Hello all.
For the past 6 months Dark Studio Productions (aka: me, Reaperman, my daughter, Dragon3, Jerico2day, Twindisk and RPGamer) have been working away on a project called Darkstar.
What is Darkstar?
Darkstar is a turn based space trading, conquest and exploration game, which it could be said is an MMORPG, ( although that IS stretching it a bit
) that allows potentially tens of thousands of gamers to play at the same time.
The game covers the Earth system (SOL) and also other areas of nearby space such as Alpha Reticules, Pegasus and Wolf systems.
What is the aim of the game?
The year is 2209 and you play a character that has just managed to get the credits together to buy their first interstellar ship. Your ship is capable of transporting a small amount of goods and is also armed with Photonic Torpedoes and a short range phased laser. It has simple deflector shields but like everything your ship can be upgraded if you get enough money to do so.
You may load up goods and then set a course towards any of the habitable locations . There is also the ability to explore other areas and to perhaps earn money by mining moons, asteroids or even terra-forming whole planets.
On the downside, there is always the danger of space phenomena such as Ion Storms, Black Holes etc, plus rogue traders and even aliens. Not forgetting the other players in the game that can attack you and steal your goods, or who could go to one of your mining platforms or planets and take them over.
How does it work?
Because this game is a turn based game, there was no need for real-time moves. Instead we used a system that was similar to other turn based games, like Nemesis, where each player can make several moves and actions and then the program uploads a small text file to a server via standard ftp protocol.
There is another computer linked to the server that downloads all the available files every cycle (which is about 10 seconds) and then processes them, in order.
(Each file that the players computer uploads is time stamped)
After that, it uploads the files again and then it is simply a question of the players program to download the file and show the results of the actions.
Until now, we have had 17 people playing a limited size game, which covered just our solar system, and the graphics were represented by flat 2D.
What we now need to do is to increase the amount of players to about 200 and let them play using the new 3D graphic representation of the space map.
We have estimated that the load on cycles should not increase until we hit about 380+ players, and then it should only increase by 2 extra seconds.
What do we need.
The easy answer is: YOU.
We need people to post here if they are willing to become a player.
Because of how the game works, we need to know at this time in advance, how many will be playing.
This game works very well as a turn based game, and you will very quickly get in to it, but we need to have a lot more people playing it so that we can find out its limits and get the bugs out as fast as we can.
Also, if any of you would like to produce some music for the game, or would like to do the title screen (the one above is only temporary) then post here and tell us. We could also do with some 3d models of new craft too.
We will have the 2D engine replaced with the 3D engine within 14 more days, and everyone who posts here and wants to play will have the program emailed to them (or if you have a small email account, we will put it on a site for download).
So there you have it.
Ok, so it is NOT a realtime MMORPG, but as far as we know, no one has tried to use DBP in this way before to make a multi-player game...So it was well worth the try IMHO.
Anyone out there who wants to help us in any way, please post and let us know, or if you have questions, then ask away.
Cheers
Reaperman
