News
UpdateDecember 21st, 2015
Half year passed since last update. Coincidentally, that's how previous update started... This time however without updated game client. As it turns out, there are some bugs in my audio code and OpenAL doesn't really give you much info about what's wrong, only that something bad happened. Even better, OpenAL doesn't always fail when it should, which is even more fun. Thanks to that, for a long time there was a wrong system in place that appeared to work, except that music sometimes didn't start playing. It used to happen only once in a while, but few days ago it started to happen in a pattern that helped me tracked down the issue. It turns out that OpenAL will allow you to create whatever number of sound sources, but after you exceed some number, creating further sources may or may not succeed, which is that weird and annoying part. So until that is fixed, new release will be postponed. That also brings us to the good news section!
Good news is that we now have awesome original music, so far comprising 3 tracks, one for ambient, threat, and combat situations. This is also why bugs in audio are that much more annoying. Continuing good news, we now have new additions to the team in form of two concept artists with some great ship concepts so far. Speaking of which, we are still looking for some 3D modeler to get these rolling out and turn this into something playable.
Onto code updates! There were changes made to how GUI works under the hood that wasted a lot of time, but were necessary to retain my sanity when making changes to GUI visuals and new functionality. Oh yes, it was that terrible. GUI started as makeshift piece of code that got the job done and was expanded over time without much thinking about future and slowly evolved into this huge unmaintainable mess that was all over the place. Anyway, that's taken care of. In the department of new features stands rudimentary research system. It is working and all, but some nice visualization of tech tree will be needed before I would call it finished. New to the game are unit voices, so now ships can respond to your commands and comment on the ongoing battle and such - Homeworld style. So far there are only proof-of-concept notebook built-in microphone recorded crappy lines, but that may change soon, probably even in the next update. There were also small improvements like fighter/bomber behaviour so they will follow your orders in a more intelligent way, multiple ships able to dock to one subsystem and possible minor things I don't remember (time to start that changelog, right?).
UpdateJune 29th, 2015
Half year passed since last update. New version is uploaded and ready to go. Since lack of assets is still ongoing problem, there isn't much content, and it is still more like proof of concept. There is a tutorial mission that tries to introduce you to game basics, battle mission that should show that hurling everything you have at enemy without thinking isn't that effective as chosing targets and surrounding your enemy.
As always, I'm still looking for all kind of artists to help out.
Game server and new hostingJanuary 21st, 2015
In an attempt to get hosting for game server, I've been informed that my forums are screwed up, and mails with authentication keys aren't being sent. And since I didn't get any emails complaining about the situation, I believed that everything worked (it also turns out that some email could get lost, so maybe that was the reason?). So it appears that free hosting I had really sucked...
Fortunately, guys at www.specialattack.net provided me with completely free hosting (save for a domain name) that currently runs both website and game server! How awesome is that? Very much, that's how! So big thanks to them! That means that forums should now be functional, and you can connect to game server from game if you copy this little file into "soil/settings/" directory. Chances that you will meet anybody there are minimal, but you know, we can always organize some games on forums ;)
I apologize for any inconvenience caused by my previous derpy hosting and my inability to see it :|
Third attempt... now with Star Destroyer!January 9th, 2015
Hey, happy new year! You know, to both of you who read this! ;)
This update (over in downloads section), while not particularly large, is at least marked by much optimism. First of: while not exactly a person doing the dirty work for me, certain guy knows as Nomada_Firefox was kind enough to supply me with a lot of Star Wars models, so BIG THANKS to him and all those who created those models. You can now download this Star Wars dataset and have some fun with totally imbalanced and unfinished dataset. And if your definition of fun means balancing and creating damage models, we will both be happy.
Another big thanks goes to certain guy known as teknomancer2008 who participated in a "compatibility testing program", resulting from a fact that he could not run this game at all... Thank to his patient testing of many of my derpy attempts to fix some bug, Soil now runs on Intel HD 4400, and with luck will run on other Intel GPUs that can support OpenGL 3.2! I still have no idea what exactly fixed it, and attempts to break it again failed, so it will be classified as a miracle until proven otherwise.
While this update brings no new features (or I can't think of any), there is plenty of bugfixes including one crash fix in editor and a huge desync is now fixed (you know, that's useful for multi-player). While I don't know if it is new in this release, but if game still desyncs, if will automatically resync, so you can continue playing... or you know, sometime in the future.
With nothing more to say I again call for help of content creators, testers, clowns, balancers, just some feedback or
spreading word to anyone who might be interested! And if you cannot get it started, please contact me and I will gladly try to help you.
Reporting errors and bugs benefits me more than you, so why wouldn't I help?
And hey, here is some really bad video, because I'm too lazy to edit it :P
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!
Send me e-mail
