with current AI (well, it may not be intelligence, but it's sure artificial), but you can at least see what the game has to offer without digging through editor.
Spoiler: you cannot win

So yeah, have fun, contact me if you cannot get the damn thing started, and maybe you know someone who would be interested in creating some content? No need for original content, anything that would be remotely playable would be great!

Some sort of releaseSeptember 24th, 2014

Today marks public release of this freeware not-yet-finished game Soil. It is space real-time-strategy game, much like Homeworld packed with more features. So what it does? It could pretty much be played, if only there was some content. So consider this call for help from all interested artists (3D models, textures, sounds, ...) and modders (balancing, putting together something meaningful) and various testers (hardware compatibility, bugs, gameplay) or anyone else with constructive feedback.

Right now, download package contains editor where you can create and edit ships, fighters, turrets, etc. Editor runs on top of game engine, so you immediately (to limited extent) see changes in visuals and behaviour. You can even use editor to spawn and command ships for testing/balancing purposes. No need to close and start another application. Also included is game itself, currently consisting of multiplayer. In order to play multiplayer, someone has to host dedicated server, also included. This little server only resends data between players without running game itself (low CPU cost). So far, there is no server with public static IP running, so multiplayer is limited to LAN or manual setup with port forwarding. If you choose standard download, you also get proof-of-concept grade dataset, suitable to just play around before starting modding or to be used as some sort of reference.

If you wish to help, head over to contribute section to find out how, or/and join forum for any feedback. Priority for now is creating content to form something playable and get some server. If there is any way you can help, please do support this until now one man project! Even spreading word counts ;)

Thanks!

Oh, and one more thing... this is 100% free game, so to prevent unnecessary costs, this page is running on free webhosting, so be patient if any "Error 500" or such pops up... It tends to fix itself within few minutes.